Monday, January 13, 2025

Lying MAGA filth attack California



The helicopter blades beat through the smoldering air no more than a couple hundred feet above my head. At ground level, the scent of fire brings back memories of fire pits I’d seen at “Cement City” during the Gulf War. As the helicopter passes overhead on the way to the nearby fire, my middle son, his wife, their son and daughter, hurry to pack the car and leave their home near West Hills, California, after the outbreak of the Kenneth Fire. Neighbors pack up and move out as well. Traffic in the area is at a standstill. 

And while the residents packed and fled, firefighters scrambled to give those fleeing extra time to do so even as the fierce winds whipped up the fire in a drought-stricken land, making any effort to contain it problematic at best and futile at worst. Those in LA spearheading the effort to put out half a dozen wildfires apparently diverted some of the air resources from the Palisades and Eaton fires to assist, slowing the growth of the West Hills fire which still grew from five acres to nearly 1000 acres in a matter of hours. After burning more than 1,000 acres in the San Fernando Valley since Jan. 10, the Kenneth Fire has now been 100% contained. 

The day before, the Pacific Palisades fire had prompted the evacuation of my oldest son and his fiancée from their home in Santa Monica. This monstrous fire, which began Monday and reached nearly 24,000 acres by Sunday evening, had destroyed some of the most expensive and picturesque residential real estate in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. As the sun set Thursday, the fire's eerie red glow and thick acrid smoke smell permeated everything from Malibu east through the Palisades and Santa Monica. Ash fell in Santa Monica which contained burned paper and rubbish and looked like snow on a cool winter night.



[. . .]

Friday morning Donald Trump was sentenced for his conviction of 34 felonies in Manhattan. Judge Juan Merchan unconditionally discharged the case saying it was the only thing to do out of respect to the office of the President of the United States. Not the man. The office. At the same time, Trump made a rambling statement about the tiniest slap on the wrist he received by the only court to hold him accountable for any of his alleged illegal actions over a long lifetime of grifting as a case of “lawfare” against him. In rambling, typical Trump fashion, the president-elect referenced the deadly southern California fires as a reason the legal actions taken against him were ridiculous.

Many others have politicized the fires while forgetting that wildfires just don’t care what your politics are. The fire burns Republicans, Democrats, Christians, atheists, blacks, whites, members of the LGBTQ and straight community without prejudice. 

As I helped my son evacuate, I thought about that; how we have more in common with each other than we realize. In times of crisis, I often think of the Trump supporters and detractors who have suffered. Nobody cares what your religion is when you’re in the foxhole. Everyone in LA is in that foxhole now. 




Exactly.  But Donald Trump and other liars keep lying because they have no humanity and they have no decency.  Rhona Tarrant (CBS NEWS) notes:


The Federal Emergency Management Agency has reactivated its online rumor response site, which it last used in the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton in the fall, to address false claims about the agency as it responds to deadly wildfires in California. 

The agency posted responses to rumors that resurface during major disasters, including setting the record straight on whether FEMA assistance is limited to one payment (it's not), and whether applying for assistance grants FEMA or the federal government authority or ownership of a person's property (it doesn't). 

The Los Angeles Fire Department has also directly refuted falsehoods as it continues to respond to the fires. "Clearing Up Online Misinformation," LAFD Public Information Officer Erik Scott wrote on X as he debunked claims that they were calling on the general public to help fight wildfires. 

The rapid and direct response to false claims reflects a new approach to communicating with the public during disasters, according to Jason Davis, a research professor at Syracuse University specializing in disinformation detection.

Davis says the rapid spread of false claims, combined with the rise of AI-generated content, has prompted officials to be more direct in confronting the falsehoods. 

"In the past, the idea was to be above the mis- and disinformation, to not say anything because it would give it credibility," Davis said. "That conversation has changed because of its prevalence and the quality that's now being generated."



The lies are out of control and then some.  Which is to be expected when Donald Chump's involved.  Troy Matthews (MEDIASTOUCH NEWS) notes:


Quite possibly the only thing that spreads faster than a wildfire is disinformation. There has been a firehouse of lies online largely stemming from Donald Trump and his MAGA influencer corps, trying to discredit the California and Los Angeles response to the devastating wildfires for political gain. A similar outbreak of lies occurred around the FEMA response to hurricane Helene in North Carolina to try and discredit President Biden and Vice President Harris before the election.

These lies and misinformation are extremely harmful to rescue and recovery efforts during a natural disaster and quite literally put people in danger. Here is a fact-check of the biggest lies spread so far about the Los Angeles wildfires, with quick facts and longer explanations. This information was largely provided by the State of California on their own wildfire fact-check site:

Myth: There was no water in the fire hydrants when the wildfire broke out

Fact: A number of factors caused a lowering of water pressure in the hydrant system, but the hydrants were never out of water, and wildland firefighters don't use hydrants

Probably the the biggest claim of incompetence leveled at state and local leadership in Los Angeles is that they somehow allowed hydrants in the wildfire area to go empty and there was no water available for firefighters. This is false. 


Multiple factors led to low water pressure in hydrants at the outset of the Palisades fire. These included the use of multiple hydrants at once to deal with the massive size of the fire, where more water was pumped from the hydrants than is used during a typical fire. There was also reportedly a cut off of power to pumping stations that filled hydrant storage tanks due to prescribed fire outages; part of a larger California containment plan to prevent power station explosions which spread the fires.

Moreover, wildland firefighters use water tenders, not hydrants, so the majority of the wildfire operation is not being sustained by the urban hydrant system. According to the State of California, "three million gallons of water were stored in three large tanks for fire hydrants in the area before the Palisades fire, but the supply was exhausted because of the extraordinary nature of this hurricane-force firestorm."

Elon Musk filmed a video trying to push the idea that the hydrants were empty in a video posted on X, where he can be seen being corrected by firefighters on how hydrants and water storage work during a wildfire.




Not only do we have to deal with lies about the fires, we also have to deal with jerks and idiots and liars like Trump and Elon Musk and also Senator John Barrasso.  Who?  The idiot who went on CBS' FACE THE NATION and argued that their should be "strings" attached to any aid to our state.  David McAfee (RAW STREET) explains:

Chris Murphy, a Democratic Senator from Connecticut, wasn't buying it.

"C'mon. We aren't idiots. Republicans never ask for 'strings' attached to disaster funding for Republican states," the Democrat said. "This isn't about helping California. This is about punishing California because it votes for Democrats."

Norm Ornstein, emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, also weighed in, saying Barrasso "is not the worst or most embarrassing, pathetic partisan hack among Senate Republicans."

"Which tells you a lot about Senate Republicans," the scholar added.

Sharon Loper Miller, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, said, "Never heard Barrasso say one word before about anything and now he is so animated about 'strings attached to money' for Californians."

Writer and director Marshall Herskovitz replied, "Here we go."

"Trying to remember the strings attached to money going to FL, GA, and NC after Hurricane Helene. This definitional. A statement like Barrasso’s reveals what authoritarianism looks like," he then added.



These people are disgusting.  They can't stop hating long enough to be a Christian so let's stop indulging their fantasies of faith.  Barrasso and others are going to hell and it's where they belong. 


"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Monday, January 13, 2025.  Surprised by the attacks on Kamala Harris that THE NATION engaged in from August to election day?  Maybe you didn't know that a Marxist was now running THE NATION?  JACOBIN remains silent on Ana Kasparian's rightward lurch and grift because they used to play seven minutes in heaven with her in the closet that they all hid in while they pretended they were Democrats, Mark Suckerberg continues to lie about Joe Biden as the timeline demonstrates, FANBASE is being talked up, and much more.



Let's start with POST-LEFT WATCH.



Ana's a hateful transphobe grifter who's moved over to the right and yells and screams on camera because what says I-love-my-viewers more than caterwauling like the criminally insane?  

And I would've left it alone but PLW notes Ben Burgis rushed in to defend her.

Of course, he did.  He's trash garbage.  He's a lying fat f**k.  

There's the fact that he's written a book about Chris Hedges that tries to redeem Chris and that's your first proof that Ben is not a journalist.  

A journalist doesn't praise a plagiarist.  In 2014, when THE NEW REPUBLIC exposed his long, long pattern of plagiarism, that should have been it for Chris Hedges.  He's doctored his own WIKIPEDIA page to pretend that THE NEW REPUBLIC stood down from the report.  It did not.  Everything was fact checked and this was noted in a response that THE NEW REPUBLIC ran.  But Chrissy Lynn is a dirty liar.  We'll probably address that again this week when switch from the "Iraq snapshot" to just "Snapshot."  

A real journalist does not endorse a plagiarist.  

Doris Kearns Goodwin was all over the place talking about Jimmy Carter in recent days.  We didn't highlight her due to her own plagiarism scandal.  

It's called standards.

And Chris Hedges has none.  (He does have the blood of Iraqi people on his hands.  We'll talk about that this week.)  What is he?  A closeted Socialist.  Corporate media is never bringing him back so why does he have to hide in a political closet?

And look who's in there with him:  Ben Burgis.

Which is why we're starting with this today.

Ben's a columnist for the DSA bible JACOBIN.  That's where the Democratic Socialists of America pretend to be Democrats.  It's basically SOCIALIST WORKER -- a publication that began falling apart as the Iraq War continued on Barack Obama and as they twisted themselves into pretzels to avoid calling that out.  It eventually collapses in 2019 due to a multitude of work place scandals having to do with racism and sexism.  Before that happened Bhaskar Sunkara, admitted Marxist and DSA member, created JACOBIN.  Bhaskar has taken his strand of politics to THE NATION where he was wrongly named president of the magazine.  He was part of the cabal working to destroy Kamala Harris so, yes, he helped put Donald Trump back into the White House.

THE NATION has long lied about their history.  At THIRD, we have explored the forties where, for example, THE NATION ran writings by propagandists who were not Democrats 

We've, for example, noted their silence on Otto Katz.  

Are they confused?  He also used the aliases Simon Katz, Otto Simon and Andre Simon.  He's the one that the magazine's editor and owner at the time Freda Kirchwey went to the Sherry Netherland with to plot another 'Democratic' magazine that could fool the readers.

 Because Otto wasn't a Democrat.  He was a Communist.  Know what else he was?  A double or triple agent for foreign government.  He was executed December 3, 1952.

Bhaskar Sunkara, a Marxist, is now in charge of THE NATION with Socialist Katrina vaden Heuvel (the Freda to his Otto).  

And we saw what that resulted in from August through election day as THE NATION ran one article after another trashing her and KvH would use her Twitter account (yes, she's still on Twitter, we told you she's a racist) to amplify those.  House Democrat Joan Walsh wrote pro-Kamala column but she wasn't platformed by Bhaskar or Katrina.  

So let's get back to 'honest' Ben Burgis.  He defends Ana's attack on a Black man because, of course, what else would a White fat f**k do?

A real writer would be exposing Ana.  A real writer would call out her move to the right and her attacks on people of color.

But Ben Burgis is in a bind.

See, Ana started out a Socialist.  That's why JACOBIN gave her a podcast to begin with.

And they try to look the other way.

It's not just that they're in political closets, it's also that they are compromised liars.

They should have called her out forever ago.

But some at JACOBIN -- like Ben Burgis -- aren't as left as they pose and others fear calling out Ana would mean inviting people to really look into what they do and who they are at JACOBIN.

But let's be very clear, putting a Marxist in charge of THE NATION resulted in the magazine tearing into Kamala constantly, selling the lie that she was a liar, selling the lie that she was no different than Donald Chump.

THE NATION is a joke and it is a lie.  It's producing Marxist thought and doing so dishonestly by hiding behind the lie that "We're just Democrats talking about issues."


They have become a Marxist periodical with a few left overs from previous years.


When Katrina and Bhaskar Sunkara published the editorial telling people not to vote for Kamala, they showed you the real damage that political closet cases can do when they're allowed to pose as Democrats.

I studied poli sci, I have no problem with Democrats, Socialists or Marxists.  I do have a problem with those who hide in a political closet and lie so that they can trick you.


They're liars and we call out liars here -- liars like Mark Suckerberg.  As we noted Friday, all hell was about to reign down on Suck as he announced and implemented a new policy for FACEBOOK that will promote hate speech and lies which he refused to acknowledge because he was too busy lying.  Did Suck not grasp that he doesn't own FACEBOOK/META?   He may be the largest single stockholder but he's answerable to the board and -- yes, FACEBOOK is a publicly traded company, one that sells itself as being positive and diverse -- the stockholders.  Facts were never Suckerberg's strong suit.  That's why he keeps showing up lying about 2020 and 'pressure' from Joe Biden.  Joe Biden was a candidate in 2020.  He didn't get elected until the end of 2020 and he didn't get sworn in until January 2021.  We've been pointing this out forever -- most recently August 28th:


From liar Paxton to another, Mark Zuckerberg.  META's anti-Christ is back in the news and see if you can spot the lie:


Mark Zuckerberg says he regrets that Meta bowed to Biden administration pressure to censor content, saying in a letter that the interference was "wrong" and he plans to push back if it happens again.

Meta's CEO aired his grievances in a letter Monday to the House Judiciary Committee in response to its investigation into content moderation on online platforms. Zuckerberg detailed how senior administration officials leaned on the company to censor certain posts about Covid-19, including humor and satire, and “expressed a lot of frustration” when the social media platform resisted.


FACEBOOK started as garbage.  Sorry, I never had a FACEBOOK account.  But you do see the lie don't you?
 

Ruth posted "There are numbers and then there are the fake numbers in Trump's crazy head" last night.  Convicted Felon Donald Trump -- a worm apparently eating what was left of his brain -- was raving like a nut that in 2020 Joe Biden's White House was having him censored.  Joe wasn't in the White House.  Donald was.

So before you back up the liar Mark Zuckerberg, maybe revisit Kurt Wagner's March 30, 2020 report for BLOOMBERG NEWS entitled "Facebook, Twitter, YouTube Remove Posts From Bolsonaro" which opened:


Twitter Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google’s YouTube have all removed posts shared by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for including coronavirus misinformation that violates the social media companies’ rules against posting harmful content.


So FACEBOOK was censoring post on COVID in March 2020.  Per Mark's testimony -- if you believe the liar -- that's due to the White House.  Again, Joe Biden wasn't president in 2020.  He's sworn in January of the following year.

Facts is hard for garbage like Zuckerberg.  He wanted to endorse Donald a few months back but he was told it would be bad for the shares in the company -- so he claimed he wasn't endorsing despite calling Donald "bad ass."   This is his way of endorsing him: Lying to Congress that FACEBOOK only censored COVID posts due to Joe Biden's White House.


Lie.

Liar.

Trash.

I can do this all day long.  Want to drop back to February of 2021 (when Joe was president) and  Michael Gryboski (CHRISTIAN POST) noted this:


In 2019, before the pandemic began, Facebook announced that they were looking to reduce the influence of anti-vaccination posts on their social media platform.

“We will reduce the ranking of groups and Pages that spread misinformation about vaccinations in News Feed and Search. These groups and Pages will not be included in recommendations or in predictions when you type into Search,” stated Facebook at the time.

“When we find ads that include misinformation about vaccinations, we will reject them. We also removed related targeting options, like ‘vaccine controversies.’ For ad accounts that continue to violate our policies, we may take further action, such as disabling the ad account.”


Again, Joe was president in 2021.  However, he wasn't president in 2019.  That was Donald Trump.  So if Zuckerberg was having his arm twisted to censor by a White House, in 2019 that would have been Donald.



Under mounting pressure to counter misinformation around the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook is increasingly dictating what its users should see and think.

Facebook already downgrades any posts it doesn’t like the look of regarding the virus, but it’s apparently concerned that some of its users might still interact with the wrong content. It’s not Facebook users’ fault, you see, they’re just hapless plebs with not critical faculties of their own. Thankfully Facebook is on the case.

The social media giant’s VP of Integrity (an Orwellian job title if there ever was one), Guy Rosen, recently provided An Update on Our Work to Keep People Informed and Limit Misinformation About COVID-19. “We’re going to start showing messages in News Feed to people who have liked, reacted or commented on harmful misinformation about COVID-19 that we have since removed,” said Rosen.


Again, that would be when Donald Trump was president. 

Legal idiot Jonathan Turley felt the need to Tweet:

Fox posted my column on Mark Zuckerberg's admission that Facebook did censor Americans under pressure from the Administration. He wants people to know that they are really regret now their role. It is the feigned regret that comes with forced exposure...


No, you fool,  the censorship began under Donald -- as we took the time to document above.  Jonathan, you're a damn liar and a bigger disgrace and disappointment than even Robert Kennedy Junior.  Matt Taibbi and Glynneth Greenwald are equally stupid.  

Deliver us from the idiots, please.

Again, Zuckerberg made statements that are being spun as truth but it is public record that the censorship began long before Joe was president.  


He's lying and he's been lying and the media has let him get away with this lie for months and months now.  It's not that hard to demonstrate he's lying.  But for some reason, the media can't do a basic fact check on Mark Suckerberg.  We can but they can't.  In the words of John and Yoko, "I hope someday you'll join us and the world will live as one."  Lily Mae Lazarus (THE DAILY BEAST) reports:

Mark Zuckerberg’s shock choice to scrap fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram has sparked concern and outrage—including from inside the top ranks of the company.

Michael McConnell, co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Board, said in an interview Friday that the move looks like “buckling to political pressure.”

“I would have liked to have seen these reforms laid out in less contentious and partisan times, so that they would be considered on the merits rather than…Donald Trump is president and now they’re caving in,” McConnell told NPR.

According to him, neither he nor the board, an international group of experts in law, human rights and journalism, were not told about the new policy ahead of time.

Meta executives, however, allegedly informed Trump officials about the change in policy prior to the announcement, a source with knowledge of the conversations told the New York Times. 



Again, a publicly traded company with a board of directors and a publicly traded company that's sold itself to shareholders as a company that respected diversity and was socially conscious.  





Roland Martin and Isaac Hayes III are calling on people to leave FACEBOOK and move to FANBASE.


I can't follow that call because I'm not on FACEBOOK.  Never had been.  But I will gladly amplify their call for people to move to FANBASE.


Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Miss Sassy On A Leash" went up Friday,   Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Cult Member? Yes. Sex Slave? No" went up on Thursday and Isaiah's latest THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "The Ugly Rudy G" went up Wednesday.   The following sites updated:









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