11 posts tagged “liar”
Wow, Palin doesn't have much a record of accomplishment... but what record she does have, is pretty scary. Now comes this tidbit from the Anchorage Daily News which tells of Ms Palin's police department charging rape victims for the "rape kit" used by the police to collect evidence. The paper looked into the matter and, as it turns out, the policy really was as bad as it sounds.
[Former Gov. Tony Knowles (D)] broke new ground while answering a reporter's question on whether Wasilla forced rape victims to pay for their own forensic tests when Palin was mayor. True, Knowles said.
Eight years ago, complaints about charging rape victims for medical exams in Wasilla prompted the Alaska Legislature to pass a bill -- signed into law by Knowles -- that banned the practice statewide.
"There was one town in Alaska that was charging victims for this, and that was Wasilla," Knowles said
A May 23, 2000, article in Wasilla's newspaper, The Frontiersman, noted that Alaska State Troopers and most municipal police agencies regularly pay for such exams, which cost between $300 and $1,200 apiece.
"(But) the Wasilla police department does charge the victims of sexual assault for the tests," the newspaper reported.
What's more, USA Today reported that the state sponsor of the legislation on rape kits wrote the bill with Wasilla in mind. It was that one small town, in other words, that necessitated statewide legislation to protect rape victims from this absurd fee.
A Palin spokesperson, contacted by USA Today, said the governor "does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test."
That's good, but there's still the record to deal with. The town of Wasilla had rape victims to pay for their own medical exams during Palin's mayoral tenure, and Palin's hand-picked police chief publicly opposed the state law when it was passed in 2000.
Asked when Palin learned of the policy, and what Palin did to try to change the policy, her spokesperson chose not to respond.
So here we have the facts, on the record of the town charging for these kits. We have the former governor describing when and why he signed a law banning this practice. And then we have Ms Palin, saying that she didn't have her police force charge for the kits. Hmmmm, you gonna believe your lyin' eyes, or Ms Palin?
*******
Later update: I just read that there is even more to this story. Not only did Palin's town charge for those rape kits, but now it has come out that McCain voted against a bill sponsored by Joe Biden to ban any police force in the country for charging for them. Oh mama, this story just gets crazier!
In 1994, John McCain voted against legislation -- pushed through Congress by Joe Biden -- that helped put an end to the practice of charging rape victims for sexual assault exams.
Twisted as it may sound, charging victims for a forensic exam was a real problem. For example, as AMERICAblog has documented (and the media is now reporting), when Sarah Palin was mayor of Wasilla, the town charged rape victims for the exams.Biden's legislation required that state, local, and Indian governments provide the rape exams to victims free of charge as a condition of receiving federal funds under the Violence Against Women Act. In 2000, Alaska finally passed state legislation in order to qualify for federal funding.
McCain not only opposed Biden's legislation, but also has voted against funding it as recently as October 2007.
Well, at least the foreign press will actually use the word "lie" to describe the blatant and knowing telling of untruth...
Well, that's it. It's all over: the election, human existence, everything. It turns out that a preposterous new McCain campaign ad, which attacks Barack Obama for attacking Sarah Palin, also manages to tell a lie about an article published on a website that only exists in the first place to point out when the campaigns are telling lies, thereby creating a fatal wormhole in the space-time continuum that will shortly suck all physical matter into its gaping maw. The ad suggests that the non-partisan service Factcheck.org, at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, has dismissed Obama's attacks on Palin as "absolutely false" and "misleading". But guess what, irony enthusiasts: that claim itself is absolutely false and misleading! Factcheck.org was talking about crazy rumours put about by so-called online internet bloggers, not criticisms levelled by Obama at all. (Perspicacious lie-spotters may also have noticed that yesterday's McCain attack ad used footage of the CBS news anchor Katie Couric apparently agreeing that criticisms of Sarah Palin had been deeply sexist; in fact, she was talking about Hillary Clinton, and the ad has since been removed from YouTube at CBS's request. You remember Hillary Clinton -- she's the one about whom a McCain supporter once asked him "How do we beat the bitch?", causing the crusading progressive feminist John McCain to chuckle and declare "that's an excellent question.")
Whereas we here in the U.S. get this double-speak from the NY Times...
Escalating its efforts to portray Senator Barack Obama as a candidate whose values fall outside the mainstream, the campaign of Senator John McCain on Tuesday unveiled a new television advertisement claiming that Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, favors “comprehensive sex education” for kindergarten students.
“Learning about sex before learning to read?” the narrator asks in the 30-second advertisement, which the campaign says will be shown in battleground states and on national cable. The commercial also asserts that a sex-education bill introduced in Illinois, which Mr. Obama did not sponsor and which never became law, is his “one accomplishment” in the field of education.
Both sets of accusations, however, seriously distort the record.
The Obama campaign expressed outrage over the commercial, with Bill Burton, a spokesman, describing it as “shameful and downright perverse.”
But Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said, “the Obama campaign did not and cannot dispute a shred of the content in the ad.”
Hmmm, by reading the NY Times, you'd have to be a close reader of the article to really get the idea that the McCain campaign is lying. Did Obama propose to have sex education taught to kindergarten age kids or not? The answer is - no he did not. So then, if you say that he did... then you sir, are a liar. Plain and simple. Get it NY Times? Is that so hard???
Good riddance jackass... though he should have been led off in handcuffs. I'm just waiting for Bush to give him a medal.
All right Arizona! I just read this little tid-bit:
A newly released Behavior Research Center poll finds that Governor Janet Napolitano (D-AZ) would defeat John McCain for his Senate seat in 2010, with Napolitano ahead 47%-36%. The poll was conducted from July 27 to August 4.
So awesome. I'm not sure when the next time McCain is up for election is, but hopefully it is soon. It would be pretty awesome if that guy finally lost his seat. What a total phony!
The Congressional Research Service has just released some extraordinary new figures showing that the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has jumped to an astounding $12 billion per month.
Twelve billion dollars per month. For anyone counting, that's $10 billion every month for Iraq and $2 billion for Afghanistan. In 2005, the bill for Iraq was $8 billion a month. CRS attributes the additional monthly $2 billion to the surge -- an operation that the Pentagon estimated in January would only cost an additional $5.6 billion through September.
Now we can juxtapose that little bit of information with this article that I saw this morning...
The fight over a popular health insurance program for children is intensifying, with President Bush now leading efforts to block a major expansion of the program, which is a top priority for Congressional Democrats.
Democrats have proposed a major expansion of the program, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, to cover more youngsters with a substantial increase in federal spending. This would increase spending by $50 billion over the next five years — the amount decried by Mr. Bush as “a massive expansion."
So let's see... we can get health insurance for tens of millions of kids for ten billion a year, or we can spend that on a month in Iraq. Of course Bush won't sign the bill for the health insurance because it is "too expensive." What a joke. That's ok, Bush is putting the cost of this disastrous war on all of our credit cards. My grandkids will still be paying back the interest for the cost of this war to the Bank of China...
Worst
President
Ever
This story. reminds me of the old Bart Simpson line ... I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything...
The Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the National Archives, Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.”
As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice President, the National Archives protested the Vice President’s position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse. The Vice President’s staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the President’s executive order.
Once again Cheney shows how much he is a total force for evil. He is really the driving force behind just about every horrible disaster that this administration has foisted on the world. From torture to illegal wiretapping, from global warming denial to executive power grabs... all of it has Cheney's fingerprints on it. Only he doesn't want anyone to get the evidence of all his malfesance, so like any two bit hood, he is trying to hide the evidence. Unfortuneatly he's got the power of the government on his side, that, and the help of a cadre of Federalist Society court-packed judges... has kept a lot of the smoking guns secret. Someday they'll come out, but he's betting that he'll be long gone by then. Unfortunately, these guys have stacked the deck so well, he's probably right. There is no doubt in my mind that Cheney is the most nefarious force in American politics since Nixon.... and at least Nixon did a few decent things. Cheney's legacy is one of failed policies and negative influences.
Q: Are there any members of the Bush family or this administration in this war?
SNOW: Yeah, the President. The President is in the war every day.
Q: Come on, that isn’t my question –
SNOW: Well, no, if you ask any president who is a commander in chief –
Q: On the frontlines, wherever…
SNOW: The President.
I posted yesterday about how much the war is costing us in dollars, not even to mention the horrendous human toll. Just to follow up a bit on where that money could have gone, I give you this little tid-bit;
President Bush, yesterday:
“First, I’m pleased that we’re funding cancer research. We’re up about 25 percent or 26 percent since 2001; it’s a commitment that I made when I first came to Washington, it’s a commitment we’re keeping. And the reason why it makes sense to spend taxpayers’ money on cancer research is that we can make some good progress, and have.”
ABC News Medical Editor Timothy Johnson, a few hours later:
“[W]hen the administration tries to take credit for increased spending, per se, I think they’re misleading. It is true that the total budget for the National Cancer Institute has gone up by $1.2 billion since 2001. But most of that occurred in those early years under a Clinton initiative. The budget was actually cut last year and the projected budget for this year is to be cut even further. So, I think it’s a real tragedy that we are cutting the budget for the National Cancer Institute at a time we’re on the verge of many exciting discoveries.”
So here, we see a perfect encapsulation of the lies and total un-reality of this whole Bush gang. The increase of $1.2 billion is about a week or two of Iraq costs. Just think about that for a second...
Cheney was on his favorite territory yesterday. Limbaugh's lie fest. A safe zone where there would be no questions and reality would never destroy the fantasy world that he tries to build up. Read it for yourself...
CHENEY: Well, I think there’s some natural level of concern out there because in fact, you know, it wasn’t over
instantaneously. It’s been a little over three years now since we went into Iraq, so I don’t think it’s surprising that people are concerned.
On the other hand, this government has only been in office about five months, five or six months now. They’re off to a good start. It is difficult, no question about it, but we’ve now got over 300,000 Iraqis trained and equipped as part of their security forces. They’ve had three national elections with higher turnout than we have here in the United States. If you look at the general overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well.
Now you can contrast that with just a little dose of actual reality from outside the delusional fact-free zone that the so-called leaders of this country live in. There was an article in the paper today by an Iraq analyist and expert from the Hoover Institution, a bastion of conservatism, which said we are weeks away from the point of no return in Iraq.
But in a sign of the growing sense of urgency, a member of a high-powered government advisory body that is developing options to prevent Iraq's chaotic collapse warns that the United States could have just weeks, not months, to avoid an all-out civil war.
"There's a sense among many people now that things in Iraq are slipping fast and there isn't a lot of time to reverse them," said Larry Diamond, one of a panel of experts advising the Iraq Study Group, which is preparing a range of policy alternatives for President Bush.
"The civil war is already well along. We have no way of knowing if it's too late until we try a radically different course," said Diamond, an expert on building democracies who is at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and is a former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
I really don't know what needs to happen before people start just calling it like it is, and calling Cheney a liar to his face. The facts are there. Why won't any serious journalist just point out the facts every time Cheney lies to our face. It isn't that hard. "Cheney said X, the facts on the ground show that he is wrong, here they are..." See how easy it is. All you journalists out there, you have my permission to crib my outline here, and simply fill in the appropriate blanks. You can play that little game every time Cheney opens his mouth. It'll be fun, and even help save the country...
I just saw this outrageous statement by Condoleezza Rice:
On the radio, Rice asked rhetorically, "Does anybody really believe that somebody would have walked into my office and said, oh, by the way, there's a chance of a major attack against the United States and I would have said, well, I'm really not interested in that information?"
"I mean, it's just ridiculous," said Rice.
Yeah... that is just ridiculous....
BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?
RICE: I believe the title was, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."
Yup, I don't know where anyone would get the idea that someone told Rice that there was a chance of a major attack, and she ignored it... Where oh where would anyone get that idea?
