Issa Schooled For HSR Lies

Darrell Issa has had an interesting position in the 111th Congress as one of the chief yarn-spinners on the Republican side. I guess it's because he's immune to any charge of hypocrisy. First he demanded White House compliance with necessary Presidential Records Act laws regarding email, after playing down the Bush Administration's major failings in this regard. Yesterday, he appeared on MSNBC with David Shuster to parrot the latest RNC talking point, that the stimulus earmarked construction of an LA-to-Las Vegas high speed rail train. Now, I'm not sure what's so horrible about this - LA to Vegas is a busy corridor, especially on the weekends, and the route essentially goes through desert so construction will be disruptive to almost no communities. But the fact is that it's completely untrue - LA to Vegas is not on the current DOT high speed rail lists and no money expressly goes toward construction of that corridor. A fact that David Shuster inconveniently pointed out. I particularly enjoy the smile after he knows he's been caught.



This zombie lie isn't going away, but at least some reporters aren't taking the bait.

Triumph Of The Will

George Will resurrected a zombie lie yesterday. In fact, he literally resurrected it - Brad Johnson compared and contrasted his misinformation yesterday with a column from April 2006.

“Let Cooler Heads Prevail,” 4/2/2006

While worrying about Montana’s receding glaciers, Schweitzer, who is 50, should also worry about the fact that when he was 20 he was told to be worried, very worried, about global cooling. Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.” Science Digest (February 1973) reported that “the world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age.” The Christian Science Monitor (”Warning: Earth’s Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect,” Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers “have begun to advance,” “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” and “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool.” Newsweek agreed (”The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975) that meteorologists “are almost unanimous” that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said “may mark the return to another ice age.” The Times (May 21, 1975) also said “a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable” now that it is “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.”

“Dark Green Doomsayers,” 2/15/2009

In the 1970s, “a major cooling of the planet” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950″ (New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the “cooling trend” could result in “a return to another ice age” (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated “a full-blown 10,000-year ice age” involving “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The “continued rapid cooling of the Earth” (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery” (International Wildlife, July 1975). “The world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age” (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of “ominous signs” that “the Earth’s climate seems to be cooling down,” meteorologists were “almost unanimous” that “the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, “The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975). Armadillos were fleeing south from Nebraska, heat-seeking snails were retreating from Central European forests, the North Atlantic was “cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool,” glaciers had “begun to advance” and “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974).

He shuffled around the quotes a bit, but they are basically the same ones. Which are, of course, wrong. And it's amusing how they're wrong, because Will values the fact that Newsweek and other pop-science publications wrote mass-market articles about global cooling over, you know, science, and the breadth of scientific opinion at the time. In other words, Will believes that anything in a Villager text reflects the collected wisdom of the entire world. The Village community presumes to speak for the scientific community.

But that's not all that Will was wrong about. He skimmed data about Arctic sea ice off a 45 day-old blog post from Jim Inhofe's climate denialist shop, which was quickly slapped down by, well, a scientist. And he wrote "[A]ccording to the World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade," which is practically the opposite of the truth.

Will could have done the world a favor by reading his own paper's news coverage and maybe canceling his column for the day.

The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Field, a member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have largely outpaced the estimates used in the U.N. panel's 2007 reports. The higher emissions are largely the result of the increased burning of coal in developing countries, he said.

Unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere as the result of "feedback loops" that are speeding up natural processes. Prominent among these, evidence indicates, is a cycle in which higher temperatures are beginning to melt the arctic permafrost, which could release hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, said several scientists on a panel at the meeting.

True, that was the result of a scientific study and not what old Newsweeks were printing to sell copies through counter-intuition 30 years ago. But you know, it's a perspective.

Predictably yet somewhat hilariously, Will and his editor Fred Hiatt are ducking accountability on this tripe.

Mum's the word for George Will and the Washington Post when it comes to explaining how misinformation on global warming got into Will's most recent column.

Yesterday morning we called Will to ask him about the misrepresentations in his Sunday column. We also called Fred Hiatt, the editor of the paper's editorial page, to ask about the editing process that the Post's editorial page employs. Neither chose to answer our questions [...]

Will's assistant told us that Will might get back to us later in the day to talk about the column. And Hiatt said he was too busy to talk about it just then, but that he'd try to respond to emailed questions. So we emailed him yesterday's post, with several questions about the editing process, then followed up with another email late yesterday afternoon.

But still nothing from either of them, over twenty-four hours after the first contact was made. Nor has the online version of Will's column been updated, even to reflect the fact that the ACRC has utterly disavowed the claim Will attributes to it.

I get the impression that opinion columns in Big Media papers aren't rigorously fact-checked, with the excuse being that they are, well, "opinion." In practice, this becomes a license for Villagers to use the credibility they've assumed for themselves to lie. And if they make a mistake that actually filters through the roadblocks and reaches their editors, they face no consequence. In fact, they frequently fail upward. So they reprint the same nonsense the next week or the next month or the next year. And they are feted at cocktail parties through the next millennium.

Somebody convene a blogger ethics panel.

Zombie Liars And The Right-Wing Puke Funnel

Media Matters chronicles the evolution of a wingnut talking point, where Rush reads something, distorts it, bounces it to Drudge and the Wall Street Journal editorial board and Fox, and then Rush cites the chatter as an "example" of how the talking point is growing. It's all so depressingly familiar.

Wall Street Journal senior economic writer Stephen Moore and Fox News anchors Bill Hemmer and Megyn Kelly promoted on February 10 the falsehood that the economic recovery bill includes a provision that would, in Moore's words, "hav[e] the government essentially dictate treatments." Former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey apparently originated the false claim in a February 9 Bloomberg "commentary," which Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge touted that day. Indeed, Moore credited Limbaugh, saying of the provision, "I just learned of this myself yesterday. In fact, Rush Limbaugh made a big deal out of it on his radio show and it just -- it caused all sorts of calls into congressional offices." Limbaugh later took credit for spreading this story, saying during the February 10 edition of his radio show: "Betsy McCaughey writing at Bloomberg, I found it. I detailed it for you, and now it's all over mainstream media. Well, it's -- it headlined Drudge for a while last night and today. Fox News is talking about it."

The name "Betsy McCaughey" may not be totally familiar to you, but it may interest you to know that perhaps nobody is more responsible for the fact that America is the only industrialized nation on Earth without a universal health care system than her. The latest distortion, that because of the health IT provisions in the stimulus - backed by every side of the ideological spectrum from Barack Obama to Newt Gingrich - a National Coordinator of Health Information Technology will

...monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions.

Now, I can't think of anyone who should be more worried about electronic medical records being made public than Rush Limbaugh, but McCaughey is predictably peddling nonsense here. It talks about doctors having "complete, accurate information" to guide patients' care, but nothing about a federal bureaucracy having any authority to do the same. It's a deliberate lie, a misreading of the language of the bill.

But McCaughey, a Hudson Institute Senior Fellow, has a long history of distorting legislation to scare Americans about "socialized medicine." She was the writer of the long New Republic piece, allowed into the magazine by then-editor Andrew Sullivan, that slandered the Clinton health care plan with one lie after another. James Fallows provides the history, with a telling reminder of how the Village worked to screw health care reform in the 1990s:

Much of the problem for the plan seemed, at least in Washington, to come not even from mandatory alliances but from an article by Elizabeth McCaughey, then of the Manhattan Institute, published in The New Republic last February. The article's working premise was that McCaughey, with no ax to grind and no preconceptions about health care, sat down for a careful reading of the whole Clinton bill. Appalled at the hidden provisions she found, she felt it her duty to warn people about what the bill might mean. The title of her article was "No Exit," and the message was that Bill and Hillary Clinton had proposed a system that would lock people in to government-run care. "The law will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better," McCaughey wrote in the first paragraph. "The doctor can be paid only by the plan, not by you."

George Will immediately picked up this warning, writing in Newsweek that "it would be illegal for doctors to accept money directly from patients, and there would be 15-year jail terms for people driven to bribery for care they feel they need but the government does not deem 'necessary.'" The "doctors in jail" concept soon turned up on talk shows and was echoed for the rest of the year.

These claims, McCaughey's and Will's, were simply false. McCaughey's pose of impartiality was undermined by her campaign as the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of New York soon after her article was published. I was less impressed with her scholarly precision after I compared her article with the text of the Clinton bill. Her shocked claim that coverage would be available only for "necessary" and "appropriate" treatment suggested that she had not looked at any of today's insurance policies. In claiming that the bill would make it impossible to go outside the health plan or pay doctors on one's own, she had apparently skipped past practically the first provision of the bill (Sec. 1003), which said,

"Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting the following: (1) An individual from purchasing any health care services."

It didn't matter. The White House issued a point-by-point rebuttal, which The New Republic did not run. Instead it published a long piece by McCaughey attacking the White House statement. The idea of health policemen stuck.

Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose, n'est-ce pas? Gary Wills has more on McCaughey's lies.

This is how the conventional wisdom often gets set in Washington - an article that "the right people" read builds among the chattering class and then is distilled out to the people, no matter its veracity. While zombies like McCaughey are still churning out the lies, there's a whole new set - Rush, Drudge, Fox - of opinion leaders that get to set the agenda on these matters. Drudge still rules their world.

And Now We Have A CBO Report

Despite my misgivings about how Obama is handling the stimulus package and some of the content, it was still worth rebutting the nonsense that Republicans and the media teamed up to push about a Congressional Budget Office report showing that too little of the money spent would impact the economy in the first two years. That "report" didn't exist and was used as a propaganda tool. Turns out that the CBO has now done a full analysis of the entire bill, and the numbers are far more in line with what the White House and the OMB has been saying.

As summarized in the cost estimate, H.R. 1 would specify appropriations for a wide range of federal programs and would increase or extend certain benefits payable under the Medicaid, unemployment compensation, and nutrition assistance programs. The legislation also would reduce individual and corporate income tax collections and make a variety of other changes to tax laws.

Assuming enactment in mid-February, CBO estimates that the bill would increase outlays by $92 billion during the remaining several months of fiscal year 2009, by $225 billion in fiscal year 2010 (which begins on October 1), by $159 billion in 2011, and by a total of $604 billion over the 2009-2019 period. That spending includes outlays from discretionary appropriations in Division A of the bill and direct spending resulting from Division B.

But into less econo-speak, 64% of the spending would hit the economy in the first two years. While Bloomberg claims this "casts doubt" on the Obama Administration's more optimistic projections, we're not talking about that much of a difference, especially compared to the initial CBO "report." And some readings of the data show more like 79% hitting the economy in two years, which actually beats the OMB projection. The other point is that the economy is not going to be magically fixed by this stimulus in two years, and so having some longer-term spending initiatives in there is qualitatively good.

The point is that the traditional media joined with Republicans to demagogue the initial "report" through dozens upon dozens of mentions. When it became clear that the "report" was bogus, morons like Lou Dobbs and Ed Henry refused to back down from their shoddy journalism and lobbed names at the groups that called them out.

DOBBS: Let me turn to one other thing very quickly, Ed, because that left-wing, liberal group -- they want to call themselves a watchdog group, but they are hardly that -- Media Matters taking issue with your reporting here Friday night. Where does all of that stand?

HENRY: Well, they're upset that we used -- mentioned the CBO analysis, the Congressional Budget Office, that basically found early last week that less than half of the spending projects in here in the stimulus bill would actually stimulate the economy in the first two years of Barack Obama's administration. As we've noted, that's only part of essentially the bill that they analyzed. Robert Gibbs did point out late last week that this is still a work in progress, that the CBO took a just snapshot in time and the bill is still changing. He insists that the White House budget office here has looked at it and 75 percent of this will be stimulative. But if you follow Robert Gibbs' own logic, this is still --

DOBBS: How does he know? How does he know?

HENRY: Right. This is still a work in progress, as he himself says. What's most interesting, when you take a step back, is for the last eight years, I've been covering -- at least for part of it -- the Bush White House. The CBO was always held up by Democrats as a gold standard of nonpartisan analysis. Now that the CBO has analyzed an Obama initiative and has not come out completely favorable, it's interesting to see liberals now attacking the CBO and essentially saying that you can't trust them. What's most -- even more interesting is that the former head of the CBO is now the president's White House budget director, Peter Orszag. So obviously, President Obama thought the CBO was good enough that he picked their chief to be his new White House budget director, Lou.

DOBBS: Indeed he did. And with the OMB attacking the CBO in some of the most ridiculous counterclaims on the part of the Media Matters, that left-wing -- I mean, frankly, they are so silly it's beyond belief. But to try to conflate the Office of Management and Budget numbers as somehow superior with the Congressional Budget Office is an absurdity. Peter Orszag having to -- well, his head must be spinning as he tries to change roles here now as a member of the administration.

As usual, your reporting was outstanding. As usual, Media Matters is what it is, a partisan bunch of hacks trying to play games. We thank you very much.

This distorts what Media Matters said (simply that the initial CBO "report" didn't exist) and buries the mea culpa in name-calling and this weird construction of "I thought Democrats liked the CBO analyses" (yeah, we do when they're complete and extant).

We can talk about whether the bill appropriates money where it's needed and in a way that works. That's a good discussion to have. Republicans and most of the traditional media don't want to have that discussion. They want to play demagogue and block progress away from the status quo with cynical tricks and lies.

...Krugman explains the point about stimulus spending and timing even more here.

...the CBO, by the way, thinks the stimulus plan is desperately needed. This won't stop the know-nothings on the right, but you should know this.

Hortonization

Karl Rove issued a prediction last week that sounded a bit more like a warning:

The “campaign architect,” as he is commonly called, built a case against President Barack Obama’s order to close Guantanamo, an overseas CIA detention center where terrorists and other “enemy combatants” are held. Obama’s order could enable terrorists to be tried in U.S. courts, to be given undeserved rights afforded American citizens and could cause damaging long-term effects, Rove said.

“One year from now, Gitmo won’t be closed,” Rove said. “If it is, there will be an uproar in the U.S. about where to put these people.”

Interrogation tactics used by the CIA during Bush’s term in office were not torturous, Rove said, but he did not deny that the CIA strongly pressed terrorists for vital information.

“You bet we squeeze them for information,” Rove said. “If we hadn’t, those same terrorists could have executed their plans to kill, and [people] would be asking why Bush didn’t protect American soldiers’ lives.”

That's going to be the strategy going forward. If Obama closes Guantanamo, terrorists will be shopping next to you at the Pic 'n' Save. Before long, there will be a TV ad with a revolving door at the gates of a prison, and a closeup on a bearded Muslim face while the voice-over intones "America can't afford that risk."

Actually, I didn't have to wait for the ad.



Note the "There Goes The Neighborhood" caption. And the doofus offering Alcatraz, a MUSEUM, as an alternative.

Of course, terrorists are already housed in federal prisons on US soil. But the above piece doesn't really mention prisons all that much. It asks residents if they want scaaary Mooslims living next to them.

We have, then, the outliines of a political strategy for the next election. President Obama and the librul Congress want terrorists to work in your office while tough daddy Republicans want to keep you safe. Never mind that it's the height of weakness to think that maximum security prisons aren't sufficient, or that our security can only be bought with a loss of liberty.

Another part of this narrative is that nasty libruls want to spend taxpayer money on condoms for your kids while heartland Murcan Republicans are the paragons of virtue and values.

You'll note that the lie quotient since Republicans have lost power has, if anything, been raised. But these kinds of appeals to emotion, to safety and protection and xenophobia, have a resonance in the lizard brain. I wouldn't discount them, nor would I combat them solely with an appeal to reason. There has to be an emotional counterpart.

Factcheckers

In this economy, I guess the media isn't hiring them:

Reports of a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, showing that the vast majority of the money in the stimulus package won't be spent until after 2010, have Democrats on the defensive and the GOP calling for a pullback in wasteful spending.

Funny thing is, there is no such report.

"We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study," a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.

Rather, the nonpartisan CBO ran a small portion of an earlier version of the stimulus plan through a computer program that uses a standard formula to determine a score -- how quickly money will be spent. The score only dealt with the part of the stimulus headed for the Appropriations Committee and left out the parts bound for the Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce Committee.

Because it dealt with just a part of the stimulus, it estimated the spending rate for only about $300 billion of the $825 billion plan. Significant changes have been made to the part of the bill the CBO looked at.

This was not only a major part of the GOP pushback on the recovery package the past couple days, it was trumpeted by all the usual suspects on cable news. At first I thought it odd that Republicans gave a damn whether stimulus spending happens quickly, considering they've spent the last several months blocking any stimulus at all. Of course it was just a way to undermine the plan, and the media played happily along. Thing is, the new head of the Office of Management and Budget spent most of the day refuting this report, with numbers and everything, but he wasn't really part of the reports. He said/she said balance would have been an IMPROVEMENT upon this fiasco. But conservatives rule their world.

It's pretty clear that the media has no ability to or interest in understanding this stuff, because then they wouldn't have their precious "conflict". So they regurgitate whatever some GOP staffer feeds them, just to spice things up. Cable news' ratings soared this past year in the midst of an election based on change, but they haven't changed one bit.

Media's War On America Continues

I was on this phone call today with Tom Malinowski from Human Rights Watch and others discussing the Obama executive orders on torture, and everyone is guardedly optimistic about what this means for the rule of law. If the gray areas on "other dispositions" besides trying or releasing Gitmo detainees and the wiggle room on extra-legal torture techniques are cleared up, we have a blueprint for restoring the rule of law. We need to be vigilant, however, to close whatever loopholes there may be.

This didn't seem to matter to one reporter on the call, who up front ADMITTED HE HASN'T BEEN FOLLOWING THE ISSUE and asked what would happen if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had to be set free because we waterboarded him. This is someone who has confessed to practically every terrorist act of the last 40 years, wants to be a martyr, and for whom there is enough evidence untainted by torture to progress to trial.

The question was certainly colored, if not outright prompted, by a false report from the Pentagon in the waning days of the Bush tenure, claiming that 61 freed detainees from the prison camp have "returned to the batlefield." Expect to hear a lot about this in the coming days, like from this Kyra Phillips bobblehead report:

Kyra Phillips: It's one of the biggest fears about releasing terror suspects from Gitmo, that they'll go back to their alleged old ways.

New Pentagon figures actually say 61 released detainees have been linked to some kind of terror activity, up from 37 as of March, 2008. About 520 Gitmo prisoners have been freed or transferred to other prisons around the world.

Let's be clear: the Pentagon report itself only cited 18 "confirmed" cases of former detainees returning to the battlefield, and offered NO EVIDENCE on that beyond an assertion. The other 43 are "suspected of participating in terrorist activities." Moazzam Begg is a writer who has led activist efforts to close Guantanamo. I'm willing to bet that he's included in the 61. The three detainees featured in the movie "The Road To Guantanamo" are ALSO included in the 61. In short, anyone who has criticized the United States is part of that number.

But Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall University Law School has represented some of the detainees and says the Pentagon has failed to produce evidence of early claims that former detainees have returned to the battlefield.

"The numbers are wrong about who has returned to the fight; their numbers and names are wrong about who has been in Guantanamo. And, of course, the characterization of 'returned to the fight' is far broader than they would like to admit," said Denbeaux. "What they would like is to be understood to mean as 'return to the battlefield,' but, of course, that hasn't happened. So what they mean by 'return to the fight' is engaging in propaganda battles and criticisms of the United States at home and abroad."

This is a propagandistic lie designed to ensure that those loopholes stay open. And the media is totally complicit in aiding and abetting this. I heard on the radio coming in this morning some talking head yammering about how some detainees are "too dangerous to release, but they haven't committed a crime yet so we can't prosecute them." What is this, Minority Report? All of this nonsense designed to preserve the status quo has to be coming from somewhere. The media is just a conduit.

Given all this, it's a wonder how people have enough information to reject torture and indefinite detention. Maybe it's because, unlike the Christopher Hitchenses and media sycophants of the world, they have a value system.

The media's war on America continues.

Registered Voter By Birth

As the last of the lawsuits against ACORN gets laughed out of court, and as Republican Secretaries of State grumble about having to reinstate voters to the rolls, it's clear that, no matter what happens in the election, this insanity around voter registration and zombie lies about voter fraud has to stop. Exhibit A is the fact that John McCain's own head of his "Honest And Open Election Committee" can't name any evidence of voter fraud.

But Ronald Michaelson, a veteran election administrator and member of the McCain-Palin Honest and Open Election Committee, said in an interview that he could not name a single instance in which this had occurred.

“Do we have a documented instance of voting fraud that resulted from a phony registration form? No, I can’t cite one, chapter and verse,” he said [...]

Asked for specifics about the dangers of fake registration, Ben Porritt, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, provided links to 13 news clips and a 2003 Missouri state auditor’s report. Eleven of the cases did not involve registration fraud. Two recounted how felons appeared to have cast illegal votes under their own names. The lone example of a forged registration leading to an illegitimate vote comes from The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, who in April 2006 wrote that a community organizer had improperly registered a noncitizen, and “someone eventually voted in [the noncitizen’s] name.”

Michaelson, who served for 27 years as executive director of the Illinois Board of Elections, said the sharp exchanges over registration fraud have undermined voters’ confidence in the electoral system.

“The fact that so many of these illegal registrations are being made public raises a perception in the minds of people,’’ he said. “That’s more of a general concern. You don’t want to perpetuate the idea that our election process is lacking integrity.”

Asked whether his own party was responsible for fostering that perception, Michaelson said, “Well, it doesn’t help. It has captured the attention of a lot of people.” Why do it, then? “Maybe it’s because there’s nothing else to talk about,” he said.

Boy, he is part of a committee with the word "honest" in it, isn't he?

This is one of those "problems" that actually has a solution, a very smart and nonpartisan solution that would be simple to implement and would eliminate a lot of unnecessary labor. Rick Hasen asks for America to nationalize voter registration.

The solution is to take the job of voter registration for federal elections out of the hands of third parties (and out of the hands of the counties and states) and give it to the federal government. The Constitution grants Congress wide authority over congressional elections. The next president should propose legislation to have the Census Bureau, when it conducts the 2010 census, also register all eligible voters who wish to be registered for future federal elections. High-school seniors could be signed up as well so that they would be registered to vote on their 18th birthday. When people submit change-of-address cards to the post office, election officials would also change their registration information.

This change would eliminate most voter registration fraud. Government employees would not have an incentive to pad registration lists with additional people in order to keep their jobs. The system would also eliminate the need for matches between state databases, a problem that has proved so troublesome because of the bad quality of the data. The federal government could assign each person a unique voter-identification number, which would remain the same regardless of where the voter moves. The unique ID would prevent people from voting in two jurisdictions, such as snowbirds who might be tempted to vote in Florida and New York. States would not have to use the system for their state and local elections, but most would choose to do so because of the cost savings.

There's something in this for both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats talk about wanting to expand the franchise, and there's no better way to do it than the way most mature democracies do it: by having the government register voters. For Republicans serious about ballot integrity, this should be a winner as well. No more ACORN registration drives, and no more concerns about Democratic secretaries of state not aggressively matching voters enough to motor vehicle databases.

Finally, universal voter registration is good for the country, not only because it will make it easier for those who wish to vote to do so, but because it should end controversy over ballot integrity that threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our election process. If President McCain or Obama makes this a priority, we can have the system ready in time for the president's re-election.

Of course, Republicans aren't serious about ballot integrity, and their opposition to this would prove it. They just want something to carp about and undermine confidence in elections. In addition, there's a credible concern, given how the current government has politicized the Department of Justice and the General Services Administration, that giving over voter registration to them might have dangerous consequences.

But of course, there are Republican Secretaries of State doing that politicization right now. And wouldn't it be nice to create an election system where people don't have to turn in a form or remember to vote at an old precinct if they missed the cutoff, a system designed to make voting easier instead of harder?

This is but one possible innovation in elections (like expanding early voting access, making Election Day a weekend or a holiday, instant runoff voting, a mandate for paper ballots, abolishing the Electoral College, etc., etc.), but it certainly would help to defuse this massive hissy fit we hear every four years like clockwork. I'd love to see Republicans oppose the concept of registering every American to vote.

This Has The Look Of A Zombie Lie

The right-wing narrative has been set - the federal government forced the lenders to give houses to black people and Hispanics, they couldn't pay back, "Fannie and Freddie went wild," and they brought the whole system down.

It should be noted that we've had housing downturns before in this country, and none of them caused the financial markets to collapse (the Depression was more about monetary policy, stock speculation, and trade). The extreme leveraging (and the exemptions given to investment firms to double their leveraging limit) and bundling of exotic securities, as well as authorizing awful loans, is the new element here, and both the CRA and the GSEs have nothing to do with that.

Let's clarify the causes of current circumstances. Ask yourself the following questions about the impact of the Community Reinvestment Act and/or the role of Fannie & Freddie:

• Did the 1977 legislation, or any other legislation since, require banks to not verify income or payment history of mortgage applicants?

• 50% of subprime loans were made by mortgage service companies not subject comprehensive federal supervision; another 30% were made by banks or thrifts which are not subject to routine supervision or examinations. How was this caused by either CRA or GSEs ?

• What about "No Money Down" Mortgages (0% down payments) ? Were they required by the CRA? Fannie? Freddie?

• Explain the shift in Loan to value from 80% to 120%: What was it in the Act that changed this traditional lending requirement?

• Did any Federal legislation require real estate agents and mortgage writers to use the same corrupt appraisers again and again? How did they manage to always come in at exactly the purchase price, no matter what?

• Did the CRA require banks to develop automated underwriting (AU) systems that emphasized speed rather than accuracy in order to process the greatest number of mortgage apps as quickly as possible?

• How exactly did legislation force Moody's, S&Ps and Fitch to rate junk paper as Triple AAA?

• What about piggy back loans? Were banks required by Congress to lend the first mortgage and do a HELOC for the down payment -- at the same time?

• Internal bank memos showed employees how to cheat the system to get poor mortgages prospects approved that shouldn't have been: Titled How to Get an "Iffy" loan approved at JPM Chase. (Was circulating that memo also a FNM/FRE/CRA requirement?)

• The four biggest problem areas for housing (by price decreases) are: Phoenix, Arizona; Las Vegas, Nevada; Miami, Florida, and San Diego, California. Explain exactly how these affluent, non-minority regions were impacted by the Community Reinvesment Act ?

• Did the GSEs require banks to not check credit scores? Assets? Income?

• What was it about the CRA or GSEs that mandated fund managers load up on an investment product that was hard to value, thinly traded, and poorly understood

• What was it in the Act that forced banks to make "interest only" loans? Were "Neg Am loans" also part of the legislative requirements also?

• Consider this February 2003 speech by Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozlilo at the American Bankers National Real Estate Conference. He advocated zero down payment mortgages -- was that a CRA requirement too, or just a grab for more market share, and bad banking?

The answer to all of the above questions is no, none, and nothing at all.

Honestly, most of these charlatans on the right probably don't know what Fannie (FNMA) and Freddie (FHLMC) stand for. They just want something to yell about. And the GSEs sound as good as anything else.

I'm glad that activists are fighting back against this not-too-subtle racism. It won't be successful, but at least they're putting another narrative out there.

The head of the National Urban League is calling on Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. to refute statements by conservative politicians and pundits that subprime mortgages provided to minorities led to the financial crisis and a $700 billion federal rescue of Wall Street.

In a strongly worded letter to Paulson this week, Marc H. Morial said Paulson has "an obligation to correct the misinformation that is spread concerning the root cause of the current financial crisis."

Morial, a former mayor of New Orleans, said in an interview yesterday that the effort "to pin the subprime crisis on African Americans and Latinos" is a "big lie."

"It's an effort to shift the climate away from deregulation and the lack of oversight," he said. "The numbers are becoming clearer each day that a large number of people who ended up with a subprime loan could have qualified for a prime loan. That's the abuse that's inherent here."

I think that ultimately, reasonable people would agree on that as the cause of the crisis. Those who want to believe something else are being fed an alternate take. It's disgusting.

Lie, Lie, Lie Some More

For her public appearances thus far, Sarah Palin uses prepared remarks, off a TelePrompTer, that are virtually identical to her convention speech. I mean to the letter identical. It's like a traveling summer stock production, where the audience can recite the familiar lines by heart after a while. This is popular, despite the fact that some of those lines are documented lies.

"She said she "championed reform of earmark spending by Congress, and I told the Congress thanks but no thanks on that 'Bridge to Nowhere'", she said, ommiting (sic) mention that she'd campaigned for governor supporting the bridge."

It's a lie, everyone knows it's a lie, and yet she repeats it, word for word. If anything shows that Palin is a typical Republican politician, this is it. The zombie lie that never dies is a staple of Republican campaign strategy. We've seen multiple new ones sprout up these past months: that Palin recited the speech from memory after the TelePrompTer broke (then why's she still using one?), that the Democrats threw away their American flags from their convention, that Obama plans to raise everyone's taxes, that China is drilling off the coast of Cuba, etc.

I agree with Atrios that Republicans actually relish repeating debunked lies. When truth is devalued, those on the wrong side of it react with glee when their leaders "throw it in the face" of those Eastern elites with their facts and such. Their base appreciates lying to the public.

It may be an insult to our intelligence but that doesn't mean it won't succeed. This really is uncharted territory - lie, have the lie exposed, and continue to lie. And I have no faith in the media dissemination that the lie will hurt the Republican ticket in any meaningful way.

Meet Your New Zombie Lie

Next thing we'll be hearing that Sarah Palin fought off a polar bear while delivering her remarks last night:

Sarah Palin delivered a powerful speech last night, but she did not "wing it."

That is what Erick Erickson, citing sources close to McCain, has written on his blog, RedState.

Erickson writes that "the teleprompter continued scrolling during applause breaks. As a result, half way through the speech, the speech had scrolled significantly from where Governor Palin was in the speech."

This claim has been picked up on Drudge and could quickly enter into the insta-mythmaking about a speech that need not be embroidered.

Perhaps there were moments where it scrolled slightly past her exact point in the speech. But I was sitting in the press section next to the stage, within easy eyeshot of the teleprompter. I frequently looked up at the machine, and there was no serious malfunction. A top convention-planner confirms this morning that there were no major problems.

It's mythology now, of course, to be repeated endlessly. Despite there being photographic evidence, on every shot over her shoulder, that the TelePrompTer matched her words.

Lying With Impunity

It's amazing to me how much of conservative thought is based on outright lying. These aren't opinions that you could see both ways, just total lies.

On Fox & Friends, Mike Huckabee falsely asserted, "When Katrina, a Cat-5 hurricane, hit the Gulf Coast, not one drop of oil was spilled off of those rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico." In fact, according to a report prepared for the federal government by an international consulting firm, damages related to Hurricane Katrina resulted in 70 spills from outer continental shelf structures with a total volume of approximately 11,104 barrels of oil and petroleum products.

You could see the Katrina-caused oil spill from space. There's documentary evidence. Yet not only every conservative columnist, but the current governor of the state of Louisiana insists that no oil was spilled there.

Of a similar ilk is this myth that China is drilling off the coast of Cuba, which conservatives have been spouting for three weeks despite it being totally untrue.

This is important to understand. You have one political party whose entire worldview is shaped by lies. You have another political party that is oftentimes too timid to call the lies for what they are. And you have a media completely unwilling to play referee.

If nothing changes, you literally have a country's citizens unable to get the truth.

Down The Memory Hole

Remember when that report came out that a suicide attack in Iraq was carried out by militants who strapped bombs to two mentally ill women? Remember what a "symbol of desperation" that was?

Yeah, um, didn't happen.

The U.S. military said Wednesday that two women used as suicide bombers in attacks earlier this month had undergone psychiatric treatment but there is no indication they had Down syndrome as Iraqi and U.S. officials initially had claimed.

Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a military spokesman, said the women used in the Feb. 1 pet market bombings had been identified as residents from the northeastern outskirts of Baghdad who were in their late 20s or early 30s.

There will be no fallout from this. And the next time the military makes a wild charge, most of the country will believe it, seeing no reason for them to lie. AND, this "terrorist insurgents strap bombs to Down's Syndrome patients" story will pop up from time to time, too. It's now a zombie lie.