Bad Deeds for 10-26-2009

 

Wingnuts Quote Satire Piece As Obama ‘Thesis’ – Looks like the wingnuts are so eager to find “proof” for their theories about Obama, they don’t even bother to check the source.

Right-wing pundit Michael Ledeen published an item this week on Barack Obama’s “college thesis,” which Obama allegedly wrote as a student at Columbia 25 years ago. Leeden cited some website, which ran a piece in August.

The paper was called “Aristocracy Reborn,” and in the first ten pages (which were all that reporter Joe Klein — who wrote about it for Time — was permitted to see), the young Obama wrote:
“… the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.”

That’s quite an indictment, even for an Ivy League undergraduate…. Maybe instead of fuming about words that Rush Limbaugh never uttered, the paladins of the free press might ask the president about words that he did write.

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh picked up on Leeden’s report, blasting Obama for the alleged paper.
The first sign of trouble was when Joe Klein noted that he’s never seen or written about Obama’s college thesis, and has “no idea where this report comes from.”

The second sign of trouble was when one stopped to notice that Obama didn’t write a senior thesis (though he did write a thesis-length paper on Soviet nuclear disarmament).

The third sign of trouble was when one clicked on the link that Leeden provided as support and found the word “satire.”

Yes, Leeden and Limbaugh got all worked up, trashing the president for a paper he didn’t write in college 25 years ago, relying on a satirical blog post. And for real entertainment value, notice what Leeden and Limbaugh did when they realized they’d fallen for a dumb joke — they blamed Obama anyway.
Leeden conceded he was wrong and apologized, but added, “It worked because it’s plausible.” Limbaugh said the text he touted was fake, but it didn’t matter because, “I know Obama thinks it.”

 

John McCain Takes a Lot of Money From Telecom Companies, Then Wants to Give Them the Internet – The “Maverick” just played his hand on Net Neutrality, and the cards reveal a man who’s outsider image doesn’t quite add up.

On Thursday, Sen. John McCain introduced legislation to kill the open Internet, the deceptively named “Internet Freedom Act.” The bill would stop all FCC efforts to have an open and public discussion about proposed Net Neutrality rules.

 

Study Shows Fox News Bias – Researchers at George Mason and Chapman universities analyzed coverage of President Obama on the first 30 minutes of Fox News’ “Special Report with Bret Baier” because that segment most resembled a network newscast. They found that 77% of the coverage of the president was negative, and only 23% was positive.

The researchers found that news coverage of the president , in general, to be 43% positive (v. 57% negative) from May through mid-August.

 

Conservative George Will Claims Health Bill is Not Online That’s Been There For Almost a Week – On “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” George Will said in reference to the Senate Finance Committee Health Care Bill, “although they could put this on the internet in 10 minutes, they haven’t put it on the internet, this 1502 pages, because people might discover what’s in there.”However, the bill has been on line since Oct. 19th. Anyone can go read all 1504 pages here. Stephanopoulos did not question Will about his statement.

 

Current Healthcare System Wastes Up to $800 Billion a Year – The U.S. healthcare system is just as wasteful as President Barack Obama says it is, and proposed reforms could be paid for by fixing some of the most obvious inefficiencies, preventing mistakes and fighting fraud, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Monday.

The U.S. healthcare system wastes between $505 billion and $850 billion every year, the report from Robert Kelley, vice president of healthcare analytics at Thomson Reuters, found.

“America’s healthcare system is indeed hemorrhaging billions of dollars, and the opportunities to slow the fiscal bleeding are substantial,” the report reads.

“The bad news is that an estimated $700 billion is wasted annually. That’s one-third of the nation’s healthcare bill,” Kelley said in a statement.

“The good news is that by attacking waste we can reduce healthcare costs without adversely affecting the quality of care or access to care.”

 

Republican Malpractice Myths

1. An Explosion of Malpractice Litigation
2. A System Plagued by Frivolous Lawsuits
3. Rising Damage Awards Key to Higher Malpractice Premiums
4. Rising Malpractice Insurance Rates Driving Doctors from Practice
5. Medical Malpractice Reform Would Save U.S. $200 Billion Annually
6. Defensive Medicine Costs $200 Billion a Year

 

Taking Preventive HIV Drugs ‘Pre-Existing Condition,’ Report Says – A woman who took anti-HIV medication after believing she was raped was turned down by multiple insurance companies because she had taken a drug to fight HIV, according to an investigative report Wednesday.

Christina Turner said that she took anti-HIV drugs after believing she was sexually assaulted outside a bar in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Months later, after losing her health insurance, she was denied coverage by several insurance firms due to the fact she had taken a drug suggesting treatment for HIV.
She never developed an infection, she said, but the drugs taken as a precaution flagged her as a bad insurance risk.

 

Dallas Cop Tickets Woman for Driving While Not Speaking English – A Dallas rookie police officer erred when he cited a woman earlier this month for being a non-English speaking driver, police said. Seems to me the problem is not merely with Officer Bromley’s assumptions about Driving While Mexican, but those of his training officer, who presumably oversaw the citations as Bromley was writing them up. Now the Dallas police chief is admitting that there have been dozens of such tickets. Dallas Police Chief David Kunkle said this afternoon that his officers have written at least 39 citations to people over the past three years for not speaking English.

 

Fox News Makes False Claim About Obama Pay Czar Interview – On Fox News, Chris Wallace criticized the Obama administration for “trying to exclude Fox from interviewing pay czar Ken Feinberg” — even though that claim has been debunked. Fox News reported last week that the White House had attempted to keep the network away from Feinberg by refusing to grant Fox an interview with him. But subsequent investigations have found that it was the Treasury Department, not the White House, that arranged the interviews, and that Fox was initially not listed for an interview because they hadn’t requested one.

 

Bush Administration Only Spent One Hour on Afghanistan Report According to Podesta – John Podesta, now president of the Center for American Progress, said the Bush administration spent only one hour on a report on Afghanistan before handing the issue over to the incoming Obama administration. Podestra also pointed out that the Bush administration sat on Gen. [David] McKiernan’s request for more troops for eight months.

 

Burning Coal And Oil Kills 20,000 Americans A Year – The burning of coal and oil is killing 20,000 Americans each year, a new Congressional report has found. The National Research Council (NRC), an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, recently found that the United States is paying a heavy price in health and lives lost for its dependence on fossil fuels. In the newly released report, “The Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use,” the NRC explores the “externalities” of energy use, costs that are not factored into its market price. Requested by Congress in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the report monetizes these unseen energy costs at $120 billion annually by tracing the full cycle of our energy use—extraction, development, deployment, and waste.

 

After Twitter shuts down GOP accounts impersonating Dems, party complains of ‘free speech’ infringements – Twitter has shut down 33 fake accounts created by Connecticut Republicans meant to impersonate Democratic state representatives. According to the Hartford Advocate, the GOP scheme was designed “to send out posts under the Democrats’ names mocking the liberal tax-and-spend bastards.” Twitter strictly forbids impersonation “intended to mislead, confuse or deceive others” on its site. However, the state GOP chairman is now complaining that Republicans’ “free speech” rights are being violated.

 

Regards,

Jim