The producers pulled the YouTube video of the debate. There is apparently a way you can view it for a fee, but in a quick scour of the Internet, I could not find it, so I’m posting Jon Stewart’s recap of the debate from his show — although now this video seems faulty. We apologize for their problems.
“It would be more appropriate to make its complaint against CBO than against President Obama’s speech.”
— Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in a post titled, “AP Factcheck Should be Billed to Romney Campaign.” Baker takes issue with Associated Press “fact checkers” who claim there would be no peace dividend from winding down the war in Afghanistan.
President Obama is working off a baseline set by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that assumes war spending continues over the next decade. If he doesn’t intend to continue this spending then he is freeing up money relative to this baseline. AP may not like this method of scoring, but it is absolutely standard in Washington policy debates. Changes are measured against a baseline.
Baker joins others who suggest that the AP’s analysis might have been more correctly classified as an editorial than as fact checking.
H/T to The Nation
Who knew FOX News even had a “resident liberal?” Apparently they do, and the internets are afire over Sally Kohn’s description of Rep. Paul Ryan’s Republican National convention speech titled, Paul Ryan’s Speech in 3 Words: Dazzling, Deceiving, and Distracting.
Two things set apart the column from the others from fact-checkers who dispute almost every word uttered by Ryan and Romney. First, Kohn uses the L-word, something most mainstream outlets bar.
…to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies [emphasis added] and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.
Second, the column appears on the FOX News website’s opinion page.
Rush Limbaugh has to be thinking that now would be as good a time as any to retire. His recent assertion that the National Hurricane Center (NHC) is conspiring to re-elect the president is all the evidence anyone needs that Rush would probably be happier at home, out of the reach of microphones.
Here’s what Rush said on his show earlier this week:
The hurricane center is the regime. The hurricane center is the Commerce Department. It’s the government. It’s Obama.
And as Obama, the NHC obviously wanted to disrupt the Republican National Convention by forecasting, while Isaac was still a tropical storm south of Haiti, that it could strengthen and threaten the gulf coast of Florida, including Tampa. Just listen to Rush’s version:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
During a discussion about women’s pay on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Rachel Maddow attempted to state the fact that women are paid 77 cents for every dollar men are paid, but she could barely get a word in edgewise because of interruptions by Alex Castellanos, a Republican operative, who insisted that it was not true — that women and men are paid equally:
Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.
It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. […]
After the Fox network show “Glee” featured a trans character last week, Fox News’ resident social scientists Bill O’Reilly and Gretchen Carlson did a segment on O’Reilly’s show in which they warned Fox News’ audience of predominantly elderly viewers that teenagers who watch “Glee” without parental supervision, often while doing drugs, are likely to choose to be gay:
Partial transcript:
In the diplomatic ranks, trained professionals toil,
To keep the peace and tamp down foreign turmoil.
But for Greek ambassador,
Trump picked an artful dodger —
The grifting, drunken blackmailer Kimberly Guilfoyle.
