Blame the damn insurance corporations

If you needed further proof of the total failure of our Fourth Estate you need look no further than the media's frenzied search for alleged Obamacare victims. Today the (once proud and now useless bird cage liner) Wall St. Journal delivers up cancer victim Edie Sundby whose losing one of her insurers. What the op-ed doesn't tell you is she would lost that coverage anyway because United Healthcare long planned to drop all individual policies. It seems they can't compete in the individual market in California because of selective tax breaks being given to only some insurers, of which they were not one.

But there's a lot more Ms. Sundby didn't tell us in her lament for lost health care. Steve M. does some digging and discovers the Edie's is a  poor little rich girl tale. Leaving aside the discrepancies in her stories, (she's been featured in various media more than once), few cancer patients have this luxury:

Whenever Edie suffered a setback, she took what she calls "a spirit quest" into the wilderness. Weary from chemo in the summer of 2009, she and Dale traveled by camper van through national parks in the West. "The wilderness helps me forget everything," Edie explains. "I don't think about cancer; I feel healthy there." Twice more they headed out on camping trips, the last time in 2011 when the cancer returned.

So they both could take months off from work and travel as far afield as Alaska and Fiji. And they clearly have resources or at least connections among the the venture captial crowd. Edie was looking forward to launching a new line of beauty products this year. It may well be that Edie will be inconvenienced by Obamacare but she is far from the typical insurance consumer. Clearly it won't ruin her life to rework her policies whereas living without any health care at all would literally kill millions of Americans who will now have access to affordable coverage.

So the question for all the journos who are jumping on the "Obama lied because these people say they like their insurance" is, did it never occur to you that maybe the alleged victims are lying because they hate Obama, or liberals or Democrats, or poor people and they want to help Republicans kill Obamacare because it only helps millions of uninsured and doesn't do anything for them? Crazy idea I know. That never happens.

The biggest Benghazi scandal

In a startling new first, Major Garrett called Republicans liars -- on the teevee. Never would have expected Major to be the one to break that taboo.

Kevin Drum, who lately has dropped his old squishy style in a favor of a refreshingly bold persona, sums up the details of the GOP's ratfuckery:

So here's what happened. Republicans in Congress saw copies of these emails two months ago and did nothing with them. It was obvious that they showed little more than routine interagency haggling. Then, riding high after last week's Benghazi hearings, someone got the bright idea of leaking two isolated tidbits and mischaracterizing them in an effort to make the State Department look bad. Apparently they figured it was a twofer: they could stick a shiv into the belly of the White House and they could then badger them to release the entire email chain, knowing they never would.

Except the White House did release them, proving that the GOPers lied their faces off and burned Jon Karl. Not that Jon will pay a price for pushing it without confirming, but can't have everything. What should happen next is obvious, but since he got there first, over to you, Charlie Pierce:

The right thing to do here is for ABC to reveal the source that fed it bogus information. This is what should happen for two reasons: 1) it should happen to demonstrate the consequences of feeding bogus information to ABC, and 2) it should happen to demonstrate that there is something of a campaign among Republican congressional staffers to wound an elected president with bogus information, because (as I think we would all agree) that's a helluva news story, too. (Those of us who remember ABC's performance during Whitewater are not optimistic, by the way.) Ball's in your court, folks. Who do you really serve? The country, or the liars in your BlackBerries?

I'm not optimistic names will be named, but I'll take what we can get. Seeing generic Republicans called out by BigMedia for their mendacity is a damn good start. [graphic via]

How the NRCC redesigned their website

The GOP decided their only problem is they're not selling their "starve granny to feed the rich more caviar" agenda well enough. So in an effort to win the affection of the cool kidz, the National Republican Congressional Committee redesigned their site by stealing from others.

Yes. The committee that elects Republicans to the House is taking BuzzFeed's advice to heart... by copying BuzzFeed itself.

The committee spent hours poring over BuzzFeed's site map and layout, studying how readers arrived at its landing pages and bounced from one article to the next. Unsurprisingly, a ton of traffic came from social media -- but a lot of it also seemed to come from the site's sidebar, said Lansing. So the NRCC's redesign includes a list of recent and popular posts.

Other changes include shorter posts, fewer menu items and a heavy helping of what now passes for social currency on the Web: snark.

And by snark they mean, stealing other people's cute animal photos and memes and re-captioning with their same old tired lies.

To be fair, it's a pretty good redesign and so appropriate that it's based almost entirely on stealing creative work from others without compensation while they pay their own pack of grifters --er-- consultants millions for the thievery. How very GOP, if by GOP you mean Greedy Overbearing Predators.

To tell the truth

This slipped under the radar. WaPo is launching a new fact check feature for it's website -- Truthteller.

The concept is well-intentioned. Watch the vid at the link, it's short but you can't, it basically does fact checks in real time. They have some kind of algorithm that flags phrases and matches them to their archived previous fact checks.

The obvious problem is the WaPo doesn't have that stellar on record on doing fact checks. Lots of dubious "both sides do it" has been passed on by their human "truth tellers" for "balance." And of course, the other big problem is there's still a huge demo that wouldn't believe a fact that conflicts with their world view if their God himself came down and tattooed it on their ass. So I don't have much hope for it.

Nonetheless, it's always good to see the media at least try to keep the record straight. It's a start. [image via wikipedia]

Rebranding the GOP

It's not like Republicans really didn't get the message of the 2012 election. They do seem to understand they have an image problem because the majority of the country sees them as the party of the rich. The sudden shift in the GOP rhetoric drift is at once amusing for its lack of sincerity and irritating in its potential for succeeding with the rubes.

Of course all they did was add an extra step to their master plan:

1) Enact policies that cause enormous uptick in Americans living in poverty.
2) Make somber speeches about how sad it is there are so many Americans living in poverty and demand something be done to "increase opportunity."
3) Continue to push the same failed policies that created worst income inequality since the Gilded Age, but with new names.
4) Profit!!!!

Hell, why not? Shameless mendacity has worked for them so far. All they need is some better agitprop.

Pundits do the CYA dance

This is hilarious. He is always wrong, about everything. So much so, his predictions are considered the proverbial kiss of death. Still it's significant that Dick Morris is willing to tell us he lied in order to keep the Rmoney campaign alive.

"I think that there was a period of time when the Romney campaign was falling apart, people were not optimistic, nobody thought there was a chance of victory and I felt that it was my duty at that point to go out and say what I said."

-- Dick Morris, in an interview on Fox News, explaining why he predicted a landslide for Mitt Romney in the presidential election.

On a related note, I'm not much for public shaming, but this tumblr, Pundit Shaming is on its way to becoming a valuable archive of just how wrong all the pundits were. Not that they'll ever suffer for it, or feel ashamed, as long as they keep collecting the big paychecks.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Republicans flip on immigration

Well, they didn't do so well on reading the tea leaves before the election, but the GOP is suddenly embracing the reality of the maths after seeing how badly they fared with the Hispanic vote. At least some of them are. Thinking this will be the hill where their personal civil war is decided. Won't be easy for the 27% of their core base to learn to love the all new and inclusive Republican party. Not that I believe for a minute the new believers will mean a single word of what they will eventually say, but this conservative leader sees the GOP's future:

American Conservative Union President Al Cardenas said the fight was necessary, both politically and for good policy.

“There will be a number of outspoken people on the subject but they have to have a plan of their own, conservatives cannot advocate the status quo, it's indefensible,” he said. “For conservatives to say they're not for comprehensive immigration reform is unsustainable.”

They clearly assume no one will remember they also said they were all about jobs, jobs, jobs in 2010 and then didn't do a thing to help create any. Or that they once named a bill that allowed air pollution to increase, "Clear Skies." (Well, okay, I may be the only one that remembers that). But the point is, the GOP has long succeeded by fostering fear and hate of "the other" and creating meaningless slogans that telegraphed exactly the opposite of what they actually planned to do.

It appears they believe their base and the electorate in general are too stupid or too gullible to ever smarten up and catch on to their smoke and mirrors strategy. This past election suggests that strategy is becoming less effective and one hopes will utterly fail in the years to come as the next, more politically savvy generations come into power.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Screw the vote

As it always the case, whatever GOPers are obsessing about, it's because they're doing it themselves. Saw on the twitter that Fox Spews is making a big deal about some black guy opening doors at the polls for old white ladies. Implication being Black Panther intimidation. Which is, of course, a lie.

In real life it's the Tea Party cons planning on intimidating black voters. An investigation has been requested:

"We have seen their list and it strongly suggests that the Pennsylvania Republican Party is coordinating with the Pittsburgh Tea Party to target African American voters for intimidation at the polls," said Nicole Berner, SEIU Associate General Counsel. "The Pennsylvania Republican Party has serious questions to answer about where they are putting their poll watchers and why."

Meanwhile, in Ohio, Republican observers forged signatures to illegally gain access to the polls.

Yesterday we reported that True the Vote was attempting to place observers at precincts in Central Ohio, focusing on African American districts. We also noted that there might be some problems with the forms they submitted to the Franklin County Board of Elections (FCBOE).

The FCBOE met today and determined that True the Vote had likely falsified the forms submitted for general election observers. The new observer forms, filed over the past few days by True the Vote representative (and Hilliard Tea Party Member) Jan Loar, used candidate signatures copied from a previous set of forms filed in early October.

All but one of the six candidates whose names appeared on the original form had withdrawn permission to use their signatures prior to the submission of today’s forms. During the BOE meeting Candidate Terri Jamison spoke up to say her name was “forged” on the latest round of forms.

And actual ballot fraud, yep, GOPers are the ones commiting that too. Got your GOPer trying to vote twice in two different polling places. And then there's your Republican elections workers altering already cast ballots in Oregon.

Not wonder they don't care that Romney has lied his face off for the last six years. Their "Christian values" apparently allow for lying and cheating as long as it helps them win.

The Romnopoly game

Thanks to someone at Balloon Juice for posting the best pro-Obama ad of the entire season.



Really well done. This should be on TV.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

You know who else used to photoshop his photo ops?

No sillies, not Hitler. Well, maybe he did, Leni was a great propagandist, but you will recall the many instances of Bush era photoshopping from the toppling of Saddam's statue to the crowds at Georgie's speeches.

Not for nothing, has Romney hired nearly every Bushie apparatchik. They come in very handy when one needs to fake the attendance at a Romney rally. Gotta keep the myth of Mittster's phony momentum going somehow.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Gloria Allred springs October surprise

Until the court agrees to unseal the records, this falls under juicy gossip only, but if it plays out it would be a bombshell. Because if Romney lied under oath to help a friend screw over his wife during a bitter divorce, that's a serious crime.

Mitt Romney LIED under oath when he testified in the divorce of his good friend and screwed the friend's wife out of a lot of money in the process ... so claims the ex-wife of Staples' founder Tom Stemberg.

Multiple sources connected with the divorce tell TMZ ... during Tom's uber nasty divorce case with ex-wife Maureen, Mitt Romney gave a deposition and testified during the trial that Staples was worth virtually nothing. Romney testified that the company was worth very little and Tom was a dreamer and "the dream continues."

Here's the tell that gives it credibility:

Partly as a result of Romney's testimony, Maureen got relatively little in the divorce, but we're told just weeks after the divorce ended, Romney and Tom went to Goldman Sachs and cashed in THEIR stock for a fortune. Short story -- Romney allegedly lied to help his friend and screw the friend's wife over.

And it gets uglier. In shades of Newt Gingrich the ex-wife "suffered from MS and had multiple bouts with cancer." Romney's BFF Tom Stemberg cancelled her health insurance, left her homeless and in severe financial distress. One might call such vile heartlessness the Vulture Capitalist Code, so beloved by conservatives across our country.

Time is short, so who knows if this will play out in time to make a difference but Gloria Allred was in court with the ex-Mrs. Stemberg and various newspapers have petitioned the courts to release the records. It would be really good if the truth came out before millions of Americans make the same horrible mistake as they did in 2004.

Mitt's many binders of women

[graphic via]

By now you're aware the seminal moment of the debate was Mitt's bizarre response to a question about equal pay for women. And of course, binders of women became an instant meme. Within minutes, there was a facebook page with 142K likes, a tumblr page and the phrase was trending on the twitter. But the hiliarity shouldn't obscure the larger issues.

To the shock of no one, Mitt lied in his personal anecdote about how he was so very concerned that no women had applied for a job with his cabinet after he was elected governor that he immediately sent forth his menfolk to scour the land and assemble said binders of women. In fact, MassGAP, a bipartisan group had approached all the candidates before the election and asked them to commit to hiring more women. Mitt agreed to sign on, (why not, he'll do anything for a vote) and the group did vet and assemble a list of candidates. In other words, the group did all the work and Mitt took credit for it last night.

To be fair Mitt did hire “roughly two or three” of the suggested MassGAP candidates. (No, I don't know what "roughly" is supposed to mean either.) But the part about Mitt not having any candidates of his own, was another Romney lie. He hired "around" ten women total. The others were off his own list.

And why was Mendacious Mitt so interested in hiring women in the first place, when the Mormon tradition suggests a woman's place in the home and she shouldn't pursue a career once she has a family. Well, I think Matt Bors may have the answer:

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Honesty as fascism

Daniel Henninger at WSJ apparently suffering from some sort of dyslexia, needs some help in making his point. So let's edit his piece a bit for clarity.

The Obama Romney's campaign’s resurrection of “liar” "lying" as a political tool is odious because it has such a repellent pedigree. It dates to the sleazy world of fascist and totalitarian propaganda in the 1930s. It was part of the milieu of stooges, show trials and dupes. These were people willing to say anything to defeat their opposition. Denouncing people as liars for spewing lies was at the center of it. The idea was never to elevate political debate but to debauch it.

The purpose of calling someone a liar flat out lying about someone then was not merely to refute their ideas or arguments. It was to nullify them, to eliminate them from participation in politics.

Now, his silly post makes sense. If he was really saying the Romney campaign should be allowed to lie with impunity without ever being called on it, because demanding honesty from our leaders is fascist... well, that would be extraordinarily stupid. And I certainly wouldn't want to hurt Daniel's feelings, or make him feel nullified, by calling him a dumbass Murdoch flunky.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Nut doesn't fall far from the tree

Like father, like son. Josh Romney is proud to be known as a life-long compulsive liar:

"I don't know if you guys saw the debate last week," Josh Romney said, as the crowd cheered and applauded. "I take a lot of pride in that, because — I don't know if you noticed, but I was — me and my brothers were responsible for my dad doing so well. We were the ones, as kids, that kept saying the same thing over and over. And we'd say the same lie over and over. And my dad learned then, not to believe it. While we didn't go to any of the formal debate preparation, we did the real hard stuff.

"So as a father, he learned how to debate an obstinate child. We had a lot of fun, we had a lot of fun watching the debate."

Apparently delighting in being mendacious bullies also runs in the family. As always, IOKIYAR. Imagine the reaction if it was Malia spewing this crap.

Lying is good politics

On some bobblehead show this morning, Newt admitted Mitt changed his tune on taxes, completely. He didn't call him a liar this time, but considering Rmoney's real tax plan still includes a huge break for the 1%, it's clearly not true. But as Newt says, it is good politics.

Most of the 60 or 70 millions viewers of that debate haven't been following along. This would have been the first, most specific claim they've heard Rmoney make. The media has been half-heartedly calling him out on it, but those viewers won't see that either. So no incentive to be truthful and we already know Mitt will throw his own sons overboard (calling them habitual liars) to save his sinking ship of fools.

More interesting is the hard core conservative purists swallowed the flip-flop whole, without a peep of complaint. Some of them at least must have noticed the straying from the required orthodoxy, but they don't care. They're too busy crowing about how their guy beat down "Nobama." Which of course accounts for the bump the Mittster saw in the polling in the immediate aftermath.

Going to take the chest pounding cons a while to realize it won't last. In the meantime, let them enjoy their newly "unskewed" polls. Wonder what the Skewing Vetter is going to say when the numbers change again. I saw he was taking credit for scaring the pollsters into accuracy yesterday with his mad vetting skillz.

Baby, baby Paul Ryan is out of time

Have to give Chris Wallace some credit here for trying to pin down Paul Ryan on the math of his secret, very serious, tax plan. But the Exalted Grand Wizard of Wonkiness can't be bothered with the details:

RYAN: It’s revenue neutral. [...]

WALLACE: But I have to point out, you haven’t given me the math.

RYAN: No, but you…well, I don’t have the time. It would take me too long to go through all of the math. But let me say it this way: you can lower tax rates by 20 percent across the board by closing loopholes and still have preferences for the middle class. For things like charitable deductions, for home purchases, for health care. So what we’re saying is, people are going to get lower tax rates.

And he's never going to have time to explain the numbers. You just wouldn't understand. Math is for wonks, not "you people." Just take his word for it.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

And the award for most craven misrepresentation of the First Amendment goes to...

The willfully obtuse Perfessor Instypundit who allegedly teaches law at some obviously negligent University that continues to employ him even though he dishes out this absolute bullshit on the internets. (No, don't click that link, I'll tell you what he said):

WHY BARACK OBAMA SHOULD RESIGN. Just for the record, this is what it looked like for a man who made a film that made the Obama Administration uncomfortable:

“Just after midnight Saturday morning, authorities descended on the Cerritos home of the man believed to be the filmmaker behind the anti-Muslim movie that has sparked protests and rioting in the Muslim world.”

When taking office, the President does not swear to create jobs. He does not swear to “grow the economy.” He does not swear to institute “fairness.” The only oath the President takes is this one:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

By sending — literally — brownshirted enforcers to engage in — literally — a midnight knock at the door of a man for the non-crime of embarrassing the President of the United States and his administration, President Obama violated that oath. You can try to pretty this up (It’s just about possible probation violations! Sure.), or make excuses or draw distinctions, but that’s what’s happened. It is a betrayal of his duties as President, and a disgrace.

Of course what the mighty deceiver Insty doesn't bother to tell his deluded fan base is Nakoula was taken in for a voluntary interview with probation officials and has not been arrested or detained. And law enforcement waited until midnight to spare him the media mob camped outside of his home. And Nakoula was subsequently released and has since disappeared.

Neither did Perfessor Deluder tell his "Army of dumbed down Davids" that:

The man, who served 21 months in prison on fraud and identity theft charges, could face more prison time if it is determined his involvement in the film was a violation of his probation, which barred him from either owning or using devices with access to the Web without prior approval from his probation officer.

In other words, this was a criminal matter where the creep's free speech was not even an issue.

Adding, I would be somewhat less disgusted by Insty's perfidy if these creepy cons raised the free speech alarm when say Code Pink is arrested for protesting. Or when YouTube took down videos created by lefties which were damaging to their own endless trumped up outrages. But they applaud those because in wingnut world free speech applies only to them. If anyone criticizes them, that's a suppression of their free speech too.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Ryan lied, journalism died

To be fair, there's a whole lot more fact checking and pushback going on in the legacy media than I expected to see, but the people who really need to know won't see it unless it's on teevee. And TPM doesn't find much fact-checking on the cable news:



As Atrios would say, journamilism at its finest. And as Greg Sargent points out -- again:

This sort of thing, by the way, is exactly what the Romney campaign is banking on: that influential reporters and news outlets will prove unable to keep up with the sheer scope and volume of falsehoods the campaign uncorks daily, or just won’t care enough to reckon with what’s actually going on here. Again, this is a test: what should media figures do when one campaign has decided that there is literally no set of boundaries it needs to follow when it comes to the veracity of the assertions that form the foundation of its whole argument?

Obviously, they all should be pushing back immediately and calling the liars out to their faces at every interview. That's the test. One the teevee media is all too likely to fail. Sadly, their failure will be all of ours if the GOP is allowed to take over the country again based on unchallenged, shameless dishonesty.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Accomplished lies

Find this rather incredible. I remember when campaign advisers would try to hide this stuff. Yet I've lived to see the day when Republicans openly flaunt their trickery. Apparently they're so sure they can manipulate the media and the base to their advantage, Team Rmoney laid out the details of their deceit:

Advisers say the campaign has no plans to pivot from its previous view that diving into details during a general-election race would be suicidal.

The Romney strategy is simple: Hammer away at Obama for proposing cuts to Medicare and promise, in vague, aspirational ways, to protect the program for future retirees — but don’t get pulled into a public discussion of the most unpopular parts of the Ryan plan.

“The nature of running a presidential campaign is that you’re communicating direction to the American people,” a Romney adviser said. “Campaigns that are about specifics, particularly in today’s environment, get tripped up.”

Not so sure Team Rmoney's confidence is misplaced. They're playing to keep the base agitated. Their lies are what the base wants to hear and believe. And dammit, they will believe them in the face of indisputable empirical evidence to the contrary. Or they will excuse them. These people cannot be moved.

So the question is, along with the various voter suppression schemes, will that be enough to let them steal the election? Thinking that will depend on the media more than ever this year. [Via Greg Sargent. Read his post.]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Mythical voter fraud debunked

I already did a longer post at Detroit News yesterday so I'm just going to archive the link to this study showing "voter fraud" is a GOP lie.

A new nationwide analysis of more than 2,000 cases of alleged election fraud over the past dozen years shows that in-person voter impersonation on Election Day, which has prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tougher voter ID laws, was virtually nonexistent.

The analysis of 2,068 reported fraud cases by News21, a Carnegie-Knight investigative reporting project, found 10 cases of alleged in-person voter impersonation since 2000. With 146 million registered voters in the United States, those represent about one for every 15 million prospective voters.

I assume I don't need to tell you the whole vote fraud lie is just a cover to steal the election via Voter ID laws. Reading the comments at my DetNews post is pretty depressing though. It shows just how firmly embedded the lies are in the hard core con psyche.

Latest estimates suggest some five million legitimate voters will be robbed of their right to vote. Which of course, is the real voter fraud. And also why this really is the most important election ever. Every single vote to counter this fraud is critically needed.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]