How Many Books Will Trump Try To Censor Before The Election?

Trump isn't suing [UPDATE: oops!]  his niece and isn't that worried about the harrowing and salacious book, Too Much and Never Enough, that's being released next month (July 28). (Pre-sales drove it into the best seller list already.) But he-- or at least Barr on his behalf-- is suing his former national security advisor, John Bolton, to prevent the release of his memoir, The Room Where It Happened. It's not salacious but from what I'm hearing it is absolutely devastating.

Martha Raddatz taped an interview with Bolton for ABC News this Sunday. It's supposed to be top secret but an old friend of mine who did watch it (the whole show, not this), on the down low-- and who is not given to hyperbole, told me that it will be "the most damning report in American politics ever." Oo; can't wait.


In fact, at least in part, we don't have to. Some of the best parts started leaking out today. Writing for the Washington Post earlier, Josh Dawsey noted that, according to Bolton, during a one-on-one meeting at the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Japan, Xi "Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win the 2020 U.S. election, telling Xi during a summit dinner last year that increased agricultural purchases by Beijing from American farmers would aid his electoral prospects... [having] turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win." Bolton further wrote that "I would print Trump’s exact words but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise." Maybe it was just a coincidence, but Trump gave Xi the thumbs up on China's policy of building concentration camps for the Uighurs... Bolton says he was so alarmed by Trump’s determination to do favors for autocrats such as Erdogan and Xi that he scheduled a meeting with William Barr in 2019.





Too bad the DNC isn't as nimble and quick on its feet as the Lincoln Project appears to be. I guess the DNC is too busy undermining progressives to bother with Trump, though.

ABC New reported yesterday that the Trumpist Justice Department's 27page filing "also requests that a judge order Bolton to take any actions 'within his power' to stop the publication of his book as it's currently drafted and 'retrieve and dispose' of any copies that may have been sent out to third parties. The DOJ additionally requests for Bolton to be ordered not to further disclose information he wrote about in the book or release details 'in any form or media... without first obtaining written permission. The United States is not seeking to censor any legitimate aspect of Defendant's manuscript; it merely seeks an order requiring Defendant to complete the prepublication review process and to take all steps necessary to ensure that only a manuscript that has been officially authorized through that process-- and is thus free of classified information-- is disseminated publicly,' the filing says."

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this week, Bolton's lawyer Chuck Cooper said White House attempts to accuse Bolton of violating his non-disclosure agreement were merely an attempt to "censor Bolton."

"This last-minute allegation came after an intensive four-month review, after weeks of silence from the White House, and-- as Mr. Eisenberg admits in his letter-- after press reports alerted the White House that Mr. Bolton's book would be published on June 23," Cooper said. "This is a transparent attempt to use national security as a pretext to censor Mr. Bolton, in violation of his constitutional right to speak on matters of the utmost public import."

The filing Tuesday offers insight into the process behind the pre-publication review, acknowledging that the National Security Council's senior director for records Ellen Knight had completed her review of the book and "was of the judgment that the manuscript draft did not contain classified information."

The next person to take up the review was a deputy legal adviser for the NSC Michael Ellis, who according to the filing "was concerned that the manuscript still appeared to contain classified information, in part because the same administration that the author served is still in office and that the manuscript described sensitive information about ongoing foreign policy issues."

The DOJ alleges in the filing that in its current form, the manuscript "contains certain passages, some up to several paragraphs in length-- that contain classified national security information."

"In fact, the NSC has determined that information in the manuscript is classified at the Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret levels," the filing says.

In the event the judge rejects the request from the DOJ, both Bolton and his publisher could still face potentially significant financial and even criminal jeopardy, legal experts argue, by moving forward in publishing a book that the White House claims contains classified information.

Reacting to the filing Tuesday, attorney Mark Zaid, an expert in national security law who has previously represented multiple individuals through the pre-publication review process, noted the suit stops short of what would have been a more extraordinary step in filing for an injunction to halt publication of the book altogether.

"This is a routine civil action for breach of contract for (Bolton) violating his non-disclosure agreement, which his own lawyer has admitted he did," Zaid said. "Absent something extraordinary happening, Bolton should be prepared to take out his check book and may never see a dime in profit. The lawsuit also asserts Bolton has released classified information which potentially subjects him to criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act."

"I think that Bolton faces real risk to the extent he publishes material that a reasonable person could describe as classified," said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. "Presumably, he has taken care to scrub the book of anything that could plausibly be described as classified information, but we have that this administration that takes extraordinarily broad view of its classification power."

On Monday, in fact, President Donald Trump, in an exchange with reporters, argued his view that "every conversation with me as president highly classified," garnering significant skepticism among those who have previously been involved with such pre-publication reviews.

"That is not something that any Executive Branch has responsibly said let alone any court has ever said," said Joshua Geltzer, a visiting law professor at Georgetown who previously served as the NSC's senior director for counterterrorism. "That legal theory would get them laughed out of court."

But, Geltzer noted that it's true the president does have broad classification authorities. And in the event that a judge were to agree that the book contained classified material after its publication, Bolton could face potential prosecution under the Espionage Act-- though such cases are rare.

However, Bolton's most imminent legal danger, according to Zaid, could be the open violation of his non-disclosure agreement as alleged by DOJ in the Tuesday filing.

"Bolton is in serious trouble with at least a breach of contract, which is literally a hands-down winner for the government," Zaid said. "Bolton has an obligation before publication to receive approval from the government-- a lack of approval breaches his contractual obligation and that has nothing to do with whether or not there's one word of classified information in the book."

The problem is that Trump-- and Barr-- insist that by exposing Trump as an ignorant and foolish old man-- he once asked Bolton, for example, if Venezuela was ever part of the U.S.-- national security has been breached. He also asked if Finland, which he visited and where he had his infanmous meeting with Putin, is part of Russia. He insists he is the state, the way Louis XIV used to do.

The New World-- Triage, Censorship, Iziki, Social Distancing... Conservative Self Extinction

The other day, I cooked up an old side dish I used to make when I was a chef in Amsterdam in the 1970s-- carrots, daikon and iziki. Except I had no iziki in the house and used nori as a substitute. It was delicious but it wasn't the same. So the next day, I suited up with the Base Camp N-99 mask I bought for hiking in the Himalayas a couple of years ago, along with the wrap-around shades Al Jourgenson gave me, and headed out for Erewhon, the health food supermarket, across town. Observations from my excursion: construction sites are still all open and functioning, many not-even-close-to-essential shops on Melrose were still open, like furniture stores, and most depressing, the people waiting on the long line in front of Erewhon was about one tenth masked. I didn't see a single masked employee inside the store either. And the shelves were largely bare of anything worthwhile and there wasn't only no iziki, there wasn't even any nori. Plenty of fresh fruits and veggies though. I have a feeling that a significant number of people don't know how to prepare anything that isn't in a can or box.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal this weekend, Holman Jenkins had some downright dire predictions about the efficacy of social distancing and the coming great shut down. That route, he wrote "is likely no cure at all. We might hold off an expected surge in coronavirus cases for two or three weeks with the kind of extraordinarily destructive economic lockdowns seen in California, New York and elsewhere. But unless warmer weather is coming to our rescue, [a crazy idea since COVID-19 has done just fine in Thailand's 90 degree weather] Americans probably won’t accept the social devastation that would be inflicted by a five-month or 18-month campaign of virus suppression of the sort promoted, variously, by the U.K.’s Imperial College London, Germany’s Robert Koch Institute and other public-health think tanks. Mandatory social distancing might well break down. (Look for speakeasies to re-emerge in New York and other shut-in cities.) The government might well face a choice of coercion or seeing its authority collapse. I’m not being alarmist. This is a lesson the World Health Organization’s Bruce Aylward brought back from Wuhan. People with flu-like symptoms had to be isolated in dormitories, hospitals and stadiums. Asking them to self-isolate voluntarily didn’t work."

Yet on Friday, a new Gallup poll seems to have indicated a rosier picture: Americans Rapidly Answering The Call To Isolate, Prepare. Linda Saad's toplines:

• After limited early adoption, majorities now avoiding routine interactions-- good, most people will live through this
• About half have stocked up on food, medical and household supplies-- again, good; an indication most people will survive
• Republicans still lag in social distancing-- best yet, the herd thinning will result in less disgusting, worthless, stupid conservatives

Saad wrote that "In the span of a week, Americans have gone from tepid adoption of social distancing to majorities engaging in nearly every major practice advocated by government and health officials as ways to contain community spread of the novel coronavirus. But there is a long way to go to approach full compliance. Gallup polling conducted March 13-15 and March 16-19 shows the biggest increases in social distancing occurring with those avoiding public places like grocery stores and restaurants (+24 percentage points to 54% doing this) and avoiding small social gatherings (+23 points to 46%). Majorities last weekend were already avoiding traveling by airplane or mass transit and avoiding events with large crowds out of concern for coronavirus. But with 20-point jumps in these behaviors this week, more than 70% of Americans are now on board with them... The trend shows Americans are moving less quickly to stockpile essential supplies, something that could be important in the event a household is quarantined due to illness, or if groceries and other supplies were to become scarce in the coming weeks and months. Just over half of Americans, 52%, say they have stocked up on food, medical or cleaning supplies as a safeguard from coronavirus disruption, up 13 points since the first polling period... [A]bout one in five are not considering stocking up on supplies."

The first response of one of my friends was to run out and buy a shotgun. I read that gun shops have long lines.

In the earlier survey 41% of respondents "described themselves as very likely to comply if public health officials recommend everyone stay home for a month should there be a serious outbreak of coronavirus in their community" and that rose to 51% in just a week-- even before Californians, New Yorkers and Illinoisans were ordered to shelter in place. Among the rebels: 14% said they were "somewhat unlikely" to comply in the first survey and 16% said they were "very unlikely" to comply. That changed in the second survey when 11% said "somewhat unlikely" and 12% said "very unlikely."

Saad interprets that to mean that "The country is approaching universal adherence to avoidance of large crowds and travel, with more than seven in 10 adults of all age groups, all political parties and regions saying they are already eschewing these activities. More variation is seen at the level of smaller interactions, including staying away from stores and restaurants and foregoing visits with friends and family. While more Americans across the societal spectrum are taking both precautions, women, residents of the Northeast, those living in high population density areas, and Democrats are more likely to be doing so than residents living in other regions, particularly the South and Midwest, in low-density areas, and Republicans."

From survey one to survey two these were the partisan changes among the percentage of Americans reporting they are avoiding public places such as stores and restaurants (before restaurants were shut down in several states, counties and cities):

• Democrats went from 41% complying to 65% complying, an increase of 24 points
• Independents went from 27% complying to 54% complying, an increase of 27 points
• Republicans went from 21% complying to 43% complying, an increase of 22 points

And where are people least likely to comply? The South, of course. Just 48%. If I were a mathematician I would try to figure out how long it would take for Southern Republicans to make themselves extinct.

Triage is coming to American hospitals. Doctors should probably take this demographic information when they are forced to decide who lives and who... doesn't get treatment. After all, older Republican men in the South seem determined to make themselves and this around them sick. Why should hospitals forced to chose who to use scare sources on waste it on them? Women, Democrats and Independents, younger people, non-Southerners are the people who are willing to accept societal restrictions to save themselves and those around them (and the country and species). Shouldn't they be saved first? Wouldn't the world be better off with fewer old, male, selfish Republican Southerners? Hard to admit... but you know it's true. Karen Weise and Mike Baker, reporting for the NY Times:

Medical leaders in Washington State, which has the highest number of coronavirus deaths in the country, have quietly begun preparing a bleak triage strategy to determine which patients may have to be denied complete medical care in the event that the health system becomes overwhelmed by the coronavirus in the coming weeks.

Fearing a critical shortage of supplies, including the ventilators needed to help the most seriously ill patients breathe, state officials and hospital leaders held a conference call on Wednesday night to discuss the plans, according to several people involved in the talks. The triage document, still under consideration, will assess factors such as age, health and likelihood of survival in determining who will get access to full care and who will merely be provided comfort care, with the expectation that they will die.

The effort is statewide so individual doctors and hospitals will not be left to make such decisions, said Cassie Sauer, chief executive of the Washington State Hospital Association, one of the groups convening the call.

“It’s protecting the clinicians so you don’t have one person who’s kind of playing God,” she said, adding, “It is chilling, and it should not happen in America.”

Ms. Sauer stressed that several things, including more hospital beds and equipment, could reduce the need to make such decisions. “This country has resources,” she said.

The state has been urgently seeking ventilators for patients and protective masks for health care workers, including from the Strategic National Stockpile, a repository of critical medical supplies for public health emergencies. Officials have also been looking to have the U.S. Navy hospital ship Mercy, which has 80 intensive care beds, dock near Seattle to handle seriously ill patients other than those who have contracted Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

In the meantime, officials in King County have begun building a field hospital on a soccer field north of Seattle. One large hospital system based in the area has started making masks and face shields by hand. Hospitals have already postponed elective surgeries to preserve resources.

Dr. Chris Spitters, the interim health officer for the Snohomish Health District, where the nation’s first coronavirus case was diagnosed, was part of the group that discussed the rationing proposals this week. He said that while the crisis strategies were not something anyone wants to anticipate, it would be worse not to be ready in the event they were needed.

I saw my oncologist last week. She was distressed when she told me the hospital had been approached-- she didn't say by who-- about beginning to think about cutting off care in "the future" to elderly cancer patients. Hopefully it won't be so then can provide care to male Southern Republicans drunk on Corona beer and mumbling about the pandemic being a hoax.

A corollary: a friend of mine living in China predicted this morning that there is likely to be "domestic deployments of troops that will probably be focused on protecting hospitals and vital supplies from rogue citizens." He also called my attention to the early stages of censorship starting up-- innocently-- right now. The intensified censorship of Internet 'misinformation' (let's all keep in mind the "infallibility" of official sources) could become more permanent, with relatively small pullbacks after the pandemic burns out, because such censorship is a relatively cheap and an efficient way to perform what the National Security State sees as a core function of Internet gatekeepers."

Twitter is among the major internet companies that have stepped up to play an active role in countering “misinformation” about the risks of and response to the coronavirus, although critics fear the measures it has announced could do more harm than good.

This week, the social media platform announced that it’s taking a “wide range of actions on potentially abusive and manipulative content” related to the subject, and to that end it is broadening his definition of “harmful” content.

Content that may be removed includes “denial of global or local health authority recommendations” (such as discouraging people from engaging in “social distancing”); descriptions of “ineffective” treatment or prevention methods, “even if made in jest”; “denial of established scientific facts” from “global and local health authorities”; urging people to go out to local businesses in defiance of government mandates; statements such as “ignore news about COVID-19, it’s just an attempt to destroy capitalism by crashing the stock market”; “unverified” claims that could “incite people to action and cause widespread panic”; impersonation of official government bodies, including parody accounts; and more.

While some of these rules are fairly straightforward, the language about humorous content can be seen as overreach, particularly if it affects obvious satire or jokes that, while potentially in poor taste, are obviously not meant to be taken as real information.

Twitter’s language also could potentially cross the line from halting the spread of misinformation into stifling legitimate debate about the wisdom of government’s response as well as the true threat of the virus, a relatively new and evolving situation on which the experts themselves are not of one mind.

Per “social distancing” recommendations, Twitter is taking on this task with reduced manpower, meaning it will be increasing its reliance on “machine learning and automation” to monitor and remove objectionable content. The company acknowledges that artificial systems “can sometimes lack the context that our teams bring, and this may result in us making mistakes,” so it will not be suspending any of the accounts whose content is removed by these systems.

Twitter is part of a joint effort by tech giants including Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Reddit to fight “fraud and misinformation about the virus” while “elevating authoritative content on our platforms, and sharing critical updates in coordination with government healthcare agencies around the world.”

Google’s own efforts in that regard have already produced some hiccups, such as inadvertently blocking legitimate news apps and even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control from appearing in certain searches on the Google Play store.

Twitter Can't Ban Racist Content Because Their Algorithms Can't Distinguish Between White Nationalists And Republican Politicians

Rep. Steve King (R-IA), neo-Nazi internet troll

Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler posted a pretty funny terribly sad piece at Vice's Motherboard website Thursday morning. I have a feeling some GOP loudmouths in Congress, like Gym Jordan (R-OH), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Mark Meadows (R-NC), Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX), are flipping their lids today-- or will be as soon as someone points this out to them.

Ever wonder how Twitter was able to excise ISIS from its pages but can't do the same thing with the ugly vitriolic racism coming from the Trump base? It's a decision made at the top levels of the company.

At a Twitter all-hands meeting on March 22, an employee asked a blunt question: Twitter has largely eradicated Islamic State propaganda off its platform. Why can’t it do the same for white supremacist content?

An executive responded by explaining that Twitter follows the law, and a technical employee who works on machine learning and artificial intelligence issues went up to the mic to add some context. (As Motherboard has previously reported, algorithms are the next great hope for platforms trying to moderate the posts of their hundreds of millions, or billions, of users.)

With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.

There is no indication that this position is an official policy of Twitter, and the company told Motherboard that this “is not [an] accurate characterization of our policies or enforcement-- on any level.” But the Twitter employee’s comments highlight the sometimes overlooked debate within the moderation of tech platforms: are moderation issues purely technical and algorithmic, or do societal norms play a greater role than some may acknowledge?

Though Twitter has rules against “abuse and hateful conduct,” civil rights experts, government organizations, and Twitter users say the platform hasn’t done enough to curb white supremacy and neo-Nazis on the platform, and its competitor Facebook recently explicitly banned white nationalism. Wednesday, during a parliamentary committee hearing on social media content moderation, UK MP Yvette Cooper asked Twitter why it hasn’t yet banned former KKK leader David Duke, and “Jack, ban the Nazis” has become a common reply to many of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s tweets. During a recent interview with TED that allowed the public to tweet in questions, the feed was overtaken by people asking Dorsey why the platform hadn’t banned Nazis. Dorsey said “we have policies around violent extremist groups,” but did not give a straightforward answer to the question. Dorsey did not respond to two requests for comment sent via Twitter DM.

Do you work at Twitter? We would love to hear from you. Using a non-work computer or phone, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

Twitter has not publicly explained why it has been able to so successfully eradicate ISIS while it continues to struggle with white nationalism. As a company, Twitter won’t say that it can’t treat white supremacy in the same way as it treated ISIS. But external experts Motherboard spoke to said that the measures taken against ISIS were so extreme that, if applied to white supremacy, there would certainly be backlash, because algorithms would obviously flag content that has been tweeted by prominent Republicans—or, at the very least, their supporters. So it’s no surprise, then, that employees at the company have realized that as well.

This is because the proactive measures taken against ISIS are more akin to the removal of spam or child porn than the more nuanced way that social media platforms traditionally police content, which can involve using algorithms to surface content but ultimately relies on humans to actually review and remove it (or leave it up.) A Twitter spokesperson told Motherboard that 91 percent of the company’s terrorism-related suspensions in a 6 month period in 2018 were thanks to internal, automated tools.

The argument that external experts made to Motherboard aligns with what the Twitter employee aired: Society as a whole uncontroversially and unequivocally demanded that Twitter take action against ISIS in the wake of beheading videos spreading far and wide on the platform. The automated approach that Twitter took to eradicating ISIS was successful: “I haven’t seen a legit ISIS supporter on Twitter who lasts longer than 15 seconds for two-and-a-half years,” Amarnath Amarasingam, an extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told Motherboard in a phone call. Society and politicians were willing to accept that some accounts were mistakenly suspended by Twitter during that process (for example, accounts belonging to the hacktivist group Anonymous that were reporting ISIS accounts to Twitter as part of an operation called #OpISIS were themselves banned).

That same eradicate-everything approach, applied to white supremacy, is much more controversial.

“Most people can agree a beheading video or some kind of ISIS content should be proactively removed, but when we try to talk about the alt-right or white nationalism, we get into dangerous territory, where we’re talking about [Iowa Rep.] Steve King or maybe even some of Trump’s tweets, so it becomes hard for social media companies to say all of this ‘this content should be removed,’” Amarasingam said.

In March, King promoted an open white nationalist on Twitter for the third time. King quote tweeted Faith Goldy, a Canadian white nationalist. Earlier this month, Facebook banned Goldy under the site’s new policy banning white nationalism; Goldy has 122,000 followers on Twitter and has not been banned at the time of writing. Last year, Twitter banned Republican politician and white nationalist Paul Nehlen for a racist tweet he sent about actress and princess Meghan Markle, but prior to the ban, Nehlen gained a wide following on the platform while tweeting openly white nationalist content about, for example, the “Jewish media.”

Any move that could be perceived as being anti-Republican is likely to stir backlash against the company, which has been criticized by President Trump and other prominent Republicans for having an “anti-conservative bias.” Tuesday, on the same day Trump met with Twitter’s Dorsey, the President tweeted that Twitter “[doesn’t] treat me well as a Republican. Very discriminatory,” Trump tweeted. “No wonder Congress wants to get involved—and they should.”

JM Berger, author of Extremism and a number of reports on ISIS and far-right extremists on Twitter, told Motherboard that in his own research, he has found that “a very large number of white nationalists identify themselves as avid Trump supporters.”

“Cracking down on white nationalists will therefore involve removing a lot of people who identify to a greater or lesser extent as Trump supporters, and some people in Trump circles and pro-Trump media will certainly seize on this to complain they are being persecuted,” Berger said. “There's going to be controversy here that we didn't see with ISIS, because there are more white nationalists than there are ISIS supporters, and white nationalists are closer to the levers of political power in the US and Europe than ISIS ever was.”

Twitter currently has no good way of suspending specific white supremacists without human intervention, and so it continues to use human moderators to evaluate tweets. In an email, a company spokesperson told Motherboard that “different content and behaviors require different approaches.”

"For terrorist-related content we've a lot of success with proprietary technology but for other types of content that violate our policies—which can often [be] much more contextual-- we see the best benefits by using technology and human review in tandem,” the company said.

Twitter hasn't done a particularly good job of removing white supremacist content and has shown a reluctance to take any action of any kind against “world leaders” even when their tweets violate Twitter’s rules. But Berger agrees with Twitter in that the problem the company is facing with white supremacy is fundamentally different than the one it faced with ISIS on a practical level.

“With ISIS, the group's obsessive branding, tight social networks and small numbers made it easier to avoid collateral damage when the companies cracked down (although there was some),” he said. “White nationalists, in contrast, have inconsistent branding, diffuse social networks and a large body of sympathetic people in the population, so the risk of collateral damage might be perceived as being higher, but it really depends on where the company draws its lines around content.”

But just because eradicating white supremacy on Twitter is a hard problem doesn’t mean the company should get a pass. After Facebook explicitly banned white supremacy and white nationalism, Motherboard asked YouTube and Twitter whether they would make similar changes. Neither company would commit to making that explicit change, and referred us to their existing rules.

Follow The Rubles

I bet Señor Trumpanzee is sorry he ever hired Stormy Daniels to go to bed with him. Funny the porn star has a lawyer better than Trump's whole legal team! Unlike Trumpanzee, Michael Avenatti actually did go to and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Avenatti also graduated first in his class from George Washington University Law School where he worked with Jonathan Turley and got every award available. Michael Cohen, for example got his law degree from Thomas M. Cooley Law School , one of America's schlockiest law schools, fighting to hold onto its accreditation, one of ten American law schools found to be out of compliance with the American Bar Association's requirement that schools only admit students who appear capable of earning a J.D. degree and passing the bar examination. As you know, Señor Trumpanzee only hires the best people. And... everyone know there was no collusion, no collusion... NO COLLUSION. Except there was. Putin put Trump into the White House. Trump is an illegitimate "president." He should be impeached immediately. This is one of the most shameful episodes in American history.

CNN made it into an exclusive yesterday. The exclusive-- which is news everywhere-- was that Mueller's investigators have questioned Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch, a sanctioned Putin puppet and multibillionaire who is one of the half dozen richest men in Russia, about hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments his company's U.S. affiliate made to Michael Cohen, immediately after the election. "The purpose of the payments," CNN naively reported, "which predate the sanctions, and the nature of the business relationship between Vekselberg and Cohen is unclear."

The scrutiny of the payments could add to the legal troubles for Cohen, whose home and office were raided last month as part of a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan. In court documents, the prosecutors said at least part of their inquiry stemmed from a referral from Mueller's office.

The questions asked of Vekselberg suggest that Mueller investigators have been examining some of Cohen's business relationships as part of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Vekselberg is one of two Russian oligarchs the FBI stopped earlier this year after their private jets landed in New York-area airports as part of Mueller's investigation.

Investigators also asked Vekselberg about donations the head of his US affiliate made to Trump's inaugural fund and campaign funds, sources said.

The attorney for Stormy Daniels-- the porn star who received $130,000 to keep quiet about an alleged affair she had with Trump a decade ago-- produced information Tuesday evening that appears to add further details to CNN's reporting. Michael Avenatti alleged that Cohen received half a million dollars from a company affiliated with Vekselberg in the months after the presidential election.

Avenatti alleged the $500,000 went into the bank account for Essential Consultants, a shell company that Cohen set up before the election that was used to pay Daniels. Avenatti added that the payments occurred from January to August 2017.

...Vekselberg's cousin Intrater gave generously to support Trump.

He donated $250,000 to the Trump inauguration fund, $35,000 to the Trump Victory Fund, and $29,600 to the Republican National Committee in June 2017, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

While it is illegal for foreigners to donate to US politics, Intrater is American.

However, the donations were a sharp increase from previous cycles and may raise questions for investigators. Intrater's only previous political donations included $1,200 to Democrat Bill Richardson's presidential run in 2008 and $2,600 in 2014 for Republican Chris Day's congressional race in New York. Renova Group donated between $50,000 and $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, but it's not clear when the contribution occurred, according to the foundation's public list of donors.

Vekselberg may also be of interest to investigators because of his close ties to the Kremlin. He built his fortune following the collapse of the Soviet Union through a series of deals in the oil and gas sector. In 2004, he paid over $100 million to buy nine Faberge eggs from the American Forbes family, returning the second-largest collection of imperial eggs to Russia. Six years later, he was appointed by then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to lead the Skolkovo Innovation Center project, the Kremlin's answer to Silicon Valley.

From 2007 until March 2012, Vekselberg was a shareholder and chairman of the board of Rusal, the aluminum company controlled by Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska has business ties to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who has been indicted on fraud and tax related charges as part of Mueller's investigation. Manafort has pleaded not guilty. Deripaska, who also was added to the US sanctions list last month, has sued Manafort over a soured investment deal.

Lamesa Investments Ltd, an affiliate of Renova, acquired a large stake in the Bank of Cyprus at the same time Wilbur Ross, then a private equity investor, made a capital infusion into the then-struggling bank. Lamesa now holds a 9.2% stake in the Bank of Cyprus. Ross resigned from his position as vice chairman of the bank after he was confirmed as Trump's commerce secretary.

Vekselberg also attended the December 2015 dinner in Moscow for RT, the state-controlled television channel, where Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser, sat beside Putin, according to NBC News. Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying about a call he had with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition and is cooperating with the Mueller investigation.

Vekselberg attended Trump's inauguration ceremony as a guest of "one of his closest American business partners," Renova spokesman Andrey Shtorkh told the Washington Post. The New York Times reported that Intrater gave Vekselberg the ticket.

So why is the CNN reported so tepid and tentative? Maybe it was because Trump was carrying on again about "fake news" and taking away the White House credentials of news organizations that don't report the White House party line.

This afternoon, New York published a piece by Frank Rich, Following the Money in Trumpland Leads Ugly Places that may even shut up Giuliani and the orange ape he works for. Rich starts with the question the whole country is asking: "With Michael Avenatti’s revelation that the shell company Michael Cohen used for the Stormy Daniels payoff also received money tied to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg (as well as payments from other companies with government business), it looks like the two main threads of Donald Trump’s legal troubles may be part of the same story. Has Avenatti found the 'collusion' that Trump has spent so much energy denying?" and he starts the process of answering it: "Avenatti, whose revelations have since been verified by the Times and others, is doing exactly what Woodward and Bernstein did in Watergate-- following the money. By doing so he has unveiled an example of collusion so flagrant that it made Trump and Rudy Giuliani suddenly go mute: a Putin crony’s cash turns out to be an essential component of the racketeering scheme used to silence Stormy Daniels and thus clear Trump’s path to the White House in the final stretch of the 2016 election. Like the Nixon campaign slush fund that Woodward and Bernstein uncovered, this money trail also implicates corporate players hoping to curry favor with a corrupt president. Back then it was the telecommunications giant ITT, then fending off antitrust suits from the government, that got caught red-handed; this time it’s AT&T. Both the Nixon and Trump slush funds were initially set up to illegally manipulate an American presidential election, hush money included. But the Watergate burglars’ dirty tricks, criminal as they were, were homegrown. Even Nixon would have drawn the line at colluding with Russians-- or, in those days, the Soviets-- to sabotage the Democrats."

And don't forget Rachel Maddow. Last night her analysis was far more courageous than CNN's "exclusive" reporting. A slight addition though: it turns out AT&T's bribe wasn't a measly $200,000 but a bribe more befitting Sr. Trumpanzee: $600,000. And late this afternoon Novartis admitted it gave Cohen a million buckaroos, not a mere $400,000.

An eighth-grader can't wear an incendiary T-shirt like this in a class photo, can she?

Apparently she can't in Owensville, Ohio, where her school principal ordered the T-shirt Photoshopped out. (Sophie, the student in question, supplied this photo of herself holding the T-shirt to the website Women You Should Know.)

by Ken

Just this afternoon in my previous post I was reduced to spluttering in the face of the continued misunderstanding emanating from the Vatican, which doesn't quite get that female people are people just like male people are. Of course the Vatican isn't alone. The Vatican motto enshrined by Pope John Paul II and Pope Cardinal Ratguts, and apparently now tolerated by Pope Francis, is "Them Bitches Be Hos." They're okay to cook and clean, and of course to bear children, for which purpose it's even okay to have s*x with them. But otherwise, they're just accessories.

In case you were wondering why it matters that an organization as influential as the Catholic Church champions the mental deformity that produces this bullshit, we have a case in point this week coming out of Ohio. For once, thank goodness, it's not a case of rape or other violence perpetrated against a woman. But it's pretty appalling nonetheless, not least for being perpetrated by a school.


Since I was extremely un-confident about an embedded version of this clip loading, I'll suggest that you watch it onsite.

A picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, but sometimes it's what's not in the picture that sends the words flying. As with the eighth-grade photo from Clermont Northeastern Middle School in Owensville, Ohio, in which the principal had a T-shirt with the word "FEMINIST" worn by a student in the front row Photoshopped out, apparently because it might cause controversy -- or even "upset" some people.

Here's Ian Millhiser reporting the story for ThinkProgress:

An eighth grade student at Clermont Northeastern Middle School in Batavia, Ohio wore a black T-shirt on class photo day which included the word “FEMINIST” written across the shirt in white letters. Yet, while the shirt does not violate any school rule and the student has worn it to classes before, the school chose to doctor her class photo to remove the word.

According to the site Women You Should Know, which identifies the student as “Sophie,” Sophie asked principal Kendra Young why the word “FEMINIST” was removed from her shirt in the class photo that was distributed to students, and was told that “the photographer called me and brought it to my attention and I made the decision to black it out because some people might find it offensive.”

Principal Young has reportedly apologized to Sophie for doctoring her shirt, and Young also offered to provide Sophie with an unaltered copy of the class picture. According to a local news report, however, the doctored photo is displayed within the school.

And here's a more detailed account provided by the student's mother, Christine, to the website Women You Should Know:

A couple of weeks ago Sophie wore a t-shirt to school that she had made that said “FEMINIST.” She wore the shirt all day without any issues. It also happened to be the day the 8th grade class pictures were taken.

On Monday, the pictures were handed out to the students and Sophie sees the photo and notices that the word FEMINIST had been blacked out on her shirt. Sophie went to the school principal, Mrs. Young, to find out why this happened. Mrs. Young said, “the photographer called me and brought it to my attention and I made the decision to black it out because some people might find it offensive.”

A friend of Sophie’s called me and I went to the school. Mrs. Young walked out and wouldn’t talk to me about what had happened. I have emailed her twice and she has yet to contact me at all.

Sophie was not violating dress code, she was not inappropriately dressed. Being a feminist is not a bad thing. She should be allowed to express herself.

She just wants everyone to be treated equally. That’s it. The end. She thinks everyone should be treated kindly and with love and that we should all have the same rights. Merriam Webster’s definition of feminism is the belief that men and women should have equal opportunities. Most people, especially in this area, seem to think feminism and misandry go hand and hand and that’s a common misconception. You can still love men and be a feminist. You can still be a homemaker and be a feminist. That’s where we are with this. We just want equality.

I am completely dumbfounded by the situation. I’m upset that the principal won’t speak to me or return my emails regarding the situation. I would think she would want our involvement. I’m just shocked by how the entire thing is being handled.

Wednesday afternoon, the same blogpost reports Christine provided this update:

I actually had a meeting with Mrs. Young (the one who blacked out the shirt) today. She apologized to me profusely, of course, after the local news station called her this morning! She asked me if we were good? I told her she needed to apologize to Sophie and ask her that question. She seemed dumbfounded by that. So she called Sophie down to the office. She apologized to Sophie and asked “What do you want from this?” Sophie replied, “I want everyone to realize that we NEED feminism. I want you to have someone come into the school and educate everyone about feminism. I want us to go to the news station together and show the people that we are working together the make this school and our community and better place for everyone. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.” I was so proud of her. She never once said I want a public apology or anything like that. She just wants to give to others. She is such a great kid.

Surely of all people a school principal, charged with educating the students under her oversight, should understand that if there are people who are violently upset by the mere word "feminism," then the one person whose problem it isn't is the student wearing the T-shirt. It's certainly the problem of any such people who would have made a stink about it, but the solution is for them to get over it -- or go the hell back where they came from, which can't possibly be the U.S.A. And I guess it's a problem for the school and for society insofar as we allow censorship merely to coddle their diseased sensibilities and deformed understanding of how our country is designed to work.

#

Here's The Jimmy Stewart Scene That Inspired The FBI To Warn Americans That "It's A Wonderful Life" Was Commie Propaganda

Today the 1946 Frank Capra film is universally considered a Christmas classic but when it was first released, the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee tried to label it Communist propaganda. In 1947, an FBI document, Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, went after two of the screen writers, Frances Goodrich and her husband Albert Hackett for, among other things, "eating lunch daily with" known Communist screen writers. According to Michael Winship, Bill Moyers senior writer, the FBI-- which was working with Ayn Rand on this crackpot project-- was not happy with the film's storyline, in which the hero, Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey, was in opposition to "the avarice and power of banker and slumlord Henry Potter, played by Lionel Barrymore." The FBI memo accused the film of "a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a 'scrooge-type' so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists." The movie also "deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters."

Ayn Rand wasn't the only right-wing extremist cooperating with the FBI in its attempt to censor popular culture. Among the other rats: Gary Cooper, Walt Disney and, of course, Ronald Reagan. Today, these same types are going out of their minds because Pope Francis has been turning the Catholic Church away from knee-jerk conservatism and towards-- horror of horrors-- the actual message of Jesus Christ. All the talk about banksters and capitalism's excesses has been bad enough for them, but now the Pope has been shaking up the conservatism that dominates the curia itself.

Offering his Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia, the senior churchmen who run the Holy See, Pope Francis, having observed at close quarters for the past 20 months how the Vatican actually works, unexpectedly gave his Roman bureaucrats a severe dressing down.

He listed 15 deadly sins-- "ailments" he called them-- that he had witnessed since he took office. Too much micro-management, too little internal co-ordination, examples of boastfulness, showing off, claiming to be indispensible, a tendency to gossip and defamation and, even worse, clerics leading double lives.

...According to worldwide polls conducted by the prestigious US-based Pew Research Centre, a majority of people in over half the 43 countries surveyed say they had a positive view of Pope Francis, with particularly high ratings in Europe (84%) and Latin America (72%).

Part of his popularity derives from favourable media comment on his style of communication with his flock and with outsiders, but also with his style of Church government:

• He has made it increasingly clear that he has no time for careerism among Catholic clergy and has started to shift long-tenured cardinals and bishops away from the Vatican

• He has moved cautiously but effectively to clean up the money-laundering scandal concerning the Vatican Bank, the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), which had tarnished the image of the church for the past two decades

• He installed Australian Cardinal George Pell as overseer of all Vatican finances

• From 1 January, new accounting and management practices become operative within all Vatican departments. They will be obliged to draw up detailed annual budgets, which-- astonishingly-- had never been done in the past

...Perhaps Pope Francis's most significant quote of the year was during a recent interview with La Nacion, a newspaper from his home town in Argentina, Buenos Aires.

Acknowledging internal resistance to his planned reforms, he said: "It's a good sign for me, getting the resistance out into the open, no stealthy mumbling when there is disagreement. It's very healthy to get things out into the open!"

Perhaps getting everything out in the open would have protected Pope John Paul I from being murdered by the curia after just a month. He was also trying to reform the corrupt, reactionary Vatican, albeit more quietly. The Pope is even making an impact inside the Beltway. Today, Brent Budowsky, writing for The Hill suggested a "Ready For Pope Francis" movement, asserting he's the most popular public figure in the world.

The people’s pope, alone among world leaders, has directly and forcefully confronted institutions of finance, politics, media and now the organization that governs the Catholic Church itself. For this reason, while the 21st century remains young, we may be witnessing in real time the leadership of a man historians will ultimately regard as one of the greatest men of the century.

Jesus taught that the last shall be first, that we should sell all of our possessions and give the proceeds to the poor, and that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus forcefully challenged the institutions of his time, as Francis does, and for this he was crucified.

We celebrate the birth of Jesus not because of big discounts during holiday sales but because His message of love and generosity is timeless and common to teachings of great faiths everywhere. It is with this faith that Francis teaches and with this standard that, while Francis condemns abuses of institutions in almost every power center of the world, he criticizes himself and asks for forgiveness-- an honesty more politicians might practice.

When Francis notes that as the stock market rises it becomes a banner headline but when millions of homeless people suffer they are treated like nonpersons to be forgotten, he is challenging the institutions of media.

When Francis condemns abuses of greed in the economy and calls for dramatic reforms, he is challenging financial institutions and calling for dramatic change.

When Francis condemns the environmental degradation that could destroy the planet itself, he is challenging business and political institutions that fail to be stewards of the earth.

When Francis teaches love and kindness toward the poor, he is challenging politicians who support cutting help for the poor, such as food stamps, a program the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops strongly supports.

It is said that when Francis read stories about would-be immigrants who died seeking a better life when their overcrowded boats sank in stormy seas, and learned that when the bodies were recovered the drowned mothers were still tightly hugging their sons and daughters with love during their last moments of life, he rededicated himself to humane treatment for immigrants. Francis challenges those in power who think otherwise, as some in earlier generations did when they opposed immigration of those who were Italian, Irish and Jewish, among others.

When Francis excoriates some members of the Catholic Curia itself, listing 15 “ailments and temptations” that corrupt their service to the Lord, as he did this week in his Christmas address that read like an indictment of abuses of power within the church itself, he is challenging the institutions of governance he leads.

Muzzling The Media-- Standard Operating Procedure For Corrupt Republican Incumbents Like Buck McKeon

This is the one of the ones we're running on the KHTS website

This is Free Speech Week and Buck McKeon (R-CA) has a peculiar way of celebrating; he has censorship in mind-- and it's another attack on the free functioning of democracy.

I met reporter Mark Archuleta in an odd way. He had just been fired by KHTS, the big radio station in Santa Clarita owned and run by a longtime Buck McKeon crony, Carl Goldman. "So you're Down With Tyranny," he said when we shook hands. He first got an inkling he was going to be fired-- and he's a family man with a son who just got into Yale-- when Buck McKeon staffers called him, his news director, Carol Rock, and the station owner into McKeon's office to complain. McKeon isn't used to unbiased political reporting-- and that's what KHTS was doing. McKeon wanted it stopped. His staffers accused Mark and Carol of working with DownWithTyranny. "What's that?" Carol asked.

A week later Goldman fired Mark and Carol (with no two weeks notice or anything like that-- and hired someone from The Signal). And that ended the unbiased political reporting at KHTS. Now it's just another cheerleading operation, like The Signal, for McKeon. McKeon isn't the only powerful incumbent interfering with press freedom. It really is standard procedure for small town Republicans. Even with David Dreier's status as a notorious closet case being widely discussed in the L.A. media, Dreier's crony who owned all the local newspapers in his district, adjacent to McKeon's, chose to ignore it and to never published one word critical of his pal the congressman.

Small town publishers and radio stations owners love cozying up with the local congressman. The prestige! The status! The business opportunities!

Today Lee Rogers reacted to the firing of Mark and Carol with a press release unlikely to see the light of day in the McKeon-controlled press.

Last Friday, the Capitol Hill newspaper, Roll Call, broke a story about McKeon’s staff on the House Armed Services Committee, which he serves as Chairman, threatening military sexual assault victims’ advocates and telling them that if they would receive no help from the Committee if they spoke to media in McKeon’s district.

Four days earlier, a local radio station, KHTS 1220 AM, fired the two journalists most closely following the campaign. The station cited budgetary reasons, but the journalists themselves were in no doubt they lost their jobs because they insisted on reporting stories that raised questions about Congressman McKeon’s job performance, and because of the personal relationship between McKeon and the station’s owner, who has endorsed McKeon.

“The media has a job to do and some politicians may not like it when the media does it, especially if the politician is not doing their own job,” Dr. Rogers said. “But, manipulation of the media-- or even the appearance of it-- poses a direct threat to freedom of speech and everything we hold most dear about our democracy.”

Part of a leaked memo from McKeon's office about manipulating the local media

“Congressman McKeon needs to provide a more convincing explanation of his behavior than he has so far, and he needs to let the media do its job of reporting stories that matter to his constituents. If the stories raise questions, he needs to answer them, not move to prevent the questions from being asked at all,” Rogers continued.

McKeon’s attitude has been a concern since a strategy memo leaked from his Congressional office in January outlining a plan to subvert local media. The subject of that memo was the Countrywide mortgage scandal investigation, which affected McKeon directly since he personally benefited from a preferential mortgage rate and failed to include it in his mandatory financial disclosure forms.

Multiple other instances have arisen since. On May 11, a story published on the KHTS website was critical of a land swap deal McKeon brokered for the Mammoth Mountain Ski Area (MMSA) right after the organization threw a fundraiser for him. The story questioned the timing of McKeon’s legislation so close to the fundraiser and drew a contrast between his success in arranging the Mammoth land swap deal and his failure to prevent the Cemex gravel pit mine in his district under a similar deal.

Screen save-- the article was removed when McKeon complained

Additionally, McKeon admitted he made no contribution to the costs of the fundraiser, which is illegal.

McKeon called Carl Goldman, the radio station owner, and ordered him to pull the story. Goldman deleted the story within minutes of it being placed.

On October 2, KHTS’s Mark Archuleta reported on an FEC fine imposed on McKeon and his wife Patricia, his Campaign Treasurer, for failing to file timely reports. Three days later, a meeting was called in McKeon’s district office in which McKeon’s district director and press secretary expressed their displeasure to Archuleta, his news director, Carol Rock, and Goldman, the station’s owner. Archuleta and Rock were immediately told they would no longer be covering McKeon, including the debate between McKeon and Rogers held five days later. Additionally, Goldman offered to issue a public endorsement of the Congressman’s re-election campaign, which he did the very next business day. Rock was also ordered to rewrite a story already published to feature McKeon more prominently.

On October 15, Rock and Archuleta were fired. Goldman said it was “an economic decision.” But four days later KHTS hired a new news director, Perry Smith, raising questions about what budget savings, if any, had been made by the firings.

Blue America is trying to even it out a little by running some TV and radio spots in the district. Here's one of the TV ads. If you'd like to help us get this up more widely, here's the page. Every dollar goes right up on TV. Undecided voters make their decisions in the last 5 days.

 

UPDATE: KHTS In The Pocket Of Corrupt Congressman

Santa Clarita blogger, Notes From Newhall published the full testimony of how KHTS fired journalist Mark Archuleta. "In a brutal three minutes during Public Comments tonight, former KHTS Political Reporter Mark Archuleta accused KHTS station owner Carl Goldman of systematically manipulating news coverage to benefit major SCV political figures, including Congressman Buck McKeon & at least one unidentified City Council Candidate... KCAL 9 news was there, making video of the speech, so we should probably see some real media coverage of Archuleta's comments in the days to come."

My name is Mark Archuleta and I am a resident of Canyon Country.

I wanted to bring to your attention an obituary that may not have caught your attention. The deceased, is the Free Press in the Santa Clarita Valley.

As you may have heard News Director Carol Rock and I were fired last week by K-H-T-S. There has been lots of speculation as to why and I am here tonight to end my silence.

For six months we’ve worked under the pressure from K-H-T-S owner Carl Goldman that at anytime our news stories could be pulled or we’d be forced to alter them to fit a political agenda that would keep facts from the public. We resisted and were fired.

Make no mistake, this move by Goldman is in response to building complaints by supporters and staff of Congressman Howard Buck McKeon.

You may wonder how media suppression works. It begins with a simple phone call, includes threats, and ends in firings of those who will not comply. Two examples:

On May 11th Goldman called me to say he was pulling down from the K-H-T-S website my article on the Mammoth Mountain land swap deal. He said McKeon had called him and demanded it be removed or he would leave a business junket, arranged by Goldman, stranded in DC without his support.

The story disappeared.

Prior to the City Council election, I conducted an interview with one of the candidates. It was a tough, but fair interview. That candidate called Goldman and complained. Goldman came to me and Carol and said the story had to be changed to protect the candidate.

As Goldman explained it was important to prevent a three-person voting bloc on the council and to accomplish that it was necessary to protect the person I’d interviewed and to keep two people from winning. Look at your council tonight and you will see Goldman’s plans worked part way.

Carl and Jeri Goldman have done a lot of good for Santa Clarita through charity. But a lot of good does not balance out a lot of harm. Altering stories to influence elections is harmful and not the business of a reputable news organization.

It is also cynical to hope that the public will believe Carol and I were “laid off for budget cuts,” and then hire our replacements by the end of the week, before our bodies were even cold.

Our firing came days after an October 5th meeting in McKeon’s district office where Carol, Goldman, and myself met with McKeon staffers (District Director) Morris Thomas and (Communications Director) Alissa McCurley.

Because they’d complained about my writing, Goldman promised McKeon’s staff that Carol and I would both be barred from covering McKeon any more until after the election-- including reporting on the upcoming debate with Dr. Lee Rogers.

If muzzling us wasn’t enough, Goldman appeased them further by promising to personally endorse McKeon through K-H-T-S. He also promised to have Rock rewrite a story about the Habitat for Humanity Veteran’s Village project to feature McKeon as a more prominent figure. Goldman even touted his relationship with Buck on this pet project as reason for his endorsement.

Five days after the debate Rock and I were fired.

Goldman made an interesting statement on their website regarding the future of the news coming out of K-H-T-S. He said, “It will be an opportunity for you to judge if our Santa Clarita news continues to be stellar.”

First, let me point out that they didn’t even spell my name right in their statement. What’s that tell you?

Second, it’s not the stories you see online that should concern you. It’s the ones that will never appear because they’ve been silenced by a phone call from Buck McKeon or some other politician or advertiser.

Carol and I have been forced from our jobs, but our heads are held high knowing we served the public trust.