I don't think the treasonous conservative/America Hating/Republican "impeachment inquiry" can get off to a worse start than this.


GOP's own witness pours cold water on Biden impeachment: 'I do not believe the evidence meets the standard'

Sarah K. Burris
September 28, 2023 10:34AM ET



(MSNBC Screen cap).


Lawyer Jonathan Turley was ridiculed as "shameless" after he was announced as a Republican witness willing to speak out at the House Oversight hearing that would advocate for the impeachment of President Joe Biden.

But, as the hearing started Thursday, he was pouring cold water on the GOP's plan.

In a statement, the George Washington University Law School professor declared: “I do not believe that the evidence currently meets the standard of a high crime and misdemeanor needed for an article of impeachment.”



Instead, Turley intends to use his time on the stand to attack the past impeachment of former President Donald Trump.

"The purpose of my testimony today is to discuss how past inquiries pursued evidence of potentially impeachable conduct," the statement continues.

"Four years ago, I appeared as an expert witness in the only impeachment hearing held in the first impeachment of former president Donald J. Trump," Turley says. "While opposing many of the proposed articles of impeachment, I testified that two possible articles presented viable impeachable conduct, if proven. However, I maintained that the House needed to create a full record to support those articles. (Those two articles were the articles later adopted by the House)."

Turley said that while the standard doesn't reach an actual impeachment of Biden, an "inquiry" is allowed.

"My testimony also reflects the fact that I do believe that, after months of investigation, the House has passed the threshold for an inquiry into whether President Joe Biden was directly involved or benefited from the corrupt practices of his son, Hunter, and others," his statement continues.

"Since my testimony focuses on the historical and legal aspects of this inquiry, I will leave much of the discussion of the evidence to my fellow witnesses and to the Committee members themselves. However, I believe that the record has developed to the point that the House needs to answer troubling questions surrounding the President. As discussed below, polls indicate that most of the country shares those concerns while expressing doubts over the Biden Administration investigating potential criminal conduct."

Impeachments require a vote of the full House. Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) hasn't held a vote and political analysts assume it is because he doesn't have enough support for it to pass.

Read the full statement here.


https://www.rawstory.com/biden-impeachment-republican-witness/

 

Time to burst the fallacy that wrong story is a reliable news source.

Should you trust media bias charts? - Poynter
Should you trust media bias charts?
These controversial charts claim to show the political lean and credibility of news organizations. Here’s what you need to know about them.
Ad Fontes' media bias chart, left, and AllSides' media bias chart, right. Larger versions are available to view below and on each organization's website.
By: Jake Sheridan
November 2, 2021

Impartial journalism is an impossible ideal. That is, at least, according to Julie Mastrine.

“Unbiased news doesn’t exist. Everyone has a bias: everyday people and journalists. And that’s OK,” Mastrine said. But it’s not OK for news organizations to hide those biases, she said.

“We can be manipulated into (a biased outlet’s) point of view and not able to evaluate it critically and objectively and understand where it’s coming from,” said Mastrine, marketing director for AllSides, a media literacy company focused on “freeing people from filter bubbles.”

That’s why she created a media bias chart.

As readers hurl claims of hidden bias towards outlets on all parts of the political spectrum, bias charts have emerged as a tool to reveal pernicious partiality.

Charts that use transparent methodologies to score political bias — particularly the AllSides chart and another from news literacy company Ad Fontes Media — are increasing in popularity and spreading across the internet. According to CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring platform, the homepages for these two sites and the pages for their charts have been shared tens of thousands of times.

But just because something is widely shared doesn’t mean it’s accurate. Are media bias charts reliable?

Why do media bias charts exist?
Traditional journalism values a focus on news reporting that is fair and impartial, guided by principles like truth, verification and accuracy. But those standards are not observed across the board in the “news” content that people consume.

Tim Groeling, a communications professor at the University of California Los Angeles, said some consumers take too much of the “news” they encounter as impartial.

When people are influenced by undisclosed political bias in the news they consume, “that’s pretty bad for democratic politics, pretty bad for our country to have people be consistently misinformed and think they’re informed,” Groeling said.

If undisclosed bias threatens to mislead some news consumers, it also pushes others away, he said.

“When you have bias that’s not acknowledged, but is present, that’s really damaging to trust,” he said.

Kelly McBride, an expert on journalism ethics and standards, NPR’s public editor and the chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at Poynter, agrees.

“If a news consumer doesn’t see their particular bias in a story accounted for — not necessarily validated, but at least accounted for in a story — they are going to assume that the reporter or the publication is biased,” McBride said.

The growing public confusion about whether or not news outlets harbor a political bias, disclosed or not, is fueling demand for resources to sort fact from otherwise — resources like these media bias charts.

Bias and social media
Mastrine said the threat of undisclosed biases grows as social media algorithms create filter bubbles to feed users ideologically consistent content.

Could rating bias help? Mastrine and Vanessa Otero, founder of the Ad Fontes media bias chart, think so.

“It’ll actually make it easier for people to identify different perspectives and make sure they’re reading across the spectrum so that they get a balanced understanding of current events,” Mastrine said.

Otero said bias ratings could also be helpful to advertisers.

“There’s this whole ecosystem of online junk news, of polarizing misinformation, these clickbaity sites that are sucking up a lot of ad revenue. And that’s not to the benefit of anybody,” Otero said. “It’s not to the benefit of the advertisers. It’s not to the benefit of society. It’s just to the benefit of some folks who want to take advantage of people’s worst inclinations online.”

Reliable media bias ratings could allow advertisers to disinvest in fringe sites.

Groeling, the UCLA professor, said he could see major social media and search platforms using bias ratings to alter the algorithms that determine what content users see. Changes could elevate neutral content or foster broader news consumption.

But he fears the platforms’ sweeping power, especially after Facebook and Twitter censored a New York Post article purporting to show data from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of President-elect Joe Biden. Groeling said social media platforms failed to clearly communicate how and why they stopped and slowed the spread of the article.

“(Social media platforms are) searching for some sort of arbiter of truth and news … but it’s actually really difficult to do that and not be a frightening totalitarian,” he said.

Is less more?
The Ad Fontes chart and the AllSides chart are each easy to understand: progressive publishers on one side, conservative ones on the other.

“It’s just more visible, more shareable. We think more people can see the ratings this way and kind of begin to understand them and really start to think, ‘Oh, you know, journalism is supposed to be objective and balanced,’” Mastrine said. AllSides has rated media bias since 2012. Mastrine first put them into chart form in early 2019.

Otero recognizes that accessibility comes at a price.

“Some nuance has to go away when it’s a graphic,” she said. “If you always keep it to, ‘people can only understand if they have a very deep conversation,’ then some people are just never going to get there. So it is a tool to help people have a shortcut.”

But perceiving the chart as distilled truth could give consumers an undue trust in outlets, McBride said.

“Overreliance on a chart like this is going to probably give some consumers a false level of faith,” she said. “I can think of a massive journalistic failure for just about every organization on this chart. And they didn’t all come clean about it.”

The necessity of getting people to look at the chart poses another challenge. Groeling thinks disinterest among consumers could hurt the charts’ usefulness.

“Asking people to go to this chart, asking them to take effort to understand and do that comparison, I worry would not actually be something people would do. Because most people don’t care enough about news,” he said. He would rather see a plugin that detects bias in users’ overall news consumption and offers them differing viewpoints.

McBride questioned whether bias should be the focus of the charts at all. Other factors — accountability, reliability and resources — would offer better insight into what sources of news are best, she said.

“Bias is only one thing that you need to pay attention to when you consume news. What you also want to pay attention to is the quality of the actual reporting and writing and the editing,” she said. It wouldn’t make sense to rate local news sources for bias, she added, because they are responsive to individual communities with different political ideologies.

The charts are only as good as their methodologies. Both McBride and Groeling shared praise for the stated methods for rating bias of AllSides and Ad Fontes, which can be found on their websites. Neither Ad Fontes nor AllSides explicitly rates editorial standards.

The AllSides Chart

(Courtesy: AllSides)

The AllSides chart focuses solely on political bias. It places sources in one of five boxes — “Left,” “Lean Left,” “Center,” “Lean Right” and “Right.” Mastrine said that while the boxes allow the chart to be easily understood, they also don’t allow sources to be rated on a gradient.

“Our five-point scale is inherently limited in the sense that we have to put somebody in a category when, in reality, it’s kind of a spectrum. They might fall in between two of the ratings,” Mastrine said.

That also makes the chart particularly easy to understand, she said.

AllSides has rated more than 800 sources in eight years, focusing on online content only. Ratings are derived from a mix of review methods.

In the blind bias survey, which Mastrine called “one of (AllSides’) most robust bias rating methodologies,” readers from the public rate articles for political bias. Two AllSides staffers with different political biases pull articles from the news sites that are being reviewed. AllSides locates these unpaid readers through its newsletter, website, social media account and other marketing tools. The readers, who self-report their political bias after they use a bias rating test provided by the company, only see the article’s text and are not told which outlet published the piece. The data is then normalized to more closely reflect the composure of America across political groupings.

AllSides also uses “editorial reviews,” where staff members look directly at a source to contribute to ratings.

“That allows us to actually look at the homepage with the branding, with the photos and all that and kind of get a feel for what the bias is, taking all that into account,” Mastrine said.

She added that an equal number of staffers who lean left, right and center conduct each review together. The personal biases of AllSides’ staffers appear on their bio pages. Mastrine leans right.

She clarified that among the 20-person staff, many are part time, 14% are people of color, 38% are lean left or left, 29% are center, and 18% are lean right or right. Half of the staffers are male, half are female.

When a news outlet receives a blind bias survey and an editorial review, both are taken into account. Mastrine said the two methods aren’t weighted together “in any mathematical way,” but said they typically hold roughly equal weight. Sometimes, she added, the editorial review carries more weight.

AllSides also uses “independent research,” which Mastrine described as the “lowest level of bias verification.” She said it consists of staffers reviewing and reporting on a source to make a preliminary bias assessment. Sometimes third-party analyses — including academic research and surveys — are incorporated into ratings, too.

AllSides highlights the specific methodologies used to judge each source on its website and states its confidence in the ratings based on the methods used. In a separate white paper, the company details the process used for its August 2020 blind bias survey.

AllSides sometimes gives separate ratings to different sections of the same source. For example, it rates The New York Times’ opinion section “Left” and its news section “Lean Left.” AllSides also incorporates reader feedback into its system. People can mark that they agree or disagree with AllSides’ rating of a source. When a significant number of people disagree, AllSides often revisits a source to vet it once again, Mastrine said.

The AllSides chart generally gets good reviews, she said, and most people mark that they agree with the ratings. Still, she sees one misconception among the people that encounter it: They think center means better. Mastrine disagrees.

“The center outlets might be omitting certain stories that are important to people. They might not even be accurate,” she said. “We tell people to read across the spectrum.”

To make that easier, AllSides offers a curated “balanced news feed,” featuring articles from across the political spectrum, on its website.

AllSides makes money through paid memberships, one-time donations, media literacy training and online advertisements. It plans to become a public benefit corporation by the end of the year, she added, meaning it will operate both for profit and for a stated public mission.

The Ad Fontes chart

(Courtesy: Ad Fontes)

The Ad Fontes chart rates both reliability and political bias. It scores news sources — around 270 now, and an expected 300 in December — using bias and reliability as coordinates on its chart.

The outlets appear on a spectrum, with seven markers showing a range from “Most Extreme Left” to “Most Extreme Right” along the bias axis, and eight markers showing a range from “Original Fact Reporting” to “Contains Inaccurate/Fabricated Info” along the reliability axis.

The chart is a departure from its first version, back when founder Vanessa Otero, a patent attorney, said she put together a chart by herself as a hobby after seeing Facebook friends fight over the legitimacy of sources during the 2016 election. Otero said that when she saw how popular her chart was, she decided to make bias ratings her full-time job and founded Ad Fontes — Latin for “to the source” — in 2018.

“There were so many thousands of people reaching out to me on the internet about this,” she said. “Teachers were using it in their classrooms as a tool for teaching media literacy. Publishers wanted to publish it in textbooks.”

About 30 paid analysts rate articles for Ad Fontes. Listed on the company’s website, they represent a range of experience — current and former journalists, educators, librarians and similar professionals. The company recruits analysts through its email list and references and vets them through a traditional application process. Hired analysts are then trained by Otero and other Ad Fontes staff.

To start review sessions, a group of coordinators composed of senior analysts and the company’s nine staffers pulls articles from the sites being reviewed. They look for articles listed as most popular or displayed most prominently.


Part of the Ad Fontes analyst political bias test. The test asks analysts to rank their political bias on 18 different policy issues.

Ad Fontes administers an internal political bias test to analysts, asking them to rank their left-to-right position on about 20 policy positions. That information allows the company to attempt to create ideological balance by including one centrist, one left-leaning and one right-leaning analyst on each review panel. The panels review at least three articles for each source, but they may review as many as 30 for particularly prominent outlets, like The Washington Post, Otero said. More on their methodology, including how they choose which articles to review to create a bias rating, can be found here on the Ad Fontes website.

When they review the articles, the analysts see them as they appear online, “because that’s how people encounter all content. No one encounters content blind,” Otero said. The review process recently changed so that paired analysts discuss their ratings over video chat, where they are pushed to be more specific as they form ratings, Otero said.

Individual scores for an article’s accuracy, the use of fact or opinion, and the appropriateness of its headline and image combine to create a reliability score. The bias score is determined by the article’s degree of advocacy for a left-to-right political position, topic selection and omission, and use of language.

To create an overall bias and reliability score for an outlet, the individual scores for each reviewed article are averaged, with added importance given to more popular articles. That average determines where sources show up on the chart.

Ad Fontes details its ratings process in a white paper from August 2019.

While the company mostly reviews prominent legacy news sources and other popular news sites, Otero hopes to add more podcasts and video content to the chart in coming iterations. The chart already rates video news channel “The Young Turks” (which claims to be the most popular online news show with 250 million views per month and 5 million subscribers on YouTube), and Otero mentioned she next wants to examine videos from Prager University (which claims 4 billion lifetime views for its content, has 2.84 million subscribers on YouTube and 1.4 million followers on Instagram). Ad Fontes is working with ad agency Oxford Road and dental care company Quip to create ratings for the top 50 news and politics podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Otero said.

“It’s not strictly traditional news sources, because so much of the information that people use to make decisions in their lives is not exactly news,” Otero said.

She was shocked when academic textbook publishers first wanted to use her chart. Now she wants it to become a household tool.

“As we add more news sources on to it, as we add more data, I envision this becoming a standard framework for evaluating news on at least these two dimensions of reliability and bias,” she said.

She sees complaints about it from both ends of the political spectrum as proof that it works.

“A lot of people love it and a lot of people hate it,” Otero said. “A lot of people on the left will call us neoliberal shills, and then a bunch of people that are on the right are like, ‘Oh, you guys are a bunch of leftists yourselves.’”

The project has grown to include tools for teaching media literacy to school kids and an interactive version of the chart that displays each rated article. Otero’s company operates as a public benefit corporation with a stated public benefit mission: “to make news consumers smarter and news media better.” She didn’t want Ad Fontes to rely on donations.

“If we want to grow with a problem, we have to be a sustainable business. Otherwise, we’re just going to make a small difference in a corner of the problem,” she said.

Ad Fontes makes money by responding to specific research requests from advertisers, academics and other parties that want certain outlets to be reviewed. The company also receives non-deductible donations and operates on WeFunder, a grassroots crowdfunding investment site, to bring in investors. So far, Ad Fontes has raised $163,940 with 276 investors through the site.

Should you use the charts?
Media bias charts with transparent, rigorous methodologies can offer insight into sources’ biases. That insight can help you understand what perspectives sources bring as they share the news. That insight also might help you understand what perspectives you might be missing as a news consumer.

But use them with caution. Political bias isn’t the only thing news consumers should look out for. Reliability is critical, too, and the accuracy and editorial standards of organizations play an important role in sharing informative, useful news.

Media bias charts are a media literacy tool. They offer well-researched appraisals on the bias of certain sources. But to best inform yourself, you need a full toolbox. Check out Poynter’s MediaWise project for more media literacy tools.

 

Raw Story Media Bias | AllSides
Raw Story
AllSides Media Bias Rating™: Left

• agree
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-4

LeftWhat does this mean?AllSides Media Bias Meter™
How we determined this rating:

• Independent Review
• Community Feedback: 2,569 ratings

Unless otherwise noted, this bias rating refers only to online news coverage, not TV, print, or radio content.

Learn about our bias rating methods
Raw Story
Bias Rating Left
Type News Media
Region National
Owner Raw Story Media, Inc.
Established 2004
Website rawstory.com
Twitter @RawStory
Facebook TheRawStory
Wikipedia Raw Story
Go to Raw Story
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Contents

1. About Raw Story's Bias Rating
2. What a "Left" Rating Means
3. Details
4. Community Feedback
5. Ownership & Funding
6. Articles from Raw Story

About Raw Story's Bias Rating
Raw Story is a news media source with an AllSides Media Bias Rating™ of Left.

What a "Left" Rating Means
Sources with an AllSides Media Bias Rating of Left display media bias in ways that strongly align with liberal, progressive, or left-wing thought and/or policy agendas. This is our most liberal rating on the political spectrum.

Learn more about Left ratings
Details
The Raw Story is an online news publication founded in 2004 by John Byrne. It covers current national and international political and economic news and publishes its own editorials and investigative pieces. The Raw Story describes itself as progressive, bringing attention to stories that it sees as downplayed or ignored by other media outlets. It is owned by Raw Story Media Inc. based in Washington, D.C., in the United States. Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_story
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Community Feedback
Feedback does not determine ratings, but may trigger deeper review.
As of September 2023, 2,569 people have voted on the AllSides Media Bias Rating for Raw Story. On average, those who disagree with our rating think this source has a Lean Left bias.

Raw Story Ownership and Funding
Funding and ownership do not influence bias ratings. We rate the bias of content only.
Owner: Raw Story Media, Inc.

Articles from Raw Story
This content was curated by AllSides. See our Balanced Newsfeed.
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Trump gaining ground among Hispanic voters, poll shows
50% of Hispanic Republican voters said they would vote for Trump in the GOP primary

Former President Donald Trump is gaining momentum among Hispanic voters, according to a recent Univision poll, which claims to be the largest Hispanic bipartisan primary public polling of the 2024 election cycle so far.

Among Hispanic Republicans, Trump maintains a strong lead, with 50% responding they would vote for him in the GOP primary, the poll found. Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis follows in second place with 12%, and pharmaceutical businessman Vivek Ramaswamy trails behind at 9%.

Despite four federal indictments, Trump is dominating among Hispanic voters and stands at 36%, a four-point increase from when he left office in January 2021, as per a previous Univision News poll.

Jamie Joseph

 

Does anyone know anyone who uses All Sides media charts or otherwise? I sure don't. They are way to confusing and don't really tell you anything.

 

Does anyone know anyone besides the hater that actually listens to wrong story?

They are propaganda purveyors and offer nothing but liberal bullshit.

 

Two things are colliding here at once. One, the treasonous conservative/America Hating/Republican's "impeachment inquiry" is being exposed as a laughable phony, lying, corrupt, and incompetent Trump demanded publicity stunt. And even I am a little surprised at what a disaster it is. I knew President Biden and the Democrats were locked and loaded and willing and able to fight back with the facts. But I thought the treasonous conservative/America Hating/Republicans would at least up their game a little bit and instead they thought they could lie their way through on national TV. And just stupid ignorant and mentally ill lies at that. Like doing hack jobs on text messages that were so easily revealed by just showing and reading the actual message. Or Jim Jordan sitting there and just deliberately, blatantly, and knowingly lying about what Devin Archer testified to. When the actual transcript of what Archer said has been public for more than a month. Things like that make national news and grab the headlines because it is both just so outrageous and stupid for sitting members of Congress to lie like that in a hearing let alone something as serious as impeachment.

But at the same time all the comedy will end when the government shuts down. Treasonous conservative/America Hating/Republicans live in a fantasy world where no one needs or wants government. Which is delusional since they sure as fuck want their paychecks and want their staff to get paid and want their services.But they are and always have been wrong that the American people don't want a functioning federal government. And it pisses them off when it gets shut down.

So we can expect these numbers to grow.




Poll finds majority oppose impeachment inquiry as House GOP kicks off hearings two days before likely shutdown

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
September 28, 2023 11:32AM ET



Kevin McCarthy (Photo by Win McNamee for AFP)


A just-released NBC News poll finds a solid majority of registered voters are opposed to House Republicans' impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden, which kicks off Thursday morning, just two days before House Republicans are likely to shut down the federal government.

"56% of registered voters say Congress should not hold hearings to start the process of removing Biden from office, while 39% say it should," NBC News reports. "The House Oversight Committee is gathering for its first hearing in the inquiry, which Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., announced two weeks ago to investigate Biden’s ties to his son Hunter’s business dealings, probing what McCarthy described as 'allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption.'"

Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s "own conference was divided over the impeachment inquiry, and so are voters — who are also, unsurprisingly, divided along party lines when it comes to proceedings aimed at removing Biden from office," NBC News adds. "An overwhelming majority of Democrats (88%) oppose the hearings, while 73% of Republicans support them. Six in 10 independents oppose the hearings, and 29% say Congress should move forward with them."

The Congressional Integrity Project, a group of Democratic strategists, have published what it calls a "regularly updated rundown of Republican commentators, Members of Congress, and media personalities" who have indicated there is not sufficient evidence to initiate an impeachment inquiry against President Biden. It includes recent statements from Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), Rep. Dave Joyce (R-OH), Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD), Rep. French Hill (R-AR), Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT), Senator Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV), and Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY).

At midnight on Saturday the federal government will shut down, unless the House passes legislation to fund the government, the Senate passes the House's legislation, and President Joe Biden signed it into law.

The shutdown, which has yet to begin, may already have cost the American taxpayers possibly a billion dollars, well-known economist Justin Wolfers casually suggested:

"This week you and I are paying over a million federal employees over a billion dollars to put aside their regular work to plan for a pointless shutdown, and that shutdown will grind the government to a halt which will also cause untold disruption through the private sector."

Earlier this week, House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi said, "A MAGA shutdown drains billions of dollars from our economy. It says to our men and women in uniform — you’re not getting paid. To women and children depending on food assistance — you're not eating. All 3 recent shutdowns were under REPUBLICAN House Speakers. Irresponsible."



https://www.rawstory.com/poll-finds...off-hearings-two-days-before-likely-shutdown/

 

Just shouldn't put all your faith in polls​

NBC News poll: Nearly 70% of GOP voters stand behind Trump amid indictment and investigations

A whopping two-thirds of Republican primary voters say they stand behind former President Donald Trump and dismiss concerns about his electability, despite his recent criminal arrest and other legal investigations into his past conduct, a new national NBC News poll finds.

That — along with his double-digit lead over his nearest potential GOP rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — makes Trump the clear front-runner in the early race for the Republican presidential nomination.


The Republican Party’s continued enthusiasm for Trump stands in contrast to an anxious nation’s displeasure with how the 2024 race is shaping up. Substantial majorities of Americans don’t want Trump or President Joe Biden to run for president in 2024, setting up a potentially divisive and uninspiring general-election rematch between the two men, with Biden expected to launch his re-election bid in the coming days.



And half of those who don’t want Biden, 80, to run say the president’s age is a “major” reason why.

Trump is 76 years old.

“At this stage, 2024 is shaping up to be a sequel of the 2020 election,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research, which conducted this poll with Republican pollster Bill McInturff and his team at Public Opinion Strategies. “Sequels are frequently hits at the box office, but apparently not at the ballot box.”

McInturff, the GOP pollster, said: “It’s clear that people do not want a Biden-Trump rematch.”

The NBC News poll — conducted April 14-18 — comes after Trump’s arrest and arraignment in New York City over charges that he falsified business records to conceal damaging information in a hush-money case.

It also comes as prosecutors and grand juries in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., examine the former president’s alleged interference in Georgia’s 2020 election results, his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and his handling of classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago home.

Despite the indictment against him and the other investigations into his conduct, Trump leads the NBC News poll’s first national trial heat of the Republican presidential race.

Forty-six percent of Republican primary voters pick Trump as their first choice, while 31% select DeSantis as the 2024 candidate they favor.

They’re followed by former Vice President Mike Pence at 6%, and by former South Carolina Gov. and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C. (who’s exploring a 2024 bid), and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who are all tied at 3%. Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy has 2%.

 

​

 

And what makes me laugh so hard is that is the same guy that on other days is saying Trump can't get the nomination. And if he does he can't win. Just like his the election was definitely not stolen. The election was definitely stolen. And I have stated my position on this many times so I don't need to answer any questions.

 

GOP Rep. Ken Buck Goes Rogue Again, Praises Merrick Garland
Arthur Delaney
September 20, 2023·3 min read
629



GOP Rep. Ken Buck Goes Rogue Again, Praises Merrick Garland

• 
  

WASHINGTON — Rep.

(R-Colo.) went way off the party message Wednesday as his colleagues fulminated against the supposed corruption of the Justice Department under
.

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Buck praised key decisions by U.S. Attorney General

regarding the investigation into the president’s son
.

“In three different opportunities where you could have acted, you would have been criticized either way, whether you acted or did not act in that situation,” Buck told Garland.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) had opened the hearing with accusations that Garland is running a two-tiered justice system that benefits Democrats and persecutes former President Donald Trump, who is facing two federal and two state indictments.


“There is one investigation protecting President Biden, there’s another one attacking President Trump,” Jordan said. “The Justice Department has both sides of the equation covered.”

The idea that the Justice Department has been protecting the president’s family is part of Republicans’ broader impeachment inquiry against the president, which has focused mainly on bogus claims that as vice president years ago, Biden twisted U.S. foreign policy to benefit his son.

In TV appearances, Capitol hallway interviews and newspaper articles, Buck has torched both the politics and the premise of the impeachment effort. On Wednesday, he defended the integrity of the investigation into the president’s son led by David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware.

Weiss has headed up the probe since his appointment by Trump in 2018. U.S. attorneys are presidential appointees who typically turn over when the White House changes hands, but the Biden administration kept Weiss in place to continue his investigation.

“Do you know what people would have said if you asked for U.S. Attorney Weiss’ resignation when you became attorney general?” Buck said Wednesday. “They would have said that you were obstructing the Hunter Biden investigation and you were firing a Republican appointee so that you could appoint a Democrat to slow-walk this investigation and lose the leadership of that investigation.”

Republicans have complained that Weiss was taking too long, but Buck said that if Garland agreed and replaced Weiss with someone speedier, his colleagues “would have again said that you were interfering with the prosecution.”

Republicans hated a plea deal Weiss struck this summer with Biden’s legal team on tax and gun charges. The deal fell apart in August over a disagreement about whether the president’s son would be immune from further prosecution, and Weiss requested special counsel status so that he could charge Hunter Biden in jurisdictions outside of Delaware. Republicans have continued complaining about Weiss even after he leveled felony gun charges against Biden this month, with tax and other charges waiting in the wings.

“If you made the decision to appoint somebody else to special counsel, people would have criticized you because you would have been taking somebody out of the investigation that knew the facts,” Buck told Garland.

The other Republican critics of the impeachment effort tend to be lawmakers from districts that Biden won in 2020, whereas Buck is a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus.

With a tiny House majority, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) can only lose four or fewer Republicans and still pass a resolution, meaning Buck’s opposition, by itself, is a major obstacle to impeaching Biden.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/gop-rep-ken-buck-goes-203339076.html

 

From the beginning the despicable narrative on Biden corruption has been to twirl and howl that the "evidence" against Biden is thin to nonexistent and/or a pack of lies.
Well, that isn't working very well anymore.
What with actual bank records and evidence of a conspiracy involving Bidens to sell America to the highest bidder, "NO EVIDENCE" is sounding a bit ........ hollow.
They're going to have to come up with another tactic or cut bait and admit the old boy is corrupt.​

The ‘no evidence’ claim about Biden corruption is looking increasingly ridiculous (msn.com)
The ‘no evidence’ claim about Biden corruption is looking increasingly ridiculous
Opinion by David Harsanyi•17h

Joe Biden’s defenders have been on a wild ride this past year.

It began with them arguing that the president knew absolutely nothing about his family’s influence-peddling business to arguing that it’s no big deal that ChiCom wire payoffs happen to have Biden’s home address listed on them.

The quality of the excuses, unsurprisingly, has been deteriorating rapidly.

They largely entail repeating the words “no” and “evidence” in a perpetual loop.

But this week, when James Comer released financial records of Hunter Biden receiving two wire transfers totaling $260,000 in 2019 from Beijing with the president’s Delaware home listed as the beneficiary address, the White House jumped into action.

“Imagine them arguing that, if someone stayed at their parents’ house during the pandemic, listed it as their permanent address for work, and got a paycheck, the parents somehow also worked for the employer,” wrote White House spokesman Ian Sams. “It’s bananas. Yet this is what extreme House Republicans have sunken to.”

Speaking of bananas, the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the United States wasn’t reported until January 2020, and shutdowns were still a year away when Hunter Biden used his dad’s house as a beneficiary address on a wire payment.

According to Hunter’s memoir, he was living in Los Angeles with his new wife at the time.

Of course, even if the pandemic had been raging by summer 2019, Hunter Biden wasn’t a college student visiting home; he was a 49-year-old who had the wherewithal to craft numerous international million-dollar deals — not to mention allegedly evade taxes, buy firearms illegally and score crack and prostitutes.

Why would Hunter need to stay at Daddy’s house?

Why do they keep talking about this grown man as if he’s a toddler?

For God’s sake, this is an accomplished artist whose work goes for upwards of a million dollars.

And it wasn’t a “paycheck,” but a wire transfer from a ChiCom investment firm that his father repeatedly lied about to the American people.

In an October 2019 presidential debate, Joe Biden incredulously claimed that Hunter never benefited from Chinese interests — “My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about, China.”

It was weird, even then, that Biden could make such an assertion with confidence, considering that not long before he had claimed to “never” have spoken to Hunter about his “overseas business dealings.”

Perhaps one day the president will be asked by the political media why he made this claim, and whether he knew his address was being used on Biden Inc. paperwork at the time.

And while they’re at it, they could ask him whether he was at his Wilmington house in 2017 when his son threatened his Chinese partner, Henry Zhao, with the words, “I am sitting here with my father.”

Let’s also remember that not only did Joe Biden fly his son to Beijing aboard Air Force Two during an official visit in 2013 to meet with potential investors, but the vice president met Jonathan Li, whose name is on the 2019 wire transfer, for coffee.

The two would talk again on the phone — probably just some “casual conversations” or “niceties about the weather.”

Joe was even kind enough to write college recommendation letters for Li’s son and daughter.

It’s a really weird coincidence that the same guy happens to have Joe Biden’s address on a wire transfer.

A cynic might start to piece together these stories and come to the conclusion that there’s actually plenty of evidence the president had created the “illusion” of access to the White House on his son’s behalf — at the very least, enriching his entire family.

 

whataboutism.
It's all they've got anymore, these despicables.

 

Yep

 

She proves the point yet again.

Damn. Swear, she can't be that stupid.
Even if she is an American hating despicable.