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New episode out now! DB Cooper and the JFK Assassination with my good friend John Limbach. https://thecoopervortex.podbean.com/e/db-cooper-and-the-jfk-assassination-john-limbach/ Enjoy!

Yep. When you factually report on the trial that found that Trump sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll, it makes him sound like a rapist (since, objectively, he is one.) Then when you factually report on the sexual improprieties of Joe Biden, the report sounds . . . not that bad, since he has not sexually assaulted anyone. Conservatives demand that the media make both reports sound the same. Even if you report on the accusations, it makes Trump sound worse, since 13 women have accused him of sexual assault (one of which was proven) and he's admitted to sexual assault on TV. Then you report on the one woman who's accused Biden, and it makes it sound like Trump is much, much worse. Trump supporters demand enforced equality. If you spend 15 minutes listing all of Trump's accusers, you have to spend 15 minutes on Biden's one accuser. If you make it sound like Trump raped someone, you have to make it sound like Biden raped someone too. They want rapists made equal to non-rapists, criminals made equal to non-criminals, and people who pay to cover up their banging a porn star made equal to people who don't bang porn stars. This demand for equality in everything is, ironically, something they vociferously oppose when applied to the rest of society, and indeed regularly claim that people are NOT equal and should not be forced to be. Unless their last name is Biden. Then they should be made equal to Trump.

And who can forget Moses, who told his troops to kill all the women and kill all the children in a city, but keep the younger virgin girls "for their use." But he looks upon that with fond forbearance, just a historical quirk of years gone by. And sucking little boys' penises has a long tradition, and you have to understand X and Y and Z, and if you don't, you don't get to have an opinion. It's very nuanced, requiring a lot of study to understand the context. Muslims, though, worship a sick pedophile, and they're all mentally ill, period.

Yeah, but I’d bet you’d vote for her over pretty much any possible democrat. Wendy P.

Yeah totally: SCOTT SIMON, HOST: There's fresh scrutiny on Hunter Biden, the president's son, as he is under investigation. Part of that investigation appears to center on emails that showed up on a notorious laptop that was publicized before the 2020 election and then dismissed by much of the news media. Many of these emails have now been authenticated. NPR's David Folkenflik joins us now. David, thanks so much for being with us. DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Pleasure. SIMON: And what have we learned so far? FOLKENFLIK: We've learned a bunch more detail about Hunter Biden's vision to help a Ukrainian natural gas company called Burisma handle bad press in the U.S. and some other ramifications here although he didn't register as a lobbyist. We also learned about a Chinese energy company presumably with links to the Chinese communist government that made Hunter Biden seven figures in a short amount of time. To be clear, Hunter Biden has not been charged with any wrongdoing on this. He's said in the past that he's done stupid things but nothing illegal. SIMON: How did that information surface? FOLKENFLIK: Mostly through new reporting. You got to start with revelations in a book last fall by Politico's Ben Schreckinger and more recently in articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Much of these reports appear to center on materials related to the federal investigation of Hunter Biden. And there are a lot of witnesses and a lot of lawyers who have been asked about some of those Hunter Biden emails and correspondence and documents between him and some of his associates. SIMON: The New York Post broke this story just weeks before the 2020 election. Remind us of what ensued then. FOLKENFLIK: So The New York Post presented this story as a bombshell, and it said the emails were a smoking gun showing effectively Hunter Biden's corruption and suggesting much the same about candidate Joe Biden. Yet, its scoops were based on emails that could not at the time be independently authenticated, on a laptop that had not been positively identified as belonging to Hunter Biden, which was said to be abandoned at a repair shop. The laptop was provided, it's worth remembering, by President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to The New York Post. That's a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, a political ally of Donald Trump. And I think it's also worth noting, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal and Fox News had reporters who had the same material. They passed on the story concerned about how authentic it might be. SIMON: Hmm. Are conservative critics of the president correct, though, in saying that in retrospect, the media was just too deferential to the Bidens? FOLKENFLIK: Maybe. I do think you have to understand the context of the moment. Think of what happened in 2016. You had the Russian involvement in the leaking of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, and that caused incredible havoc during the election season. And think, too, a bit later of the so-called Steele dossier that attracted a ton of press coverage. It was posted in full by BuzzFeed News, and it turned out that contained a lot of misinformation not about Hillary Clinton and Democrats, but about the conduct of Donald Trump. SIMON: Hmm. Does that let off the media too easily? You wrote at the time that the mainstream press was right to be wary of the reporting at The New York Post. FOLKENFLIK: And I still think so. I don't think it lets them off too easily. I do think, though, there are two important points I want to make here. First, let's acknowledge social media's role. A number of platforms tamped down on sharing of the Post's story. In the case of Twitter, not only did they try to block sharing of it, they suspended The New York Post's actual Twitter account for sharing its own article. That was a wild overreach, and even Twitter had to acknowledge that. And then there was this cohort of paid pundits - 50 former national security officials, many of them appearing frequently in mainstream media outlets - who came together for a statement saying that this surfacing of the laptop bore all the hallmarks of a Russian misinformation campaign. And they pointed to the Russia's hacking of emails back in 2016, and their claims were not sufficiently and rigorously enough tested and questioned. I will go back to what I wrote at the time. None of the criticism from conservatives to do this seeming expose on Hunter Biden should force reporters to accept The New York Post's claims as true without additional reporting and additional verification. SIMON: And there are now Republicans and conservatives who say what we do know now, in their mind, demonstrates corruption by a sitting president. FOLKENFLIK: You know, from the evidence we have now - and that's important to note, the timing - President Joe Biden's actions have not been shown to be corrupt. What has been shown is a seeming tolerance for close family members - Hunter Biden, the president's brother - who are willing to trade on the family name in a way that seems, if not corrupt, untoward. And there is now more heft to a storyline that we already knew a lot about and yet remains one we're still pursuing. SIMON: NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik, thanks so much. FOLKENFLIK: You bet. https://www.npr.org/2022/04/09/1091859822/more-details-emerge-in-federal-investigation-into-hunter-biden

Another knock on effect from the mainstream right’s embrace of Trumpism. You can’t report honestly on Trump without the coverage sounding like a hatchet job, so when the majority of right wingers choose to throw away their principles and support him anyway they’re not going to want to work for an organisation that makes them feel bad about that. Now, given how much your guy moans about lack of Hunter coverage (whose misdeeds he conflates with Joe, which is a pretty big red flag) I’d be interested to know how much time NPR spent covering Jared’s far more successful influence peddling from inside the White House vs Hunter’s solo efforts. Would anyone here really be surprised if the bias was actually in the other direction?

Why do you have a preoccupation with trolling?

Skip is a solid suspect.

Thank you so much! You have made my day!

HuffPo: Police Report: Trump County Chair Threatened To Rape Boss's Wife, Then Kill Him One of Donald Trump’s county campaign chairs in New Hampshire lost his job as a police officer after threatening to kill his colleagues in a shooting spree, murder the department chief and rape the chief’s wife in retaliation for his suspension over his relationship with a high school girl, according to a newly released report from an internal affairs investigation. I hope he can still take her to the prom! Stone has remained in Trump’s camp since. Trump named him one of his 14 New Hampshire county and city chairs last June and praised him from the stage during a rally in Claremont five months later. Only the best people!

Does that let Jerry Lee Lewis off the hook.

oh lol, I thought you guys had money. Sorry.

Staunch Conservatives generally don't want progress, so I am not surprised that even back then they supported this.