Whoever
controls the media, controls the mind.
Jim Morrison
The annual “star studded” extravaganza to reward the
purveyors of fake news known as the White House Correspondents Dinner has been
notified that President Donald Trump will not attend. Since 1921 the purveyors of lies and fake
news have been rewarded for their efforts to mislead the American people into
supporting wars for Wall Street profits in what has been dubbed “the nerd ball.” At the dinner the POTUS is “roasted” by the
media whores who, in large part, make or break presidential candidates on
behalf of the media barons who pay them.
From Bloomberg:
Excerpt:
Trump Says He Won't Attend White House Correspondents Dinner
President Donald Trump said he
won’t attend this year’s White House Correspondents Association Dinner on April
29, following weeks of attacks on news organizations that included calling them
“the enemy of the American people.”
“I will not be attending the White
House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this year. Please wish everyone well
and have a great evening!” Trump said Saturday on Twitter.
In his first month in office, Trump
has made attacks on the media a signature policy of his administration. On
Friday, his spokesman Sean Spicer held a
briefing for reporters that excluded news organizations including the New York
Times and CNN that have written stories critical of the president. That
followed a Conservative Political Action Conference speech in which Trump again
lashed out at what he calls “fake news.”
The annual WHCA dinner -- dubbed
“nerd prom” -- is a fundraising event
where Washington’s journalists hobnob
with politicians and celebrities. The correspondents association was
founded in 1914 after President Woodrow Wilson threatened to do away with news
conferences. The group started the annual dinner in 1921 and presidents have
traditionally attended.
The reportage that Trump excluded the New York Times and CNN
from a press briefing for writing stories that were “critical of Trump” is
laughable. CNN and the New York Times as
well as the Washington Post and all of NBC and ABC “news” report nothing but
fake news. The Black Agenda Report recently wrote an article on one of the media whores who is sure to be present at
the “nerd ball” Roland Martin.
Excerpt:
Roland Martin: That Hustla Ova
There Tryna Sell Us School Privatization
Roland Martin pretends to be a journalist. But what does a guy do
when the one percent won't pay for an informed public? Roland is a hustla for hire, and he's found a dependable set of
clients. Roland is all about blackening up and selling us the destruction and privatization of public schools,
which is what both elite Democrats and Republicans want. Journalists tell the
truth without fear or favor. Hustlas do what they're paid to do, and the charter school sugar daddies pay well.
Despite what his web site says,
Roland Martin is no journalist. His daily news show doesn’t break any new
stories. Roland traffics in celebrity interviews...
And Roland consistently makes the
shallow case for privatizing education on behalf of his sponsors, with
corny tweets, videos and a series of so-called “town hall meetings”, though
he’s plenty smart enough never to say the p word.
A journalist’s job is to research, to dig deep and to oppose official
lies with facts. Journalists uncover, they publish and they popularize
among ordinary people important truths
that the wealthy and powerful would rather keep hidden. By that standard
Ida B. Wells and Lu Palmer were serious black journalists. Roland Martin ain’t
that. Roland is a competent and reasonably successful hustler, with a keen eye
for what sponsors will pay him to write and to say.
Right now, the big money is in
turning over public education to private operators of all kinds. Those
operators and investors, whom we at Black Agenda Report call the charter school
sugar daddies need public relations talent, and Roland the hustler is all over it…
As my colleague Glen Ford has documented over the years, privatizing education has been a pet
objective of parts of the US ruling elite since at least the 1980s.
For more than a generation now
there have been been deep right wing
pockets willing to fund the careers of black educators, black preachers, business
leaders willing to speak up for privatizing schools, whether they called
their advocacy vouchers or charter schools or school choice, and to bankroll
fake grassroots organizations pretending to a “movement” for the same…
Martin echoes Arne Duncan’s vicious
old claim that Hurricane Katrina was the
best thing that ever happened to public education in New Orleans. For the record, after Katrina, the state
of Louisiana closed more than a hundred New Orleans public schools and fired
all their teachers and staff, seizing
upon the disaster to create the nation’s first all-charter big city school
system under what was called the New Orleans Recovery School District. Charter operators and contractors made
fortunes, but New Orleans children didn’t do so well…
Yes, Roland Martin is a hustler but he is just one among
many, and there are legions of media whores willing to line their pockets as
they mislead the public. No doubt Martin will have a seat at the “nerd ball” as
a reward for a job well done. But how
are the for-profit charter schools that Roland Martin dutifully hawks for his
Wall Street puppet masters doing? Let’s
check with a REAL journalist to find out.
From USA Today:
Excerpt:
Hidden dropouts: How schools make
low achievers disappear
Tucked among posh gated communities
and meticulously landscaped shopping centers, Olympia High School in Orlando offers more than two dozen Advanced
Placement courses, even more afterschool clubs, and an array of sports from
bowling to water polo. U.S. News and World Report ranked it among the
nation’s top 1,000 high schools last year. Big letters painted in brown on one
campus building urge its more than 3,000 students to “Finish Strong.”
Olympia’s success in recent years,
however, has been linked to another, quite different school 5 miles away. Last school year, 137 students assigned
to Olympia instead attended Sunshine
High, a charter alternative school run by a for-profit company.
Sunshine stands a few doors down from a tobacco shop and a liquor store in a
strip mall. It offers no sports teams and few extra-curricular activities.
Sunshine’s 455 students – more than 85 percent of whom are black or
Hispanic – sit for four hours a day in front of computers with little or no live teaching... Sunshine takes in cast-offs from Olympia and
other Orlando high schools in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Olympia keeps
its graduation rate above 90 percent — and its rating an “A” under Florida’s
all-important grading system for schools — partly by shipping its worst
achievers to Sunshine.
Sunshine collects enough school district money to cover costs and pay its management firm, Accelerated
Learning Solutions (ALS), a more than
$1.5 million-a-year “management fee,” 2015 financial records show – MORE
THAN WHAT THE SCHOOL SPENDS ON INSTRUCTION.
But students lose out, a ProPublica
investigation found. Once enrolled at
Sunshine, hundreds of them exit quickly with no degree and limited prospects.
The departures expose a practice in which officials in the nation’s tenth
largest school district have for years quietly funneled thousands of disadvantaged students – some say against their wishes
– into alternative charter schools that allow them to disappear without counting as dropouts…
The role of charter alternative
schools like Sunshine – publicly funded
but managed by for-profit companies – is likely to grow under the new U.S.
Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, an ardent supporter of school choice. In
her home state of Michigan, charter schools have been responsible in part for a
steep rise in the alternative school population. She recently portrayed Florida as a national model for charters and
choice.
So Roland Martin will join with other fake news purveyors to
hobnob with celebrities like fake newswoman Campbell Brown who touts the
wonders of for-profit charter schools that profit off taxpayer dollars to disappear
minority students. Another fake news
purveyor is Josh Rogin who Larry Johnson at “No Quarter” dubs the King of Fake
News.
Excerpt:
Josh Rogin, King of Fake News
Washington Post reporter, Josh
Rogin, appears to have lost his mind. But it is not all of his fault. Where are
his damn editors? Rogin does not get to
unilaterally decide to publish whatever lie he decides to push for a day. He
has to have permission from above.
The latest dust up came with
Rogin’s account of a supposed brawl between Steve Bannon and General Kelly over
green card holders:
“Two administration officials gave
the following account of their exchange: Respectfully but firmly, the retired general told Bannon that
despite his high position in the White House and close relationship with
President Trump, the former Breitbart chief was not in Kelly’s chain of command…
General Kelly was adamant that
Rogin got the story completely wrong. But this is not an isolated mistake on
Rogin’s part. He is not a reporter. He
is a politicized advocate… Evidence? When senior foreign service officers with close ties to the
Obama regime were essentially fired last week, Rogin “reported” The State
Department’s entire senior administrative team just resigned: The entire senior level of management
officials resigned Wednesday, part of an
ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick
around for the Trump era…
Rogin’s political agenda extends to
foreign policy. He went after Tulsi
Gabbard in a brutal fashion (How Tulsi Gabbard became Assad’s mouthpiece in
Washington)…
Gabbard was not the first U.S. elected official to meet Assad. In
the early years of Assad’s presidency, several senior U.S. lawmakers publicly
traveled to see the young English-speaking optometrist-turned-ruler, in the
hope that he might be a reformer, break with Iran and even make peace with
Israel. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
(D-Calif.) visited Assad in 2007. Then-Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) led a
delegation in 2009.
When the history of this sordid
period in U.S. policy in the Middle East is written, Tulsi Gabbard will stand
as a woman of courage and integrity. Rogin
happily ignores the fact that it has been a U.S. covert program to arm radical
Islamists fighting the government of Bashar al Assad…
And what is her reward? She is
attacked by Rogin as a tool of Assad. Future
stories by Rogin should come with a warning, BEWARE, FAKE NEWS. He has
demonstrated that he is putting politics above telling the truth. That is not a
journalist. That is an activist.
The fake news has replaced real news in America. George W. Bush’s illegal war on Iraq would not
have been possible without a compliant media echoing the Bush/Cheney lies about
weapons of mass destruction. After
killing millions of Iraqis, American soldiers and completely destroying a
sovereign nation, the media whores at the White House Correspondence Dinner got
a big laugh out of the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq.
CNN is the largest purveyor of lies when it comes to Ukraine
and Syria. The former journalist Jake
Tapper has become a carnival barker for war based on lies spreading fake news
like few others. His fake journalism
continually begs for more wars, more destruction. Tapper’s false claims that Assad gassed his own
people, and the lie that Russia annexed Crimea are based on CIA fed
falsehoods. From Information ClearingHouse:
Excerpt:
What the US Representative to the
UN Should Know About Annexed Crimea
The speech by the new US permanent
representative to the UN Security Council, Nikki Haley, at a Security Council
meeting on 3 February backed up the idea that the foreign policies of two
American administrations – the previous one and the current one – will be
continued…
The White House supported Haley’s statement on the need for Crimea to
be returned to Ukraine, and the White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer,
stated during a briefing that: «With respect to the sanctions, I think
Ambassador Haley made it very clear of our concern with Russia’s occupation of
Crimea. I think she spoke very forcefully and clearly on that».
It is interesting that Mrs Haley was speaking about the territory of
Crimea rather than the people… Do
the Crimean people regard themselves as Ukrainian? And does Nikki Haley know
the answer to this most important question? It is unlikely that the US
ambassador to the UN wants to move the people out of Crimea so that she can
give the peninsula back to Ukraine. Especially as she would have to move not
only the living, but also the dead, since the ‘Ukrainian’ history of Crimea is
very short, around a quarter of a century…
From the point of view of the
people who live on the Crimean Peninsula, Ukraine
annexed Crimea in 1991, grossly violating the rules of international law.
Crimea became part of independent Ukraine illegally, and repeated attempts by
the Crimean people to redress this injustice met with opposition from Kiev…
But did the Ukrainian nation have
the right to self-determination in Crimea if the number of Ukrainians on the peninsula made up only 25.8 percent of
the population? The answer is
obvious – no, it did not. This was the first step in the annexation of Crimea
by the Ukrainian state, which, at that point, was the Ukrainian SSR separate
from the Soviet Union.
The February (2014) uprising in Kiev was not supported by Crimea,
but attempts by Crimeans to oppose it led to tragedy: on the night of 20 and 21
February, buses taking protesting Crimeans home from a chaotic Kiev were
stopped by armed nationalists in the small city of Korsun-Shevchenkivskyi. The Crimeans were beaten, tortured, forced
to sing the Ukrainian national anthem under threat of death…
In a referendum on 16 March 2014, the Crimean people once again
confirmed their historical choice… Just
like Americans, Crimeans also want to live, be free and be happy. That is
precisely why they spent decades trying to break away from the Ukrainian
trident, something they finally managed in 2014 when they returned to Russia.
It seems that Nikki Haley, like millions of her fellow Americans,
does not know the history of the Crimean people’s struggle against its illegal
annexation by Ukraine, which began in 1990 and ended in 2014…
The purveyors of fake news have learned nothing from Bush’s
disastrous Iraq War. They continue to promote
falsehoods about Russia, Ukraine, Syria, Libya, and Yemen in order to feed the
military industrial complex’s insatiable appetite for war. Those same whores that led America to its
self-destruction in Iraq now are gathering their forces to destroy Donald Trump. They tried their best during the GOP primary
and failed, but refuse to give up.
While the gala nerd ball was being planned, the party of
losers elected a new loser leader. I’m
sure the Bernie Bots are going to be whining and crying that Keith Ellison was
passed over after being endorsed by St. Bernard. What the Bernie Bots fail to understand is
that both Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison are war hawks. From Black Agenda Report:
Excerpt:
Rep. Keith Ellison, the
Personification of the Phony, Pro-War “Progressive”
“Ellison is part of the pro-war
Left, whose primary mission is make self-described liberals and leftists
comfortable supporting imperial wars.”
Keith Ellison, the Black U.S. House
member from Minneapolis who is co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, says the
U.S. should push for a no-fly zone over
rebel-held areas in Syria. Ellison, who is also one of only two Muslim
members of Congress, appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, as did
Republican Arizona Senator John McCain. It is a measure of how far to the right the Democratic Party has come under President
Obama, that McCain, the war monger who likes to sing about bombing Iran,
and Ellison, who claims to be a progressive, are in basic agreement over Syria.
“Both are raving American
imperialists.” On U.S. imperial policy, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference
between McCain, the hard-right Republican, and Ellison, who purports to be
a progressive Democrat.
Yep, the Democratic Party is no more, the image of Donna
Brazile handing over the gavel to Tom Perez signified the last nail in the DNC
coffin. Good riddance.
Donald Trump has two words for the White House
Correspondents, bon appetite. Trump has
better things to do than to dine and dance with a bunch of high paid
whores. I applaud President Trump for
putting an end to this disgusting tradition where people who should be in
prison are treated like celebrities for a job well done. That job being the betrayal of America and
American values, the whole treacherous lot should be fired.
By Patricia Baeten
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