A Bad Word Whispered Will Echo A Hundred Miles

The post title is a Chinese proverb.

From PolitiFact.com:

In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama's ambitious plan to overhaul America's health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a "government takeover."

"Takeovers are like coups," Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. "They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom."

The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the "public option" concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.

But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn't let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.

PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen "government takeover of health care" as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats' shellacking in the November elections.

PolitiFact is an independent, non-partisan fact-checking arm of the St Petersburg Times. They branded Luntz's talking points bullshit as "an inaccurate claim." As in:

"Government takeover" conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees. But the law Congress passed, parts of which have already gone into effect, relies largely on the free market:

• Employers will continue to provide health insurance to the majority of Americans through private insurance companies.

• Contrary to the claim, more people will get private health coverage. The law sets up "exchanges" where private insurers will compete to provide coverage to people who don't have it.

• The government will not seize control of hospitals or nationalize doctors.

• The law does not include the public option, a government-run insurance plan that would have competed with private insurers.

• The law gives tax credits to people who have difficulty affording insurance, so they can buy their coverage from private providers on the exchange. But here too, the approach relies on a free market with regulations, not socialized medicine.

So congratulations, America; in 2010, you were punk'd by Frank Luntz and the Fox News/talk radio echo chamber. What will you fall for next year?

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If The Truth Hurts, Fox News Is Pain Free.

Emily Henry is the Managing Editor of the South Los Angeles Report. Jose Lara is a teacher. Fox News is a fake news organization.

Those are the facts.

Here's Ms. Henry on HuffPo:

It began with an article posted on the Fox News website -- With Revolutionaries 'Looking On,' Teachers Take Kids on a Protest Trip to Arizona -- and soon spiraled into a slugging match between the far, far left and the far, far right. Anything involving the SB 1070 law has a tendency to do that, especially when it also happens to involve teachers, students and South Central.
The Fox story implied that Santee Education Complex teacher Jose Lara had led students on a "field trip" to Arizona to protest the SB 1070 law. The set up of the piece was obviously designed to raise questions about indoctrination: should teachers air opinions in front of students, potentially encouraging them to follow suit, or simply keep their mouths shut and teach?
But Lara wasn't shocked by the content of the story. He was disturbed by the journalistic process by which it had come about.
Lara, whose staunch social justice activism is captured through his FLIP camera and distributed via a handful of social networking accounts, was not directly quoted in the article, but both his Facebook and YouTube accounts were used as sources. Being that his first encounter with the story was after its publication, the situation raised questions for Lara about the validity of journalists sourcing social networking accounts rather than actual people.
If they had spoken to him directly, Lara says, they would have realized that they were publishing a factually incorrect account of events.
Lara has composed a response to the Fox news article and the questions it raised for him about "fair and balanced" journalism:

Fox News does it again
By Jose Lara

In a recent article, Fox took another swing at immigrant rights activists, teachers, and our public school system by misreporting and misleading the public.
According to Fox, three teachers took a Los Angeles School District sponsored field trip to Arizona to protest the new law, SB 1070. However, nothing can be further from the truth. Instead of fact checking and conducting authentic journalism, Fox decided to look to YouTube and Facebook for their "fair and balanced" news report, and without establishing actual contact with the subjects of the story, published it anyway.
Here is the truth: Firstly, teachers did not take any students on a field trip. The Los Angeles Unified School District would not have approved of such a trip. Secondly, the high school student quoted in the Fox article went on the Arizona protest trip with her mother, who is also a teacher. All of Fox's sources appear to come from Facebook, YouTube and online discussion groups.
I have a few questions for Fox:
Is a journalist who gets all their information from YouTube and Facebook without fact checking really a journalist at all?
Shouldn't Fox retract this story if they know it to be false?
Who benefits from stories like this?
Perhaps Fox News does not intend to produce authentic journalism, but yellow journalism instead. That is to say that Fox uses eye-catching headlines and over-sensationalized stories with little to no authentic research in order to gain ratings.
And, unfortunately, it is a successful method of attracting eyeballs. It also increases hate and division among people. The Fox News message board is filled with hateful rants - comments such as "Deport them all now", "Bring it on beano", and "America is being invaded!!!!" Fox fuels the fire by attempting to pass off opinion pieces as authentic journalism.

Maddow To Beck: "Back Off."

Hypocrisy In Da House!

More hypocrisy here.

Mark's Man.

In news from around the world of sports, baseball's first blind manager claimed to be among the only people on Earth unaware that Mark McGwire was juicing.

From ESPN:

In an interview with ESPN's "Baseball Tonight," (Cards manager Tony) La Russa said he didn't know McGwire had used steroids until the slugger admitted using performance-enhancing drugs in the phone call to the manager earlier Monday.

"He found out this morning," McGwire told (Bob) Costas of La Russa. "He's like talking to my dad. I've let a lot of people down."

In other news, Jose Canesco was last seen on his iPhone, laughing hysterically while pitching a sequel to his book publisher.

Rudy Lies; Stephanopoulos Swallows.

Snakeoil Salesman.

Take a look at a spokesjerk in action:

Dancing With Myself: Limbaugh Caught In Another Lie.

File under: "I'm a liar, and I'll lie about why I'm not."

Yet another example of deranged, circular logic from a dim bulb selling himself as a bright, shining light.

There Is No Such Thing As 'Truth In Advertising' On Fox News.

We all know that Fox News is bullshit and not news at all. But I've never been much of a Rick Sanchez fan, either. Still, he does call a liar a liar here, and the last minute-and-a-half is actually pretty good:

Glenn Beck: "I Think It's The University Of--I Don't Remember Which University It Is..."

Total made-up bullshit from FOXed-up News.

Again.

Who's Lying Now?

Lots of lying from the fringe about the size of yesterday's Rally of the Misinformed in Washington.

From Salon.com:

"You have redefined gridlock in Washington, D.C.," Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., told the crowd gathered in front of the Capitol on Saturday for a rally that was part Tea Party and part Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project. The reference was to the highways around the nation's capital, which Blackburn said she'd heard had been closed due to the 1.5 million people who'd come out for the demonstration.

Crowd size estimates like the one Blackburn gave were flying around all day on Saturday. Some said they heard 1.2 million, others 1.6 million; conservative blogger Michelle Malkin said in one post that ABC News had estimated the attendance at 2 million.

Malkin was wrong -- ABC had never reported anything like that. In her own way, Blackburn was wrong, too. So were all the others. They weren't even in the ballpark, which most news outlets estimated in the tens of thousands and D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services said, unofficially, was somewhere between 60,000 and 75,000 people.

That first screenshot above is of ABC News' Yunji di Nies' Twitter page, in which she refutes the eternally-shrieking Malkin's bogus claims.

The second is from D.C.'s Fire and Emergency Medical Services.

And the third is from Malkin's own blog, where she blames her lies on event organizers and Astroturf-masters Freedomworks.

(As usual, nice "fact-checking," Ms. Goebbels.)

If you're looking for truth and accuracy from Michelle Malkin or her fellow propagandists, look someplace else.

The Jackals Among Us.

Pathetic. Repulsive. Hateful. Ripe for ridicule.

"Free speech" doesn't mean shrug-shouldered acceptance of mass idiocy. It just means there is a right to lie and/or rock your zombie stupidity in public.

After you've finished laughing at the teabaggers, exercise your exact same right and spread some truth.

(H/T: HuffPo for the pics.)

Don't Believe The Hype.

More trickery from conservatives opposed to health care reform...

From ThinkProgess:

Earlier this year, Conservatives for Patients Rights (CPR), an anti-health care reform group led by the disgraced former CEO of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Rick Scott, began running a commercial attacking the British health care system. The TV ad runs through “tragic stories” of British citizens who it portrays as being against government-run health care such as the National Health Service (NHS). Watch it:

Now, the Daily Mail is reporting that two of the women featured in the commercial say they were “duped” into appearing in CPR’s ad campaign:

Furious Kate Spall and Katie Brickell claim that their views on the NHS have been misrepresented by a free market campaign group opposed to Mr Obama’s reforms in a bid to discredit the UK system. [...]

Ms Spall and Ms Brickell both agreed to appear in a documentary on healthcare reform. But neither knew that the footage would be used as part of a TV advertising campaign carried on US networks.

The Daily Mail article goes on to note that both Spall and Brickell actually support government-run health care and were advocating for reforms within the NHS, not for its abolition.

CPR’s ad campaign is one of many misleading attacks being used by American conservatives against the United Kingdom’s single-payer health care system, which is so popular that even Conservative Party politicians unambiguously endorse it.

The right-wing Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) ran an editorial recently claiming that physicist Stephen Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance” in the UK because the NHS does not offer proper care to the elderly, prompting Hawking to remind IBD that he both lives in Britain and that without the NHS’s “high quality of treatment,” he “wouldn’t be alive today.”

Fed up with the deceptive attacks against their health care system from the American right, British citizens have started the “We love the NHS campaign” on Twitter, which has become one of the top trending topics on the service, with even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown taking part.

Hannity Parrots Boehner's Bull.

Typically, FOX News's GOP waterboy Sean Hannity didn't bother to check the facts. Of course, "facts" are listed in the FOX News employee handbook as being against company policy.

As Media Matters points out:

A June 23 Roll Call article uncritically quoted House Minority Leader John Boehner's claim, "Today the President again claimed that the Democrats' government takeover of health care would not force Americans off of their current plans, yet independent analysts have reported that at least 23 million Americans would lose their coverage under the bill drafted by Senate Democrats." Boehner has repeatedly cited that figure, attributing it to the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of draft legislation from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP). In fact, the CBO calculated that with respect to that bill, in 2017, approximately 10 million individuals "who would be covered through an employer's plan under current law would not have access to that coverage under the draft legislation because some employers would choose not to offer it." But those individuals would not be left without health insurance, as Boehner suggested; the CBO stated that under the draft HELP bill that CBO analyzed -- which did not include a public option -- these individuals would have purchased private insurance offered through the government-regulated exchanges set up by the legislation.

The "at least 23 million Americans" figure Boehner used actually refers to the number of Americans currently covered under employer-provided, individual, or government-provided health insurance that the CBO determined would be covered in 2017 through the bill's insurance exchanges.

The rest is here. E-mail it to Sean.