Barack Obama

Buzzfeed Scoops Breitbart: The Obama Harvard Video

Posted by on March 7, 2012 at 1:55 pm. 16 Comments :

At last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Andrew Breitbart said that he had videos of President Obama in his college days at Harvard. The implication was that the content of the videos was so scandalous that it would have an impact on Obama’s reelection. Breitbart gleefully announced that…

“I have videos. This election we’re going to vet him from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008. The videos are going to come out, the narrative is going to come out.”

Well, they came out today. But Breitbart’s survivors at BigGovernment.com had nothing to do with it. The “vetting” was done by Andrew Kaczynski at Buzzfeed. Kaczynski acquired video from WGBH TV in Boston of the future president speaking at a rally for more diversity in the Harvard faculty.

The Breitbart crew immediately blasted Buzzfeed for releasing what they said was a “selectively edited” copy of the video.

“[T]he video has been selectively edited–either by the Boston television station or by Buzzfeed itself. Over the course of the day, Breitbart.com will be releasing additional footage that has been hidden by Obama’s allies in the mainstream media and academia.”

Gee, I can hardly wait. This should be endlessly informative since the Breitbart clan is intimately familiar with the practice of selectively editing videos. BigGovernment’s Joel Pollak says that the unveiling of the uncut video will take place tonight on Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News. There’s another sign of how much credibility any of this will have. Hannity is famous for airing videos of sparsely attended Tea Party rallies that turned out to be from completely different, and crowded, events.


The most remarkable thing about this video is how little Obama has changed. He had the same oratorical style and poise then as now. At the time Obama was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was speaking on behalf of Prof. Derrick Bell, the first tenured African-American professor in Harvard’s law school. The occasion was a rally in support of greater diversity in general, and specifically the hiring of an African-American woman in the law school.

Pollak further promised to expose Bell as a “radical academic tied to Jeremiah Wright.” I’m surprised that he isn’t also tying him to George Soros, Van Jones, Saul Alinsky, and Che Guevara. However, Bell was a respected legal scholar and author who served in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, at the NAACP as an associate counsel, as the dean of the University of Oregon School of Law and, in addition to Harvard, also taught at USC, Stanford, and NYU. Clearly a dangerous anti-American. But Breitbart’s ghost is already setting in motion the smear campaign.

Perhaps Pollak has portions of the video where Obama advocates the violent overthrow of the government by black nationalists or discloses his Kenyan birthplace, but somehow I doubt it. It appears that the Breitbart folks are just upset that their phony plot to trickle out snippets of an entirely harmless video in order to create a fake controversy has been foiled by the lamestream media (if Buzzfeed qualifies as that). Now they will have to resort to smearing the name of a deceased law professor and pretending that there is something wrong with Obama supporting a more diversified Harvard faculty. Fox Nation has already jumped in with an item about this story headlined: Obama Harvard Video: Rally for Race-Based Hiring. So there’s your talking point, righties. Go at it.

Late Breaking: Breitbart’s site released the “uncut” video and the only additional footage on it is of Obama embracing the professor he had just introduced. It was not exactly a secret that Obama admired his Harvard law professor. But the real problem for the Breitbart clan is that they have been bashing Buzzfeed all day long about having “selectively edited” the video, but now they have been shown to be lying.

PBS/WGBH posted the REAL uncut video here.

Hannity and Co. spent over 20 minutes discussing this embarrassing flop of a scandal, even though the exclusive broadcast of the uncut video offered nothing new. The pair from Breitbart.com (Ben Shapiro and Joel Pollak) fidgeted nervously as they desperately tried to set some sort of fire under this non-event, but they utterly failed to come up with anything other than a bumper sticker criticism of Bell which they repeated incessantly to make sure the brainwashing stuck: Derrick Bell is the Jeremiah Wright of academia.

Just as I suspected, that’s the talking point they are running with. It’s so pathetic that I actually feel a little sorry for them. Their leader passed away last week and now they are floundering like lost orphans. What a sad spectacle.

Fox News Slanders DOJ Attorney As A ‘Terrorist’ Lawyer

Posted by on March 5, 2012 at 1:58 pm. 1 Comments :

Once again Fox News is demonstrating their overt hostility to anything and everything in the Obama administration. It doesn’t matter if unemployment has dropped two points or that Osama Bin Laden is dead, somehow everything this administration does is tantamount to treason.

Case in point: The Department of Justice recently announced that it had promoted Tony West, the head of the Civil Division, to a new post as Associate Attorney General. This promotion was the result of his exemplary performance. In his role as the head of the Civil Division, West “recovered more than $8.8 billion in taxpayer money, the highest three-year total in department history.” Ordinarily that sort of accomplishment would be heralded by a deficit-obsessed right-winger. But we are dealing with an epidemic of Obama Derangement Syndrome, the symptoms of which are all too predictable. Here is how Fox News framed the story:

Fox News - Terrorist Lawyer

The headline on the Fox News web site declared “Terrorist Lawyer Gets Influential Justice Post.” On the air Fox News described Mr. West as a “Taliban Defender.” Both of these were deliberately designed to create the impression that West is affiliated with America’s enemies. Even worse, the story is being driven by a former DOJ attorney from the Bush administration, J. Christian Adams, who is defaming West and the entire Justice Department. Adams appeared on Fox & Friends with an all-encompassing allegation that Attorney General Eric Holder is…

“…filling [the Justice Department] with attorneys that, before they came to Justice, took on the most radical causes. And now they’re filling the Justice Department from top to bottom.”

Adams provides no support for his charge. And for someone with a record of dubious accusations that were easily debunked, Adams should be more careful with his unsubstantiated rebukes. He has previously tried to concoct DOJ conspiracies to prosecute civil rights cases against white defendants while letting black defendants off the hook – again, with no evidence to support it.

The characterization of West as a terrorist sympathizer stems from his having worked for a law firm that defended John Lindh, aka the American Taliban. That service is viewed by right-wingers as fraternizing with the enemy. American conservatives have long sought to portray themselves as the defenders of the Constitution despite the fact that they frequently show disdain for its most fundamental principles. For instance, the Sixth Amendment that guarantees a right to an attorney. That is the principle that West was patriotically upholding when he helped to represent an American citizen charged with a serious crime. But Adams expressly believes that respecting the Constitution in this manner disqualifies you from ever serving your government.

The larger condemnation that Fox is attempting to assert is that Obama and his entire administration is in cahoots with Al Qaeda. It is part of their years long effort to paint the President as a foreigner, a Muslim, and an anti-American socialist. That anyone actually believes those allegations is a testament to the success Fox has had in instilling ignorance in their audience. In the three years that Obama has been in office there have been more terrorists brought to justice (captured or killed) than in eight years of the Bush administration – and that includes Osama Bin Laden. So obviously Obama is working with Al Qaeda. It is part of their devious plot to allow him to dispose of their own members to make the American people think he isn’t one of them.

It is also notable to observe just who the right chooses to target when they make nonsense allegations like this one against West. The previous targets have included Van Jones, Valerie Jarrett, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, Eric Holder, UN Ambassador Susan Rice – all African American advisers and cabinet members. And let’s throw in Energy Secretary Steven Chu (Asian American) and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis (Latina American). But how often do you hear right-winger complaints about Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, Tom Vilsack, Shaun Donovan, Ray LaHood, or Arne Duncan – all white cabinet members? I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.

Andrew Breitbart’s Vetting Of Barack Obama Begins With A Dud

Posted by on March 5, 2012 at 11:13 am. 2 Comments :

The recently deceased Andrew Breitbart delivered a stem-winding speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last month. In it he dangled a tempting treat before the assembled disciples of rightism in the form of a promise to expose the radical, Marxist roots of the young Barack Obama. Breitbart announced that…

“I have videos. This election we’re going to vet him from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008. The videos are going to come out, the narrative is going to come out, that Barack Obama met a bunch of silver ponytails in the 1980s, like Bill (Ayers) and Bernadine Dohrn, who said one day we would have the presidency, and the rest of us slept as they plotted.”

That’s pretty heady stuff. It got the CPAC crowd worked up and initiated a stream of anticipation throughout the conservative community. What does Breitbart have? Are there videos of Obama conspiring with fugitive members of the Black Panther Party? Does the future president show up on film plotting the overthrow of the government?

Not exactly. The first part in the presumably continuing series of slander is not a video at all, but consists entirely of a poster for a play about conservative bogeyman Saul Alinsky.

Breitbart-Alinsky Poster

The play “The Love Song of Saul Alinsky” was staged in 1998 in Chicago. Obama was a state senator at the time and, as a student of local history, had some knowledge of Alinsky and his work in the city. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Obama would participate in a post-play panel discussion about the author and community organizer. Nevertheless, Breitbart’s survivors at BigGovernment think they have unveiled the next Watergate via their crack investigation of the world of the theater.


Despite the dishonest headline that calls the play “Barack’s Love Song To Alinsky,” he had nothing whatsoever to do with it. This is another attempt to smear the President by association with a demon that the right invented. Alinsky was not the Marxist menace that Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich, and Fox News make him out to be. In fact, he explicitly rejected the communists of his era saying…

“My only fixed truth is a belief in people, a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they’ll generally reach the right decisions. The only alternative to that belief is rule by an elite, whether it’s a Communist bureaucracy or our own present-day corporate establishment. You should never have an ideology more specific than that of the founding fathers: ‘For the general welfare.’ That’s where I parted company with the Communists in the Thirties, and that’s where I stay parted from them today.”

Alinsky was always, first and foremost, an advocate for the underclass in society that was abused and oppressed by the powerful. That’s a message that Tea Partiers could adopt if they weren’t such tools of powerful manipulators like the Koch brothers.

It is a sad and ironic tribute to Breitbart that his web site has published his last article and it is brimming with the sort of lies and distortions for which Breitbart was famous in life. If this is any indication of what Breitbart meant when he claimed to have explosive materials that would impact the President’s reelection, then the Democrats don’t have much to worry about. But I wouldn’t rest too easy because the Breitbart machine is still alive and it is probably working overtime to fabricate its next batch of propaganda.

At Fox Nation, Puerile Propaganda Doesn’t Take Weekends Off

Posted by on March 3, 2012 at 3:16 pm. 2 Comments :

The busy news fictionalizers at Fox Nation are hard at work this Saturday creating the stream of asinine idiotainment that their glassy-eyed readers demand. Here is an abridged selection of what Fox regards as newsworthy reporting today:

Fox Nation

Starting off with a hard-hitting investigative news item, the Fox Nationalists uncover a juicy morsel about a new Obama campaign hire. Apparently this low-level social media promoter in a Wisconsin campaign office used to be employed by Charlie Sheen. That automatically makes him the subject of ridicule deserving of taunts from the Fox family of dimwits. No matter what you think of Sheen, his social media presence is impressive. He has 6.7 million followers on Twitter and 2.3 million people “LIKE” his page on Facebook. Anyone who contributed to that success could be a real asset for any political campaign.

On the other hand, in the world of unfortunate associations, Mitt Romney has picked up the endorsement of the incontinent Ted Nugent. It will be interesting to hear Romney defend Nugent’s assassination threats against President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and senators Feinstein and Boxer (if anyone in the media has the integrity to ask him).

Nugent: I was in Chicago last week I said, “Hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these, you punk?” Obama, he’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on one of my machine guns. Let’s hear it for them. I was in New York and I said, “Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset you worthless bitch.” Since I’m in California, I’m gonna find Barbara Boxer she might wanna suck on my machine guns. Hey, Dianne Feinstein, ride one of these you worthless whore.

Fox Nation continued its quest for journalistic malpractice with a story it headlined: Memo: Obama To Raise Taxes For Middle Class If Re-Elected. The source to which Fox linked was an article at a web site called WeaselZippers. That should be the first sign of its credibility. The truth behind the data that Fox is deliberately misconstruing is related to the tax cuts for the wealthy that Bush pushed through more than a decade ago with a sunset provision that has already passed. It was Bush who predetermined that taxes would go back up. Obama has repeatedly tried to cut a deal where only the tax cuts for the rich would expire, but the GOP has fought him every step of the way.

The next story is one that tries to imply that Obama’s Department of Justice is aligning itself with Taliban terrorists. Just how stupid do they think their readers are? (Don’t answer that). The real story is that an attorney who has been working for the DOJ for three years has been promoted as a result of his exemplary performance. In his role as the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, Tony West “recovered more than $8.8 billion in taxpayer money, the highest three-year total in department history.” One of the many things that the right-wingnuts never understand about the Constitution is that every defendant is entitled to representation. It is the foundation of our justice system. And trying to smear an attorney for carrying out his constitutional obligations is reprehensible.

Finally, the Fox Nationalists were kind enough to post a link to the GOP response to Obama’s weekly address. But astute observers will note that they never posted a link to the address that the GOP were responding to. You know, the one Obama delivered. It’s like posting the answer to a question without ever posting the question. Fox is valiantly protecting its readers from any exposure to information that would give them a full and complete understanding of current events. That explains why they are so pitifully ignorant. Thank Fox’s dedication to fairness and balance for that. Here, by the way, is the Obama video:

Fox Nation vs. Reality: America’s Founding Principles

Posted by on February 29, 2012 at 1:38 pm. 4 Comments :

What is it with conservatives who purport to revere American history but have virtually no knowledge or understanding of it? From GOP candidates who think that the Revolutionary War began in New Hampshire, to Republicans who reject marriage equality, to Supreme Court justices who think corporations are people. The right has fetishized the Constitution and canonized its authors, but they repeatedly show disdain for both through their ignorance.

The Fox Nationalists routinely abuse the American legacy by misrepresenting it and twisting its meaning in pursuit of their partisan agenda. This morning they ran an item that unfairly hammers President Obama with an accusatory headline saying “Obama Attacks America’s Founding Principles in Detroit.”

The basis for their assertion is an article that misquotes the President’s remarks to the UAW in Detroit yesterday. The article was originally published by CNS News, a subsidiary of the ultra-rightist Media Research Center, and slams Obama for allegedly saying that “trying to climb to the very top” is only about “greed.” But the President’s message was more than that. What he actually said was…

“America’s not just looking out for yourself, it’s not just about greed, it’s not just about trying to climb to the very top and keep everybody else down. When our assembly lines grind to a halt, we work together and we get them going again. When somebody else falters, we try to give them a hand up, because we know we’re all in it together.”

That part about not “keep[ing] everybody else down” was a significant omission. As is the part where Obama says that “we’re all in it together.” The notion of collective destiny is something that conservatives have profound trouble grasping. It’s why they hate unions and community organizing. However, another great American had something to say in this vein, and he knew a thing or two about America’s founding principles:

Ben Franklin

How long will it be before Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh rips Benjamin Franklin apart for being a socialist Alinskyite?

Koch Brothers Whine About Obama Fund Raising Letter

Posted by on February 28, 2012 at 1:03 pm. 9 Comments :

For a couple of multi-billionaires with virtually unlimited resources who vigorously engage in hardball political activity, the Koch brothers are an awfully lily-livered pair of wusses.

The Koch brothers created and bankrolled the Tea Party, an AstroTurf, corporate funded, pseudo-movement, that incessantly disparages President Obama as a communist, a Nazi, a Muslim, an atheist, a Kenyan, and a Manchurian agent whose mission is to deliver America to its enemies and/or Satan. The Kochs are also the money behind numerous think tanks and organizations whose purpose is to destroy the presidency through propaganda or outright manipulation and suppression of the vote (such as the American Legislative Exchange Council).

Despite their prominent role in attacking the President, the Kochs are wetting their britches because the Obama reelection team mentions them in a fund raising letter. The exchange looks something like this:

Obama Fund Raising Letter: In just about 24 hours, Mitt Romney is headed to a hotel ballroom to give a speech sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a front group founded and funded by the Koch brothers. Those are the same Koch brothers whose business model is to make millions by jacking up prices at the pump, and who have bankrolled Tea Party extremism and committed $200 million to try to destroy President Obama before Election Day.

Koch Response: [I]t is an abuse of the President’s position and does a disservice to our nation for the President and his campaign to criticize private citizens simply for the act of engaging in their constitutional right of free speech about important matters of public policy. The implication in that sort of attack is obvious: dare to criticize the President’s policies and you will be singled out and personally maligned by the President and his campaign in an effort to chill free speech and squelch dissent. […] the inference is that you would prefer that citizens who disagree with the President and his policies refrain from voicing their own viewpoint. Clearly, that’s not the way a free society should operate.

Apparently the way a free society should operate, according to the Kochs, is that critics of the administration are permitted vast leeway to spew any and all slander that they like, but if the other side seeks to respond they are guilty of squelching dissent. That’s not debate. That’s a one-sided harangue. And it becomes media propaganda when the right-wing press links arms with the Kochs to take their side and whine about free speech. Seriously? Fox News is grumbling about free speech?

The Koch brothers have absolutely no case when they are actively orchestrating nasty campaigns against the White House and other Democrats, but expect their targets to stay silent. They have recruited Fox News, who spent six minutes on this topic this morning with Megyn Kelly and Laura Ingraham, but no opposing view. They recruited Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago by planting an article written by the Kochs’ attorney on their editorial page. Fox Nation joined in with a featured item that linked back to the Kelly/Ingraham segment on Fox News. Kelly even plugged the Wall Street Journal article to bring the noise machine gears around full-circle.

The Kochs need to quit crying like toddlers lost in a Wal-Mart. They are not merely private citizens engaging in free speech. They are political powerhouses who have committed more than $200 million dollars to defeating the President. The Bush administration was quite vocal in denouncing their critics, including Cindy Sheehan, who was not a billionaire, but the mother of a slain soldier in Iraq. Vice-President Cheney actually did seek to chill free speech by explicitly warning people to “watch what you say.” But we never responded by whimpering about the White House being mean to us. We continued to press our case, get our message out, and speak truth to power.

If the Koch brothers think that they can persuade people that they are sympathetic waifs being put upon by a mean president, they are out of their minds. They are only embarrassing themselves by appearing to be wealthy weaklings who want to dish it out but run away weeping if the victim of their vitriol raises his voice.

Rick Santorum And The Anti-Intellectual, Theocratic Legacy Of The GOP

Posted by on February 26, 2012 at 1:43 pm. 8 Comments :

The Republican Party has been advocating ignorance for decades. They Reject the 98% of scientists who affirm that climate change is real and the result of human activity. They scoff at evolution in favor of Biblical affirmations that put the age of the Earth at only 6,000 years. They belittle Harvard graduates as elitists and revere candidates they think would make good beer drinking companions.

Now Rick Santorum, the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, has said aloud what has only been alluded to in the past. At a forum for the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, Santorum said…

“President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob!”

Really. How elitist of Obama to suggest that all Americans have access to the same opportunities to improve themselves personally and professionally. What a pompous, exclusionary attitude. Santorum continued saying…

“There are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.”

Exactly. Heaven forbid that kids should be encouraged to learn things taught by college professors when all they are capable of is manual labor and assembly line work. Santorum is squarely opposed to kids having higher aspirations. He castigates Obama for wanting to remake kids in the image of someone who began poor, from a broken home, and rose to become president of the United States. But Santorum prefers the image of kids who skip school, get a job, and never achieve anything greater than their parents did. Never mind the fact that most parents sacrifice selflessly to give their kids the opportunity to reach their highest potential.

In Santorum’s world ignorance is the goal. It would have to be in order to persuade people to vote for him. And his followers are fully on board with this. They applauded enthusiastically at his “snob” comment. But this is a relatively recent position for Santorum. In is last campaign for senate, his web site told a different story:

“In addition to Rick’s support of ensuring that primary and secondary schools in Pennsylvania are equipped for success, he is equally committed to ensuring the {sic) every Pennsylvanian has access to higher education.”

Critics will surely jump on that reference as evidence of Santorum’s hypocrisy. But not so fast. He was only in favor of “every Pennsylvanian” having access to higher education, not every American. Screw the Kansans and the Carolinians. Obama has the temerity to favor people from Arizona to Maine earning college degrees. That is unconscionable, but it’s OK for PA.

This weekend also saw Santorum describing the parts of the Constitution that make him vomit.

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country… to say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes me want to throw up.”

Of course, I don’t know of anyone who says that people of faith should have no role in the public square. They can and do in great numbers. However, having “involvement in the operation of the state” is another thing entirely. It’s called theocracy, and it’s what you get when there is no separation of church and state.

The combination of viewing education as a character flaw and the Bible as an addendum to the Constitution is what defines the modern Republican/Tea Party. But it is not what this country is based on and it is not the path to peace and prosperity. And when discourse devolves to the point that the Constitution makes candidates wretch and advocating greater access to a college education makes you a snob, you know that a line of reason has been crossed.

Sarah Palin’s Anti-Reality Energy Rant Invites Mockery

Posted by on February 24, 2012 at 1:00 pm. 5 Comments :

The increasingly irrelevant VP-losing, half-term serving, un-reality TV has-been, Sarah Palin, has climbed atop her Facebook soapbox once again to show the world that she has not yet exhausted her supply of incoherent policy positions and dopey cliches.

In a posting titled, “Obama’s Anti-American Energy Policies Invite the Next Crisis,” Palin gets just about everything wrong and calls President Obama a traitor in the process. The woman who coined the term “death panel” obviously has no better understanding of international energy markets than she does of health insurance reform. And the purpose of her posting is to advance the same tired myth about oil production and prices that she and the GOP have been peddling for years.

Srah Palin - Mythbusters

The posting begins on a note of delirium with Palin asserting that Obama “likes to take credit for actions initiated by the last administration.” Credit? Credit for what? Destroying the economy? Starting two wars? $4.00 per gallon gasoline? I think the word Palin is looking for is blame. And since Obama certainly doesn’t want any of that, her point is pure lunacy. Particularly the part where she says…

“[Obama]’s not interested in lowering the price of gas because exorbitantly high gas prices are one of his campaign promises.”

Of course. Because every political analyst knows that higher gas prices are the one sure way to guarantee reelection. It’s almost as good as high unemployment, which Republicans have also accused Obama of causing deliberately (to enslave people, or something).

The crux of Palin’s argument is a regurgitation of the standard Republican mantra to “drill, baby, drill.” She and her GOP comrades have invented a theory that gas prices are increasing because of low supply and that if we have more of it prices would decline. The problem with that theory is that all of the evidence refutes it.

McClatchy: “U.S. demand for oil and refined products — including gasoline — is down sharply from last year, so much that United States has actually become a net exporter of gasoline, unable to consume all that it makes.”

So what benefit would there be to producing more domestic oil if we are just going to ship it to other countries? If more supply would lower prices all we would have to do is stop exporting the gas we are producing now, but the domestic market would not support that. So what is the cause of higher prices? According to experts it is the inordinate impact of speculators and the instability in the Middle East, a point on which both Palin and Obama agree. However, Palin’s solution is “to drill here and drill now,” which we already know is no solution at all.

In a speech on energy yesterday, Obama responded to criticisms from his opponents by noting that “Only in politics do people root for bad news.” Palin took that missive as advice and declared that “I guarantee the rising prices will only get worse.” Nowhere does Palin cite the basis for her guarantee, nor how the guarantee will compensate anyone foolish enough to put their faith in it. I’d want to get it in writing. Obama also mocked the right’s energy strategy as a political stunt:

“You can bet that since it’s an election year, they’re already dusting off their 3-point plan for $2 gas. And I’ll save you the suspense. Step one is to drill and step two is to drill. And then step three is to keep drilling.”

Once again, Palin took Obama’s mockery as a model for her platform. She literally proposed a 3-point plan, the day after Obama predicted it, that consisted of drilling (in Alaska), drilling (in Canada), and more drilling (for natural gas). And all the while she continues to ignore the reality that there is no deficiency in supply. In fact, the right’s (and Palin’s) favorite energy boondoggle, the KeystoneXL pipeline, is specifically designed to transport oil from Canada to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico so that it can be exported. If it were intended for domestic use they could build a much shorter pipeline to refineries in the Midwest.

There is a reason that Sarah Palin has become so irrelevant, and it has to do mostly with what she does and says herself. This Facebook energy treatise is merely the latest example of her monumental inability to shape a coherent thought. To say that she invites mockery is an understatement. She literally begs for it.

Is President Obama A Christian? Santorum? Gingrich? Romney?

Posted by on February 21, 2012 at 10:53 am. 4 Comments :

It’s always comforting to know that there is someone you can turn to who can provide answers to the perplexing spiritual problems that we all face on a daily basis. Someone with wisdom and insight and experience in the ways of the Lord.

Such a person is Rev. Franklin Graham, at least in his own mind. He is the son and heir to the Billy Graham evangelist empire, and he appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe today (video below) to discuss the personal faiths of some national leaders. Here is what transpired:

Willie Geist: Do you believe that Pres. Obama is a Christian?
Graham: You have to ask Pres. Obama.

After that dodge, Graham spent several minutes evading the question by repeating the excuse that he doesn’t know what is in another person’s heart. Throughout the segment he pointedly refused to simply say that he believes that Obama is a Christian. However, he does say that he thinks Obama bends over backwards for Muslims and he finds it significant that some Muslims regard him as one of their own.

So what about Rick Santorum? Is he a Christian? Geist posed that question to Graham and got this response:

Graham: Oh, I think so. Because his values are so clear on moral issues. No question about it.

So he cannot answer the question about Obama because he can’t see into another person’s heart, but apparently he can see into Santorum’s heart. And that’s not all. Graham then volunteered this about Newt Gingrich:

Graham: I think Newt is a Christian. At least he told me he is.

Well, Obama also told Graham that he is a Christian, but that didn’t seem to stick. Graham said that what matters most is not what people say but how they live their lives. So of course he would be suspicious of an assertion of faith from Obama, a devoted husband and churchgoer, but he would accept Gingrich’s testimony, despite being a thrice-married, admitted adulterer who left his congressional post in disgrace for ethical violations.

Which brings us to Mitt Romney. When Alex Wagner asked Graham if Romney is a Christian, Graham wiggled this out:

Graham: I like him. He’s a Mormon. Most Christians would not accept Mormonism as part of the Christian faith.

Nevertheless, Graham praised Romney as a candidate. So there you have it. According to this Christian leader, being a serial sinner or a practitioner of a false religion is not an impediment to either the White House or Heaven. But God has much stricter standards for heathens like Obama who are faithful to their families, charitable to others, and ethical in their profession. It really makes you want to sing the praises of whatever brand of Christianity Graham is peddling.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Gas Price Myth

Posted by on February 17, 2012 at 2:32 pm. 3 Comments :

Fox Nation has joined Fox News and most of the right-wing noise machine in attempting to slow President’s Obama’s increasing popularity due to the recent trends in the improving economic and employment numbers. They have settled on the issue of rising gas prices as a means of disrupting the President’s positive momentum.

Fox Nation

The only problem with asserting that Obama is responsible for a massive spike in gas prices is that it doesn’t happen to be true. The 83% figure was derived from calculating gas price changes from Obama’s inauguration to the present. But that doesn’t take into account that in the weeks prior to the inauguration there was a worldwide economic meltdown that was the catalyst for a precipitous drop in gas prices. As noted by economists at the time, “The overwhelming cause of the collapse in oil prices has been the faltering world economy, which has fueled the drop in consumption.”

Here are the facts: Gas prices peaked at $4.12 per gallon in the summer of 2008. By the time Obama was inaugurated the following January, the Bush recession that began in the fall had caused prices to drop to $1.61. While everyone likes lower gas prices, nobody wants them to decline due to people being too poor to purchase it. But that’s what happened in late 2008.

Arguably, the rise in gas prices since then validates the Obama economic revival that has produced higher retail fuel consumption. So a proper comparison would not begin at the lowest point of a recession that Obama had nothing to do with. It would begin from the pre-recession market until the present. By that measure gas is 17% lower.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for Fox News to present these facts, or any others that make the President look good. Their mission to destroy this presidency and anything that resembles progressivism is more important to Fox than facts.