Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Media Matters Daily Summary 09-01-09

Liz Cheney now peddling health reform falsehoods
On ABC's This Week, Liz Cheney repeated the false claim that President Obama admitted "he hasn't read" the House tri-committee health care reform bill, and on Fox News' On the Record, Cheney asserted as fact that Obama hasn't "actually read any of the legislation." Cheney's false attacks on Obama and health care reform followed numerous television appearances in which she spread falsehoods about the president and his policies. Read More

Goldberg ignores Bush's responsibility for $1 trillion deficit in 2009
In a September 1 USA Today op-ed calling Republicans and Democrats "hypocrites for caring about the deficit," Jonah Goldberg wrote that "Obama's budget will have, for the first time, a single year deficit of $1 trillion," adding that "Obama's 2009 budget deficit will be greater than all of the Bush deficits from 2002 to 2007 combined." Absent from Goldberg's analysis was the fact that before President Obama took office or signed any legislation, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that, based on actions taken by President Bush and economic conditions at the time, the deficit for fiscal year 2009 would reach $1.2 trillion. Read More

Why Glenn Beck, and Fox News, can't escape the "racist" trap
Have so many blue-chip advertisers ever fled a program as quickly as the who's who of corporate America that's sprinted away from Glenn Beck in recent weeks? I certainly cannot recall ever seeing a mass exodus of this scale. Read More

Lou Dobbs and his hate groupies
By now, CNN's Lou Dobbs, with his single-minded obsession over all things anti-immigrant and his bizarre embrace of the loony birther movement, is well known for trafficking in disturbing, misleading, and often inaccurate garbage. Escaping under the radar of many, however, are his close associations with an organization that has been described by experts as a "hate group." Read More

LA Times forwards Cheney's EIT misinformation

The Los Angeles Times reported Dick Cheney's claim that " 'enhanced interrogation techniques' [EIT] saved American lives and prevented terrorist attacks," without noting -- as it did in a previous article -- that a recently released CIA inspector general's (IG) report stated that "the effectiveness of specific techniques 'cannot be so easily measured.' " Moreover, the Times did not note that Cheney's statement is inconsistent with one he previously gave about the CIA documents, nor did it note that one detainee subjected to EITs, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, has reportedly stated that he gave false information to the CIA during the "harshest period" of his interrogation. Read More

Huh? Hill says Dems may "circumvent Senate rules" by using Senate procedure
A September 1 Hill article reported that Sen. Judd Gregg "told The Hill in a recent interview that Republicans will wage a vicious fight if Democrats try to circumvent Senate rules and use a budget maneuver to pass a trillion-dollar healthcare plan with a simple majority." In fact, the budget maneuver, known as reconciliation, is a part of the current Senate rules and Republicans have previously used it to pass President Bush's agenda -- Gregg himself even introduced a reconciliation bill that, had it been enacted, would have opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, which the Hill article did not report. Read More

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