#i will be peddling my lies right to the end of the line‚ everybody. the end isn't nigh‚ the end happened on march 10th of last year

[gingerteaonthetardis]

actually the series finale of the marvelous mrs. maisel already happened and it was titled 'how do you get to carnegie hall?' and it came out in the year 2022. to me. and they kissed at the end

[alexsmitposts]

It’s been One Hell of a Year in the US and its “Not Over with Yet!”

What is really going on in the US? Lots of people are having a difficult time, and see more of the same, if not worse, for the future. Most Americans are just thinking about one more stimulus check, just before Christmas, with so many unemployed, locked down with COVID restrictions, etc. And they should not get their hopes up too much, as they may be waiting for a long time.

All the while the US government is working to get Covid-19 vaccinations to the American public, but now they want strings attached, as people have not only lost faith in the government but the public health system. One proposal, from former congressman John Delaney of Maryland, aims to link the provision of stimulus checks to getting vaccinated, which is virtual blackmail.

Herd Immunity or Herd Mentality?

Since there’s such massive censorship, especially in the mainstream media and on social networking sites, people who would never otherwise give much credence to far-fetched allegations are now starting to believe there’s a conspiracy, or a “cluster-fuck” of conspiracies, starting out with Russiagate, Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, which proved to be the proverbial witch-hunt.

In light of everything that transpired during its run up, the recent US elections have really opened a Pandora’s Box. Take for instance absentee ballots. Several people claim they’ve seen boxes full of postal ballots not collected or counted after hours. According to Jackie Pick, a volunteer attorney in the State of Georgia who presented the evidence to the state Senate, said four suitcases ‘come out from underneath a table at the site while there was no election supervisor present’. But…. if they’re mail-in ballots, they would be for Biden anyway, right?

The mainstream media continue to totally dismiss claims of voting irregularities and fraud, without being willing to address the fact that the thing is remotely possible, claiming that Trump is merely “crying foul over the results”. But this only adds fuel to an already roaring fire. For example, CCTV evidence recently presented to a Georgia Senate Judiciary Subcommittee shows poll workers waiting for observers and media to leave before accessing ballot-stuffed suitcases from under a table, but no one has bothered to explain this, considering it not worthy of a democratic country’s attention.

Bearers of Bad News

Why is it necessarily to look elsewhere, to “off-the-wall” media outlets for alternative views on the election? Some of their insight into election cyber security, diverting votes by electronic means, Dominion Voter Machines, and old-fashion vote rigging is starting to make sense, and a democracy should be concerned about such claims, not treating them as part of sour rhetoric.

Some are now claiming that large transfers of money were made by Chinese investors prior to the elections, which brings a smile to my face in the light of Biden and his son Hunter, and a plethora of allegations of corruption involving them, including influence peddling and other backhanded moves, reported by the New York Post and other non-mainstream publications and outlets. Such stories, and even more scandalous ones, are quickly discounted or not reported in the respectful American mainstream media. They call that fact-checking.

However, a range of pundits and born again types, also not to be believed, are saying that 5 or 6 counties (cities) in the US were able to control the entire election process, and had known in advance what would be the outcome. In these same 6 cities the voting count was held up due to water problems, and allegedly people were robbed of their votes. There were also water main breaks in those same cities: Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix…, and a few other cities also decided the election: Dallas Milwaukee and Seattle.

It is more than sheer coincidence that all these allegations are buttressed with the erosion of fundamental rights that Americans hold so close, free speech, majority rule, an array of constitutional rights and mainstream values. There is little doubt that the mainstream media, especially news networks such as CNN, have been manipulated in recent years, driving domestic and foreign policy, to a degree Joseph Goebbels would have been envious of.

At last some inside information concerning the agenda of the news networks is beginning to surface, and this is not good timing for those who have been manipulating the news. There is no longer a fine line between the truth and the lie, and CNN and others in the same stream of media flows have taken one maxim to heart: “If you tell a lie often enough people will come to accept it as truth.”

Some of the born again types, and their media outlets, seem to know what is going on, including the backdating of absentee ballots. They believe that Trump will somehow remain in office.

In the Meantime!

It is becoming clear that until Trump is out of the White House, he will be a problem. It does not matter whether he won or not. People continue to send him money that he can use for his own personal use. I liken these people to “useful idiots” or “real patriots.”

Yet many Republicans say nothing – which is sad, as without this force, which saw them of them riding on Trump’s coattails, many would not be in office now. It is so depressing to see that people can be so ignorant, or arrogant, or both. If Trump refuses to leave office – which I don’t believe – there will be huge protests. But he will leave office – he may not like it – but he will leave and continue to “suck” money from his supporters.

CNN Defect and Manufacturing Dissent

Recent breaking news is that James O’Keefe of Project Veritas caught CNN red handed conniving to influence the election over a period of two months during conference calls. This network made a concerted effort to report in favour of Joe Biden in the run-up to the election, and in its wake, thus adding more layers of conspiracies to an already complicated mess.

In the video he has released, O’Keefe enters into a CNN conference call, unmuting himself, telling the CEO, Jeffrey Zucker,

“We’ve been listening to your CNN calls for basically two months and recording everything. Just wanted to ask you some questions, if you have a minute … do you still feel you are the most trusted name in news? Based on what I’ve been hearing on these phone calls, I don’t know about that. I mean, we’ve got a lot of recordings that indicate you’re not really that independent of a journalist.”

The plot thickens as to how media and politics are joined up, and the playing field is less than level. The Washington Post, another media outlet which has also been accused in recent years of one sided coverage, reported that “while Project Veritas had previously disseminated covert recordings of CNN’s daily meetings, in this video O’Keefe himself could be seen dialing in to a private CNN call — apparently without the knowledge or consent of participants”.

It is clear that these recordings, legal or otherwise, show that CNN took sides in the US election, and even in the coverage of Trump’s bout with COVID, and made a concerted effort not to show him and his party in the best of light. What escapes critical attention, however, is what degree of conspiracy may have taken place with those outside of the media, such as the DNC. Based on the 2016 election, CNN is still referred to by some by the nickname, Clinton’s News Network, and that is not a good position for the network itself to be in.

I Smell a Rat!

I remember the news about the “stopped counting” on the night of the election. When this was first reported a few days after the election, election officials added an excuse that people were tired and needed to sleep. Nowhere else in history, especially on Election Day or before a deadline, and “where does a company send night-shift workers home because they’re afraid their workers are too tired?”

I smell a rat. This clip of vote counting clearly shows the counting votes continuing after hours, when everybody else, such as the election monitors, has left. Due to one sided media coverage, only now is this getting the attention it deserves, with recent Senate Hearings, e.g., Congressional Oversight in the Face of Executive Branch and Media Suppression.

Taken together, the media coverage, election results and all else happening now reminds me of an old film about the nexus of media to politics and American values. This is A Face in the Crowd (1957), directed by the rather controversial Elia Kazan, who has long been vilified for naming names during McCarthyism.

Some recent liberal critics have begun to maintain that the film predicts the Trump era, as it exposes an unhealthy alliance between populism, media and politics, while others claim just the opposite. However it definitely shows how lies and manipulation are part of any election process, and what has apparently transpired shows much more than just how low lying, deceitful politicians, journalists and governmental election oversight watchdogs will go to achieve their ends.

We’re Nowhere Near the Thick of it!

There are several videos of postal contract workers saying they saw suspicious dealings with truckloads and boxes full of ballots. As for the movie, readers should watch this carefully, stop at places and take notes, as it tells it all. Think of your own political history, your country – many countries have had, or still do have, similar vote rigging, media manipulation, playing the same political games. Compare for yourself with what is being alleged in the US, and see how your own people are manipulated into accepting all this as normal by government and media.

Think back to Dr. Goebbels, and how Hitler grabbed and consolidated power, and how it all fell apart in the end. The US is supposed to protect the world from that sort of thing. Whenever it is criticised by doing the opposite, it deflects this by saying that can’t be true because such things don’t happen in the US itself. Once the global community had to accept that argument but will it now?

Nobody is going to be the winner in the US presidential election, and the vote count is a moot issue; only democracy will have been lost. This will only empower those who want a different system – dictators, radicals and extremists of all kinds. These are same people who then dress their deeds up as “democratic”, Soviet-style, to give them legitimacy. They day they don’t will be the day US-hegemony ends, and it make be as soon as the day you read this article.

[bountyofbeads]

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/01/08/politics/donald-trump-prime-time-address-immigration-wall/index.html?__twitter_impression=true

Trump lies on a daily basis and now the media is going to give him cart blanche in prime-time to continue to spew their propagandist and lies. This is exactly how we got Trump in the first place. #BoycottTrumpPrimeTime

#boycottTrumpAddress #BoycottMediaOutlets

#TrumpShutdown #TrumpLiesMatter

Why is @POTUS even doing a Prime Time Trump address? Because @realDonaldTrump is losing. He doesn't have public sentiment behind him, or the facts, or the votes. None of that changes after he finishes reading from the teleprompter tonight.

Prime-time Trump faces credibility crisis

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN | Updated 8:53 AM EST, Tue January 08, 2019 | Posted January 9, 2019 |

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump will face one huge obstacle when he appeals to Americans in a prime-time Oval Office address Tuesday to unite behind his crusade for a border wall: Himself.

Trump has spent years exploiting immigration -- one of the nation's most divisive fault lines -- during an insurgent campaign and a presidency sustained by the fervor of his committed political base.

But now, the downside of that strategy is becoming evident. In his attempt to convince the nation that a genuine crisis is unfolding at the southern border, the President's arguments face extreme skepticism from those not already in his camp.

About 57% of Americans oppose Trump's wall compared with 38% in favor, according to a December CNN poll conducted by SSRS. Those numbers are similar to where they were just after Trump took office in 2017.

On Tuesday night, Trump will commandeer the symbolic might of his office in an effort to bolster a political approach that has failed to force Democrats to cave to his demand for $5 billion in wall funding amid a government shutdown now in its third week.

He will hold forth on a deeply contentious issue from the spot where President Ronald Reagan eulogized the Challenger space shuttle crew and where other predecessors gave notice of the start or ends of wars.

The historically resonant stagecraft represents an attempt to convince the country -- with scant hard evidence -- that a real threat is unfolding on the frontier of the US and Mexico border, including drug trafficking, rising sickness among migrants, increasing border crossings and a busted asylum system.

"The American people will hear from the President tonight that we have a crisis," Vice President Mike Pence told "CBS This Morning" Tuesday, part of a series of appearances on network morning shows to make the administration's case. He urged Democrats to "come to the table" to make a deal but did not indicate that the administration's funding demand was negotiable.

Trump's capacity to make a similar argument is complicated by his choice not to broaden his support beyond his loyalist base in two years in office. And he's often used immigration as a cudgel to attack Democrats and moderate Republicans.

The address promises to be yet another extraordinary moment in a singular presidency. When news broke of his prime-time appearance, a remarkable debate broke out in Washington about whether the President of the United States can be trusted to tell the truth in an address to the nation.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer demanded the right of reply.

"Now that the television networks have decided to air the President's address, which if his past statements are any indication will be full of malice and misinformation, Democrats must immediately be given equal airtime," they said in a joint press release.

Pelosi and Schumer will deliver the response for the Democrats, which CNN will carry live.

'Build the wall'

Many Trump supporters do believe that the border is being besieged by criminals, is easily penetrated by drugs and gangs, and share his view that "without borders, we don't have a country."

And the President can clearly argue that he won election by promising to purge deep concern about a broken immigration system. At almost every rally, Trump beams as the crowd chants "build the wall, build the wall." The border issue has become an almost mystical symbol of Trump's appeal to his supporters.

But Trump has also stigmatized Mexicans and other immigrants and his dark vision of a nation under siege from hordes of invaders has turned a border security dispute into a political quarrel that tears at American cultural and racial divides.

The wall is just as powerful a metaphor for liberals, including Democratic leaders he now wants to fund the project after failing to get it built during two years of GOP control on Capitol Hill.

For Trump's critics, the wall is a metaphor for an inhumane and un-American approach to immigration that has seen undocumented migrant families separated and several detained children die of illnesses. So, when the President seeks to corral public opinion behind him Tuesday, he will be operating on scorched political ground and will require something extraordinary to shift opinion.

That is especially the case since Trump's hardline rhetoric on immigration was seen by critics inside and outside of the GOP as a key factor in the party's loss of the House in the midterm elections. The risk for Trump is that after the fire and fury of his relentless immigration rhetoric, anyone left who has an open mind simply will not believe him.

"I expect the President to lie to the American people," said New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee on Monday. "Why do I expect this? Because he's been lying to the American people and his spokespeople continue lying to the American people," he said.

In the latest notorious case of the administration peddling untruths, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders was caught on Fox News implying falsely that up to 4,000 terrorists have poured over the southern border.

In an annual terrorism report published in July 2017, the State Department reported that there was"no credible information that any member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico to gain access to the United States."

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told Fox News Monday night that Sanders got "confused" and made an "unfortunate misstatement." "So, I think, it got unfortunately confused by my colleague," she said. "That was an unfortunate misstatement and everybody makes mistakes."

Conway said the nearly 4,000 people Sanders was referring to are known or suspected terrorists prevented from entering or traveling to the US via any means - not just over the southern border.

'Immigration arguments not landing'

Trump has claimed that a wall is needed to deter "drug dealers, human traffickers and criminals." He also argued without evidence that a caravan of migrants from Central America that headed to the border last year included "unknown Middle Easterners" -- another reference to terrorism.

Such a record will complicate Trump's attempts and those of his key aides, such as Pence and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who are due on Capitol Hill Tuesday to sell his message before the President heads to the border on Thursday.

CNN's Kevin Liptak reported on Monday that Trump's decision to deliver a prime-time address followed warnings from advisers that his arguments about immigration -- delivered in tweets and impromptu media scrums in recent days -- are not resonating amid the shutdown.

But if Tuesday's speech is pockmarked with factual errors and easily discredited spin, any hope the President has of influencing anyone other than his supporters will likely be dashed. The President's set piece speeches have rarely succeeded in changing public opinion on a key issue or easing tensions in a political standoff; in fact, the opposite is more often the case.

Trump's decision to trigger a shutdown, apparently fearing anger from conservative pundits if he folded over wall funding, left an impression that he is covering up his embarrassment over his so-far failed campaign promise.

Given his hyper political approach in the past, it's always possible that Trump has no expectation of changing the partisan brew over immigration, but just wants to show his supporters he's ready to fight.

Trump's most difficult assignment will be to make a case that the situation at the US-Mexico border really amounts to a genuine crisis.

Apprehensions of undocumented migrants coming across the border did rise by about 100,000 in the 2018 fiscal year to nearly 400,000. The administration has also warned of a rise in families crossing the border illegally. The numbers reached more than 51,000 families in October and November. But the figures are still nowhere near record-setting levels of up to 100,000 families a month in the early 2000s.

The number of asylum claims among migrants rose nearly 70% to almost 93,000 in fiscal year 2018 from the previous year. But 90% of those claims are not granted.

Nielsen told reporters at the White House that the asylum system, which was designed to process far fewer applications was "bogged down."

But the White House's critics are more likely to put those failures down to the administration's draconian approach and mismanagement than to an outside crisis that truly threatens US national security.

CNN's Tammy Kupperman, Geneva Sands, Jim Acosta and Betsy Klein contributed