Detroit, Obama Town

Detroit, the town where Obama got his start in politics?

Judge Judy: 'Government is there to serve us, not the other way around'

Popular television judge Judy Sheindlin – better known as “Judge Judy” – told Megyn Kelly Friday on "The Kelly File" that “government is there to serve us. Not the other way around."
Judge Judy didn’t stop there, also questioning whether the welfare state has allowed people to become too dependent on government.
“What we’ve done to a whole group of people is say, ‘not to worry, if you can’t take care of yourself, we’ll take care of you,’” she said.
At the end of her chat with Kelly, her self-proclaimed "number one fan," Judge Judy wondered if today’s children are too often told that they’re special.
“It gives young people a false sense of reality,” she said. “It creates mediocrity. It stops people from wanting to be better.”

Cruz Calls Out Hecklers at Values Voter Summit

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz effectively dealt with a small group of hecklers who tried to shout him down during his speech Friday at the Values Voter Summit

The shouting started after Cruz had launched into an attack against "that trainwreck, that disaster, that nightmare that is Obamacare."

"It seems that President Obama's paid political operatives are out in force today," Cruz said.

Urgent: Do You Support Sen. Ted Cruz's Efforts to Defund Obamacare? Vote Here.

The smattering of catcalls continued throughout his speech. "I'm curious, is anybody left at the Organizing for America headquarters? Cruz asked at another point, referring to Obama's political action committee.

"I'm actually glad that the president's whole political staff is here instead of actually doing mischief in the country."

The hecklers were eventually hustled out of the room at Washington's Omni Shoreham Hotel.

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/cruz-obama-hecklers/2013/10/11/id/530625?ns_mail_uid=5689450&ns_mail_job=1541365_10112013&promo_code=1528C-1#ixzz2hSjntt9z
Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed? Vote Here Now!

Peter Roff Who’s Checking the Fact Checkers?

"Facts," someone once said, "are stubborn things." If there is one thing that is gnawing the marrow out of political coverage in America today, it's the so-called "fact checkers" whom editors of some of the nation's most prestigious publications have appointed to evaluate the veracity of statements made by candidates for public office.
According to the American Heritage dictionary, the definition of "fact" is: 1) Knowledge or information based on real occurrences; 2) Something demonstrated to exist or known to have existed; or 3) A thing that has been done, especially a crime. The last is especially interesting since the way fact-checking has been employed in the last two election cycles is as near to a crime as a journalist can commit.
Now comes a study from the George Mason University Center for Media and Public Affairs that demonstrates empirically that PolitiFact.org, one of the nation's leading "fact checkers," finds that Republicans are dishonest in their claims three times as often as Democrats. "PolitiFact.com has rated Republican claims as false three times as often as Democratic claims during President Obama's second term," the Center said in a release, "despite controversies over Obama administration statements on Benghazi, the IRS and the AP."
[Check out our editorial cartoons on President Obama.]
"Republicans see a credibility gap in the Obama Administration," said Dr. Robert S. Lichter, head of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. "PolitiFact rates Republicans as the less credible party."
As the first person to empirically demonstrate the liberal, pro-Democrat bias in the Washington press corps, Lichter's analysis is worth further study and comment.  His study – and in the interests of full disclosure, he was once a professor of mine at the George Washington University  - "examined 100 statements involving factual claims by Democrats (46 claims) and Republicans (54 claims), which were fact-checked by PolitiFact.com during the four month period from the start of President Obama's second term on January 20 through May 22, 2013." The conclusion: Republicans lie more.
Or do they? As the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto has consistently reported, the fact checking business often – too often for anyone's good – turns on matters of opinion rather than matters of "fact." One recent example that drives the point home is the Washington Post's recent fact check that gave President Barack Obama "four Pinocchios" for asserting that he had, in fact, called what happened in Benghazi an act of "terrorism."
According to the Post's Glenn Kessler, Obama did in fact refer to it the next day in a Rose Garden address as an "act of terror," but did not call it "terrorism." Is this a distinction without a difference? Hardly, at least as far as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney might be concerned. It will be a long time before anyone forgets how the second presidential debate turned into a tag team match with Obama and CNN's Candy Crowley both explaining to the mystified Republican that Romney was, in fact, wrong when he accused the president of not having called the Benghazi attack a terrorist incident.
[See a collection of editorial Cartoons on Benghazi.]
The fact that, as the Lichter study shows, "A majority of Democratic statements (54 percent) were rated as mostly or entirely true, compared to only 18 percent of Republican statements," probably has more to do with how the statements were picked and the subjective bias of the fact checker involved than anything remotely empirical. Likewise, the fact that "a majority of Republican statements (52 percent) were rated as mostly or entirely false, compared to only 24 percent of Democratic statements" probably has more to do with spinning stories than it does with evaluating statements.
There is a "truth gap" in Washington, but it doesn't exist along the lines the fact checkers would have you think. It was Obama who said you could keep the health care you had if you liked it, even if Obamacare became law. It was Obama who said the Citizens United decision would open the floodgates of foreign money into U.S. campaigns. It was Obama who said Benghazi happened because of a YouTube video. It was Obama's IRS that denied conservative political groups had been singled out for special scrutiny. And it was Obama who promised that taxes would not go up for any American making less than $250,000 per year.
All of these statements and plenty more are demonstrably false, though some people still pretend there is truth in them. As the Lichter study demonstrates, it's not so much fact checkers that are needed as it is fact checkers to check the facts being checked.

PolitiFact Bias

Hoystory: "Fact checking frauds"

Self-described "reformed journalist" Matthew Hoy's disgust with PolitiFact only occasionally bubbles over into blog posts at his blog, Hoystory, but this week we have a double helping.

Hoy starts out by pulling the rug out from under PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" rating of Jeb Hensarling's claim that Congress leaves itself as the only ones not receiving subsidies on the "Obamacare" exchanges.

Hoy:

The point Hensarling was making, which is obvious to anyone with half a brain (which explains Politifraud’s problem), was not that no one was getting subisides, but that Congressional staffers, many of whom make north of $100,000 a year, would be the only ones at that income level who get subsidies from the federal government.

And Hoy continues by pointing out PolitiFact's failure to apply its own standards consistently in rating "False" an obvious use of hyperbole, this time when conservative bloggers mocked the Obama administration for closing the ocean as a result of the partial government shutdown:

In their effort to protect their lord and savior, Barack Obama, from himself, Politifarce conveniently disregarded two of  their own rules on what statements deserve their attention:

In deciding which statements to check, we ask ourselves these questions:

• Is the statement rooted in a fact that is verifiable? We don’t check opinions, and we recognize that in the world of speechmaking and political rhetoric, there is license for hyperbole.
  
• Would a typical person hear or read the statement and wonder: Is that true?

Visit Hoy's Hoystory blog for the whole takedown, and let this serve as a reminder that PolitiFact's problems are legion. We don't have the hours in the day to expose them all, so we're grateful to people like Hoy who take the time to expose PolitiFact's errors and distortions.

AP Poll: Obama Approval Plummets to 37

Radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh attacked survey results released on Wednesday that blamed Republicans for the federal shutdown while burying the news that President Barack Obama's approval ratings had plunged to 37 percent among Americans surveyed.

"The point is, once again, there is no media, there is no news," the conservative host said, according to a transcript of his afternoon program. "This is the Democrat Party with activists disguised as journalists. Thirty-seven percent approval.

"And it's not some outlier poll," Limbaugh continued. "You have to read over halfway down into that story to learn that. I haven't seen it anywhere else. It's been on AP, but have you seen anybody else pick that up? It's just classic."

Urgent: Should GOP Stick to Its Guns on Obamacare? Vote Here.

The article was on the Associated Press-GfK survey of 1,227 probable voters conducted Oct. 3-7, with a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.

"Americans are holding Republicans primarily responsible for the partial government shutdown as public esteem sinks for all players in the impasse, President Barack Obama among them, according to a new poll," the report began. "It's a struggle with no heroes."

The article then disclosed that 62 percent of respondents "mainly blamed Republicans for the shutdown" and that "the poll found that the tea party is more than a gang of malcontents in the political landscape, as its supporters in Congress have been portrayed by Democrats.

"Rather, it's a sizable — and divisive — force among Republicans," the AP report said.

But in the seventh paragraph appears the first — and only — reference to Obama's new approval ratings: "Most Americans disapprove of the way Obama is handling his job, the poll suggests, with 53 percent unhappy with his performance and 37 percent approving of it.

"Congress is scraping rock bottom, with a ghastly approval rating of 5 percent."

The report was published by such mainstream media outlets as The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and National Public Radio.

The information appeared in the seventh paragraph of The Huffington Post's story and in the eighth paragraph of those published in The Washington Post and on NPR.

Limbaugh charged that such coverage was wrong about what was actually occurring in Washington.

"If you are a conservative media guy inside the Beltway, you're convinced that Obama's winning everything," he said. "If you're a conservative media guy inside the Beltway and you're subjected to that narrative each and every day, you think the Republicans are really getting shellacked. You think they're taking it on the chin.

"It's the exact opposite," Limbaugh said. "It's the exact opposite of what's happening outside the Beltway."

"The president's at 37 percent. The shutdown is going on. Now we learn that five military families were insulted profoundly with the way the deaths of their service-member relatives were treated.

"It is obvious that this administration is acting purposely to inconvenience and to harm people it considers its political enemies," Limbaugh said.

Further, Limbaugh contrasted the coverage of Obama's new 37 percent rating with coverage by Wolf Blitzer of CNN of its poll on March 13, 2006, when Republican President George W. Bush's rating hit a new low of 36 percent.

"The president's job-approval rating has taken a downward turn again, falling to only 36 percent," the Blitzer excerpt began, according to the Limbaugh transcript. "This represents his lowest rating ever in the CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll … The president's poll numbers are pretty bad, pretty awful right now, rock bottom …"

"Today, Barack Obama's approval number's at 37 percent, and they are not talking about it," Limbaugh said Wednesday. "The AP story in which that poll result is announced has the following headline: "Poll: GOP Gets the Blame in Shutdown." They have a poll that shows that 71 percent of the American people are blaming the Republicans for the shutdown.

"In the same poll, 50 percent are blaming the Democrats for something, but the media says: ''Look, 20 percent spread. Boy, the Republicans are really taking it on the chin for the government shutdown.' But the poll does not say people are upset with the shutdown.

"It's journalistic malpractice," Limbaugh concluded, "except it's not — because it's not journalism."

Among other findings, the AP poll showed that more than 4 in 10 Republicans identified with the tea party and were more apt than other Republicans to insist that their leaders hold firm in the standoff over reopening government and avoiding a default of the nation's debt in coming weeks.
Indeed, the poll showed that everyone making headlines in the dispute has earned poor marks for their trouble, whether Democrat Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, or Republican John Boehner, the House speaker, both with favorability ratings of 18 percent.
And much of the country draws a blank on Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas despite his 21-hour Senate speech before the shutdown. Only half of the poll respondents were familiar enough with him to register an opinion. Among those who did, 32 percent viewed him unfavorably, 16 percent favorably.
Other findings in the AP Poll:

• Sixty-eight percent said the shutdown is a major problem for the country, including majorities of Republicans (58 percent), Democrats (82 percent) and independents (57 percent).
• Fifty-two percent said Obama is not doing enough to cooperate with Republicans to end the shutdown; 63 percent say Republicans aren't doing enough to cooperate with him.
• Republicans are split on just how much cooperation they want. Among those who do not back the tea party, fully 48 percent say their party should be doing more with Obama to find a solution. But only 15 percent of tea-party Republicans want that outreach. The vast majority of them say GOP leaders are doing what they should with the president, or should do even less with him.
• People seem conflicted or confused about the showdown over the debt limit. Six in 10 predict an economic crisis if the government's ability to borrow isn't renewed later this month with an increase in the debt limit — an expectation widely shared by economists. Yet only 30 percent say they support raising the limit; 46 percent were neutral on the question.
• More than 4 in 5 poll respondents felt no personal impact from the shutdown. For those who did, thwarted vacations to national parks, difficulty getting work done without federal contacts at their desks, and hitches in government benefits were among the complaints.

"So frustrating," Martha Blair, 71, of Kerrville, Texas, said of the fiscal paralysis as her scheduled national parks vacation sits in limbo. "Somebody needs to jerk those guys together to get a solution, instead of just saying no."

Blair's nine-day trip to national parks with a tour group won't happen if the parks are still closed next month. "I'm concerned," she said, "but it seems kind of trivial to people who are being shut out of work."
In Mount Prospect, Ill., Barbara Olpinski, 51, a Republican who blames Obama and both parties for the shutdown, said her family is already seeing an impact and that will worsen if the impasse goes on. She's an in-home elderly-care director, her daughter is a physician's assistant at a rural clinic that treats patients who rely on government coverage, and her husband is a doctor who can't get flu vaccines for patients on public assistance because deliveries have stopped.
"People don't know how they are going to pay for things, and what will be covered," she said. "Everybody is kind of like holding their wallets."

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/public-blames-obama-gop/2013/10/09/id/530025?ns_mail_uid=5689450&ns_mail_job=1541013_10092013&promo_code=15229-1#ixzz2hJJDyW16
Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed? Vote Here Now!