Resist Misinformation This Election Season!

MaeZe

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And now Trump starts a new run on hydroxychloroquine by announcing he's been taking it daily for weeks (multiple news sources).

That man needs to have a cardiac side effect or come down with COVID 19 to save us all.


On another front, beware of multiple claims smokers are getting fewer cases of COVID 19. People are even coming up with rationalizations why it could prevent the infection but somehow people do worse once infected. And like the hydroxychloroquine, social media 'science' is directing research dollars to disprove what has never been established in the first place. Nicotine studies have begun.

So here's the problem, I've hunted down the claims to their sources and found basic faults in the claims.

Most of the studies look at smokers in China. But their control, the percentage of smokers in China, is using outdated numbers. And the data on smokers who have COVID 19 is as doubtful as other data coming out of China. That's all well and good but the data needs to be replicated in other countries.

Then there is another person flooding the comment sections of other papers on COVID 19 claiming the big V.A. study of more than two million vets showed smokers were 55% less likely to get infected. He links to his own Tweet as a source. In that he has a screen grab from the V.A. study. He did his own math from the chart.

2 FOLLOWERS
[HILITE]Marcus Constantinus[/HILITE]
@meritoest
@plantmann_1 @clairlemon Covid-19 Testing, Hospital Admission, and Intensive Care Among 2,026,227 United States Veterans Aged 54-75 Years. USA: Smokers 55% less likely to test positive for COVID-19. https://t.co/YzkKp0Hibq https://t.co/9460r0zVRD

The original paper where the claim in the Tweet came from, page 23:

So is Marcus right? No, he isn't. He jumped to a conclusion without considering the tested population. At first I couldn't figure out why the authors of the study weren't talking about the underrepresented smokers in the COVID positive group. Until I looked more closely.
Design, Setting, and Participants: Retrospective cohort study including all patients tested for Covid-19 between February 8 and March 30, 2020, inclusive. We extracted electronic health record data from the national Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, on 2,026,227 patients born between 1945 and 1965 and active in care
So how is that affecting the data and why didn't the authors make the claim the guy who is flooding social media made? You'd think that was important to mention, even if you were looking for something else.

The numbers in the graph:
Smoking (bolded) followed by number tested positive, then the number that tested negative
Never 1042 (27.5) 216(36.9) 826(25.8)

Former 883 (23.3) 179 (30.6) 704 (22.0)

Current 1603 (42.3) 159 (27.2) 1444 (45.1)

It looks like smokers are 42% of the population and only 27% of them have COVID 19. Great big study, lots of people.

It's easy. Except Mr Twitter flooder doesn't understand the numbers he's looking at.

First these are vets that came into clinics because they were ill with respiratory infections. There's no control of vets who came in for something else. OK, so why are there fewer smokers testing positive?

Because they came in for respiratory infections and it was flu season! Smokers are underrepresented among COVID positive patients because they are overrepresented by other respiratory infections. Non-smokers and ex-smokers are getting more COVID and less other things.

This is what happens when people (including some science reporters repeating the claims) don't understand epidemiology and don't know how to interpret the numbers they are seeing.

And it only takes one person to flood social media with false assertions.
 

Roxxsmom

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And now Trump starts a new run on hydroxychloroquine by announcing he's been taking it daily for weeks (multiple news sources).

That man needs to have a cardiac side effect or come down with COVID 19 to save us all.

You just beat me to it. I started a thread on just this topic.
 

mccardey

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I'd be interested to know if the putative (though not scientifically accepted) dosage of hydroxychloroquine for a man of Trump's considerable girth is one pill. Only because I have grave suspicions about anything that man says, and "I take a pill every day" might be a tell.
 

mccardey

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He's not taking it. I'd bet all the change in my couch.
Me, too. I'd love to hear that it's only available in capsules, or that the general dose is two pills twice a day or something.

ETA: Oh honestly, mccardey. Go and focus on something productive.
 

frimble3

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Or that he's taking a mess of pills for various things, and the only one he really recognizes is the blue of Viagra.
 

MaeZe

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I'm going to post over in the George Floyd thread but a development in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle spawned a serious disinformation campaign that needs to be flagged here:

Twitter rundown of the lies being fed the public [You have to hit "see this thread"]
In the days since abandoning their East Precinct, The Seattle Police Department has been engaged in a disinformation campaign aimed at delegitimizing protesters, fomenting violence, and repairing their murderous public image.

Here are the details...

Marchers in Seattle were persistent enough last night the police backed down in steps, taking down barricades and eventually pulling out of the area altogether. The area has been named CHAZ for Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. It consists of a couple blocks from Cal Anderson Park up the hill on a single street to a police station.

Trump thinks that all of Seattle is in chaos but I digress.

I woke up this morning to the police disinformation campaign on the news, there's an interview of the mayor saying things are fine but that was overwhelmed by news of the police chief telling us she didn't agree with the mayor, never wanted the cops to pull out and she went on to repeat half a dozen claims (see the Tweet for specifics) which I found out later weren't true.

This one was particularly egregious:
Later that night, Seattle Police officers used public police scanner frequencies to make it appear as if 30 armed white-supremacists were moving towards the East Precinct, intent on starting violence with the protesters. This went on for hours, clearly intended to cause chaos.
I'm going to see if I can find verification the police actually did this.

There's a Facebook page with a live feed and lots of images showing what is actually happening there. It's Haight Ashbury when the Flower Children were hanging out, not the later version of the Haight that the police are trying to say it is.
https://www.facebook.com/ashleyimhof

I'm gobsmacked by the false information that was featured on the news. I'm hoping by 11pm the news media will have caught up to the facts.

:popcorn:
 
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MaeZe

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MaeZe

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Here's an excellent article by 538 on fake and questionable polls. It's a detailed eye opener from 2017 that is well worth reading today.

Fake Polls Are A Real Problem
Is Kid Rock leading the U.S. Senate race in Michigan? A story like that is essentially designed to go viral, and that’s exactly what happened when Delphi Analytica released a poll fielded from July 14 to July 18. Republican Kid Rock earned 30 percent to Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s 26 percent. A sitting U.S. senator was losing to a man who sang the lyric, “If I was president of the good ol’ USA, you know I’d turn our churches into strip clubs and watch the whole world pray.”

The result was so amazing that the poll was quickly spread around the political sections of the internet. Websites like Daily Caller, Political Wire and Twitchy all wrote about it. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted it out. And finally, Kid Rock himself shared an article from Gateway Pundit about the poll.

There was just one problem: Nobody knew if the poll was real. Delphi Analytica’s website came online July 6, mere weeks before the Kid Rock poll was supposedly conducted. The pollster had basically no fingerprint on the web.

Indeed, Delphi Analytica isn’t a polling firm in any traditional sense, and it’s not entirely clear they even conducted the poll as advertised.

The story of Delphi Analytica, its mysterious origins and its Kid Rock poll show that the line between legitimate and illegitimate pollsters is blurring. ...

Trusting polls is about more than real vs. fake
It’s fairly easy to dismiss both CSP Polling and Delphi Analytica. Maybe they conducted some polling and maybe they didn’t, but their lack of transparency and shady behavior make it easy to disqualify their work. But let’s say they were more transparent, and their data looked more legitimate. Even then it’s not clear whether news outlets should take their results seriously. ...

A fake poll can have real influence
For most people, no individual poll will have much of an impact. Most voters go about their lives not paying attention to every single poll that is or isn’t reported by the press. But make no mistake: A rogue poll or pollster can influence an election.

As Adam Geller, a Republican pollster who worked on the Trump campaign, told me, public polls can create news because “they are easy stories to write.” But, he said, “there is far too little scrutiny on the methodology of the poll. To most journalists, a poll is a poll is a poll.”

Public polls can also influence donors,
Geller says. Donors don’t want to back a likely loser. Voters themselves can be influenced as well. For example, in a primary campaign where voters are trying to decide between ideologically similar candidates in a large field, voters may take into account who they think has the best chance of winning. A fake poll could affect that calculus.

In this case, Delphi Analytica’s claims may have made Kid Rock more seriously consider entering the Michigan Senate race. He retweeted the results, after all. And while the singer has not made any official moves toward running for Senate, such as filing a statement of candidacy, it wasn’t too long after Delphi Analytica published its poll that Kid Rock said he’d take a “hard look” at a Senate bid and that former New York Gov. George Pataki endorsed him.

Think about that for a second. A poll that may not even have been conducted could wind up being at least partially responsible for the election of a musician to the U.S. Senate.
It’s pretty amazing.
 

paintedlady

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I don't think a Trump cardiac can save the US. If you get a chance, or haven't already, find a video of Jordan Klepper VS Trump Supporters to witness first-hand proof of the imbecility of Trump supporters. It's one of those "funny" videos that becomes truly frightening the longer you watch and the more you recognize the horror of it.
 

MaeZe

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I don't know if we posted this yet. Here is Trump vs. Truth: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

The reason I'm posting it here is he does a great job explaining how falsehoods enter the mainstream. It's funny but also well worth the time listening to what is going on in this country with the Liar in Chief making stuff up, getting falsehoods from the media (Brietbart and Fox), repeating them and subsequently members of the public accepting what Trump says is truth.

Youtube: Trump vs. Truth: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
 

Gregg

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Resignation letter from New York Times journalist.
https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

Sample paragraph:
"My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.'
 

Roxxsmom

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Resignation letter from New York Times journalist.
https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

Sample paragraph:
"My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.'

What's your take on this, Gregg? How specifically is it related to misinformation during the election season?
 
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JJ Litke

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It looks to me like a post about misinformation by Bari Weiss, as she portrays legitimate criticism as “bullying.” The “my work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels” is especially absurd since that happened after she took to Twitter to openly criticize co-workers. I mean, if you start shit-talking your coworkers in public, and they then want to address that in company channels, you pretty well set yourself up for that, it’s not “bullying.”

So, yeah, I’m perfectly comfortable assuming this is misinformation being spread by Bari Weiss. Thank you, Gregg.
 

frimble3

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Wait, this person openly bad-mouthed her colleagues (journalism people and presumably on speaking terms with words) on Twitter, where everyone and their mothers go, and thought there would be no blow-back?
:roll:
She's lucky that they're desk people who retaliate with words. Never mess with your co-workers unless you're leaving the company and it's your last day.
 

MaeZe

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Remember when GW Bush had a fake reporter in his press conferences asking planted questions?

The Guardian: Fake reporter unmasked at White House - Jeff Gannon

Well, Trump doesn't like the questions he gets, no problem, he brings his own.

Yahoo News: 'Antifa' website cited in conservative media attack on Biden is linked to — wait for it — Russia
WASHINGTON — At his press briefing Wednesday, President Trump, as he usually does, called for a question from Chanel Rion, the chief White House correspondent for the conservative One America News network, which has at times replaced Fox News as the president’s favorite news outlet. Rion’s question had nothing to do with COVID-19 or the economic recovery Trump had been boasting about, but instead brought up an obscure website, antifa.com.

“I wanted to highlight a kind of odd situation. In the last hour or so, if you googled ‘antifa.com,’ it would take you straight to Joe Biden’s website — his official campaign website — odd situation,” Rion said, adding, “We don’t know who’s behind that.”
Apparently we do know who's behind it.

Rion went on to suggest the site posed “an interesting leadership question” for the former vice president and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.
Is there a question for Trump here?

“Should Joe Biden, the Democrat Party, Kamala Harris, should they publicly denounce the antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?” Rion asked the president....

... there is no evidence that the Biden campaign had anything to do with antifa.com, or vice versa. Instead, the phenomenon cited by Rion had a clear link to Russia.

The people in control of any website can redirect to another, without the permission or even knowledge of the second site. Nothing Rion described would indicate direct involvement by Biden’s campaign, which did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Records for “antifa.com” in the domain name database Whoisology.com show the site was registered in the Russian Federation from 2013 through last July. Starting last November, the site’s registration was moved to Panama, The website has always been anonymously registered and its owners could not be reached for comment.

After briefly redirecting to Biden’s page on Wednesday, the site went dark. Based on copies of the site on the Internet Archive, it was blank from 2013 until June of this year when it began to feature a message in support of the protests that erupted around the U.S. following the killing of George Floyd. The page declared, “we are actively increasing Membership” but provided no contact information for anyone interested in joining.

“We Are Antifa: Join Us & Take Action,” the note said, adding, “More to come ... Check back regularly for updates & How you can be part of something that is changing the world.”
Hmmm, site goes dark, nowhere to apply. I'm surprised they haven't used the site to gather data on people.

Rion’s question provided Trump an opportunity to highlight one of his favorite campaign themes, the supposed far-left stance of Biden and, as of this week, Harris.


There have been other attempts by the Trump people directly trying to gin up the antifa boogeyman. And it's a twofur, gives them an excuse to spy on anyone protesting the government.

The Nation: Homeland Security Is Quietly Tying Antifa to Foreign Powers
“They targeted Americans like they’re Al Qaeda,” a former senior DHS intelligence officer with knowledge of the operations told The Nation. The officer, who served for years in the DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), compared the operations to the illegal surveillance of activists during the civil rights era. “They essentially were violating people’s rights like this was the ’60s…the type of shit the Church and Pike committee had to address.”

While the law generally prohibits intelligence agencies from spying on US residents, many of those protections do not apply if the individual is believed to be acting as an agent of a foreign power.

“Designating someone as foreign-sponsored can make a huge legal and practical difference in the government’s ability to pursue them,” explained Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. ...

... Once someone (or some group) is identified as an agent of a foreign power, they are subject to warrantless search and surveillance in a way that would be illegal and unconstitutional for any other US person. ...

Last week the DHS reassigned its intelligence chief after The Washington Post revealed that the agency had been compiling intelligence reports on American journalists and activists in Portland, Ore. In response to President Trump’s executive order to protect monuments and other federal property, the DHS created the Protecting American Communities Task Force, which sent DHS assets to Portland and other cities. The agency has found itself in transition under the Trump administration.“They are always pressuring I&A for political reasons. It’s been like that since the election,” the former intelligence officer said.


The Red Scare is alive and still just as sick.
 

frimble3

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I had posted this under 'Did the Trumps donate to Kamala Harris', but perhaps it's proper place is here:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/newsp...p5&OCID=FIRPLC

Trump has now decided that being undisputably born in the US isn't enough - how dare Kamala Harris even think of being in the chain of succession when (drumroll, please) her parents were immigrants and not citizens when she was born. I have never heard that you needed anything but to be born in the U.S. to aspire to the highest office.
BTW, he couches it in his usual mealy-mouthed terms: 'I have heard', 'It's worth looking into', 'maybe it is, maybe it isn't'. So he can plant the idea in his followers' heads, while denying it if people shout it down.

Shout, Americans, shout!
 
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MaeZe

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On the subject of the media contributing to the problem of spreading misinformation:

One of those rare black Trump followers was on the BBC News an hour ago repeating the lie that the pandemic was China's and the WHO's fault, and Trump gallantly acted to stop people from China coming here while all the Democrats protested that he shouldn't do that.

Sadly the BBC anchor merely let the BS stand and went on to something else.:mad: Colbert, on the other hand, challenged his guest on that claim immediately by pointing out that was in Feb/March and Trump did nothing in April and May except deny the problem.

As long as the milquetoast news media gives these liars a platform we might indeed see Trump reelected.

In 2016 it was Cambridge Analytica and social media. That will continue. But add to that the insidious Sinclair Broadcasting company that has had a large proportion of the broadcast market (radio and TV) across the country.

VOX: Sinclair, the pro-Trump, conservative company taking over local news, explained - Sinclair reaches 40 percent of households — and soon will reach 72 percent.
This month, the 193 local TV affiliates owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group began running a series of promotional segments, warning of a scourge of “fake news” promoted by “members of the media [who] use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think.’”

The segments, which echo the Trump administration’s anti-media rhetoric, are eerily uniform across all Sinclair affiliates, so much so that Deadspin’s Timothy Burke was able to edit them together into a supercut showing dozens of Sinclair anchors saying the exact same words.
My own local news channel, KOMO 4, is a Sinclair owned station and the influence is subtle so far but clearly there. They played Pence's convention segment about Law and Order over and over last night and this morning, more than the other stations. That's fine but they did nothing to counter the BS that was also spouted at the convention by GOP governor of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem who claimed the wealthy were fleeing riot torn Seattle leaving it to the poor stuck behind.

That's the old fashion stereotype of white flight to the suburbs. Guess she hasn't heard about the new problem, gentrification.

From an interview on Rachel Maddow: Mediaite: ‘She Needs to Get Off Twitter and Fox News’: Seattle Mayor Fires Back at SD GOP Gov’s Claim Democratic-Run Cities Are Being ‘Overrun by Violent Mobs’
MSNBC broke into the third night of the Republican National Convention with an instant response to South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s incendiary, fear-mongering narrative that “violent mobs” are taking over the nation’s urban areas, inviting Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan to weigh in after her city was specifically called out.

During the Republican governor’s speech, she echoed the “law and order” narrative that President Donald Trump and his party have chosen as a driving message for his re-election effort. Similarly, she stoked fears that cities being run by Democratic elected officials have the equivalent of lawless hellholes because they have experienced unrest marked by violence and looting amid weeks of ongoing peaceful protests after the George Floyd killing.

“From Seattle in Portland to Washington and New York, Democrat[ic]-run cities across this country are being overrun by violent mobs,” Noem claimed. “The violence is rampant, there is looting, chaos, destruction and murder. People that can afford to flee have fled.”

Primetime host Rachel Maddow appeared just as Noem’s speech concluded and doubled back to that specific charge Noem had just made.

“As we have said over the course of this coverage, we will interject when we feel like there is something that’s important and deliberate and very wrong that should be corrected just so that we feel responsible about our broadcast,” Maddow explained. “Joining us for more on that and to essentially run a reality check on that assertion is the mayor of the great city of Seattle who is joining us on short notice.”

“She is very right about one thing and that is our values are at stake: equality, freedom and opportunity,” Durkan said. “Unfortunately, this president does not stand for any of those values. Her caricature of the great cities across America is not only wrong, it is purposefully wrong. I think she needs to get off Twitter and get off Fox News and come see our city. Seattle is a city that I raise my two children in and I would not have raised them anywhere else. There are fine young man as their friends. Our violent crime is down 5% this year. We have — people are not leaving Seattle. In fact, again, our housing prices continue to increase, and the people moving here are young families.”

Maddow then followed up to ask if false claims about the state of her city, which saw protesters occupy a small, six-block section of the city’s downtown for weeks, affected its ability to “govern and Seattle’s ability to get the resources it needs?”

“It did have an impact this summer on something because the president and Fox News were so insistent on driving that message that people started to come there to make the reality real,” Durkan claimed.
...



More on Sinclair:

Deadspin from 2018: How America's largest local TV owner turned its news anchors into soldiers in Trump's war on the media
Earlier this month, CNN’s Brian Stelter broke the news that Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner or operator of nearly 200 television stations in the U.S., would be forcing its news anchors to record a promo about “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.” The script, which parrots Donald Trump’s oft-declarations of developments negative to his presidency as “fake news,” brought upheaval to newsrooms already dismayed with Sinclair’s consistent interference to bring right-wing propaganda to local television broadcasts.

You might remember Sinclair from its having been featured on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight last year, or from its requiring in 2004 of affiliates to air anti-John Kerry propaganda, or perhaps because it’s your own local affiliate running inflammatory “Terrorism Alerts” or required editorials from former Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, he of the famed Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that failed to mention Jewish people. (Sinclair also owns Ring of Honor wrestling, Tennis magazine, and the Tennis Channel.)
 

Roxxsmom

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I had posted this under 'Did the Trumps donate to Kamala Harris', but perhaps it's proper place is here:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/newsp...p5&OCID=FIRPLC

Trump has now decided that being undisputably born in the US isn't enough - how dare Kamala Harris even think of being in the chain of succession when (drumroll, please) her parents were immigrants and not citizens when she was born. I have never heard that you needed anything but to be born in the U.S. to aspire to the highest office.
BTW, he couches it in his usual mealy-mouthed terms: 'I have heard', 'It's worth looking into', 'maybe it is, maybe it isn't'. So he can plant the idea in his followers' heads, while denying it if people shout it down.

Shout, Americans, shout!

You need to be a natural-born US citizen to qualify to be POTUS. That simply means you don't have to be naturalized, as in you have the rights and privileges of US citizenship from birth. This is also called birthright citizenship.

There are two ways, as far as I understand it, you gain this status.

One is being born on US soil (birthright citizenship), whether or not one's parents are citizens. Kamala Harris qualifies. She never had to apply for citizenship, or take a citizenship class, or take a citizenship oath. Oakland is no more a foreign country than Honolulu, as much as many Republicans may wish these two "blue" cities to be. She could be President even if her parents never themselves naturalized or if they went back to their original countries. I believe the kids of parents who came here "illegally" and had them here later are still qualified, in fact.

The second way of birthright citizenship is to have one or both parents be US citizens and at least one of these citizen parents had lived in the US for a period of at least one continuous year at any point prior to the birth of the child. This qualifies you, even if you were born overseas, which is why Ted Cruz was also qualified to run for POTUS (nauseating though he may be). Notice the Constitution says natural born, not native born. Trump took some pokes at Cruz's eligibility too, but it never got as much traction, probably because his presidential bid never got very far, and because he's white (of course), and anyway, he's a Republican, and Republicans are the ones who always seem to get most worked up about this sort of thing.
For some reason, the first thing anyone says to a US citizen who was born overseas, even with one or both US parents, is, "That means you can't be President." It's untrue.
 
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MaeZe

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Oh this is going to get so bad...

There was a report on CNN that Trump had had a stroke when he went to Walter Reed in the middle of the night:

CNN: The mystery of President Trump's unannounced hospital visit By Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent The news bit is from last year, being replayed because there are new reports. The clip reminds us of Trump's doctors doing his specific bidding of lying like with the letter saying he had the best health of any POTUS ever, yada yada.

But keep watching the next two clips, they are short and about blatant disinformation.

Clip one is Trump talking about people you've never heard of in the dark shadows that are running the Biden campaign. Seriously. Trump is mad that Biden pointed out the violence is in Trump's America. So Trump is claiming a conspiracy to cause the violence when we know he's the one egging these people on.

The next clip is about the doctored videos putting words in Biden's mouth about defunding the police and another where they fake Biden falling asleep in an interview. The original video was Harry Belefonte.

This is the fake videos about Clinton's head bobbing and stroke all over again. I suspect the people supporting Trump know the Biden campaign is not going to create a war of fake videos. And Trump's conspiracy theories resonate with his base. And they are very dangerous.

It's encouraging this is CNN not MSNBC which is dismissed as biased by people who don't want to hear whatever MSNBC has to say. But it's discouraging that the level of dishonest campaigning is going to be so much worse.
 

MaeZe

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This is important enough I'm going to start a new thread about it, but it belongs here as well:

Politico: ‘This is ********** crazy’: Florida Latinos swamped by wild conspiracy theories - A flood of disinformation and deceptive claims is damaging Joe Biden in the nation’s biggest swing state.
MIAMI — George Soros directs a “deep state” global conspiracy network. A Joe Biden win would put America in control of “Jews and Blacks.” The Democratic nominee has a pedophilia problem.

Wild disinformation like this is inundating Spanish-speaking residents of South Florida ahead of Election Day, clogging their WhatsApp chats, Facebook feeds and even radio airwaves at a saturation level that threatens to shape the outcome in the nation’s biggest and most closely contested swing state.

The sheer volume of conspiracy theories — including QAnon — and deceptive claims are already playing a role in stunting Biden’s growth with Latino voters, who make up about 17 percent of the state’s electorate.

“The onslaught has had an effect,” said Eduardo Gamarra, a pollster and director of the Latino Public Opinion Forum at Florida International University.
The Cambridge Analytica folks would be proud. They might even be running the planning in whatever their new company version is.

This is the threat we should be paying attention to. Not all that BS about Trump refusing to leave and how all the GOP governors are going to call their states for Trump claiming they need to because of voter fraud.

The latter is a consciously inserted distraction, to which Trump is likely playing a bit part.
 

MaeZe

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This one goes well beyond the election season. You've possibly heard of Sinclair Broadcasting, a group that's out to monopolize TV and radio stations around the country. They started with rural radio stations but they've expanded well beyond that. Watch this 1:39 minute video to see exactly what they are up to.

"Sinclair's Soldiers in Trump's War on Media":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

Anchors at Sinclair-owned local news station parrot a script pushing Trump talking points and “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.”
Subscribe to Deadspin: https://goo.gl/62kZmG


They control ABC (in my area that is channel 4 KOMO). I'll see if I can find a recent list of their stations. They let the stations do their regular programing so when they mandate the stations carry Sinclair's messages they slip right in under one's nose.