Mitt’s Misinformation Parade Comes to a Sudden Stop

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Among the bogus claims made by Mitt Romney in last night’s debate was the howler that “half” the green energy firms the Obama administration invested “have gone out of business,” adding that “a number of them happened to be owned by people who were contributors to your campaigns.” Thing is, as quickly shown by journalists these claims are not remotely true, and now even the Romney campaign has admitted he was wrong.

ThinkProgress has the story via reporter Igor Volsky in a post headlined, “Romney Admits Pushing Misinformation in Debate“. He writes,

“[Michael] Grunwald [author of The New New Deal] estimates that less than 1 percent of green firms have gone bad in terms of dollar value.”

Volsky story includes a report of this Grunwald tweet: 

@MikeGrunwald
ICYMI: Romney camp told me (after my tweet-rants) Mitt didn’t mean to say half the #stimulus-funded green firms failed. Probably <1% so far.

Romney also singled out Tesla Motors, which designs and manufactures electric vehicles, and received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy. Last night, he quipped, “I had a friend who said you don’t just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers, all right?” But the company is not a loser. “Founder Elon Musk says it will accelerate its payment of the principal in the spring—and the Department of Energy isn’t complaining it’s not getting its money back.” Romney, unfortunately, has turned to rooting against an American company in his effort to unseat Obama.

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“If You Want to be President, You Owe the American People the Truth!”

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I was among the bloggers and journalists who participated in a conference call this morning with David Axelrod, President Obama’s senior advisor. About Mitt Romney’s debate performance he said it was “Well-delivered, but fraudulent…We’ll hold [him] accountable for the things he said… and make him justify those claims.” The president held a spirited rally before leaving Denver today. Here’s a 7-minute video of his talk and then a transcript of it.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Now, the reason I was in Denver obviously is to see all of you, and it’s always pretty, but we also had our first debate last night. And when I got on to the stage, I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney. But it couldn’t have been Mitt Romney because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy. The fellow on stage last night said he didn’t know anything about that. The real Mitt Romney said we don’t need any more teachers in our classrooms, but -don’t boo, vote – but the fellow on stage last night, he loves teachers, can’t get enough of them. The Mitt Romney we all know invested in companies that were called pioneers of outsourcing jobs to other countries, but the guy on stage last night, he said that he doesn’t even know that there are such laws that encourage outsourcing. He’s never heard of them. Never heard of them. Never heard of tax breaks for companies who ship jobs overseas. He said that if it’s true, he must need a new accountant. Now, we know for sure it was not the real Mitt Romney because he seems to be doing just fine with his current accountant. So you see, the man on stage last night, he does not want to be held accountable for their real Mitt Romney’s decisions and what he’s been saying for the last year and that’s because he knows full well that we don’t want what he’s been selling for the last year. So Governor Romney may dance around his positions, but if you want to be president, you owe the American people the truth. So here’s the truth – Governor Romney cannot pay for his $5 trillion tax plan without blowing up the deficit or sticking it to the middle class. That’s the math. We can’t afford to go down that road again. We can’t afford another round of budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy. We can’t afford to gut out investments in education or clean energy or research and technology. We can’t afford to roll back regulations on Wall Street or on big oil companies or insurance companies. We cannot afford to double down on the same top-down economic policies that got us into this mess. That is not a plan to create jobs, that is not a plan to grow the economy, that is not change, that is a relapse. We don’t want to go back there. We’ve tried it, it didn’t work and we are not going back, we are going forward.

Now, I’ve got a different view about how we create jobs and prosperity. This country doesn’t succeed when we only see the rich getting richer. We succeed when the middle class gets bigger. We grow our economy not from the top down, but from the middle out. We don’t believe that anybody’s entitled to success in this country, but we do believe in something called opportunity. We believe in a country where hard work pays off and where responsibility is rewarded and everybody’s getting a fair shot and everybody’s doing their fair share and everybody plays by the same rules. That’s the country we believe in. That’s what I’m fighting for, that’s why I’m running for a second term as President of the United States, and that’s why I want your vote.

AUDIENCE: Four more years!

PRESIDENT OBAMA: What I talked about last night was a new economic patriotism, a patriotism that’s rooted in the belief that growing our economy begins with a strong, thriving middle class. That means we export more jobs and we outsource – export more products and outsource fewer jobs. You know, over the last three years we came together to reinvent a dying auto industry that’s back on top of the world. We’ve created more than half a million new manufacturing jobs. And so now you’ve got a choice. We can keep giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, or we can start rewarding companies that are opening new plants and training new workers and creating jobs right here in the United States of America. That’s what we’re looking for. We can help big factories and small businesses double their exports and create a  million new manufacturing jobs over the next four years. You can make that happen. I want to control more of our own energy. You know, after 30 years of inaction, we raised fuel standards so that by the middle of the next decade, your cars and trucks will be going twice as far on a gallon of gas. We’ve doubled the amount of renewable energy we generate from sources like wind and solar, and thousands of Americans have jobs today building wind turbines and long-lasting batteries. The United States of America today is less dependent on foreign oil than any time in the last two decades. So now you’ve got a choice between a plant that reverses this progress or one that builds on it. You know, last night my opponent says he refuses to close the loophole that gives big oil companies $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies every year. Now, we’ve got a better plan where we keep investing in wind and solar and clean coal and the good jobs that come with them, where farmers and scientists harness new biofuels to power our cars and our trucks, where construction workers are retrofitting homes and factories so they waste less energy, and we can develop a hundred-year supply of natural gas that creates hundreds of thousands of jobs and, by the way, we can cut our oil imports in half by 2020. That will be good for our economy, that will be good for our environment, that will be good for Colorado, that will be good for America, that’s what we’re fighting for, that’s why I’m running for a second term as President of the United States.

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Who “Cares About Your Needs and Problems”?

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While Romney evidently gained more from the first debate, this CBS poll shows President Obama still holds edge on the question of who “Cares About Your Needs and Problems”.

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Sanctions on Iran are Working, Preventing War

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Feeling bad for the Iranian people who are enduring hardship wrought by the West’s economic sanctions, but the majors demos in Tehran today–inveighing against the Ahmadinejad government and religious establishment–show the whole sanctions policy is working. President Obama has insisted they be given a chance to work, and he’s being proven correct. Mitt, Bibi, and other wingers all look silly, having insisted on imminent war. Even Bibi is now altering his stance to favor sanctions. The mullahs have a growing currency crisis on their hands, while the cost of consumer goods has increased four-fold. Instability is brewing. Sanctions that result in curtailment of their nuclear ambitions are a far better option than bombing. Painful though the sanctions are for Iranians, the people are taking their anger out on the regime, where it belongs for their autocratic rule.

Think my outlook is too rosy? Read what Tod Robberson, editorial writer at the Dallas Morning News published yesterday:

“Mitt Romney and his pal, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, face an increasingly uphill battle arguing that the tough sanctions regime put in place by the Obama administration isn’t working. The pressure on Iran’s government to cease its uranium-enrichment program and abide by its international treaty obligations has never been more severe than it is today.

The value of Iran’s currency, the rial, is in free fall. According to Reuters, the rial reached a record low value of 37,500 to the dollar on the free market. A week ago it traded at about 24,600. Between 2010 and 2011, the rial’s value remained relatively steady at between 10,300 and 10,800 to the dollar. According to one report, Iranians lost 660 trillion in rial-based assets because of the plummeting market. This marks an enormous financial crisis for the country.

Heck, things are so bad that, instead of sightseeing in New York last week, the Iranian delegation headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went on a shopping trip to Costco to buy stuff like shampoo that they can’t get in their own country. One member of his delegation reportedly has defected.

What has happened since last year to make the currency plummet to less than half its 2011 value? Sanctions, that’s what. . . .

And now, there can be no argument that the sanctions are taking a steep toll on Iran’s government. This helps explain why Israel’s foreign ministry issued a report last week calling for the government to give sanctions more time — in spite of the constant drumbeat of war coming from Netanyahu and Romney.

Yes, Romney can ask for proof that Iran has curtailed its uranium enrichment program as a result, and that’s a fair question. The answer almost certainly is: There is no proof — yet. That’s what the sanctions are all about. At a certain point pretty soon, Iran’s isolation and economic strife are going to reach a breaking point, at which time Tehran will seriously enter negotiations on inspections and agree to international limits on its enrichment activities. Sure beats war.

Romney is going to have to come up with another argument heading into tomorrow’s debates. He can’t even rely on backing from Netanyahu, who appears to be backing away from the hard-line stance he had maintained barely three weeks ago. Read more on that at ForeignPolicy.com,” in a Joel Rubin story headlined Netanyahu Aligns with Obama on Iran.

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10 Years Later, Michael Bell Still on the Trail of New England’s Vampires

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One of the most unusual and fascinating books I edited and published in the seven years I was an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf (2000-07) was Food For the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires by folklorist Michael Bell. Over more than 20 years of research at the point the book was published in 2001, Michael had identified more than a dozen New England gravesites where, beginning in the late 1700s and continuing for at least 100 years, the relatives and neighbors of people who’d died from tuberculosis handled the cadavers and conducted their burial in a way that they imagined might diminish the chances of the disease being passed on to others. These funerary practices, at first inexplicable to moderns living with 20th century medicine, possessed a clear logic in an era when the notion of contagion was sensed but not formally known. They included burning some of the fleshly remains and inhaling the smoke from the resulting fire; feeding some of the burnt byproducts to the ill; and arranging the limbs of the dead in such a way as to thwart transmission of illness. Clearly, the grieving and anxious survivors hoped they could somehow inoculate themselves by taking these steps.

The book is a readable synthesis of fascinating stories combining literary lore from such authors as Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Amy Lowell, and Robert Frost, who retold and reimagined these vampire stories; medical anthropology; and travel tales, with Michael wandering from one corner of New England to another, always in search of more folklore on this surprising topic.

Though Michael’s book came out more than ten years ago, his investigation didn’t end with publication. In fact, according to a comprehensive article by Abigail Tucker in this month’s issue of Smithsonian, Michael has now documented more than eighty examples of these burials and exhumations, ranging beyond New England and stretching as far west as Minnesota. According to Tucker,

“Hundreds more cases await discovery, [the author] believes. ‘You read an article that describes an exhumation, and they’ll describe a similar thing that happened at a nearby town,’ says Bell, whose book, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires, is seen as the last word on the subject, though he has lately found so many new cases that there’s a second book on the way. ‘The ones that get recorded, and I actually find them, are just the tip of the iceberg.’”

I remain fascinated by this topic, and am excited to have Smithsonian‘s update on Michael’s research, and to be reminded of the book that Michael Kenney in the Boston Globe described as an “Absorbing account [that] is neither Halloween fantasy nor tabloid frenzy, but a major contribution to the study of New England folk beliefs.” I’ll be interested to learn about the more recent cases that Michael has discovered in the decade since I published Food For the Dead with him, and eager to learn about the next book. Below are images of the front and back cover of the 2002 paperback edition.

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Sam Zell Part II/Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) says Out-of-Work are “Hobos”

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Are Dean Heller, Nevada Repub Senate candidate, and Sam Zell–who this morning asserted that under-employed people lack work because government has “incentivized” them to stop trying to find it–sipping at the same toxic water cooler? In the same news cycle as Zell made the offensive assertions in the post below–Steve Sebelius of the Las Vegas Review-Journal is reporting this about Heller, as tipped to me by maddowblog.com:

“In February 2010, Heller questioned the wisdom of extending unemployment benefits for people thrown out of work by the recession. He told the Elko County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner that the longer a person is out of work, the smaller the chance they’d eventually be re-employed. ‘Is the government now creating hobos?’ he asked, according to the Elko Daily Free Press.”

In a debate this week with his Senate opponent, Dem Shelley Berkley, Heller denied he’d ever made the “hobo” remark. It isn’t clear from Sebelius’s story if Berkley nailed him for it then, but post-debate Sebelius has him red-handed having said it.

Jeez, from “incentivized” to “hobos” in a few hours–I am forced to conclude that there are a lot of Repubs who hate the people they think of as lower-class. It can’t get much more conspicuous!

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Sam Zell, Corporate Raider & Certified Asshole

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In case you’re unfamiliar with businessman Sam Zell, he’s the billionaire who a few years ago managed to acquire the Tribune media empire (which at the time included the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Baltimore Sun, and Hartford Courant). While the newspapers were already losing money, the advent of Zell’s ownership and the ways he leveraged his acquisition of the media company saddled it with additional enormous debt, whereupon he began downsizing newsrooms, laying off journalists and gutting the papers. At the same time, he fashioned himself a media critic, supposedly knowledgable about what news organizations must do to survive amid a transformed media landscape.

By now, several years after his Tribune purchase, the company is embroiled in a number of lawsuits over Zell’s attempt to walk away from various pension obligations. Zell has remained what he was at the outset–a foul-tempered, profane, corporate raider who routinely exhibits contempt for news and media professionals. By the standards of Geoffrey Nunberg’s provocative new book, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years, Sam Zell is a certifiable “asshole.”

This all brings us to today, where I see on ThinkProgress.org in a story by Pat Garofalo that Zell’s done an interview on CNBC TV’s “Squawk Box” program, during which he offered these observations, complaining:

ZELL: The reality is as follows: the whole focus has been on how the, quote, one percenters, the 10 percenters, whatever these top earners have moved ahead of everybody. I wonder if there’s any correlation between while they were moving ahead, the rest of the government was subsidizing, subsidizing more and more people and disincentivizing them. Why is it always assumed that somebody doesn’t succeed because he can’t, as opposed to he doesn’t want to, or isn’t incentivized to. […]
SORKIN: There’s no suggestion, at least that I’ve heard, that the reason why people have had a harder time rising through the ranks today is a function of the fact that they’re disincentivized to rise through the ranks.
ZELL: Wait a minute. I think that they are disincentivized by, in effect, if you don’t have to pay for your health care, that’s another thing you don’t have to worry about…For every step contributing to the progress at the top, there’s an additional step on the bottom to increase the earned income [tax credit], to extend unemployment insurance for 28 years.

This guy doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. My wife and I damn well pay for our expensive healthcare, and hope each year to get the benefit of a tax deduction for having obtained coverage through the small business we operate. And, “unemployment insurance for 28 years”? What rank hyperbole! Ninety weeks is the absolute limit, as I recall, and mine in NY State didn’t even last that long after I was laid off from Sterling Publishing in 2009, an experience I’ve recounted in a personal blog essay, Three Years Ago Today.

So, let’s get this straight–a man who used Bain-like tactics to strip money out of a company he acquired, laid off hundreds of experienced professionals, and ignored his obligations to their pensions, is now lecturing the rest of us on why many Americans lack full-time employment–it’s because we’ve been conditioned to be lazy by government policies that “disincentivize” us. This guy would fit in perfectly in Mitt Romney’s 47% video reel. What an asshole.

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Did You Hear the One about a Bigoted Christian Who Walks into a Synagogue on Yom Kippur?

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I thought this was a parody or an Onion story, but evidently it’s not.

Word comes via the Chicago Tribune that congregants of Anshe Emet Synagogue in Lakeville, IL, were upset by the unexpected appearance in their sanctuary of Congresswoman Michele Bachmann during Kol Nidrei, the service that began the solemn Yom Kippur holiday last Tuesday. According to reporter Manya A. Brachear’s story, there is “No word on why Bachmann was in Chicago or why she chose to attend the Jewish service. Calls and emails to her campaign and congressional office were not returned.”

Rabbi Michael Siegel, following his congregation’s practice of acknowledging the presence of public officials as guests in their sanctuary, welcomed the conservative congresswoman from the pulpit. But according to Brachear,

“The formality enraged more than a few congregants, prompting some to walk out and one to start a campaign of his own in support of Bachmann’s opponent in the race for her congressional seat, Jim Graves. ‘The holiness of the room and the holiness of the evening was greatly diminished for me, if not completely destroyed,’ said Gary Sircus, who stormed out of the synagogue where he has observed the High Holidays for 25 years. ‘Our congregation values and embodies tolerance, compassion, respect for individual rights, intelligence, science—all of the things that I think Michele Bachmann stands against.’ 

“Later that night, [Sircus] composed an email to Graves’ campaign and sent it to others, urging them to donate. His words have since gone viral. ‘I felt that the best way to ‘honor’ Ms. Bachmann’s visit was to make a contribution to your campaign,’ Sircus wrote [to Graves]. ‘Even though I do not vote in Minnesota, please do everything in your power to take away this evil woman’s soapbox.'”

I’ve seen reports that Bachman is in the closest race of her congressional career, and really may be ousted on November 6. Also reportedly in very close races are Bachmann’s fellow right-wing extremists Joe Walsh of Illinois, the deadbeat who failed to pay his wife her child support; Steve King of Iowa, as demeaning a congressman as there is toward new Americans and immigrants looking to catch a foothold our country; and Alan West of Florida who routinely demeans female politicians.

 

 

 

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