The River Wanders...

thepoliticalfreakshow:

There’s a reason they’re call gun “NUTS.”  The NRA just lies.  These guys should consider teaming up with the religious right, considering the audacity of lies they tell.

You might recall that we reported earlier this week that the NRA had launched an ad/Web site targeting President Obama’s children.  The ad claimed – falsely, we now know – that the school the Obama girls attend, Sidwell friends, has “11 armed guards.”

In fact, the school has no armed guards of any kind.

Now, you’d think that when the NRA saw that the source for lie was “Breitbart,” a far right blog known for its sensationalism rather than it’s love of veracity, they’d have double checked.  Well, if they did, they double checked with Fox News, because it’s a lie.

From the Washington Post’s fact checker:

But what about the claim that Sidwell Friends has 11 armed guards, which some Web sites have depicted with images of armed police with binoculars?

This is based on the fact that the online directory for Sidwell Friends lists 11 people as working in the Security Department. Five are listed as “special police officer,” while two are listed as “on call special police officer,” which presumably means they do not work full-time. The directory also lists two weekend shift supervisors, one security officer and the chief of security….

But we spoke to parents who said they had never seen a guard on campus with a weapon. And Ellis Turner, associate head of Sidwell Friends, told us emphatically: “Sidwell Friends security officers do not carry guns.” (Note: this includes those listed as special police officers.)

And just to clarify, the NRA wasn’t talking about Secret Service protection – they were talking about actual armed security forces – more from the Washington Post:

While some news organizations reported that the ad was referencing the Secret Service protection provided to the Obama family — as required by federal law — the longer ad makes it clear that the NRA is specifically referring to the security force at Sidwell Friends.

The Post’s conclusion?

A slashing attack like this has an especially high threshold to get its facts straight. The ad gives the impression that a phalanx of armed police are guarding students, such as the Obama and Gregory children, at Sidwell Friends.

But that is completely false. Far from being elitist, the relatively small force of unarmed security guards at Sidwell is not unusual for a school of its size.

Moreover, the ad also suggests that Obama rejects out of hand boosting security at schools, when in fact his proposals include provisions that would provide funding for more school security.

If the NRA is also trying to count Secret Service protection for Obama’s children as part of that force of armed guards, that’s even more ridiculous. As we noted, such protection is mandated under federal law — and only exists for the president’s children.

Four Pinocchios

wilwheaton:

It’s really amazing to see political reporters dutifully passing along Republican complaints that President Obama’s opening offer in the fiscal cliff talks is just a recycled version of his old plan, when those same reporters spent the last year dutifully passing along Republican complaints that Obama had no plan. It’s even more amazing to see them pass along Republican outrage that Obama isn’t cutting Medicare enough, in the same matter-of-fact tone they used during the campaign to pass along Republican outrage that Obama was cutting Medicare.

This isn’t just cognitive dissonance. It’s irresponsible reporting. Mainstream media outlets don’t want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS hidden in plain sight, the hypocrisy and dishonesty that defines the modern Republican Party. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans insisted that anyone who said they wanted to cut Medicare was a demagogue, because I’m more than three weeks old.

[…]

 I realize that the GOP’s up-is-downism puts news reporters in an awkward position.  As long as the media let an entire political party invent a new reality every day, it will keep on doing it. Every day.

This is worth your time. Will those who call themselves journalists continue to let the GOP play them like this?

People need to push back on the media, incident by incident.  MSM gets a lot of payoff for fomenting controversy - they won’t back off that paradigm until we make it UNPROFITABLE.

I have no idea what is in his heart. I am just a fat, old broad who speaks too much and probably should keep some of her opinions to herself. When Mitt says: I respect and will protect a woman’s right to choose… Roe v. Wade has gone too far… I am pro-choice… I am pro-life… I never really called myself pro-choice…When I am asked if I am pro-choice or pro-life, I say I refuse to accept either label… I assume he is a liar. But I actually don’t know for sure he is a liar. He could just be a dumb ass who is confused. Maybe I should just call him honesty-challenged. At least that way, one of his robotic sons won’t haul off and hit me… or shave my head like his father does to those who disagree with him.

I’ve read some of the comments here. I get it. I drank the Kool-Aid so why listen to me? I am just a dumb liberal who doesn’t watch Fox News and therefore hasn’t a clue. You shouldn’t listen to me.

Instead you should listen to someone who really does know what is in Mitt’s heart. Let me introduce you to the woman who has been washing his underwear for 43 years. Well I am assuming that of course. She could have outsourced the laundry duties. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ann Davies Romney:

“Mitt has always been a pro-life person, he governed, when he ran, uhmm, as pro-choice…”

That would be an exact quote. It gets a little complicated after that because Ann finds it hard to make that shit sound truthful, but basically she said that he was pro-life while he campaigned as pro-choice . Then he got elected. Once elected, Mitt realized that he couldn’t actually govern as a pro-choice because, in fact, he was pro-life. So then, and only then, he let everyone know via an editorial in the newspaper that, in fact, he was exactly the opposite of what he campaigned. He was Pro-No Choice. Of course, now he is back to needing women to vote for him so he is willing to be pro-choice-ish again. It’s confuing, I know. Ann has always had a problem separating her whites from her colors.

Let me see if I can wash Mitt’s underwear better than Ann. Mitt misled the voters. He campaigned one way, knowing he was exactly the other way. Unlike Tagg, Ann has no problem calling Mitt a liar… I’m sorry… She has no problem that her husband is a dumb ass… Sorry again… I meant to say that she has no issue with her husband being less than honest. Settle down there Tagg.

Ann may not have a problem with her say anything husband, but I do. I have a problem that the man running for the Republican candidate for President is willing to lie to 100% of the women in America. After all, it’s one thing for him to not care about 47% of the population, but we are now talking about 50.4%. He’s running out of people to be honest with.

I have a problem that he has no issue with misleading voters. I am proud to be one of the 47% (give or take 3.4%) who will never be on the Romney’s Christmas card list. Yes, I checked… just in case you are not familiar with the religion, Mormons do celebrate Christmas. Other than the whole getting your own planet when you die stuff, they actually aren’t as unusual as many want to make them out to be. For instance, Mormons believe in the Ten Commandments too… but clearly the Romney’s are a little lax on that Ninth one.

I am no longer afraid of Tagg Romney despite my lack of Secret Service protection. Your dad is a dumb ass liar. Bring it on, son. I mean it. Really.

Full disclosure:  I’m a senior citizen but I do NOT have Margaret & Helen’s street cred - far from it.  But I *am* working on it =D

(via silas216)

justinspoliticalcorner:

What is most obnoxious about the Welfare Queen myth is that it is traced directly back to Ronald Reagan, who was indulging in gleeful hyperbole to outrage his Republican base. It has probably done more than any other conservative talking point in living memory to encourage Americans to be cruel to their neediest neighbors, even when some of those Americans are receiving some form of government assistance themselves. Stupid Uncle Bonzo.

What Reagan actually said, according to Wikipedia: “During his 1976 presidential campaign, Reagan would tell the story of a woman from Chicago’s South Side arrested for welfare fraud: ”She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.”

The real life inspiration, according to Wikipedia: ”In 1976, the New York Times reported that a woman from Chicago, Linda Taylor, was charged with using four aliases and of cheating the government out of $8,000. She appeared again in the newspaper while the Illinois Attorney General continued investigating her case. The woman was ultimately found guilty of “welfare fraud and perjury” in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois.”

So one woman scammed the government out of a total of eight thousand dollars andgot caught and sentenced. From this one woman’s situation, Reagan creatively invented multiple imaginary dead fake veteran husbands (not true), a six-figure “annual salary” ($8,000 is four digits and not enough to live on for a year),  a dozen fake Social Security cards (not correct), 80 aliases (no) and 30 fake home addresses (also no) and so on…in short, he created the Welfare Queen stereotype by wildly exaggerating information about a real person who got caught doing something wrong and who was punished for her criminal act.

Right from the beginning, when Reagan first told the infamous Welfare Queen story, there wasn’t anyone who actually got away with welfare fraud in real life! One middle-aged woman inspired Reagan’s anecdote, and she got caught! She was punished! That fairy tale The Gipper told us has led to a lot of misery, most of it directed at the weakest members of our society: those who are the least capable of defending themselves. Are we a country of unkind assholes who lack compassion for our neighbors, now?
 

The same people who believe in the Welfare Queen myth also believe that people on government assistance are out blowing all that “free money” on iPhones, fancy shoes and lobster. In truth, the government provides pre-paid phones to low-income people who take part in welfare-to-work programs. When is the last time you spotted a payphone in the wild? (Was it in working order?) The government provides phones to people so they can apply for jobs. It is a bit difficult to hang out around the last surviving payphone in your area (again, if there is one) all day hoping an employer will call you. (What is more likely to happen if you hover around a payphone all day long is that the local police will assume you are selling drugs.) The government also provides phones because it needs these people to check in often and make sure that they are actually applying for work, because if they are not actively participating in job training or trying to find work, they lose the few benefits they qualify for.

Are you feeling the urge to gnash your teeth and shake your fist about so-called “Obamaphones” now? It’s such a crazy liberal idea, loaning poor people a phone to use! It was particularly smart of Obama to travel back in time to the mid-1980s to start a program that helped low-income people afford telephone service. Wait…what?

Except, again, as we have learned, Linda Taylor didn’t get away with anything. Ultimately she served years in jail and paid restitution. Crime did not pay. Gut social programs anyway! Better ten thousand starving children and babies than the chance that one woman get a penny more of “our” tax dollars than she is entitled to…even though over 91% of all government assistance recipients are the elderly, the disabled, children and the working poor (so much for the idea of an army of shiftless welfare recipients sitting at home on the couch, eating government cheese and food stamp-purchased bonbons all day).

This suggests that the Welfare Queen archetype and the distorted view of Black Americans on welfare is well-entrenched in the White American psyche. The majority of welfare recipients are non-urban and White. The majority of food stamp recipients have jobs or are children, so comparing paychecks to food stamps makes no sense.”

Let’s get this one thing straight: there are no Welfare Queens out there driving Cadillacs, having five kids specifically to get extra financial benefits from the government, getting free iPhones, and somehow getting rich off “your” money. NONE. There never were.

h/t: Addicting Info

(via other-stuff)

liberalsarecool:

via David Frum:

“I mentioned this during last evening’s live blogging of the VP debate. The plan can’t cut as much as it claims while also being revenue neutral. Sorry, but it’s a fantasy. I was going to expound on this today, but Josh Barro’s got it covered.

Mitt Romney’s…

The incendiary anti-Islam film, Innocence of Muslims, is being widely blamed for sparking anti-U.S. demonstrations in the Middle East, leading to the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others in Libya. 

This morning, according to NBC News, a Federal law enforcement official has confirmed that the shadowy Sam Bacile, the producer of the film, is really Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an ex-con on probation for financial crimes.

[…]

In the Fall of 2008, in the leadup to the Presidential election, approximately 100 newspapers and magazines in the U.S., including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, and St. Petersburg Times, distributed millions of DVDs of the anti-Islam documentary, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” Altogether, including a separate direct mail campaign, 28 million DVDs flooded into swing voter states.

The newspapers, inexplicably, did not inquire into the details of who had produced the incendiary film or where the big money came from to place it in millions of big-name newspapers. The nonprofit organization named on the packaging of the DVD as the entity behind the film, the Clarion Fund, Inc., had no known history of operations and had a virtual office address in New York City with no physical presence and no employees on site. Documents submitted to the IRS to obtain its tax-exempt status show the Clarion Fund demanded total secrecy from its vendors.

The film portrayed Muslims as violent people intent on killing Westerners. The first half of the film is filled with scenes of suicide bombers and human carnage; the second half intersperses clips of Hitler, Hitler Youth, or Hitler analogies intermittently with Muslim crowds and young children with fists in the air calling for death to westerners. Once at the beginning and again at the end, the film reminds us that not all Muslims ostensibly want to kill us but quantifies the amount that do as 100 to 150 million – without any effort to support this assertion.

The newspapers that carried the DVD in the final days of a Presidential race, where one candidate was already being smeared for Muslim ties, were rebuked by outraged readers in letters to the editor and on-line forums.

[…]

“The 28 million DVDs were produced at a cost of $15,676,181 by Artist Direct Media which does mass manufacturing of CDs and DVDs with volume discounts. The big media buy for Sunday newspaper insertions ran up the tidy tab of  $719,436 and was conducted by NSA Media, a unit of the global ad giant, Interpublic Group, parent of McCann-Erikson. That figure seems decidedly on the light side so there may be other funding sources involved that have not yet surfaced. (NSA Media is a powerful ad buyer, representing some of the biggest print buyers and consumer brands in the country, which might help explain why so few questions were asked by the largest newspapers about this unseemly project.) 

“The full tab, and then some, was paid by the super secretive libertarian nonprofit, Donors Capital Fund. In 2008, Clarion Fund became Donors Capital Fund’s largest grantee by a large margin, receiving $17,778,600. That sum constituted 96 per cent of all funds received by Clarion in 2008 and 9 times its revenue in 2007. 

“Donor’s Capital Fund is a ‘supporting organization’ to Donors Trust, a sister nonprofit. Both promise the pursuit of taking over social welfare needs with private funds rather than government solutions; they want small government… 

“There are shades of Charles Koch all over Donors Capital and Donors Trust. Two grantees receiving repeat and sizeable grants from Donors Capital are favorites of the Koch foundations: George Mason University Foundation and Institute for Humane Studies. Another tie is Claire Kittle. A project of  Donor’s Trust is Talent Market.org, a headhunter for staffing nonprofits with the ‘right’ people. Ms. Kittle serves as Talent Market’s Executive Director and was the former Program Officer for Leadership and Talent Development at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. 

“Then there is Whitney Ball, President of both Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust. Ms. Ball was one of the elite guests at the invitation-only secret Aspen bash thrown by Charles Koch in June of this year, as reported by ThinkProgress.org. Also on the guest list for the Koch bash was Stephen Moore, a member of the Editorial Board at the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Moore is a Director at Donors Capital Fund. Rounding out the ties that bind is Lauren Vander Heyden, who serves as Client Services Coordinator at Donors Trust. Ms. Vander Heyden previously worked as grants coordinator and policy analyst at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. 

“Legal counsel for the Kochs has declined to respond to two emails with a week’s lead time seeking clarification of the relationship the Kochs have to Donors Capital and Donors Trust.”

It is now just seven weeks before the Presidential election.  It was exactly seven weeks before the 2008 election when the 28 million anti-Islam DVDs saturated swing voter states. It’s time to get to the bottom of exactly who is funding and marketing these films.

(via kathiek)

Greg Sargent:

I didn’t expect this, but the epic dishonesty of Romney’s campaign is finally prompting something of a debate among media types about whether what we’re seeing here is unprecedented — and how to appropriately respond to it. This debate is focused partly on whether there’s a racial dimension to this attack. But it’s also about (as I noted here yesterday) what the media should do when one campaign has decided that there is literally no set of boundaries or standards it needs to follow when it comes to the veracity of the core assertions at the heart of its entire argument.

There seems to be a bit of a strain of media defeatism settling in about this. James Bennet, the editor of the Atlantic, wrote yesterday that he is glad to see news outlets calling Romney’s falsehoods out for what they are. But he wondered whether we are about to discover that the press is essentially impotent in the face of this level of deliberate dishonesty: “what if it turns out that when the press calls a lie a lie, nobody cares?”

I’m sympathetic to the question. Indeed, it goes to the heart of the Romney campaign’s gamble here, which is that the press simply won’t be able to keep voters informed in the face of the sheer scope and volume of mendacity it unleashes daily. At the same time, though, I have to agree with Atrios: When news orgs want to make a big stink about something, and keep that stink going for a good long while, they prove to be very capable of it indeed.

As Steve Benen and James Fallows keep arguing, this poses a test for the news media. What would happen if a nontrivial number of articles and broadcasts about the welfare lie and other Romney falsehoods called out his dishonesty right in their headlines, prominently featuring unequivocal declarations (not mealy-mouthed he-said-she-said nonsense) that Romney is misleading people and has done so again and again and again, despite knowing the truth?

Mark Kleiman suggests that horserace reporters begin clearly spelling out that Romney has “made a strategic decision to try to bury Obama under a blanket of false charges.” Would that be an exaggeration? No, it wouldn’t. What if newspapers devoted extensive front page pieces to dissecting Romney’s decision to continue basing entire ad campaigns on widely debunked claims, even as Romney advisers openly boast about the success of their dishonest ads and openly declare that they won’t be constrained by fact-checking?

Could something like that begin to shift the dynamic a bit and make it harder for a campaign to keep lying at this pace? I don’t know, but it would be nice to find out.

justinspoliticalcorner:

TAMPA, Fla. — Ann Romney on Tuesday recounted her husband’s life story in her prime time convention speech, describing his effort to launch Bain Capital as a struggle with a high amount of risk.

“I was there when he and a small group of friends talked about starting a new company. I was there when they struggled and wondered if the whole idea just wasn’t going to work. Mitt’s reaction was to work harder and press on,” she said.

The tale the Romneys are telling, however, is not true. Romney only agreed to run Bain Capital after he had been promised that he could have his old job back if it failed, plus raises he would’ve missed. He was also promised that if it failed, a cover story would be crafted so that he took none of the professional blame.

For their book “The Real Romney,” Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman interviewed Bill Bain, the founder of Bain & Co., who asked Romney to head Bain Capital. The story he tells couldn’t be more different than Mitt and Ann Romney’s.

h/t: Ryan Grim at HuffPo

(via randomactsofchaos)