Fact Check: Enough of the GOP Medicare BS

The new lie from the Romney camp and its hatchet men is that the Affordable Care Act cuts $716 billion from Medicare. Mitt Romney himself says that President Obama "stole $716 billion from Medicare to fund Obamacare" and that current seniors are seeing a reduction in their benefits and their service. All of it is absolute horse shit.

And thank you, Soledad O'Brien for giving us a concise look at the facts.

 


This has to be shouted from the mountaintops. I don't give a shit that Paul Ryan's plan which Mitt Romney embraces, cuts the same amount of money out of the Medicare program. This is a bad argument for the mere fact that it'll get convoluted in a "both sides are the same" meme.

The argument is that ACA reduces Medicare increases by $716 billion over 10 years by reducing payments and streamlining the system and pumps that savings back into the healthcare system. Romney and Ryan would have that $716 billion come from the pockets of those who can least afford it, namely seniors on a fixed income, by restructuring Medicare into a voucher system that will never keep up with the rising cost of healthcare, especially if they plan on "repealing ALL of Obamacare" as Romney continues to threat.

And here's a great catch from Bob Cesca on the latest Romney ad flat out lying about the CBO report that I didn't catch the first time I saw it:

...the CBO’s director Doug Elmendorf wrote that if the House Republicans repeal the Affordable Care Act, the repeal would increase federal spending on Medicare by $716 billion. There’s nothing about cutting Medicare in there. NOTHING. Romney and his campaign are lying. Again. And they’ll keep on doing it.

(Cross-posted on ABLC)

The Big Gas Lie

Last week, I received an email from House Republicans. I guess I'm on their list, or someone being a wise guy put me on their list. But no matter - I love seeing the latest shit that comes out of their ass and their attempt to pass it as some kind of idea.

The email was hitting all talking points of the most recent attack on President Obama in blaming him for the current gas prices. Here's the chart they included:



Perhaps they should have included a wider timeline range... like this:



You see that big peak in June of 2008 when gas prices were $4.12 per gallon just before that precipitous decline? Can anyone remind me who was President in June of 2008? Oh, right! It was George W. Bush. Was he to blame for to blame for that? No. Just as President Obama isn't to blame for current prices. And the reason for the nose dive to $1.61 by December of 2008, just one month before President Obama took office was the huge recession that we are still recovering from these three and a half years later.

But that doesn't stop the GOP from trying to tie high gas prices to Obama administration policies. Hell, that's all they really have, isn't it? They scream about Keystone XL even though any oil from that project would go on to the global market. We are in our 24th straight month of private sector job growth, unemployment is down to 8.3% from a high of 10% in October of 2009 and more people are now encouraged to enter the job market which is why the unemployment rate remained steady.

So if they can't attack Obama on the economy, and they can't attack the man who gave the go ahead to take out Osama bin Laden as being weak on terrorism, and their attacks on the contraception battle are backfiring, what can they attack him with? Something he can't do much about: the price of a gallon of gas. Even though the fact is that no presidential or congressional policies can do much to affect the cost of gas.

What is driving up the price of gas is global oil prices,  Wall Street speculation, Middle East unrest (I'm looking at you Iran and Israel.)

But that doesn't stop Newt Gingrich's from bellowing that he can give us gas for $2.50 a gallon while we are headed for $10 per gallon at the current rate because of that meddling President Obama. Gingrich is lying. Plain and simple. Not that it matters. Anti-Obama factions will believe what they want to believe. They'll even believe a thrice married, twice adulterer, disgraced former Speaker of the House who was run out of town on ethics violations. But I never claimed those people were smart.

Let's Get This Straight

POSTED BY JHW22

I just hit my limit of hearing jackasses talk about Sandra Fluke's Congressional testimony on contraception and getting it WRONG. Tony Perkins was on Martin Bashir and said that, although he wouldn't want his daughter insulted, his daughter would never go before Congress to talking about "sexual promiscuity".

THAT DID IT! I am about as pissed as I can be.

It's painfully clear Mr. Perkins didn't hear or read Ms. Fluke's testimony or he'd know that the only mention of contraception for sex was about a married couple who couldn't afford birth control any longer. It's painfully clear he takes his cues from Limbaugh and the right-wing talking heads on the value of LYING.
But what REALLY sent me into shaking, screaming, rising blood pressure mode was the next topic of discussion: transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking access to their legal rights. He said that transvaginal ultrasounds are important for sharing FACTS with women.

Well, I suggest Mr. Perkins begin by educating himself on facts by reading and watching Ms. Fluke's testimony before he goes on air again to distort and further insult Ms. Fluke by making her out to be someone she's not. Yes, Mr. Perkins, facts are important. GET SOME! Perhaps you can help me educate Mr. Perkins by Tweeting him with facts @tperkins

Leader Pelosi, members of Congress, good morning, and thank you for calling this hearing on women's health and for allowing me to testify on behalf of the women who will benefit from the Affordable Care Act contraceptive coverage regulation.

My name is Sandra Fluke, and I'm a third-year student at Georgetown Law School. I'm also a past president of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice, or LSRJ. And I'd like to acknowledge my fellow LSRJ members and allies, and all of the student activists with us, and thank them so much for being here today.

We, as Georgetown LSRJ, are here today because we're so grateful that this regulation implements the nonpartisan medical advice of the Institute of Medicine. I attend a Jesuit law school that does not provide contraceptive coverage in its student health plan. And just as we students have faced financial, emotional and medical burdens as a result, employees at religiously affiliated hospitals and institutions and universities across the country have suffered similar burdens. We are all grateful for the new regulation that will meet the critical health care needs of so many women. Simultaneously, the recently announced adjustment addresses any potential conflict with the religious identity of Catholic and Jesuit institutions.

When I look around my campus, I see the faces of the women affected by this lack of contraceptive coverage. And especially in the last week, I have heard more and more of their stories. On a daily basis, I hear from yet another woman from Georgetown or from another school or who works for a religiously affiliated employer, and they tell me that they have suffered financially, emotionally and medically, because of this lack of coverage. And so I'm here today to share their voices, and I want to thank you for allowing them -- them, not me -- to be heard.

Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that's practically an entire summer's salary. Forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they've struggled financially as a result of this policy.

One told us of how embarrassed and just powerless she felt when she was standing at the pharmacy counter and learned for the first time that contraception was not covered on her insurance, and she had to turn and walk away because she couldn't afford that prescription. Women like her have no choice but to go without contraception.

Just last week, a married female student told me that she had to stop using contraception because she and her husband just couldn't fit it into their budget any more. Women employed in low-wage jobs without contraceptive coverage face this same choice.

And some might respond that contraception is accessible in lots of other ways. Unfortunately, that's just not true. Women's health clinics provide a vital medical service, but, as the Guttmacher Institute has definitively documented, these clinics are unable to meet the crushing demand for these services. Clinics are closing, and women are being forced to go without the medical care they need.

How can Congress consider the Fortenberry, Rubio and Blunt legislation, that would allow even more employers and institutions to refuse contraception coverage, and then respond that the nonprofit clinics should step up to take care of the resulting medical crisis; particularly when so many legislators are attempting to defund those very same clinics?

These denials of contraceptive coverage impact real people. In the worst cases, women who need this medication for other medical reasons suffer very dire consequences. A friend of mine, for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome, and she has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by Georgetown's insurance, because it's not intended to prevent pregnancy. Unfortunately, under many religious institutions' insurance plans, it wouldn't be. There would be no exception for other medical needs. And under Senator Blunt's amendment, Senator Rubio's bill or Representative Fortenberry's bill, there's no requirement that such an exception be made for these medical needs.

When this exception does exist, these exceptions don't accomplish their well-intended goals, because when you let university administrators or other employers, rather than women and their doctors, dictate whose medical needs are legitimate and whose are not, a woman's health takes a backseat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body. In 65 percent of the cases at our school, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed prescriptions and whether they were lying about their symptoms. For my friend, and 20 percent of the women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription. Despite verification of her illness from her doctor, her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted birth control to prevent pregnancy. She's gay -- so clearly, polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy for her.

After months of paying over $100 out of pocket, she just couldn't afford her medication anymore, and she had to stop taking it. I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that, in the middle of the night in her final-exam period, she'd been in the emergency room. She'd been there all night in just terrible, excruciating pain. She wrote to me: "It was so painful I woke up thinking I'd been shot." Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary as a result. On the morning I was originally scheduled to give this testimony, she was sitting in a doctor's office trying to cope with the consequences of this medical catastrophe.

Since last year's surgery, she's been experiencing night sweats and awaking and other symptoms of early menopause as a result of the removal of her ovary. She's 32 years old. As she put it: If my body indeed does enter early menopause, no fertility specialist in the world will be able to help me have my own children. I will have no choice at giving my mother her desperately desired grandbabies, simply because the insurance policy -- that I paid for, totally unsubsidized by my school -- wouldn't cover my prescription for birth control when I needed it. Now, in addition to potentially facing the health complications that come with having menopause at such an early age -- increased risk of cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis -- she may never be able to conceive a child.

Some may say that my friend's tragic story is rare. It's not. I wish it were. One woman told us doctors believe she has endometriosis, but that can't be proven without surgery. So the insurance has not been willing to cover her medication, the contraception she needs to treat her endometriosis. Recently, another woman told me that she also has polycystic ovarian syndrome, and she's struggling to pay for her medication and is terrified not to have access to it. Due to the barriers erected by Georgetown's policy, she hasn't been reimbursed for her medication since last August. I sincerely pray that we don't have to wait until she loses an ovary or is diagnosed with cancer before her needs and the needs of all of these women are taken seriously, because this is the message that not requiring coverage of contraception sends: A woman's reproductive health care isn't a necessity, isn't a priority.

One woman told us that she knew birth control wasn't covered on the insurance, and she assumed that that's how Georgetown's insurance handled all of women's reproductive and sexual health care. So when she was raped, she didn't go to the doctor, even to be examined or tested for sexually transmitted infections, because she thought insurance wasn't going to cover something like that, something that was related to a woman's reproductive health.

As one other student put it, this policy communicates to female students that our school doesn't understand our needs. These are not feelings that male fellow students experience, and they're not burdens that male students must shoulder.

In the media lately, some conservative Catholic organizations have been asking, what did we expect when we enrolled at a Catholic school? We can only answer that we expected women to be treated equally, to not have our school create untenable burdens that impede our academic success. We expected that our schools would live up the Jesuit creed of "cura personalis," to care for the whole person by meeting all of our medical needs. We expected that when we told our universities of the problems this policy created for us as students, they would help us. We expected that when 94 percent of students opposed the policy, the university would respect our choices regarding insurance students pay for completely unsubsidized by the university.

We did not expect that women would be told in the national media that we should have gone to school elsewhere and -- even if that meant going to a less prestigious university. We refuse to pick between a quality education and our health, and we resent that in the 21st century anyone thinks it's acceptable to ask us to make this choice simply because we are women.

Many of the women whose stories I've shared today are Catholic women. So ours is not a war against the church. It is a struggle for access to the health care we need. The president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges has shared that Jesuit colleges and universities appreciate the modification to the rule announced recently. Religious concerns are addressed, and women get the health care they need. And I sincerely hope that that is something we can all agree upon.

Thank you very much.

A "Government Takeover" It Is NOT

A few days ago, a couple of my colleagues asked me what I thought about the Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare). Both of these colleagues are what I consider to be liberal to progressive Democrats and what they ultimately were questioning was where I stood in the government mandating that everyone buy health insurance from a private entity.

I believe they had no problem adding some coin to the coffers for a health care plan we could all enjoy, but I had the sense that they were kinda pissed about the fact that we'd still be purchasing said health insurance from private corporations. Wasn't this some kind of ethical breech of liberal conduct? Don't we hate corporations and why are we lining their pockets?

After explaining my position (it's a good first step in the right direction), we all nodded and went our separate ways. So imagine my surprise when about 10 days later I was perusing through my Twitter feed and found someone mentioning PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" for 2010 was this:

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.

Now, the person tweeting this probably wasn't aware they were tweeting last year's Lie of the Year, but it's worth a second look and it goes to show you how this discussion hasn't faded away. Everyone, both on the left and the right, especially with the clown car full of GOP presidential nominees who are vowing to "repeal Obamacare on Day One," are still discussing this issue.

Now, Mitt Romney may want to repeal a health care law that is based on his own Massachusetts health care law (including the mandate to purchase insurance), but if he were ever to be in that position, and for the good of the country I hope not, he'd have to have a complicit Congress to revote and reject ACA. You can't just declare a law null and void because you don't like it - and the fact that ACA has helped millions of people who weren't eligible for insurance previously due to preexisting conditions will make it difficult for members of Congress to deny that new privilege to their constituents.

So sure, this first step towards a country where health care can be available to all Americans may not be exactly what progressives wanted, but know that it's not a final step. Just as Social Security's first round excluded farmers for example, ACA will need to be tweaked over the coming years to make it fairer and more affordable. It will happen, but it will take time. Rome wasn't built in a day. But no, thank you Frank Luntz. A "government takeover" it's not. If only that were true, we actually might be better off.

VERY LARGE Pants On Fire

Via PolitiFact:

...Having endorsed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, [New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie has been addressing what he considers illegitimate comparisons between Romney’s health care reform in Massachusetts and the national health care reform led by President Barack Obama...

"...ninety-three percent of the people in Massachusetts had private insurance then and have private insurance now. That’s not what’s gonna happen under Obamacare. It’s gonna be a government takeover of health care."

PolitiFact previously addressed the "government takeover of healthcare" talking point as its 2010 Lie of the Year.

Romney's Bullshit Talking Point

For the last few days, whenever I've caught Mitt Romney on the television machine he's inevitably saying this:

“Barack Obama has failed America. He didn’t create the recession, but he made it worse and longer. And now we have more chronic long-term employment than this country has ever seen before.”

Really, Mitt? More chronic than the Great Depression? Please show me the bread lines.

Now any legitimate economist, or normal adult for that matter, will explain to you that Mitt Romney is full of shit.

Moody's economist Mark Zandi says the stimulus helped:

If government had not reacted as aggressively or as quickly as it did, the financial system would still be unsettled, the economy would still be shrinking, and the cost to U.S. taxpayers would be vastly higher. In sum, the government’s unprecedented response stabilized the financial system and ended the recession...

...Setting the record straight on the stimulus question is important because it will shape the current debate about how government should manage the still-fragile economic recovery. Last month (July, 2010), partly because of the misconception that the stimulus didn’t work, Congress was barely able to muster enough votes to pass another extension of emergency unemployment benefits. Not doing so would have been a serious error, putting the recovery in jeopardy.

Calvin Woodward and Jim Kuhnhenn of AP also fact checked Romney's recession claims:

THE FACTS: The gross domestic product, the prime measure of economic strength, shrank by a severe 6.8 percent annual rate before Obama became president. The declines eased after he took office and economic growth, however modest, resumed. The recession officially ended six months into his presidency. Unemployment, however, has worsened under Obama, going from 7.8 percent in January 2009 to 9.1 percent last month. It hit 10.1 percent in October 2009.

A case can be made for and against the idea that Obama's policies made the economy worse than it needed to be and that the recession lasted longer than it might have under another president. Such arguments are at the core of political debate. But Obama did not, as Romney alleged, make the economy worse than it was when he took office.

Now call me crazy, but isn't the mainstream media supposed to know these facts? And yet, I didn't hear CNN moderator John King questioning Romney on his debunked talking points in the GOP debate last night. He was too busy playing "Obamneycare Gotcha" with Tim Pawlenty.

Socialist Sarah?!

This weekend, Sarah Palin, who not four months ago said Canada should switch to a privatized health care system, admitted in a Calgary speech that she and her family would "hustle" over the border into Canada to take advantage of their government health care.

"We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada. And I think now, isn't that ironic?"

What's ironic is her use of the word "hustle." She certainly knows about that, doesn't she? I suppose she forgot to scribble not to disclose that little tidbit of information on her telepalmer.

Supporting establishment politician John McCain, calling the Tea Party illegitimate and how they should choose one of the establishment parties and now this? How soon before the teabaggers jettison Socialist Sarah after realizing that she is nothing but a grifter who will do or say whatever it takes as long as it works to her advantage?

Unfortunately, the answer is "never." Palin will laugh this off like she tried to justify the GOP crib notes on her hand, actually comparing it to God using a Bic on His hand,  and all the Palin puppy dogs will lap it up.

Eve Harrington had nothing on this opportunistic sociopath.

More Health Care Bogeymen

I have a question: if this health care reform bill is really so horrible that practically every GOP member is against it, then why not debate what you're against and make it better, instead of making shit up to freak out your lunatic base?

Why doesn't House Minority Leader John Boehner judge the bill on the merits of what's actually in the bill instead of using the old, reliable abortion wedge issue and feel the need to make shit up about a "monthly abortion premium" being charged of all enrollees in the government-run health plan?

Unless he's seriously that stupid and doesn't understand what he's reading, if he's actually reading anything in the bill other than page numbers so he can complain about how long it is, how is it that scumbags like Boehner and his ilk feel it is completely legitimate to mislead the people that voted them into office with lies and smears?

Framing the Debate: Why Does the GOP Hate the Middle Class?

We find ourselves in the middle of an economic crossroads, arguably the hardest financial crisis the country has had to face since its founding. 3.6 million jobs have been lost since December 2007 and half of those were in the last three months alone, which means the problem is accelerating. Basically, we are facing another Great Depression if nothing is done to try and stem the tide.

And yet for the last three weeks, while debating an economic recovery bill that will attempt to create jobs, give tax breaks to middle and lower income workers and try to kick start the economy with some consumer spending, there has been nothing but resistance from the Republican Party. I really don't understand that. Are the Republican leaders in Washington so isolated that they think doing nothing and letting this economic storm run its course is the way to go? Are they so obtuse that they think corporate tax cuts, the same type of cuts that we experienced for the last eight years, are the solution to losing 600,000 jobs a month?

For all those three weeks, I personally heard nothing from GOP leaders except whining and moaning about how much this bill was going to cost our children and our grandchildren. I heard about how it was so full of pork, it wasn't really a stimulus bill. I heard about how the real way to get the economy going again was a round of tax cuts for businesses one minute and then crying that there were too many giveaways for the "corporate high rollers" the next, thank you very much, Senator John "The Fundamentals of Our Economy Are Still Strong" McCain.

And the news outlets and cable news talking heads and pundits were all too eager to frame the narrative in the same fashion, repeating GOP talking points about money for "grass on the National mall" and criticizing Medicaid family planning money as "$200 million for contraception." And after all the grousing, and President Obama acquiescing because he knew that the sooner we could get this bill passed, the sooner we could make our way back on the road to economic recovery and the better off we would all be, he still got absolutely zero support from his supposedly distinguished colleagues across the aisle.

Well, the bill passed anyway and out of all the Republican members of Congress, the bill only received three Republican votes. Three. So now it is our turn to frame the narrative. Every Democratic Congressman and Senator should be shouting this from the mountaintops:

The GOP just voted against the biggest middle class tax cuts in history!

Why does the Republican Party hate the middle class? Why are cuts for businesses and the wealthiest Americans not a problem for the GOP to vote for, but they can't bear the thought of giving a break to middle and lower income earners, the people who need it most? Keep repeating until it becomes second nature and you say it in your sleep. It's time to take over the narrative.

(H/T Bob Cesca)

Adding...

And I'm tired of hearing wingnuts complain that there wasn't time to read the bill that was written behind closed doors. Are you telling me that Senators and Congressmen don't have enough interns or staff to take the 400 or so pages that were amended and break it down into 40 page sections to get through it in an hour? They wasted their time on the news outlets crying and moaning about the "spending" in a stimulus bill instead of reading the fucking thing. They certainly seem to have time to make up lies about what's in the bill or sling mud at the Speaker of the House. Studying field mice? A Pelosi vacation trip to Europe?

Stop wasting time making shit up and start using your time constructively and do some fucking work. Sorry, I'm not going to take the "no time to read the bill" crap as an excuse when they have plenty of time to make shit up out of whole cloth, and can spare a staffer to run to the pet store for a furry cat toy play mouse to use as a prop on the House floor.

These rats are circling the drain. Next stop: November 2010.

Time For Offense...

... from the Obama camp. The Rude One makes a great point in his post yesterday about McCain's heinous "sex" ad and that it's time to pull the ol' switcharoo on McCain.

... dear Obama campaign, you have to use the word "lie." You wanna make an ad about the Bridge to Nowhere? Call McCain and Palin's assertions "lies." People don't give a fuck about "exaggerations" or "misleading statements." That's lawyer talk.

... You want the best route? Here it is: emasculate John McCain. Use Palin to cut his nuts off. Constantly say shit like, "Am I running against John McCain or Sarah Palin?" or "If the Republicans wanted her to be president, they should have nominated her" or "Maybe Republicans are used to a vice president that runs the show" or whatever. Make McCain have to defend himself. Turn him into Palin's bitch. It'll make him insane. And if there's one thing that Republicans hate most about women, it's the perception of the castrating bitch telling men what to do (see all the shit about Hillary Clinton).

I'm all for it. How about you?

[Updated 4:55pm to add pic]

Quote of the Day

Former senator Bill Bradley, a leading supporter of Obama and who ran for president in 2000, accused the Clintons of "lying" in pursuit of victory.

"The bigger the lie, the better the chance they think they've got. That's been their whole approach," he said. "She's going to lose a whole generation of people who got involved in politics believing it could be something different."

T Minus 367/366 Days

From the calendar: "The night before Bush's first inauguration, members of Clinton's staff reportedly removed the "W" key from White House keyboards in protest of his election."

Kinda pisses me off that they couldn't find a quote for this day, he's had so goddamn many gaffes, but because so many people still believe the vandalism story to be true, let's research this, shall we?

ARI FLEISCHER PURPOSELY DECEIVED HIS PRESS COLLEAGUES RE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE BEHAVIOR

"NOT LONG after George W. Bush was sworn in as president, many were aghast to read in newspapers and hear on television that in the final days of the Clinton administration, employees had trashed the White House. Democrats were embarrassed, and Republicans, stroking their wallets, gloated that they knew all along the Clintons were hillbillies. The story began as a gossip item in The Washington Post that the letter ''W,'' Bush's middle initial, had been removed from keyboards, and within days it had mushroomed to a scandal reported prominently on TV and the front page of the Post. The details were startling: Walls had been desecrated with obscene graffiti, file cabinets glued shut, telephone wires cut, presidential seals steamed off doors and pornography left on fax machines. So extensive was the damage that a communications worker was said to have been reduced to tears and a national magazine hinted that the White House was spending $10,000 a day to repair phone systems damaged by departing Democrats. Talk-show hosts from the nutty right, like Jay Severin in Boston and his audience of dumb and dumbest, all congratulated themselves on having been proved right that the Clintons were trailer-park trash.

"And what of the Globe? At a time when Bush aides were privately promoting the story, Anne E. Kornblut of the Globe's Washington Bureau was filing stories that were skeptical. For example, at a briefing Jan. 25, Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer deceptively encouraged reporters' suspicions while refusing to confirm or deny reports of damage. The next day, in a 620-word account, Kornblut wrote: ''No public evidence exists that Clinton and Gore staff members vandalized the White House or Old Executive Office Building.'' For that statement, she was denounced by some for political bias and for not reporting in greater detail what one reader said was further evidence that under Clinton, America had seen the greatest moral decay since the founding of the nation. ''Kornblut either knows the truth and she wrote a blatantly dishonest, biased story,'' wrote Lee Vincent of Groton, Conn., ''or she is incompetent or inexcusably clueless about a widely known set of facts.'' Now, three months later, buried in the national briefs column in the Globe a few days ago was an AP story four sentences long that said an investigation by the General Accounting Office found no evidence of vandalism, no evidence of wires slashed, no evidence of equipment damaged, and no evidence or anything to match the allegations.

"Knowing how difficult it is to write against the current and risk the wrath of readers, not to mention the censure of editors, I called Kornblut to congratulate her for having covered the story with temperance and, above all, for having gotten it right. 'Just basic reporting,' she said. 'What made me suspicious was the fact that the White House wouldn't give specific examples and wouldn't say, on the record, that this happened here or that happened there. I made phone calls to people who told me it just wasn't true. Also, there were no pictures, and they never seemed to be able to say on the record, in public or at a press conference, here is what happened.'" --Boston Globe, 5/28/01

The General Services Administration has found that the White House vandalism flap earlier this year was a flop. The agency concluded that departing members of the Clinton administration had not trashed the place during the presidential transition, as unidentified aides to President Bush and other critics had insisted. Responding to a request from Rep. Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican, who asked for an investigation, the GSA found that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. "The condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy," according to a GSA statement. No wholesale slashing of cords to computers, copiers and telephones, no evidence of lewd graffiti or pornographic images. GSA didn't bother to nail down reports of pranks, which were more puckish than destructive. Among those pranks was the apparent removal, by aides to former President Bill Clinton, of the "w" key from some computer keyboards and the placing of official-looking signs on doors, saying things like "Office of Strategery," after a popular "Saturday Night Live" spoof on Bush. But the vandal scandal, tales of torn up offices and items stolen from the presidential jet, was the hottest story in town during the early days of the Bush administration until White House furniture and last-minute pardons pushed it off the front page. "I think it was this calculated effort to plant a damaging story," said Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. "There was a sort of fertile ground for believing anything bad." Typical was Tony Snow, a syndicated columnist and former presidential speech writer for President Bush's father, who wrote that the White House "was a wreck." He also said that Air Force One, after taking Clinton and some aides to New York following the inauguration, "looked as if it had been stripped by a skilled band of thieves -- or perhaps wrecked by a trailer park twister." He went on to list all manner of missing items, including silverware, porcelain dishes with the presidential seal and even candy. "It makes one feel grateful that the seats and carpets are bolted down," Snow fumed. Except none of it happened. An official at Andrews Air Force Base, which maintains the presidential jets, told The Kansas City Star at the height of the controversy that nothing was missing. Bush himself acknowledged the same a few days later. And now GSA has made it official. --Kansas City Star, 5/17/01

Even back then, with the Clintons on their way out the door, these bastards had the nerve to kick them one last time, in true Rovian fashion, with lies about vandalism. And after they had handed the election on a silver platter by the Supreme Court. This is just another of many reasons why I hate these fucks. Looking at it in hindsight, it shows just how diabolical their thinking has been from the very beginning. It's not bad enough that they stole the election to begin with, they started spinning and mudslinging the very second they stepped in the White House.

The mentality on this one was, 'This has to be true. Why would anyone make up something this outrageous if they couldn't prove it?'. And they couldn't, but it didn't matter. It was the first of now hundreds of times the press became repeaters, not reporters. This was the turning point of where true journalism fell. Perhaps it was a test by then Press Secretary Fleischer to gauge the press corps he had to deal with, to see just how far he could get away with what would become the norm in the Bush White House. If they investigated, then he would know he'd have to be careful. If they just became human mimeograph machines, then all bets were off. Lie, lie, and lie became the status quo for the Bush Administration.

Olbermann: Bush State of Union Address Claims Fake Terrorist Plots

Keith Olbermann's Special Comment of January 30th claims that the State of the Union Address this past week contained a section in which Bush took credit for terrorist plots that have been thwarted. Here's the passage:

"For the terrorists, life since 9/11 has never been the same.

Our success in this war is often measured by the things that did not happen. We cannot know the full extent of the attacks that we and our allies have prevented, but here is some of what we do know: We stopped an al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast. We broke up a Southeast Asian terror cell grooming operatives for attacks inside the United States. We uncovered an al Qaeda cell developing anthrax to be used in attacks against America. And just last August, British authorities uncovered a plot to blow up passenger planes bound for America over the Atlantic Ocean. For each life saved, we owe a debt of gratitude to the brave public servants who devote their lives to finding the terrorists and stopping them."

Olbermann dissects these sentences and makes a strong case that Bush took credit for thwarted attacks that weren't threats to begin with.

Hmmm... I don't know who to believe. A journalist with a history of integrity and foresight that is rare among his "peers", or GEORGE THE LIAR. This one is tough.

Sirota: What They Said...

...And When They Said It

Great article by David Sirota writing in the San Francisco Chronicle. No one is taking responsibility. No one is being held accountable. Not the politicians, not the media, not the pundits.

Sirota: "How can we expect to change course in Iraq, if a president is given a pass to claim he has never stayed the course in the first place? How can we expect to hold lawmakers accountable if they are never questioned about their efforts to deliberately mislead us? How can we expect the media to be a watchdog if its leading analysts and news framers face no public sanctions when they disrespect the truth or give credence to fringe ideologies?

A country whose national political conversation is dominated by voices that deny their own complicity in national security tragedies; downplay human casualties, and generally make dishonesty mundane, is a nation prevented from reflecting on its bad decisions -- and thus is doomed to repeat such bad decisions in the future."