“In the order by District Judge Mike Menahan, the judge shot down several claims made by Zephyr and the ACLU:
Plaintiffs have asked this Court to issue injunctions prohibiting Defendants from enforcing their censure of Rep. Zephyr and from refusing to recognize her on the House floor. Based on the relief requested, the Court finds Plaintiffs are unlikely to succeed on the merits and therefore cannot satisfy the first requirement. Plaintiffs’ requested relief would require this Court to interfere with legislative authority in a manner that exceeds this Court’s authority. Plaintiffs also seek injunctive relief which far outpaces the facts at issue here.“
In case you missed it, the City Commission was recently asked by City Manager Greg Doyon about how to proceed with City Commission meetings in light of a recent spike in local Covid-19 cases.
In an informal consensus vote commissioners decided 4-1 to move the upcoming September 7 City Commission work session and regular meeting from in-person to all virtual. It’s unclear how far into the future the all virtual meeting rule will apply.
I was the dissenting vote for reasons I will address later and in a different format.
KRTV ran a story about it this morning, and posted a link to it on its Facebook page.
What happened next was curious to say the least.
One commenter, former Great Falls resident Kenny Volk, wrote the following:
“With the exception of Rick Tryon (the lone dissenting voice), are commissioners still going out to eat, leaving their homes, or otherwise physically participating in everyday society?”
First, KRTV ran interference for the politicians, interjecting to Volk’s rhetorical question by encouraging him, rather smarmily and inappropriately in my opinion, to contact the commissioners directly via the Zoom meeting.
Isn’t it the job of a “news organization” and “digital journalists” to go and ask those questions of the politicians rather than making snarky comments, then deleting the post altogether, in response to readers/viewers legitimate queries?
Then, curiously, KRTV deleted Volk’s post and their response to it:
Undeterred, Volk reposted his question, asking why it was deleted in the first place.
It looks to me like Deletin’ Dave Sherman is more “passionate” about curating the so-called “news” in KRTV’s digital content to fit his own bias and opinions than he is about informing local folks in an unbiased and straightforward fashion.
And then, KRTV deleted the entire post. You can’t find it anywhere now.
If you had any interest in knowing how to contact your local government, definitely do not rely upon KRTV. They’re not journalists; they’re activists.
An NBC Montana journalist called Maritsa Georgiou, in keeping with the rest of her alarmist Twitter feed, recently shared a hospital map that painted a dire picture of COVID-19.
If you still aren't concerned about COVID, I hope this updated hospital capacity map changes your mind. 5 of our MT counties are at 100% inpatient bed capacity as of today. Lewis and Clark and Yellowstone counties are nearly there. And there's no new information from Missoula Co. pic.twitter.com/aOlpDFBSXT
Georgiou later attempted to clean up her misleading tweet.
To be clear, these are NOT all COVID-19 hospitalizations. But our state map today showed 266 active COVID hospitalizations. Here's the more complete breakdown.https://t.co/mmGLf6d17A
Take a look at the picture at the top of this article. It was published on the Vox “news” site today with the headline, “Trump’s latest tweets are from an alternate reality where the protests are out of control”.
That particular picture is intended to remind you of someone. The headline with it is intended to make you believe that anyone who thinks that some of the protests have gotten out of control is “from an alternate reality”.
The alternate reality is actually the space that Vox occupies because they apparently believe we can’t see whats going on in our country with our own eyes.
“Oh”, but you say, “well Vox is just a left-wing propaganda rag, real news media isn’t like that.” You’re only half right, the first half.
Here’s a headline from ABC News yesterday.
Do you see the subtle deception and bias here? The President didn’t say he was going to use the military to “stop protests”. That’s not just an innocent mistake, it’s an outright lie.
Here’s what the President actually said.
“As we speak, I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel, and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults, and the wanton destruction of property…We will end it now.”
You can read the full statement from the President here.
“Oh”, but you say, “that’s the national media, our local media gives us the straight scoop.” Wrong.
Here’s a headline also from yesterday’s Great Falls Tribune online.
No, that is a direct lie. The President did not call protests “acts of domestic terror”.
Here is what the President actually said.
“Small-business owners have seen their dreams utterly destroyed. New York’s Finest have been hit in the face with bricks. Brave nurses, who have battled the virus, are afraid to leave their homes. A police precinct station has been overrun. Here in the nation’s capital, the Lincoln Memorial and the World War Two Memorial have been vandalized. One of our most historic churches was set ablaze. A federal officer in California, an African American enforcement hero, was shot and killed.
These are not acts of peaceful protest. These are acts of domestic terror. The destruction of innocent life and the spilling of innocent blood is an offense to humanity and a crime against God.”
The Great Falls Tribune is lying to all of us with their dishonest headline.
They are fully aware that most folks just read a headline and move on without reading the article. Is it any wonder that they’re a laughingstock in the town they’re supposed to be serving?
And is it any wonder that the mainstream media in general is held in such low esteem by the American public.
HERES AN UPDATE on an item we posted yesterday taking KRTV and their Online News Director Dave Sherman to task for what some of their readers/viewers consider to be an unexplainable and contradictory censorship/delete/block policy on the stations Facebook page.
We used a screenshot from that Facebook page to illustrate the point. You can read our post and see the screenshot here.
Two commenters on our own Facebook page took us to task for “attacking” Sherman and KRTV. We welcome criticism and “attacks” on our content but we wondered then and wonder now why the critics of our KRTV/Sherman post didn’t seem even a little concerned that KRTV allowed the insulting, derogatory, homophobic comments to remain on the page even after 6 hours.
“…but we wondered then and wonder now why the critics of our KRTV/Sherman post didn’t seem even a little concerned that KRTV allowed the insulting, derogatory, homophobic comments to remain on the page even after 6 hours.”
So we went back and looked again – and lo and behold, two of the three slurs are STILL THERE after more than 30 hours. Here’s the screenshot taken about 6:50 PM, Thursday:
“Judge fagg lmfao!”
“What a fagg !”
This is why we find KRTV’s policy so strange; these slurs are allowed to remain even though they clearly contradict KRTV’s own policy which we’ve included below (emphasis added).
•Comments that contain vulgar, profane, hateful, or abusive language or images; personal attacks against other commenters, or offensive terms that discriminate against specific ethnic, national, racial, or sexual groups.
•Derogatory comments about a person’s appearance or name.
•Comments that point out spelling/grammar errors of other commenters
•Comments that are clearly off-topic or spam
•Comments that make unsupported legal accusations or encourage illegal activity, or which contain deliberate falsehoods or misinformation.
•Comments that implicate family members in crimes that they are not charged with.
•”Drive-by” or sarcastic comments that are designed primarily to elicit negative responses or start a comment fight (sometimes known as trolling).
•Comments that link to non-MTN news sites”
Oddly enough, these guidelines which were apparently copied and posted yesterday by a commenter on the KRTV FB page, appear to have been taken down from the link they list for guidelines. As of 8:00 PM Thursday we got the following message when clicking the link: http://www.krtv.com/story/34511953/krtv-facebook-page-commenting-guidelines
“Our Apologies
The page you requested is currently unavailable. Pages on this site are constantly being revised, updated, and occasionally removed. You may have followed an outdated link or have outdated pages in your browser cache.
Please use your browser’s BACK button to return to the previous page.
We apologize for any inconvenience.”
By not deleting the offensive comments, is Online News Editor Sherman just being stubborn to prove point or does he consider homophobic, derogatory slurs mocking someone’s name to be appropriate content for KRTV’s FB page?
An alert (and angry) reader alerted us to this item on KRTV’s Facebook page earlier today, the comments below the news item are what caught the readers, and our, attention:
So we have to ask, where was KRTV online news director Dave Sherman for this one? After all, Deletin’ Dave has gained quite the reputation around town for being real quick with the delete button and block function for comments and commenters as he’s directin’ that online news for KRTV.
Just ask the many folks who have had their comments blocked or opinions deleted on KRTV’s Facebook page if their comments were as bad or insulting as what you see here.
“Judge fagg lmfao!”
“Such a fagg”
“What a fagg !”
Yeah, hilarious huh?
Yet those comments remain after at least 6 full hours. How is this kind of juvenile mockery in any way appropriate? What is KRTV’s standard for deleting and blocking their viewers and readers opinions and comments? Because as far as we can tell it’s kind of arbitrary and depends more on Deletin’ Dave Sherman’s political views and agenda than on any kind of common sense or fair standard.
KRTV has the right to block and delete anything they see fit. Unfortunately, it appears that these kind of juvenile comments against a Republican candidate are exactly the kind of garbage that KRTV deems appropriate.
We’re asking for folks to go ahead and let us know if they’ve been blocked or deleted by Deletin’ Dave and KRTV. Just post your story here or on our Facebook page.
From a front-page, AP story in the Tribune this morning on Trump’s budget: “The Trump administration’s budget plan for 2018 assumes that a mix of sharp spending and tax cuts can both shrink the deficit and fuel economic growth of 3 percent a year — a level it hasn’t achieved in more than a dozen years.” [Emphasis added]
“First, the budget isn’t being cut. Indeed, Trump is proposing that federal spending increase from $4.06 trillion this year to $5.71 trillion in 2027. Second, government spending will grow by an average of almost 3.5 percent per year over the next 10 years.” Dan Mitchell
Andrew Higgins, Moscow bureau chief for the venerable New York Times, the “newspaper of record,” snuck in two glaring admissions about the recently-released intelligence report concerning Russian “hacking”:
But the absence of any concrete evidence in the report of meddling by the Kremlin [emphasis added] was met with a storm of mockery on Saturday by Russian politicians and commentators, who took to social media to ridicule the report as a potpourri of baseless conjecture.
Now, surely Higgins didn’t intentionally (and so casually) cite the report’s lack of evidence as if it were fact. Or did he? He continues:
The report provides no new evidence [emphasis added] to support assertions that Moscow meddled covertly through hacking and other actions to boost the electoral chances of Donald J. Trump and undermine his rival, Hillary Clinton, but rests instead on what it describes as Moscow’s long record of trying to influence America’s political system.
The three intelligence agencies’ report pointedly declines to tell us what specific information gives them such “high confidence” that they know the operation of Vladimir Putin’s mind. They plead that the nature of their work does not allow for that: To tell us how they know what they purport to know would compromise intelligence methods and sources. Fair enough. The problem, though, is that if you’re essentially going to say, ‘Trust us,’ you have to have proven yourself trustworthy over time.
Several Great Falls and Montana residents have decided this is a perfect time to compliment existing print and TV news, with an online news blog to explore various issues and their effects on Great Falls and Montana residents.
Our idea stems from the Great Gregg Smith, who hung up his spurs after a successful run with Electric City Weblog, en route to a first-ballot Hall of Fame blogging career. We miss ECW!
Our Editor and Publisher Kelly Parks, entrepreneur, believes that like her grandfather’s numerous newspapers in the early 1900’s, the public has a right to know all sides of a story.
Our vision is to explore and add depth and discussion to newsworthy matters that many of our readers have requested.
It took a bit of time and some serious discussion, but alas here we are.
H/T to BizPacReview, for exposing the worst-kept secret in this year’s 2016 presidential election: the mainstream media, particularly CNN, is totally in the bag for Hillary Clinton:
Witness CNN’s Chris Cuomo, the man who called Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort a liar and debated Rudy Giuliani for 32 break-less minutes on the ridiculous liberal interpretation of Trump’s Second Amendment statement, wax eloquent during a 2014 segment during which he and another host were discussing Clinton’s potential entry into the race.
“It’s a problem because she’s doing what they call in politics “freezing pockets,” because the donors are giving her money thinking she’s going to run, that means they’re not going to have available money for other candidates if she doesn’t.” Cuomo said. “And I don’t think she’s going to give it to them. We couldn’t help her any more than we have, she’s got just a free ride so far from the media, we’re the biggest ones promoting her campaign, so it had better happen.”
