http://donpolson.blogspot.com/ Bringing you the very best information, analysis and opinion from around the web. NOTE: For videos that don't start--go to article link to view. FAVORITE SITES FOR INFO: https://pjmedia.com , www.powerlineblog.com , https://rumble.com/c/Bongino , instapundit.com https://justthenews.com , https://Bonginoreport.com
Amid concerns that conservative voices are being silenced on social media, a U.S. House committee announced Friday that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and other tech executives will appear before the panel on Capitol Hill Sept. 5.
Dorsey will discuss his company’s “algorithms and content judgment calls” before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the committee announced via Twitter.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who has frequently complained about "one-sided" content on social media, said Dorsey's scheduled appearance was arranged through talks among Dorsey, himself and U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., chairman of the committee.
"One-sided conversations are an affront to the public mission that serves as the foundation for these social media platforms – including Twitter," McCarthy said in a statement. "That is why I worked with Chairman Greg Walden and requested Jack Dorsey to testify to Congress and talk with the American people about filtering practices on Twitter."
"One-sided conversations are an affront to the public mission that serves as the foundation for these social media platforms – including Twitter."
- House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.
McCarthy added: "We all agree that transparency is the only way to fully restore Americans’ trust in these important public platforms."
Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook have faced accusations of liberal bias as numerous conservative commentators have been banned or censored for violating guidelines. Many have complained that the guidelines are unclear.
Most recently, Salena Zito of the New York Post, wrote that her column – which she said contained “no expletives, conspiracy theories, hate speech or sexual language” – was removed by Facebook and Twitter without explanation.
Dorsey has conceded that San Francisco-based Twitter’s staff is primarily “left-leaning,” but has denied notions that the platform bans users for conservative viewpoints.
“[I] do understand the concern,” Dorsey said in an interview with Fox News Radio’s Guy Benson. “We have folks that are at various points in the political spectrum and they don’t feel comfortable today bringing up certain issues or their viewpoints on certain issues. And I don’t believe that is acceptable.”
Noted Walden in a statement: “Twitter is an incredibly powerful platform that can change the national conversation in the time it takes to go viral. When decisions about data and content are made using opaque processes, the American people are right to raise concerns.”
Representatives from Google and Facebook are also scheduled to appear at next month's hearing.
Bradford Betz is an editor for Fox News. Follow him on Twitter @bradford_betz.
The Democrats and the media continue to demean the electorate. In Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home, Garry Wills described the 40 President’s relationship with the voters as “a kind of complicity,” implying that Reagan and the electorate had colluded to commit some sort of crime. The offense was, of course, their mutual refusal to imbibe the propaganda ladled out by the liberal establishment and the media. This defiance caused Reagan and his supporters to be written off by their “betters” as a collection of cretins. History proved precisely the opposite, but the Beltway brain trust never absorbed the lesson. They are thus repeating their error with President Trump and his supporters. In the New York Times, for example, Charles Blow advises us that the President has hijacked the GOP and now presides over a reign of terror that prevents “mainstream Republicans” from taking a stand against him. Having difficulty remembering a Times writer acknowledging the existence of “mainstream Republicans?” The Gray Lady’s editorial position has long been that the GOP is a gang of dirty rotten scoundrels whose sole mission is to do down widows and orphans on behalf of rightwing robber barons and rabid racists. Blow would have us believe that, under Trump, the GOP base has further devolved into a national threat: th Republicanism is Trumpism, with no daylight between them. Traditional Republicans are now afraid to stand on principle because they do so at great peril of being drummed out of politics. The voters are now Trump’s noxious base, ergo Trump holds each of their fates in his hands.… Viewed that way, Trump’s base itself becomes the enemy of the Republic. But the President’s base is “viewed that way” only by TDS victims. The Democrats are already losing support because of the #WalkAway movement. Meanwhile Trump’s “beastly base,” as Blow also calls them, already consists of about 63 million voters and public opinion polls show that his support among crucial Democratic constituencies is increasing dramatically. If Blow had any sense, he would realize that insulting the customer isn’t an effective sales technique. He would hesitate to alienate any additional voters. But neither Blow nor his colleagues are rational. Last week another TDS victim, Dana Milbank, wrote the following: Trump and his Fox News-viewing supporters dock their spaceship in a parallel universe where truth isn’t truth. At Tuesday night’s rally in West Virginia, Trump’s irony-challenged audience could be heard chanting “Drain the Swamp!”… Republican lawmakers fear that with 87 percent of Republican voters backing Trump, crossing him is political suicide. And they are obviously right. What sane Republican would deliberately cross a president of his own party whose support among his constituents approaches 90 percent? The only politician willing to even consider doing so would be someone expecting to retire or otherwise leave office. House Speaker Paul Ryan fits the bill to the extent that he’s retiring, and has thus received some unsolicited advice from NBC talking head Chuck Todd. Todd, a lifelong Democrat, professes to be worried about the future of the Republican Party if Speaker Ryan doesn’t sic the House Judiciary Committee on President Trump post haste: The way a functional Washington would work is that Congress, there is a process here. The sitting president is accused of a crime. The Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives would begin to look to see if there’s enough evidence to start investigating and drawing up articles of impeachment, but this is not a functional Congress. This is a Congress controlled by Republicans. Paul Ryan may not be the most dynamic Speaker of the House, and he famously criticized candidate Trump after the infamous Access Hollywood tape was released (not exactly an exclusive club), but he isn’t an idiot. Why would he take the advice of a guy who believes that while the Republicans hold majorities in both Houses, “this is not a functional Congress,” and has dismissed the Trump White House thus: “It’s like we’re living inside a parody.” At least Todd has not directly insulted the voters. That cannot be said about Politico’s Marc Caputo who mocked attendees of a recent Trump rally as toothless “garbage people.” In addition to such demeaning insults, there is the breathtaking hypocrisy. CNN commentator Sally Kohn published a book in the spring titled, The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity, in which she advocates treating everyone with respect — including Trump supporters. In an interview with Vanity Fair she actually said, “I don’t see how demonizing people who disagree with you gets you closer. And morally, you are not walking the talk.” Sadly, Kohn is a classic lefty hypocrite. Last week she outed 8/28/2018 The Left Still Doesn’t Know Why It’s LosingThe American Spectator herself with this Tweet: “MEMO TO ALL TRUMP SUPPORTERS: YOU, TOO, CAN GROW A CONSCIENCE!” And this Tweet came after Kohn told Vanity Fair that no genuine progressive standing up for dignity and humanity can say, “Listen, I think we should treat everyone with equality and fairness and dignity except Trump supporters.” Nonetheless, after banking the money from her book sales, she tells us that we can “repair our humanity” without respecting those who support Trump. Does that mean Trump supporters aren’t really human? Charles Blow suggests as much when he refers to the President’s supporters as “beastly.” This kind of dehumanization is familiar. Where have we seen this? The History (a.k.a. the Nazi) Channel? Oh my, Catron. That was way over the top. Perhaps, but this is the image evoked when the media and the Democrats mock voters for the crime of wearing MAGA hats. These images are hard to banish when it comes time to cast a ballot on Election Day, considering the sordid history of the Democratic Party. Trump voters are daily reminded that, at best, they are second class citizens. That pisses them off, thus they pull the “R” lever. And their relationship with Trump does indeed involve “a kind of complicity” to make America great again. https://spectator.org/the-left-still-doesnt-know-why-its-losing/
New documents obtained by investigative journalist Sara Carter show that the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign --dubbed Operation Crossfire Hurricane -- heavily relied upon faulty intelligence gathered by longtime FBI informant Stefan Halper, a Cambridge professor, after he tried to set up several members of the Trump campaign.
In the fall of 2016, Adam Lovinger, a former senior official of the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), stumbled upon evidence that the deep state wanted buried -- documents exposing Halper's role in the frame-up job. He voiced his concerns about what he had found and paid dearly for it.
Lovinger, a DoD analyst turned whistleblower, had his security clearance suspended on May 1, 2017, after he raised concerns about the roughly $1 million in tax-payer funded money Halper had received to write Defense Department foreign policy reports.
“It was a topic of conversation within the office,” Lovinger's attorney, Sean M. Bigley, told the Washington Times earlier this month. “What is Halper doing, and why is he being paid astronomically more than others similarly situated?”
According to Bigley, Lovinger was suspended shortly after he began asking questions about the suspicious DoD contracts with Halper, as well as a close friend of Chelsea Clinton and others. He was then relegated to a make-work desk job until April 3, 2018, when he was indefinitely suspended from duty and pay.
Lovinger, a husband and father of three, was the primary breadwinner of his family, according to Carter.
“When Mr. Lovinger raised concerns about DoD’s misuse of Stefan Halper in 2016, he did so without any political designs or knowledge of Mr. Halper’s spying activities,” Bigley told SaraACarter.com. “Instead, Mr. Lovinger simply did what all Americans should expect of our civil servants: he reported violations of law and a gross waste of public funds to his superiors.”
Bigley told Carter that they had expected some degree of retaliation for the whistleblowing, but were taken aback by the "ferocity" of it.
“We weren’t surprised when DoD bureaucrats moved shortly thereafter to strip Mr. Lovinger of both his security clearance and his detail to the National Security Council, where he had been senior director for strategy as a by-name request of the incoming Trump Administration,” said the attorney.
"Yet, we were puzzled by the unprecedented ferocity of efforts to discredit Mr. Lovinger, including leaks from DoD of false and defamatory information to the press," he said.
Bigley explained that at the time they assumed that the reason for the intense blowback was because Lovinger had raised concerns about a contract that went to a firm headed by Jacqueline Newmyer Deal, who is reportedly a close confidante of Chelsea Clinton.
While they remain convinced that that connection "certainly may have played a role,” Bigley now suspects that it was his focus on Harper that made the deep state panic because it was in the process of trying to frame Trump.
“Mr. Lovinger unwittingly shined a spotlight on the FBI’s secret weapon – Stefan Halper – and threatened to expose the truth about the Trump-Russia collusion narrative being plotted: that it was all a set-up," Bigley said.
The House Intelligence Committee Russia report and documents obtained by this outlet revealed that the bulk of the warrant against Page relied heavily on an unverified dossier compiled by Former British Spy Christopher Steele and the matter is still under congressional investigation. Steele, who was a former MI6 agent, also had ties to many of the same people, like former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, who were part of the seminar.
Halper, along with Dearlove, left the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar in December 2016, saying they were concerned about Russian influence. Halper had told reporters at the time that it was due to “unacceptable Russian influence.”
Ironically, documents obtained by SaraACarter.com suggest that Halper also had invited senior Russian intelligence officials to co-teach his course on several occasions and, according to news reports, also accepted money to finance the course from a top Russian oligarch with ties to Putin.
"What we discovered is that he was actually involved in every aspect of the FBI's investigation," Carter explained on Fox News' "Hannity" Monday night. Carter appeared with Lovinger's lawyer, Sean Bigly, and Fox News correspondent Greg Jarrett.
Carter said that Halper, who has direct ties to Russian intelligence, befriended Trump advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in 2016 in an attempt to set them up.
But before Halper set his sights on Page and Papadopoulos, he targeted the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
Flynn was invited to Cambridge in February 2014 for a dinner hosted by former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove and Halper.
Carter maintains that the investigation into Trump didn’t start with Carter Page or George Papadopoulos -- but with General Flynn, who had clashed with President Obama and the CIA over the administration’s false narrative that al-Qaeda had been defeated or was on the run.
"Stefan Halper invited the Trump campaign officials into the lion's den," Bigley explained. "This was not a set of organic meetings. This was not Halper reporting things that he witnessed that he thought were concerning -- as he has put out there in the media."
He continued: "We have an absolute, ironclad document trail that shows that Halper invited the Russians -- Halper foisted the Russians on the Trump officials at these meetings and at these seminars."
Bigley said that deep state actors were engaging in "a classic espionage tactic" by accusing the Trump campaign of what they themselves were doing. "That's the entire genesis of the Mueller investigation," he explained.
"There's no question that there was a conspiracy afoot here, and that was to use people to insinuate themselves into the Trump campaign as spies and in order to set up individuals as scapegoats essentially for the Trump/Russia collusion probe," Fox News' Gregg Jarrett added. "And the FBI's all in on this."
Bigley said that the bombshell documents he shared with Sara Carter reveal three things:
1. Stefan Halper co-led his series of seminars with a noted Putin apologist who spent a decade at the State Academy in Russia.
2. Stefan Halper co-taught these seminars at Cambridge University with the former head of Russian intelligence.
3. Stefan Halper accepted funds from a front company for the Russian intelligence service, or what MI6 believes to be a front company for the Russian intelligence service.
Now that the truth is finally coming out, "everything has boomeranged," Hannity said to close the segment.
Print
Close
