Tag Archives: Osama Bin-Laden

‘Meet The Press’ Drops All Pretense Of Journalism And Embraces Right Wing Conspiracies

tin_foil_hat

It has always been obvious that David Gregory is no real liberal…

Addicting Info

After watching Sunday’s Meet The Press, one could be forgiven for wondering exactly when the United States went from being a country that faced down nuclear armageddon in the Cold War to cowering under the sheets from the threat of terrorists that may or may not exist.

David Gregory, clearly one of the liberal elitists that are in the tank for Obama, did his very best to conflate Benghazi, Boston and Syria as if they were all part of a grand terrorist plan to destroy America 3 or 4 people at a time:

 I want to widen this out a little bit, because I think there’s the broader topic that we’re broaching here about national security, about our personal freedoms in America, coming out of the Boston bombing is, in part, ongoing concern about terrorism. The graphic this week in The Wall Street Journal about that growing al-Qaeda threat, even a couple of years now after Osama bin Laden is killed.

Looking in North Africa, in the Persian Gulf states, where you either have al-Qaeda with a safe haven, or, indeed, more activity. And it leads, too, to what happened last 9-11 in Benghazi, and the ongoing questions about what the United States knew about that, what the administration knew. Did they do enough to stop it? And now, new hearings coming up, new details being reported on, Mr. Mayor [Guiliani]. Is there something here that somehow gets to why we’re more vulnerable now and whether the administration has done enough, in your estimation? (Emphasis mine) 

I’m curious to know in what sense are we more vulnerable under Obama? Did terrorists hijack 4 airplanes and use them as missiles aimed at American buildings? Was anthrax used to kill several people using the mail? Were several different American consulates attacked resulting in dozens of causalities? If I’m not mistaken, so far in Obama’s 4+ years in office, terrorists have killed exactly 4 people on American soil and 4 Americans not in an active war zone.

Gregory goes on:

“Jane Harman, and Mayor Giuliani, as we look at all of this, whether it’s jihadist elements operating in Syria, whether we look at, now, this widening plot out of the Boston bombings, they wanted to attack, reportedly, on July Fourth, there are others now involved, friends of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, who show their pictures, who are involved, at some level, of clearing out some of the materials from his room, what does this tell us about what we’re up against here, specifically in the Boston plot, and this question of, “Are we any safer?”” 

“Widening plot?” Until they can put a finger on who, if anyone, trained the older brother, Tamerlan, the “widening plot” amounts to three young idiots doing something phenomenally stupid. That these imbeciles, which one official referred to as “the Three Stooges,” tried to (poorly) cover up something of this magnitude doesn’t make them part of a grand terrorist conspiracy that makes America less safe; it just makes them dumber than a sack of hammers. No lovable goofball ending here, just a lot of jail time.

But it wasn’t a total fear-fest. Mr. Gregory did accidentally allow Sen. Patrick Leahy to make a point that interferes with the whole “It’s all Obama’s fault we’re under attack” narrative:

DAVID GREGORY: –how vulnerable we are and what we’re doing about it?

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Oh, there are questions should be asked. I know I chair a committee that handles the State Department’s budget. We put in extra money, a great deal of extra money, for embassy security.

DAVID GREGORY: I mean that’s what we’re hearing about– (Translation: ERROR! ERROR! That is off script! We can not blame Republicans for their actions!)

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Let me finish. And that was blocked by the House. They said they didn’t want to spend the money. Whether that would have made a difference or not, I don’t know. Should we look at Benghazi? Yes. But keep in mind that’s just one place. We should look at our security throughout our embassies, because there will always be easy targets.

DAVID GREGORY: Were warnings ignored on Benghazi, Congressman, in your judgment? (Translation: Let’s get back to promoting the right’s conspiracies!)

Continue reading here…

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Rush Limbaugh Compares Suspected Boston Bomber To Trayvon Martin

It’s too easy to say that the Limbaughs, Coulters and Hannitys of the world merely seek and need attention.  These people are simply unadulterated evil

Think Progress

Conservative radio prognosticator Rush Limbaugh used his nationally syndicated show on Tuesday to try and tie Dzhakar Tsarnaev, the captured suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings last week, to murdered teenager Trayvon Martin.

Last March, weeks after 17-year-old Martin was shot and killed, Limbaugh and the rest of the conservative echo chamber spent a considerable amount of time attacking Martin’s character and pushing back against a widely circulated photograph of the teen, claiming that the media was trying to gin up sympathy for the murdered boy.

On Tuesday, Limbaugh compared the media’s portrayal of Trayvon to the treatment of the captured Tsarnaev, citing the media’s use of slightly outdated photographs in both instances:

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh called out a variety of media outlets on Tuesday for trying to [do] “to Dzhokhar [Tsarnaev] what they did to Trayvon Martin.” He said that showing images of Tsarnaev at 14-years-old is an effort to humanize him and frame him as a “normal” or “mixed-up kid,” rather than an accused murder[er] and terrorist.

‘The news media are doing to Dzhokhar what they did to Trayvon Martin,”Limbaugh observed. “They’re regularly showing a photo of Dzhokhar that was taken when he was about 14. Soft, angelic, nice little boy. Harmless. Cute. Big, loveable eyes.”

“Not at all what he looks like today,” Limbaugh added. “The way, when we’re shown Osama bin Laden, it’s in his shepherd pose with his walking stick, walking through the mountains or whatever.”

The implication, subtly made, is that the liberal media is somehow supportive of Tsarnaev, who is responsible for the murders of three people and the injuries of more than 170 others. In reality, the outdated photograph of the younger Tsarnaev brother is one of several photographs in constant rotation on every news network since he was first identified late last week.

The comparison is also deeply offensive for Trayvon Martin and his family. Martin was a victim of gun violence in a state that remains lenient towards gun owners who turn their weapons on other Floridians.

HT: Mediaite

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10 things you need to know today: March 27, 2013

Secret Service agents watch the audience while President Obama speaks in March 2012.

The Week

Petraeus apologizes, Obama names the first female Secret Service chief, and more in our roundup of the stories that are making news and driving opinion

1. PETRAEUS SAYS HE’S SORRY FOR AFFAIR
David Petraeus apologized Tuesday night for the extramarital affair that derailed his career, in his first public speech since he resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency five months ago. The retired four-star general was invited to speak at the event — an ROTC dinner at the University of Southern California — before news broke of his affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. Petraeus said he’s “keenly aware” that his actions have tarnished his reputation since then, and that he regrets causing “such pain” for his wife, Holly, and his friends and supporters. “Perhaps my experience can be instructive to others who stumble or indeed fall as far as I did,” he said. [New York Daily News]
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2. SUPREME COURT HEARS ARGUMENTS ON THE DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE ACT
The Supreme Court is stepping into its second gay-marriage case on Wednesday, as justices hear oral arguments on a challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act. The hearing comes a day after a similar one on California’s same-sex marriage ban, Proposition 8. The Defense of Marriage Act denies gay couples access to federal benefits — even if they are legally married under state law — because it defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The law was signed in 1996 by then-president Bill Clinton, who says he now believes it’s unconstitutional. DOMA has already been rejected by four federal courts and two appeals courts. [BBC News]
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3. OBAMA NAMES FIRST FEMALE SECRET SERVICE CHIEF
President Obama is appointing 30-year Secret Service veteran Julia Pierson as director of the agency, White House officials said on Tuesday. She will be the first woman ever to head the agency, which is best known for providing protection for the president. Obama’s selection of Pierson, who now serves as the agency’s chief of staff, comes a year after a prostitution scandal involving 13 agents and officers exposed a macho culture in the agency. Pierson’s predecessor, Mark Sullivan, announced his retirement last month after apologizing for the embarrassing mess. [Los Angeles Times]
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4. NORTH KOREA WARNS WAR COULD BREAK OUT SOON
North Korea cut off its last military hotline with South Korea and warned on Wednesday that “war may break out an any moment.” The isolated communist regime has been making increasingly bellicose threats since facing global condemnation and tightening sanctions after its recent missile and nuclear tests, and has threatened to launch nuclear strikes against South Korea and the U.S., although experts say it doesn’t have the technology to deliver a warhead to the U.S. mainland. [Reuters]
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5. NEW ACCOUNT BLURS STORY OF BIN LADEN RAID
A third member of Seal Team 6 has come forward offering details of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and his account contradicts what a former comrade said in the February issue ofEsquire. A SEAL member called “The Shooter” in the Esquire article said that he had shot bin Laden as they stood face-to-face and the al Qaeda leader reached for a gun. In an interview with CNN, the latest SEAL to talk says that version of the story is “complete b.s.” The source essentially backs up the account of former SEAL “Mark Owen,” who wrote in his book, No Easy Day, that a member of the special forces team shot an unarmed bin Laden from down the hall. [CNNHuffington Post]
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6. NORTH DAKOTA ENACTS NATION’S STRICTEST ABORTION LAW
North Dakota’s Republican governor, Jack Dalrymple, signed the nation’s most restrictive anti-abortion law on Tuesday. The measure makes abortion illegal as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detectable, which can occur as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. Legal scholars say the law is likely to be overturned in federal court, as the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalized abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, which usually takes 22 to 24 weeks. Dalrymple concedes the likelihood of a challenge, but says “this bill is nevertheless a legitimate attempt by a state legislature to discover the boundaries of Roe v. Wade.” [Christian Science Monitor]
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7. SPAIN CONDUCTS CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OF ARMSTRONG’S DOPING
Spanish authorities are investigating possible criminal charges against Lance Armstrong in connection with the former cycling champion’s doping, which was described in a U.S. Anti Doping Agency report, according to ABC News. Armstrong lived in Spain for several years during his record run of seven consecutive Tour de France titles. Under Spanish law, it isn’t a crime for an athlete to use performance-enhancing drugs, although a conviction for trafficking and distributing banned drugs carries a prison term of up to two years and fines of as much as 400,000 euros ($520,000). [ABC News]
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8. FOLLOWER ACCUSED OF TRYING TO SNEAK CHARLES MANSON A CELL PHONE
A California man, Craig Carlisle Hammond, has been arrested on charges that he tried to smuggle a cell phone to cult leader Charles Manson in prison. Manson, 78, is serving a life sentence for the 1969 “Helter Skelter” killing spree in Los Angeles, in which seven people were murdered. Over the years, Manson has reportedly been caught with a weapon and contraband cell phones, and has been accused of threatening a peace officer. Prison officials say contraband cell phones are dangerous, as they can be used for such things as planning escapes and ordering hits. [New York Daily News]
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9. SPACEX DRAGON COMPLETES SECOND SPACE STATION SUPPLY RUN
The privately built and owned SpaceX Dragon capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after its second resupply mission to the International Space Station under a $1.6 billion contract with NASA. The unmanned craft brought back 1 ton of old space-station equipment and science experiments. It was launched into orbit from Cape Canaveral in early March. With the space shuttle fleet retired, SpaceX, run by billionaire PayPal and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk, is NASA’s only option for two-way delivery to the space station, but a competitor, Orbital Sciences Corp., plans a test flight next month. [Associated Press]
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10. PICASSO PAINTING SELLS FOR $155 MILLION
Hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen has purchased Pablo Picasso’s Le Reve from casino owner Steve Wynn for $155 million — the most a collector has ever paid for a work of art in the U.S. Wynn had agreed to sell Cohen the painting for $139 million, but the deal was canceled after Wynn accidentally put his elbow through the canvas. Cohen remained interested, however, as the work was being restored. [Bloomberg]

 

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Michelle Obama’s Oscar surprise

Michelle Obama dress: Michelle Obama stuns in Naeem Khan at the 2013 Oscars

I didn’t get to see the Oscars® but I’m pretty certain the FLOTUS’ surprise visit was well received…

Politico

First lady Michelle Obama announced the best picture category in a surprise appearance live from the White House at Sunday’s Academy Awards, crowning political drama “Argo” as the best picture.

In a year where several of the nominated films had political connections — from “Lincoln” to “Zero Dark Thirty” — “Argo” came out on top among the Washington crowd, winning three of the seven awards it was nominated for, including best picture. The film is about a CIA plan to rescue Americans trapped in Iran during the Carter-era hostage crisis.

After being introduced by legendary actor Jack Nicholson, Obama spoke by satellite from inside the White House, where she thanked the Hollywood community for their “vitally important work” before announcing “Argo” the winner.

“Welcome to the White House, everyone,” Obama said, wearing a silver Naeem Khan gown. These movies “took us back in time and all around the world. They made us laugh. They made us weep and made us grip our armrests just a little tighter. They taught us that love can endure against all odds and transform our minds in the most surprising ways. And they reminded us that we can overcome any obstacle if we dig deep enough and fight hard enough and find the courage to believe in ourselves.”

(PHOTOS: Politics at the Oscars)

Affleck — who wasn’t nominated in the best director category for “Argo” — seemed thankful and nervous when he took the microphone after the film won.

“I want to thank our friends in Iran living in a terrible circumstance right now,” he said. “I want to thank my wife [actress Jennifer Garner], who I don’t normally associate with Iran, but I want to thank you for working on our marriage. … It is work, but it’s the best kind of work and there’s no one I’d rather work with.”

“Argo” also won for best adapted screenplay and film editing, rounding out its three Oscars. “Lincoln” scored two awards — best actor for Daniel Day-Lewis and best production design.

“Zero Dark Thirty,” about the U.S. government’s hunt for Osama bin Laden, won its only award of the night for sound editing, a category in which it tied with “Skyfall,” the latest James Bond installment. (Surprisingly enough, ties for Oscars aren’t all that uncommon, as ABC News noted.)

(Also on POLITICO: Politicians, media tweet Oscar picks)

Meanwhile, Day-Lewis won best actor for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in the presidential biopic “Lincoln.” It was his third best actor award.

Day-Lewis showed his comedic chops during his acceptance speech, thanking director Steven Spielberg for not making  “Lincoln” a musical.

“And Steven didn’t have to persuade me to play Lincoln, but I had to persuade him that if I was going to do it – it shouldn’t be a musical,” he said.

He also joked with his presenter Meryl Streep, who won best actress last year for her portrayal of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in “Iron Lady.”

“It’s a strange thing because three years ago before we decided to do a straight swap, I had actually been committed to play Margaret Thatcher – and Meryl was Steven’s first choice for ‘Lincoln.’ And I’d like to see that version,” Day-Lewis said.

All kidding aside, Day-Lewis then thanked “the mysteriously beautiful mind, body and spirit of Abraham Lincoln.”

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Fox News: Al Jazeera America Is A Plot To Activate Muslim Sleeper Cells In Detroit

Fox News must seriously consider getting out of that perpetual bubble they’re in…

Think Progress

In a typical fair and balanced panel, Fox News warned on Wednesday that Al Jazeera is set to “infiltrate” the United States amid dire warnings about “sleeper cells” in the Muslim suburbs of Detroit.

Host Megyn Kelly began a segment about Al Jazeera’s expansion into the American television market by raising questions about the network’s “real anti-American bias.” Contributor Lisa Daftari agreed, veering into blatant Islamophobic fear-mongering in the process:

DAFTARI: The point is they want to differentiate themselves from their sister network, but at the same time, it’s the same thing. They’re having the same type of coverage. They’re apparently expanding to eight cities, including Detroit, Michigan. Detroit, Michigan is a large ex-pat community of Muslim-Americans and sleeper cells have been detected. You can Google this, you can find out all this information. So if you’re trying to set yourself apart the Qatari petro-dollars are backing this, you’re still developing in this area where the sleeper cells have been detected. They’re going to have do do much more to prove to me that they’re different from their sister network.

Watch it:

Daftari was referring to the suburbs of Detroit — like Dearborn, MI and others — which have high populations of refugees and immigrants from Muslim-majority nations like Lebanon. Dearborn has been the target of hate speech and protests against Muslims for years now. As for the specific “sleeper cells” she was referring to, in 2008 a former Dearborn resident was convicted of “providing material support” to Hezbollah — hardly the makings of a widespread support for terrorism.

Conservatives have been concerned about the purchase of former Vice President Al Gore’s Current TV by Qatar-based Al Jazeera since the deal was announced in January. Fox’s points about the difference in coverage between Al Jazeera English — which currently airs in millions of homes in the United States — and Al Jazeera Arabic — the original channel, which was the chosen distributor of Osama bin Laden’s video messages — would be accurate if they weren’t so hyperbolic and fearful of the encroaching Muslim threat. Also, Fox News’ concern about the presence of Middle Eastern oil money in U.S. media does not extend to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch’s deals with Saudi Arabia.

 

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If You Want To Make The Case For Keeping Your Guns, Stop Threatening To Kill The President…

ObamaTYRANNY

…it’s just that simple.

Addicting Info

The official line of gun advocates is that the majority of gun owners are responsible and that we shouldn’t punish the many for the actions of the few. Never mind that nearly every law that’s ever been on the books punishes the many for the actions of the few. Never mind that no one with any sort of power is suggesting that guns be banned.

Polls disagree with the NRA’s official line. 85% percent of gun owners and 87% of NRA members agree that there should be sensible restrictions on guns. The other 13%-15% is comprised of NRA leadership and people who, in an attempt to show the nation that their guns should not be taken away, make the case for exactly why their guns should be taken away.

Here are a few lovely examples, courtesy of Tom Joad on Facebook:

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Calib Weaver's profile says It feels like I'm permanently hungover, I haven't been sober for more than three days, for the last three years of my life...." We're so glad you have access to guns.

Calib Weaver’s profile says
“It feels like I’m permanently hungover, I haven’t been sober for more than three days, for the last three years of my life….”
We’re so glad you have access to guns.

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Logan Fike likes "getting high and pole vaulting."

Logan Fike likes “getting high and pole vaulting.”

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Surprisingly, only one of these Twitter profiles, at least as of publication, seems to have been taken down.

I’m sure I could collect examples of these for weeks and the odds of finding someone who’s more than just talk is pretty slim, but pretty slim is not the same as zero.

Why should any of this be a surprise when it’s the largest gun organization in the world that is creating a culture of violence? The NRA, once an advocate for gun safety, has become a safe-haven for people who think only with their guns. Is it a coincidence that its number two spokesman, Ted Nugent, spouts some of the most violent rhetoric heard outside of prison? Is it a coincidence that a branch of the NRA was caught handing out treasonous materialIs it a coincidence that Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA, calls the President a tyrant? Is it a coincidence that the NRA’s members are simultaneously being taught that the answer to tyranny is guns, the bigger, the better?

I don’t believe for a moment that LaPierre actually believes the President is a tyrant. I don’t believe he wants to see him dead, nor do I believe that most of these Twitter posters have the fortitude to commit themselves to die in prison. I do, however, know that LaPierre wants to sell guns and the more he can gin up his membership, the happier he makes his employers.

While LaPierre would probably never pull the trigger on a human being, he will continue to incite people to do the dirty work for him. Whether the victims are small children or the President of the United States, it’s doubtful he’ll lose sleep.

 

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Zero Dark Thirty Trailer

- Toure’ from MSNBC’s The Cycle gives a riveting review of the movie Zero Dark Thirty.

Mercury NewsEntertainment section places Zero Dark Thirty at number two on their Oscar Power Rankings list:

2) “Zero Dark Thirty

Opens Dec. 19 in New York and Los Angeles

Getting raves everywhere it’s screening and knocked off a formidable field to win best film from the influential New York Film Critics Circle.

Watch the Official US Trailer – In Theaters 12/19

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How The Conservative Media Lost The Election

BuzzFeed Politics

The plan was to unmask Obama. It didn’t work.

President Obama’s decisive reelection has promised the conservative new media four more years of fodder, but it’s also left some of its more earnest participants with a gnawing question: What went wrong?

The new online right came roaring out of 2008 convinced that the only reason Obama won was because John McCain’s weak-stomached campaign — cowed by the aura of the first black presidential nominee — had failed to document his ties to the radical left. Their mission would be to “vet” the president as McCain hadn’t, and convince the American people to reject him.

Now the loose coalition of scrappy bloggers, advocacy journalists, and unrepentant trolls who spent four years writing about Jeremiah Wright and Saul Alinsky are coming to terms with reality: The polls weren’t skewed, and their narrative didn’t stick.

And with the Republican Party now in full-throttle soul-searching mode, many in the conservative blogosphere are turning introspective as well.

“I think the right media may have erred,” Dan Riehl, a contributor to Breitbart News and longtime proprietor of Riehl World News, told BuzzFeed a week after the election. “I think we let Obama get into our heads and we wound up campaigning against him, rather than for the things we believe in.”

“It was a trap,” he added. “And one I can’t say I didn’t fall into.”

In hindsight, Riehl questioned the wisdom of devoting so much energy to combing through the president’s early life for signs of radicalism — a process that yielded few true exposés, but rather a handful of scraps that bloggers tried to spin into scandals. For example, in March, Breitbart News reported that Obama attended a 1998 production of a play about left-wing Chicago activist Saul Alinsky. The story, which was presented as a major scoop on the site, included this memorable lede:

In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama claims that he worried after 9/11 that his name, so similar to that of Osama bin Laden, might harm his political career.

But Obama was not always so worried about misspellings and radical resemblances. He may even have cultivated them as he cast himself as Chicago’s radical champion.

“I just don’t know that America cared,” Riehl now says of this story genre. “The guy had already been elected, and our message was that Barack Obama’s a socialist that wants to control your life. I’m not arguing that he isn’t, but is that a message people want to hear?”

Continue reading McKay Coppins‘ article here…

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Conservative Tries To Donate To Obama As Bin Laden, Commits Crime

WND is just one of many right-wing online publications that seem to have spent a huge amount of time trying to shine the most negative and despicable light on President Obama through lies, innuendos and blatant slander….

Addicting Info

WND, one of my personal favorite right-wing propaganda machine sites, has apparently and unwittingly committed a crime while erroneously reporting that Obama is accepting money from foreign nationals.

WND made the claim that, “Using a Pakistani Internet Protocol and proxy server, a disposable credit card and a fake address, “Osama bin Laden” has successfully donated twice to Barack Obama’s presidential re-election campaign.”

First of all, that’s not true. As the Obama campaign has explained (and has, unsurprisingly, been ignored),

“If a billing address is verified via AVS, then the credit card contribution is processed without delay. Some transactions caught by AVS may initially appear to a donor to have been accepted even though this is not the case. Obama for America employs a manual process to review any transaction flagged by AVS, also taking into account other fraud risk factors, and using fraud detection services provided by our credit card processor.

“As an example, the contribution discussed here may have initially appeared to have gone through when the donor completed the transaction at 10:18 a.m. but it was rejected at 4:51 p.m. under our standard fraud detection procedures.

“So any claims that Obama for America has disabled AVS are inaccurate; any question about this would have been answered-if the question had been asked.”

Conveniently, this information is not noted in the WND article, but they don’t seem to care much about what is correct and what isn’t. They also state that, “The acceptance of foreign contributions is strictly illegal under U.S. campaign finance law,” which isn’t true, either. Foreign donations, provided they come from U.S. citizens, are perfectly legal. What isn’t legal are donations from foreign nationals. American citizens outside of the United States must prove citizenship for the donation to be accepted.

Another bit of easily verifiable information that they failed to properly investigate comes from the Daily Caller, a well known source for totally fair and balanced conservative propaganda news:

As the Daily Caller reported, a statement accompanied the GAI’s report from former U.S. Attorney Ken Sukhia noting that 68 percent of traffic to BarackObama.com comes from foreign users, all of whom are redirected to a fundraising page operated by the president’s re-election campaign.

First of all, the domain name that the Daily Caller reported on was not – repeat, not – BarackObama.com. It was, in fact, Obama.com, and those two domain names have different traffic results entirely. However, the 68% foreign traffic number is wrong for both, as easily seen and verified on Alexa (barackobama.com site stats found here and obama.com stats here).

Here are screenshots for the traffic percentages to each:

As you can see, foreign hits are actually only 17.6% of traffic on BarackObama.com — a far cry from 68%.

Here’s the picture for Obama.com:

For Obama.com, 29.3% are from foreign countries. Also, considering Obama’s good standing in the world, it is not surprising in the least that there are foreign visitors to his site.

On another note, somebody should probably let the good folks over at WND know that donations in another person’s name are not permitted before they take the following action: “WND is preparing an affidavit for the Federal Elections Commission and the FBI on the illegal donation accepted by the Obama campaign.”

Yeah, good luck with that. Aaron Klein, the writer that published this piece of easily disproved garbage, should probably get the “worst journalist ever” award for this one. However, the real goal was never accurate journalism anyway, but rather a piece of fiction that will be seized upon and repeated ad nauseam. As reported by Media Matters:

Right-wing media are ignoring anti-fraud protections the Obama campaign has in place to allege that the Obama campaign accepted donations from someone impersonating Osama bin Laden.

Matt Drudge is hyping an article by World Net Daily’s Aaron Klein who claimed that ”Using a Pakistani Internet Protocol and proxy server, a disposable credit card and a fake address, ‘Osama bin Laden’ has successfully donated twice to Barack Obama’s presidential re-election campaign.’ “

Have fun with that, conservatives. We’ll be looking forward to your breathless and credulous reporting on this non-story for the next week in between your hourly floggings of the made up Benghazi scandal.

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NBC’s David Gregory Misquotes Obama, Falsely Claims President Said ‘Al Qaeda Has Been Defeated’

I simply don’t watch Meet The Press anymore since Tim Russert died.  I tried a couple of times to watch the show but David Gregory is no Tim Russert…

Think Progress

This morning on Meet The Press, David Gregory twice asserted that, in May, President Obama declared that “al Qaeda has been defeated.” Gregory used that claim to advance a theory that Obama was simply not concerned enough about al Qaeda in advance of the attack on the American embassy in Libya. Here’s the transcript:

GREGORY: The President has said as recently as May of this year that al Qaeda has not had a chance to rebuild, that al Qaeda has been defeated.  There is an election on, as we’ve been talking about, and the President’s challenger said plain and simple, the President failed to level with the American people and call this a terrorist attack, because you had to be concerned about another terrorist attack from al Qaeda in the Middle East after the President said that al Qaeda had been defeated.

Watch it:

That is not, however, what Obama said in May. Gregory was apparently referring to an address that Obama delivered from Afghanistan in May on the one year anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Here is what Obama said:

And one year ago, from a base here in Afghanistan, our troops launched the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The goal that I set — to defeat al Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild — is now within our reach.

Still, there will be difficult days ahead. The enormous sacrifices of our men and women are not over.

So, the truth is that Obama did not say al Qaeda had already been defeated and specifically acknowledged that there were “difficult days” and “enormous sacrifices” yet to come.

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