Breitbart burns Beck, Dobbs, right-wing media with false claim of "Community Organizers Praying TO" Obama

Breitbart burns Beck, Dobbs, right-wing media with false claim of "Community Organizers Praying TO" Obama

Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and prominent conservative bloggers followed the lead of conservative website Breitbart.tv after the site falsely claimed that an online video showed community organizers from the Gamaliel Foundation "pray[ing]" to President Obama. Breitbart.tv subsequently updated the original post with an editor's note acknowledging that "there is a debate over what is actually being said" and that the crowd may, in fact, be saying "oh God" rather than "Obama"; the Gamaliel Foundation subsequently stated that "at no time have we prayed to President Obama" and that in the video, the organizers "can be heard saying, 'Hear our cry oh God,' 'Deliver us oh God,' etc."

How can Lou Dobbs claim, with a straight face that he is mainstream and his critics are "lefty" "loons".

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA). says that constituent who has major depression should go to the emergency room.
One of the most radical opponents of health care reform is Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA). He has said that a public option would “kill people.” Last Tuesday, Broun was confronted by a constituent at a health care town hall who explained that he has has gone into debt because he can’t afford insurance for his major depressive disorder. In response to his constituent’s story, Broun said that “people who have depression, who have chronic diseases in this country…can always get care in this country by going to the emergency room.” That comment prompted boos from the crowd. Towards the end of Broun’s answer, a constituent yelled, “That’s why we need a public option!” which brought cheers from the audience.

Whether its Kevin Jennings or Salmon Can Sean Hannity Tell Fact From Fiction

Despite evidence to contrary, Fox News machine claims Jennings "cover[ed] up statutory rape"
Despite evidence to the contrary, Fox News -- led by Sean Hannity -- and other right-wing media have claimed that Department of Education official Kevin Jennings "cover[ed] up statutory rape" and violated Massachusetts law by not reporting to authorities a 1988 conversation in which a high school student told Jennings about his relationship with an older man. In fact, Jennings' attorney wrote in a 2004 letter that the student was 16 years old, which is -- and was at the time -- the legal age of consent in Massachusetts.


Jon Stewart Schools Sean Hannity About History, The Food Chain (VIDEO)
There are so many complex problems facing Americans these days that we should all be thankful to Sean Hannity for boiling them down to their simplest, if nonsensical, forms. Love farmers? Kill fish. Love farmers? Hate president. What could be easier?

Among many other causes Hannity has taken up since Obama took office, Sean is deeply upset that the White House is ignoring his call to wipe out a species of fish by raising water levels in order to combat a drought hurting farmers. When challenged by a representative of the Federation of Fisherman, who warned that killing these fish will in turn destroy the salmon population, Hannity's crowd booed. Good thing he had comedian Paul Rodriguez at his side to lend an air of credibility to the broadcast.

Jon Stewart spent almost a third of his show last night mocking Hannity for his ignorance of the food chain and of the historic laws that created reservoirs for these farmers in the first place.

How Conservatives and the Media Framed the Perception of ACORN

Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong
Using the controversy over the community group ACORN, this study illustrates the
way that the media help set the agenda for public debate, and frame the way that
debate is shaped. We describe how opinion entrepreneurs (primarily business and
conservative groups and individuals) set the story in motion as early as 2006, the
conservative echo chamber orchestrated its anti‐ACORN campaign in 2008, the
McCain‐Palin campaign picked it up, and the mainstream media reported its
allegations without investigating their truth or falsity. As a result, the relatively littleknown
community organization became the subject of a major news story in the 2008
U.S. presidential campaign, to the point where 82% of the respondents in an October
2008 national survey reported they had heard about ACORN.
• Although ACORN is involved in many community activities around the country,
including efforts to improve housing, wages, access to credit, and public education,
the dominant story frame about ACORN was “voter fraud.” The “voter fraud” frame
appeared in 55% of the 647 news stories about the community organization in 15
mainstream news organizations during 2007 and 2008. The news media stories about
ACORN were overwhelmingly negative, reporting allegations by Republicans and
conservatives.
• In October 2008, at the peak of the campaign season, negative attacks dominated the
news about ACORN:
76% of the stories focused on allegations of voter fraud
8.7% involved accusations that public funds were being funneled to ACORN
7.9% of the stories involved charges that ACORN is a front for registering
Democrats
3.1% involved blaming ACORN for the mortgage scandal
• The mainstream news media failed to fact‐check persistent allegations of “voter
fraud” despite the existence of easily available countervailing evidence. The media
also failed to distinguish allegations of voter registration problems from allegations of
actual voting irregularities. They also failed to distinguish between allegations of
wrongdoing and actual wrongdoing. For example:
82.8% of the stories about ACORN’s alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to
mention that actual voter fraud is very rare (only 17.2% did mention it)
80.3% of the stories about ACORN’s alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to
mention that ACORN was reporting registration irregularities to authorities, as
required to do by law
85.1% of the stories about ACORN’s alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to
note that ACORN was acting to stop incidents of registration problems by its
(mostly temporary) employees when it became aware of these problems
95.8% of the stories about ACORN’s alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to
provide deeper context, especially efforts by Republican Party officials to use
allegations of “voter fraud” to dampen voting by low‐income and minority
Americans, including the firing of U.S. Attorneys who refused to cooperate with
the politicization of voter fraud accusations – firings that ultimately led to the 61.4% of the stories about ACORN’s alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to
acknowledge that Republicans were trying to discredit Obama with an ACORN
“scandal”
• 47.8% of the news stories about ACORN in October 2008 linked the organization to
candidate Barack Obama, most of them seeking to discredit him and his campaign
through guilt‐by‐association.
• The media bias against ACORN was evident not only in its focus on allegations of voter
fraud but also in the language used to describe ACORN, such as leftist, left‐wing, front
(for Democrats), radical, activist, political, militant, and socialist.
• The attacks on ACORN originated with business groups and political groups that
opposed ACORN’s organizing work around living wages, predatory lending, and
registration of low‐income and minority voters. These groups created frames to
discredit ACORN that were utilized by conservative ”opinion entrepreneurs” within
the conservative “echo chamber” – publications, TV and radio talk shows, blogs and
websites, think tanks, and columnists – to test, refine, and circulate narrative frames
about ACORN. These conservative “opinion entrepreneurs” were successful in
injecting their perspective on ACORN into the mainstream media.
• Perhaps the peak moment in the attack on ACORN occurred at the presidential
debate between Obama and McCain on Oct. 15, 2008. Although not asked a
question about ACORN, McCain injected the issue on his own, saying: “We
need to know the full extent of Senator Obama’s relationship with ACORN,
who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in
voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.“
Clearly this statement was newsworthy. This study reveals, however, that
opinion entrepreneurs, the conservative echo chamber, and the mainstream
media had laid the groundwork for McCain’s attack on ACORN.
• Local newspapers, which were more likely to verify the actual voting conditions of
county election boards, were much less susceptible to the politicized “voter fraud”
frame than the national news media.
The ACORN Story. One of the biggest stories

Hannity's Culture of Corruption versus ACORN

Hannity's Culture of Corrution versus ACORN

During his September 18th “Great American” Panel, Sean Hannity brayed about the alleged criminality of ACORN, and going after “corrupt radicals in the Obama administration” - corruption that Hannity wasn’t outraged about during the Bush administration when Bush officials resigned and received probation or jail sentences (one of whom was a Homeland Security official who was convicted of using a computer to seduce a child) as a result of criminal investigations. But in yet another sterling example of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy, Hannity failed to note that one of his guests, Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, former mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, left office because he was convicted of a federal racketeering conspiracy or as the presiding judge described it, “running a criminal enterprise.” The four year investigation was dubbed “Operation Plunder Dome.” Cianci served five years in jail and now hosts a radio talk show. So while denouncing ACORN, Hannity hosts an unrepentant ex mayor who used his taxpayer funded office to run a criminal racket. Oh, the irony – or is it the hypocrisy!

LA Times report further undermines ACORN videographers' credibility

Why has America become a nation that can't make anything bad end

New Rule: If America Can't Get it Together, We Lose the Bald Eagle

New Rule: If America can't get its act together, it must lose the bald eagle as our symbol and replace it with the YouTube video of the puppy that can't get up. As long as we're pathetic, we might as well act like it's cute. I don't care about the president's birth certificate, I do want to know what happened to "Yes we can." Can we get out of Iraq? No. Afghanistan? No. Fix health care? No. Close Gitmo? No. Cap-and-trade carbon emissions? No. The Obamas have been in Washington for ten months and it seems like the only thing they've gotten is a dog.

Well, I hate to be a nudge, but why has America become a nation that can't make anything bad end, like wars, farm subsidies, our oil addiction, the drug war, useless weapons programs - oh, and there's still 60,000 troops in Germany - and can't make anything good start, like health care reform, immigration reform, rebuilding infrastructure. Even when we address something, the plan can never start until years down the road. Congress's climate change bill mandates a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions... by 2020! Fellas, slow down, where's the fire? Oh yeah, it's where I live, engulfing the entire western part of the United States!

We might pass new mileage standards, but even if we do, they wouldn't start until 2016. In that year, our cars of the future will glide along at a breathtaking 35 miles-per-gallon. My goodness, is that even humanly possible? Cars that get 35 miles-per-gallon in just six years? Get your head out of the clouds, you socialist dreamer! "What do we want!? A small improvement! When do we want it!? 2016!"

When it's something for us personally, like a laxative, it has to start working now. My TV remote has a button on it now called "On Demand". You get your ass on my TV screen right now, Jon Cryer, and make me laugh. Now! But when it's something for the survival of the species as a whole, we phase that in slowly.

Folks, we don't need more efficient cars. We need something to replace cars. That's what's wrong with these piddly, too-little-too-late half-measures that pass for "reform" these days. They're not reform, they're just putting off actually solving anything to a later day, when we might by some miracle have, a) leaders with balls, and b) a general populace who can think again. Barack Obama has said, "If we were starting from scratch, then a single-payer system would probably make sense." So let's start from scratch.

Even if they pass the shitty Max Baucus health care bill, it doesn't kick in for 4 years, during which time 175,000 people will die because they're not covered, and about three million will go bankrupt from hospital bills. We have a pretty good idea of the Republican plan for the next three years: Don't let Obama do anything. What kills me is that that's the Democrats' plan, too.

We weren't always like this. Inert. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law and 11 months later seniors were receiving benefits. During World War II, virtually overnight FDR had auto companies making tanks and planes only. In one eight year period, America went from JFK's ridiculous dream of landing a man on the moon, to actually landing a man on the moon.

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A regular feature of the conservative noise machine is the weekly faux outrage

Students Sang Bush's Praises Too

Students Sang Bush's Praises Too

Republicans have been in an uproar recently over video footage of children at a New Jersey elementary school singing the praises of President Barack Obama. The outrage has been fueled mainly by a constant drumbeat from conservative media. But on Friday it boiled over into the realm of political opportunism when the Republican National Committee sent out a fundraising appeal calling the episode an "indoctrination of our nations... children" and "fanaticism."

"Friend," RNC Chairman Michael Steele wrote, "this is the type of propaganda you would see in Stalin's Russia or Kim Jong Il's North Korea. I never thought the day would come when I'd see it here in America."

Alas, such "propaganda" has not been limited to despots, dictators and the Obama White House. As a savvy source points out, back in 2006 children from Gulf Coast states serenaded First Lady Laura Bush with a song praising the President, Congress, and Federal Emergency Management Agency for their response to -- of all things -- Hurricane Katrina. The lyrics were as follow:

Our country's stood beside us People have sent us aid. Katrina could not stop us, our hopes will never fade. Congress, Bush and FEMA People across our land Together have come to rebuild us and we join them hand-in-hand!

The event took place at that year's White House Easter Egg Roll and included roughly 100 children from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. President Bush, it seems, wasn't in attendance during the song itself. But he was there earlier, when the First Lady read the book, Will You Be My Friend: A Bunny and Bird Story by Nancy Tafuri, to the children.

"After the reading," the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, "Mr. Bush asked, 'Did you like this book? Does it tell you about what people can do to help other people, what bird did to help bunny? Be kind to him and give him shelter.'"

The weather that day was described as a "chilly rain" which must have seemed appropriate given the fact that the Gulf Coast children were actually thanking the administration for its feeble response to the hurricane.

Uninsured 22-Year-Old Boehner Constituent Dies From Swine Flu
A 22-year-old woman from Oxford, Ohio, died from swine flu on Wednesday. Kimberly Young graduated from Miami University in December and continued to live in Oxford, Ohio, within Minority Leader John Boehner’s congressional distrct. Reports now indicate that after initially getting sick, Young put off treatment because she was uninsured:

Young became ill about two weeks ago, but didn’t seek care initially because she didn’t have health insurance and was worried about the cost, according to Brent Mowery, her friend and former roommate. […]

On Tuesday, Sept. 22, Young’s condition suddenly worsened and her roommate drove her to McCullough Hyde Memorial Hospital in Oxford, where she was flown in critical condition to University Hospital in Cincinnati.

“That’s the most tragic part about it. If she had insurance, she would have gone to the doctor,” Mowery said.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 30 percent of 19-24 year olds are uninsured, more than any other group. Despite the conservative argument that young people are voluntarily refusing health coverage in favor of extra spending money, the reality is that high costs on the individual market put coverage out of reach. As Suzy Khimm notes at Campus Progress, young people “are far more likely to be working part-time or lower-paying jobs for employers who don’t offer coverage”:

In its 2008 study, the Commonwealth Fund found that 66 percent of young adults aged 19 to 29 who experienced a time without coverage in the past year said they had gone without it because of the cost. [...]

Young people might have a better chance of accessing comprehensive coverage if there were a public plan, which could lower the cost of insurance, particularly for those without good employer benefits. Young people may also have a better chance at coverage if there were generous subsidies for lower-income individuals, as many take lower-paying jobs when they first enter the workforce.

Even though Boehner represents a large university, he has been an outspoken opponent of a public option that would make insurance cheaper and more accessible to recent graduates like Young. On Meet the Press last week, the Minority Leader continued to stick to the obstructionist Frank Luntz-endorsed talking points, dismissing the public option as “big government” while defending a watered-down plan.
Update TPM writes, "Still, if Young's lack of insurance did contribute to her not seeking treatment sooner, it would be hard to find a starker or more compelling example of the need to fix our broken health insurance system. And the fact that she was a constituent of the man who's leading House Republicans' in their effort to block reform only underlines the point.

Fox and Republican media baselessly claim NEA broke laws

Fox and Republican media baselessly claim NEA broke laws

Advancing Glenn Beck's and Andrew Breitbart's aggressive promotion of an August 10 conference call, Fox News' Gretchen Carlson and conservative columnist Ben Shapiro have alleged that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) broke laws against lobbying and electioneering during the secretly taped call. In fact, the transcript of the conference call released by Breitbart's website contains no evidence of illegal electioneering or lobbying by government officials.

Carlson and Shapiro baselessly claim NEA broke laws

Carlson baselessly claims NEA official's actions were "against the law." Discussing the release of secretly taped audio recordings of the August 10 conference call, Carlson claimed that "[y]ou can tell from listening to [former NEA communications director] Yosi Sergant, who, by the way, no longer has that position, because he was fired-slash-resigned from it, that, you know, we'll figure out how to talk about this legally, because here's the basic bottom line: You cannot tell federally funded organizations how they should be doing their work. In other words, you can't give them a mandate and say, 'Hey, push President Obama's health care reform plan with federal tax dollars.' That's against the law." [Fox News' Fox & Friends, 9/23/09]

Hatch Act limited to activity in support of candidates, parties

Regulations under Hatch Act limit "political activity" to "an activity directed toward the success or failure of a political party, candidate for partisan political office, or partisan political group." In his September 22 blog post, Shapiro asserted that "[t]he conference call also violates the Hatch Act ... which prohibits federal employees from 'knowingly solicit[ing] or discourag[ing] the participation in any political activity of any person who -- (A) has an application for any compensation, grant, contract, ruling, license, permit, or certificate pending before the employing office of such employee." But regulations promulgated by the Office of Special Counsel -- the agency responsible for enforcing the Hatch Act -- define "political activity" as "an activity directed toward the success or failure of a political party, candidate for partisan political office, or partisan political group." Shapiro pointed to no statements by government officials advocating for the success or failure of a party, candidate, or partisan political group, and the "full transcript" on BigHollywood.com contains no such statements.

Some facts and satire, Absolute Proof Herman Melville Wrote Dreams From My Father