Month: September 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post fact-checks another GOPropoganda lie that started with a column written by the Washingon Post's Marc Thiessen, a former speech writer for George W. Bush. Romney and his bucket brigade:

As Romney has pursued his kitchen-sink strategy this week, he and his party have pivoted from the economy, where Obama is most vulnerable, to national security, where Obama is strongest. The outcome has been a series of dubious attacks.

On Monday, Romney tried to blame the president for scheduled defense-spending cuts put in place by the bipartisan debt deal reached last year. The idea “emanated from the White House, and it will result in the loss of thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of jobs,” he said. Evidently, Romney didn’t consider that this attack contradicted his previous claim that private-sector investment, not big government spending, creates jobs.

About the same time, the Republican National Committee and prominent Republicans such as Dick Cheney and John McCain threw another faulty bit of plumbing at Obama: that the president “does not attend his daily intelligence meeting” more than half the time, in contrast to George W. Bush, who “almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.” This claim was the work of former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, who writes a weekly online column for The Washington Post.

In reality, Obama didn’t “attend” these meetings, because there were no meetings to attend: The oral briefings had been mostly replaced by daily exchanges in which Obama reads the materials and poses written questions and comments to intelligence officials. This is how it was done in the Clinton administration, before Bush decided he would prefer to read less. Bush’s results — Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and the failure to find Osama bin Laden — suggest this was not an obvious improvement.

So it is a fiction entirely made up out of whole cloth. But the right-wing noise machine, including our own embarrassment from Arizona, Sen. John McCain, has perpetuated this GOPropganda lie.

UPDATE: Steve Benen has more, The bogus 'intelligence briefings' talking point:

The truth, as Thiessen probably realizes, isn't controversial at all. In
reality, Obama received a detailed, written intelligence briefing
yesterday, just as he does literally every day, which contained pressing
national security information. Most of the time, Obama also receives an
in-person briefing in the White House, though as Thiessen probably
realizes, many of the president's national security meetings are never put on his public schedule (Jonathan Capehart):

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

A day after the punditocracy effectively declared Willard "Mittens" Romney unfit for the presidency after he imploded his campaign by making false claims over the embassy attacks in Egypt and Libya before all the facts were even known, the fact-checkers are equally unforgiving.

FactCheck.org FactCheck: Romney gets it backward on embassy attacks:

Mitt Romney claims the Obama administration issued an "apology for
American values" after U.S. embassies were attacked. Not true. Romney
refers to a statement issued before mobs attacked either in Egypt or Libya, and faults U.S. diplomats for failing to condemn actions that hadn't yet happened.

Furthermore, the word "sorry" or "apologize" doesn't appear in the
statement. Under the headline, "U.S. Embassy Condemns Religious
Incitement," the embassy in Cairo said, "Respect for religious beliefs
is a cornerstone of American democracy."

Romney has falsely accused Obama of "apologizing for America" many
times before. The line has been a dependable applause-getter with
conservative audiences. But we found no basis for this claim in Obama's previous speeches and remarks. And other fact-checkers [Washington Post] came to similar conclusions [PolitiFact.com].

* * *

Romney got his sequence of events backward.

* * *

Romney was wrong about the statement from the embassy coming in response
to the protest. Nor do we see any basis for Romney's claim that the
embassy statement was "apologizing for free speech" and "appeared to be
an apology for American principles."

* * *

Romney's claims about the administration "apologizing for American
values" fits an ongoing theme of his campaign: accusing Obama of
beginning his presidency on an "apology tour" in foreign countries. In
fact, that meme informed the title of Romney's book "No Apology."

We looked into the Obama speeches that Romney cited
as evidence and concluded that nowhere did we see that the president
"apologized" for America. In some speeches, Obama was drawing a
distinction between his policies and those of his predecessor, George W.
Bush. In other instances, Obama appeared to be employing a bit of
diplomacy, criticizing past actions of both the U.S. and the host
nation, and calling for the two sides to move forward.

Then, as now, Romney's claim of Obama "apologies" falls flat.

by David Safier "M-a-a-a-ybe Sarah Palin?" That's what Ally Miller, running for Pima County Supervisor in District One, said, with no little excitement, when she was talking about who she would like to see as Arizona's next Senator. Ally made her endorsement during the same "Women of Courage" video where she proclaimed her involvement with … Read more

Posted by AzblueMeanie:

For a guy who professes to be an expert on the Great Depression, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke really manages to piss me off with his cowardly reluctance to use his monetary powers to stimulate the economy, just because Tea-Publicans in Congress have told him that it will look like he is playing politics to help President Obama's reelection effort by stimulating the economy.

These Tea-Publican insurrectionists have been holding America hostage and actively sabotaging the American economy for ideological reasons and partisan political gain. it us unpatriotic and un-American. Bernanke's reluctance to act, as he is required to do under federal law, has only aided and abetted these Tea-Publican insurrectionists. What is in the best interests of America should always take precedence over what is in the political interests of the GOP.

Today, Ben Bernanke finally stopped fiddling while the economy suffers under the weight of GOP austerity measures and congressional inaction, and ordered a new round of quantitative easing to stimulate the economy. Fed launches bond-buying plan to boost economy:

The Federal Reserve on Thursday opened a major new offensive in the
battle to reduce unemployment, launching its most extensive effort to
stimulate the economy in the past two years.

Posted by AzBluieMeanie:

The person who identified himself as Sam Bacile and described himself as the writer and director of the “Innocence of Muslims” told the AP on Tuesday that he had gone into
hiding.

But doubts rose about the man’s identity amid a flurry of false claims about his background and role in the film. Official: Calif. man is key figure behind the film (paragraphs have been reordered):

Bacile told the AP he was an Israeli-born, 56-year-old Jewish writer
and director. But a Christian activist involved in the film project,
Steve Klein, told the AP on Wednesday that Bacile was a pseudonym and
that he was Christian.

Klein had told the AP on Tuesday that the filmmaker was an Israeli Jew who was concerned for family members who live in Egypt.

Officials in Israel said there was no record of Bacile as an Israeli citizen.

When the AP initially left a message for Bacile, Klein contacted the AP
from another number to confirm the interview request was legitimate;
then Bacile called back from his own cellphone.