Last week, right-wing web and radio and the GOP Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise, have been parroting a false claim in Reuters that the Obama administration has embedded hidden tax increases for most Americans in the budget. No doubt this wing-nut media frenzy will continue, because they are counting on public ignorance of this:
The journalist who wrote an article on Monday that turned into an embarrassment for Reuters has left the wire service, the company said Friday. A Reuters spokeswoman declined to say whether the journalist, Terri Cullen, left voluntarily, or why. “I can’t really go into any detail,” said the spokeswoman, Courtney Dolan.
Ms. Cullen stepped down less than a month after being hired for the newly created position of wealth management editor. She had worked for more than a decade for The Wall Street Journal Online.
Her article said that President Obama’s budget amounted to a backdoor tax increase for middle-income and even lower-income people, based largely on the scheduled expiration of income tax cuts passed in 2001. But the president had actually proposed keeping those cuts in place for all but high-income families. [$250,000 up]
After a complaint from the White House, Reuters withdrew the article, stating that it was inaccurate. But by then, some prominent conservatives had seized on the article, and a few — notably Rush Limbaugh — insisted that the retraction meant simply that the media were protecting the president.
Inserted from <NY Times>
Now, stripping away the diplomatic niceties, what we see is this. A Rupert Murdoch operative from one of his propaganda outlets (WSJ) infiltrated a respectable news wire (Reuters) to plant the GOP’s favorite big lie: “Obama will raise your taxes.” Reuters, properly chagrined, retracted the story and fired the liar. No matter. The damage is done. You can be sure that Terri Cullen will resurface somewhere in Murdoch’s media empire. I am also confident that we will have to counter this claim with the facts over and over throughout the Presidential campaign of 2012, The only lower and middle class tax Obama has supported is the smokers tax in SCHIP. He would have been better served to tax Big Tobacco directly.
3 comments:
I wish the intellectuals who see what the fuck is happening would get off their ivory asses and educate the people around them with the same tenacity the rabid dogs are feeding on the sheep with.
I seriously doubt Albert Einstein, Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau...would have stood idly by in the face of this assault on freedom.
Henry David Thoreau - Sic Vita
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.
A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I'm fixed.
A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
Doth make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.
And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.
Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they're rife.
But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life's vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.
That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.
As Pauline said in the previous post - perhaps she can't read. It's hard to counteract all this propaganda when you have an entire news organization dedicated to it, that apparently 49% of people think is totally accurate.
This reflects on our poor education systems, especially in the South, where the high school graduation rate barely exceeds 50% in a lot more states than I could believe. Some are as low as the 30's.
Right on, Mark. That's exactly why I have the respect rule here, in the hope that an occasional victim of their brain washing might stick around long enough to learn something.
Lisa, as if that is not bad enough, around 75% of those who do graduate high school are functionally illiterate. I used to tutor at a community college teaching high school grads basic grade school grammar.
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