Tag Archives: Democrats

Don’t Take My Tax Cut! And Get a Job!

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Petition: Tell Congress: Protect Workers, NOT Millionaires!

Senator Scott Brown made a fiery speech a couple of days ago as he blocked the Senate from considering an extension of unemployment benefits. He said that first we need to find a way to pay for those benefits without raising the deficit. At last report the unemployment rate in this country stands at 9.7% and Brown wants to put their ability to buy groceries, pay their bills, mortgage or rent payments in doubt while Congress turns its attention to the deficit.

I believe that Washington has finally turned its attention to the deficit in earnest, and that Brown’s theatrics are not necessary.  The report that bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has just been released provides outstanding recommendations for debt reduction. Holding the unemployed hostage during the holiday season is little more than political theater. Brown needed an issue to distinguish himself on, and he chose this. Nice, Senator! Pick on the unemployed. They’re so busy job hunting they won’t be paying much attention!

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The Senator, the Unemployed and the Millionaires

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Read: "Congress lets unemployment benefits expire: 'What now' and six other questions

Senator Scott Brown blocked the extension of unemployment benefits for millions of Americans.

About 8,400 Americans will see their unemployment benefits cut off by the end of this week, according to the Labor Department. By the end of the third week of December, aid to 1.36 million Americans will be interrupted, the agency said.

Brown says that we can’t afford the extension and that we need to start focusing on “what is important,” the federal deficit.

The unemployment rate in this country still hovers around 9.6%. That seems pretty important to me. Unemployment benefits help people without work to pay their bills, put food on their tables, get medical care, and enjoy the holidays!  Moreover, virtually all of the benefits paid out to the unemployed go back into the economy. They are not hoarded, put in savings accounts or invested abroad.
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Fox News Chairman says NPR Executives are Nazis, “of Course”

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Fox News, a News Corp subsidiary

Honestly, I am think that Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and most at that network live in a reality that is different than mine.

I was just pointed to an interview with Howard Kurtz in which he said that President Obama “has a different belief system than most Americans” and that on his recent travels he “told by the French and the Germans that his socialism was too far left for them to deal with.”  I don’t know if Ailes believes this or if it is part of the continuing campaign of the right to paint the President as so radically different from us that he is somehow threatening, but the statements are not simply wrong, they are absurd.

President Obama is a capitalist and he believes in our system of representative, Constitutional democracy.  He has given no indication otherwise.  He would not have risen in the party system were that not the case and he certainly would not have got elected to the highest office in the land, either.  The Presidents differences with the the opposition are differences of degree, not belief systems.

As for France and Germany telling him that his socialism is to far left, well that is ridiculous.  Germany, France and the United States do have differences on approaches necessary to stimulate their economies because in a global economy what is done in one country impacts the others, but the questions concern the means and scale of intervention and have nothing to do with ideology.  France and Germany are also democratic, capitalist states, but both are fundamentally more socialist in character then the US.  Both have and have had for some time, state funded systems of education, government owned rail systems, universal health care, strong labor movements, etc.

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Hey Candidates! Just Anwer the Questions and Check Your Facts: Mid-terms 2010

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Every election year since 1992 Project Vote Smart, CNN and prominent national leaders from both across the political spectrum survey candidates for U.S. House & Senate, governor and state legislatures on key issues facing the nation. Called the National Political Courage Test, in fact what it revealed was an appalling lack of courage and a complete unwillingness to take a stand.

Only 17% of all 2010 candidates for U.S. House, Senate, governor and state legislatures are willing to tell voters their positions on key issues facing the nation. The rest are afraid of exposing themselves to their opponents.

I was kind of bowled over by that number. Perhaps one way of looking at it would be the way that Richard Kimball, Project Vote Smart President did in a piece he wrote today. In fact this number demonstrates that candidates for office have a great deal of courage. It takes guts to stand in front of a non-partisan public interest group, journalists, and voters themselves, and refuse to take a position, a fortitude that is new in politics, enabled by developments in media. He writes sarcastically:

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Frank v. Beilat, No Contest

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The top mailing was meant to give me three reasons for firing Barney Frank, but in fact the mailings themselves were 3 reasons NOT to vote for Sean Beilat!

When I picked up my mail today I found a magazine, a fund raising appeal, and four political mailings relating to the elections next week, three of which were targeted against Congressman Barney Frank.  According to the first mailing, Americans for Limited Government believe he “no longer represents ‘us'” and that Nancy Pelosi “has him in the palm of her hand.”  Sean Beilat for Congress sent two mailings.  The first claims that Frank “and his “rich friends… live by a different set of rules,” and  the other that provides three reasons why voters should “fire Barney Frank on November 2,” claiming he caused the financial meltdown, bailed out friends in the financial sector, and accepted vacations from the people who got federal bail out money.

These claims are, at best, exaggerations, some of them outright falsehoods.  They are examples of some pretty intense negative campaigning and an obvious attempt to mislead the public.  Quotations are taken out of context, presented in the mailing to look like press clippings, and topped with the logos from the newspapers’ mastheads so they look like actual published news articles, when in fact they are taken from opinion pieces or editorials.  They are not objective analyses.

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More on Truth in Political Advertising

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Reality for Men

One kind of truth in advertising

In the commercial sector there are legal requirements that mandate “truth in advertising.” General principles are outlined on Business.gov, the site of the US Small Business Administration.

Advertising laws are aimed at protecting consumers by requiring advertisers to be truthful about their products and to be able to substantiate their claims. All businesses must comply with advertising and marketing laws, and failure to do so could result in costly lawsuits and civil penalties. So before you start an advertising campaign, it’s important you understand some basic rules.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is the main federal agency that enforces advertising laws and regulations. Under the Federal Trade Commission Act:

  • Advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive;
  • Advertisers must have evidence to back up their claims; and
  • Advertisements cannot be unfair.

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This means that if I were to start canning and marketing my mother’s spaghetti sauce, there are limits on what I can say to convince people to buy it instead of my competitors products.  I could talk about taste, because that is based on a subjective judgement. I could say all kinds of good things about my ingredients of cooking process.

But I couldn’t claim It was because I use garlic grown in the ashy soils of Mount Vesuvius, if that wasn’t the case. More importantly, I couldn’t promote my sauce based purely on the deficiencies in my competitors’ products, particularly if my claims were not based on fact. I couldn’t claim those other sauces cause cancer, use rat meat instead of beef, or are owned by people with ties to organized crime if none of it was true.

Any yet in political campaigns few such requirements exist.

If the charges made in a campaign are reckless enough, one could be sued or prosecuted under libel or slander laws, but there is considerable time, effort and costs involved, and the bar on what constitutes those offenses is pretty high, and even more so in an election season. Obviously candidates seek to undermine the credibility of one another to some degree.  It is an election, after all. Simply lying about your opponent is not enough.  

But it goes too far when you get advertisements like this:
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If You Spend Enough Money, Will People Believe Your Lie?

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"Perry pushed for a law that lets insurance companies raise homeowners’ rates without having to justify the increase." Back to Basics, --Wednesday, September 8th, 2010.

Spending by interest groups, so-called Political Action Committees and Unions most notably, is up well over 5 times what it was in the 2006 midterms, according to an article in New York Magazine.  Spending is up on both sides of the aisle, but these third-party groups are putting most of their money behind Republican candidates by a huge margin, approximately 7 to 1, according to The Washington Post!  This was all made possible by last years Supreme Court decision saying that limits on spending were essentially the same as limits on free speech.

I have a problem with this because I don’t think a pharmaceutical corporation should have a stronger voice than a network of cancer survivor groups just because they can spend more on campaigns, but I suppose outside spending isn’t all that different than spending by the candidates themselves.  Nothing stops a multimillionaire candidate from using his own funds to vastly outspend opponents on advertising.  In a sense this is buying the election, but legally it’s not seen that way.

What is disconcerting is the out and out dishonesty of the campaigns.  I am not naive.  Politics has always been a dirty game.  But in this election it seems that the fact that the backers of those PACs with the patriotic names can remain anonymous has emboldened them.  Politifact.com, a non-partisan service that evaluates the claims of political discourse, evaluated 31 claims made in the advertisments of these third party groups in the current campaigns throughout the country.  Only 5 were rated “mostly true” and two “true.”

Think about that for a minute.  31 claims were made in the political ads of third party organizations analyzed by Politifact.com.  On 16% of those were claims were based substantially on fact, on only 6% were essentially true.  All others were significant distortions of the facts or outright lies.

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Third-Party Groups Taking Over the Election

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The President has begun slamming campaign commercials paid for by funds from third-party independent groups that, thanks to Supreme Court decisions in January, are now able to spent unlimited amounts promoting candidates and agendas. Democrats are outraged about these groups because the GOP-leaning ones have spent $24.8 million on Senate and House ads from Aug. 1 to Sept. 20, but Democrat-leaning groups also spent $4.9 million according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group. Here’s the ABC News Report. The article is at this link.


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This year it is Liberals who are are upset, because Conservative groups are outspending them 5 to 1! I worry about that, too. But while I’d be more comfortable about the outcome if the ratio were inverted, it would still bother me. I don’t see how unidentified, undisclosed contributions are good for a democracy. If, as Supreme Court justices have argued, spending money is a form of speech, shouldn’t it be clear who is speaking?

FactChecking ‘The Pledge to America’

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Get a load of that title! Click for text, with pictures.

FactCheck.org is the website of a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics for voters

by monitoring the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

They are a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and not related to any political party.  They simply check facts.  In these midterm elections, they are a good place to turn for the truth behind the spin in any given campaign.  This post, for example, shows that both the Republican and Democratic candidates for Senator in Nevada are making false claims about each other.

So what about the Pledge to America that Republican Party leaders recently made?

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Checking Facts on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster

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The April 20 explosion that started oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico has prompted a slew of claims and counterclaims about the disaster. What caused it, how it’s being handled, the history of drilling accidents in the area – all are subjects ripe for false or misleading statements by politicians and others.

We keep track so you don’t have to. Some of the lowlights so far, in no particular order.
* Some Republicans falsely claimed Obama was slowing the cleanup by not waiving the Jones Act, which actually doesn’t apply to the cleanup operations.
* Obama said he issued a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf. Not quite. Much drilling continues.
* A Republican governor keeps saying the spill is the first big blowout in the Gulf, failing to note a 1979 disaster that continued for 10 months, and numerous smaller blowouts.
* A DNC ad claimed that a GOP lawmaker spoke for his party when he said BP deserves an apology. But that apology had already been rejected by other leading Republicans.
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There are plenty more where those came from. See our “Analysis” section for a roundup of the oil-spill whoppers we’ve encountered.

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