Exposing The Lies

Kurt Schlichter  posted an article at Townhall.com today entitled, “2014: The Year The Liberal Lies Died.”

He mentions some of the obvious recent battles:

The truth is poison to liberalism, so no wonder liberals hate the idea of a free press – after all, they are the ones who argued to the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case that the government has the right to ban books. Conservative magazines like National Review long fought the fight alone. But it is only recently that we saw the rise of a truly free press as technology put a camera in everyone’s cellphone and conservative new media (including social media) created a path around the gates that the liberal mainstream media kept.

The new media has had a lot to do with the public becoming more informed on both sides of an issue:

How about the Grubering of America? Obamacare was built and sold on a foundation of lies, buttressed with contempt and condescension toward normal Americans. Without the citizen journalists working in conservative new media, would we have ever seen Obamacare’s architect on video laughing at the giant scam he and the Democrats pulled on the American people? Would we have seen video compilations of Obama promising that if we liked our health plan we could keep it?

You think we would? Really? My unicorn’s name is Chet. What do you call yours?

The questions are simple. How many Americans still trust the mainstream media and the stories it is telling? As Americans begin to read new media, will the politics of America be changed? Will the new media affect the election of 2016? What will liberals do to discredit or shut down the new media?

We are at a crossroads. Americans need to take responsibility for what they believe. It is time for all Americans to learn to do their own political research. The mainstream media has forgotten the skill of honest investigative reporting–it is time for all Americans to learn that skill.

 

Distraction Or Scorched Earth Policy?

Today is the day that Jonathan Gruber is expected to testify at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee (The Hill), today is the day that Senate Intelligence Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein is scheduled to release a report on CIA interrogations of terrorists after the events of September 11, 2001 (The Washington Post), and to top it off, it has now been reported that President Obama has not actually issued an executive order to grant amnesty to up to five million immigrants (World Net Daily).

Which story is supposed to have the attention of the American people and which stories are we supposed to ignore? I am definitely feeling manipulated.

The Hill reports on the scheduled hearings:

After the videos went viral last month, President Obama dismissed Gruber as “some adviser who was never on our staff,” while House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she didn’t even know who he was.

Opponents of ObamaCare say Democrats are changing their story.

They note that Gruber has been to the White House 21 times and met with multiple members of the administration, including Obama, according to visitor logs. Pelosi’s office also cited his work in a 2009 policy analysis.

“Why was Mr. Gruber called an ‘architect’ of ObamaCare by The Washington Post, someone who was lauded by President Obama and cited by then-Speaker Pelosi, and is now just ‘some advisor’? ” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said in a statement.

As Gruber steps into the line of fire on Tuesday, he might find little protection from Democrats who once paid him nearly as much as the presidential salary for his consulting work.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the committee’s top Democrat, said he would use the hearing to mount a defense of the healthcare law, not Gruber.

Regardless of what Mr. Gruber says about the stupidity of the American voter, we need to get rid of ObamaCare. It may take a circus to wake up the American voter (however, when you consider that half of the Democrats who voted for ObamaCare lost their seats in the last election, Americans may already be awake).

The Washington Post reports on the release of the CIA interrogation report:

With the apparently imminent release of the Feinstein report on CIA interrogations of high-value terrorists a decade ago, let’s consider the situation of intelligence personnel who have been involved, not in that program but in drone strikes against terrorists, conducted in a variety of countries around the world.

They have four sources of direction and protection: Their strikes are authorized by the president, briefed to Congress, deemed lawful by the attorney general and determined useful by the CIA director.

Yet people in the drone program know that co-workers involved in enhanced interrogation had these assurances as well. And the drone program has some distinctive characteristics. Instead of employing waterboarding, stress positions and sleep deprivation, the targets are killed (sometimes with collateral damage to the innocent). President Obama dramatically expanded the use of drones, increasing the proportion of attacks that are “signature strikes” — meaning those authorizing attacks don’t know the identities of the targets, just their likely value.

Some may argue a subtle moral distinction between harshly interrogating a terrorist and blowing his limbs apart. But international human rights groups and legal authorities generally look down on both. The main difference? One is Obama’s favorite program. A few years from now, a new president and new congressional leaders may take a different view.

That is a very good point. Congress had been briefed on these interrogations when they happened. There is no reason to release this report. The report endangers Americans overseas and will cripple the CIA in dealing with future terrorism threats. I wonder how the restrictions put on the CIA today would compare to any restrictions put on the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II.

Meanwhile, about amnesty, World Net Daily quotes Senator Jeff Sessions:

In remarks made at the Washington office of the government-watchdog group Judicial Watch, Sessions said: “I guess they just whispered in the ear of (DHS Director) Jeh Johnson over at Homeland Security, ‘Just put out a memo. That way we don’t have to enforce the law.’”

The news that Obama had not signed an executive order to carry out the policy he announced to the nation in a televised address Nov. 20 was broken by WND Senior Staff Writer Jerome Corsi last week.

As a result of the president’s use of a memo instead of an official order, the senator observed: “We don’t even have a really significant, direct, legal direction that we can ascertain, precisely what the president is doing. It’s a stunning event in my view.”

…The senator dropped a bombshell last week when he revealed he had learned the Obama administration is opening a facility in Crystal City, Virginia, to implement the president’s amnesty plan.

Sessions discovered the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, is hiring 1,000 full-time and permanent staff members to quickly approve illegal immigrants’ applications for amnesty.

Sessions also learned the administration will provide work permits, photo IDs, Social Security and Medicare to illegal immigrants.

He noted that all of those benefits for illegal immigrants had been rejected by Congress.

The Obama administration had initially indicated illegal immigrants would not be eligible for Social Security benefits, but officials were forced to admit the plans after Sessions revealed them.

Welcome to Monday morning under the Obama Administration.

Who Can We Trust?

Even Snopes doesn’t get it right all the time.

Yesterday the Washington Examiner posted a story about a recent entry on the Snopes site. Snopes is a site that many people use for fact-checking. The entry had to do with comments made by health economist Jonathan Gruber last year (see rightwinggranny.com). The comments are recorded on video and evidently later taken off of the internet (although they are still in the rightwinggranny article).

The article at the Washington Examiner tells the story:

Rather than giving the claim what is easily a “true” rating, the fact checking group gives it a “mixture” rating.

“It appears the comments made by Gruber entered the stream of social media hot topics due to a 9 November 2014 post on the website the Daily Signal, where it was framed as a ‘newly surfaced video,’ ” the website reported. “The shorter version of the video was initially posted by the political action committee (PAC) American Commitment.”

American Commitment, which is not a PAC, had also linked to the original video from UPenn from its own YouTube channel.

…Snopes fact-checkers seem unable to draw obvious conclusions about something as simple as reading a time stamp on YouTube.

“While the newly-circulated video of Gruber’s remarks is unedited, the comments are neither recent nor complete, and whether the originating source attempted to pull them from the Internet at one point remains unclear,” the conclusion reads.

Snopes is owned by Barbara and David Mikkelson of California. I have no idea what their political persuasion is, but in the case of Jonathan Gruber they seem to have missed the boat. This incident is another reason every person needs to do their own research on the issues they care about.

Being Force-fed Spin

Every now and then a person involved in policy making makes a mistake and tells the truth. Admittedly, creating and passing legislation can be messy, but that mess should be subject to scrutiny by the American people who vote for our legislators.

Yesterday the Daily Caller posted an article about some of the things that were involved in the passage of ObamaCare. As I am sure you remember, ObamaCare was passed through the reconciliation process rather than the normal Parliamentary Procedure. Also, not one Republican voted for it.

The Daily Caller reports a statement from the man who designed it, Jonathan Gruber:

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that.  In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass… Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”

This is the YouTube video of his remarks:

This is an example of a party with a political agenda taking advantage of the lack of involvement of the American people in the political process in America. If we are to keep the republic we were given by our Founding Fathers, we need to wake up and start paying attention. Otherwise, we will become the world’s next banana republic.