When you set yourself up as a self-described “fact checker,” you’d better have your ducks in a row. We here at Rumproast, among a number of others, have had cause to point and laugh at Glenn “Gepetto” Kessler’s “fact checking” efforts at the Washington Post before now.
A notable example was when Kessler judged President Obama’s claim that “We said working folks deserved a break, so within one month of me taking office, we signed into law the biggest middle-class tax cut in history, putting more money into your pockets” false by the simple expedient of asking whoever was hanging around the WaPo offices that day what they thought “biggest” meant:
We took an informal survey in our office and asked people what they thought the president’s statement meant. Everyone agreed he was claiming the biggest tax cut in terms of dollars.
After a bunch of fancy-dancy semantic shuffling, Kessler dealt from the bottom of the deck:
“The point the president was making [is] that is there is not a tax cut that has been enjoyed by such a broad section of the population,” an administration official said, pointing to a report that said that 95 percent of working families received some kind of tax cut under the Making Work Pay provision in his stimulus bill. ...
In other words, this isn’t about the size of the tax cut, but about the fact that every working family, except those making more than $190,000, received as much as $800 in tax cuts.
That strikes us as very odd way to claim “the biggest,” but maybe that’s because Obama can’t make that claim. We ran the numbers every which way, but the fairest over time is to look at the tax cut as a percentage of national income (Gross Domestic Product minus depreciation.)
Ding! Goalposts successfully moved. Four Pinnochios.
This projected series was interrupted for a while because every day sees the shallower rightwing end of the media pool and associated bloggers lathering themselves up revoltingly over some invented scandal or another, and we’d be up to no. umpteen gazillion now if I hadn’t decided to reserve it for absolute whoppers of triviality that are demonstrably disproven before the virtual ink is dry. It’s now election year, so I suppose we’ll all have to ramp it up a little.
Memeorandum (don’t sigh, I’ll be done soon enough) is popping with bonkers today over a supposed super-sekrit extravagant Halloween bash the Obamas allegedly hushed up in 2009 to avoid rubbing the rest of your faces in it and risking a pitchfork-wielding torchlit mass invasion of the White House lawn in the era of Tea Parties and the thick of the recession.
So many assholes, so little time. Where to start? Well, Memeorandum’s software’s plonked Verum Serum at the head of the pack, so I guess that’s as good a place as any.
Much virtual ink has been spilled in the past few days about Ron Paul’s leftier-than-thou credentials, especially regarding warfare. What does his campaign’s senior adviser, Doug Wead, have to say about all that?
Megyn Kelly: You know, one of the issues, obviously you know, that Congressman Paul’s most controversial on is his foreign policy stance, and in particular Israel and Iran, and whether he would allow Iran to get the bomb. He’s said he doesn’t want it, but he doesn’t want it because he’s worried that the United States will then go to war with Iran, and he doesn’t want that, just the same as he didn’t want the Iraq War, he thinks we’re too ... too prone to attacking other countries and to ... injecting ourselves militarily .... Newt Gingrich came out and said given that kind of attitude and policy stance, it would be a tough choice for Americans if the choice came down to Barack Obama versus Ron Paul, and Ron Paul is to the left of Barack Obama on certain issues, including foreign policy with respect to Iran. To those voters and to Newt Gingrich, what do you say?
Doug Wead: Yeah, yeah, I totally disagree with ... that idea he’s to the left or the right. He’s pro-Constitution. He’s in favor of taking the idea of war ... he’s not against war. He was the only public figure in 1981 to stand up and defend Israel’s right to defend herself and take out those Iraqi nuclear facilities. He’s not against war, he’s in favor of going to the US Congress as the Constitution says, debating it, committing to war, getting in, winning it, then getting out. He’s against these endless wars that just happen ... at a whim because somebody ... believes that someone’s a threat to the United States. If they’re a serious threat to the United States and/or our allies, then let’s take it to Congress, let’s discuss it, let’s commit, and let’s get in and win it and get out.
In this book, you’ll find out who stuck the cactus up Dr. Paul’s ass. He dispenses some tough love to the lazy people mucking it up for the rest of us. Dr. Paul explains the difference between “makers” and ”takers” and how being a maker is preferable unless you’re taking business risks or making babies. Tony Robbins credits this book with changing his life and writes a moving foreword. (Ha! “Moving foreword” cracks me up every time I read it.)
I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but the brief period between the Christmas holiday celebrations and the full-on bacchanalian blitzkrieg that is Hogmanay in these climes always seems like an unreal limbo.
Maybe it’s because I work from home, but every weekday seems like Sunday, the skinny newspapers that do appear are pared down to the important issues, like coverage of bloatered knobs in drag hunting varmints with hounds, and my lackadaisical first world-problem lassitude as I pick my way around the not-yet-stowed or yet-to-be-delivered Christmas gifts and the debris of a dozen meals and beer sessions cluttering the kitchen to try to muster the enthusiasm to do some work is not improved by yet another round of 90 mph gales and darkness at noon, with the ever-present threat of a random power cut to scupper the plans of the day.
Buffeted and dazed, I cast around the Web, while I still can, in search of illumination and comfort, and am buoyed by one less than seasonably generous thought. Every day when I wake up, I thank the Lord I’m not a Republican:
As LTMidnight pointed out in the comments to gil’s post down yonder, PUMA’s BAAAACK. Or something very like it. Because it worked out so well last time. HuffPo’s Sam Stein reports:
Huffington Post reader Andrew Rohrberger (via an Off The Bus submission) grabbed a copy of the audio of the “Run Hillary 2012” robocalls that are reportedly being made in an attempt to persuade the secretary of state to run for the White House.
The script leads one to believe we’d be living in a veritable utopia if only Clinton had won in 2008.
America would be better off today if Hillary Clinton was our president. The Wall Street robber barons would be jailed, young people could afford college and find jobs and six million homeowners wouldn’t face foreclosure. We need to change our course. Please sign our petition to draft Hillary Clinton for president.
Clinton’s not running, of course. And it’s remarkable to see that people are still holding out hope that she might change her mind. That said, the call represents an extreme version of the type of buyer’s remorse that Obama faces in the months ahead.
I can’t say I am surprised by any of this. President Obama’s support is tepid at best and among some demographic groups, nonexistent. If there was ever an election campaign ripe for a third party challenger, I believe 2012 is it.
If Hillary decides to jump in at the 11th hour, she will have my support and the support of my Blog.
The narrative that Obama is losing the base was debunked by a new CNN poll which found that support for the renomination of the president has tied an all-time high.
The CNN poll found that overall 81% of those surveyed thought that the Democratic Party should nominate Obama again. Only 18% of respondents thought that the Democratic Party should go with a different candidate.
Aided by comparison to the vastly unpopular Congress, Barack Obama has advanced to a 49 percent job approval rating in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll - his best showing since spring, and one that, if it holds, that may put his re-election prospects back within reach.
Amid the other fusses this last week or so, Mitt Romney’s enlistment of Ann Coulter as a surrogate after she had expressed grave reservations about his wingnut credentials earlier in the year was a little overshadowed. For some reason, the Romney campaign imagined that inflicting her dulcet tones in robocalls to voters in Iowa would be a winning tactic.
Mitt is desperate to win Tea Party support from current GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich, and recently picked up the endorsement of South Carolina’s Tea Party darling, Governor Nikki Haley, flitting round the state in a series of town halls where he declared:
“I actually think that on the issues of the day and the experience that I would bring to the White House, that I line up pretty darn well with Tea Partiers.”
Meanwhile, Coulter’s televised contribution to the rough wooing was highlighted by Media Matters and picked up by Mediaite.
It’s a Sunday morning, you may be fragile after the excesses of last night or the rigors of the week, so unless you have the stomach or the masochistic streak to view Coulter in full cry at this hour of the day, here’s the punchline from the interview:
Pemmaraju pressed Coulter on Romney’s conservatism, adding that the Tea Party has resisted him strongly, an indication he may not be as conservative as she thinks. Coulter replied that the Tea Party was “wrong about this” because “they’re looking at who is going to go around bombastically demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate or calling him a Kenyan,” instead of substance.
For one reason or another, we’ve turned our attention away from the loons at Conservatives4Palin since Snooki decided that presidentin’ wasn’t for her and she wanted to spend more time ... well, doing whatever it is that fills her time nowadays as she waits for a no longer enamored Roger Ailes to finally sack her from her lucrative but painfully pointless Fox gig.
You turn your back for a few weeks, and look what happens: arch holdout Palinbot Ian Lazaran has collected enough money from the still-willing dupes idling their lives away in his comments sections to encourage Snooki to come out of hiding and Run, Sarah, Run!!!! via a TV ad due to air by November 30, since there is apparently no other way for her remaining followers to reach her in her Alaskan fastness, or that Arizona hangout of hers, or wherever else she may be. Well, I guess she probably watches TV. But she may have trouble getting reception from Sioux City, Iowa.
This is probably the weirdest Palin ad yet, and (perhaps wisely) doesn’t feature the famous screeched inanities that we’ve all grown to love and that send our critters cowering. In fact, you get no spoken words at all, just some gritty sound effects of a thousand Underpants Gnomes scratching their balls in unison, a burst of canned applause, followed by ultra-cheesy synth burbling transplanted from the 70s, and a taser sting to send you on your way.
What we do next after the television ad goes up is a more difficult question. If this ad is able to build some momentum for the Governor, the best way to keep that momentum going may be to commission a national GOP primary poll that includes the Governor as one of the options. We’ll see if it’s possible given our resources. We’re open to other ideas but the greatest challenge may be that time is running short for her to reconsider.
Like, I suspect, Ian Lazaran, I’ve no idea who they imagine that ad’s going to appeal to or what it’s going to achieve, but here’s some expert analysis from Smitty over at Stacy McCain’s dump (no link, you can Google the fecker), who’s wetting himself at the prospect of writing her name in, since she’s going to have trouble getting a slot on any caucus ballots at this late stage, let alone the Iowa one on January 3:
Theory: this is a little shot o’er the bow for the Dems, in case they hoist the Hillary flag.
That’s one way to get the first female president: both parties nominate a lady.
With electoral registration deadlines looming fast, the tension is all but palpable as we wait to see who will finally answer the call to primary Obama in 2012. That tension has only been tentatively relieved by the entry into the race of advertising manager and financial services consultant Darcy Richardson, from Florida.
You have to dig fairly deep in the media to find much coverage of Richardson’s announcement of his run in the New Hampshire Primary a couple of days ago—like the Boston Globe‘s “Political Intelligence” blog, that’s how deep. And he’s not even the headliner there, ranking behind some of the Republican entry:
“I wanted something out of the ordinary to do this winter,” said Linden Swift, an 81-year-old retiree from Indiana who failed in his effort to plan a vacation to Ireland. “It seemed like running for president was a good second choice.”
Although a registered Democrat and elected Montgomery County precinct committeeman at the time, Richardson was nominated to run for the position of Pennsylvania Auditor General in 1980 on the Philadelphia-based Consumer Party’s ballot line. In that race he finished third with 48,783 votes.
In 1988, the Consumer Party again nominated Richardson, this time to run for U.S. Senate. That same year, Richardson was the national campaign manager of former Senator Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. McCarthy was also running on the Consumer Party ticket. Richardson was later a senior advisor to McCarthy’s final presidential campaign, in which he ran as a candidate in the Democratic primaries.
He’s a published author, and other sources reveal he’s not without that all-important media experience:
... Richardson has been quoted in major publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and has written numerous articles for a wide range of publications. He has also been a guest on several nationally-syndicated radio talk shows, ranging from the progressive “Thom Hartmann Show” to Joseph Farah’s conservative “WorldNetDaily Radioactive” program.
The déjà vu from the reaction of certain media to the Occupy series of protests has been utterly predictable. Anyone who was publicly active in the peace movement of the 1980s (I imagine much the same occured in the 1960s but I have no direct experience of that) will recognize the tawdry sensationalist fascination with demonstrators’ toilet habits, their appearance, their projected lack of cleanliness, the focus on supposed hypocrisy in their ranks because they haven’t eschewed every trapping of modern capitalism while existing in a major conurbation, the cries of “Get a job!” coupled with contradictory implications of lack of commitment to the cause.
So it’s no surprise to see my favorite organ of the yellow press, the Daily Mail, trumpeting a “gotcha!” about the Occupy London campaign that’s been gladly seized on by the usual suspects, complete with—you couldn’t make this up—thermal imaging camera “evidence”:
These are the damning images that prove the anti-capitalist protest that has closed St Paul’s Cathedral is all but deserted at night.
Footage from a thermal imaging camera taken late at night reveals just a fraction of the makeshift camp was occupied.
An independent thermal imaging company, commissioned by the Daily Mail, captured these pictures after similar footage from a police helicopter found only one in ten tents were occupied after dark.
Chilly: The images were taken at 11pm on Monday night, when most activists could be expected to have been curled up in their tents keeping warm
Yup. The Daily Mail expects everyone to be in their pajamas and tucked up in their sleeping bags by 11pm, even in the hubbub of a city center during a protest. It’s the British way.
Big Journalism has learned that the Occupy Washington DC movement is working with well-known media members to craft its demands and messaging while these media members report on the movement. Someone has made the emails from the Occupy D.C. email distro public and searchable. The names in the list are a veritable who’s who in media.
Journolist 2.0 includes well known names such as MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi who both are actively participating; involvement from other listers such as Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald plus well-known radicals like Noam Chomsky, remains unclear. The list also includes a number of Occupy organizers, such as one of the Occupy Wall Street main organizers Kevin Zeese.
As John Cole observes, this news is as earthshattering as the fact that Breitbart himself is an opportunist maniacal asshole (I paraphrase):
Has anyone at Breitbart HQ watched so much of five minutes of Ratigan over the course of the last two years? Read any Taibbi? They aren’t secretly doing anything- Dylan Ratigan has been screaming about this stuff for years. Hell, Taibbi just publicly gave advice to #OWS.
I am shocked—SHOCKED, I tell you—to think that some in the media might help a protest movement to foment unrest. So are the commenters at Big Journalism, as you can see if you don your knee boots and gasmask and tread warily into the mire (and may I say, you look quite fetching in them, even on a Monday morning):
Petroglyph 14 hours ago
This is seditious and treasonous. There is no other definition which I can think of to describe people who have turned on America and wish to destroy it. They should be treated as such. We ARE under attack.
There’s much more like this over at the link, where the commie Ratigan and his ilk are taking a pasting:
Charm2 14 hours ago
Good work Big Jornalism! I look forward to seeing how the commie apparatchiks deal with this revelation.
Lord help me, I’ll post anything to forestall Strange polluting the blog with more wacky wingnut wimmin today (Hillary being the exception that he’ll no doubt cower behind to prove some sort of rule or other), but the odd case of Ron Paul’s Eyebrow With A Life Of Its Own escaped me in the flurry of fluff that was the GOP New Hampshire debate.
It escaped me, but apparently not the approximately 1,990,000 benighted souls who’ve discussed this issue over the past couple of days.
“African-Americans have been brainwashed into not being open minded, not even considering a conservative point of view,” Godfather’s Pizza executive Herman Cain said on CNN’s “The Situation Room” in an interview airing Wednesday between 5-7 p.m. ET. “I have received some of that same vitriol simply because I am running for the Republican nomination as a conservative. So it’s just brainwashing and people not being open minded, pure and simple.”
Cain went on to explain that his interactions with African Americans led him to be optimistic about his own chances with the demographic.
“This whole notion that all African-Americans are not going to vote for Obama is not necessarily true,” Cain said.
He continued, “I believe a third [of African-Americans] would vote for me, based on my own anecdotal feedback. Not vote for me because I’m black but because of my policies.”
I’ll happily go on record right now as saying that among the things I don’t give a damn about when it comes to Palin is who she’s allegedly slept with in the distant past. I barely give a damn about the “babygate” stuff that’s been doing the rounds of certain blogs since 2008, (a) because I have no way of establishing the truth of any allegations myself, (b) I’ve grown more and more impatient with the way it’s been trundling on and on and on for so long and has taken up a lot of people’s time who might be better employed elsewhere, and especially (c) even if she’s ever proven an outright liar about any of this, it probably won’t change that many people’s minds one way or another about her fitness for office or her role as a pundit anyway. Her words and public conduct have done that in spades, and if they don’t convince you, I doubt anything else will.
I’ve no idea what the grand strategy is behind this formal warning letter, beyond providing cover in the face of the challenge from some quarters that if the allegations were untrue, Palin would sue. There’s no injunction in the pipeline as far as I know, and through my work I’m familiar with how excruciatingly careful publishers’ legal departments are over potential libel, especially with predictably explosive subjects like Palin. I’ve actually read more allegations from the book about Palin on Breitbart’s site than I have anywhere else. I haven’t read detailed excerpts of McGinniss’s book, and I probably won’t bother as a lot of it’s beyond snark by this stage, much of it has already been around as rumor over the past three years or so, and my tolerance for things Palin beyond marveling at her continuing status as a punchline for the follies of fame and fandom in politics has steadily dwindled.
But if it does ever go to court, hold onto your hat because there’ll be a daily stream of allegations and revelations, happily broadcast by the media of every political stripe.
I’ll note before I go any further after the fold that Palin’s living in a glass house (suspiciously similar to a certain public building in Wasilla built around that time, but that’s by the by ...), given, among other things, her attempts to smear McGinniss as a peeping tom and pedophile during his time as her next door neighbor. Now that’s what I call slander and libel, but she gets a free pass for that every time she does something similar.
The story so far: On an ESPN radio show in Las Vegas, world-renowned brain-case Mike Tyson made some pretty heinous observations regarding Sarah Palin’s alleged date with basketballer Glen Rice. Tucker Carlson posted a clip and transcribed extracts from the show on his Daily Caller news site. Wingnut blogger Dan Riehl promptly accused Carlson of being a sexually-inadequate sissy-boy. Greta Van Susteren followed up by calling Carlson a “pig” on her Fox blog. A frenzy of angry Twittering ensued, culminating in last night’s Greta/Tucker slap-fest.
And, somehow, this is all the fault of media Liberals.
News Hounds kindly points out Greta’s rather spotty record of defending other female celebrities who don’t sign paychecks to her husband.
