Obama Cherry Picking on Bain Capital
Factcheck provides a very detailed explication of what Paul Harvey used to call 'the rest of the story' on the Obama ads focusing on Bain Capital.  Worth a close read.

Turn Off Fox News: Our Patriotic Duty
While the power of the mass media in the hands of private sector elites should not be taken lightly, power imbalances do not relieve us of our responsibility to at least try to stay informed. 

And in the past several years numerous studies have documented one consistent finding that should help us do just that:  if you choose to watch Fox News you are choosing to be far more misinformed than those who choose to get their news from any other source…and even more misinformed than those who have no daily source of news at all.

Consider the list below of inaccurate statements that Fox News viewers are far more likely to believe to be true and it is clear that it is no accident that our political discourse has become so confusing…these are inaccurate statements that some elites are spending billions in the hope that we will repeat these as if they were true…and as if these were our own ideas. 

This list is from a Fall 2010 study at the University of Maryland, which found that Fox News viewers were "significantly more likely" to believe the following inaccurate statements to be true:

• Most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely)
• Most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)
• The economy is getting worse (26 points)
• Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)
• The stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)
• Their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)
• The auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)
• When TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)
• It is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)

Consider that all these inaccuracies skew in one partisan direction, making this evidence of systematic, not just random, efforts to misinform…and evidence that the efforts are working (given the magnitude of the differential found and shown in parentheses above)…millions of us repeat these every day, with passion, as if these were our own ideas.

Consider the Lukovich cartoon above.  Media sources other than Fox cover this as seen here (in what some criticize as depending on a clearly false equivalency in order to preserve their professional norm of objectivity).  Fox News covers this without any effort to reveal the ways that elites on both sides strategize to advance their interests. 

Instead, Fox consistently frames news stories as if one side is right and the other side is wrong…such that large numbers of Americans still think the president is an alien, a Muslim, and a socialist…despite all evidence to the contrary. 

The sad part is, as Lukovich shows here, neither approach presents the story in a way that makes it easier to understand, though the Fox approach makes is many times more confusing since Fox does not even start by getting the basic facts right.

Regardless of your position on policy or the president, make your case without relying on systematic misinformation from Fox News…that would seem to be a serious and do-able step toward staying informed and supporting the sustainability of American democracy.  We should all reject Fox News as a sign of our patriotism.

Below are some excellent sources of news to consider in place of Fox.  While Fox is the worst (because they do not even try to be objective) any single source has its own framing devices, so the easiest step two is to have more than one source of daily news.  That puts us on a path to learn to see the spin and framing and be better prepared to make our own judgments.  

So, for instance, combine the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.  Or, Huffington Post and National Review.  Or Rachel Maddow and Brent Baier.  Or all of the above and those below.  The internet makes this pretty easy to accomplish.

Here are a few good sources that I recommend you bookmark on your favorites list...in addition to reading your local daily newspaper…but the specific list is less important than (1) stop consuming Fox News because Fox does not even try to inform and (2) get your daily news from more than one source—and multiple sources that have competing perspectives is even better—so you can learn to see the spin and think for yourself.

• National Public Radio
• The News Hour on PBS
• Factcheck
• Real Clear Politics
• The Daily Show

While a comedy show, if you are trying to learn to see the spin and challenge the messages that the powerful want us to repeat for them as if they were our own ideas, your list should include the Daily Show or the Colbert Report…but like any single source, if you only listen to these you will simply be spouting their ideas as if they were yours.

When Tough on Crime is Actually Soft on Crime
For centuries we have wondered how many of those behind bars might actually be innocent.  Before DNA technology that question was often impossible to answer, other than to say that a conviction by a jury of one’s peers is the best evidence we can muster.  Today, we can say more.  The InnocenceProject works to help those falsely imprisoned with DNA testing and has exonerated 291 so far.  The data collected by the Innocence Project suggests that perhaps as many as 25% of those behind bars are innocent.  With a prison population larger than any other in the history of man, that is a large number of innocent American citizens serving time on convictions for crimes they did not commit. 

Now the Innocence Project is being joined by a second effort, called the National Registry of Exonerations, which is creating a searchable database with the stories about those who have been wrongfully convicted and exonerated.  Currently that site has details on 873 cases (more than one hundred of these were on death row). This data points out one concrete way that our criminal justice system is soft on crime:  when we rush to convict the wrong person we not only ruin their life…we are leaving that actual perpetrators undisturbed and even more hidden within our communities to strike again. 

Both the Innocence Project and the National Registry provide powerful data pointing to faulty eye witness testimony and official misconduct (errors and bias in the work done by police officers, prosecutors, and state forensic labs) as the leading causes of false convictions.  Countless studies have shown that eye witness testimony is as unreliable as it is persuasive to jurors listening to it.  Official misconduct is even more deeply disturbing, yet this form of government over-reach is rarely on the agenda of those most loudly calling for less government intrusion into our lives. 

Check out the Innocence Project and National Registry pages.  Bookmark them and return periodically to familiarize yourself with important data that should concern any patriotic American.

Without Leviticus, What is Left?
Andrew Holleran’s letter to the editor in today’s Akron Beacon Journal provides an important insight.  He helps us see very clearly the inconsistency and hypocrisy in an all-too-common selective, contradictory, and self-serving reading of the bible. 

He pulls back the curtain on an odd type of Christian...one who abhors what she does not like (and chooses not to understand) based on Leviticus, but overlooks the Leviticus abhorrence of other things (with illustrations listed in Holleran’s letter for those who have not read Leviticus), because to abhor these would be inconvenient for her, or might reveal her to be less-than-thoughtful and would certainly expose her as not interested in loving neighbors as herself. 

While the whole letter is worth reading, here is how Holleran concludes his letter:

“The point is that if you’re going to stand behind a book from the Bronze Age and claim it as law, you don’t get to pick and choose which rules you follow and which ones you don’t.

The moment you start crossing off the more barbaric or merely inconvenient of your God’s rules as charmingly antiquated, your Bible becomes man-made. All the rules I’ve quoted are from the same book as the rules against homosexuality.

If you want to inflict your beliefs on society while avoiding the harsh glare of hypocrisy, then you should lead by example and follow every rule from your own book. But since I don’t think people are going to start killing their progeny for back talk or stoning brides on their wedding night because they didn’t save themselves for marriage, maybe it’s time to re-examine Leviticus 18:22 as well.

Perhaps then we can tackle this same-sex marriage question not as the biblical one, but as the prejudicial bigotry the rest of the world knows it to be.

If we remove from the equation the putatively authoritative nature of an abhorrence listed in Leviticus…what justification remains for hating homosexuals? None. 

Do Not Let Big Money Mislead You...Use Factchecking Resources at Your Fingertips
A few of our most affluent Individuals and corporations are investing billions in an effort to secure a president they believe more likely to cater to their needs…and their interests and needs are not the same as ours, so catering to them is (often) at odds with helping average Americans by ensuring a strong economy that is producing living wage jobs, ensuring justice and security.

One of those affluent Americans, Karl Rove, is an expert at misleading and distracting and his new series of TV ads are, again, filled with inaccurate statements.  His hope is that if he just keeps repeating these false claims, because he has $25 million to silence the rest of us, that we will eventually just accept his false claims as common sense. 

The Obama campaign put out a short response to these ads on youtube today.  But just like big money ads, we cannot just take a campaign's word for it...and we do not have to...

www.Factcheck.org has evaluated the Rove commercial and found the claims to range from outright false to misleading exaggerations, other than the claim that Obama had not lived up to his promise to cut the deficit in half (though he has made $1 trillion is spending cuts and we have witnessed an uncooperative Congress refuse to combine cuts with new revenues).

www.Factcheck.org finds the ad's claim that Obama has not cut taxes on middle class to be FALSE; the ad's claim that Obama had not helped homeowners to stay in their homes as FALSE; the claim that you will not be able to keep your own health care plan to be FALSE.  www.Politifact.com also finds the various claims in the ad to be ‘mostly false.'

Do not just sit back and let big money redefine common sense...use www.factcheck.org and other fact check resources every day...and then share this information with facebook or twitter friends.  Factchecking sites make it easier to be informed, and provide a do-able first step toward refusing to let big money mislead us.

Thinking More Clearly About Our Health Care Options

C. William Keck, a physician and the former director of the Akron Health Department, provides a thoughtful analysis of our distorted debates about health care and how we might better understand our options. 

Our political discourse has been so poisoned by partisan bickering that it is increasingly difficult for many to pay attention to independent voices who seek to debate the major issues of our time based on facts and pragmatism rather than political ideology. There is no better example than the noise generated by those who oppose the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The May 1 letter by Loretta Hurite (“On the way to tyranny”) is a good example of the many misunderstandings that pervade the ranting back and forth about this issue. Of course, no health system is perfect. No matter how good a health system is, people will complain about it, and it is easy to cherry pick negative comments if your wish is to disparage.

A dispassionate look by the World Health Organization at the health systems of its 191 member nations ranked the United States 37th in overall effectiveness, far from the best system in the world (France was first; Cuba, 39th).

We have few peers in high-tech interventions, but we are plagued with the highest costs per person in the world, limited to no access to health services for many and huge disparities in health status among our citizens.

Actually, it is a misnomer to call medical services in the U.S. a “system.” We actually have a hodgepodge of approaches.

Most Americans believe our military and our veterans deserve the best medical care. The Veterans Administration, a completely socialized system in which the government employs the providers and owns the facilities just like in Great Britain and Cuba, is well-regarded, and most veterans are pleased with the care they receive.

To take care of the elderly, poor and other special groups, Medicare and Medicaid were established. These are government insurance programs that pay for care delivered by private providers, just as is the case in Canada. This is not a socialized system, and it is very efficient.

Overhead costs are about 4 percent, with private insurance plans coming in at three to five times that amount. The one thing most Americans look forward to about their 65th birthdays is that they will then have health insurance. Canadians have that assurance from birth.

The majority of Americans with health insurance are covered by private insurance policies, usually financed jointly by employers and employees. This is the model followed by countries such as Germany and Japan, although, unlike in this country, insurance markets are very tightly regulated there to keep costs down and services uniform.

That still leaves about 16 percent of our population (about 50 million people) with no coverage at all, just like the majority of residents of Burundi or rural India.

Far from being socialized medicine, the Affordable Care Act expands Medicare and Medicaid to increase the numbers of Americans with government-based insurance and delivers an additional 20 million people into the private insurance market.

It also begins to shift provider incentives by emphasizing health promotion and disease prevention and encouraging collaboration across providers to improve the quality and effectiveness of both primary and specialty care.

It is a significant first step to bring us closer to the universal access to effective health care that every other industrialized nation has in place, and to improve the level of health we enjoy.

Daily Show Comes Through Again

Jon Stewart does it again…providing more insightful analysis of current events than anyone else in the media, with a bonus...he also makes us laugh.  Stewart provides an overwhelming amount of evidence to show that the claim that Obama is politicizing his success in the War on Terror, is itself politicizing and  divisive and (as the other side would say if it were reversed) unpatriotic…and it only works if we have no memory. 

This episode puts current claims in historical context...admittedly a short term context, just reaching back to the same individuals making opposite claims about the same tactic when mobilized by then President Bush.   Stewart is jogging our memory with video that exposes Ed Gillespie (Romney’s campaign manager), Governor Pataki, and others as trying to mislead and distract us.  Stewart focuses on the tactics…which helps us understand politics.  Pay attention...a tactic exposed is ineffective, but we have to work to see the tactic.