fayfreethinkers.com

[size=150]Parties moving in opposite directions[/size]
By Steve Benen

"...with several new national polls released this week -- CNN, Pew Research Center, USA Today, Washington Post/ABC News -- there's very little good news for Republicans. On the contrary, it seems the party's lack of popularity is preventing Republicans from taking advantage of the larger scandal-generated opportunities.

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This chart, for example, shows the results from the CNN poll, which asked respondents for their general attitudes towards the two major political parties. For Democrats, support is up, and a 52% majority has a favorable opinion of the party. For Republicans, support is down, and a 59% majority has a unfavorable opinion of the party.

Adding insult to injury, the GOP's standing in the poll is at its third-lowest point since CNN started doing polls a couple of decades years ago.

Meanwhile, President Obama's approval rating is up to 53% in the CNN poll, up to 51% in the Post/ABC poll, and up to 53% in the USA Today poll.

It's worth emphasizing that much of this week's polling was on the major controversies of the day -- last September's violence in Benghazi, the IRS scrutiny of tax-exempt groups, and the subpoenas of Associated Press reporters...

This isn't what Republicans were hoping for, either."
[url=http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/05/21/18399924-parties-moving-in-opposite-directions?utm_source=feedly]LINK[/url]

IRS "scandal" Debunk:

[size=150]The Latest Lie: IRS Targeted Conservatives[/size]

"Remember the video of the guy in the "pimp costume" who got advice from ACORN employees on how to run his prostitution ring? Turns out the whole story was just a lie, a doctored-video smear job on an important organization. The guy never wore a "pimp costume" and the real, undoctored videos showed that ACORN employees did nothing wrong. But a lie travels around the world before the corporate media bothers to check the facts. The "news" media blasted the story everywhere, and Congress was so outraged they forced ACORN to close its doors. And here we are again.

The corporate media is blasting out the story that the IRS "targeted conservative groups." Some in the media say there was "IRS harassment of conservative groups." Some of the media are going so far as claiming that conservative groups were "audited."

This story that is being repeated and treated as "true" is just not what happened at all. It is one more right-wing victimization fable, repeated endlessly until the public has no choice except to believe it.

Conservative Groups Were Not "Targeted," "Singled Out" Or Anything Else

You are hearing that conservative groups were "targeted." What you are not hearing is that progressive groups were also "targeted." So were groups that are not progressive or conservative.

All that happened here is that groups applying to the IRS for special tax status were checked to see if they were engaged in political activity. They were checked, not targeted. Only one-third of the groups checked were conservative groups.

Once again: Only one-third of the groups checked were conservative groups.

Conservative groups were not "singled out," were not "targeted" and in the end none were denied special tax status – even though many obviously should have been.

From last week's House hearings on this:

Rep. Peter Roskam, R-IL: "How come only conservative groups got snagged?"

Outgoing acting IRS commissioner Steve Miller: "They didn't sir. Organizations of all walks and all persuasions were pulled in. That’s shown by the fact that only 70 of the 300 organizations were tea party organizations, of the ones that were looked at by TIGTA [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration]."

Bet you didn't see that blasted all over your TV news that night."

[url=http://crooksandliars.com/dave-johnson/latest-lie-irs-targeted-conservatives]LINK[/url]

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Wingnuts be all in a flap over Benghazi again:

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Terrorism way down in the US:

[img]http://www.motherjones.com/files/domestic-bombings_0.gif[/img]

Excellent article:

[size=150]Charts: How Much Danger Do We Face From Homegrown Jihadist Terrorists?[/size]

[url=http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/charts-domestic-terrorism-jihadist-boston-tsarnaev]Mother Jones[/url]

[size=150]U.S. is second-worst of 35 developed nations when it comes to child poverty[/size]

"The United States ranks 34 out of 35 on a UNICEF measure of relative child poverty in developed nations. To be clear, that's 34 out of 35 in the bad way—second highest level, doing better than only Romania with more than 20 percent of children living in a household with an income below half the median.

[quote]But the picture looks even worse when you examine just how far below the relative poverty line these children tend to fall. The UNICEF report looks at something it calls the “child poverty gap,” which measures how far the average poor child falls below the relative poverty line. It does this by measuring the gap between the relative poverty line and the average income of poor families.
Alarmingly, the United States also scores second-to-last on this measurement, with the average poor child living in a home that makes 36 percent less than the relative poverty line.[/quote]

This is the context before the start of sequestration, as Bryce Covert points out. With the full effects of sequestration yet to come, we've already seen kids cut from Head Start programs, less housing assistance available to families struggling to stay off the street, and homeless shelters losing funding among the sequester's effects that will hit poor kids directly."

[url=http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/04/18/1202964/-U-S-is-second-worst-of-35-developed-nations-when-it-comes-to-child-poverty]Link[/url]

"A new study by the Pew Research Center finds that the GOP is alienating scientists to a startling degree.

[u]Only six percent of America's scientists identify themselves as Republicans[/u]; fifty-five percent call themselves Democrats. By comparison, 23 percent of the overall public considers itself Republican, while 35 percent say they're Democrats.

The ideological discrepancies were similar. Nine percent of scientists said they were "conservative" while 52 percent described themselves as "liberal," and 14 percent "very liberal." The corresponding figures for the general public were 37, 20 and 5 percent."

[url=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/10/only-six-percent-of-scien_n_229382.html]LINK[/url]

[size=150]Why Americans Are So Ignorant -- It's Not Only Fox News, There Are Some Understandable Reasons for it[/size]
[i]Sure propaganda, government secrecy and Fox News have a lot to do with it. But there are broader societal pressures as well.[/i]

[url=http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/why-americans-are-so-ignorant-its-not-only-fox-news-there-are-some#.UWl1dgxmlzA.facebook]Alternet[/url]

Excerpt:

"That American ignorance is explainable does not make it any less distressing. At the very least it often leads to embarrassment for the minority who are not ignorant. Take for example the facts that polls show over half of American adults don’t know which country dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or that 30 percent don’t know what the Holocaust was.

We might explain this as the result of faulty education; however, there are other, just as embarrassing, moments involving the well educated. Take, for instance, the employees of Fox News. Lou Dobbs (who graduated from Harvard University) is host of the Fox Business Network talk show Lou Dobbs Tonight. Speaking on March 23 about gun control, he and Fox political analyst Angela McGlowan (a graduate of the University of Mississippi) had the following exchange:

McGlowan: “What scares the hell out of me is that we have a president . . . that wants to take our guns, but yet he wants to attack Iran and Syria. So if they come and attack us here, we don’t have the right to bear arms under this Obama administration.”

Dobbs: “We’re told by Homeland Security that there are already agents of Al Qaeda here working in this country. Why in the world would you not want to make certain that all American citizens were armed and prepared?”

Despite education, ignorance plus ideology leading to stupidity doesn’t come in any starker form than this. Suffice it to say that nothing the President has proposed in the way of gun control takes away the vast majority of weapons owned by Americans, that the President’s actions point to the fact that he does not want to attack Syria or Iran, and that neither country has the capacity to “come and attack us here.”

Finally, while there may be a handful of Americans who sympathize with Al Qaeda, they cannot accurately be described as “agents” of some central organization that dictates their actions.

Did the fact that Dobbs and McGlowan were speaking nonsense make any difference to the majority of those listening to them? Probably not. Their regular listeners may well be too ignorant to know that this surreal episode has no basis in reality. Their ignorance will cause them not to fact-check Dobbs’s and McGlowan’s remarks. They might very well rationalize away countervailing facts if they happen to come across them. And, by doing so, keep everything comfortably simple, which counts for more than the messy, often complicated truth.

Unfortunately, one can multiply this scenario many times. There are millions of Americans, most of whom are quite literate, who believe the United Nations is an evil organization bent on destroying U.S. sovereignty. Indeed, in 2005, George W. Bush actually appointed one of them, John Bolton (a graduate of Yale University), as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations."

Keystone

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[url=http://keeptalkingwingnuts.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-wingnuts-think-they-should-keep.html]Keep Talking Wingnuts![/url]

[size=150]Iraq war costs U.S. more than $2 trillion: study[/size]

(Reuters) - The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans,
expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said.

"...an update of a 2011 report the Watson Institute produced ahead of the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks that assessed the cost in dollars and lives from the resulting wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

The 2011 study said the combined cost of the wars was at least $3.7 trillion, based on actual expenditures from the U.S. Treasury and future commitments, such as the medical and disability claims of U.S. war veterans.

That estimate climbed to nearly $4 trillion in the update...

Excluded were indirect deaths caused by the mass exodus of doctors and a devastated infrastructure, for example, while the costs left out trillions of dollars in interest the United States could pay over the next 40 years.

The interest on expenses for the Iraq war could amount to about $4 trillion during that period, the report said.

..."Action needed to be taken," said Steven Bucci, the military assistant to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war and today a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think-tank.

Bucci, who was unconnected to the Watson study, agreed with its observation that the forecasts for the cost and duration of the war proved to be a tiny fraction of the real costs.

"If we had had the foresight to see how long it would last and even if it would have cost half the lives, we would not have gone in," Bucci said. "Just the time alone would have been enough to stop us. Everyone thought it would be short."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/14/us-iraq-war-anniversary-idUSBRE92D0PG20130314

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[size=150]The party 'in need of a major makeover'[/size]

Chart: NBC/WSJ poll shows Americans trust Democrats more on every -- every -- domestic issue.

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[url=http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/02/27/17116916-the-party-in-need-of-a-major-makeover?lite]LINK[/url]

The original has a typo that you left uncorrected. "In contrast, slightly more than one-third of Republicans do not like to see their elected officials compromise" should have omitted the "do not."

[size=150]The ‘suicidal’ Republican resistance to compromise[/size]

Excerpt:

"The Pew Research Center recently came out with a study that shows how we as Americans think about political compromise. The good news is that half of us like elected officials who make compromises with people they disagree with. This is especially good news given that just two years ago only 40% of Americans liked officials who compromised. However, a very different picture emerges when that figure is broken down by party.
Close to 60% of Democrats like to see elected officials compromise. In contrast, slightly more than one-third of Republicans [s]do not[/s] like to see their elected officials compromise. For a majority of the GOP’s rank-and-file, it’s their way, or “no way.”
In his column last Saturday, the New York Times‘ Charles Blow referred to these unbendable Republicans as “suicide conservatives.” These are the folks that will not support any sort of compromise even among their own party. Not only are these conservative partisans willing to go down, but they’ll take down those around them."

[url=http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/02/13/the-suicidal-republican-resistance-to-compromise/]LINK[/url]

[correction noted and fixed]

[size=200]The Right's Library of Fake Quotes[/size]
Putting words in dead people’s mouths

"Abraham Lincoln despised class warfare, Thomas Jefferson detested bailouts and the founders of the nation were all Bible-believing Christians. These are among the historical “facts” you’ll learn as a regular consumer of talk radio, Fox News and other conservative sources.
While non-conservatives have been known to misquote historical figures to add credibility to their own views, the right seems to have a special enthusiasm for putting words in dead people’s mouths."

[url=http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/the-right8217s-library-of-fake-quotes/]FAIR[/url]

[size=150]GOP Debunked: Obama did not create $5 trillion in new debt[/size]

"Republican pundits love to say that the national debt has increased by $5 trillion because of President Obama. Factually, that statement is simply untrue. Let's examine the evidence.

Of the alleged $5 trillion, $1.6 trillion is related to costs of the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars. These were costs George W. Bush intentionally hid from the budget, and that President Obama allowed to be calculated when he assumed office.

Note that Obama could have continued to hide the bill as Bush did, passing it along to his successor.

President Bush was able to manipulate funding for the Iraq/Afghanistan wars using special emergency authorization bills. He did this because, as you recall, the Democrats were attempting to defund the war legislatively.

The overall point is simple: Obama, as president, authorized not one cent of that $1.6 trillion to be spent.

It has been previously reported by marketwatch.com that President Obama increased overall government spending by a smaller margin than any modern president, all the way to President Eisenhower.

Rex Nutting at marketwatch clarifies:

What people forget (or never knew) is that the first year of every presidential term starts with a budget approved by the previous administration and Congress. The president only begins to shape the budget in his second year. It takes time to develop a budget and steer it through Congress — especially in these days of congressional gridlock.

Over $1.4 trillion was spent on interest payments caused by the already standing debt.

Knowing that, let's examine the GOP's argument.

They say President Obama has spent too much, but 32% of the total amount they claim has been spent is a direct result of Republican presidential policies, and previous spending.

President Obama is stuck paying the bill for the previous GOP administrations of Reagan, H.W. Bush, and W. Bush. President Clinton left with a surplus if you recall, and added nothing to our debt. This point has been discussed constantly, and was even visited by President Obama's former Press Secretary Jay Carney during a press gaggle.

It is not disputed that the national debt was $10 trillion before President Obama took office.

The interest that is paid on the debt today was created by the very same people who now are attempting to blame the cost of that interest on the president. Do not allow yourself to be fooled, the GOP is attempting to blame the president for something they caused.

Now our journey of $5 trillion has been twiddled down to $2 trillion."

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Links and references and the rest here... [url=http://www.examiner.com/article/gop-debunked-obama-did-not-create-5-trillion-new-debt]Examiner[/url]

Filed under... rank hypocrisy:

[url=http://www.ranker.com/list/top-10-anti-gay-activists-caught-being-gay/joanne][size=150]Top 15 Anti-Gay Activists Caught Being Gay[/size][/url]

[size=150]Corporate profits are highest-ever share of GDP, while wages are lowest-ever[/size]

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[url=http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/03/1166878/-Corporate-profits-are-highest-ever-share-of-GDP-while-wages-are-lowest-ever]Daily Kos[/url]