More On Breitbart's Smear

An update.

So far both the White House and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have apologized to Shirley Sherrod:

The Obama administration issued an extraordinary public apology Wednesday and offered to reinstate a federal official who was fired after she appeared to make racial comments on a misleading snippet of video.

When it became clear that Shirley Sherrod's comments had been taken out of context, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack spoke to her by phone to apologize and to ask if she would return to the department.

And in what must be a new definition of chutzpah, Andrew Breitbart has even chimed in:

Andrew Breitbart, who posted the clip of USDA official Shirley Sherrod that got her fired, said today that he feels sorry for Sherrod.

"I feel bad that they made this about her, and I feel sorry that they made this about her," he told MSNBC. "Watching how they've misconstrued, how the media has misconstrued the intention behind this, I do feel a sympathy for her plight."

Breitbart says his intention was never to prove that Sherrod, until this week the Georgia state director for rural development, was racist. He says the video he posted proves instead that the NAACP is racist, because of the audience's reaction to her speech.

That last part? That's just bullshit.

From Mediamatters:

Since his smear of Sherrod was repudiated, Breitbart has claimed that his story is "not about Shirley Sherrod" but rather about "the NAACP." In fact, in his initial post on July 19, Breitbart claimed that the video is "evidence of racism coming from a federal appointee" and that Sherrod discriminated against a white farmer in her "federal duties" as the USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development. The video itself also included text that said, "Ms. Sherrod admits that in her federally appointed position, overseeing over a billion dollars she discriminates against people due to their race." Breitbart also posted a tweet on July 19 asking, "Will Eric Holder's DOJ hold accountable fed appointee Shirley Sherrod for admitting practicing racial discrimination?" After the USDA forced Sherrod out of her position in response to the deceptive video, Big Government celebrated with a post titled: "Racist Govt Official/NAACP Award Recipient Resigns after Big Government Expose."

And Breitbart bullshit part II:

In a July 20 Fox News appearance, Breitbart claimed that the video proves there are racists among the NAACP because "the audience was laughing and applauding as she described how she maltreated the white farmer," and he argued that the audience did not "know that there was going to be a point of redemption" in her story. On a July 21 appearance on ABC's Good Morning America, Breitbart again claimed that his video shows that "at an NAACP event, people are applauding racism." But in his initial post, Breitbart described the audience reaction as only "nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement," not applause. Indeed, a review of the full video indicates that the NAACP audience does not applaud at any point in her story about her interaction with the farmer.

Apart from Shirley Sherrod, no one looks good in this. The wingnut press (Andrew Breitbart, Fox "News" and so on) for lying, the mainstream press for not (not ever) calling them on it and finally and unforgivingly the Obama Administration for caving so quickly.

A pox on all their houses.

Jack Kelly Sunday

This past Wednesday, I sent an email to a couple of friends (I'll refer to the first as "Friend A" and the second as "Friend B") this question:

How much you wanna bet on who mentions the Shirley Sherrod/Andrew Breitbart thing first - Jack Kelly or the Trib?

Friend A wrote back first:

Kelly has to wait until Sunday, so...

Good thing Friend A did not take the bet because it was Jack Kelly who was the first to mention l'Affaire Sherrod. He did it today.

When I pointed that out this morning, Friend B responded with a hearty yet succinct:

LOL

I have no idea whether Friend B would have taken the bet either but I should have gotten a few beers out of it. Or maybe a donut. A wafer thin mint, perhaps.

But I digress.

Jack's column is the usual, I guess. Immediately deflect the discussion to someplace else and then go from there. Here's Jack's opening:

Tainting the tea party with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective tactic for Democrats," Mary Frances Berry, a former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, told the Webzine Politico Tuesday.

"There is no evidence tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans," said Ms. Berry, who is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one's opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness."

In 2008, a group of liberal journalists discussed how to handle news coverage of Barack Obama's long association with his hate-spewing pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

"If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose," Spencer Ackerman, now of Wired magazine, said in an e-mail to colleagues on Journolist. "Instead, take one of them -- [Weekly Standard editor] Fred Barnes, [former Bush aide] Karl Rove, who cares -- and call them racists."

Journolist was a list-serve created by The Washington Post's Ezra Klein. He shut it down after conservative commentators Tucker Carlson and Andrew Breitbart obtained e-mails members had sent to each other.

Journolist and Jeremiah Wright? And this involves Shirley Sherrod and Andrew Breitbart how? The issue is ostensibly about her, her speech, how Andrew Breitbart lied to the public with a selective editing of it, and her cowardly firing. To jump right in the matter and, within three paragraphs, to mention Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a desperate diversion.

And I suppose it's is intended to plant in the reader's mind the phrase:

See? The Left does it too!

Except they don't. To quote Crooksandliars:

[W]here exactly are these misleading video clips posted from the left that destroy people?

Show me.

Let's turn, with this in mind to the end of Jack's column. Remember, he's commenting on Andrew Breitbart's use of a clip so edited that it appears to say something that it doesn't.

Now here's Jackie:

If Mr. Breitbart had the whole tape and released only a misleading portion, he's committed an offense as vile as Think Progress did when it chopped up the remarks of a tea partier, who was standing next to his black wife, to give the false impression he was racially prejudiced.

Whether Breitbart had the whole tape and edited it himself or merely received the edited version, his offense is the same. He failed to show the context of Sherrod's story and in doing so allowed his audience to think something of her that just isn't true. It's a lie and Breitbart is a liar regardless. (Keep telling yourself that and remember that the next time he posts something that gurgles up into the mainstream media.)

In any event Jack, did you think I couldn't find the Think Progress video? Here it is:


The gentleman Jack mentions shows up right at the beginning (about 7 seconds in). At that point the man says of President Obama:

He's too black to be President.

Sounds pretty racist to me.

But then, about 30 seconds later in the tape we hear him saying:

It's nothing racial. If you look at my wife, it's not the color of his skin that troubles me.

So where's the deception? Where's the deception as vile (Jack's phrase) as the one shown by Andrew Breitbart?

T'Ain't there. Indeed, if anything, the reality of that short short clip is precisely the opposite of what Breitbart did. As clumsy as it may have been, at least Think Progress included the video of the man reassuring us he wasn't a racist because the woman he identifies as his wife is black. How it invalidates the man's previous racist statement, I am not sure. And Jack, of course, leaves that part out.

This is Jack's evidence showing Think Progress doing something as vile as Andrew Breitbart.

I will include something I agree with from Jack's column (sit down, Ed. I know that's a shocker!):

Mr. Breitbart said his source sent him only the portion of the tape he aired. Even if he had no intent to deceive, it was reckless of him to release the excerpt without learning more about its context. He owes Ms. Sherrod an apology.

But it wasn't Mr. Breitbart who fired Ms. Sherrod without giving her a chance to tell her side of the story. To liberals as well as conservatives, the administration appears rash, cynical, weak and disingenuous.

Can't say I can disagree with that last part.

And if you're looking for any more evidence for racist elements in the tea party movement, go back to the video above and listen carefully at about second 28. A man with dark sunglasses is asked "Why do you hate Mexicans?" and he answers:

Because they're filthy stinking animals.

Yea - no racism there.

Fake News At Breitbart (In A Piece ABOUT "Fake News")!

I saw this at Breitbart today:

MONTGOMERY, Alabama — Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), a hard leftist Democrat (sic) senator from New Jersey who spent Saturday campaigning with fellow radical Doug Jones, went on a fake news tirade on Saturday night, pushing inaccurate information about GOP nominee for U.S. Senate Roy Moore and calling for President Donald Trump to resign.

So "pushing inaccurate information" is their definition of "fake news." So be it.

The piece continues:

According to Vice News’s Alex Jaffe, who interviewed Booker at a Jones campaign event in the state of Alabama, Booker called for President Trump to follow Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) in resigning. Franken, this week, announced his forthcoming resignation from the Senate over allegations of sexual misconduct that he has admitted to and apologized for after photographic evidence emerged of him groping radio personality Leann Tweeden. Several other women have similarly accused Franken of sexual misconduct. Franken, in his speech announcing his plans to resign within “weeks,” bashed both Moore and Trump.

Allegations have been made about both Moore and Trump, but in both of their cases no actual evidence has emerged to substantiate the allegations. In Moore’s case, just this week, one accuser admitted she forged the yearbook inscription she and her activist attorney Gloria Allred originally claimed was written by Moore himself decades ago.

Ok. Let's stop right there. Did that accuser really admit that she "forged the yearbook inscription"?

No, that in itself is fake news.  From the BBC:

Beverly Nelson said she noted the date and location beneath what she maintains is his handwriting on her yearbook.

Her lawyer said the "red herring" does not undermine her client's claim Mr Moore attacked her when she was 16.

The candidate's team says Ms Nelson's admission amounts to a "forgery" that debunks her whole allegation.

In a news conference last month, Ms Nelson did not mention any additions.

On Friday morning, Ms Nelson told ABC News she had included some notes beneath an inscription that she says was written by Mr Moore.

Say what you want about the inscription but it's not a forgery.

And yet Breitbart said she admitted to exactly that.

Even Fox News has admitted that their earlier reporting (that Nelson had "forged" the inscription) is inaccurate. According to The Hill in a tweet (since deleted) announcing this story they said:

BREAKING NEWS: Roy Moore accuser admits she forged part of yearbook inscription attributed to Alabama senate candidate.

But Fox has since have issued a correction:

An update to this story reflects that Beverly Young Nelson admits writing what ABC News characterized as “notes” beneath what she says is Roy Moore’s signature, and that the only notes below the signature are the date and location. Furthermore, the headline on story now specifies that Nelson admits to writing part of the inscription herself, rather than forging part of it. [Emphasis added.]

Is Fox News wrong? If you say that the inscription is a forgery, you're saying exactly that. Fox News corrected their reporting while Breitbart has not. And yet they're using it as an example of a bit of "inaccurate information" (i.e. "fake news") being pushed by Senator Cory Booker.

Let's move on to the next sentence:

What’s more, Booker falsely claimed that Moore was “banned” from the shopping mall in his hometown of Gadsden, Alabama, decades ago, something the mall manager has proven was untrue and fake news.

Really? This is proven as untrue and fake news?  Let's take a look at Breitbart's own reporting on this:

Barnes Boyle, 86, told local Alabama news station WBRC on Thursday that they kept track of reports and that Moore was never banned from the mall.

“Sure, it’s part of the job, yeah. We did have written reports and things, so, but to my knowledge, he was not banned from the mall,” he said during a brief interview.

WBRC Fox 6 News anchor Janet Hall said the station checked on the report in the New Yorker that alleged Moore had been banned from the mall in the 1980s.

“We cannot confirm that,” she said.

Boyle told the station he is a Roy Moore supporter and plans to vote for him in December. [Emphasis added]

In case you didn't think that was important, just imagine how Breitbart would report it if the details were switched: that even with no paper trail to support it either way, the then manager of the mall specifically remembers a ban. And oh, by the way, he's planning on voting for Moore's opponent.

I'd think the reporting would be a tad different, don't you?

But because it aligns with Breitbart/Bannon's defense of Roy Moore (a guy who even his friends admit pursued teenage girls because of their "purity"), it gets an passing mention, otherwise unnoticed, and then nothing more.

Where's the fake news? Brietbart has the fake news.

Interesting.

The Tribune-Review Gets It Wrong. Again

And the "it" is Climate Science.

Yea, I know.  Go figure.

Here's what we find in Scaife's Tribune-Review:

Breitbart-London reports that a soon-to-be-released study by none other than the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change radically reduces the previously estimated economic costs of “global warming.” Previous studies placed the costs at between 5 percent and 20 percent of world GDP. The new study slashes that cost to between 0.2 percent and 2 percent of world GDP. As Breitbart tells it, “all it would take is an annual growth rate of 2.4 percent for the economic costs of climate change to be wiped out within a month.” So much for the “moral challenge of our time.” [Bolding in original.]

Ok.  So that leads to this piece in Breitbart-London.  Which says:

The economic costs of 'global warming' have been grossly overestimated, a leaked report - shortly to be published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - has admitted.

Previous reports - notably the hugely influential 2006 Stern Review - have put the costs to the global economy caused by 'climate change' at between 5 and 20 percent of world GDP.

But the latest estimates, to be published by Working Group II of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, say that a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures by the end of the century will cost the world economy between just 0.2 and 2 percent of its GDP.

However, Reuters reports:

Many governments want sterner warnings of probable economic damage from global warming in a draft U.N. report due on Monday, saying that existing estimates of trillions of dollars in losses are only part of the picture.

A final draft before talks this week among governments and scientists in Japan projected that warming would cut economic output by between 0.2 and 2.0 percent a year by damaging human health, disrupting water supplies and raising sea levels.

But many countries reckon that is an underestimate because it excludes risks of catastrophic changes, such as a runaway melt of Greenland's ice, collapse of coral reefs or a drying of the Amazon rainforest that could cause massive economic losses. [Emphasis added.]

And so:

Trying to address the objections, an updated draft text from the meeting on Friday, obtained by Reuters, adds that impact estimates "do not yet account for catastrophic changes, tipping points, and many other details."

But there's a bit more to the story.  Reuters has this:

The projected 0.2 to 2.0 percent range for economic losses is based on warming of 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, more than a 2.0C (3.6F) ceiling set by almost 200 governments for limiting heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising seas.

The range was drawn from a sub-chapter co-led by Richard Tol, an economist at the University of Sussex in England who is often at odds with scientific colleagues for saying that moderate global warming may have economic benefits.

He said this week he had pulled out from the 70-strong team writing the draft summary, saying he viewed parts as alarmist.

Ah, well then.  An outlier economist who's at odds with mainstream climate science.  Climate Science Watch has more:

With respect to global GDP, the WG2 report offers cost estimates only up to 2.5ºC of warming. These impacts are negative, estimated to cost up to 2% of global income, which is acknowledged to be only a partial estimate. In fact, the costs of 2.5ºC of warming laid out in WG2 are something of a best-case scenario (or at least a reasonably good scenario), showing what will happen IF we take strong action to reduce carbon emissions. If we do not take action on climate mitigation, we could be experiencing around 4ºC of warming by 2100 according to the business as usual (RCP 8.5) scenario (WGI Annex II Table 7.5). That’s uncharted territory and possible even within the lifetimes of some who are alive today.

And The Stern Review so dutifully criticized by Breitbart London said, in 2006, of its GDP warnings:

Using the results from formal economic models, the Review estimates that if we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year, now and forever. If a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account, the estimates of damage could rise to 20% of GDP or more.

So the .02-2% of GDP is if the world takes "strong action" while the 5-20% of GDP is if the world does nothing.  And yet Breitbart says that the former invalidates the latter.  I'd say it invalidates Breitbart London.

Now go back and read what the Trib wrote.  And while you're reading notice all the important stuff they've left out.  Once you've done that, you can decide for yourselves how valuable it is.

Tracking Teh Crazie - WND On That Breitbart-Obama Video

Read teh crazie here:

Video footage of President Obama during his college years at Harvard University was intentionally suppressed by news media and academia during the 2008 presidential campaign in order to hide Obama’s connections with radical leftists, according to the editors of Breitbart.com, the website of late conservative activist Andrew Breitbart.

Tapes of Obama at Harvard in 1991 have now been posted online and aired on the Fox News Channel, and they show then–student Obama speaking warmly on behalf of a leftist professor, Derrick Bell.

“Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell,” Obama says during his speech before hugging him.

The embrace between the pair had been edited out of a video that was released earlier in the day by Buzzfeed. (Video of the embrace can be seen here.)

“This is just the beginning. And this video is a smoking gun showing that Barack Obama not only associated with radicals, he was their advocate,” said Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro.

Referring to Professor Bell, Shapiro explained, “This is a close associate of [controversial Obama Rev.] Jeremiah Wright, a man who was quoted by Jeremiah Wright regularly. This is a man who posited that the civil rights movement was too moderate because it accepted the status quo, and believed that the entire legal and constitutional system had to be transformed in radical fashion. This is a man so extreme that, as we’ve reported, he wrote a story in 1993 in which he posited that white Americans would sell black Americans into slavery to aliens to relieve the national debt, and that Jews would go along with it.”

Selling black Americans to aliens to relieve the national debt?? What the heck is that all about?  Once you see the details and how WND/Breitbart is manipulating them, you'll see how empty this story is.

Anatomy of (Yet Another) Right Wing Smear

Mediamatters has the story:

Based on what appears to be selectively edited footage, Andrew Breitbart falsely suggested that Shirley Sherrod said that, in her former position with the USDA, she had discriminated against a white farmer. In fact, Sherrod's statements in the video corroborate her statement that the story she was discussing is 24 years old.

Turns out that the video was edited. Edited to the point where it said almost exactly the opposite of what Breitbart said it said. Here's Breitbart (by way of mediamatters):

We are in possession of a video from in which Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, speaks at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia. In her meandering speech to what appears to be an all-black audience, this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions.

In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn't do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from "one of his own kind". She refers him to a white lawyer.

Sherrod's racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups' racial tolerance.

The full video vindicates her story that she was taken out of context. She was discussing incident that occurred 24 years ago and how that incident made her realize that:

You know, and they could be black, and they could be white, they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people -- those who don't have access the way others have.

That last part was in the full video, but not in the edited video posted by Breitbart.

Of course, the Obama Administration demanded her resignation (and got it).
Given that this is a complete smear, will she get her job back?

And why should anyone trust Andrew Breitbart from now on? Remember, he's the guy who brought us the ACORN/pimp tape (so he's no stranger to edited smears).

Even On Election Day, My Work Is Never Done.

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Braintrust:

The folks at Seattle's KTVA-TV insist the incident was not as nefarious as some made it out to be. But it certainly wasn't very complimentary and it might very well be representative of the unfair treatment Republicans can expect if they surge to victory in today's elections.

Here's what happened: A telephone call to discuss Alaska GOP U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller's upcoming appearance on a newscast never disconnected when it was "over." Station staffers then can, among other things, be heard laughing at the possibility of reporting on the appearance of sex offenders at a Miller rally.

The Miller campaign claims the station was plotting to fabricate stories. The station denies that interpretation as "out of context." Nevertheless, it was enough to prompt former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to label those involved at the CBS affiliate as "corrupt bastards."

See, this is how the great smear works. The braintrust is counting on you not checking the story, not checking the facts (or "facts") for yourselves. They're hoping you'll trust them that they're telling the whole truth.

Of course they're not.

The story popped up at Andrew Breitbart's website first. That should be the first clue that something's amiss. Breitbart, let's all take a minute to remember, lied about Shirley Sherrod. He championed another liar, James O'Keefe. In a rational journalistic world, that would completely undermine any claim of credibility Breitbart has, has ever had or ever will have.

And this is where this "corrupt bastard" story began.

But let's leap like a frog over that part and look at some examples of skepticism regarding the recording.

Ben Smith at Politico:

The transcript does not, in fact, make it terribly clear what they're talking about. KTVA General Manager Jerry Bever, in a statement to my colleague Byron Tau, confirms the authenticity of the recording left (in error) on the voice mail of a Miller aide but says that Miller's claims are wrong abut the details and "absurd" on their face.

If Politico is not good enough a source for skepticism, how about Brit Hume of Fox News? About a 1:20 in, he says that while "it doesn't sound very good" he added that it was still "not utterly conclusive."

Brit Hume said that. NOT UTTERLY CONCLUSIVE.

But let's even assume the "not utterly conclusive" smear that Breitbart and Palin are doing - that this tape is evidence of the TV station making stuff up. What, then, do we make of this?


About 2:15 in, Fox News reporter Dan Miller says that his staff could find no bias or "hit pieces" against Joe Miller.

So, the charge itself floats up from a less-than-credible source. It's not clear from the tape or the transcript what they're talking about. Brit Hume himself says it's not utterly conclusive and then no bias can be found in the station's reporting on Miller himself.

Tell me again who the corrupt bastards are?

Breitbart admits lying; being insufferable asshole

In yet another twist in the Breitbart/Sherrod story, Andrew Breitbart admitted on his BigGovernment blog yesterday to lying and being an "insufferable asshole."

He further confessed to believing that "the ends justify the means" and to engaging in "open political warfare."

NOTE: No Breitbart-style journalistic ethics and standards were harmed in the making of this post.
.

Some Actual Weather Scientists Debunk Breitbart's Weather Truthiness

Hey remember this?

It's only from a few days ago but it was the story on how some climate truthiness from Breitbart made it all the way to the United States House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

As climate science, it was completely wrong and frighteningly indicative of what we can expect from President small-hands pussy grabber (and his enablers in the GOP) for the next four years.

Luckily, Kait Parker of Weather.com spoke up:


A couple of takeaways:

• Science doesn't care about your opinion about the fact that the planet is warming
• Breitbart claimed that land temps plummeted when actually land and ocean temps have gone up
• Breitbart cherry picked its data to support its truthiness

Climate science is true.  Rightwing truthiness that it's either ending or non-existent is false.

Or as Neil deGrasse Tyson said:

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

Let's make the facts louder than the opinions.

You'd Think They'd Learn

From the Op-Ed page of today's Tribune-Review:

Congress must ensure that successor organizations don't circumvent its ban on federal funding of the defunct national ACORN and its affiliates.

That defunding happened after video of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now workers helpfully advising a purported pimp and prostitute made continuance of Obama Democrats' longtime ACORN love affair politically untenable. Now, Congress must ensure that old flame isn't rekindled.

They're basing this on the O'Keefe pimp tapes??
For those of you who don't know (and there maybe one or two) O'Keefe lied his way through the tapes:


They know the pimp story's crap, right? O'Keefe's pimp costume was no where to be found when he was taping in the ACORN offices. He never presented himself as a pimp. It was plainly dishonest. They know O'Keefe's a creep, right? The Pimp hoax was posted on Breitbart's website - they know Breitbart's a liar, don't they? Then why even touch the story? The clue (inadvertant projection as it is) can be found in the op-ed's last few lines:

ACORN's Washington sweethearts must think taxpayers -- and lawmakers -- have awfully short memories. Hopefully, enough remember ACORN scandals to deny federal funding to its renamed affiliates.

They're hoping YOU have a short memory and have forgotten that O'Keefe and Breitbart have no credibility whatsoever.

But then again, this is the Tribune-Review we're talking here.

Post-Truth, Truthiness, And The House Science Committee

From The Washington Post, we read:

Oxford Dictionaries has selected “post-truth” as 2016's international word of the year, after the contentious “Brexit” referendum and an equally divisive U.S. presidential election caused usage of the adjective to skyrocket, according to the Oxford University Press.

The dictionary defines “post-truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

A little while later they write:

For what it's worth, “post-truth” is not to be confused with “truthiness,” a subtly different term popularized by Stephen Colbert more than a decade ago that described the phenomenon of “believing something that feels true, even if it isn't supported by fact.”

And then finally:

And if anything, the rise of truthiness cleared the path for “post-truth,” as in: “In a post-truth world, truthiness is all that matters.”

Which brings us to the United States House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and this tweet yesterday:

.@BreitbartNews: Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists https://t.co/uLUPW4o93V

— Sci,Space,&Tech Cmte (@HouseScience) December 1, 2016

And as HuffingtonPost points out:

The tweet linked to an article posted on hyper-conservative Breitbart News, which points to the oft-used and completely incorrect assumption that because it’s getting cold out (i.e. winter) the climate can’t be changing.

Breitbart is where Steve Bannon, President-elect Pussy Grabber's chief strategist, came from.

Let's look a little deeper at that Brietbart truthiness.

From its first paragraph, you should know something goofy is going on:

Global land temperatures have plummeted by one degree Celsius since the middle of this year – the biggest and steepest fall on record.

Note the time frame (6 months "since the middle of this year") and the geographic frame ("Global Land Temperatures") - each is a limit on the data.

But first let's look at the source of Breitbart's piece - it's a piece in the Daily Mail about how the most recent el Nino could be the cause of the recent higher global temperatures.  What's left out, of course, any acknowledgement that the climate still is getting warmer despite the localized ups/downs of el Nino/el Nina.

Something that's shown in this tweet by an actual climate scientist:

A classic example of false news. https://t.co/ECOkzeBW9j

The truth? pic.twitter.com/zEZGzOF7vi

— Katharine Hayhoe (@KHayhoe) December 1, 2016

I'm sure that within those rising red rectangles, there were el Nino peaks and valleys.

Still doesn't change the fact that this decade is warmer than the last, which was warmer than the one before that and so on.

In the end, I am not sure if this is Post-truth or just "truthiness" but what the Republican-led House Committee on Science tweeted is still something untrue masquerading as a fact.

Fair is foul and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.  (Let's hope we fare better than Macbeth.)

Science in Trumpistan - the new normal.  I will resist the new normal.

Clinton's Alt.Right Speech (And Alt.Right's Response)

You can watch the video:


Or you can read a transcript over at Vox.

Some highlights are in order.  Clinton said about the billionaire (?) bigot:

• A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet, should never run our government or command our military.
• We all remember when Trump said a distinguished federal judge born in Indiana couldn’t be trusted to do his job because, quote, "He’s a Mexican."
• He’d abolish the bedrock constitutional principle that says if you’re born in the United States, you’re an American citizen. He says that children born in America to undocumented parents are, quote, "anchor babies" and should be deported.

And so on.

Of course our friends on the alt.right responded - bringing on teh stoopid.

Breitbart:

In 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fondly eulogized Sen. Robert Byrd, a former member and recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan. Clinton called Byrd “my friend and mentor” in a video message to commemorate his passing.

But what our misguided friends on the alt.right omit is Byrd's ultimate rejection of the KKK he belonged to.

From Snopes:

It's also true that Robert Byrd was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and helped establish the hate group's chapter in Sophia, West Virginia. However, in 1952 Byrd avowed that "After about a year, I became disinterested [in the KKK], quit paying my dues, and dropped my membership in the organization," and throughout his long political career (he served for 57 years in the United States Congress) he repeatedly apologized for his involvement with the KKK

. That link leads to the same Washington Post piece that Breitbart links to. It ends with this from Robert Byrd (who, BTW, died six years ago):

I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times ... and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened.

And when he passed, the NAACP issued a statement that contained this:

The NAACP is saddened by the passing of United States Senator Robert Byrd. Byrd, the longest serving member of congress was first elected to the U.S. House from in 1952 and was elected Senator in 1958. Byrd passed away this morning at the age of 92.

"Senator Byrd reflects the transformative power of this nation," stated NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous. "Senator Byrd went from being an active member of the KKK to a being a stalwart supporter of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and many other pieces of seminal legislation that advanced the civil rights and liberties of our country."

Now go back and reread Breitbart or Infowars or whomever else tried to bring up the "Hillary's mentor was a KKK recruiter" meme to see how stoopid it really is.

Stephen Colbert On Pizzagate

A few takeaways:

• On Mike Flynn, Trump's choice for national security advisor, who was found to have tweeted on #pizzagate - a tweet that began with a "U decide", Colbert says: "OK, then I decide that a guy who spreads this bullshit shouldn’t be in charge of national security."
• And then, after demolishing any possible explanation of #pizzagate other than it's complete conspiracy theory bullshit, he ends with, "Look around the country. Wouldn’t you agree we need some more adults? So WikiLeaks, Alex Jones, and the subreddit sub-geniuses—and I mean this in the nicest way possible: grow the fuck up."

FYI - Right now, Alex Jones has this on his website:

This is a red level emergency.

Infowars, Breitbart, the Drudge Report and other independent sources are destroying the mainstream media narrative like never before, and the establishment is getting desperate.

In an effort to try and censor the liberty movement and free speech, the mainstream media is now attempting to label legitimate news sources like Infowars as "fake news" to push towards a government-led shut down of Infowars.com.

The Washington Post has even gone as far as to label sites like Infowars as "Russian propaganda fake news" web sites, exemplifying the last attempt of a dying media conglomerate to force out any and all dissenting voices.

Even more concerning, the United States House of Representatives quietly passed legislation targeting 'Russian propaganda' websites.

I wonder if Jones means H.R. 5181, the "Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016" - but that can't possibly be the case, because Jones said that The House "quietly passed" the legislation and H.R. 5181 was only introduced in the house. 

Last May.

But what the heck, we live in a post-fact world now, right?

But even if it isn't that legislation, look at what Alex Jones is saying: that the MAJORITY REPUBLICAN, TEA-PARTY CONTROLLED House of Representatives is quietly looking to shut down Infowars, Breitbart and the Drudge Report.

And you believe that (or any of the other conspiracy theories floating around right wing media), you need to GROW THE FUCK UP.

Delusional, II

Andrew Breitbart (of breitbart.com and James O'Keefe false ACORN 'pimp' story fame) has declared that he will take "down the institutional left" in the "next three weeks."

(He's also supremely fun to bait on Twitter and will retweet any an all criticism of himself posted there.)
.

Tracking Teh Crazie - The Obama-Paris-July 4 Lie Edition

A very interesting story bubbled up on my facebook a day or so ago.  Seems that our President was abandoning Amur-ika on the 4th of July and going to Paris for a fundraiser.

He was abandoning Amur-ika on the 4th of July and going to Parisian fundraiser.

Of course the story's a lie.

Jonathan Chait traces the lie through the right-wing noise machine:

Here's a fun game of conservative media telephone. The Hollywood Reporter reported last week that Americans living in Europe will have an Independence Day fund-raiser for the Obama campaign. Ben Shapiro at Breitbart.com turned that into an item implying, without saying, that Obama himself would be in Europe on the Fourth of July

Here's what Shapiro wrote:

Apparently tiring of US soil as a source of campaign dollars, the Obama campaign is headed overseas -- with its celebrity friends in tow. The European Obama campaign starts next week in Paris on July 4 with a reception organized by various fundraising heavy-hitters. Independence Day fundraisers in Paris – now that’s a flag-waving campaign.

And then:

That also may be the only place Obama can still find cheering throngs.

Which Andrew McCarty over at National Review Online misread the Shapiro's "reporting" into a rhetorical question linking back to Breitbart:

How will Obama be spending American Independence Day this week?

The answer, of course, he was going to be in Paris for a 4th of July fundraiser!

Wrong, as I said.  Shapiro posted his original ambiguity on June 29.  ALSO posted on June 29 was this from the AP:

The Obamas plan to celebrate Independence Day with military families at the White House with a barbeque, concert and view of the fireworks from the South Lawn.

So a simple Google search would have disinfected the lie before it happened.  But, remember, this is Karl Rove and co.  Of course the truth didn't stop them from spreading a lie.

Churchill was right when he said that "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." 


Especially with the right wing noise machine.

Jack Kelly Sunday

With this week's column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, columnist Jack Kelly tries, yet again, to dance the Benghazi dance.

Didn't he realize that he was in trouble with his beginning sentence?

Here it is:

We used to expect more of our presidents than that they not have been indicted for felonies.

Yea like waterboarding, eh Jack?

Remember when Jack Kelly defended the use of waterboarding?  That was only 3 or so years ago.   Here's what Jack wrote wa-a-a-ay back then:

Torture, according to Merriam-Webster, is "the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing or wounding) to punish, coerce or afford sadistic pleasure." Federal law defines torture as "severe mental or physical pain," and mental pain as "prolonged mental harm." Because waterboarding inflicts neither physical pain nor prolonged mental harm, it isn't torture, said the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration.

Interesting he went to the dictionary first, rather than international law - but whatever.  Also interesting that he omitted the first definitions he found in his Merriam-Webster.  They are:

1. a: anguish of body or mind
   b: something that causes agony or pain

Anyone want to guess how much agony and/or waterboarding causes?  If there's any, then Jack lied to all of us 3 years ago about waterboarding.

Then there's International Law (a law signed by President Reagan and ratified by the US Senate) that states:

For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

And yet, Jack Kelly said waterboarding isn't torture.

Why should we trust him on anything?

But let's move on to this current perspiring pile of fetid feculence.

After pointing out the "rejected pleas" for more security at Benghazi, Jack amplifies his argument with this:

“This was a suicide mission,” a security officer assigned to the consulate told a superior in Washington. “There was a very good chance that everybody here was going to die.”

“Everybody back here in D.C. knows that people are going to die in Benghazi,” responded a diplomatic security desk officer. “Nobody cares, and nobody is going to care until somebody does die.”

Which is curious because while he probably got this quotation from Breitbart (or some such right wing "news" source), if you took a look at the Breitbart piece, the link is to the Democratic Benghazi report (the one issued a few days before the Republican report).

The source of quote has been named "Agent B" and did you know Agent B wasn't posted at Benghazi at the time of the attack?  Did you know he was there about 10 months earlier concerning the security situation there about a year before the Benghazi attacks?

If that's even something Jack Kelly knew, it was something he decided to tell you.  Think about the two possibilities.  Either he didn't know the context of the quotation he was using (bad, Jack!) or he did and he chose not to tell us (very bad, Jack!).

Not only that, but the Democratic report follows up on those concerns:

The Select Committee did not interview the DS Desk Officer referred to by Agent B, but that official was interviewed by another congressional committee in August 2013. Although he never described that specific conversation in his interview, the DS Desk Officer confirmed that Deputy Assistant Secretary Lamb was responsible for the decision to provide only three DS agents.

Both Agent A and Agent B left Benghazi in 2011 before their security requests were fulfilled. Following the approval of the December 2011 memo extending the Department’s presence in Benghazi, the Department funded and implemented a number of these physical security requests.[Emphasis added.]

Huh. Jack didn't tell you that either, did he?

Then there's this from Jack:

The Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team in Rota, Spain, probably could have gotten there before former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed. But its departure was delayed while officials, including Ms. Clinton, bickered over whether the Marines should wear their uniforms. The Marines changed clothes four times.

Look carefully at that passage.  Nothing about Sean Smith or Ambassador Stevens, right?  And were there other delays than the Marines changing clothes?

Let's to to the Republican report on just this subject.

Page 150:

One of the FAST platoons ordered to deploy by the Secretary arrived in Tripoli at 8:56 p.m. local time [2:56 p.m. in Washington D.C.] the evening of September 12, nearly 24 hours after the attacks began. 456 As military witnesses have posited on many occasions, the mission of a FAST Platoon is not hostage rescue but to “put that layer of steel around a critical infrastructure of the United States to say to our enemy, ‘ Don’t mess [with us].'"

Wait, the FAST platoon is not a hostage rescue team?  But didn't Jack Kelly, former "National Security" correspondent at the P-G just say that the team "probably could have gotten there" before Woods and Doherty were killed?  What for, if not as a rescue team?

But let's go deeper into the timeline, shall we?  Let's see if what Jack so casually wrote was even possible.  The attack begins shortly before 10pm (Libya time) on September 11, 2012.

Then:

10:30 p.m.: Stevens and State Department information management officer Sean Smith have taken refuge in the main building in the compound, behind a fortified door with metal bars that keeps the attackers from breaking in. But the militants set fire to the building. Within minutes, Stevens and Smith are overwhelmed by smoke.

Then:

1 a.m.: A U.S. rescue team arrives in Benghazi from Tripoli, Libya’s capital. Nearly 30 Americans are rescued from the compound. Shortly thereafter, Stevens is taken to Benghazi Medical Center and pronounced dead on arrival, according to a hospital source.

And then:

4 a.m.: Gunmen launch an assault using mortars against the CIA annex. Glen Doherty and Tyrone S. Woods, both former Navy SEALs, are killed.

And the Senate Select Committee report of 2014 states (page 31):

Sometime between midnight and 2:00a.m. Benghazi time, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta verbally ordered two Marine Fleet Antiterrorism Security Teams (or "FAST platoons") to deploy from their base in Rota, Spain, to Libya.

Between 2 and 4 hours before the mortar attack that eventually kills Woods and Doherty at the CIA annex.

One team was to go to Benghazi, the second to Tripoli.  However it would take 96 hours for the Tripoli team to arrive.

However:

Because all Americans were evacuated from Benghazi before the first FAST platoon could arrive, it was diverted to protect the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli and arrived at 8:56p.m. Tripoli time, 011 September 12, 2012.

You'll note that the Post timeline says that at 1am a rescue team from Tripoli was able to secure 30 at the compound.  This would be within an hour (in either direction) of Secretary Panetta ordering the FAST platoon to deploy.

Now take a look at this from the Marine Corps Times:

The FAST Marines, who were based out of Rota, Spain, were ready to leave for Libya at 5:45 a.m. local time the morning after the attack, the team's platoon commander told the committee. The Marines waited six hours for Air Force C-130s to arrive in Spain, but then they were delayed on the ground. Rota is about 2,000 miles from Benghazi.

That's an hour and 45 minutes after the mortar attack that kills Woods and Doherty.  They were ready to go but they were still 2000 miles away.  And then they had to wait six hours for the C-130s to arrive.  If my arithmetic is correct the earliest they could have departed Rota was almost 8 hours after the mortar attack began.  And if a C-130 cruises about 300 mph, it would still have to take more than 6 hours to get to Libya.

Does retired Marine Jack Kelly really believe that they "could have gotten there" in time to save Woods and Doherty were it not for a 3 hour delay regarding uniforms?  Does he think that the C-130 is some sort of time machine?

Do I really need to beat him down any more over this ridiculous column?  I'm feeling kinda guilty at this point so I'll just stop except to ask this question yet again:

Doesn't anyone at the Post-Gazette (where this poop is published) fact-check Jack Kelly ?

If they are, they're doing a crappy job of it.

Jack, see ya next week maybe?

More On James O'Keefe (Conservative "Investigative Reporter")

Some highlights of Conservative Journalism:

• Christopher Ruddy: Main pusher of the universally debunked "murder" of Vince Foster
• James Guckert (aka Jeff Gannon): Male escort given extraordinary access to the Bush White House in order to lob softball questions during press briefings
• Andrew Breitbart: Serial video faker
• James O'Keefe: Employed by Breitbart, fake pimp, another video faker...

And now total and complete creep (as if he was ever anything otherwise).

The story from CNN:

A conservative activist known for making undercover videos plotted to embarrass a CNN correspondent by recording a meeting on hidden cameras aboard a floating "palace of pleasure" and making sexually suggestive comments, e-mails and a planning document show.

James O'Keefe, best known for hitting the community organizing group ACORN with an undercover video sting, hoped to get CNN Investigative Correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat filled with sexually explicit props and then record the session, those documents show.

By the way, those ACORN videos?

The videos led to some of the employees being fired and contributed to the disbanding of ACORN, which advocated for low- and middle-income and worked to register voters.

But prosecutors in New York and California eventually found no evidence of wrongdoing by the group, and the California probe found the videos had been heavily and selectively edited.

For the record.

The plan revolved around getting CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau into a boat (a "pleasure palace"). In the boat would be video equipment (hidden, of course, so as to be able to video the upcoming tryst) and some other props:

1. condom jar
2. dildos
3. lube
4. porn
5. candles
6. viagra
7. fuzzy handcuffs
8. blindfold

Which he was gonna use to seduce Ms Boudreau and video it. Misogynist, creepy, disgusting.

This is the current state of Conservative Investigative Reporting, ladies and gentlemen.

By the way Mediamatters reports that there's legislation in the house (from Pete Olson of Texas) "honoring" O'Keefe for his (now fraudulent) work on ACORN.

According to Mediamatters, there are 31 cosponsors on this. Included is Pennsylvania's very own Joseph Pitts (PA-16).

Trump! Now with more Trump!

“I am who I am. It’s me. I don’t want to change. Everyone talks about, ‘Oh, well you’re going to pivot.’ I don’t want to pivot.”  

So said Donald Trump on Tuesday.

And if there are any members of the GOP still desperately holding out for the long promised pivot, those hopes came crashing down the very next day when Trump doubled down by choosing Steve Bannon, executive chairman of the radical right fringe Breitbart.com "news" site, as his new campaign chief -- a man called "the most dangerous political operative in America" by Bloomberg Businessweek.

How radical right fringe is Breitbart.com? Media Matters gives some of their worst headlines in an article here which include:

Sorry, GOP. Trump is who he is.

Jack Kelly Sunday

In this week's column, P-G columnist Jack Kelly calls President Obama a liar, quotes breitbart.com as reliable information and said that CNN's Candy Crowley "intervened to rescue" Obama from another debate loss and "handed" him "the win."

And no, I am not kidding.  But if you read this blog and Jack's column, you'd already know that.

The bulk of the column is Jack's rightwing defense/ahistorical rewrite of the Administration's treatment of the Benghazi attacks.

Here's Jack:

State Department officials knew right away that this was a terrorist attack because they were watching it in "near real time" on a live feed from security cameras, they told journalists Oct. 9. So, Mr. Romney asked the president, why for more than a week afterwards did he and other senior administration officials claim that it appeared to be a "spontaneous" protest in response to a YouTube video?

"The day after the attack, governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened," Mr. Obama responded. "That this was an act of terror, and I also said that we're going to hunt down those who committed this crime."

Mr. Romney was incredulous. He knew Mr. Obama was still blaming the video when he spoke to the United Nations nearly two weeks later. "I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror," he said.

Referring to the Rose Garden statement, Ms. Crowley interjected, "He did in fact, sir ... call it an act of terror ..."

The hand off and the win, in Jack's eyes.  And a few paragraphs later:

What she did was tackle Mr. Romney as he was about to score a touchdown. The president, in my view, was lying. He did not specifically call the attack on the consulate in Benghazi an act of terror during that Rose Garden press conference, as Ms. Crowley later acknowledged. What he said was, "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation ..."

As the President said, let's go to the transcripts.  From Whitehouse.gov.  In remarks regarding the attacks in Benghazi, he framed things this way:

Of course, yesterday was already a painful day for our nation as we marked the solemn memory of the 9/11 attacks. We mourned with the families who were lost on that day. I visited the graves of troops who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hallowed grounds of Arlington Cemetery, and had the opportunity to say thank you and visit some of our wounded warriors at Walter Reed. And then last night, we learned the news of this attack in Benghazi.

See that?  He grouped all those attacks together.  And then he said:

No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done. [Emphasis added.]

He even mentions the four who died in Benghazi in the very next sentence.

If there was any doubt, he reiterated the very next day in Las Vegas. In a speech where he begins by announcing the deaths in Benghazi, he said:

As for the ones we lost last night: I want to assure you, we will bring their killers to justice.  And we want to send a message all around the world -- anybody who would do us harm: No act of terror will dim the light of the values that we proudly shine on the rest of the world, and no act of violence will shake the resolve of the United States of America. [Emphasis added.]

And yet Jack Kelly said the president didn't call the attacks in Benghazi an act of terror.

Jack's the one who's lying.  Either that or he didn't bother doing the necessary research for the column.  Which is it?  Incompetence or dishonesty?  We've asked this before...

But then there's this:

He did not specifically call the attack on the consulate in Benghazi an act of terror during that Rose Garden press conference, as Ms. Crowley later acknowledged. [Emphasis added.]

The grammar is a bit confused here.  What, exactly, did Crowley acknowledge?  Looks to me like he was saying that Crowley backtracked her initial fact check.  Did she?

Breitbart certainly thinks so.

But Crowley says no.

Another mistake/bit of dishonesty on Jack's part, I guess.

More On Cyber Ninja's "Audit"

In case you didn't know it, here's the news: 

After months of delays and blistering criticism, a review of the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county, ordered up and financed by Republicans, has failed to show that former President Donald J. Trump was cheated of victory.

Instead, the report from the company Cyber Ninjas said it found just the opposite: It tallied 99 additional votes for President Biden and 261 fewer votes for Mr. Trump in Maricopa County, the fast-growing region that includes Phoenix.

“Truth is truth and numbers are numbers,” Karen Fann, the Republican Senate president who commissioned the vote review, said as the findings were presented to the State Senate on Friday.

This is from the Audit's Executive Summary. This is the reality: 

What has been found is both encouraging and revealing. On the positive side there were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official election canvass results for Maricopa County. This is an important finding because the paper ballots are the best evidence of voter intent and there is no reliable evidence that the paper ballots were altered to any material degree.

Of course, reality will not sway the Trump-mob:

After all the scurrying, searching, sifting, speculating, hand-counting and bamboo-hunting had ended, Republicans’ post-mortem review of election results in Arizona’s largest county wound up only adding to President Biden’s margin of victory there.

But for those who have tried to undermine confidence in American elections and restrict voting, the actual findings of the Maricopa County review that were released on Friday did not appear to matter in the slightest. Former President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists redoubled their efforts to mount a full-scale relitigation of the 2020 election.

Any fleeting thought that the failure of the Arizona exercise to unearth some new trove of Trump votes or a smoking gun of election fraud might derail the so-called Stop the Steal movement dissipated abruptly. As draft copies of the report began to circulate late Thursday, Trump allies ignored the new tally, instead zeroing in on the report’s specious claims of malfeasance, inconsistencies and errors by election officials.

So what were some of those specious claims? 

The AP:

[Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas], claiming election results were deleted from Maricopa County’s election management system: “So some individual went into an application, and they chose specifically to run something that would clear all records in the system that was used to generate the official results, the day before an audit started.”

THE FACTS: No, the data never disappeared; it was just moved. Maricopa County officials made copies of the data and archived it before removing it from the election management system.

“We have backups for all Nov. data & those archives were never subpoenaed,” the county said in a statement on Twitter. County officials said data cannot be stored indefinitely on the election management system. “Cyber Ninjas don’t understand the business of elections,” the county said. “We can’t keep everything on the EMS server because it has storage limits.”

And:

LOGAN: “23,344 people voted when they should no longer have access, or would not normally have access” to voting in Maricopa County because they have moved.

THE FACTS: No, that’s not what happened. Logan reviewed the names of voters against a commercial database of addresses, not a database of voters. He found that 23,344 reported moving before ballots went out in October. While the review suggests something improper, election officials note that voters such as college students, those who own vacation homes and military members, can move to temporary locations while still legally voting at the address where they are registered.

“A competent reviewer of an election would not make a claim like that,” said Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky.

And the Maricopa County had some more info on this:

CLAIM: 23,344 mail-in ballots voted from a prior address.

BOTTOM LINE: Cyber Ninjas still don’t understand this is legal under federal election law. To label it a “critical” concern is either intentionally misleading or staggeringly ignorant. AZ senators should know this too.

— Maricopa County (@maricopacounty) September 24, 2021

And the report actually addresses this:

You're going to see a lot of people reference the number 23,344 in the coming hours. That's the number of people Cyber Ninjas said voted from a previous Maricopa County address in the 2020 election.

But the report itself notes that number doesn't imply 23,344 fraudulent votes.🧵 pic.twitter.com/o7LTxkbqwi

— Joe Uchill (@JoeUchill) September 24, 2021

Then there's this from AZ Central:

Did Maricopa County count 17,000 “duplicate” ballots?

Analysis by Shiva Ayyadurai, or "Dr. Shiva" as he is known to far-right adherents, found what he called 17,322 “duplicate” ballot envelope images in the county’s files. These were different images of the same envelopes, with the same voter ID.

Just because there are multiple images of the same envelopes does not mean that the county counted the ballot inside more than once.

Sometimes there is more than one image of the same ballot envelope because, if there are issues with the original signature, the county takes an image of the same envelope multiple times as workers attempt to get a valid signature from the voter.

For example, if there is a blank signature, the county takes an image of the envelope before contacting the voter to attempt to get a signature. If the voter then signs the envelope, the county takes another photo.

Because the Senate’s subpoena asked for all envelope images, the county provided the Senate with all of the images, even those that did not have final signatures.

The county says it only counts the ballot inside once there is a valid signature.

And so on.

Feel free to peruse Maricopa County's twitter feed or their debunking website on this issue.

Real world example from Breitbart.

After rather quietly pointing out the truth:

At the presidential ballot level, the report found very little difference between “the results of the hand-recount of the Presidential Race of the Maricopa County Forensic Audit” and the Official Maricopa County Canvass.”

The Trump-patriots at Breitbart spend an inordinate amount of time talking about what they call in the headline "49,000 questionable votes."

The headline, of course, does not mention the reality that the audit showed Biden winning.

Then they break down those 49k.

• 23,344 mail-in ballots were counted from individuals who no longer lived at the address to which the mail-in ballot was sent. The audit called these “mail-in ballots voted from prior address” in the voter history phase. (critical impact)

We've dealt with this above.

• 9,041 more ballots returned by voters than received in the voter history phase. (high impact)

Maricopa tweeted a response to this:

CLAIM: 9,041 more ballots returned by voters than received

BOTTOM LINE: This suggests a lack of understanding about how EV 33 files work. It’s not unusual for more ballots to be returned by voters than received.

— Maricopa County (@maricopacounty) September 24, 2021

• 5,295 voters that potentially voted in multiple counties in the certified results phase.  (high impact)

Mariacopa tweeted on the "multiple counties" issue:

EXPLANATION: 10,000+ votes in multiple counties is unlikely.

More likely: different people, same name. Example: if you search for Maria Garcia born in 1980, you’ll get 7 active voters in Maricopa County and 12 statewide. And that’s just one name.

— Maricopa County (@maricopacounty) September 24, 2021

ABC15 in Arizona goes further:

Public voter files in Arizona only contain the name, address, and year the person was born. This makes for a very weak match to other databases that would, at the very least, require a full date of birth. In a state with over 4.3 million active voters, there is a very real risk of false positives, two people with the same name and birth year. The audit report confirms that around 86,000 voters could not be matched to Melissa Data.

But even if the match is completely reliable… there are still issues.

There are two findings in the report marked “critical”; 23,344 people that the audit says voted from prior addresses and 10,342 potential voters that voted in multiple counties.

ABC15 provided a random sampling of the underlying data that the audit report used to make these claims.

Both reached the same conclusions. Most of the samples were false positives, meaning the person had the same name and birth year, but had a different driver's license and social security number on file.

They said there was no evidence of people voting in multiple counties.

• 3,432 more ballots cast than the list of people who show as having cast a vote. The audit called this group of ballots “official results does not match who voted,” in the certified results phase. (medium impact)

 For this we go to Doug Logan, head of Cyber Ninjas himself:

Logan said one of the audit’s findings, that 3,432 more ballots were cast than were shown in a file of voters provided by the county, was resolved when election officials explained on Thursday that those voters didn’t show up in the files because their addresses are protected. The addresses of certain voters, such as law enforcement members, judges and domestic violence victims, are kept confidential under state law.

Do I need to keep going?

Biden won. Biden won Maricopa County. The Cyber Ninjas "audit" was a waste of time and money.