Pittsburgh Protest of the Ferguson Grand Jury Verdict Today @ 2:00 PM

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#Ferguson #WhatILearnedFromThePressConference

If I understand the prosecutor correctly, Micheal Brown is dead because of social media.

Don't They Filter Out Obvious Untruths?

Diana West writes a column for the Tribune-Review.

She's responsible for all the columns written under her byline.  She wrote them, she owns them.

So in that case, she's a birther.  Though to be fair and as far as I know, that column was NOT published in the Tribune-Review.  But still, they publish the columns of a known birther.

Bad.  Bad Tribune-Review.  Bad dog.

Here's another one.  In her most recent column, published Friday August 29 and titled "Rush to judgment in Ferguson" Diana West writes:

Even the dark suits and American flags fail to obscure the 21st-century lynch mob at work. According to federal and state authorities, Wilson shot the 6-foot-4, 292-pound man multiple times for “racist” reasons. The other story out there is that Wilson fired as Brown charged him after having beaten Wilson to the point of fracturing his orbital socket and rendering the six-year veteran cop nearly unconscious.

The fractured eye-socket story?  She went with the fractured eye-socket story?

Wasn't that debunked more than a week before (on August 21)?

But let's take a look at this fake story, shall we?  Where did it come from?  For that we turn to Salon.com:

Perhaps the first shot in the right-wing news campaign to smear Michael Brown came in the form of a call to a conservative talk radio host Dana Loesch on Aug. 15. A caller who claimed to be a friend of Wilson’s — who would only identify herself as Josie — told Loesch that Brown had “bum rushed” officer Wilson, punched him in the face and tried to go for Wilson’s gun. Brown and his friend then walked away. Wilson pulled his gun and ordered Brown to stop. Brown turned around, taunted Wilson, then again “bum rushed” him. Wilson fired six shots, the last shot to Brown’s forehead. “Josie” claimed that she had gotten this information from a Facebook discussion. She did not claim that Wilson had been seriously injured in the encounter.

Much discussion and rampant speculation followed in the right-wing blogosphere, even though the only source was an anonymous caller to a radio show and a supposed Facebook discussion. Then, on Aug. 19, Jim Hoft, a St. Louis-based blogger, announced on his site Gateway Pundit that Wilson had suffered an “Orbital Blowout Fracture to Eye Socket.”

“The Gateway Pundit can now confirm from two local St. Louis sources that police Officer Darren Wilson suffered facial fractures during his confrontation with deceased 18 year-old Michael Brown. Officer Wilson clearly feared for his life during the incident that led to the shooting death of Brown. This was after Michael Brown and his accomplice Dorian Johnson robbed a local Ferguson convenience store.”

Hoft offered a still from a CT scan as evidence of Wilson’s injury. It did not take long for people to debunk the story. Later that afternoon on the website Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson, who takes delight in debunking Hoft, shredded the story.

Johnson, for example, foiled the description of how painful a fractured orbital socket is with the video of Officer Wilson casually walking about the corpse of Michael Brown.  No ambulances were called for him, none of the officers gave him first aid and the X-Rays Holt posted at Gateway Pundit were stock images from the University of Iowa.

The story's false and yet Diana West still went with it and just as importantly, the Trib allowed onto its pages.

But let's take a look at West's description of "the other story out there" - that Wilson shot Brown 6 times after Brown beat him so badly he shattered the officer's eye socket and nearly rendered him unconscious.

Wow.  Does Diana West seriously think that makes any sense?  Any sense at all?

Does the Trib?

Meanwhile, Outside

What's going on in Ferguson is the most important story of the day, by far.  Without a doubt.  No one deserves to be gunned down in the street like that.  No one.  No one's corpse deserves to be left there for hours.  No one.  No one's pre-shooting reputation deserves to be smeared like that by the local police - especially since it was the police that did the shooting.  No one.

This is America.  Crap like that isn't supposed to happen.  But it does.  All too often.

That being said, it's still getting warmer out there.  From NOAA:

• The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for July 2014 was the fourth highest on record for July, at 0.64°C (1.15°F) above the 20th century average of 15.8°C (60.4°F).
• The global land surface temperature was 0.74°C (1.33°F) above the 20th century average of 14.3°C (57.8°F), marking the 10th warmest July on record. 
• For the ocean, the July global sea surface temperature was 0.59°C (1.06°F) above the 20th century average of 16.4°C (61.5°F), tying with 2009 as the warmest July on record. 
• The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for the January–July period (year-to-date) was 0.66°C (1.19°F) above the 20th century average of 13.8°C (56.9°F), tying with 2002 as the third warmest such period on record.

It may have been cool round these parts, but overall it's still getting hotter out there.