[guest post by Dana]

Fake news is all the rage these days. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that he is establishing a group of media professionals as fact-checkers who will check and flag fake news:

The decision comes after Facebook received heated criticism for its role in spreading a deluge of political misinformation during the US presidential election, like one story that falsely said the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump.

To combat fake news, Facebook has teamed up with a shortlist of media organizations, including Snopes and ABC News, that are part of an international fact-checking network led by Poynter, a nonprofit school for journalism in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Starting as a test with a small percentage of its users in the US, Facebook will make it easier to report news stories that are fake or misleading. Once third-party fact-checkers have confirmed that the story is fake, it will be labeled as such and demoted in the News Feed.

Also included in the described “respected fact-checking organization”: PolitiFact, Factcheck.org and the Associated Press. Obviously, there are any number of problems with this plan. Further, it’s troubling that along with several other politically liberal billionaires, the involvement of George Soros in the fact-checking effort is hypocritically being overlooked by the very media outlets claiming that this will be an objective and non-biased endeavor.

So, does it count as fake news when the fact-checkers themselves are posting intentionally incomplete or misleading reports?

Here is ABC News this morning – even after German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said yesterday that, “authorities have “no doubt” that the attack was intentional,” and German Chancellor Angela Merkel also said yesterday, “We must assume at the current time that it was a terrorist attack.”:

And, on a side note, shouldn’t this also be flagged as fake news, too?:

MSNBC host Chris Hayes reported on the comments made by Turkish assassin Mert Altintas in the aftermath of his murder of the Russian ambassador Tuesday, but curiously left out the fact that he yelled “Allahu akbar“– “God is great” in Arabic.

“The gunman was Turkish, a 22-year-old officer in the Ankara special forces,” the All In host said. “According to witnesses, the gunman yelled out, ‘Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria,’ wounding three additional people before being fatally shot by police.”

Video of the shooting is readily available online, and shows that Altintas immediately yelled “Allahu akbar” after firing the shots. While nearly all outlets included that fact in their reports on the shooting (including MSNBC earlier in the day), Hayes did not.

–Dana

[guest post by Dana]

It’s no secret that Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers can count on the babbling foolishness of the rich and famous to boost the barbaric business of baby butchery.

On her “Women of the Hour” podcast, Lena Dunham voiced regret, not at having had an abortion, but at *not* having had one because it renders her without an authentic voice in the cause:

I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had.

Dunham is a confused and muddled mess when she discusses the cultural stigmas of abortion. Through her lens, she is guilty of stigmatizing abortion because she hasn’t had one:

Dunham said that as an “abortion rights activist,” she always thought that she never did anything to “stigmatize abortion.”

“But one day, when I was visiting a Planned Parenthood in Texas a few years ago, a young girl walked up to me and asked me if I’d like to be a part of her project in which women share their stories of abortions,” Dunham said. “I sort of jumped. ‘I haven’t had an abortion,’ I told her. I wanted to make it really clear to her that as much as I was going out and fighting for other women’s options, I myself had never had an abortion.”

“And I realized then that even I was carrying within myself stigma around this issue,” Dunham continued. “Even I, the woman who cares as much as anybody about a woman’s right to choose, felt it was important that people know I was unblemished in this department.”

Of course, the unblemished Dunham doesn’t really care about all women’s right to choose. Just ask any unborn women taking a pair of scissors in the back of their skulls.

I get that ultimately, Dunham and her ilk want to see all cultural stigmas stripped away. To their foolish and misguided way of thinking, they seem to believe it would clear the decks for a conscience-free existence. But if there is one thing that should continue to have a cultural stigma attached to it, should it not be the willful action to end the life of another who is unable to participate in the decision-making? Shouldn’t our society continue to wince at, and struggle within the collective conscience about this? Not to condemn, not to abuse, but to always recognize that as all lives matter, this is not about just one woman and her life, but that it very clearly includes another. And that “other” is an innocent being forced to pay the ultimate price.

As someone said on the Twitters, maybe Dunham will get lucky this Christmas and find an abortion in her stocking.

–Dana