Archive for the 'Lies' Category

A word of advice for lobbyists and Republican operatives masquerading as grassroots political activists: stay away from Rachel Maddow. She will expose and humiliate you. If you think you’re too slick for her, check out the following interview with Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity. It’s tame enough at the beginning, as Maddow employs her usual confrontational style and presses Phillips to disclose the identities of his donors, while Phillips slips and slides and tries to make the dishonest point that it’s actually the big health insurance companies that are pressing for Obama’s healthcare reform:

When Phillips falsely accuses Maddow of having gone soft on the Obama administration, he seemed to touch a nerve. She extended the interview, and showed everyone what a piece of crap Phillips really is:

So let this be a lesson to all you lobbyists and political insiders who are trying to fool regular people into thinking you represent them. Tim Phillips is as slick as they come, and even he couldn’t avoid being drawn and quartered by Maddow. So if you feel the need to go on TV, stick with the softball pitchers at Fox News and CNN.

Given America’s school dropout rate, especially among African-American males (less than half graduate from high school), you’d think that everyone would be urging President Obama to use his position as the nation’s first African-American president to urge students to stay in school.

Now the President is doing just that, offering a short speech on the importance of education to be broadcast to schools across the nation. But instead of getting behind him, a significant fraction of Americans are attacking Obama’s efforts. That’s right: they’re attacking the president for telling students that they ought to stay in school and take their education seriously. Not surprisingly, Michelle Malkin is among the most hysterical of the critics:

Obama’s classroom campaign: No junior lobbyist left behind

Instead of practicing cursive, reviewing multiplication tables, diagramming sentences, or learning something concrete, America’s kids will be lectured about the importance of learning. And then the schoolchildren, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, will be exhorted to Do Something — other than sit in their seats and receive academic instruction, that is.

[Apparently, Malkin thinks that students are more likely to be motivated by doing an extra multiplication table than by watching a 5 minute speech by the President of the United States. I guess she’s as stupid as she is crazy.]

The activist tradition of government schools using students as junior lobbyists cannot be ignored. Zealous teacher’s unions have enlisted captive schoolchildren as letter-writers in their campaigns for higher education spending. Out-of-control activists have enlisted their secondary-school charges in pro-illegal immigration protests, gay marriage ceremonies, environmental propaganda stunts, and anti-war events.

[See if you can follow the logic here: if some activists have enlisted children in political activities, the president shouldn’t address students on the importance of staying in schools. And if you’re wondering why you didn’t hear about any of the events Malkin describes, it’s because they were all voluntary activities for which the children received parental consent.]

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Why do you suppose the Republicans chose a mascot with such a long nose?

Republicans now have a new excuse for blocking the health care reform that we so desperately need. They’re saying that they would have come together with Democrats to craft a bipartisan compromise, but they couldn’t because Ted Kennedy was absent for most of the time that health care legislation was being considered.

Because as we all know, Republicans in the Senate were always eager to meet Kennedy half way on issues like gun control, immigration, civil rights, and expansion of public health care.

That’s why they always invoked Kennedy in their fundraising letters. Maybe you thought that they were attacking their opponents by calling them “Ted Kennedy-stlye liberals”. Not so. What they meant by that was that their opponents would be the sort of politicians that congressional Republicans would be eager to work with. You know, like Ted Kennedy.

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In other news, the liars at the Republican National Committee mailed out a survey that included this question:

“It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person’s political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibility concern you?”

Maybe it’s time that I surveyed my own readers. Please answer in the comments:

It has been suggested that Republican leaders oppose universal health care because they want young women with sickly children to become desperate enough to sell themselves to dirty old men and serial adulterers like Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, David Vitter, Mark Sanford, John Ensign, and Bob Barr. Does this possibility concern you?

Ever wonder why dishonest hacks like Penn Jillette, George Will, James Inhofe, and Michael Crichton resort to telling half truths and outright lies when they’re trying to prove that man-made global warming is a myth?

Benjamin Netanyahu, world class hypocrite

Israeli officials feigned dismay over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory in Iran’s presidential election:

The re-election of hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a disputed vote underscores the growing threat posed by Tehran and its nuclear ambitions, two senior Israeli politicians said Saturday, urging the world not to engage in dialogue with Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has argued that Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, should occupy the world’s attention.

The Israelis have found that the American media is far less likely to scrutinize Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank when there is a perceived crisis elsewhere in the region. Maybe that’s why hardline Israeli officials were hoping that Ahmadinejad would be re-elected:

When it comes to the Iranian presidential elections, Jerusalem is convinced that it is in fact Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is the best candidate to serve Israel’s interests. “We’re better off with him getting elected,” said a senior political source. “The prevailing opinion here is that Ahmadinejad just speaks his mind. How are the others any different? They’re just nicer, but they think exactly like him.”

Sources in Israel argue that Ahmadinejad expresses most clearly the opinions held by the Iranian establishment, and by virtue of this fact, actually facilitates the international community’s understanding of their positions. The source explained that such an assessment was shared by all the agencies in Israel dealing with the Iranian matter.

These same hardliners will tell you that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon, and that Ahmadinejad has pledged to wipe Israel from the map. So why would peace-loving Israelis want Ahmadinejad to win? They wouldn’t. Government officials wanted him to win precisely because they do not want peace. They want to keep fighting, because they know that they will have to stop expanding West Bank settlements as soon as there is a lasting ceasefire. That’s why Israel helped nurture Hamas, that’s why they wanted Ahmadinejad to win, that’s why they keep expanding their settlements, and that’s why they violated a recent ceasefire.

Israel can’t get what they want in a peaceful environment, because what they want belongs to someone else. So they make a big show of pretending to negotiate with the Palestinians in order to keep American aid flowing, all the while striving to ensure that those negotiations never produce a lasting peace.

Am I just pretending to be outraged so that Letterman will stop making fun of me? You betcha!

David Letterman took aim at Sarah Palin during a recent show, devoting his top ten list to her visit to New York and making a joke about her daughter getting pregnant. For good measure, Letterman said that Palin should keep her daughter away from former governor and infamous womanizer Eliot Spitzer.

Naturally, Palin chose to interpret Letterman’s joke as a jab at her 14-year-old daughter Willow. The joke’s more obvious target was Palin’s 18-year-old daughter Bristol, whose pregnancy hampered her mother’s candidacy for vice president and undermined Palin’s message that abstinence-only education works. Letterman conceded that the joke was in poor taste, but insists that Bristol was his target.

The fact that Bristol was obviously the target of Letterman’s pregnancy joke leads me to believe that Sarah Palin is once again trying to deflect criticism with manufactured outrage. Letterman has been particularly successful in stripping away the veneer from Alaska’s corrupt, clueless governor. Just last month, Letterman’s top ten list focused on Palin’s upcoming memoir. Included in the list was this gem: “The entire thing, plagiarized word-for-word from Artie Lange’s Too Fat To Fish“, a reference to Palin’s habit of quoting other people without attribution.

This isn’t the first time that Palin has deliberately misinterpreted a remark in order to generate fake outrage. During the presidential campaign, Obama compared Palin and McCain’s sudden embrace of change to putting lipstick on a pig:

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Dick Cheney: still evil

In an address at the National Archives, President Obama defended his proposal to close the prison at Guantanamo and detain many of its inmates in federal prisons in the US, as well as his decision to end the practice of torture:

Faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions… instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford.

In other words, we went off course. And this is not my assessment alone. It was an assessment that was shared by the American people who nominated candidates for President from both major parties who, despite our many differences, called for a new approach — one that rejected torture and one that recognized the imperative of closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

…

The decisions that were made over the last eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable — a framework that failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions, and that failed to use our values as a compass. And that’s why I took several steps upon taking office to better protect the American people.

First, I banned the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques by the United States of America.

I know some have argued that brutal methods like waterboarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more. As Commander-in-Chief, I see the intelligence. I bear the responsibility for keeping this country safe. And I categorically reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation. What’s more, they undermine the rule of law. They alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America. They risk the lives of our troops by making it less likely that others will surrender to them in battle, and more likely that Americans will be mistreated if they are captured. In short, they did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts — they undermined them, and that is why I ended them once and for all.

In a rebuke to senators who voted overwhelmingly against his plan to house Guantanamo detainees in the US, Obama pointed out that there has never been an escape from a federal supermax prison. All told, he made an effective case for fighting terrorism without resorting to torture and without abrogating our commitments as set forth in the Geneva Conventions.

Shortly after Obama finished speaking, former Vice President Cheney took the stage at the American Enterprise Institute to defend torture, indefinite detention without trial, and warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.

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Check out this clip from a town hall Obama held back in March, followed by the reports in which Fox News deliberately distorts Obama’s message so that he appears to say the opposite of what he actually did say:

So Obama says that he’s against imposing a health care system that is like those found in Europe, and Fox News edits the clip to make it appear as though Obama supports imposing a European-style health care system. I have to conclude that Obama is doing such a good job as president that Fox has to make things up in order to attack him.

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Federal efforts to deal with the latest flu outbreak are being hobbled by the fact that the top 20 federal positions that deal with health care are still unfilled. A big part of the problem is that Republicans in congress have held up 5 nominees, including Obama’s pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Since the HHS Secretary will have to work closely with health officials, she should be confirmed before filling too many of the top spots. But it’s now months into Obama’s tenure and there is a possible pandemic on the horizon, so the president needs to move forward with filling as many spots as he feasibly can, as quickly as possible. And the Republicans in the Senate should stop dragging their feet and allow Obama’s nominees to take office.

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One of the big challenges that Obama faces is a critical shortage of primary care doctors. Skyrocketing costs and lack of health insurance for millions of Americans has artificially depressed demand for these doctors’ services, so more primary care doctors will have to be trained if Obama is to significantly decrease the number of Americans who lack insurance.

There are a lot of proposals for increasing the number of doctors in the long run, but there’s one obvious solution that lawmakers don’t seem to be seriously considering: attract doctors from abroad to work in the US.

War crimes?

No worries.

Palestinians?

No problem.

Why?

Because the brave IDF boys were just following orders.

And anyway ~ “Israel ubber alles!”

That’s why.

And please pay particular attention to the very last sentence of the BBC report. It’s a blatant, inexcusable outright lie.

Hamas did not “seize control” of anywhere. They were democratically elected by the Palestinian people.

Because said election results made such a monkey of the United States and their choice of puppet/poodle, the lying American & British governments (and almost all of their respective media), were/are once again only too willing and eager to create and to perpetuate, yet one more myth.

What has lately happened to the once so credible/reliable and well respected BBC, is not only sickeningly shameful, it’s downright sodding scary.

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

Dean Baker points out that when it comes to business, conservatives tend to be just as pro-regulation as liberals are:

Framing regulation debates in terms of more and less is not only inaccurate; it hugely biases the argument toward conservative positions by characterizing an extremely intrusive structure of, for example, patent and copyright rules, as the free market. In the realm of insurance and finance over the last two decades, calls for deregulation have been cover for rules tilted starkly toward corporate interests. And the recent change in bankruptcy law, hailed by conservatives, requires much greater government involvement in the economy.

False ideological claims have circumscribed the public debate over regulation and blinded us to the wide range of choices we can make. Without these claims, what would guide regulatory policy? What kinds of choices would we have?

Exactly right. Both liberals and conservatives favor more regulation, and both favor less regulation, so it doesn’t make sense to talk about conservative tendency toward deregulation. But the sorts of regulations favored by conservatives tend to benefit the wealthy and powerful, while regulations favored by liberals tend to benefit workers and consumers.

Amandagon points out that the “conservatives are against regulation” talking point is false but effective, because nobody likes being told what to do:

Of course, the lie works well enough. Most interactions with the hazily-defined group of things we call “regulations” are unpleasant, since you tend to become more aware of regulations when you cross some line and they’re enforced on you. No one likes to get a speeding ticket, and we all think we’re the exception who can easily drive as fast as we want without putting others in danger. Hostility to the mythical liberal “big government” that’s mysteriously larger in the imagination that conservative big government echoes especially nicely with people who feel that they can exert dominance over others in their own sphere and are paranoid that the federal government is going to restrain their power grabs.

Conservatives love to pretend that government has the same function in real life as it has in the game of Monopoly, and the media loves to parrot their rhetoric. In Monopoly, the government does two things: withdraws money from the economy and slows down the game. The government taxes players and forces them to make “improvements” on their property that don’t enhance the property in any way, and it arbitrarily sends players to jail. If that were really the way government worked in real life, then the Libertarians would be correct in asserting that the government that governs least governs best.

But in real life, government spending and regulation can be either helpful or harmful, and many government functions are necessary to maintain a high standard of living. And in real life, conservatives like business regulations as well as liberals do, as long as those regulations benefit elites who make up the real Republican base.

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While I’m on the subject of things that conservatives aren’t really against, let’s talk about taxes. This chart shows who the big taxers really are:

That’s government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product, and you can see a sharp rise during the administrations of Reagan and of George the Smart, followed by a steep decline under Clinton, followed by an immediate jump under Dubya. We know that virtually all of the money spent will eventually have to come from taxes. And we know that conservatives’ tendency to borrow money means that there will also have to be interest paid, again with taxes. So even though conservatives have a tendency to pass the cost of government to the next generation, the fact is that their policies lead to higher taxes.

What conservatives actually favor is shifting the tax burden to the poor and middle class. That’s why they favor sales taxes over income taxes, and flat taxes over graduated taxes. They cut taxes on the wealthy, knowing that this means that in the future, the middle class will have to pay back more of the money that the government borrows today.

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I’ll debunk one last myth about conservatives. The media tells us that conservatives favor states’ rights. In reality, they favor states’ rights only when they agree with the laws that state lawmakers pass. But they want the federal government to step in when states legalize marijuana and assisted suicide, or when they pass strict fuel economy standards, or when they legalize reimportation of prescription drugs, or when they legalize gay marriage, or when they regulate firearms. Again, what they oppose is not an overly powerful central government. What they oppose is a government that protects the people from the powerful.

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Dean Baker’s analysis is generally good, but his protectionist ideology leads him to this ridiculous conclusion:

Doctors are well-paid because, unlike less politically connected workers, they enjoy protection from international competition. The same is true for lawyers and other highly paid professionals. The six-figure salaries depend less on skill and hard work than on being able to structure labor markets in ways that autoworkers, textile workers, and cab drivers cannot.

Really? Auto workers and textile workers would be making six figure salaries if it wasn’t for foreign trade and immigration? Doctors and lawyers don’t have special skills that set them apart from cab drivers? And how do we account for the large wage disparities between auto workers and cab drivers? And why do investment bankers and CEOs make so much money, despite international competition? In reality, there are a lot of factors that go into wage disparities that are more important than free trade and immigration, including unionization, skills, profitability, supply, and demand.