Tag: hypocrisy

The US Has As Much Moral Authority As Saudi Arabia On The Legitimacy Of Elections

“Let there be no mistake – Sunday’s regional and municipal elections in Venezuela are nothing more than a sham,” reads a recent statement authored by Republican US Senators Jim Risch and Michael McCaul. “The illegitimate Maduro regime has taken drastic measures to dismantle or control every independent institution in the country, including hijacking political parties and the National Electoral Council to ensure state-sponsored electoral fraud.”

“Today’s elections in Venezuela are as illegitimate as Maduro’s tyrannical regime,” reads a tweet by Republican Senator Rick Scott. “The Venezuelan people deserve free and democratic elections NOW. The U.S. and all freedom-loving nations must stand up, condemn these sham elections and support the people in their fight for freedom.”

The imperial media are lining up behind the official US government line on Venezuela’s gubernatorial and mayoral elections, with The New York Times assuring us that conditions “are far from freely democratic” and The Washington Post reporting that opposition parties “say the elections have been stacked against them by the socialist government of President Nicolás Maduro,” who sees the elections as “a chance to reassert strength while projecting a veneer of legitimacy.”

This level of intrusiveness into Venezuela’s heavily internationally monitored democratic process is typical of what we’ve been seeing from the US political/media class with regard to electoral contests in empire-targeted Latin American nations like Bolivia and Nicaragua. Which is really silly, because the US has no more moral authority over the legitimacy of democratic processes than a totalitarian monarchy like Saudi Arabia.

US elections are of course corrupt and fraudulent, entirely dominated at the federal level by legalized oligarchic bribery in the form of campaign contributions, manipulated primaries, gerrymandering, voter suppression, shutting out third parties, and the worst voting system in the western world.

More than this, though, the United States is also the world’s single most egregious offender when it comes to interfering in foreign elections. As Claire Bernish has observed in The Free Thought Project, the US government’s own data shows that it interfered in no fewer than 81 foreign elections just between the years 1946 and 2000. You’d never know it from the shrieking of the political/media class post-2016, but this would also include brazenly interfering in Russia’s elections in the nineties to ensure the presidency of Washington lackey Boris Yeltsin.

And that’s just election interferences. It doesn’t include more brazen interferences in who governs foreign nations like direct military invasions, staged coups, color revolutions and proxy wars.

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GoFundMe Denied Rittenhouse Fundraising While Crowdsourcing Funds For BLM Rioters

The crowdsourced fundraising service GoFundMe sought to justify their early decision last year to terminate campaigns for Kyle Rittenhouse after the teen shooter was acquitted on all charges Friday.

“GoFundMe’s Terms of Service prohibit raising money for the legal defense of an alleged violent crime. In light of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, we want to clarify when and why we removed certain fundraisers in the past,” the platform wrote on Twitter with a link to a company statement.

Yet while Rittenhouse was denied crowdsourced funds for a political show trial charging the shooter with first-degree homicide in a case that was clearly self-defense, the website is still hosting campaigns soliciting donations for Black Lives Matter activists charged with violent crimes.

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Joe Biden Wants To Have The IRS Harass Americans While Dodging It Himself

The White House fears that an impending Congressional Budget Office analysis will say Democrats’ spending bill would increase federal deficits. The dispute seems unsurprising, given the myriad budgetary gimmicks in the bill—but not for the reasons one might expect.

Ignore for a moment the fact that the bill contains ten years of tax increases to pay for a few years’ of spending that Democrats later hope to extend, meaning that independent budget analysts have pegged the bill’s true ten-year cost not at $1.75 trillion but nearer to $5 trillion. Ignore too the fact that front-loading the bill’s spending means it will almost certainly increase federal deficits in the short-term, exacerbating inflation at a time price increases are already at 30-year highs.

Instead, the proximate dispute with CBO concerns whether an increase in tax enforcement will yield as much revenue as Treasury claims. On that front, one of the biggest arguments against the Biden administration’s position comes via Joe Biden himself.

Dueling Tax Estimates

The New York Times reported Monday that “the White House has begun bracing lawmakers for a disappointing estimate” from CBO, and is “urging lawmakers to disregard the budget office assessment, saying it is being overly conservative in its calculations.” While administration officials say additional tax enforcement will generate $400 billion in new revenue, CBO Director Philip Swagel on Monday said he stood by the agency’s September estimate that enhanced enforcement authority will net roughly $120 billion.

The difference between the lower and higher revenue figures could determine whether the bill gets scored as a budget-saver or budget-buster. Treasury has therefore come out swinging at CBO, with Assistant Treasury Secretary Ben Harris calling the office’s methodology “patently absurd” in an interview with the Times.

Whither IRS Enforcement?

But given his own boss’ conduct, Mr. Harris doth protest too much on tax enforcement. After leaving the vice presidency in early 2017, Joe Biden and his wife Jill created two S-corporations, and characterized most of their book and speech earnings as profits from those corporations rather than taxable wages.

These maneuvers allowed the Bidens to dodge nearly $517,000 in payroll taxes. The Tax Policy Center called the Bidens’ actions “pretty aggressive.” And a recent Congressional Research Service report outlined several instances in which federal courts agreed with the IRS in requiring S-corporations to pay back taxes—all of which arguably applied to the Bidens.

Yet despite the Bidens’ public release of their returns, and coverage of the irregularities surrounding them, no news has yet emerged of an IRS audit. Why?

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Aspen Disinformation Group Includes Twitter Exec Who Censored Hunter Biden Story

The Twitter executive responsible for blocking stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop is one of several advisers to the Aspen Institute’s disinformation commission.

Yoel Roth is one of several questionable advisers to Aspen’s Commission on Information Disorder, which on Monday released its much-anticipated report. Commission members include Katie Couric, who recently acknowledged that she edited comments on National Anthem protests out of a 2016 interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg to preserve the justice’s reputation with liberals. Another commissioner, Rashad Robinson, helped fuel actor Jussie Smollett’s hate crime hoax.

Commission members’ censorship of legitimate news stories could undercut their lofty mission. The commission blamed “decreasing levels of public trust” in public institutions for the crisis, which it dubs a “whole-of-society problem that can have life-or-death consequences.” Its report calls for Congress and the White House to take action to counteract disinformation.

Roth, the head of site integrity at Twitter, blocked access to an Oct. 14, 2020, New York Post article regarding emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. Roth told the Federal Elections Commission he blocked the story in part because the intelligence community had briefed him that foreign governments might release hacked materials prior to the election. No evidence has emerged that Biden’s laptop was stolen or hacked, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has since acknowledged that the company should not have blocked links to the story.

The Aspen Commission report criticizes Twitter and other social media companies for failures to rein in disinformation but does not cite Twitter’s censorship of the Biden article.

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Joe Biden’s ‘Negro’ Quote Earns Hilarious Label From Twitter as ‘Fact Checkers’ Spin Like Tops

We previously reported on how some in the media rushed into damage control mode Thursday in the latest round of “Protect Joe” after President Biden called the late Major League Baseball legend/icon Satchel Paige a “negro.”

For those who missed it, Biden was giving a speech on Veterans Day at Arlington National Cemetary when he made the comments, which I’m providing below just so I don’t get accused of taking the current White House occupant out of context:

I want to welcome all the Cabinet members and honored guests joining us today, including the father of our Secretary of State, who served in the Army Air Corps during World War Two, Ambassador Donald Blinken, whose birthday is today. Happy Birthday. (Applause.) Thank you for your service to our country.

And I just want to tell you, I know you’re a little younger than I am, but, you know, I’ve adopted the attitude of the great Negro — at the time, pitcher in the Negro Leagues — went on to become a great pitcher in the pros — in the Major League Baseball after Jackie Robinson. His name was Satchel Paige.

Naturally, when members of the media hit the Code Red button to alert each other that it’s once again time to Protect the Precious, their colleagues on the “fact-checking” side often also jump in to “confirm” the media’s spin, which Snopes, Politifact, and Reuters have already done in a matter of 24 hours by laughably suggesting discussion/reporting on the comments “lacked context,” while Politifact also brought up the fact that Biden sometimes has a stuttering problem to try and explain what happened.

Compounding the hilarity of the collective Defend Biden effort, Twitter also jumped into the debate in their “events” section to amplify the claims from “fact-checkers” as though a single person in this country should trust anything fact-checkers say at a time when their liberal bias could not be more obvious.

“Edited clips of Joe Biden’s remarks about Black baseball player Satchel Paige lack some context, fact-checkers say,” the promo on the right-side Twitter column read.

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Climate Conference’s Carbon Footprint Doubles From Last Summit

The carbon emissions associated with the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow more than doubled from the last time the conference was held, according to a report commissioned by the British government.

The conference, which ends Friday, is estimated to contribute to the emission of around 102,500 metric tons of CO2e, a measure of greenhouse gas emissions, the Scotsman reported. The majority of those emissions came from international flights, as world leaders and delegates flew on private planes to the summit.

Those projected emissions more than double the carbon footprint of the last conference, which was held in Madrid in 2019. That summit only led to the emission of 51,101 metric tons of CO2e.

President Joe Biden and his climate czar John Kerry both attended the conference in Scotland. The president was spotted dozing off during one speech at the summit.

Environmental activists and critics slammed the conference for the gross emissions created by air travel.

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People Who Spread “Misinformation” About COVID-19 Vaccines Are “Criminals,” Says Pfizer CEO

People who spread “misinformation” about COVID-19 vaccines are “criminals,” according to the CEO of Pfizer.

During an appearance at the globalist Washington D.C.-based think tank Atlantic Council, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla blamed a “very small” group of people for circulating information that leads to people being vaccine hesitant.

“Those people are criminals,” he told Atlantic Council CEO Frederick Kempe. “They’re not bad people. They’re criminals because they have literally cost millions of lives.”

Bourla went on to suggest that life would only ever get “back to normal” once the unvaccinated have been vaccinated.

“The only thing that stands between the new way of life and the current way of life is, frankly, hesitancy to vaccinations,” he said.

The increasing shift towards demonizing people who question the safety and efficacy of vaccines as not just “conspiracy theorists,” but actual criminals who deserve prison time is accelerating.

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