From Breitbart.com:
A poll released by Democratic pollster Pat Caddell and Republican pollster John McLaughlin shows that a vast majority of American voters want a special select committee to investigate the Benghazi scandal.
Also demanding hearings are three family members of the Benghazi victims. We, on the Left, don’t pay much attention to Benghazi but it is an entire industry on the Right.
Chicago gun ban thrown out. According to the ruling:
Chicago’s ordinance goes too far in banning legal buyers and legal dealers from engaging in lawful acquisitions and lawful sales of firearms, and at the same time the evidence does not support that the complete ban sufficiently furthers the purposes the ordinance tries to serve.
They don’t like Yellen at Breitbart:
He predicts that Yellen will be like Fed Chairman “Bernanke on Steroids.” If Bernanke is a “believer” in a Keynesian approach of creating artificial stimulus policies and keeping interest rates artificially low, then Yellen is a “true believer.”
Yellen believes, like many Republicans and Democrats, you can “spend your way to prosperity,” says Lewis. She will be expanding money supply and will in effect be destroying the middle class by keeping interest rates so low that they can’t earn money on their savings. Lewis makes the point that if “inequality” is your concern then the Fed’s manipulating interest rates by continuously printing money contributes more to that than anything else in the economy.
Democrats consorting with terrorists again!
Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon reports that three Democrats–Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA)–had invited a “representative of a human rights group headed by a designated al Qaeda terrorist” to brief them on U.S. drone policy late last year.
The group, Al Karama, was founded and is currently headed by Abdul Rahman Naimi, who was added to the U.S. Treasury’s list of terrorists and Al Qaeda supporters in December, according to Goodman. Other Al Karama officials have suspected terror ties. Mohammad Al Ahmady, the official who was to have briefed the Democrats in question, was denied a visa by the State Department for unspecified reasons, though he blamed President Barack Obama directly: “I curse Obama and the traders of wars,” he said in a statement to the Free Beacon.
RedState also picks up on this story. So I bet you’ll be hearing more about it.
And for appreciators of the 2nd amendment and some gore (not the Al kind), Breitbart.com brings you this:
A professional mixed-martial artist killed one home invader, put another in the hospital with facial injuries, and sent two more fleeing on New Year’s Day in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
…
The trailer exhibited dried blood, broken glass, and overturned furniture in the fight’s aftermath.
RedState is enjoying some global warming hilarity:
The Akademic Shokalskiy ventured forth to show the world that there just wasn’t enough ice around Antarctica during the Austral Summer. This would demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that Earth had a fever. We then, yea verily would have to put up with self-congratulatory lectures from the mighty Nobel prize winners like Al Gore or Michael Mann.*
Then reality intruded when the Akademic Shokalskiy got stuck in the imaginary ice.
RedState is also excited about turning Missouri into a “Right to Work” state from being a “Forced Unionism” State.
Heritage Foundation has a list of the 10 worst regulations of 2013. In particular, they are not happy with a certain bureau:
The mortgage market will undergo radical change on Jan. 10, when virtually every aspect of home financing will be commandeered by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The consequences of government overreach for creditors and borrowers will be all too predictable—more costly products and services, fewer options and, worst of all, the erosion of economic freedom.
Nasty Democrats have been engaging in class warfare:
Class warfare: SEC rules on executive pay. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on September 18 proposed a requirement that public companies disclose the ratio of CEO compensation to the median earnings of all employees. The agency had no real choice in the matter. The rule was among several dictates in the Dodd–Frank act that have no purpose other than to stoke populist anger about wage “inequality.” The inanity of the regulation is exacerbated by the difficulty in calculating median earnings for myriad employee groups that cannot be compared with any statistical credibility.
They don’t like the Volcker Rule, transfat bans, limiting carbon usage, or Obamacare either. Speaking of which, they offer Ten Broken Obamacare Promises. These would be worth taking a look at — particularly if you want to take up refuting cogent conservative talking points.
John Tehan says
My brother George is a typical right-wing nutjob – he thinks Sarah Palin is great, “a breath of fresh air”, he wants to deport every hispanic person he sees, he thinks Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Socialist, and on and on. He recently posted a picture of Hillary Clinton on his Facebook feed that said the “liberal media” was out to whitewash her role in Benghazi, where 4 brave men died on her watch. This is, of course, enough reason to never, ever consider voting for Clinton for president.
I left comment asking him how he squares that with his vote for Bush to have a second term after he allowed over 3,000 Americans to be killed in their offices on American soil on 9/11 – so far, no reply…
kbusch says
That’s probably why it might be useful to be come experts at this new subject. I suspect it is all hoax, hype, drama, and fraud, but a bit more knowledge would be useful. To become a real Benghaziologist, though, you have to be up on the very latest accusations. I didn’t follow, for example, whether the failed arms deal between Libyan Islamists and the Syrian opposition ended up being something cuckoo clocks believed or not. Possibly they liked that fantasy because it could run parallel to their ideas about Fast and Furious.
SomervilleTom says
I agree that we need to be aware of these lies and distortions. Some of these lies may almost be “truthy”.
Certainly the ridiculous nonsense about the Akademic Shokalskiy exemplifies “fractally wrong” — it is wrong (and dishonest) about the broad picture, and equally wrong (and dishonest) about the fine details.
The danger with being sucked into these fractally-wrong lies is that, because they are fractal, it will take an infinite amount of time to refute them. I suggest that we, instead, strive to preserve a culture where the onus of proof rests on the person making a claim (rather than getting seduced into attempting to disprove a plethora of false ones).
A good place to start is doing all in our power to influence the media to adopt this standard. To quote Carl Sagan: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”.
mikew says
The NY Times did a good job of putting this to bed. Lara Logan is vacationing because 60 Minutes tried to push the lies. This has become a hardy perennial mostly because the fantastic lies pushed by the right are, frankly, far more entertaining than the facts. We may have made some errors in judgement but that is about it. Since when don’t americans die in the Middle East: Beirut in 1983, 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and of course, our misadventures in Iraq caused plenty of death.
fenway49 says
the 13 “Benghazis” during GWB’s time in office.
IOKIYAR.
Christopher says
…on account of coining the term Benghaziology!
jconway says
Sounds like my dads good buddy Joe Clark, who trolls on my facebook wall now and again and then gets destroyed by various friends of mine. I stopped engaging with him awhile ago, sometimes they are just too over the deep end. It was really amusing one time when Joe called dad and my brother (a lay leader at his church) answered and proceeded to defend the right to choose and liberal economics in a scripture citation battle.
John Tehan says
…cancelling the National Day of Prayer while simultaneously welcoming Muslims to the White House. The email was complete with a picture of Obama bowing to the Muslim leaders – but if you looked out the window in the picture, you saw minarets! Obviously, that picture was taken in the middle east, unless the architecture around the White House has been altered drastically since my last visit.
I replied with the appropriate link to snopes.com debunking the whole myth, but my other brother, who is married to a Muslim woman, wrote the best reply I have ever seen for that kind of tripe, asking if he should sleep with one eye open, wondering if the Muslim domination of the US would start with her spending all his money, etc. I wish I had saved it – it did quiet George down for a while.
jconway says
You didn’t get the memo? He added the minarets so he could pray to Mecca in Murica’s House!
Christopher says
n/t
fenway49 says
Don’t know why they assume the middle class even has any savings at this point. It’s the average American not making enough to pay bills and save simultaneously, stupid.
jconway says
It really goes to what Tom Frank has been saying for some time. Liberals get together and read graphs about N Carolina turning blue, and trade pie charts proving Keynesian economics, and sit in salons and discuss with one another why the filibuster inhibits democracy and go on blogs like this one if there aren’t friends or independent book stores or coffee shops nearby. And then the righties go on brietbart, redstate, and just get mad, and mad, and then grab their neighbors and start screaming at Congressmen, sending letters, and march on the Mall.
We need to start taking the streets and coming up with ideas that can fit on an index card. And then we go door to door talking to the great silent majority of ‘moderates’ ‘independents’ or ‘unengageds’ who don’t realize how liberal they really are. When one side is noisy and they other side stays home and chats, the noisy side gets the coverage.
That the outrage machine could inflate Benghazi into Watergate 2.0 while liberals couldn’t even stop John Kerry from voting for the war-it shows the work we have to do to catch up.
mikew says
the right has been whining about “spending our way to prosperity” for years. The gubmnt shutdown should have made the case as to how wrong they are.
I have yet to see the bumper sticker that says “Prosperity Through Austerity.”
Christopher says
…where they thought the government shutdown was great, and somehow proved that we could all do with less of it.
jconway says
It’s time for the movement to look in the mirror.
Social issues win pluralities, they don’t win enduring majorities. George W. Bush learned that the hard way, and our party will soon enough. It’s always the economy stupid! And unfortunately the author of that slogan contributed as much as anyone to our party’s inability to connect with the harsh realities of being a working American in the 2010s. The values of Silicon Valley are not the ones we ought to be emulating, we ought to get back to our roots in the farmer, the miner, the factory worker, and it’s 21st century equivalent the low wage service worker working multiple jobs. And as the holder of an elite University degree, I can personally attest that college and ‘buy more skillsets’ is not the solution working America has been clamoring for.
whosmindingdemint says
That should have been a thumbs up
John Tehan says
…in my brother’s FB feed. He put up a picture of Dianne Feinstein that says “Feinstein Logic!” across the top with a quote across the bottom:
Since it sounded thoroughly implausible, I googled it – the origin was a satirical web site called the Palookaville Post, which has since gone offline, but now the quote has a life of its own on the right. Under the picture was a link to a video that YOU MUST WATCH NOW! I took a look – the collapse of 2013 is just around the corner!! MARSHAL LAW!! Never mind it’s 2014 and martial law isn’t spelled that way – I wonder how much money the grifter who made that video has amassed from it.
The picture was a repost from a FB group that wants to abolish the IRS – I haven’t got time to go through their page, but the first few scrolls were priceless…
jconway says
Nearly any Onion article has a few dozen and sometimes a significant number more of conservative commentators not realizing it’s a joke. This is always true even on their non political stuff. For instance an article stating “New Teen trend of going out in public wet and baked peaks at worst possible time during Polar Vortex”. At least a dozen commenters who assumed its real, including a few blaming Obama.
mikew says
USA Today reports that Al Queda is on the rise.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/01/07/al-qaeda-spread/4358845/
The terror network “remains far from crippled, and there is little evidence” al-Qaeda is on the decline, says one analyst.
That one analyst happens to be Katherine Zimmerman of AEI.
Hey this could well be the case and we should know about it if it is.
But then we come to graph 13:
Besides bin Laden’s chosen successor, Ayman al-Zawahri, few individuals who served directly under bin Laden remain at large. The United States described the deaths as a “crippling blow,” and President Obama and his Cabinet have said the operations showed that al-Qaeda was on the path to defeat.
Which ties it up nicely as a seed for the right wing propaganda machine. Look for more on this in the coming months.