(Most of the other FnF related threads seem to be in FedUp, so I guess I'll throw this one in here, too. Gen, feel free to move if I guessed wrong.)

I got to thinking about the whole Fast and Furious imbroglio recently. Obviously, AG's are pretty common political targets over the past few decades, especially wrt to presidential elections, so to some extent this is sadly business as usual in American Politics. (I'm sure Eliott Spitzer would agree.)

But then it suddenly occured to me that this time it is also a great way to cripple and undermine the credibility of the AG and the Justice Department. "Who would benefit from the that?", I asked myself?

Karl's oft quoted mantra then rang through my head: "Stop the looting and start prosecuting."

Could the uproar over FnF also be another delaying tactic by the Banksters to avoid prosecution by tying the JD in knots? Or maybe the reverse is true? Is this is a convenient way for the White House to AVOID focusing on prosecuting the extraordinary criminality in the Financial sector by throwing Holder and the ATF under the bus over this issue?

The article below details how the whole FnF "scandal" really doesn't seem to be what most people seem to think it is. (Me, included.) The numbers of weapons allegedly involved in FnF are laughably trivial compared to the overall annual estimates of illegal weapons exports to Mexico, most apparently under the disinterested gaze of Arizona law enforcement. And the details of the guns involved in the slaying of the Border Agent seem to be rather different than the common perception.

So maybe that isn't why this case is so high profile? Maybe it is so that other cases are not?

(Some emphasis added, but I encourage folks to read the entire story at the link.)

http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/20....

Quote:

The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal
June 27, 2012: 5:00 AM ET

A Fortune investigation reveals that the ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. How the world came to believe just the opposite is a tale of rivalry, murder, and political bloodlust.

By Katherine Eban

FORTUNE -- In the annals of impossible assignments, Dave Voth's ranked high. In 2009 the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives promoted Voth to lead Phoenix Group VII, one of seven new ATF groups along the Southwest border tasked with stopping guns from being trafficked into Mexico's vicious drug war.

Some call it the "parade of ants"; others the "river of iron." The Mexican government has estimated that 2,000 weapons are smuggled daily from the U.S. into Mexico. The ATF is hobbled in its effort to stop this flow. No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking within the U.S., so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws. For six years, due to Beltway politics, the bureau has gone without permanent leadership, neutered in its fight for funding and authority. The National Rifle Association has so successfully opposed a comprehensive electronic database of gun sales that the ATF's congressional appropriation explicitly prohibits establishing one.

Voth, 39, was a good choice for a Sisyphean task. Strapping and sandy-haired, the former Marine is cool-headed and punctilious to a fault. In 2009 the ATF named him outstanding law-enforcement employee of the year for dismantling two violent street gangs in Minneapolis. He was the "hardest working federal agent I've come across," says John Biederman, a sergeant with the Minneapolis Police Department. But as Voth left to become the group supervisor of Phoenix Group VII, a friend warned him: "You're destined to fail."

Voth's mandate was to stop gun traffickers in Arizona, the state ranked by the gun-control advocacy group Legal Community Against Violence as having the nation's "weakest gun violence prevention laws." Just 200 miles from Mexico, which prohibits gun sales, the Phoenix area is home to 853 federally licensed firearms dealers. Billboards advertise volume discounts for multiple purchases.

Customers can legally buy as many weapons as they want in Arizona as long as they're 18 or older and pass a criminal background check. There are no waiting periods and no need for permits, and buyers are allowed to resell the guns. "In Arizona," says Voth, "someone buying three guns is like someone buying a sandwich."

By 2009 the Sinaloa drug cartel had made Phoenix its gun supermarket and recruited young Americans as its designated shoppers or straw purchasers. Voth and his agents began investigating a group of buyers, some not even old enough to buy beer, whose members were plunking down as much as $20,000 in cash to purchase up to 20 semiautomatics at a time, and then delivering the weapons to others.

The agents faced numerous obstacles in what they dubbed the Fast and Furious case. (They named it after the street-racing movie because the suspects drag raced cars together.) Their greatest difficulty by far, however, was convincing prosecutors that they had sufficient grounds to seize guns and arrest straw purchasers. By June 2010 the agents had sent the U.S. Attorney's office (in Phoenix) a list of 31 suspects they wanted to arrest, with 46 pages outlining their illegal acts. But for the next seven months prosecutors did not indict a single suspect.

On Dec. 14, 2010, a tragic event rewrote the narrative of the investigation. In a remote stretch of Peck Canyon, Ariz., Mexican bandits attacked an elite U.S. Border Patrol unit and killed an agent named Brian Terry. The attackers fled, leaving behind two semiautomatic rifles. A trace of the guns' serial numbers revealed that the weapons had been purchased 11 months earlier at a Phoenix-area gun store by a Fast and Furious suspect.

Ten weeks later, an ATF agent named John Dodson, whom Voth had supervised, made startling allegations on the CBS Evening News. He charged that his supervisors had intentionally allowed American firearms to be trafficked—a tactic known as "walking guns"—to Mexican drug cartels. Dodson claimed that supervisors repeatedly ordered him not to seize weapons because they wanted to track the guns into the hands of criminal ringleaders. The program showed internal e-mails from Voth, which purportedly revealed agents locked in a dispute over the deadly strategy. The guns permitted to flow to criminals, the program charged, played a role in Terry's death.

After the CBS broadcast, Fast and Furious erupted as a major scandal for the Obama administration. The story has become a fixture on Fox News and the subject of numerous reports in media outlets from CNN to the New York Times. The furor has prompted repeated congressional hearings—with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder testifying multiple times—dueling reports from congressional committees, and an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general. It has led to the resignations of the acting ATF chief, the U.S. Attorney in Arizona, and his chief criminal prosecutor.

Conservatives have pummeled the Obama administration, and especially Holder, for more than a year. "Who authorized this program that was so felony stupid that it got people killed?" Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, demanded to know in a hearing in June 2011. He has charged the Justice Department, which oversees the ATF, with having "blood on their hands." Issa and more than 100 other Republican members of Congress have demanded Holder's resignation.

The conflict has escalated dramatically in the past ten days. On June 20, in a day of political brinkmanship, Issa's committee voted along party lines, 23 to 17, to hold Holder in contempt of Congress for allegedly failing to turn over certain subpoenaed documents, which the Justice Department contended could not be released because they related to ongoing criminal investigations. The vote came hours after President Obama asserted executive privilege to block the release of the documents. Holder now faces a vote by the full House of Representatives this week on the contempt motion (though negotiations over the documents continue). Assuming a vote occurs, it will be the first against an attorney general in U.S. history.

As political pressure has mounted, ATF and Justice Department officials have reversed themselves. After initially supporting Group VII agents and denying the allegations, they have since agreed that the ATF purposefully chose not to interdict guns it lawfully could have seized. Holder testified in December that "the use of this misguided tactic is inexcusable, and it must never happen again."

There's the rub.

Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.

Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.

How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It's a story that starts with a grudge, specifically Dodson's anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Rep. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election. (A Justice Department spokesperson denies this and asserts that the department is not drawing conclusions until the inspector general's report is submitted.)

"Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false," says Linda Wallace, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service's criminal investigation unit who was assigned to the Fast and Furious team (and recently retired from the IRS). A self-described gun-rights supporter, Wallace has not been criticized by Issa's committee.

The ATF's accusers seem untroubled by evidence that the policy they have pilloried didn't actually exist. "It gets back to something basic for me," says Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). "Terry was murdered, and guns from this operation were found at his murder site." A spokesman for Issa denies that politics has played a role in the congressman's actions and says "multiple individuals across the Justice Department's component agencies share responsibility for the failure that occurred in Operation Fast and Furious." Issa's spokesman asserts that even if ATF agents followed prosecutors' directives, "the practice is nonetheless gun walking." Attorneys for Dodson declined to comment on the record.

For its part, the ATF would not answer specific questions, citing ongoing investigations. But a spokesperson for the agency provided a written statement noting that the "ATF did not exercise proper oversight, planning or judgment in executing this case. We at ATF have accepted responsibility and have taken appropriate and decisive action to insure that these errors in oversight and judgment never occur again." The statement asserted that the "ATF has clarified its firearms transfer policy to focus on interdiction or early intervention to prevent the criminal acquisition, trafficking and misuse of firearms," and it cited changes in coordination and oversight at the ATF.

Irony abounds when it comes to the Fast and Furious scandal. But the ultimate irony is this: Republicans who support the National Rifle Association and its attempts to weaken gun laws are lambasting ATF agents for not seizing enough weapons—ones that, in this case, prosecutors deemed to be legal.

Quote:

None of the ATF agents doubted that the Fast and Furious guns were being purchased to commit crimes in Mexico. But that was nearly impossible to prove to prosecutors' satisfaction. And agents could not seize guns or arrest suspects after being directed not to do so by a prosecutor. (Agents can be sued if they seize a weapon against prosecutors' advice. In this case, the agents had a particularly strong obligation to follow the prosecutors' direction given that Fast and Furious had received a special designation under the Justice Department's Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. That designation meant more resources for the case, but it also provided that prosecutors take the lead role.)

In their Jan. 5 meeting, Hurley suggested another way to make a case: Voth's team could wiretap the phone of a suspected recruiter and capture proof of him directing straw purchasers to buy guns. This would establish sufficient proof to arrest both the leaders and the followers.

On Jan. 8, 2010, Voth and his supervisors drafted a briefing paper in which they explained Hurley's view that "there was minimal evidence at this time to support any type of prosecution." The paper elaborated, "Currently our strategy is to allow the transfer of firearms to continue to take place, albeit at a much slower pace, in order to further the investigation and allow for the identification of additional co-conspirators."
Rep. Issa's committee has flagged this document as proof that the agents chose to walk guns. But prosecutors had determined, Voth says, that the "transfer of firearms" was legal. Agents had no choice but to keep investigating and start a wiretap as quickly as possible to gather evidence of criminal intent.

Ten days after the meeting with Hurley, a Saturday, Jaime Avila, a transient, admitted methamphetamine user, bought three WASR-10 rifles at the Lone Wolf Trading Company in Glendale, Ariz. The next day, a helpful Lone Wolf employee faxed Avila's purchase form to ATF to flag the suspicious activity. It was the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, so the agents didn't receive the fax until Tuesday, according to a contemporaneous case report. By that time, the legally purchased guns had been gone for three days. The agents had never seen the weapons and had no chance to seize them. But they entered the serial numbers into their gun database. Two of these were later recovered at Brian Terry's murder scene.

This article continues at the link above with a detailed account of the tumultuous internal circumstances of the ATF team involved, including their incredible betrayal by their DC bosses.

An excellent related article in The Economist is also worth reading: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracy....

Not really trying or expecting to change any opinions here about the case per se: it just that it occurred to me that this hubbub may not be entirely what it seems. And as one of my favorite authors once wrote:

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Mark Twain

Pravda Has Spoken: ATF Never Allowed Gunwalking
Posted on June 28, 2012 by Teri O'Brien
http://teriobrien.com/tag/katherine-eban....

Quote:

Yesterday, Chris “Thrill Up My Leg” Matthews opened his unintentionally hilarious daily Obama slobberfest by touting this piece (http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/20.... , entitled “The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal” which he pointedly noted, was written by someone from Fortune magazine “not The Nation.” Call me a cynic, but knowing that MS-NBC is the equivalent of Korean Central Television, I decided to look into the background of the writer, one Katherine Eban.

Imagine my shock when I discovered that she does in fact write for the Nation (http://www.thenation.com/authors/katheri.... as well as the >Daily Kos (http://www.dailykos.com/news/Katherine%2.... and that her previous claim to fame was writing in 2007 about “the C.I.A.’s torture techniques.” She appeared on sad sack leftist Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” show (http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/.... to bleat about that.

She may or may not be the same person as Katherine Eban Finkelstein (http://www.thenation.com/authors/katheri....

Who knows? Who cares? Liberals often like to hide behind other identities. She also appeared yesterday as a guest on Rev. Al Sharpton’s silly waste of air time...

Read the rest at http://teriobrien.com/tag/katherine-eban....

Nah - it's just more Red Team-Blue Team bull****. Katherine Eban is simply a camouflaged Blue Team footsoldier, sent into the guns to lie for the administration. She'll be handsomely rewarded through the usual Left-Wing back channels - book deal, TeeVee appearances, etc.

addendum:

Before you mistake me, Buck - the furor over Fast & Murderous is Red Team bull****. If they get "Dick" Holder dead to rights over it, the "Right" will pull a "Clinton impeachment" and fold like a 10-high nothing poker hand.

**** those Rightie pussies. It's just another Pustule, DC kabuki dance.

Infidel wrote..

Other than trying to make the case that Dick Holder would prosecute bankers is laughable on it's face as he did nothing for the first two years before this story broke.

What Infidel said.

"No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking within the U.S."
Stopped reading there.
Other than trying to make the case that Dick Holder would prosecute bankers is laughable on it's face as he did nothing for the first two years before this story broke.

I hadn't thought to check out the author, Up. Thanks- always a good idea. Although I think the blogger you quoted has mischaracterized her a bit. She has written for all sorts of media for a long time, mostly about health care and pharma fraud. ( http://katherineeban.com/ ) I doubt she'll ever appear on Fox, but that doesn't surprise me.

Apart from that, I think you are correct about it being largely a Red/Blue theatre production, but most voters don't get that.

BTW, I didn't realize it before, but Fortune did a follow up article addressing some reader's criticisms with the original piece, Very interesting:

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/0....

Quote:

A Fortune investigation reveals that the ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels

Ridiculous.

Read the article, Duc. That allegation was made by one ATF guy who hated his boss to CBS, and doesn't seem to be supported by the available data. The ATF apparently didn't have any actual authority to halt any transactions deemed legal by the AZ Federal Attorney's office, who were the ones calling the shots, as it were.

If they weren't convinced there wasn't clear evidence there was criminal intent, the ATF couldn't do much. That was one of things I found surprising in the article. The whole affair was just a lot more complicated than I thought.

The FnF thing has just consumed far more bandwidth than I think it warrants, if viewed objectively. I'm curious as to why?

Buck - I would be willing to lay money on Katherine Eban being specifically selected to write this story (I'll leave it to the reader to figure out who the selector(s) was/were).

As I wrote before, her MO is that of a dedicated Blue Team footsoldier, whose "crusading jernalism" goes on hiatus when her team is in charge in the Pustule.

Since she stays under the radar, she was ideal to bring in to "take one for the team".

I myself have never seen her byline, and I can recognize a fair number of "jernalists" by their writing style alone.

We can see by the number of outrageous claims she makes in her article that her job was to muddy the water over F&F. Team Blue must be getting its ass kicked REAL bad over this one, if they had to bring in a designated spearcatcher.

The bottom line in F&F is that federal agents and the Justice Department committed felonies, as we can see in this Team Conservative article (posted earlier by me):

Fast and Spurious and a Prosecution by Federal Co-Conspirators
http://www.unifiedpatriots.com/2012/07/0....

(Vassar Bushmills: http://thesandsinstitute.org/)

The reason I say they committed felonies is because it's almost impossible to do most anything in this day and age without committing a felony. Being as how guns are involved, I'd say it's a certainty.

As usual when EITHER Team Red or Team Blue .govers commit felonies, nothing will come of it, just a lot of sound and fury, and the endless kabuki dance.

BTW - I'll say this much about Spearcatcher Kate Eban - the bitch can tap-dance. "Sisyphean" in the third paragraph.

Fortune revieweed 2,000 pages? Issa has asked for 80,000.

This article is the standard everyone is incompetent and we didn't know nothing that comes down after a fail government political op.

Here's the truth: Under the Bush the ATF tried operation called "wide receiver" which actually put tracking devices in the guns before letting them walk. The op was a failure even with Mexican police trying to help to catch guns on the other side. This op was sans tracking devices, sans workings with the Mexican cops and some how expected success? Bull****. This was a political op from start to finish.

Eban's article reads like Jane Mayer's New Yorker hitpiece on Linda Tripp.

As I wrote earlier, the bitch is a smooth writer, but you can see where she glosses or omits if you're watching.

The Political Scene: Portrait of a Whistleblower
The New Yorker March 23, 1998, p. 34
Jane Mayer
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1998/03....

Not at all clear why you even raised this distraction. Do you ahve any evidence it was written by the same author?

That "hit piece" appears to have been pretty charitable in retrospect, at least as compared to this thumbnail on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Tripp....

Favorite bit:

Quote:

...Eventually both Clinton and Lewinsky had to appear before a Washington, D.C., grand jury to answer questions, although Clinton appeared via closed circuit television. After the round of interrogation, the jurors offered Lewinsky the chance to offer any last words. "I hate Linda Tripp," she said.

ANYway, that was yet more Red/Blue theatre, so let's not focus on trying to discredit the author of an article just because it conflicts with any pre-conceived notions, shall we?

The article I cited appeared in the highly reputable Fortune magazine after a six-month investigation using many sources that haven't been publicly cited before. As a journalistic outlet, I'm sure unifiedpatriots.com is equally authoritative and unbiased as Time-Warner.

(You seriously want to cite this outfit as a rebuttal, Uppity? http://www.unifiedpatriots.com/how-to-su.... )

ANYway^2, it doesn't matter. The majority of Americans already think they know what the facts are, and with their usual alarming mix of apathy and incuriousness will be unlikey to change their viewpoint based on new information. Issa demanding a massive data dump of 80,000 pages is standard legal tactics. (Tie up your opponents resources while hoping to find something else to smack them with.)

ANYway^3, what really interests me though is how well-suited this FnF flap is for the purposes I mentioned in my OP: to distract and disable the agencies who might possibly bring criminal fraud charges against various culpable financial people for long enough to get the administration voted out of office.

It may even suit both sides to keep this FnF issue alive, but for different reasons. I suspect NEITHER side really wants the JD to start prosecuting...

Sipsey Street Exclusive: Send in the clown. The truth about Katherine Eban Finkelstein.
http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.c....

Quote:

Katherine Eban has a follow-up to her her big splash of last week timed to disrupt the Holder contempt vote, "The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal."

Eban's piece has been debunked by several several defenders of the Issa investigation, including Grassley staffer Jason Foster on PBS, Senator Grassley himself, Katie Pavlich and Robert VerBruggen, who did a radio show with Eban and then asked: "Did Fast and Furious Not Happen?" Teri O'Brien declared sarcastically: "Pravda Has Spoken: ATF Never Allowed Gunwalking."

Of course ATF DID allow gunwalking and Fast and Furious DID happen, but that hasn't stopped the administration mouthpieces from trumpeting the Eban piece in Fortune as proof positive that it didn't. Always in these accounts Eban is treated as a serious reporter with gravitas, which ignores her political prejudices and incidents in her past that cast doubt on her "journalistic impartiality."

Who then is Katherine Eban? Well, to begin with, for much of her career she was known as Katherine Eban Finkelstein. From her wedding announcement in the New York Times in 2002:

Quote:

Katherine Eban Finkelstein, a daughter of Elinor Fuchs of Brooklyn and Michael O. Finkelstein of Manhattan, was married yesterday evening to B. Kenneth Levenson II, the son of Bruce Levenson of Truro, Mass., and the late Arline A. Levenson. Rabbi Sarah Reines officiated at the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts in Manhattan.

The bride, 35, will be known as Katherine Eban. She is a staff writer for The New York Sun and until recently was a reporter for The New York Times.

The bride graduated from Brown University and received a master's degree in Renaissance poetry from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She also received a master's degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. The bride's father is a corporate lawyer in Manhattan. Her mother is a professor at the Yale School of Drama.

Mr. Levenson, also 35, is an architect in Manhattan. He graduated from Pratt Institute. His father, who is retired, and his mother owned the former Cupola Ski Shop in West Dover, Vt.

Last year, the couple bought a 2,358-square-foot house built in 1899 located in the Park Slope Historic District of Brooklyn for $1.17 million.

My own contact with Eban began with this email back in December:...

read more at http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.c....

Devastating counter-punch by the Sipseys.

Buck wrote..

That "hit piece" appears to have been pretty charitable in retrospect, at least as compared to this thumbnail on wikipedia:

Considering that Wikipedia is pretty much a wholly-owned & operated subsidiary of the Left (William Connolley, anyone?), that's a yawner.

it really is amazing that some people really want to believe the Big Lie told by those who just love telling it

Sub Prime is Contained

No One Committed Any Crimes

No One Could Have Anticipated This, It Is Completely Unexpected

Christ, can't you deal with the information in the article instead of wasting everyone's time persisting in trying to discredit the journalist via fringe bloggers as though they are equally meaningful? It makes it seem as though you lack an actual reasoned rebuttal.

Forget it. I don't give a rats ass.

TF continues to become an echo chamber where only a rapidly diminishing few seem able to seriously consider anything that doesn't agree with their pre-existing ideas.

Why should you seriously consider a bald faced lie ?

Buck wrote..

Christ, can't you deal with the information in the article instead of wasting everyone's time persisting in trying to discredit the journalist via fringe bloggers as though they are equally meaningful?

You mean the "fringe bloggers" that the cucking Lib funt Kate Eban smeared in the very hitpiece you posted?

Look, I know Kate's got bills to pay in her swell new digs, but I'm not going to give her a pass on her "conveniently timed" article. Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson got passes, but that was before the Interwebs got in the way of the agenda of the news manipulators.

BTW - did I mention that I hate most "jernalists" with a burning passion? This is because I know WAY too much about their little incestuous cockroach world.

Who makes these guns that are being sold to straw purchasers who are then selling them to Mexican drug cartels? One would think these gun companies are loving all these Mexicans buying guns to kill each other.

This Fast and Furious case sounds like the gun-walking had some reasoning behind it. The Feds wanted to nab the big boys in the Mexican drug cartels. They didn't care about the straw purchasers. Straw purchasers (like drug runners) are nothing. They are pawns. When a straw purchaser is arrested, another will pop up to replace him. The ends justify the means in this case.

Mr. Buck, what Mr. Uppity is really trying to say is this:

If FnF "has consumed more bandwidth than necessary," and is just a purposeful distraction (I'm para-phrasing there), then why the hell is (cock) Holder SO intent at covering it all up? Why not just turn over the information? It'd be quicker and exonerate them all.

I know, believing that the almighty Messiah-in-Chief would actually purposely commit high crimes and treason to further attack the 2nd Amendment is a serious allegation....


... sucks that it's also probably ****ING TRUE.

We can not believe anything we see in the media any more. I have been in the middle of an "event" that was extensively reported in the news a few times. Knowing the real truth and watching what the media does with it is a good way to blow out your blood vessels from overpressure. The media distorts and twists the facts around to suit their agenda with every story. You can't believe anything they say.

Here are two examples of the media getting caught distorting the truth. Just think how often they do this stuff and don't get caught. We can not believe anything the media says.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012....