The Media is the Message - Indian TV Anchor Discusses Air-Strikes Before They Happen; US Faith in News Media Falls Below 50%, as it Should

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Indian TV anchor’s texts spark cries for security leak inquiry after he discussed Pakistan airstrikes before they happened

18 Jan 2021 16:32

FILE PHOTO: Indian Air Force fighter jets on May 3, 2020. © REUTERS/Amit Dave

Opposition politicians in India have called for an investigation into a potential national security leak after a TV anchor’s messages showed he had prior knowledge of airstrikes launched against Pakistan in February 2019.

Amid a series of text messages sent from Arnab Goswami, news anchor and editor-in-chief of Republic TV network, to the head of a TV ratings agency, Goswami mentioned that India would launch a “bigger than normal strike” on Pakistan. The messages were sent on February 23, 2019, just three days before India struck military targets in Pakistan, but weren’t made public until earlier this month as part of a separate investigation.

A transcript of the messages was included in a charge-sheet filed by Mumbai police as part of an investigation into allegations of rate fixing by Republic, which the network denies. 

“On Pakistan, the government is confident of striking in a way that people will be elated. Exact words used,” Goswami’s message reportedly read.

The anchor has denied having any prior knowledge of the military action, arguing that his message was in reference to the officially stated government position that India would “hit back at Pakistan after the Pulwama attack.”

On February 14, 2019, a Pakistan-based group launched the deadliest single attack against Indian forces in Kashmir since 1989, killing 46 soldiers in a suicide bombing. In response, India launched airstrikes against militants in Pakistani locations, escalating tensions and nearly bringing the two neighboring states to the brink of war.

Addressing the calls for an investigation into a potential government leak, Goswami criticised India’s opposition parties, accusing them of being a “mouthpiece” for Pakistan. 

The Indian government has not responded to the demands from the opposition parties, nor to suggestions of impropriety or leaking. 

Alongside the internal issues caused by the content of the messages, the issue also risks international outcry. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has suggested the texts show that the strikes were a political act, and not a military move, to help Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi secure re-election.

Americans’ trust in mainstream media has never been lower –

but journalists insist it’s the audience’s fault, not theirs

22 Jan 2021 03:59

FILE PHOTO. ©  Reuters / Shannon Stapleton

Fewer than half of Americans trust mainstream media, according to PR firm Edelman’s annual “trust barometer.” But rather than attempt to repair the relationship, media outlets blame their audience’s poor ‘information hygiene.’

Long headed for collapse, Americans’ trust in the media establishment hit an all time low in 2021, falling three points overall to just 46 percent, according to Edelman’s most recent annual survey. The figure marks the first time Americans’ trust of journalism sank below the 50 percent mark.

Americans’ trust in social media also hit rock bottom, clocking in at a miserable 27 percent, according to Edelman’s annual “trust barometer.” Globally, people’s faith in social media wasn’t much better, with just 35 percent of users deeming it a trustworthy source for “general news and information.”

Survey respondents did not hesitate to expound on their dim view of the journalistic profession, either – 56 percent of Americans agreed the media was “purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations,” while 58 percent agreed most outlets were “more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than informing the public.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, breaking the numbers up by political party revealed a sharp contrast between Biden and Trump voters, with only 18 percent of the latter crowd deeming the media trustworthy in the wake of November’s presidential election. Even among Democrats, however, only 57 percent deemed the media trustworthy.

Conservatives, including the offspring of former president Donald Trump, took to social media to roll their eyes at what for them was stating the obvious. Most establishment outlets had after all been gushing about President Joe Biden's inauguration in truly outrageous terms, comparing his inaugural speech to that of JFK and waxing poetic about Vice President Kamala Harris' hair.

Others brought up dubious connections to “independent” media – including Edelman itself – suggesting the trust crisis had less to do with the media losing its touch than it did with Americans becoming more savvy regarding their manipulation.

The only group trusted by a majority of Americans out of Government, Media, NGOs, and Business in 2021 was, ironically, Big Business – even though corporations largely pull the strings of the media, politics, and the other institutions so many Americans seem to agree are not trustworthy.

Axios and other opportunistic journalists reading Edelman’s 2021 report have called for these CEOs to “visibly embrace the news media” in order to burnish the media’s public image.

'Visibly embrace', is that as opposed to 'invisibly embrace'?

“Now it’s time for [CEOs] to use the trust they’ve built up to help rebuild our civic infrastructure,” Axios concluded, specifically referring to outreach to Trump voters, whose trust in CEOs (61 percent) runs 40 points higher than their trust in the media. However, given conservatives’ unabashed loathing for mainstream media, the plan could backfire and drag corporations down a few notches in the MAGA crowd’s estimation.

Even while admitting that media distrust was a global issue rather than “a function of Donald Trump’s war on ‘fake news,’” Axios appeared to blame its audience for their refusal to put their faith in the Fourth Estate, posting a series of links tipping worried journalists off on why their propaganda might be missing the mark. Clutching pearls on topics from the Covid-19 pandemic and “vaccine hesitancy” to the US election scandals, the overarching message was simple – don't confuse your audience with opinions other than the one you want them to have.

However, Americans’ own distrust in the majority of their institutions does not bode well for the US’ “brand,” Edelman’s survey revealed. Other countries have apparently been paying attention, as trust in companies headquartered in the US fell four points to what was reportedly an all-time low of 51 percent.

Fox News’ Ratings Slide as Americans’ Mistrust of Mainstream Media Grows

6 Corporations own 90% of American news media

Rex Murphy: A Political Travesty is Unfolding in America

This sleazy attempt to get Trump out of office illustrates what happens when one side refuses to accept the voice of the people in an election

Rex Murphy, National Post
Rex Murphy is Canada's best political commentator. His drifting to the right in
recent years resulted in the termination of a very long employment at the CBC.

Back in the days when it was obvious to all the oracles of the higher punditry that Donald Trump was on a quixotic quest towards the presidency, and when it was inscribed in the granite of fate that Hillary Clinton was going to thrash the rampageous outsider, some raised a caution: what if Trump, in violation of all standards of American democracy, refused, after losing, as he was surely going to do, to accept the election’s result?

Predictably, the answer was that it would be a horror, typical of Trump’s manic manner, and in Ms. Clinton’s own tweeted words a fundamental “threat to our democracy.” The standard has always been: the people vote, the votes are counted, and save in the most exceptional and absolutely vivid demonstrations of overt and blatant examples of fraud, the loser sighs and the winner goes on to Pennsylvania Avenue. Even after the nail-biter and hanging chads debacle in the 2000 election, did not Albert Gore himself accede to George Bush II, and Americans proceeded, in the most beautiful phrase in politics, “to put it all behind them?”

Not so when, so to speak, Alaric stormed the empire and reduced Rome to ruins, which is the only historic template for how progressives viewed and still view Trump’s successful march to the White House. The psychological shock was massive and unprecedented, the “pussy hats” were out marching in days, and opinion columnists sobbed over the trauma of voters who found themselves incontinent with rage and sorrow that Trump, the disruptor, had won.

It was not, among the virulently anti-Trump forces, supposed to have been this way. Within the coven of Clinton supporters a Trump victory was against nature; it could not be, the goddess of glass ceilings must have been, had to have been, cheated. Hillary herself over the months that followed unspiralled a vast catalogue of why she shouldn’t have lost and then fixed upon the No. 1 favourite. Trump and his lawless henchpersons had “stolen” or “manipulated” the process. And most particularly, most explosively, spun the story of how the dread Darth Putin and Trump had secretly, nefariously, maliciously colluded and “stolen” the election from Hillary.

From the elegant hostelries of Martha’s Vineyard to the sleek mansion-palaces of the Silicon Valley hyper-tycoons, the keening went on. And thus, as soon as Trump was installed, the charge was made, that Trump was in the White House only because he had “colluded” with the Russians, and therefore he was not “really” president. It went even more raw than that. Some of the cable networks, and most of the big press, became utterly absorbed in the effort to prove collusion. The most hysterical of the Russian conspiracy theorists, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, went on every night for two and a half years articulating every wild wisp of an allegation that Trump was an agent of Russia, Putin’s stooge — a president beholden to an enemy tyrant.

With that as context the move to impeach originated. It would not do to have a “Russian asset” control the government of the United States. And for close to two and a half years the Russian connection was investigated as the strongest possible, irrefutable reason to take him out of office: to impeach him, and rid the country of his Russian-contaminated presence in the White House.

Hillary Clinton speaks at the Jewish Labor Committee’s Annual Human Rights Awards Dinner on Dec. 9, 2019, in New York City. Jeenah Moon/Getty Images

So there were investigations without number, hearings without end, with Robert Mueller, the distinguished, highly respected Washington prestige-figure all the while doing the most detailed and rigorous dive into the whole mess. Mueller was going to do the job, bring home the bacon. No report was more anticipated. And when it did come: Nada, nothing, no American, no one in the Trump administration, not Trump himself or his auxiliaries had “colluded with the Russians to steal the election.” The Russian collusion fantasy collapsed. Democrats again went into mourning. Rachel Maddow checked in for aromatherapy and radical grief counselling.

But. The impeachment game itself was not the least affected. After Russia, Russia, Russia every day, almost within minutes the impeach brigade jumped on a phone call to Ukraine. I’m not going to detail this adventure save to note that the speed with which his opponents went from “having evidence of collusion with Russia” as the ground base for their impeachment efforts — the very speed of the switch to Ukraine, was or should be mind-blowing.

And now to this very week: when articles of impeachment have been drawn up to vote on, on Wednesday or Thursday, there are only two charges — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Where’s Russia, where’s Lord Putin, where’s treason and being a “stooge” of a foreign power? How can they leap, with such shameless ease, from the massive campaign of nearly three years insisting they had proof Trump was a tool of Putin, to this petty sideline of an allegation that Trump abused his power on a phone call to Ukraine?

A copy of the House of Representatives articles of impeachment resolution that Democrats hope to use to impeach U.S. President Donald Trump is seen after being released in Washington on Dec. 10, 2019. Jim Bourg/Reuters

All this sits alongside what has been revealed during this farce, that the FBI and its masters had set spies in Trump’s campaign, that they had used the Steele dossier — compiled by the Clinton camp and utterly discredited — to obtain the famous FISA warrants, that they had played pat-a-ball with Hillary on her server, and the Clinton Foundation’s octopus relation with foreign “investors.” That, in fact, the whole predicate of their investigations came from a paid-for, confected, Clinton research dump, with some of the most salacious, unverified and to-be-proven-false allegations ever to rise against a president. The immortal charge came from the head of the FBI himself, and was repeated in his book tour: “I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013,” he said. “It’s possible, but I don’t know.” Of course James Comey didn’t know — that’s the off-ramp of every sly insinuation.

So now this week, the move to impeachment proceeds but is reduced from the melodrama of Russian collusion, the word Russia not even in the two articles of the impeachment itself. And what are these two? Nothing more than a formless and flowing river of hot fudge and mostly composed of the same materials, so vague they could be hauled out on a thousand occasions.

Members of the House Rules Committee hold a hearing on the impeachment of U.S. President

Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 17, 2019. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

But no Russia. That’s the big take: It is what is not in the charges, which assures anyone looking at this that the desire to impede, demean and entangle Trump, not “high crimes and misdemeanours,” was and is the whole and only motive behind a transparent travesty. The impeachment process as we have observed turns, with vicious irony, on something Hillary Clinton herself warned about, when she was “certain” and half the country was, too, that she was going to win. That not accepting the result of an election was a grave threat to American democracy.

She was right. The past three years, clouded daily by this sleazy attempt to get Trump out by means other than by democratic vote, is the full illustration of what happens when one side — the Democrats — refuse to accept the voice of the people in an election. And there is an additional irony attached: the impeachment mania may well increase support for Trump and give him a second term. As was said of old: He who diggeth a pit shall fall into it.

If Trump's phone call with Zelensky is grounds for impeachment, I guarantee there is not one President who ever sat in the Oval Office who didn't deserve a similar fate. And many have committed far more outrageous travesties, but no-one is looking into those.

It should be noted here that the Republicans did exactly the same thing during the first term of Obama. They attempted to distort and prevent everything he tried to do, not on the basis of individual merit, but because they so intensely disliked him, whether for his colour, his progressiveness, or his preference for Muslims over Jews. They certainly did not respect the people's choice. Whoever wins next year, should expect more of the same, only, perhaps, worse.

Right-Wing Parties Gain Highest Voter Approval Ahead of EU Elections – Study

The election of a Republican Government in the US was tempered by the mid-term rise in the numbers of Democratic law-makers. But elsewhere, countries are turning more and more to the right.

In Canada, when the very Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau took power in 2015, there were 8 left-leaning provincial governments in our 10 provinces, and only 2 right-leaning governments. Since then, the country has flipped with only 4 left-leaning provincial legislatures and 6 right-leaning houses. 

This is not because the right-wing message is so appealing to Canadians, but because the far-left message of the very Liberal Trudeau and the far-left governments of Kathleen Wynne in Ontario and Rachel Notley in Alberta were simple rejected as 'not who we are as Canadians'. 

(L-R) Matteo Salvini, from Italy's Lega Nord, Austrian Freedom Party member Harald Vilimsky, Marine Le Pen,

France's National Front political party head, Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) leader Geert Wilders and

Belgium's Flemish Vlaams Belang party member Gerolf Annemans © Reuters / Francois Lenoir

One in 10 Europeans will back right-wing parties in the upcoming European Union elections, according to a new study, pointing to growing support for Euroskeptic movements across the bloc.

EU elections will be held May 23rd-26th, 2019.

A Bertelsmann Foundation study found that right-wing parties with a populist, nationalist or Euroskeptic bent received the highest level of voter approval of any single political grouping. 10.3 percent of voters said they would cast their ballots for right-wing parties, while only 6.2 percent said they positively identified with left-wing groups, and 4.4 percent with a Green party.

Right-wing parties have seen a surge in support amid growing disillusionment with Brussels. Those parties include Italy’s Lega Nord, France’s National Rally party, as well as the right-wing Alternative for Germany – commonly known by its German acronym, AfD.

The research indicates that voters care more about stopping parties and policies they dislike than advancing a positive agenda of their own, which, the researchers said, could end up feeding movements on the fringes.

“Many citizens no longer choose to back one party, but rather vote against parties they oppose the most,” said Robert Vehrkamp, a co-author of the Bertelsmann study.

“The populist parties have managed to create a stable and loyal voter base in a relatively short space of time,” he added.

Interesting, but aren't these two statements contradictory?

Nearly 24,000 voters were surveyed for the study, which conducted interviews in 12 EU member states. The EU’s parliamentary elections will be held May 26.

Even centrists such as French President Emmanuel Macron are beginning to bend to growing right-wing sentiment. In an apparent concession to the Yellow Vest protest movement, the French leader conceded that the Schengen agreement, which allows for visa-free travel between 22 EU member states and four non-EU countries, is no longer tenable. Echoing right-wing leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Macron also called for changes to the Dublin Regulation, which gives an EU member state the right to send back asylum seekers to their first country of entry to the bloc.

Mainstream News Networks Refuse to Cover Senate’s ‘No Russia Collusion’ Report

The massive demonization of Russia by western countries

is beginning to unravel

but not if Mainstream Media can help it

AFP/Brendan Smialowski

The same networks that spent 2,202 minutes of collective airtime to push the Russia Collusion Media-Hoax are refusing to cover the Senate Intelligence Committee bipartisan report, which found no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The Media Research Center (MRC) did the research and found that between January 21, 2017, and February 10, 2019, “ABC’s World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News, and the NBC Nightly News [spent] 2,202 minutes on the Russia investigation [, which] accounted for nearly 19 percent of all Trump-related reporting [, and now] none of those three shows have even mentioned the investigation since NBC’s report came out on February 12.”

The same is true elsewhere on the left-wing networks.

“Neither CBS This Morning nor NBC’s Today have even acknowledged this new information from Senate investigators since the news broke on February 12,” MRC reports. “ABC’s Good Morning America briefly touched on it in a news brief totaling less than one minute on February 13.”

What’s especially fascinating is that NBC’s Ken Dilanian broke the original news of the Senate report, and NBC is still refusing to cover the story.

The reasons for this are quite obvious: the media know a reckoning is on the horizon, and they are buying time in the hopes of finding a way to wriggle out of it.

Anyone with even a lick of sense knew from the beginning that the Russia Collusion Media-Hoax was a hoax. Not only is the whole idea of it preposterous; everything involving Russia and the Trump campaign points to the opposite of a conspiracy. Look at the Trump Tower meeting. If there was a conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin, why was Rob Goldstone, a British publicist, needed as an intermediary to set up the meeting?

If there was all this collusion between Trump and Putin, why was Michael Cohen left to send proposals to blind email addresses regarding the proposed Trump Tower deal in Moscow?

Even the stuff we are told is the most “sinister” proof of collusion points in the opposite direction.

But that is not what the media have been telling us for the last two years.

Rather, again and again and again, they have promised that Watergate is right around the corner, that the other shoe is about to drop (and please ignore the fact that the first shoe has yet to drop); have told us not to worry because the aberrational nightmare, the virus in the system, the national mistake that is President Trump is about to be removed.

For two years the media have been selling the Resistance a bill of goods and have gone so far as to manufacture a mountain of fake news to keep these suckers on the hook.

So, no, they are not going to cover a bipartisan report that debunks their hoax, especially one as detailed as this one, that involved two years, 200 interviews, and a gazillion documents.

MSM is not interested in the truth, only in pushing their agendas.

CNN Dropped Local Journalist from Programming After He Said the Wall Works

Main-Stream Media's Distortion of Reality

MSM - MainStream Media can't understand why they are criticized so much. They probably assume that it is because of Trump's character assassinations, and that likely contributes. But the main reason is the politicization of news reporting. It is about what news outlets choose to cover and what they choose not to cover, and, of course, the spin they put on their coverage. If they can't spin a story to suit their political, or politically correct bias, they simply drop the story. For example...

FILE PHOTO. © Reuters / Mike Blake

The wall works!

San Diego news station KUSI has claimed that CNN reached out to its team for help covering the debate around President Trump’s planned border wall, only to drop the idea once its reporter told the network that the wall works.

San Diego was until recently the first port of call many illegal immigrants saw after crossing into the United States from Mexico. Fenced off since 2010, the border here represents the first few miles of President Trump’s long-promised border wall and was constructed in June last year.

As the government shutdown enters its third week and Trump and Congressional Democrats remained unable to reach a compromise on funding a wall along the border, CNN got in touch with KUSI, an independent local news station in San Diego to ask its journalists whether the wall there works as intended.

KUSI’s Dan Plante responded that, according to his reporting, the wall works. Backed up by Border Patrol agents, walls and fences work, Plante found in his reporting.

“We have continuously been told by Border Patrol Agents that the barrier along the Southern border helps prevent illegal entries, drugs, and weapons from entering the United States, and the numbers prove it,” KUSI stated.

That was the last KUSI heard from CNN, who KUSI say “declined to hear from us.”

KUSI News✔
@KUSINews
 Thursday morning, @CNN called the KUSI Newsroom asking if a reporter could give them a local view of the debate surrounding the border wall and government shutdown. After we informed them about our past reports, they declined to hear from us.

CNN maintains that the planned segment with KUSI was dropped for unrelated reasons, as “happens many times every day” in the news business. The cable network called KUSI’s claim “a non story.”

CNN Communications✔
@CNNPR
Ответ пользователю @KUSINews @CNN
We called several local stations to book someone for a show. We didn’t end up booking any of them. That happens many times every single day. We did, however, book a reporter from KUSI for a story on immigration and the border wall in November. This is a non story.  #factsfirst🍎

First fact: CNN apparently doesn't think it's important to know that the wall works! 2 years of arguing about the wall and whether it works or not is a non-story? This is why MSM is so lowly respected. It's not that they lie, er, not so much, it's that they just don't cover the truth. Truth is irrelevant anymore. 

With Trump considering using emergency powers to build the wall without congressional support, the eyes of the nation have been fixed on the country’s 2,000 mile border with Mexico. President Trump visited border security personnel in McAllen, Texas, on Thursday, to drum up support for the wall. His round table discussion with local authorities created a gloomy picture of a crisis involving murder, drugs and human trafficking.

CNN sent the president's consistent opponent Jim Acosta along to report from the frontier.

Standing behind a 30-foot slatted steel barrier, Acosta declared that he didn’t “see anything resembling a national emergency situation.” The veteran reporter added that “there are no migrants trying to rush toward this fence.” 

Astonishing!

Acosta was swiftly ridiculed by White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders for “so clearly explaining why WALLS WORK.”

Sarah Sanders✔

@PressSec
 When I went with President @realDonaldTrump to the border today I never imagined @Acosta would be there doing our job for us and so clearly explaining why WALLS WORK. Thanks Jim!

 Trump himself jibed at Acosta, simply retweeting Acosta’s video with the caption “Dear Diary,” a phrase used by Trump supporters to mock Acosta’s rambling coverage of the President’s rallies.

While Acosta found no evidence of a national crisis, CNN later reported that Mexican authorities found 20 burned bodies on a dirt road 50 miles away on the Mexican side of the border. The incident is believed to be the result of a confrontation between criminal gangs involved in the trafficking of guns, drugs and people.

Personally, I deplore the idea of a wall, in principle. However, Mexico is a completely failed state having been taken over by criminal gangs and there simply has to be a way to control what and who comes across that border.

Liberals and Conservatives and the Fear of God

Northwoods Ministries

NBC Reveals It Sat on Discrediting Info About Kavanaugh ‘Witness’

Mainstream Media are astonished at how little credibility they have in the public eye. Here is one of many examples why. They seem to be coming every day.

© Reuters/ Joshua Roberts

As the US Justice Department prepares to investigate media-hound attorney Michael Avenatti and Kavanaugh "victim" Julie Swetnick for making false accusations, NBC admitted they knew Swetnick's story was falling apart weeks ago.

More than three weeks after an NBC interview where Kavanaugh accuser #3 Julie Swetnick contradicted the sworn affidavit she gave Avenatti, the network is publishing text and phone exchanges with a supporting “witness.” 

Recorded around the time of Swetnick's interview, the second woman appears to tell two different stories when Avenatti is around and when he isn't.

The supposed witness signed an affidavit, made public by Avenatti on October 3, describing in no uncertain terms how she saw a young Brett Kavanaugh (now a US Supreme Court justice) spike the drinks of girls at student parties so that they could then be gang-raped. 

When questioned by NBC, however, she said she hadn't actually witnessed it, and Avenatti had grossly misrepresented her words in the document she had only "skimmed" before signing.

NBC then spoke to Avenatti, who had provided the second woman's contact information in the first place, to try to straighten out the stories, but the plot only thickened. The hot-tempered lawyer expressed his "disgust" with the outlet and at one point said "on background, it's not the same woman. What are you going to do with that?"

They then reached out to the "witness" again, and she backed Avenatti and the affidavit – only to insist in a phone call minutes later that she never saw Kavanaugh do anything and she wouldn't speak to Avenatti anymore.

Swetnick's own early-October interview to NBC revealed a story that markedly diverged from her written narrative. Questioned on camera, she could no longer be certain that Kavanaugh was among the boys who supposedly gang-raped her, or that he had spiked the punch at the party. 

It later emerged during the FBI investigation into her claims that Swetnick had a history of making false accusations of sexual misconduct.

Earlier this week, Judiciary Committee chair Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) referred Avenatti and Swetnick to the Justice Department to be investigated for conspiracy to defraud, making false statements to federal officials, and obstructing a federal investigation.

One would think perhaps NBC should be investigated as well. News is so blatantly political in America, and yet they accept no responsibility for the deep division in the country. 

Judge Orders to Restore DACA, Says Trump Admin Failed to Provide Reasons for Ending It

This is an easy out for a lose-lose situation for Trump.

He should take it and run!

Mind you, there might be a dangerous precedent here.

Activists and DACA recipients protest against the Trump administration's policies on immigrants and immigration, during a demonstration in Manhattan, New York, U.S., March 1, 2018. © Amr Alfiky / Reuters

A US federal judge has sided with the plaintiffs in a case filed against the Trump administration's move to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which had sparked a wave of protests in September.

DC District Judge John Bates on Friday upheld his earlier ruling from April 24, that found the White House's decision to scrap the policy, which has shielded about 800,000 migrants from deportation since it was adopted in 2012, was "arbitrary and capricious."

"The Court therefore reaffirms its conclusion that DACA's rescission was unlawful and must be set aside," he wrote in a 25-page opinion on Friday.

I don't know if this has happened before or not, but if it is a precedent, then it's a troubling one, even though I agree with the decision.

The court argued that the memorandum issued by Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in June, that was supposed to offer a legally sound explanation for the government's action, failed "to elaborate meaningfully on the agency's primary rationale for its decision: the judgment that the policy was unlawful and unconstitutional."

Bates contended that although the memo provides several new reasons for the court to review its decision, the majority of them "simply repackage legal arguments previously made." The only one "bona fide (albeit logically dubious) reason" offered by Nielsen was not enough to sway the court's opinion, Bates wrote, since it was "articulated nowhere in DHS's prior explanation for its decision" and hence cannot come into play now.

Calling the renewed justification provided by the department "a hodgepodge of illogical or post hoc policy assertions" that "simply will not do," the court at the same time stressed its ruling does not mean that the DHS is not entitled to rescind the program in principal, but that it "must give a rational explanation" if it wants to do so.

Bates, who in April gave the government a 90-day window so that DHS could come up with what the court will perceive as an adequate rationale to shut down DACA, on Friday provided the Trump administration with only 20 days to decide if it will appeal the ruling and seek a temporary stay in execution.

The decision is an important landmark in the litigation over DACA's validity, that saw the Trump administration being challenged by multiple lawsuits across the country. Should the ruling come into force, The White House will have to restart the DACA program in full.

In his April ruling Bates wrote that if the DHS fails to issue a memo that would prove that the program was unlawful and unconstitutional, as insisted by the government, "the Rescission Memo will be vacated in its entirety, and the original DACA program will be restored in full."

Since US President Donald Trump rescinded the Obama-era program on September 5, the White House has been embroiled in numerous legal battles. While the administration has won some, with Trump praising Judge Roger W. Titus of Maryland, who ruled in March that the President was within his authority to rescind the executive order issued by his predecessor, it has suffered more losses so far.

A California court in January ordered to partially restart the program, while a New York judge in February issued an injunction ordering the government to maintain DACA, although that will not require DHS to accept new applications. Several government appeals are still pending in US courts.

Bates' ruling was applauded by The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a plaintiff in the case, which called it a "huge victory."

"This represents a powerful victory against attempts to dehumanize immigrants who are law-abiding and productive residents of the United States and who were long ago brought to this country as children through no fault of their own," NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said.

Britain and Ecuador Discuss Wikileaks Founder's Fate

Time's running out on the Whistle Blower-in-Chief

By Sommer Brokaw

British and Ecuadorean leaders are holding talks on the fate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange who may soon have to leave an embassy in Britain after staying there six years. File photo by Hugo Philpott/UPI | License Photo

UPI -- Officials in Britain and Ecuador are discussing the fate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been holed up in Ecuador's British embassy for six years.

Assange, 47, who has rarely seen daylight in the years he's been held in asylum, could face expulsion soon from the embassy, a source told The Times.

Government officials in both countries are pondering the eviction of Assange, who gained notoriety for publishing thousands of U.S.-classified documents on the website, WikiLeaks, from Ecuador's London embassy, where he has been in asylum since 2012 and gained citizenship late last year.

Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno told the BBC Friday that he was never "in favor" of Assange's activities, and that both countries were holding talks.

The British government has become more concerned about his welfare as Ecuador cut off his internet connection in March over concerns about his use of social media interfering with diplomatic relations and cut back extra security in May after spending $5 million on protection costs.

"It is our wish that this is brought to an end, and we would like to make the assurance that if he were to step out of the embassy, he would be treated humanely and properly," British Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan told parliament last month.

"The first priority would be to look after his health, which we think is deteriorating."

Ecuador granted political asylum to Assange in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over rape allegations. Assange faced a count of unlawful coercion and two counts of sexual molestation, which expired in 2015 due to statutes of limitations under Swedish law, while the investigation for one remaining rape allegation, which had an expiration date of 2020, was dropped in May 2017.

Although the Swedish investigation has been dropped, Assange fears an arrest for bail breach in the sexual assault case would allow him to be extradited to the United States for publishing the classified documents on Wikileaks. 

The website grabbed worldwide attention in April 2010 when it released footage of U.S. soldiers fatally shooting at least 18 civilians from a helicopter in Iraq.

Perhaps Assange should have allowed himself to face American justice before Trump began loading the Supreme Court with right-wing cronies. He might have had a chance to be pardoned as a whistle-blower. I doubt that chance exists anymore.

I think Britain would demand assurances that he not face the death penalty for treason before handing him over to the US, but I seriously doubt that he would get a fair trial in America.

Elon Musk's ‘Pravda’ to Rate Credibility of Journalists & Publications

I have been waiting a long time for the brilliant inventor/entrepreneur to do something that might actually benefit society in a way other than involving transportation. He has the ability to put this program together in a way that is more than just theatre or a stage for fools. At least, I hope he has that ability, and I wonder what algorithms will be employed for social and political honesty.  

Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk appears to have declared war on the media, tweeting that he was launching a site that would let the public rate the credibility of journalists, editors and publications - which he will call “Pravda.”

Annoyed by the recent media coverage of him and his companies, Musk fired off a series of tweets on Wednesday, culminating with the proposal for the new site. The public would be able to rate the “core truth of any article” and track the “credibility score over time” for each reporter, editor and publication, he said.

Pravda, the word for “truth” in most Slavic languages, was also the name of the official newspaper of the Russian (later Soviet) Communist Party for much of the 20th century.

In a follow-up tweet, Musk explained the reasoning behind creating such a site. Even if the public doesn’t care, he said, “the journalists, editors & publications will. It is how they define themselves.”

I have to take issue with that statement. In the last couple years it seems most MSM journalists define themselves by their partiality to specific issues. They are governed by their feelings rather than common sense and logic. They constantly take sides on issues with no attempt to see the other side. They fail miserably to tell the honest and whole truth.

To the warnings that bots and trolls could game the system, and that the public doesn’t care about the truth, the Tesla and SpaceX mogul replied, “I have faith in the people.” But not journalists!

He also had a testy exchange with a reporter from the Verge, who accused him of acting like US President Donald Trump.

“Anytime anyone criticizes the media, the media shrieks ‘You’re just like Trump!’” Musk replied. “Why do you think he got elected in the first place? Because no ones believes you any more.”

The tech mogul is hardly the first to propose fact-checking and rating journalists for credibility. A cottage industry of “fact-checkers” has mushroomed following the 2016 US presidential election. Social network giant Facebook recently announced it would rank news sites based on “community trust” and partnered up with a controversial think-tank to “protect elections” from misinformation.

Last year, an attempt by Hillary Clinton supporters to create a fact-checking media platform was met with ridicule. That project, called Verrit, has only consisted of a logo on the homepage since February.

The replies to Musk’s proposals have ranged from calling him a “Typical white rich a**hole” and accusing him of “swerving into Kanye territory” to asking if he’s taking applications and suggestions that he just buy out Twitter or PornHub (“Trust me. Everyone already goes there.”)

In case you haven't noticed, this article was taken from RT. I suspect everyone in Russia goes to PornHub, at least that's what RT would have you believe, but there are many people who actually rise above the lowest levels of man's humanity; you just might have a hard time finding one in post-Communist Russia, at least, according to RT.

A poll that Musk posted on Twitter suggests a lot of the users on the platform agree with him. So far, 87 percent of nearly 200,000 voters favor the new project, with only 13 percent choosing “No, media are awesome” as their preferred option.

The 13% were probably all journalists.

Musk’s mounting frustration with the media comes amid recent bad press Tesla’s Model 3 sedan has received over braking problems. Bloomberg reported in April that Tesla was losing $6,500 a minute and it could fail before the end of the year. There has even been a proposal to oust him as chairman of Tesla’s board.

Critics have long accused the South African-born billionaire of scoring generous government subsidies for projects such as electric cars, solar roofs or high-speed mass transit. While Tesla, SolarCity and Hyperloop haven’t quite lived up to hype, Musk’s SpaceX has been very successful at launching payloads into orbit and reusing the launchers.

It appears Musk already incorporated Pravda Corp. in California last October, according to documents dug up by one reporter.

Musk has a history of picking symbolic or funny names for his endeavors. Tesla is named after a Serbian-American inventor of alternate current (AC), while the enterprise drilling tunnels for Hyperloop is called The Boring Company.

Americans Pushed into Pro-War Frenzy by Elite-Controlled MSM & NATO – Max Blumenthal

Just when I start to think that maybe my Deep State theories are a bit paranoid, someone credible comes along and agrees with them

Max Blumenthal is a New York Times bestseller political writer. His father was an aide to President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He is worth reading.

U.S. soldiers attend welcoming ceremony for U.S.-led NATO troops at polygon near Orzysz, Poland, April 13, 2017.

© Kacper Pempel / Reuters

Years of Russia hysteria and North Korea fear-mongering led by the US mainstream media and NATO propaganda have built support for war among Americans, making them ready to “fight and die” in overseas lands, author and journalist Max Blumenthal told RT.

A recent study by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs has pointed at a shift in the collective thinking and feeling of Americans, when it comes how they view global conflict.

The study was conducted over the last two years leading up to the elections in 2016 and found that Americans seem to have found a new appetite for war. 

Blumenthal, who co-hosts the “Moderate Rebels” podcast focused on US interventions and is the Senior Editor of AlterNet’s Grayzone Project, spoke to RT America’s Manila Chan about these developments.

RT: What do you make of this Chicago Council study?

Max Blumenthal: The Washington Post in a commentary framed these numbers as kind of the failure of Donald Trump’s America First policy. And I think Trump has done a pretty horrible job selling his policy. There was a non-interventionist component that he campaigned on, which proved pretty popular, particularly in places like the Rust Belt.

However, I really think that if you look at these numbers, you should look at the internals, and look at when the poll was taken, and when the numbers started to shift. They started to shift when the election campaign began. They reflect a concerted campaign by the mainstream media and by the national security state, which has unprecedented access and control over mainstream media – particularly CNN and MSNBC – to bring the American public’s views in line with the elites’ [views] of our interventionist bipartisan foreign policy consensus in Washington. Two years of non-stop red-baiting, Russia hysteria, and fear-mongering over North Korea have done the trick, particularly among Democrats.

RT: Speaking of the mainstream media, why do liberals tend to support interventionist policies at higher rates than even Republicans? It’s unusual, isn’t it?

MB: Yes, it is unusual. We should just talk about some of the numbers first. From 2015 to this summer we saw a 20 percent surge in the number of Americans who would support sending troops to defend South Korea. We also see, for the first time in history, a majority of Americans willing to send US troops to fight and die for Latvia against Russia, and that is a reflection of their support for NATO. 

Liberals disproportionately support these militaristic policies, which seem to suggest support for a hot war with Russia, and even hot war with China. It would be disastrous if they took place. So why didn’t that take place? Because of the partisan war against Trump, who has been portrayed as an enemy of NATO – even though he is now as supportive of NATO as ever; as someone who is a Manchurian candidate of Russia, who is controlled by Putin’s nine-dimensional chess and has colluded with Russia. So, Democrats tend to see Russia in a negative light, and they support interventionist policies.

But if you also look at CNN and MSNBC versus Fox News, which is the de-facto channel of the Republican Party and Trump, you see non-stop contributors from the national security state – like James Clapper, Michael Hayden, the former CIA director – pushing these kinds of militaristic policies. So, these are the channels that Democrats watch. Their media, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, has really stepped up the fear-mongering and militarism.

So, you see a total reversal from the Bush period, the Bush era – when Democrats were staunchly against the Iraq war, because it was Bush’s war. And now you see the people that are against guns that are against mass shooting – favoring pointing guns and committing mass shootings abroad. 

RT: How do you view the posture of the American people on defending eastern European countries like Lithuania and Latvia, who are members of NATO?

MB: In 2014, Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State, wife of the neo-conservative Robert Kagan, said that Americans were ready to fight and die for Latvia. That wasn’t true at the time. Now it is. These attitudes have been manufactured.

They’ve been partly manufactured by NATO propaganda. We heard at lot – especially on CNN from figures like Jake Tapper, “Deep State Jake,” who almost every show is pushing regime change in one of the non-compliant states. We heard a lot about the Zapad [West] military exercises, thinking Romania, where Russia was said to have amassed 100,000 troops on NATO borders – even “Democracy Now!” reported that.

It turns out that Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, was pushing this lie – that there will be 100,000 troops. I think less than 10,000 troops in the end appeared for these military exercises. This was supposed to terrify the states. It was absolute blaster and pro-war propaganda. We’ve seen that reflected in these attitudes.

Ron Paul: Vote All You Want, the Secret Government Won't Change

Former congressman Ron Paul is outspoken. When he retired from Congress, he called lawmakers psychopathic authoritarians to their faces. He’s also called Donald Trump an authoritarian and asserted Hillary Clinton could have run as a Republican. And just last week, Paul took aim at the foundational structure of American ‘democracy.’

In a recent episode of his web show, the Liberty Report, Ron Paul discussed the Department of Homeland Security’s decision last month to take a more active role in U.S. elections. Secretary Jeh Johnson said he was “considering whether elections should be classified as ‘critical infrastructure,’ affording them the same kinds of enhanced protections that the banking system and the electrical grid receive,” POLITICO reported.

The potential move came on the heels of the notorious DNC leak in July, which exposed intentions within the Democratic Party to manipulate the primary race against Senator Bernie Sanders. Politicians and the media quickly blamed the hack on Russia, failing to cite conclusive proof of their allegations yet spawning the narrative that the Kremlin and other foreign threats could compromise U.S. elections.

On his show, Paul took issue with the notion that the Department of Homeland Security, an agency riddled with incompetence and failed objectives — case in point, the TSA — (Security screeners at Kennedy and Newark airports have consistently failed to find weapons and bombs being smuggled by undercover operatives posing as airline passengers) is capable of securing U.S. elections.

Speaking on DHS’s decision to become more involved in the process following the DNC hack, Ron Paul offered a scathing indictment of the federal organization, arguing it will capitalize on troubling events to seize power:

“They may have false flags and they may do a lot of things, but no matter how an emergency comes up, they’re going to make use of it. And the use of it isn’t to say ‘Hey, how are we going to protect the American people?’ Are they worrying, when they talk about doing something about rigged elections, [that] the votes are counted? No, they’re making sure that the votes aren’t counted and they’re irrelevant and the government has all this power.”

Ron Paul speaks about rigged elections from personal experience. In 2012, when he ran for president within the Republican Party, he was silenced by the media and the political establishment. Primaries and caucuses in Maine and other states showed irregularities, and at more than one caucus event, the lights were simply turned off when Paul supporters stood up to Republican leadership. At another caucus, police assaulted and arrested them.

“The elections don’t matter. This is a ritual that we go through,” Paul observed last week. Instead, he referenced a seemingly omnipotent power much more influential than the ‘will of the people.’

“My belief is that the control is the Deep State,

and people have to realize that,” he said.

Michael Lofgren, a former Republican congressional aide, has written extensively on the Deep State and describes it as “a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”

Lofgren continues:

“The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department.”

Lofgren notes the financial system is also under the influence of the Deep State and that certain areas of the judicial system, namely, the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, are manipulated by the opaque, shadowy apparatus.

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was established during the cold war to oversee foreign surveillance. Out of nearly 34,000 requests for surveillance, the FISC refused 11.

As Ron Paul observed:

“Those powers are already there and I think those individuals who are behind the scenes who really find out what the policies are going to be, regardless of who’s in office, know exactly what we argue: that this place, our country, and our financial system and foreign policy is very precarious and something terrible is going to happen.”

One of those things, he argued, is the continued usurpation of civil liberties:

“This is where the real enemy is right now. Sure, we have to have a national defense. But I don’t agitate and read and study and try to change people’s minds because I think somebody is going to invade us. I want to change foreign policy so we are less in danger. But really, the greatest danger since 9/11 has been the taking away of our liberties. Our civil liberties have been undermined. This will only add fuel to the problems we have already.”

He concluded:

“We do accept the notion that our elections are rigged, but we certainly don’t come down on the side of believing that the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA will unrig our elections.”

“It is a distressing thing to think that — [this is probably a] true statement — no matter what you do [with] your vote, whether you vote or not, the Deep State is in charge and that is what we have to deal with.”

Nevertheless, Paul remained positive:

“But it is good to be politically active, to preach this message, to show people exactly what the government’s doing to us and why we should be involved.”

“But of course, the whole purpose, in the end, has to be that we change our economic philosophy, we change our attitude about protection of our civil liberties, and we change our attitude about getting involved in the internal affairs of other nations, occupying other countries, and being involved in nation-building. If we do those three little things then, believe me, the world would be much more peaceful and we would all be much more prosperous.”

This article (Ron Paul: Vote All You Want, the Secret Government Won’t Change) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Carey Wedler and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to edits@theantimedia.org.

Flurry of Gun Control Bills Pass Across US as Everytown Delights in ‘Winning’ Against Gun Lobby

Guns - third leading cause of death among USA children - 1300 per year

© Rick Wilking / Reuters

Gun control advocates are celebrating a slew of legislation passed across the country. Domestic abusers are targeted in new bills passed by five states, while other states have enhanced their background checks for purchasing firearms.

Louisiana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Tennessee and Utah all passed new restrictions on firearms for domestic abusers, according to Everytown for Gun Safety group, which is funded by billionaire and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Overall, 23 states have enhanced the laws around domestic abusers since 2013, says the gun control advocacy group.

"When you look at what's happening in statehouses across the country, the gun safety movement is winning in state after state — even in this challenging political environment — because volunteers and gun violence survivors have become the counterweight to the gun lobby," said Shannon Watts, who founded Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a part of Everytown.

Hawaii, Tennessee and Washington state passed new laws requiring that police be notified when anyone who fails to pass a background check tries to buy a gun.

Many of these measures were passed with the support of Republican lawmakers and governors, even though the party itself has promised to roll back restrictions on guns and not to allow new ones, points out Everytown.

Gun regulation advocates claimed victory and a loss for the gun lobby, noting that attempts to repeal background checks in Iowa and Nebraska failed, while 17 of 18 states rejected bills to allow guns in schools and 14 of 16 states rejected bills to allow guns on college campuses.

Additionally, 20 of 22 states didn’t pass bills that would have eliminated requirements for permits to carry guns, a top priority for the National Rifle Association, Everytown wrote in its new “report card.”

The new gun regulations could be challenged in front of the Supreme Court, but in the past nine years, SCOTUS has avoided most Second Amendment cases, including those challenging state and local restrictions.

The Second Amendment of the US Constitution protects the right to “keep and bear arms.”

Meanwhile, statistics of gun violence in the country are grim.

Last month, a study found that shootings in the US kill nearly 1,300 children every year, making it the third leading cause of mortality among children after accidents and congenital disease, the study said.