Three Cheers for PolitiFact!

I don't normally pay attention to the fact-checking websites, but if PolitiFact managed to piss off half the progressive job-killing entitlement-state blogosphere, it must be doing something right.

See: "Lie of the Year 2011: ‘Republicans voted to end Medicare’" (at Memeorandum).

PolitiFact debunked the Medicare charge in nine separate fact-checks rated False or Pants on Fire, most often in attacks leveled against Republican House members.

Now, PolitiFact has chosen the Democrats’ claim as the 2011 Lie of the Year....

With a few small tweaks to their attack lines, Democrats could have been factually correct, said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "I actually think there is no need to cut out the qualifiers and exaggerate," he said.

At times, Democrats and liberal groups were careful to characterize the Republican plan more accurately. Another claim in the ad from the Agenda Project said the plan would "privatize" Medicare, which received a Mostly True rating from PolitiFact. President Barack Obama was also more precise with his words, saying the Medicare proposal "would voucherize the program and you potentially have senior citizens paying $6,000 more."

But more often, Democrats and liberals overreached:

• They ignored the fact that the Ryan plan would not affect people currently in Medicare -- or even the people 55 to 65 who would join the program in the next 10 years.

• They used harsh terms such as "end" and "kill" when the program would still exist, although in a privatized system.

• They used pictures and video of elderly people who clearly were too old to be affected by the Ryan plan. The DCCC video that aired four days after the vote featured an elderly man who had to take a job as a stripper to pay his medical bills.

"Both parties use entitlements as political weapons," Ryan said in an interview with PolitiFact. "Republicans do it to Democrats; Democrats do it to Republicans. So I knew that this would be a political weapon that the other side would use against us."

Liberal bloggers and columnists contend it's accurate to say Republicans voted to end Medicare. Left-leaning websites such as Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, and The New Republic said PolitiFact's analysis was wrong, as did New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

Well, that's a who's who of the America-hating market-killing left.

And sooner than you can scream, LIAR!, Paul Krugman is off the blocks to smear PolitiFact as "useless and irrelevant."

And Krugman links to one of the left's premiere dishonest spin masters and lie merchants, Steve "Buttfreak" Benen, "PolitiFact ought to be ashamed of itself."

Right.

That's just the kind of faux outrage we can expect from the morally bankrupt losers of the left, now screaming like stuck pigs at being called out for their epic dishonesty and fear-mongering.

Three cheers for PolitiFact.

Have We Lost Faith In the Free-Market System of Entrepreneurial Capitalism?

Asks Jeb Bush, at Wall Street Journal, "Capitalism and the Right to Rise" (via Memeorandum).

Americans still favor capitalism, obviously, but the increasing affinity to socialism is startling --- and I'm not just talking about the Occupy asshats. Both Gallup and Pew recently found strong support for socialism, especially among young people.

And the reactions to the Jeb Bush piece are strong among the idiots of the neo-communist blogosphere, for example, here's epic airhead Barbara O'Brien at Mahablog:

Jeb’s got an op ed in today’s Washington Post about how American capitalism is being strangled by taxes and regulations. This is total bullshit, of course, but the wingnuts eat this stuff up. I’m thinking Jeb’s taking steps to shine up his “conservative” credentials and get his name in circulation.

That would be "Wall Street Journal," you stupid piece of scum. And your ignorance is what's "bullshit." Take my state, please. We're drowning in regulations and taxes and people have almost completely lost confidence in government --- and that would be Democrat government, from top to bottom.

But wait! There's more of teh stupid, from Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog:

"The right to rise"? In a sane America, if we wanted to use the phrase "the right to rise" at this moment in history, we'd use it to talk about people who can't rise because they can't sell a house and move to where jobs are because the fat cats won't allow serious levels of mortgage modification to stabilize the housing market; we'd talk about people who can't rise and find work because we refuse to make a serious effort to engage in the sort of Keynesian public-works stimulus that would put money in people's pockets that they would later give to struggling merchants in exchange for food, clothing, and consumer goods; we'd talk about people who can't rise because they've been laid off as teachers or cops as we refuse to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for needed services; we'd talk about students who will struggle to rise for decades because they bear a crushing burden of student loans and no job prospects.

It's all stupid but I've highlighted the most stupid passage of all. We haven't passed a "serious" Keynesian stimulus? Steve, you're on crack, mofo!

The 2009 stimulus authorized $787 billion in government spending, i.e., over 3/4 of a $1 trillion --- and according the president's own White House Council of Economic Advisers, the failed stimulus programs has cost taxpayers a whopping $278,000 per job! Shoot, might as well have turned the stimulus into a big fat freakin' welfare program!

Moreover, being a classically gargantuan bureaucratic program, the money was wasted on pork barrel and already-existing government contracts --- not the new projects the stimulus was ostensibly designed to promote. And not only that: Frankly, whatever jobs have been created would have likely come about without the stimulus and the resultant residual net drag to growth through the additional debt burden placed on the economy. Way to go Steve M.!

 And more! The deeper problem is that Keynesianism's simply discredited, and has long been so. See Allen Metlzer, "Four Reasons Keynesians Keep Getting It Wrong":

Those who heaped high praise on Keynesian policies have grown silent as government spending has failed to bring an economic recovery. Except for a few diehards who want still more government spending, and those who make the unverifiable claim that the economy would have collapsed without it, most now recognize that more than a trillion dollars of spending by the Bush and Obama administrations has left the economy in a slump and unemployment hovering above 9%.

Read it  all --- and weep, you ASFL progressive d-bags!

'You are a pyromaniac in a field of straw men...'

George Will decimates Robert Reich, with humor no less, via Big Journalism:

FDR Prolonged the Great Depression

From the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

Michelle Fields narrates:

RELATED: At The Other McCain, "‘F– Michelle Fields!’ — Interview With Reporter Harassed at Occupy DC Protest."

Obama Administration Blocks FDA on 'Morning After' Pill

At New York Times, "Plan to Widen Availability of Morning-After Pill Is Rejected."

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why. The administration's out of step on these issues and is freakin' over election year repercussions. See the editors at the Los Angeles Times (via Jill Stanek).

And from pro-abort extremist Amanda Marcotte, "Who to blame for the Plan B debacle?"

The Newtitlement State

At Wall Street Journal, "On Medicare, Mitt Romney has the bolder, better reform":

The contradictions of Mr. Gingrich's entitlement plan reveal part of his political character, which is that his policies often don't match the high-decibel, sometimes grandiose nature of his rhetoric. This can make it easier for his opponents to stigmatize his policies as more radical than they really are because Mr. Gingrich tells everyone they're radical. He might achieve more if he spoke more softly and carried a bigger stick.

RTWT at the link.

Obama Pushes Radical Gay Rights Agenda Internationally

Moonbattery has the bullseye headline: "Obama Using Foreign Aid to Advance Homosexual Depravity Throughout the World."

But see New York Times, "US to Use Foreign Aid to Promote Gay Rights Abroad."

And then check CNN, "Candidates quick to pan Obama foreign aid decision," and Reuters, "Conservatives bash Obama for gay rights stand." Also at ABC News, "Rick Perry Says Human Rights for Gays 'Not in America's Interests'."

And for the record, the United States can promote human rights without making a push for the radical homosexual agenda. People should be protected against threats to their dignity, period. The gay extremist agenda is a pet project of Western elites and won't do a damn for the billions of the world's poor living on less than $2 a day. What a disgrace.

Charles Blow Attacks Newt Gingrich's Imaginary War on Children

I predicted this the other day when I wrote:

Newt will be hammered as the right's public policy Ebenezer Scrooge who's also an epic hypocrite adulterer with the moral backbone of a snail.

And barely 24 hours later, here's Charles Blow with an attack on Newt at the New York Times, "Newt’s War on Poor Children":

Newt Gingrich has reached a new low, and that is hard for him to do.

Nearly two weeks after claiming that child labor laws are “truly stupid” and implying that poor children should be put to work as janitors in their schools, he now claims that poor children don’t understand work unless they’re doing something illegal.

On Thursday, at a campaign stop in Iowa, the former House speaker said, “Start with the following two facts: Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.” (His second “fact” was that every first generational person he knew started work early.)

This statement isn’t only cruel and, broadly speaking, incorrect, it’s mind-numbingly tone-deaf at a time when poverty is rising in this country. He comes across as a callous Dickensian character in his attitude toward America’s most vulnerable — our poor children. This is the kind of statement that shines light on the soul of a man and shows how dark it is.

I've taken after Charles Blow before for his truly epic mendacity. But I had no idea I'd forecast this idiotic attack so accurately. Ebenzer Scrooge is, of course, the tight-fisted old meany in Charles Dickens's 1843 novel, A Christmas Carol. Being Christmas season that's the literary image that first came to me, but a variation of the Scrooge attack is inevitable if Newt manages to win the nomination. At that point I'll of course be putting aside any differences I might have with Gingrich. Indeed, I'll be bending over backwards for his victory over Barack Obama, who he has rightly hammered as "Legitimately and Authentically a Saul Alinsky Radical."

Meanwhile, check out this penetrating essay at William Jacobson's, "Don’t play the “baggage” game." And a key passage there:

The purest of personally pure candidates will be faulted for being a religious nut and not hip enough to be president, someone from the white bread 1950s. Policies advocating personal responsibility and empowerment will be portrayed as cruel and favoring the rich. Advocacy of treating people according to the content of their characters rather than the colors of their skin will be protrayed as racially insensitive or racist.

Exactly.

The Death of European Socialist Welfare States

A massive state sector requires a robust economy, and the peripheral states of the EU can't sustain the socialist project. It's not the end of European socialism, but the left is being pummeled by events, and good thing too.

See Jonathan Blitzer, at The New Republic, "Has the Euro Crisis Killed Off Social Democracy For Good?":

Madrid – Outgoing Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, of Spain, had until recently been the beneficiary of propitious circumstances. Party infighting enabled him to outmaneuver the establishment favorite in the 2000 primaries. Four years later, he eked out an eleventh hour victory in national elections when a terrorist bombing mere days before voting turned the tide against incumbent conservatives. As he took office, a booming economy—which enjoyed the second largest budget surplus in Europe as late as 2007—paved the way for an ambitious social agenda, which rallied his progressive base.

But if a flair for the unexpected studded his ascent, it was a bruising inevitability that brought him low. A rapidly worsening economic crisis left him with little choice but to announce, in April, that he would not stand for re-election. After months of daily flaying by an emboldened conservative opposition, early elections came as a relief for Zapatero, even as his party blamed him when it was trounced, as expected, two weeks ago.

But Zapatero didn’t fall alone: Center-left governments in Portugal and Greece have also fallen in recent months. All in all, it’s a long-standing trend. Leftist governments in Europe have been teetering now for over a decade. Ten years ago, social democratic governments were at the helm in half the countries of the EU. That number has since dropped to three. But their recent plight is their most dire. The sovereign debt crisis has done more than batter incumbent socialists out of office; it may well have stripped the social democratic movement of its soul in the crisis zone.

Continue reading.

Super Committee Failure

From James Pethokoukis, at The American, "Democrats’ tax-hike obsession killed the SuperCommittee":

GOP Tax Pledge Is Hurdle to Deficit-Reduction Deal — Or Is It?

At New York Times, "Economic Memo: Tax Pledge May Scuttle a Deal on Deficit."

It's a good piece. But I think the claim that the tax pledge is the main driver of GOP decision-making behavior is off base. Spending it out of control today in a way that is dramatically different from earlier eras. That's what Senator Jeff Sessions is talking about, for example: