Brutally Honest

The plot thickens

We hope.

ABC News has in essence now reported that the Obama administration lied about Benghazi.

It's about time:

When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department.  The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community.  They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened,” Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012.  “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Summaries of White House and State Department emails — some of which were first published by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard — show that the State Department had extensive input into the editing of the talking points.

Who knew what when?

The American people, at least those not distracted by American Idol and Dancing With The Stars, want to know.

George Zimmerman's attorneys press prosecution on ethics

This whole thing has been a charade from the beginning, a tragic farce:

George Zimmerman's attorneys on Monday formally accused prosecutors of being unethical, saying that for seven months, they hid a pair of lies by their most important witness, and that they should be punished for it.

The allegations, spelled out in a new court pleading, mark a new low in the case.

Defense attorneys Mark O'Mara and Don West have complained for months about Assistant State Attorneys Bernie de la Rionda and John Guy, saying they have refused repeated requests to turn over key pieces of evidence. This time, they've asked Circuit Judge Debra S. Nelson to fine and admonish them.

Prosecutors are required to release in a timely fashion information to a suspect if it might help prove his innocence. In this case, according to paperwork filed by O'Mara, de la Rionda and Guy have flouted that rule.

For seven months, they knew that the state's most important witness, a young Miami woman who was on the phone with TrayvonMartin just moments before he was shot, had lied about going to a hospital a few days later, according to the new paperwork.

De la Rionda learned the truth during an August 2 interview with her, O'Mara wrote, but although defense attorneys had asked de la Rionda and Guy's office for months about that fact and for records to support her claim, they did not disclose it until March 4.

They also hid for six months that she had lied when she claimed to be 16, something she told Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Trayvon's family, in a recorded interview March 19, 2012.

She was 18 at the time and is 19 now.

In the new paperwork, defense attorneys also complained that de la Rionda and Guy mislead the judge and them at an Oct. 26 hearing when they claimed they had turned over all reports generated by the FBI and Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Two weeks later, they surrendered 45 more, according to the pleading.

Those things were That was unethical and cost defense attorneys an enormous amount of time, as they tried to track down the truth, O'Mara wrote.

He asked the judge to order prosecutors to pay for all the hours defense attorneys have spent trying to prove what they should have disclosed. O'Mara did not offer that dollar figure but said he'd have it ready for an April 2 hearing.

De la Rionda's and Guy's office did not have an immediate response Monday evening.

Someone needs to kick this circus out of town and George Zimmerman allowed to resume what's left of his life.

Anatomy of a bald faced lie

The latest false smear against Pope Francis, and those who pay attention will note they're coming fast and hard, is this one:

Here is the latest Urban Legend making its way through the internet like wildfire and being attributed to Pope Francis in 2007 when Cristina Kirchner was running for President of Argentina. The quote is:

“Buenos Aires, 4 de junio (Télam) - El arzobispo de Buenos Aires, cardenal Jorge Bergoglio, afirmó que “las mujeres son naturalmente ineptas para ejercer cargos políticos”, refiriéndose a la candidatura presidencial de la Senadora Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. “El orden natural y los hechos nos enseñan que el hombre es el ser político por excelencia; las Escrituras nos demuestran que la mujer siempre es el apoyo del hombre pensador y hacedor, pero nada más que eso”.

The quote above begins with: “Women are naturally inept to exercise political office..the order of nature and human activity teach us that a man is superior in the realm of politics…”

“Télam” is the “AP” or major press organization of Argentina. When people research all of the Télam articles of June 4, 2007, they come up empty for this quote. The reason is because the quote was invented out of thin air and posted in a “Yahoo Answers” by an Argentinian who went by the name “Bumper Crop” and who at the time did not cite a link because the entire phrase was posted to smear Cardinal Bergoglio and make him look like he was attacking Cristina Kirchner.

The devil must be pretty pissed off at the election of Pope Francis.

What does that say about our new Pope?

H/T to Mark Shea.

Atheism explained

Guest posted by tim, The Godless Heathen

Even I have to admit this is pretty good.

Swiped from AmericanDigest. 

"This isn't the first time that observers or artists have massively embellished the alleged evilness of the modern Catholic Church."

An atheist comes to the defense of the Catholic Church:

The publication last week of the Irish government's McAleese Report on the Magdalene laundries has proved kind of awkward for Catholic-bashers. For if McAleese's thorough, 1,000-page study is to be believed, then it would appear that those laundries were not as evil and foul as they had been depicted over the past decade.

Specifically the image of the laundries promoted by the popular, much-lauded film The Magdalene Sisters – which showed them as places where women were stripped, slapped, sexually abused and more – has been called into question by McAleese. This has led even The Irish Times, which never turns down an opportunity to wring its hands over Catholic wickedness, to say: "There is no escaping the fact that the [McAleese] report jars with popular perceptions."

In the Irish mind, and in the minds of everyone else who has seen or read one of the many films, plays and books about the Magdalene laundries, these were horrific institutions brimming with violence and overseen by sadistic, pervy nuns. Yet the McAleese Report found not a single incident of sexual abuse by a nun in a Magdalene laundry. Not one.

Also, the vast majority of its interviewees said they were never physically punished in the laundries. As one woman said, "It has shocked me to read in papers that we were beat and our heads shaved and that we were badly treated by the nuns… I was not touched by any nun and I never saw anyone touched." The small number of cases of corporal punishment reported to McAleese consisted of the kind of thing that happened in many normal schools in the 1960s, 70s and 80s: being caned on the legs or rapped on the knuckles. The authors of the McAleese Report, having like the rest of us imbibed the popular image of the Magdalene laundries as nun-run concentration camps, seem to have been taken aback by "the number of women who spoke positively about the nuns".

And yet, despite the fact that the McAleese Report has utterly exploded the popular view of these laundries, some are wondering out loud if it was nonetheless legitimate and good to have produced so many embellished stories about evil nuns in recent years, as a way of highlighting the broader culture of abuse in the Catholic Church. As The Irish Times ponders: "Are factual inaccuracies in movies justified by role in highlighting issues?" The Times cites campaigners for justice who believe that "the role such [movies and books] played in highlighting the issue justified any artistic embellishment".

A playwright told the paper that even if these portrayals of laundry life were exaggerated, they "served an important function at the time" – that is, to raise awareness about the problem of abuse in Catholic life more broadly.

This sounds dangerously like a Noble Lie defence – the idea that it is okay to make things up, to spread fibs, if one is doing it in the service of some greater good. The idea of the "good lie", the lie which helps open people's eyes to the existence of wickedness, should be anathema to anyone who cares about getting history right and establishing the truth. Yet there seem to be many in Ireland who believe that telling "good lies" about the extent of abuse in Catholic institutions is an okay thing to do since it might prove cathartic for a nation allegedly in denial about its dark past.

This isn't the first time that observers or artists have massively embellished the alleged evilness of the modern Catholic Church. In September 2010, The Independentcasually reported that in America "over 10,000 children have come forward to say they were raped [by Catholic priests]". This wasn't true. For the period 1950 to 2002, 10,667 Americans have made allegations of sexual abuse against priests but the majority do not concern rape – they include other foul things, from verbal abuse through to fondling.

When the Irish government published its Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in 2009, newspaper headlines declared "Thousands were raped in Irish reform schools" or "Thousands raped in Ireland's Christian Brothers schools". But actually, the commission heard allegations of 68 rapes, not thousands. That is a horrific number as it is; why embellish it?

God bless Brendan O'Neill who has more to say at the link.

One wonders what percentage of folks who hate the Church or othewise have problems with her base those thoughts and feelings on lies they've been told about her.

“The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

Bob Woodward has joined the chorus of those of us who have for quite some time called this President an extraordinarily deceitful man:

Misunderstanding, misstatements and all the classic contortions of partisan message management surround the sequester, the term for the $85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday.

What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened?

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.

“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid. A mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism they could devise. Nabors has said, “We didn’t actually think it would be that hard to convince them” — Reid and the Republicans — to adopt the sequester. “It really was the only thing we had. There was not a lot of other options left on the table.”

A majority of Republicans did vote for the Budget Control Act that summer, which included the sequester. Key Republican staffers said they didn’t even initially know what a sequester was — because the concept stemmed from the budget wars of the 1980s, when they were not in government.

At the Feb. 13 Senate Finance Committee hearing on Lew’s nomination to become Treasury secretary, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) asked Lew about the account in my book: “Woodward credits you with originating the plan for sequestration. Was he right or wrong?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Lew responded, “and even in his account, it was a little more complicated than that. We were in a negotiation where the failure would have meant the default of the government of the United States.”

“Did you make the suggestion?” Burr asked.

“Well, what I did was said that with all other options closed, we needed to look for an option where we could agree on how to resolve our differences. And we went back to the 1984 plan that Senator [Phil] Gramm and Senator [Warren] Rudman worked on and said that that would be a basis for having a consequence that would be so unacceptable to everyone that we would be able to get action.”

In other words, yes.

We are less than a week away from invoking that which no one thought we would.  And there will be many paying the price for the inability of this President and this Congress to do that for which they were elected.

Only in today's America will the people suffer when the political elites fail to do their jobs.

Today is “Call Planned Parenthood to schedule your imaginary mammogram” day

Many of us know Obama lies through his teeth, particularly as it relates to the "War on Women" meme he is constantly pitching to the gullible and the ignorant.

Now there's a way to learn first hand about Obama's lies:

Our friends at And Then There Were None came up with a creative and hilarious idea to help expose the truth even more — and launched the official “Call Planned Parenthood to schedule your imaginary mammogram” day!

Tomorrow Today is “Call Planned Parenthood to schedule your imaginary mammogram” day and this is your opportunity to call Planned Parenthood and their comrades out, on the false claim that Planned Parenthood provides mammograms.

Planned Parenthood, the President, and countless celebrities have spouted this fallacious claim and they refuse to admit that they are wrong. So — we’re going to expose the truth (again) and we need your help!

What to do:

TOMORROW TODAY Thursday October 18, 2012

Call 1-800-230-PLAN (7526) to get your local Planned Parenthood center.

Then — Tell Planned Parenthood you would like to schedule a mammogram. Your conversation will probably go something like this:

Planned Parenthood: Thank you for calling Planned Parenthood, how may I help you?

You: Hi. I’d like to schedule an appointment to come into your clinic for a mammogram.

Planned Parenthood: We do breast exams, but would need to refer you to another clinic for a mammogram.

You: Another Planned Parenthood clinic?

Planned Parenthood: Umm, no. We actually don’t do mammograms at Planned Parenthood.

You: Wait, what? President Obama said in the debate on Tuesday night that Planned Parenthood does mammograms.

Planned Parenthood: Umm, yeah… I don’t know why he said that. We don’t do mammograms here at Planned Parenthood. But – we’re happy to refer you somewhere else for one.

Wow. Bombshell! You just called Planned Parenthood and helped expose the truth — that Planned Parenthood does not provide mammograms. And you brought it to the attention of at least one Planned Parenthood worker. You are a rockstar and just helped expose the truth!

Will you help set the record straight and expose Planned Parenthood’s gigantic and fraudulent lie?

And help prove that Obama is an even bigger liar?

I double dog dare ya to do so and report your findings in the comments.

Obama: "We got back every dime" CBO: "You're a liar Mr. President"

Ok... the first quote is accurate, the second is my taking artistic license with what the CBO actually said... sue me:

President Barack Obama said on Thursday that “we got back every dime we used to rescue the financial system."

According to the Congressional Budget Office, however, the government will lose about $24 billion on the bailout.

“We got back every dime we used to rescue the financial system, but we also passed a historic law to end taxpayer-funded Wall Street bailouts for good,” Obama said in Miami Thursday.

The Congressional Budget Office--based on figures from Obama’s own Office of Management and Budget---gives a different assessment.

“The cost to the federal government of the TARP’s transactions (also referred to as the subsidy cost), including grants for mortgage programs that have not yet been made, will amount to $24 billion,” said the CBO report, which was released on the same day Obama spoke.

Will these sorts or reports make a difference to the electorate?

Who knows.

But make no mistake about it.

Mrs. Mo (as in momentum) is squarely, as of this writing, in the camp of Mitt Romney.

It's hope and change to believe in.

How big a liar is Joe Biden?

Pretty damned huge.  In the following video he claims that Planned Parenthood, under law, can't perform abortions:

Yet from Planned Parenthood's own website:

Abortions are available at many Planned Parenthood health centers, clinics, and the offices of private health care providers. Use our health center locator to find the nearest Planned Parenthood health center that offers abortion services. If there is not a health center nearby that provides the abortion services you need, call your nearest center for a list of referrals.

H/T to Lex Communis who reminds us:

Just remember, this emotionally unstable buffoon is only a heartbeat away from the nuclear missile launch codes.

"In an unreal world, you follow the unreal leader"

I saw this over on Facebook, read through it quickly and found myself slowly reading it again, and again.

What follows, by Daniel Greenfeld over at Sultan Knish, is an indication of the evil that is being foisted upon us by those purposed in selling a lie as truth and convincing the listening to buy that truth.

Sadly, it's being bought into by too many, and this because too many have lost sight of what truth really is:

Daniel Greenfeld, in part:

The fake is being overlaid on the real, like men fighting on top of a board with a movie of a train passing by in the background to give the impression that they are fighting on top of it. Such cheap trickery defines our media environment where reporters barge into events and badger the participants into playing along with their movie. Or they just play the clip of actual events and frame them so that everyone hears their version of what is going on.

There's Godzilla and we know he's real because we can see Tokyo in the background. There's the latest media narrative and we know it's real, because we can see Tampa in the background as some blow-dried buffoon does breathing exercises before commencing to tell us that the Republican Party, which supports things that would have made Ike and Ron have coronaries, has gone so far to the right that it might as well be a Godzilla of reactionary running dog capitalism. 

This is our shoddy virtual reality with a CNN or MSNBC logo planted on top. There is you still sitting on your same old couch, watching Chris Matthews yelling himself hoarse about racism, because racism is our virtual reality. It is the world that we are supposed to live in and Chris' job, for which he receives some 5 million a year, is to convince us that we are living in it. 

"Racism," Chris yells at the screen, like the idiot shaman of some stone age tribe, and those dull-witted enough to believe him nod knowingly, because it makes them feel as if they know something. And in a world where nothing is real, knowing something makes them feel a little less confused. They don't understand why the prices are suddenly so high and the bank won't give them a loan-- but they can understand that Republicans are bad people and somehow responsible for it.

Some 70 percent of Barack Obama's Twitter followers may be fake, but why quibble at such numbers. The people who decided to make Obama popular did so through constant repetition that translated into the peer pressure of the trend. Obama became a trending topic and everyone followed along because in an unreal world, you follow the unreal leader.

Obama is fake, his popularity is fake, but it's also real, because fake is now the ultimate reality. The purveyors of fakeness have demonstrated their ability to transform the unreal into the real through  manufactured consensus. By insisting that something unpopular was popular often enough, they made it popular. And by insisting that something popular is really unpopular, they did the opposite.

The Solomon Asch study showed that people will change their correct answers to conform with the wrong answers that are being given by others. The false consensus has operated on that same paradigm, convincing people of two lies. The first lie is that the wrong answer is the right answer. And the second lie that everyone else has already agreed that the wrong answer is correct.  

Doing all that is impossible unless people lose touch with the real. The wraparound nature of the media has made it so that the unreal never goes away. The unreal is so pervasive because it has so many outlets and we are all wired into one or more of them. If the unreal doesn't get into your head one way, it will do it another way. The viral virus adapts because its designers are intelligent. And most of all they are persistent. They aren't just malicious or in it for the money, though both those things are also true, they believe. They are missionaries and their goal is to convert you into fodder for their malicious money machine.

If you read nothing else today, read the rest of Greenfeld's piece, then pass it on.

There is much at stake, so much at stake.

Really.

[Image source]