Bizarre, Media, Politics

Gabbard Blocked By CNN From Town Hall Events Despite Greater Support Than Invited Candidates

As the DNC deals with a report that there is an effort by some members to work to block Sanders at the national convention, presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D., Hawaii) is also facing a concerted effort by the Democratic establishment to cut her off from voters. In a particularly chilling ratcheting up of the anti-Gabbard rhetoric in October, CNN analyst Bakari Sellers called her a Russian puppet — an accusation the mirrors the allegation by Hillary Clinton that she is an actual Russian asset. The Hill has an article on the controversy that notes that CNN invites other candidates with less support in polls and has refused to respond to queries on why she is being locked out. This follows the shockingly biased questions targeting Bernie Sanders by CNN reporter Abby Phillips.

Gabbard, a veteran, is a long-standing and leading anti-war activist. That stance has earned her the ire of many in the Democratic establishment as she has attacked figures like Hillary Clinton for her hawkish record in supporting wars in Iraq and Libya.

The Hill article notes that she is polling ahead of other invitees. That leaves the appearance of a raw bias against Gabbard by CNN, which invited candidates like Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick who does not even appear on most national polling. Also invited are Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer who are polling below Gabbard. In New Hampshire, Gabbard is beating Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) with 8 percent in polling.

The most outrageous moment however came from CNN analyst Sellers who declared on the air that “There is no question, there is no question that Tulsi Gabbard, of all the 12, is a puppet for the Russian government.” Sellers is a former member of the South Carolina House of Representatives.

Like the Clinton attack, it is a return to the Red Scare attacks of the McCarthy period — painting anti-war candidates as fellow travelers with the Russians. Gabbard has sued Clinton over the statements, though such lawsuits are dubious in light of the higher standard applied to public officials and public figures under New York Times v. Sullivan.

CNN seems unwilling to fully address the obvious bias against Gabbard and Sanders or to explain why she should be barred in favor of candidates with a smaller following, including Patrick who has no discernible national support — at least sufficient support to register in national polling.

64 thoughts on “Gabbard Blocked By CNN From Town Hall Events Despite Greater Support Than Invited Candidates”

  1. There are some similarities to Obama’s first primary. The Clinton wing, like Gabbard, was also against Obama, including many prominent African-American supporters – they tried to rig the primary against Obama. Democracy is the better way to proceed.

  3. Gabbard is a real contender to beat Trump. She has a 100% rating with the Human Rights Campaign. She is supported by both liberal and conservative libertarian voters of both parties. She is the only woman of color that is also a combat veteran that served in the Middle East. She can also win rural and Midwest voters.

  4. Ironically Gabbard is closer to Madison and the Framers model of government. Her critics have supported an East German Stasi model of government since 9/11 – the communist secret police model that practices warrantless domestic spying. The whole premise of the Article VI oath of office is that the ends don’t justify unconstitutional means, all of her critics agreed to that honor that loyalty oath as a condition of holding authority over the rest of us.

  7. This is becoming ridiculous. Somebody needs to do something to get these… enemies of the state in line.Like start arresting and prosecuting them for sedition would be a great place to start.

    1. The Alien and Sedition Act was ruled unconstitutional. Didn’t you study American history?

      1. David Benson is the God Emperor of Making Stuff Up and owes me forty-two citations (one from the OED, one from the town ordinances and two from the Old Testament), an equation and the source of a quotation, after sixty-one weeks, and needs to cite all his work from now on. – slavery was once legal, sedition could be again.

      2. Actually, three of the Acts expired after a few years, upon the dates set when the Acts were passed, but ‘The Alien Enemies Act’ is still on the books, just polished up. They were never ruled unconstitutional.
        The Adams Federalists (Democrats) created the laws, Wilson used the Enemies Act during WWI and Roosevelt used it during WWII. Reagan formally apologized to the Japanese for the implementation of the Alien Enemies Act during WWII.

      3. sedition is still illegal. however, the last prosecution attempted, far as I know, which was against white racists by the way, was a disaster and ended in acquittal. you can read about it, search “fort smith sedition trial” 1986 if I recall correctly

      2. Now you can read one of the many reasons I like this beautiful and wise woman from Hawaii

        “Gabbard is an original member of the bi-partisan 4th Amendment Caucus. As Gabbard notes, “Our laws regarding freedom, privacy, and civil liberties have not kept up with the rapid expansion of technology in today’s digital age.” The caucus aims to protect against warrantless searches and seizures, close privacy violating surveillance loopholes, and champion reform efforts to protect and restore Fourth Amendment rights.[19]

        In 2014 remarks on an NSA phone data mining bill, Gabbard said: “We still have yet to hear of a single example of how national security has been strengthened by allowing bulk data collection.”[20]

        In 2015, Gabbard and Trey Gowdy (R-SC-4) co-sponsored the Strengthening Privacy, Oversight, and Transparency (SPOT) Act[21] to, as Senator Tom Udall (who along with Ron Wyden joined in a bicameral effort to introduce this bill)[22] stated, “strengthen the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB)” and “significantly improve the oversight and accountability of the nation’s intelligence community to protect Americans’ constitutional rights.”[23]

        On January 29, 2019, Gabbard was awarded an ‘A+’ rating “as a champion for protecting a free and open internet and civil liberties” from Restore The Fourth and Fight for the Future, “recogniz[ing] the congresswoman’s strong record of opposing mass surveillance and the warrantless collection of Americans’ calls, emails, texts and other communications, support of civil liberties and the USA Rights amendment and more.”[24] Gabbard said “It is unfortunate that some leaders in Washington claim that the American people must choose between our national security, and our civil liberties. This is a false choice. We must ensure that our laws and policies strike the appropriate balance – protecting our national security, while simultaneously ensuring the constitutional rights of Americans are upheld.”[25]”
        —————————————-

        I would add:

        Tulsi is also in favor of across the board, federal decriminalization of adult, consenting sex work.
        This has some ups and downs to it, but she takes a consistent position in favor of the workers.

        And also the federal decriminalization of marijuana. That one is about time. The ignoring of federal law on marijuana in respect of the financing of the burgeoning industry lawful at the state level is ridiculous and it makes a mockery out of federal law as patently unenforceable.

    2. The sad thing is that she could be the one who could beat Trump. She was the only on who voted present on the House vote for impeachment. Woman, war hero logical and well spoken. But not liberal enough for the Dems and founder of the NeverHillary movement

      1. She can’t beat Trump. Neither of these candidates have a prayer of winning, who R we fooling!

    1. Anonymous – have you seen the suit Nunes filed in December against CNN. He opens up on them with a 24 gun blast.

      1. I hadn’t seen Nunes’ suit. I’ll have to go see. Your description has me intrigued!

    1. It is more rampant than you might think

      This morning I went to my usual barber in hicksville that is staffed by a bunch of good-ol’boys who do nothing but talk, solve the world’s problems and otherwise provide great entertainment. My barber knows me well and when someone mentioned conspiracy theory # 3^9 factorial (Coronavirus pandemic), and sides were established, my barber blurted, “ask the doctor, he is sitting right there”. I took a deep breath and fended questions by ~10 men who at first listened, then I withdrew and the jousting began. Alex Jones vs Jake Trapper would have been in their element.

      Everyone thinks they are an expert, whether they are members of the DNC, US Congress, MSM, Catholic Bishops, blog commenters or a bunch of hunters in a barbershop. To make matters more depressing, even scientists are at each others throats (read below) about the the Coronavirus having “uncanny similarity” with specific proteins of HIV.

      I gotta laugh. I think it’s Al Gore’s fault…for “inventing the internet”

      🙂

      Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag
      https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1#disqus_thread

      Dzogchen
      This report highlights the dangers of assuming significance to a highly improbable yet random occurrence. If one calculates the probability of finding all four peptides within the HIV-1 genome it is improbable but that does not infer non-randomness. Lots of highly improbable events happen in nature that are in fact random. Even if you constrain to just the viral sequences in the database which are nearly 6 million residues (protein) the probability is quite low that all 4 peptides match HIV-1 but the authors fell into the trap of assigning significance to randomness.

      ngschen
      This paper is fake. I aligned all 4 insertions. 3 of them share with BAT sars-like virus (GISAID no.: BetaCoV bat Yunnan-RaTG13 2013 EPI_ISL_402131). The fourth insertion (CTCCTCGGCGGG), which is the only one 2019-nCov specific insertion, has the best match to Marine virus AFVG_250M1136. Since the 2019-ncov outbreaks from the seafood market, the possibility of marine virus rcombination might be much more persuasive.

      Ilya Tsyrlov
      Dr. Konermann of Stanford just checked their results. The similarity is spurious. Out of 4 inserts they identify between NCov and SARS, 2 are found in bat coronavirus. Of the remaining two, only one is most similar to HIV, and is so short (6 AA) that the similarity is not higher than chance given database.

      Song Yang • a day ago
      In the supplemental Fig S2, the author mentioned that “the Bat-SARS Like CoV in the last row shows that insert 1 and 4 is very unique to Wuhan 2019-nCoV”. In fact, the Bat-SARS Like CoV, discovered in 2013, contains all the four insertions. Insertion 2 and 3 of 2019-nCoV are identical to Bat-SARS Like CoV. Insertion 1 involves two synonymous and one Thr-Ile mutation. Insertion 4 contains one synonymous mutation and a 12-bp insertion. Therefore, the two viruses have very high sequence similarity, and are likely evolutionarily related, naturally. Indeed, the four identified insertions are the result of the pair-wise comparison of Wuhan 2019-nCoV and 2013 SARS virus (Fig 1), and are an artifact when comparing only two viruses. The ‘insertions’ regions also appear in other coronavirus, as indicated in the multiple comparison in Fig.S1, possibly functionally important.

      1. David Benson is the God Emperor of Making Stuff Up and owes me forty-two citations (one from the OED, one from the town ordinances and two from the Old Testament), an equation and the source of a quotation, after sixty-one weeks, and needs to cite all his work from now on. – Tim Pool has a serious case of the hots for her. 😉

  14. Turley, have you worked or wrote stories with John Solomon from the Hill? So you got in Hillary and CNN and Russia’s favorite Gabbard all in one story for your village idiots today, you must be so proud.

    1. Other than repeatedly bitching about the topics of these columns, does “Fishwings” ever say anything?

  15. The rig is in.

    What I find highly enjoyable is when Hillary Clinton inserted herself into the fray and Tweeted that no one in America is above the law…and then she twice refused to be served with the defamation lawsuit by Tulsi Gabbard. After there was national outcry, her lawyer finally accepted the papers. This was after the Secret Service at Clinton’s house declined them, and her lawyer declined them.

    “Today, after the media picked up this story, Ms. Clinton’s lawyer changed course and agreed to accept service,” Dunne told Fox News in a statement. “We would have preferred that Ms. Clinton just accept federal judicial process in the first instance, without having to be called out by the press, but in any event, Tulsi Gabbard’s lawsuit against her will now be moving forward.”

    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tulsi-gabbards-50m-lawsuit-against-hillary-clinton-moving-forward-after-clintons-lawyer-accepts-legal-docs-attorney-says

Comments are closed.