The non-stop 'Russiagate' coverage provides some disturbing lessons about our current political landscape. CNN's John Berman reads from special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of Roger Stone (Screen cap). Almost 60 years ago, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of a new force that fed off and profited from Cold War paranoia: the military-industrial complex. Over the past couple of years, with Russia reappearing on the airwaves, a new corporate sector profiting from induced anxiety poses just as big a threat: Let’s call it the political-infotainment-media complex. On March 22, Robert Mueller delivered his sealed report on the narrowly defined charge of “collusion” to Attorney General William Barr. After 22 months of hype – a period in which it was the most covered story in America – “Russiagate” seemed to end with a whimper.
Neither reporters nor the public have read the Mueller report, but that hasn’t stopped rampant speculation over what’s in the report, who “lost” and who “won.” None of this analysis, however, explores the larger structural problems in today’s media environment. Matt Taibbi on the Summer of the Media Shill - Rolling Stone. Years ago, when I was an exchange student in the Soviet Union, a Russian friend explained how he got his news. "For news about Russia, Radio Liberty," he said. "For news about America, Soviet newspapers.
" He smiled. "Countries lie about themselves, tell truth about others. " American media consumers are fast approaching the same absurd binary reality. Like the old adage about quarterbacks – if you think you have two good ones, you probably have none – this basically means we have no credible news media left. The last month or so of Trump-Hillary coverage may have been the worst stretch of pure journo-shilling we've seen since the run-up to the Iraq war. Take last week's news cycle: Red-state media obsessed over a series of emails about the Clinton Foundation obtained by Judicial Watch (a charter member of the "vast right-wing conspiracy") as part of a Freedom of Information lawsuit. It's not that stations were wrong to denounce Trump's comments. This was a powerful lesson. Judy Miller: Hans Blix Bears More Responsibility For The Iraq War Than I Do.
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</a> The Wall Street Journal has published Judith Miller's defense of her Iraq War writings, in which she specifically denies responsibility for helping lead America into that war. There are others far more qualified than I am to pick apart what she's written in the Journal (and what will appear in Miller's book The Story, from which the Journal piece is excerpted). I'll limit myself to this: Another widespread fallacy is that such neoconservatives as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz strong-armed an inexperienced president into taking the country to war.
Did Blix say in January 2003 that Iraq wasn't fully compliant? ↓ Story continues below ↓ Mr. Mr. Obama’s Numbers (Quarterly Update) The Myth of Journalistic Objectivity | Orwellwasright's Weblog. Ing the GOP Response. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul made misleading or exaggerated claims in their responses to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. Rubio claimed that the federal health care law was causing people to lose “the health insurance they were happy with,” but that glosses over the fact that 27 million uninsured Americans are expected to gain coverage.
Paul claimed the federal government borrows “$50,000 every second,” but the true figure is about $30,000. And he made a reference to an Internet rumor about Obama giving out free phones to the poor. Rubio Lambasts Health Care Law Rubio gave the Republican response immediately after Obama’s address, and he criticized the Affordable Care Act. Rubio, Feb. 12: And because many government programs that claim to help the middle class often end up hurting them. Again, these are estimates for what the insurance landscape will look like in the future. Paul Overstates Federal Borrowing Paul Advances ‘Obama Phone’ Myth.
'Drill, baby, drill' fails: US petrol prices still high, despite oil boom. Climate Progress On Monday, USA Today reported that the price of gasoline hit $3.60 a gallon for the first time since October — an early start in comparison to the usual price rise seen in the spring. The increase occurred despite world oil production climbing to 88.8 million barrels per day in 2012, about 2 million barrels higher than two years ago according to the Washington Post’s Brad Plumer. And about half of that increased production is due to an oil boom in the United States that’s driven imported oil to its lowest level since 1987. That increased oil production will bring down gas prices is one of the most reliable Republican canards when it comes to energy, so what gives?
As Plumer points out, “The big thing to remember is that oil prices are a function of both supply and demand. If world demand for oil rises faster than producers can pump the stuff out, prices will go up.” Technically, the world isn’t even producing enough oil to keep pace with the rise in global incomes. Romney Avoids Taxes via Loophole Cutting Mormon Donations. In 1997, Congress cracked down on a popular tax shelter that allowed rich people to take advantage of the exempt status of charities without actually giving away much money. Individuals who had already set up these vehicles were allowed to keep them. That included Mitt Romney, then the chief executive officer of Bain Capital, who had just established such an arrangement in June 1996.
The charitable remainder unitrust, as it is known, is one of several strategies Romney has adopted over his career to reduce his tax bill. While Romney’s tax avoidance is legal and common among high-net-worth individuals, it has become an issue in the campaign. President Barack Obama attacked him in their second debate for paying “lower tax rates than somebody who makes a lot less.”
In this instance, Romney used the tax-exempt status of a charity -- the Mormon Church, according to a 2007 filing -- to defer taxes for more than 15 years. Near Zero Tax Returns After Death Capital Gains Dwindling Principal. The 2012 FactCheck Awards. Summary It’s that special time of year again when campaigning is over (finally!)
And the voting has begun. On Election Day we can stop being so serious about fact-checking false or deceptive claims and have some fun handing out imaginary hardware to those political ads that caught our eyes for other reasons. We’ve mentioned before that the 2012 campaign has been nasty, brutish and long. We’ve seen a furry animal used for skeet-shooting, inappropriate public behavior involving electricity, a talking horse and at least two imitations of zombie movies (one of them intentional, one of them not). So, here, both for your amusement and our mental health, are our Election Day awards for 2012.
Analysis The Alex Forrest Award for Most Hare-Raising Ad Winner: Cain Solutions Anyone who has seen the 1987 thriller “Fatal Attraction” knows the horrible fate of the pet rabbit of Ellen Hamilton Latzen, who plays the young daughter of Michael Douglas and Anne Archer in the film. The George A. Mark P. Sen. A taxonomy of Mitt Romney’s lies. “Jeep — now owned by the Italians — is thinking of moving all production to China.” “The president said he’d cut the deficit in half. Unfortunately, he doubled it.” These are the types of lies that come to mind for most when pondering Vanidicus Mittromneus – and with good reason. They are, indeed, outstanding specimens, but they merely hint at the rich variety to be explored. What follows is a rough breakdown of the genera and species, and we encourage you to seek out this vast taxonomic family in the wild.
MISQUOTING HIMSELF Species Repulsa cogitato var. indictus A perfect microcosm of the entire family: diverse, strategic and extremely difficult to kill. Note the recursive structure in this example; lies within lies: “I’ve spoken about health care from the day we passed it in – in Massachusetts and people said, is this something that you’d apply at the federal level? MISSTATING HIS OWN BELIEFS Species Repulsa cogitato var. attribuat MISREPRESENTING HIS OWN ACTIONS Species Repulsa facinus. Obama Defends His Finance Reform Record to Rolling Stone: A Response | Matt Taibbi.
Z Blogs | Measuring the Small Differences between Democrats and Republicans in the White House since 1980. UPDATED the Conlcusions to this post on November 1, 2012 Rebecca Solnit wrote in the UK Guardian that “If I vote for a Democrat, I do so in the hopes that fewer people will suffer, not in the belief that that option will eliminate suffering or bring us to anywhere near my goals or represent my values perfectly.” She added that “there's something to be said for actually examining the differences” as opposed to dismissing them as insignificant.
I made a few attempts to actually measure the impact of those small differences on the most vulnerable US citizens. Perhaps the often acrimonious debate I observe among US progressives during the interminably long presidential campaigns would be less bitter if they tried to quantify what those small differences are. Below is a table showing what has happened to the gap between life expectancy (LE) between black and white men in the USA under Republican and Democrat presidents since 1980. Source: (click link to data on “union coverage”) Conclusion. Whoppers of 2012, Final Edition. Summary With only days to go until Election Day 2012, we look here at the most egregiously false and misleading claims from the entire presidential campaign. Some examples: President Barack Obama claimed Mitt Romney is planning to raise taxes by $2,000 on middle-income taxpayers and/or cut taxes by $5 trillion. Neither is true.Romney claimed Obama plans to raise taxes by $4,000 on middle-income taxpayers.
That’s not true, either.It’s also not true that Obama plans “to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements,” as Romney claimed.Equally untrue is the Obama campaign’s repeated claim that Romney backed a law that would outlaw “all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest.” So many false and twisted claims were made in the early months that we issued an “early edition” of our annual wrap-up of political whoppers in July. We noted then that the campaign had been nasty, brutish and long. And it’s only gotten longer, not more truthful. Analysis Obama: Romney Raises/Cuts Taxes. Waterboarding critic named co-chair of Romney’s intelligence transition team. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has often endorsed the idea of using "enhanced interrogation techniques" if he is elected and doesn't believe that waterboarding is "torture," but he chose the GOP's most fervent critique of such methods to be the co-chair for intelligence personnel in his transition team.
Philip Zelikow, the long-time diplomat and former counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, has been named one of two officials in charge of planning for the intelligence side of a potential Romney administration as part of the Romney campaign's "Project Readiness," multiple sources with direct knowledge of the project confirmed to The Cable. Zelikow, who was also the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, co-chairs the intelligence team with former New Jersey Governor and 9/11 Commission co-chairman Tom Kean.
Zelikow is another GOP senior foreign-policy hand from the realist camp in the top ranks of the Romney transition team. He was right. "I oppose torture. Clearing the air. One of the favorite canards that Obama activists and surrogates hurl at Mitt Romney is that he is surrounded by a group of wild-eyed George W. Bush neo-cons who cannot wait to bomb Iran and bring America into yet another Middle Eastern conflict, even before the war in Afghanistan has come to an end. A recent diatribe by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the November 8 edition of the staunchly left-wing New York Review of Books highlights the tone of these attacks. "Romney's bellicosity about Iran is not encouraging," he asserts. "Nor is the fact that he has turned for foreign policy advice to the architects and advocates of the Iraq War.
" Appiah and his colleagues have it all wrong. Admittedly, Romney has a few neo-cons advising him. In fact, there is nothing inherently wrong in Governor Romney's having some neo-cons on his advisory team. Richard Ellis/Getty Images. Looking Closely at the Candidates’ Statements on Foreign Policy. Even the dispute over the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, which was expected to be a centerpiece, got less attention than the now-familiar dispute over what kind of bankruptcy had proposed for the ailing auto industry.
But when Bob Schieffer, the moderator, wrestled them back onto foreign policy, the two candidates offered starkly different views of the world. described a tough, realistic America engaged with allies in “decimating” Al Qaeda. Mr. Romney, even as he markedly moderated his tone and spoke repeatedly of “peace” as his goal, described a far scarier world in which Iran is four years closer to a nuclear weapon. In many cases, the contrasting claims were a matter of perspective, and on several occasions Mr. Here are some of the highlights: Change in Tone on Iran Mr. He urged preparations for war against Iran last year in an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Mr. “Would you be prepared to do it unilaterally if need be?” “Of course,” Mr. False Claims in Final Debate. Summary In the third and final Obama-Romney debate, the candidates again contradicted each other, while each offered incorrect or twisted factual claims.
President Obama erred when he accused Mitt Romney of saying during the 2008 campaign that “we should ask Pakistan for permission” before going into that country to kill or capture terrorists. What Romney said was that he’d “keep our options quiet.”Obama wrongly accused Romney of not telling the truth when Romney said “you and I agreed” some U.S. troops should be left in Iraq. In fact, the president tried and failed to negotiate an agreement to keep 3,000 to 4,000 support troops there; Romney said he would have left 10,000 to 30,000.Obama said unemployment among military veterans is lower than for the general population.
That’s true for veterans generally but not for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.Romney was wrong when he repeated a claim that our “Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917.” Analysis Pakistan Permission? Debate fact check. Tonight’s foreign policy presidential debate will feature plenty of talk about Libya, China, the Middle East, and terrorism but if it’s anything like every other political event ever anywhere, it will also feature plenty of exaggerations, mistruths and outright lies. Starting tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be calling them out in real time and bringing you the, you know, facts — so refresh this page often to stay up-to-date. Tweet at @aseitzwald if you see something you want checked.
Also be sure to check out Alex Pareene’s liveblog. 11:00: Romney’s afghanistan policy – Romney tonight clarified his Afghanistan policy tonight, saying he wants to pull troops out of the country in 2014 and hand over full security control fo the Afghans. 10:35: Auto bailout – In one of the most heated moments of the debate, though it had nothing to do with foreign policy, Romney and Obama traded barbs over the auto bailout. This allowed Romney to have it both ways. 9:55: Apology tour? Reading Guide: Where Obama and Romney Actually Stand on Iran. Taibbi on Moyers: On the Moyers-O'Reilly clash | Matt Taibbi. 5 Things You Need to Know Before Election Day About Mitt Romney's Shady Investments. Mitt Romney’s Bailout Bonanza. Etch A Sketch, Made in China. Factchecking Libya. MSNBC's Maddow Blasts Right-Wing Media Conspiracy Theories: "Conservative Alternative-Reality Fantasy Babble" | Video. Romney's Binders Full of Women. Debate fact-check.
A Closer Look at Some Disputed Claims. Complete Video of the Second Presidential Debate Between Romney and Obama - Interactive Feature. Ing the Hofstra Debate. Mitt Romney 'Binders Full Of Women' Claim Misleads. Ryan’s biggest debate lie. The Final Word on Mitt Romney's Tax Plan. Veep Debate Violations. GOPer Calls Paul Krugman a ‘Liar’ For Telling The Truth. Presidential Stage Fright. Five Myths About the 47 Percent. Romney Cites Energy Report That Advocates Carbon Price. The 47 Percent, In One Graphic : Planet Money. Romney's Wrong And Right About The '47 Percent' : The Two-Way.