Anyone who thinks they have all the Answers before they've even heard the Question - is Dangerously Deluded! Real Truth Requires Vigilance, Perseverance and Courage, regardless of Party and who wields Power. Left, Right, Center, Corporations, Government, Unions, Criminals or the Indifferent.
Yeah, we've all known it for a long time and Robert Greenwald did a great job of laying it all out with insiders and detailed analysis in his film "OutFoxed" - but today yet another report has come from behind partisan enemy lines, and the truth is devastating.
Indeed, a former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch’s cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as a purely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.
“It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats,” says the source. “They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.
In other words, they're Liars.
Some of these quotes are just amazing.
“They say one thing and do another. They insist on maintaining this charade, this façade, that they’re balanced or that they’re not right-wing extreme propagandist,” says the source. But it’s all a well-orchestrated lie, according this former insider. It’s a lie that permeates the entire Fox News culture and one that staffers and producers have to learn quickly in order to survive professionally.
“You have to work there for a while to understand the nods and the winks,” says the source. “And God help you if you don’t because sooner or later you’re going to get burned.”
The source explains:
“Like any news channel there’s lot of room for non-news content. The content that wasn’t ‘news,’ they didn’t care what we did with as long as it was amusing or quirky or entertaining; as along as it brought in eyeballs. But anything—anything--that was a news story you had to understand what the spin should be on it. If it was a big enough story it was explained to you in the morning [editorial] meeting. If it wasn’t explained, it was up to you to know the conservative take on it. There’s a conservative take on every story no matter what it is. So you either get told what it is or you better intuitively know what it is.”
What if Fox News staffers aren’t instinctively conservative or don’t have an intuitive feeling for what the spin on a story should be? “My internal compass was to think like an intolerant meathead,” the source explains. “You could never error on the side of not being intolerant enough.”
Yeah, that pretty much explains everything doesn't it?
Technically not news, but still interesting to see exactly how they slowly indoctrinate their staff to becoming right-wing dittoheads.
When you first get in they tell you we’re a bit of a counterpart to the screaming left wing lib media. So automatically you have to buy into the idea that the other media is howling left-wing. Don’t even start arguing that or you won’t even last your first day.
“For the first few years it was let’s take the conservative take on things. And then after a few years it evolved into, well it’s not just the conservative take on things, we’re going to take the Republican take on things which is not necessarily in lock step with the conservative point of view.
“And then two, three, five years into that it was, we’re taking the Bush line on things, which was different than the GOP. We were a Stalin-esque mouthpiece. It was just what Bush says goes on our channel. And by that point it was just totally dangerous. Hopefully most people understand how dangerous it is for a media outfit to be a straight, unfiltered mouthpiece for an unchecked president.”
Just as it's dangerous to have an unfettered, unfiltered pack of attack dogs whose only purpose is to Destroy a Democratic President by any means unneccesarry. Y'now, like this.
Always the victim, always under seige.
“It was a kick ass mentality too,” says the former Fox News insider. “It was relentless and it never went away. If one controversy faded, goddamn it they would find another one. They were in search of these points of friction real or imagined. And most of them were imagined or fabricated. You always have to seem to be under siege. You always have to seem like your values are under attack. The brain trust just knew instinctively which stories to do, like the War on Christmas.”
And don't worry when you are really attacked or criticized, you have the rest of the so-called mainstream media that will come to your rescue.
“They don’t have enough staff or enough balls or don’t have enough money or don’t have enough interest to spend the time it takes to expose Fox News. Or it’s not worth the trouble. If you take on Fox, they’ll kick you in the ass,” says the source. “I’m sure most [journalists] know that. It’s not worth being Swift Boated for your effort,” a reference to how Fox News traditionally attacks journalists who write, or are perceived to have written, anything negative things about the channel.
You wouldn't want to turn into Keith Olbermann and become the new Head of News Programming at your own Network or Jon Stewart or anything.
The former insider admits to being perplexed in late 2009 when the Obama White House called out Murdoch’s operation as not being a legitimate new source, only to have major Beltway media players rush to the aid of Fox News and admonish the White House for daring to criticize the cable channel.
“That blew me away,” says the source, who stresses the White House’s critique of Fox News “happens to be true.”
Yeah, we know.
Vyan
Link to Original story : http://mediamatters.org/blog/201102100007
As an Associate Justice, you are entrusted with the responsibility to exercise the highest degree of discretion and impartiality when deciding a case. As Members of Congress, we were surprised by recent revelations of your financial ties to leading organizations dedicated to lobbying against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. We write today to respectfully ask that you maintain the integrity of this court and recuse yourself from any deliberations on the constitutionality of this act.
Uh oh, I think that's going to upset the apple cart on Tea Bagger Hill.
It's not like Repubs can claim that Thomas is being "picked on and singled out" because he happens to be a certainty to vote against the constitutionality of the mandate because Senator Orrin Hatch has already called for Justice Kagan to recuse herself from the Patients Affordability Act deliberations for far flimsier reasons.
WASHINGTON – Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, an opponent of the recently enacted health care overhaul, says Justice Elena Kagan should not take part in the widely expected Supreme Court consideration of the new law.
...
Hatch said he is sure that Kagan participated in discussions about the law and challenges to it while she served in the Justice Department as Obama's top Supreme Court lawyer. Hatch told Fox News that he believes Kagan "should recuse herself," although he noted the justice alone will make that determination.
Oh, "He is Sure" is he? Never mind the fact that as Solicitor General she wouldn't have had anything to do with this particular issue until it appeared it might actually go before the Supreme Court - which hasn't happened yet. But he figures that it must have been water-cooler office talk??
There are several cases from which Kagan actually will have to recuse herself because she was involved in forming the administrations legal rationale for them, and hence would be judging her own arguments. In fact she has already volunteered to recuse herself from over 2 dozen cases.
Kagan, 50, has recused herself from 25 of the 51 cases the court has accepted so far this term, all as a result of her 14-month tenure as solicitor general, the government's chief legal representative in the Supreme Court and the nation's lower appellate courts.
This simply isn't one of those cases.
Kagan addressed her participation during her confirmation hearing. She said then that she "attended at least one meeting where the existence of the litigation was briefly mentioned, but none where any substantive discussion of the litigation occurred." Kagan left the administration in August, about five months after the health care overhaul became law.
So basically Hatch is a) Making Shit UP that goes directly against Kagan's sworn testimony b) Implying she's a liar and c) Implying she's a Perjurer.
Nice.
But in the case of Thomas it's not really a matter of opinion that his family, through his wife Ginny's activism for Right-Wing causes, would directly benefit from his decision. She already has in the case of Citizen's United, and she is currently making money lobbying against the Health Care Bill via her firm Liberty Central.
RICHMOND, Va. — As one of the keynote speakers here Friday at a state convention billed as the largest Tea Party event ever, Virginia Thomas gave the throng of more than 2,000 activists a full-throated call to arms for conservative principles.
Mrs. Thomas is the founder and head of a new nonprofit group, Liberty Central, dedicated to opposing what she characterizes as the leftist “tyranny” of President Obama and Democrats in Congress and to “protecting the core founding principles” of the nation.
...
A federal law requires justices to recuse themselves in a number of circumstances where real or perceived conflicts of interest could arise, including in cases where their spouses could have a financial interest. But the decision to step aside is up to each justice; there is no appeal from the nation’s highest court.
“It’s shocking that you would have a Supreme Court justice sitting on a case that might implicate in a very fundamental way the interests of someone who might have contributed to his wife’s organization,” said Deborah L. Rhode, a law professor and director of the Stanford University Center on the Legal Profession.
As many of us know Thomas failed to document the earnings from his wife's activism for over a dozen years.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has amended 13 years’ worth of disclosure reports to include details of wife Virginia Thomas’s sources of income, documents released on Monday show.
The documents indicate that Thomas’s wife, who goes by Ginni, had worked for Hillsdale College in Michigan, the Heritage Foundation and the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, among other entities.
Like all federal judges, Thomas must file annual disclosure reports on his personal finances, but he had omitted details of his wife’s earnings in what he wrote was a “misunderstanding of the filing instructions.” He also had checked a box marking no spousal income.
He also didn't disclose any information about her work with Liberty Central until recently.
Here she is on Fox News with Neal Cavuto.
Most recently Ginni has formed Liberty Consulting, a firm that couldn't have existed without Citizen's United.
Ginni Thomas’ new career advising clients on how to donate money to political causes is striking in light of the fact that this career path was much more difficult to break into just one year ago. In Citizens United v. FEC, Ginni’s husband Clarence cast the key fifth vote enabling corporations to spend unlimited money influencing U.S. elections. As a result of this vote, outside groups spent nearly $300 million influencing the 2010 elections — much of which would have been illegal before Justice Thomas greenlighted this spending.
Now, Ginni Thomas appears to have found a way to earn money off her husband’s actions as a justice. Clarence Thomas released countless amounts of corporate spending on U.S. elections, and Ginni Thomas can get rich advising those corporate clients on how to direct that spending
The point is that this isn't just a matter of opinion (or fantasy) as Hatch's criticism of Kagan, this is a matter of law.
(a) Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.
(b) He shall also disqualify himself in the following circumstances: …
(5) He or his spouse, or a person within the third degree of relationship to either of them, or the spouse of such a person: . . .
(iii) Is known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding;
Even beyond Hatch, Republicans have used this very same arguement themselves in the past when they called for the recusal of one judge from a decision on California Proposition 8, because his wife had been part of an anti-Prop 8 advocacy group.
It’s worth noting that conservatives have already interpreted this ethics law in a way that requires Justice Thomas to recuse himself from the health care litigation. After progressive Judge Stephen Reinhardt was assigned to the appellate panel that was to hear a challenge to anti-gay Proposition 8, supporters of the anti-gay law called for Reinhardt to recuse because his wife’s organization advocates against Prop 8.
Not that anyone seriously thinks Thomas will do the right thing and recuse himself in case, but it's going to interesting watching Repubs who called for Kagan and Reinhardt to recuse themselves wriggle out of the hypocrisy noose on this one.
Here's a blast from the past on Ginni by former CNN Host Rick Sanchez.
Vyan
Update: Added more videos, and links to Ginni Thomas and her current work with Liberty Consulting, as well as link to WaPo article that documents that Elena Kagan has recused herself in nearly half the cases the Supreme Court will hear this session.
Rumsfeld: The idea that he (Powell) was lying (before the U.N.) or duped is nonsense. He believed it. Our military believed. Our military got chemical weapons suits on to protect them. Saddam Hussein neighbors told us, "Be ready, when you get close to Bahgdad their going to use Chemical Weapons againt yor troops"
Sawyer: But you were wrong?
Rumsfeld: Oh my goodness, the intelligence was most certainly wrong.
WASHINGTON — In a classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared before the Iraq war, the CIA hedged its judgments about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, pointing up the limits of its knowledge.
But in the unclassified version of the NIE — the so-called white paper cited by the Bush administration in making its case for war — those carefully qualified conclusions were turned into blunt assertions of fact, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar intelligence.
The repeated elimination of qualifying language and dissenting assessments of some of the government's most knowledgeable experts gave the public an inaccurate impression of what the U.S. intelligence community believed about the threat Hussein posed to the United States, the committee said.
Dedicating a section of its 511-page report to discrepancies between the two versions of the crucial October 2002 NIE, the panel laid out numerous instances in which the unclassified version omitted key dissenting opinions about Iraqi weapons capabilities, overstated U.S. knowledge about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons and, in one case, inserted threatening language into the public document that was not contained in the classified version.
"The intelligence community's elimination of the caveats from the unclassified white paper misrepresented their judgments to the public, which did not have access to the classified National Intelligence Estimate containing the more carefully worded assessments," the Senate panel's report concluded.
"The fact that the NIE changed so dramatically from its classified to its unclassified form and broke all in one direction, toward a more dangerous scenario … I think was highly significant," the committee's vice chairman, Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), said Friday.
Donald Rumsfeld would have had access to the classified version of the report and should certainly have known that the unequivocal certainty presented in the unclassified version of the report which was presented to Congress... was a sham.
The newly released report, however, also included a dissenting view from the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as the INR.
"The claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR's assessment, highly dubious," read the dissent,
Another U.S. official said the intelligence on uranium in the NIE never rose to the level that it could be "stated flatly" by the United States.
The official also said the Niger information was included in the 90-page report because it "was out there," and for "an effort at completeness." The official said the NIE contained six main arguments supporting the case that Iraq was continuing its efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction, but uranium from Africa was not one of them.
Another point is that even within the Unclassified Version of the Report, the overall assessment was that Saddam was unlikely to to actually use any WMD's unless he was provoked. So it made a ton of sense to invade him under those circumstances unless you goal actually was to provoke him in order to provide a rationale for the invasion itself.
And if that idea seems far fetched, just remember that Bush did consider a plot provoke Saddam into shooting at UN aircraft (which would have been in disguise) in order to prompt the UN into action.
· Mr Bush told Mr Blair that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours". Mr Bush added: "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]".
That plan wasn't actually put into place, but it does show Bush's mindset of desperation to find an excuse, any excuse to attack and invade Iraq and any contrary facts or evidence that he wasn't an actual danger - be damned.
For example, in that same 2002 NIE Energy Dept Disputed that the Aluminum Tubes would be used as "centerfuges", but Bush and Rummy didn't listen.
Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although "most agencies judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."
In addition, Vanity Fair has found at least 14 instances prior to the 2003 State of the Union in which analysts at the C.I.A., the State Department, or other government agencies who had examined the Niger documents or reports about them raised serious doubts about their legitimacy--only to be rebuffed by Bush-administration officials who wanted to use the material. "They were just relentless," says Wilkerson, who later prepared Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations General Assembly. "You would take it out and they would stick it back in. That was their favorite bureaucratic technique--ruthless relentlessness."
The information about mobile labs came from one source, Curveball, whom the Defense Intelligence Agency - Rumsfeld's agency - had been well informed was a fabricator and that his claims could not be trusted.
Jan 2000-Sept 2001: Curveball's statements are recorded in German, shared with a local Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) team, and sent to the US, where they are translated into English for analysis at the DIA's directorate for human intelligence in Clarendon, Va. "This was not substantial evidence," one senior German intelligence official later recalls in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said." The reports are then sent to the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), whose experts analyze the data and share it with artists who use Curveball's accounts to render sketches.
The CIA never had access to Curveball. Instead, he was controlled by Germany's intelligence service, which passed along the information it collected to the United States through the Defense Intelligence Agency, a Pentagon spy agency that handled information from Iraqi defectors.
So the raw information - including the German agencies doubts about it's accuracy - were being directly funneled to Rumsfeld.
But at least one officer at CIA, European Field Office head Tyler Drumheller did discover that Curveball couldn't be trusted, however he couldn't get anyone to listen to him - not even Tenet.
In late 2002, the Bush administration began scouring intelligence files for reports of Iraqi weapons threats. Drumheller was asked to press a counterpart from a European intelligence agency for direct access to Curveball. Other officials confirmed that it was the German intelligence service.
The German official declined but then offered a startlingly candid assessment, Drumheller recalled. "He said, 'I think the guy is a fabricator,' " Drumheller said, recounting the conservation with the official, whom he declined to name. "He said, 'We also think he has psychological problems. We could never validate his reports.' "
...
Drumheller said he called the office of John E. McLaughlin, then the CIA deputy director, and was told to come there immediately. Drumheller said he sat across from McLaughlin and an aide in a small conference room and spelled out his concerns.
Yet to this very day, George Tenet claims nobody told him about Curveball being a liar.
The new documents also raise the possibility that caveats raised by intelligence analysts about al-Libi's claims were withheld from Powell when he was preparing his Security Council speech. Larry Wilkerson, who served as Powell's chief of staff and oversaw the vetting of Powell's speech, responded to an e-mail from NEWSWEEK Wednesday stating that he was unaware of the DIA doubts about al-Libi at the time the speech was being prepared. "We never got any dissent with respect to those lines you cite ... indeed the entire section that now we know came from [al-Libi]," Wilkerson wrote.
So yet again, the DIA - Rumsfeld - had the information that al Libi was a liar, but didn't share that information - and now he tries to blame the intelligence for being wrong?
But according to the newly declassified DIA and CIA documents provided to Levin, the credibility of those statements by Bush and Powell were already in doubt within the U.S. intelligence community. While the DIA was the first to raise red flags in its February 2002 report, the CIA itself in January 2003 produced an updated version of a classified internal report called “Iraqi Support for Terrorism.” The previous version of this CIA report in September 2002 had simply included al-Libi’s claims, according to the newly declassified agency document provided to Levin in response to his inquiries about al-Libi. But the updated January 2003 version, while including al-Libi’s claims that Al Qaeda sent operatives to Iraq to acquire chemical and biological weapons and training, added an important new caveat: It “noted that the detainee was not in a position to know if any training had taken place,” according to the copy of the document obtained by NEWSWEEK. It was not until January 2004—nine months after the war was launched—that al-Libi recanted “a number of the claims he made while in detention for the previous two years, including the claim that Al Qaeda sent operatives to Iraq to obtain chemical and biological weapons and related training,” the CIA document says.
So al Libi lied too, after he had been buried alive up to his neck - and claimed that there were bogus links between al Qeada and Saddam when there weren't.
Ultimately the Duelfer Report showed that Saddam had destroyed his WMD stockpiles all the way back in 1991, meaning that the final declaration he provided per UN mandate prior to the war was absolutely correct and that the U.S. was absolutely wrong to blow it off and claim Saddam Failed to Explain where the Yellowcake and Mobile Labs were.
Instead of a commitment to disarm, Iraq has a high-level political commitment to maintain and conceal its weapons, led by Saddam Hussein and his son Qusay, who controls the Special Security Organization, which runs Iraq's concealment activities. Instead of implementing national initiatives to disarm, Iraq maintains institutions whose sole purpose is to thwart the work of the inspectors. And instead of full cooperation and transparency, Iraq has filed a false declaration to the United Nations that amounts to a 12,200- page lie
For example, the declaration fails to account for or explain Iraq's efforts to get uranium from abroad, its manufacture or specific fuel for ballistic missiles it claims not to have, and the gaps previously identified by the United NAtions in Iraq's accounting for more than two tons of the raw materials needed to produce thousands of gallons of anthrax and other biological weapons."
This put Iraq in an impossible position of having to disprove a lie based on a forgery, and then calling them the liars for it. The truth is that Saddam was cooperating fully, and the inspectors - at our direction - were turning up "garbage after garbage".
In fact, the U.S. claim that Iraq is developing missiles that could hit its neighbors – or U.S. troops in the region, or even Israel – is just one of the claims coming from Washington that inspectors here are finding increasingly unbelievable. The inspectors have become so frustrated trying to chase down unspecific or ambiguous U.S. leads that they've begun to express that anger privately in no uncertain terms.
U.N. sources have told CBS News that American tips have lead to one dead end after another.
Example: satellite photographs purporting to show new research buildings at Iraqi nuclear sites. When the U.N. went into the new buildings they found "nothing."
Example: Saddam's presidential palaces, where the inspectors went with specific coordinates supplied by the U.S. on where to look for incriminating evidence. Again, they found "nothing."
Example: Interviews with scientists about the aluminum tubes the U.S. says Iraq has imported for enriching uranium, but which the Iraqis say are for making rockets. Given the size and specification of the tubes, the U.N. calls the "Iraqi alibi air tight."
So frustrated have the inspectors become that one source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they've been getting as "garbage after garbage after garbage." In fact, Phillips says the source used another cruder word. The inspectors find themselves caught between the Iraqis, who are masters at the weapons-hiding shell game, and the United States, whose intelligence they've found to be circumstantial, outdated or just plain wrong.
Suskind reports that the head of Iraqi intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush, met secretly with British intelligence in Jordan in the early days of 2003. In weekly meetings with Michael Shipster, the British director of Iraqi operations, Habbush conveyed that Iraq had no active nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs and no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
When Tenet was informed of the findings in early February, he said, “They’re not going to like this downtown,” Suskind wrote, meaning the White House. Suskind says that Bush’s reaction to the report was: “Why don’t they ask him to give us something we can use to help make our case?”
Instead the White House ordered the CIA to get Hubbush to forge a false letter that yet again linked Saddam to al Qeada by claiming that Mohommad Atta was trained in Iraq in an effort to yet again provide yet another bogus excuse to invade Iraq and remove Saddam from power by force. The Bush White House has denied that they asked Habbush to write this letter - even though the letter actually exists - it's interesting that they do not deny he told them there were no WMD's and they ignored it.
The handwritten memo, a copy of which has been obtained exclusively by the Telegraph, is dated July 1, 2001 and provides a short resume of a three-day "work programme" Atta had undertaken at Abu Nidal's base in Baghdad.
In the memo, Habbush reports that Atta "displayed extraordinary effort" and demonstrated his ability to lead the team that would be "responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy".
If the Bush administration didn't have direct influence on this letter being written - who did? Why exactly would Habbush lie - and provide Bush with exactly the smoking gun he was desperate to have - like this?
Just imagine if instead of making up this kind of bullcrap, Bush had done the right thing and let the weapons inspectors finish their job so that it would be been finally revealed that the intelligence was right. We could have seen the kind of democracy flowering in Iraq that we're now seeing in Egypt. Just imagine if the insurgency had been turned against Saddam instead of against us?
There were no mobile labs. There was no yellowcake and centerfuges. There were no action chemical weapons or nuclear programs. There were no stockpiles (and if there were they would have been degraded to near uselessness after so many years). All of these arguments were based on forgeries and lies that were either paid for or generated by torture.
The intelligence wasn't wrong Rummy - You Were.
It seemed incomprehensible at the time, but now in the wake of such unreasonable irrational right-wing beliefs such as Death Panels, Creeping Sharia Law, the Coming Egypto-Iranian Caliphate, Climate-Change Denierism, the Supply-Side Cult of Tax Cut Fetishists, Tentherism and Birtherism - it seems far more clear how some people are far more invested in thier own paranoid apocalyptic fantasies than in the facts and that when those people gain economic and political power the results can be devestating.
Stark: I want to know why a tax-raising, amnesty-giving, cut-and-running, negotiating-with-terrorists (Iran-Contra) guy is a hero to the conservative movement?
This weeks dramatic story in Egypt has riveted the world, with amazing images of courage and brutality, such as this one here where Christians lock hands to protect Muslims in Tahrir square during their morning prayers.
The facts are clear, but despite that Mubarak Regime has attempted to weave a completely alternative scenario as to what is actually happening claiming that "outside interests" and foreigners have instigated these protests and attempting to destabilize the country.
It's been said before, but yet again in their most recent update to the current Budget CBO has said it again. Here are the before and after projections.
As you can see there is a marked increase from the OMB numbers for FY2011 Budget compared to latest CBO projection. Why the difference? Follow over the flip.
Revenues under the President’s proposals would be $1.4 trillion (or 4 percent) below CBO’s baseline projections from 2011 to 2020, largely because of the President’s proposals to index the parameters of the alternative minimum tax (AMT) for inflation starting at their 2009 levels and to extend many of the tax reductions enacted in the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA) and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA). CBO’s baseline projections reflect current law, under which the parameters of the AMT revert to earlier levels and the reductions under EGTRRA and JGTRRA expire as scheduled at the end of December 2010.
...
CBO has also updated its baseline budget projections, which—unlike the President’s budget—assume that current tax and spending laws and policies remain unchanged. CBO has not modified its economic forecast, so those updated projections just take into account new information obtained about various aspects of the budget since the previous projections were completed in January. The resulting changes are modest, adding $11 billion to the projected deficit in 2010 and reducing projected deficits over the 2011-2020 period by a total of $63 billion.
So they make it pretty plain, the Bush Tax Cuts from 2001 and 2003 are why the deficit will not drop nearly 50% by 2012 as President Obama's administration had previously predicted.
But what about that "Job-Killing Health Care Spending Act"?
Other proposals—including ones associated with significant changes in the nation’s health insurance system—would, on net, increase revenues.
In other words, it would reduce the deficit.
And what would happen if we follow Tea-Publican advice and extended the Bush cuts permenently?
Another set of proposals would permanently extend or modify certain provisions of EGTRRA and JGTRRA that are set to expire at the end of December 2010. Those provisions include reductions in tax rates on dividends, capital gains, and other income;4 relief from the so-called marriage penalty; and an increase in the child tax credit. Other proposals would modify estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer taxes by extending 2009 law permanently. If enacted, those changes would reduce revenues, relative to the baseline, by $2.2 trillion through 2020, according to estimates provided by JCT.
Not that such simple A-B=C math seems to work for Tea-Publicans like Michele Bachmann who responded to the President saying "every day families sacrifice to live within their means — they deserve a government that does the same."
With this...
"He's absolutely shameless," the Minnesota Republican could be seen saying to her seatmate, Representative Jean Schmidt, an Ohio Republican, according to a video taken in the U.S. House chamber during Obama's State of the Union address two nights ago.
Bachmann, 54, who later gave a televised response to the president on behalf of the Tea Party Express, turned back to face Obama and repeated, "Absolutely shameless!" She spoke as the president was saying the government should balance its budget more like average American families.
Interesting the Bachmann's SOTU-Prom Date was Jeane "Coward's Cut and Run" Schmidt.
And of course Bachmann would think it's "Shameless" since she's been going around Touting this bogus chart which attempts to blame all of our deficit and debt problems on President Obama.
Michele Bachmann may honestly not know this since she apparently doesn't know that John Quincy Adams died almost 20 years before the ratification of the 13th Amendment which finally abolished Slavery, or the fact the he's not a "Founding Father" since he was only 9-years-old in 1776, it's his Father was a Founding Father - not him, but she also doesn't know that the Federal Governments Fiscal Year for 2009 began on October 1st of 2008 - which was one month before Obama was even elected.
Before Obama Took Office, The FY 2009 Deficit Was Projected At $1.2 Trillion. As reported by the Washington Times: "The Congressional Budget Office announced a projected fiscal 2009 deficit of $1.2 trillion even if Congress doesn't enact any new programs. [...] About the only person who was silent on the deficit projection was Mr. Bush, who took office facing a surplus but who saw spending balloon and the country notch the highest deficits on record." [Washington Times, 1/8/09, emphasis added]
The Actual Deficit Chart from the End of Clinton (which shows a surplus) through Obama (which shows the deficit dropping after Bush's explosion) looked like this before the Bush cuts were extended by Decembers Tax Cut Deal.
Tea-Publicans like Bachmann are constantly trying to pin our budget problems on President Obama, but the fact is that the deficit began with Bush and that continuing to implement Bush's Policies will do nothing but continue to worsen our budget problems and deficit - not improve them.
Glenn Beck's repeated fantasy rants about the "Great Leftist Plan to Collapse our System" has resulted in the issuances of Death Threats against a 78 year-old sociology professor for a minor paper she co-authored in 1966. as if it had any bearing on events here today.
Beck: Perpare for a crash landing, this plane is coming down, because the pilot is intentionally steering it into the trees. We'll be fine as long as these people are not in control. They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered.
Glenn Beck has been railing against 78-year-old CUNY professor Frances Fox Piven for weeks now, claiming she co-authored a devious plan to overthrow the government in the 1960s. Now, some of his fans are issuing death threats against her.
According to the New York Times, Piven has been receiving death threats after being villainized on Beck's show. "Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 rounds ready and I'll give My life to take Our freedom back," wrote one user on Beck's news site, The Blaze.
Exactly how Barack Obama is tied to a paper that was written when he was 5-years-old, I'm not certain - but people like Beck and his flock have been absolutely convinced that the deep dark plan is at the heart of all of Barack Obama's policy solutions to date.
The assumption that Obama will need the nation to prosper in order to protect the 2010 mid-term election incorrectly assumes that he esteems free market capitalism. He does not. Rather than win through superior ideas and policies, the Democrat plan for success in the mid-term elections is to win by destroying political opposition.
Obama adheres to the Saul Alinksy Rules for Radicals method of politics, which teaches the dark art of destroying political adversaries. However, that text reveals only one front in the radical left's war against America. The Cloward/Piven Strategy is another method employed by the radical Left to create and manage crisis. This strategy explains Rahm Emanuel's ominous statement, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."
Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation... [Emphasis added.]
Making an already weak economy even worse is the intent of the Cloward/Piven Strategy. It is imperative that we view the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan's spending on items like food stamps, jobless benefits, and health care through this end goal. This strategy explains why the Democrat plan to "stimulate" the economy involves massive deficit spending projects. It includes billions for ACORN and its subgroups such as SHOP and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. Expanding the S-Chip Program through deficit spending in a supposed effort to "save the children" only makes a faltering economy worse.
See how that works? They argue that the Recovery and Reinvestment Bill was simply a feint designed not to help the economy, but instead to destroy it. However in the meantime - despite Obama "obvious" dislike for capitalism - Corporate Profits during 2010 were at record levels.
American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or noninflation-adjusted terms.
Meanwhile on the jobs front, even though things have been slow compared to the rate of corporate profits - in 2010 more jobs were generated under Barack Obama (1.3 Million) than during George Bush's entire 8 Year Presidency (1.1 Million).
Despite all the cry and hue about Run Away Government Spending the truth is that spending has been essentially flat during Obama's Presidency and has actually come down in FY2011 by over $70 Billion, and the Deficit has already been reduced over $200 Billion, and is projected to be cut in half by 2012. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/#usgs302a
How is this possible? We all know that Obama spent massively on the Stimulus, TARP and Auto Bail outs right? Well besides the fact that both TARP and Auto Bail-out were started by George W. Bush, both were also Loans that have been paid back. In fact TARP was paid back with a profit of $73 Billion. 40% of the Recovery Act was Tax-Cuts for Businesses to spur growth and investment. In the end actually government spending has been basically neutral, while the Health Care Bill is project to save $132 Billion from the deficit over the next 10 years, including $500 Billion in savings in Medicare.
But in the end, all of these projections Depend on the Economy Recovering - and despite their claims to the contrary Republicans Don't Deserve Credit for this. But of course, if you're going to blame the Obama and Democrats for the Crash as being part of a deliberate strategy, Republicans have to take Credit for the Recovery Right (even though they voted against or blocked every aspect of it)
In Republicans' telling, they are responsible for a looming economic recovery from a recession caused by Democrats.
Close to the opposite is true, but you'd never guess that by listening to the GOP.
Citing a Dow Jones story reporting that U.S. companies plan to increase hiring, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's press shop fired off a morning roundup including this sub headline: "THERE ARE THE JOBS: Republicans Prevent Massive Tax Increase, Economy Begins to Improve."
The Dow Jones story does not credit Republicans for the recovery.
They also ignore who crashed the economy in the first place - hint: George W. Bush's "hands off" policy with the Housing Crisis and Wall Street.
Even more recently the Blaze has attacked Piven for supposed Calls for a Violent Revolution.
She’s considered by many as the grandmother of using the American welfare state to implement revolution. Make people dependent on the government, overload the government rolls, and once government services become unsustainable, the people will rise up, overthrow the oppressive capitalist system, and finally create income equality.
Now, as the new year ball drops, Piven is at it again, ringing in 2011 with renewed calls for revolution.
In a chilling and almost unbelievable editorial again in The Nation (”Mobilizing the Jobless,” January 10/17, 2011 edition), she calls on the jobless to rise up in a violent show of solidarity and force. As before, those calls are dripping with language of class struggle. Language she and her late husband Richard Cloward made popular in the 60s.
But Piven didn't call for anything more "violent" than - a Large Demonstration (a Tea Party) by and for the masses of Unemployed.
And as a result of these lies and spin this little old professor lady is getting Death Threats on the web, phone and email - via New York Times.
Her name has become a kind of shorthand for “enemy” on Mr. Beck’s Fox News Channel program, which is watched by more than 2 million people, and on one of his Web sites, The Blaze. This week, Mr. Beck suggested on television that she was an enemy of the Constitution.
Never mind that Ms. Piven’s radical plan to help poor people was published 45 years ago, when Mr. Beck was a toddler. Anonymous visitors to his Web site have called for her death, and some, she said, have contacted her directly via e-mail.
It's not like this hasn't happened before - like when Byron Williams attempted to stage a gun attack on the ACLU and Tides Foundation after becoming entranced by the Fear-Mongering of Beck.
Byron also writes that "very good information regarding 'Petrobraz' can be found in Glenn Beck's 'June' shows, where he accurately covered the Obama-Soros-Petrobraz-Chicago (Crime Inc.) connections for several days. It's all true."
Byron adds that he "found allusions to the Horizon disaster as a 'false-flag' operation in Alex Jones 'Info.Wars.com' and 'PrisonPlanet.com.' "
"Think like a conspiracy theorist," Byron tells me during the interview. "Except don't use the word 'theory.' Because the conspiracies are not theories. The official report is the lie; the conspiracy is the truth.?"
Are these ideas any less crazy than the idea that the Government is trying to control us through grammar?
All it takes is one nut being pointed in the wrong direction to start a blood bath.
Yes, Glenn Beck has stepped forward to defend, justify and rationalize this comment:
Beck: Shoot me in the head, before I stop talking about founders. Shoot me in the head, if you try and change our government.
...
You're going to have to shoot them in the head, but be warned - they might shoot you first. Karl Marx is their George Washington, you'll never change their minds. Nancy Pelosi, those are the people you should be worried about.
You see, we've got it all wrong. Like the original Shirley Sherrod Video Beck claims that this is really a cry "for peace" and a warning that the people Democrats need to worry about becoming violent - are all on the Left.
Beck: "Did Glenn Beck really tell his audience to Shoot people in the head". This is the worst of the worst. This is the Left, and those who don't care about truth, honor or justice at all.
Stu: It's just so blatant. They don't even try to hide it anymore.
Beck: And will do anything they have to do to discredit, dishonor and inflame. This is so easy to explain...
Beck's claim is essentially that he wasn't inciting anyone to violence, he was warning against the danger Radical Revolutionary Leftists to Democratic Politicians and the "Leftist" Media.
Beck: In this clip I am warning that "They" the Revolutionaries who have been co-opted by the Politicians. I was warning, that if they feel betrayed, if they feel that you've been using them - they'll kill you.
Stu: We know that because they've said it in their own words.
Ok. Beck believes that somewhere there are raving bands of Communist Radicals in the U.S. who are ready to take up arms against politicians that dare to betray their Leftist Ideals.
Really?
So why didn't we see a violent uprising after the Public Option was removed from Health Care Reform? Why didn't we see an uprising and violent overthrow of the Government when Bush stole the Election against John Kerry in Ohio? Why didn't people protest in the streets after Abu Ghraib? Why haven't they gotten out their pitchforks when the Volker Rule was dropped from Wall Street Reform?
Beck: They believe in despotism. They think they're the enlightened ones - just like the Nazis believed they were the enlightened ones. Now, the progressive movement is co-opting everybody. People that believe violent revolution and death camps. Bill Ayers talked about death camps... that there will have to be 25 Million that will have to be exterminated.
He said what?. Well apparently he's referring to a claim made by a former FBI Informant back in 1982 after the case against Bill Ayers, Bernadette Dorn and the Weather Underground had completely fallen apart.
I asked, “Well what is going to happen to those people we can’t reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?” And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated.
And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers.
And when I say “eliminate,” I mean “kill.”
Twenty-five million people.
I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.
And they were dead serious.
This was a theoretical discussion initiated and pursued by the agent himself, not a "Plan", as to what might happen in a Red Dawn situation where the U.S. Government had collapsed and other communist countries from Cuba, to North Korea and Russia were occupying our territory. This wasn't a plan because until they had this discussion none of them have ever previous thought about the subject.
It's not like this was ever a rational possibility, and Beck ignores the fact that the goal of the Weather Underground wasn't to overthrow the U.S., it was to end the Vietnam War - and since that war is over - all this "Revolution" talk is meaningless.
By the end of April, the FBI offices were to terminate all files dealing with leftist groups.[31] The files were a part of an FBI program called COINTELPRO.[32] However, after COINTELPRO was dissolved in 1971 by J. Edgar Hoover,[33] the FBI continued its counterintelligence on groups like the Weather Underground. In 1973, the FBI established the 'Special Target Information Development' program, where agents were sent undercover to penetrate the Weather Underground. Due to the illegal tactics of FBI agents involved with the program, government attorneys requested all weapons- and bomb-related charges be dropped against the Weather Underground. The Weather Underground was no longer a fugitive organization and could turn themselves in with minimal charges against them
All charges against Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dorn were Dropped because the FBI broke the law and it wasn't just a few crimes - it was thousands. For example the FBI had a habit of lying to Congress.
A 25-year FBI veteran, M. Wesley Swearingen, claimed that the FBI routinely lied to Congress about the number of break-ins and wiretaps: "I myself actually participated in more than 238 while assigned to the Chicago office, [which] conducted thousands of bag jobs." Swearingen charged that agents had lied to a Washington grand jury about the number, locations, and duration of illegal practices in pursuit of the Weather Underground.[10] FBI director William Webster disciplined only six of the 68 agents referred to him by the Justice Department. Felt and Miller were convicted in 1980, and a few months later were pardoned by President Reagan. Today the FBI can still use these same techniques, simply by mislabeling their targets as foreign agents or terrorists.
Other FBI crimes from that period included planting false evidence and witness coercion. The case against Ayers and Dorn was dropped because it wasn't possible to trust what these people say.
Today - 30 years later - Bill Ayers is a college professor and as peaceful as a baby lamb. The idea that Ayers would still want the U.S. Government collapsed, even after the end of the War, even after the Church Commission and establishment of the FISA Court to protect the privacy of citizens against the actual Government Overreach and Intrusion that was occurring under COINTELPRO - is frankly ridiculous.
Y'know who else Beck claims has called for a violent Revolution?
Van Jones.
VAN JONES, FORMER WHITE HOUSE ADVISER FOR GREEN JOBS: I think that when we look back to the history of the Obama administration and look back at the history of our progressive movement, that this week will mark a historic inflection point when progressives decided to be progressive again in this country. I think something shifted this week.
Ok, that's a great example. Not.
The third person whom Beck claims is a Radical Revolutionary is Frances Fox Piven who like the Weather Underground may have once talked about "Overthrowing the Government" during the 60's, but today is a simply calling for the Unemployed and Disenfranchised to get organized and demonstrate on their own behalf.
So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs? After all, the injustice is apparent. Working people are losing their homes and their pensions while robber-baron CEOs report renewed profits and windfall bonuses. Shouldn't the unemployed be on the march? Why aren't they demanding enhanced safety net protections and big initiatives to generate jobs?
...
Nothing like this seems to be on the agenda. Instead the next Congress is going to be fixated on an Alice in Wonderland policy of deficit reduction by means of tax and spending cuts. As for the jobless, right-wing commentators and Congressional Republicans are reviving the old shibboleth that unemployment is caused by generous unemployment benefits that indulge poor work habits and irresponsibility.
Mass protests might change the president's posture if they succeeded in pressing him hard from his base, something that hasn't happened so far in this administration. But there are obstructions to mobilizing the unemployed that would have to be overcome.
...
Losing a job is bruising; even when many other people are out of work, most people are still working. So, a kind of psychological transformation has to take place; the out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible.
Almost sounds to me like what she's calling for - IS A TEA PARTY and a heaven forfend a March on Washington to show our Government to support the people and the workers, not the fat cats and the corporations.
There's nothing violent in this request. This is not a call to revolution. But in Beck's fevered mind - it is.
Beck: I'm not calling for revolution. I'm begging for people to start paying attention to those people who are.
No, really they aren't calling for that Glenn - and that's why no one is becoming alarmed about it, except you and the people you are deliberately deluding.
Funny then, that after smearing and distorting the words and actions of these others - Glenn and his cohorts would start whining about how they've been smeared and distorted.
Stu: When someone sends a video like this edited Shirley Sherrod style. I can't believe they're trying to take down Glenn. It's almost as important what the person who edited that video thinks. They are convinced that the American people are so dumb, that they won't do 5 minutes of research to see what you're talking about.
Beck: I always ask people to do they're own homework. They can not ask you to do that because the second they do - you're exposed. It's what they think of their own followers. They're ranchers, and the people are cattle. That's why they say "Your boss did this to you".
Well, I did do my own homework Glenn - and what I found out was that you're still a lying prick.
And actually, sometimes the Boss did do it particularly when he's decided to move your job to China, just as Boeing announced it would do TODAY for 1000 workers in Southern California.
Bottom line is this: It's fair to say Beck wasn't literally calling for a violent overthrow of the government, or for a violent revolution. He wasn't literally calling for people to go out and Shoot each other in the head - he was ginning up Phony Unfounded Fears of Left-Wing Radical Revolutionaries that frankly don't exist, and rationalizing a self-defensive counter attack against them.
Basically he was authorizing a Jihad against the "Violent" Left that is long gone, while simultaneously blaming them for it with made-up exaggerated bullcrap. This is a trick Beck's been playing for a long while, like
But y'know at least he wasn't suggesting that a member of the U.S. Congress be Murdered with a Shovel - or someone should Line them Up and Shoot 'em In the Head.
Beck: I've been sitting here for the last few minutes trying to come up with a list of people I'd like to wack over the head with a shovel.
VO: And now "People We'd like to Beat to Death with a Shovel".
Beck: Charlie Rangel. (Clang!) See, I feel better already. There is a time for everything, for every season there is a purpose. And today, the season is, Clubbing people over the head with Shovels
Thank God, no one might take a clip like that and think Beck has a long habit of issuing death threats against members of Congress. Cuz, y'know that would be like a rancher leading his cattle out to graze on some fresh bails of hate.
Glenn Beck has been railing against 78-year-old CUNY professor Frances Fox Piven for weeks now, claiming she co-authored a devious plan to overthrow the government in the 1960s. Now, some of his fans are issuing death threats against her.
Byron also writes that "very good information regarding 'Petrobraz' can be found in Glenn Beck's 'June' shows, where he accurately covered the Obama-Soros-Petrobraz-Chicago (Crime Inc.) connections for several days. It's all true."