B.O.gus

A great piece in Salon exposes the NYT's "new Cold War" propaganda. Remember those photos published by our paper of record...the photos which allegedly proved that Russia had sent in their special forces? This turns out to be another B.O.gus report in Times.

OK. In Wednesday’s paper, deep in the bowels of the foreign news section, and deep in the bowels of the story found therein, we learn that the Times took the administration’s word for the validity of the pictures and got it wrong. Sorry. The pictures turned out to have been taken by a freelance photographer in Ukraine and had nothing to do with Russian anything. Reddit helped expose the nonsense.

I grow very sick of this stuff. I hesitate to go ad hominem, but these guys are ripping off my public space, my right to a responsible press. They litter my village green. Michael Gordon, Andrew Higgins, Andrew Kramer — not one of these correspondents has any call on our trust.

This is the same shit -- the exact same shit, with the same yellow coloring, same undigested kernels of corn, same everything -- that led to the Iraq war. And the same people who shoveled the shit at us then are shoveling it now.

When you see the smelly stuff flying at you, do not despair. Take names. Now you know who the spooked-up journalists are. And sca-REWWW anyone who calls you a "conspiracy theorist" simply because you dare to admit the painfully obvious fact that the mainstream news organs have spooks on the staff.

Speaking of fakes... You may have noticed that the right is still trying to promulgate the Big Lie that the IRS targeted the Tea Partiers and other conservative groups. (Who, let us say again, deserved the attention, since they clearly were partisan.) New evidence has come out demonstrating that the IRS spent more time and energy going after progressives.

Other types of groups received explicit scrutiny for longer than “progressive” or “Tea Party” organizations. These included applicants involved with “medical marijuana” but not “exclusively education” (19 appearances in the “watch list” section of the lists), which were to be forwarded to a “group 7888″ and groups believed to be possible successor-groups to ACORN, the now-shuttered Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (12 appearances on the “watch list” section).

Nevertheless, Darryl Issa has brought out a report labeled “Debunking the Myth that the IRS Targeted Progressives,” which was, of course, written by Republican staffers. Read the report if you want a laff, but here's the truth:

But the actual IRS records indicate that at least some additional scrutiny was required for groups of all types that had names that sounded political — and that the explicit heightened scrutiny for left-leaning groups was even longer-standing than for Tea Party groups.