Justin's Political Corner
Hugo Chávez is the recently deceased former socialist President of Venezuela.
César Chávez was a labor and civil rights activist. His birthday is celebrated every year on March 31st.
Easter Sunday, the day Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, falls on March 31st this year.
Why am I telling you all this? Well, Google decided to put up a Google Doodle today, March 31st, 2013:
That’s César Chávez. Clicking on the pic would bring up a slew of information surrounding him and why Google has his picture on their homepage.
Now, without any further ado…
It all kicks off with Michelle Malkin’s website doing incredible work that would make any journalist proud.
“very embarrassing.” I’ll say. But, the fun didn’t stop there! Seems like many didn’t get the memo…
“SHANE ON YOU, GOOGLE. SHANE ON YOU.”
“Come on, Public Shaming Tumblr. No way people are that dumb!” Oh, but they are!
Here are a few people who’d rather Google use Easter bunnies and eggs than an actual human being who existed:
Here are a few people tweeting about boycotting Google…from their Android phones (thanks to BuzzFeed Andrew & @RGBJacob for pointing this out:
Here are a few people who were corrected on it being CÉSAR Chávez and not HUGO Chávez, yet they still don’t really seem to give a crap:
lmao. Yes. César Chávez *MUST* be Hugo Chávez’s brother. JUST LOOK AT THEIR LAST NAMES, PEOPLE.
But, of course. All of this would be incomplete without…yes, you guessed it…RACISM!
(Note: He literally took a picture of his computer screen.)
Yes, César and Hugo look so much alike. Practically identical twins:
More reasons why I FUCKING HATE right-wingers.
BTW, César Chávez Day, observed on March 31st, is a state holiday in 3 states (California [Google’s home state], Colorado, and Texas).
Right-wing blogger Jim Hoft will reportedly receive an award from Accuracy in Media at the Conservative Political Action Conference, despite his track record of dishonesty and incompetence.
At the annual CPAC gathering, Hoft, who founded the Gateway Pundit blog, will receive the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award. According to the press release from Accuracy in Media, Hoft is being recognized for his “groundbreaking contributions to New Media,” and the fact that his blog has become “one of the country’s top resources for right-of-center news and commentary.”
What makes the choice of Hoft for an award presented by a group billing itself “Accuracy in Media” so surprising is the consistent lack of accuracy, fact-checking and the general incompetence displayed in his writings:
- In May 2010 Hoft smeared former Department of Education official Kevin Jennings, claiming seminars meant to adjust freshmen to high school, sponsored by Jennings’ former organization, the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, were “secret GLSEN gay sex classes” that were a part of President Obama’s “teen sex indoctrination.”
- In June 2010 Hoft warned his readers that Obama was planning to give a “Major Swath of Arizona Back to Mexico.” In fact, the five-mile square area was part of a refuge, had been closed since 2006, and was never going to be given to Mexico.
- In December 2011, Hoft cited a Swedish Tabloid to suggest that Obama was actually photoshopped into the now-famous war room photo from the day of the Bin Laden raid based on the tabloid assertion that he looked “way too small” in the image.
- Following the 2011 Tucson shooting Hoft claimed shooter Jared Loughner “idolized Barack Obama” on his Facebook page. The page turned out to be one of many fake Facebook profiles created in the wake of the tragedy.
- Hoft also attacked Obama following the Tucson shooting by claiming the White House tried to get applause for the president’s memorial speech by “ask[ing] for it” on the Jumbotron. The word “applause” that appeared on the screen, however, was part of the live captioning for the event.
- Hoft claimed the logo for the Nuclear Security Summit looked like an Islamic crescent, using the resemblance to question Obama’s faith. After the claim was picked up by the right-wing media, The Daily Show reported that “the inspiration for the logo is actually the Rutherford-Bohr Model of the atom.”
- In February 2011, Hoft blamed CBS reporter Lara Logan for sexual assault that she experienced while covering the Egyptian protests.
h/t: MMFA
Is there a more sniveling, dishonest bunch of cretins than those in right-wing media?
(via brooklynmutt)
Mitt Romney’s misleading new advertisement is causing auto workers to fear they’re losing their jobs.
The ad falsely claims car company Chrysler is moving its Jeep production to China, when in fact the company is opening up additional production there, not shifting American jobs overseas. But some auto workers have been calling their union, worried that they’re about to be out of work:
Bruce Baumhower, the president of the United Auto Workers local that oversees the major Jeep plant here, said Mr. Romney’s initial comments on moving production to China drew a rash of calls from members concerned about their jobs. When he informed them Chrysler was, in fact, is expanding its Jeep operation here, he said in an interview, “The response has been, ‘That’s pretty pitiful.’ ”
The Romney campaign has repeatedly insisted that they are “not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” and this ad seems to be an example with consequences.
(via recall-all-republicans)
“I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut.” Romney flatly lied about the cost of his proposal to cut income-tax rates across the board by another 20 percent (undercutting even the low rates of the Bush tax cuts). Independent economists at the Tax Policy Center have shown that the price tag for those cuts is $360 billion in the first year, a cost that extrapolates to $5 trillion over a decade.
“I will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income Americans.” Romney has claimed that he will pay for his tax cuts by closing a variety of loopholes and deductions. The factual problem? Romney hasn’t named a single loophole he’s willing to close; worse, there’s no way to offset $5 trillion in tax cuts even if you get rid of the entire universe of deductions for the wealthy that Romney has not put off the table (like the carried interest loophole or the 15 percent capital gains rate.) The Tax Policy Center report concludes that Romney’s proposal would create a “net tax cut for high-income tax payers and a net tax increase for lower- and or middle-income taxpayers.” Moreover, some of Romney’s tax cuts are micro-targeted at American dynasties, particularly his proposal to eliminate the estate tax, which would reduce his own sons’ tax burden by tens of millions of dollars.
“We’ve got 23 million people out of work or [who have] stopped looking for work in this country.” Romney is lying for effect. The nation’s crisis of joblessness is bad, but not 23 million bad. The official figure is 12.5 million unemployed. An additional 2.6 million Americans have stopped looking for jobs. How does Romney gin up his eye-popping 23 million figure? He counts more than 8 million wage earners who hold part-time jobs as also being “out of work.”
Obamacare “puts in place an unelected board that’s going to tell people ultimately what kind of treatments they can have.” Romney is reviving Sarah Palin’s old death panels lie here. Obamacare does establish an Independent Payment Advisory Board to help constrain the growth of Medicare spending. The body has no authority to dictate the practices of the private insurance marketplace. And the law also makes explicit that this body is banned from rationing care or limiting medical benefits to seniors.
“Pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan.” In the biggest whopper of the night, Romney suggested that his health care proposal would guarantee coverage to Americans with pre-existing conditions. This is just not true. Under Romney, if you have a pre-existing condition and have been unable to obtain insurance coverage or if you have had to drop coverage for more than 90 days because you lost your job or couldn’t afford the premiums, you would be shit out of luck. Insurance companies could continue to discriminate and deny you coverage, as even Romney’s top adviser conceded after the debate was over.
How do poll truthers explain Fox News polls?
Silly, libruls. Everyone knows professional pollsters make big bucks and stay in business for decades by being wrong.
Also, too, what if the Polls are Super-Skewed?
This post has been tagged “GOP Clown Car”
Luntz has been the Republican Hate-Propaganda Minister since at least 1993 and his list of words to stop policies that help America are vast:
Don’t say “oil drilling.” Say “energy independence.”
Don’t say “inheritance tax.” Say “death tax.”
Don’t say “Capitalism.” Say “Economic Freedom.”
Don’t say that the government ‘taxes the rich.’ Say Government “takes from the rich.”
Don’t admit Lobbyists are Collective Bargainers for Corporations. Say “Union Collective Bargaining steals your tax dollars.”
Luntz says people hate government so:
Don’t say “healthcare reform.” Say “government takeover.”
Don’t say “Public workers.” Call them “Government workers.”
Frank Luntz is the doubletalk machine for the GOP. He’s the reason your grandparents believe Obama is killing Medicare and taxes are evil.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
The $50 Lesson
Recently, while I was working in the flower beds in the front yard, my neighbors stopped to chat as they returned home from walking their dog. During our friendly conversation, I asked their little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, “If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?” She replied… “I’d give food and houses to all the homeless people.” Her parents beamed with pride! “Wow…what a worthy goal!” I said. “But you don’t have to wait until you’re President to do that!” I told her. “What do you mean?” she replied. So I told her, “You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and trim my hedge, and I’ll pay you $50. Then you can go over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out and give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house.” She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, “Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?” I said, “Welcome to the Republican Party.” Her parents aren’t speaking to me anymore.
It makes so much sense right? We should all put aside our liberal ways and vote Republican!
Except all this does is highlight the sheer child-like ignorance of the Republican standpoint. The Republican in the story fails to point out some pretty obvious reasons why this wouldn’t work.
For starters, no one is homeless by choice. Think about it: shower every night, a roof over your head when it rains, warmth in winter, a cool place to relax in summer, you can go to the bathroom in private…or…you can sit around outside dealing with exposure, wondering where your next meal is going to come from, and being kicked around and treated like a sub human by jerks in business suits.
So why might this guy have no job? Mental illness? Disability? But there’s “entitlements” for that!
Here’s the deal though: in order to get on disability you a) have to have a diagnosed problem, and b) have to have months worth of bill and rent money to sit on while your case is being processed. Or else, you get evicted. What happens if you get evicted and have no family or friends or church groups to help you out? You end up homeless.
Say they get lucky, and they get a full time minimum wage job — Federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. You work about 38 hours a week. Your gross income is $14,326. After taxes, it works out to about $1000 a month for a single person.
Out of that $1000, you have to pay your transportation to work, say, the bus. Busses cost, say, $2.00 a trip. That’s $4 a day, or about $120 a month. Now you are left with $880. You need to eat, and you don’t have a house, so cooking a meal at home is out of the question. McDonald’s it is. Two meals a day (because you are trying to save up here) at $6 a meal, is $12 a day, or $360 dollars a month. You are now left with $520. Then there’s the laundry costs. You can’t go to work in stinky clothing. One load of laundry a week is what, $10? $4.25 for a washer, $3.75 for a dryer, plus the cost of detergent. That’s $40 a month. We are down to $480.
You’re gonna want a place to sleep, most cheap motels have weekly rates of about $200 a week, or $800 a month. We arrange a roommate to split this, $400 a month.
The most you can really afford rent wise is $800 — that is what you are paying now for a motel with a roommate. First month’s rent, plus a deposit are going to cost you about $1600. Add in another $200 or so for utilities. $1800 gets you an apartment with no furniture, but power and water! You can sleep on the floor.
It would take you 23 months to save up that $1800. 23 months is just under 2 years — assuming you never have a sick day, never have your hours shorted, and your bills don’t go up.
It isn’t as easy as Republicans seem to think.
Three years ago, Mitt Romney proposed a constitutional amendment that would say “the president has to spend three years working in business before he becomes president of the United States. Then he or she would understand that the policies they are putting into place have to encourage small business to grow.”
h/t: Ezra Klein at WaPo
A common argument from corporate funded pundits is that Obama has no respect for the constitution. Indeed, the stunning example of honest and truthful journalism that is the Daily Caller even went so far as to put up a list detailing his top ten constitutional violations. Except they have just about nothing to do with the real Constitution.
1. The Individual Mandate
SCOTUS has already ruled that the individual mandate is not unconstitutional — much in the same way that care insurance requirements in most states are also not unconstitutional. This argument is pointless. The constitution makes no reference whatsoever on the illegality of mandating commercial purchases. If it did, we would not be required to buy car insurance. The argument made by the right here is that the founding fathers thought it too obvious to put in. Well, someone needs to tell George Washington that. He, along with this nation’s first congress actually imposed a health care mandate requiring ship owners to provide medical insurance for their seamen. Yeah, pretty sure if George Washington did it, it was constitutional.
3. Independent Payment Advisory Board (The Death Panels ooOOOOooOOOO)
This argument is based on misinformation. The Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB is an agency consisting of appointed members who make recommendations regarding Medicare. The goal is to save money without affecting coverage or eligibility. The agency can put forward proposals that come into effect the following year – - a proposal put forth in 2014 does not take effect until 2015. They do not have dictator-esque power, and can be overridden with a fast track procedure included in the law itself. The IPAB was created to end lobbyist power over government decisions on health care. They are not allowed to make decisions that render people ineligible, nor are they allowed to limit coverage. They are also absolutely not under any circumstances allowed to make decisions on individual cases. That is still up to the patient or the patient’s health care proxy/power of attorney. Again, absolutely nothing to do with the Constitution.
4. The Chrysler bailout
In 2009 the government bailed out car manufacturers. Chrysler terminated contracts with franchises violating the Fifth Amendment’s “takings” clause, which deals with things like eminent domain and the need for just compensation when the government seizes property. Note the word government. Last I checked, Chrysler does not make up our government. Chrysler was well within their rights according to the franchise agreements to cancel their contracts. Nothing was seized. Eminent domain does not apply. The government has nothing to do with this.
9. Graphic tobacco warnings
Apparently, safety warnings violate the First Amendment. Obama is trying really hard to take away Big Tobacco’s rights to free speech by making them put pictures of diseased lungs on the box. In the United States Of Republican, informing the public is a violation of the constitution (Side note: This writer smokes. This writer also has a proud collection of all the different graphics they put on Canadian cigarettes back when she lived there. I was the first of my friends to collect them all!)
The arguments that the Obama government violates the Constitution as a matter of policy are not only completely baseless but desperate attempts to validate viewpoints that amount essentially to “I just don’t like the guy.” Critical thinking requires that we don’t simply accept arguments as valid because they sound valid, but challenge the evidence presented and search for bias and merit. The arguments made by the Daily Caller in this case are meritless pseudointellectualism at best, and demeaning manipulation at worst.
On today’s edition of “WallBuilders Live,” David Barton claimed that he was recently in Michigan where he was shocked to learn that there is “not a single grocery store in the city limits of Detroit”:
Detroit has a population of over 700,000 and Barton is claiming that there is not one grocery store within a city this size? How exactly does he think these people are getting food?
Now I haven’t been to Detroit in person, but I do have access Google Street View which allows me to find various of grocery stores located within the city in about two minutes, like University Foods located at 1131 Warren Ave W, Detroit, MI 48208:
H/T: Kyle Mantyla at RWW
FLASHBACK: Barton: “Jesus Opposed the Minimum Wage” | rightwingwatch.org
The event is being webcast by the American Family Association and last night David Barton got the festivities underway by explaining to the audience that all of our economic and tax policies ought to be dictated by the Bible … and that means getting rid of the minimum wage because it was opposed by Jesus (Barton didn’t actually cite the passage he uses to support this claim in this presentation, but it is Matthew 20:1-16).
As more and more media outlets follow Fox News’ lead in covering the manufactured New Black Panther Party/Department of Justice (DOJ) scandal, Media Matters offers three case studies of previous bogus right-wing attacks that, with help from Fox News, went mainstream before being debunked.
New Black Panther story following a familiar pattern. Fox News’ embrace of Adams’ accusations against the Department of Justice are in keeping with a pattern observed in previous instances in which a bogus story has jumped from the conservative fringe to the mainstream media:
1. Right-wing bloggers, talk radio hosts, and other conservative media outlets start promoting and distorting the story.
2. Fox News picks up the story and gives it heavy, one-sided coverage.
3. Fox News and conservative media attack the “liberal media” for ignoring the distorted story.
4. Mainstream media outlets eventually cover the story, echoing the right-wing distortions.
5. Fox News receives credit for promoting the story.
6. The story is later proven to be false or wildly misleading, long after damage is done.
This same pattern has played out several times before, with some variations. Three prominent examples from the past two years are the ACORN videos, Barack Obama’s “relationship” with William Ayers, and the “Climategate scandal.”
Hits home on how FNC and FBN operate, as does the rest of the SCLM.
h/t: MMFA
