The Jack Kelly "US Slavery Was Bad, But..." Monument

Yet another great read on this here: http://verysmartbrothas.com/jack-kelly-of-the-pittsburgh-post-gazette-is-a-fucking-disgrace-and-probably-needs-to-get-fired/

Jack Kelly Sunday

With this column, the Post-Gazette's Jack Kelly tries (and fails yet again), to retro-define waterboarding as something completely, conclusively, "you-know-in your-heart-I'm-right" not torture.

It's a strange little column coming as it does only two weeks since his last failed attempt to retro-define the torture.

He starts with some horror stories hoping to get his readers to agree with him about the necessity of the Bush-era war crimes:

Anti-Muslim sentiment flared as chilling images from Australian media showed people, believed to be hostages, with their hands pressed against the glass of the Lindt Chocolate Cafe in Sydney’s central business district,” CNN reported Dec. 15. “They were holding up a black flag with Arabic writing on it reading, ‘There is no God but God and Mohammad is the prophet of God.’ ”

During a 16-hour siege, Man Haron Monis, 50, an Iranian who’d been granted political asylum in Australia in 1996, murdered two of the 17 hostages he took.

And so on.

But then he stumbles into something requiring some much needed fact-checking:

During the siege in Sydney, Rachael Jacobs, a lecturer in education at Australia Catholic University in Brisbane, described an encounter with a young Muslim woman sitting next to her on a commuter train. The woman had tears in her eyes as she removed her head scarf, evidently out of fear it might make her a target, Ms. Jacobs wrote.

“I ran after her at the train station,” Ms. Jacobs wrote on her Facebook page. “I said, ‘Put it back on, I’ll walk with you.’ She started to cry and hugged me for about a minute, then walked off alone.”

Though no one had accosted the woman, Ms. Jacobs drew praise from liberals around the world for her courageous stand against anti-Islamic bigotry.

Which never happened. She never spoke with the woman, who might not have been a Muslim, Ms. Jacobs admitted in an article she wrote for the Brisbane Times.

Even though she’d made up virtually all of her story, it was important because it launched “a pre-emptive strike against racism and bigotry,” Ms. Jacobs said.

Really, Jack? She admitted in the Brisbane Times the event never happened?  That she never spoke to the woman?

Did you think I wasn't going to check?

Here's what Rachel Jacobs wrote in the Brisbane Times:

Confession time. In my Facebook status, I editorialised. She wasn't sitting next to me. She was a bit away, towards the other end of the carriage. Like most people she had been looking at her phone, then slowly started to unpin her scarf.

Tears sprang to my eyes and I was struck by feelings of anger, sadness and bitterness. It was in this mindset that I punched the first status update into my phone, hoping my friends would take a moment to think about the victims of the siege who were not in the cafe.

Then she admitted wrote:

By sheer fluke, we got off at the same station, and some part of me decided saying something would be a good thing. Rather than quiz her about her choice of clothing, I thought if I simply offered to walk her to her destination, it might help.

It's hard to describe the moment when humans, and complete strangers, have a conversation with no words. I wanted to tell her I was sorry for so many things – for overstepping the mark, for making assumptions about a complete stranger and for belonging to a culture where racism was part of her everyday experience.

But none of those words came out, and our near silent encounter was over in a moment. [Emphases added.]

If it's "near silent" then it wasn't silent.  Words were spoken, Jack.

But Jack, you said Rachel Jacobs admitted in the Brisbane Times to never talking to the woman.  You said Jacobs admitted that the event never happened.  You even implied that she rationalized making up "virtually the entire story" because it launched a (and you quoted her here) "“a pre-emptive strike against racism and bigotry."

But did she?  Here's the actual paragraph she wrote with that phrase:

[M]y role in this movement was minuscule and unworthy of the attention received. The #illridewithyou hashtag, started by Twitter user @sirtessa and embraced by thousands, is the real story of inspiration. The movement has inspired thousands to publicly and loudly stand up for a decent and humane world. It's a pre-emptive strike against racism and bigotry. We know what fear can do to a society, and rather than fall victim, thousands have pledged to be part of the force that fights for tolerance and compassion. [Emphasis added.]

No rationalization, no confession to making up virtually the entire story.  Nothing like that.

You got it wrong, Jack.  AND OBVIOUSLY NO ONE AT THE P-G FACT-CHECKED YOU ON IT.

Again.

But let's move on to the torture.  Jack writes:

Grandstanding journalists have volunteered to be waterboarded to prove it is “torture,” which indicates it isn't.

I am not really sure what this means.  How does that "prove" (or even indicate) that waterboarding isn't torture?

Especially since, with a little googling we find this from the Guardian:

Christopher Hitchens got waterboarded (if that is the verb) for Vanity Fair last year, to see first-hand whether or not it was torture. He concluded that if waterboarding did not constitute torture, there is no such thing as torture. The world didn't erupt with one voice of adulation at his piece, but it was generally accepted that he didn't do it to be macho. His was a serious exploration of the constitutional and moral implications of forcing a wet rag into a prisoner's mouth to persuade him that he is drowning. And that is at the centre of self-imposed waterboarding, for journalistic or other research purposes - it has to be serious, otherwise it is obscene.

There has been a whole spate of voluntary waterboardings lately whose sincerity, acuity and purpose are more debatable. The journalist Kaj Larsen paid some interrogators $800 to torture him in this manner: his conclusions were the same as Hitchens' - it was uniquely unpleasant, and he would have told his torturers anything to get them to stop. [Emphasis added.]

So two of the "grandstanding journalists" who volunteered to be waterboarding say it is torture.

Jack?  Can you explain how it indicates that waterboarding isn't torture?

There is one "grandstanding journalist" (if that's indeed the correct term) who did volunteer for  waterboarding and who's held consistently that it isn't torture - Sean Hannity.

The only problem is that he's never followed through with being waterboarded:

Fox News host Sean Hannity is so adamant that waterboarding is not torture that he once offered to be waterboarded at a charity event and donate the proceeds to soldiers’ families. Four years later, a yet-to-be-waterboarded Hannity did not take kindly to being called out about it on his own radio show.

On April 22, 2009, Charles Grodin appeared on Hannity’s Fox News show and asked Hannity, if he doesn’t believe waterboarding is torture, would he agree to be waterboarded. “Sure,” Hannity said. “I’ll do it for charity. I’ll let you do it. I’ll do it for the troops’ families.” But four years later, Hannity has yet to follow through on his offer.

Which indicates that it is torture - or else he'd man up and get it out of the way, right?

But again, Jack, let's go to the treaty signed by your old boss, Ronald Reagan:

For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

And so no amount of the "But they behead people!" distraction or the "But it worked!" distraction or the "But person-X says it isn't torture!" distraction or any other distraction is going to change the fact that holding a person down and pouring water over his or her face in order to trigger a drowning response in that person's body isn't torture.

It is and it's a crime and for the sake of our continued insistence that we are a nation of laws, we have to prosecute the torture.

If only to make sure it never happens again.

Prosecute the torture.

Jack Kelly Sunday

(Looks like that sonovabich Ed Heath got here before me.  Fine.  I'll just acknowledge that and then go all passive-aggressive and continue like he didn't write what he wrote before I wrote this blog post.  See?  It's a win-win for everybody!!)

In today's Post-Gazette, columnist Jack Kelly writes about "Vote Fraud" and of course, fails to do enough homework to make the column align with reality.  The P-G, again of course, fails to adequately fact-check him.  The result is a another embarrassing Jack Kelly column on the pages of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

We've seen this happen too many times.  Too too many times.

But let's begin at the beginning:

If you Google “vote fraud,” you’ll find that most of the stories are about Democrats committing it, or denying it exists.

Fourteen percent of non-citizens in the United States in 2008 were registered to vote and about 6 percent voted indicates data collected by Harvard’s Cooperative Congressional Election Study, according to a study by Jesse Richman and David Earnest, professors at Old Dominion University.

This is where Ed started.

Did you know there are issues with the Richman/Earnest study?  Our story begins with this piece at the Washington Post.  It's from before the election (October 24) and it begins with this:

Could control of the Senate in 2014 be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens? Some argue that incidents of voting by non-citizens are so rare as to be inconsequential, with efforts to block fraud a screen for an agenda to prevent poor and minority voters from exercising the franchise, while others define such incidents as a threat to democracy itself. Both sides depend more heavily on anecdotes than data.

In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races.

Yea, we saw how all those illegals tipped the balance of power in the Senate to the party that just doesn't like them very much.  But what about that study?

Well on those same Washington Post webpages just three days later, there was this:

A recent Monkey Cage piece by political scientists Jesse Richman and David Earnest, which suggested that non-citizen voting could decide the 2014 Election, received considerable media attention over the weekend. In particular, columns such as Breitbart.com’s “Study: Voting by Non-Citizens Tips Balance for Democrats” and the National Review’s “Jaw-Dropping Study Claims Large Numbers of Non-Citizens Vote in U.S” cited results from the authors’ forthcoming Electoral Studies article to confirm conservatives’ worst fears about voter fraud in the United States.

A number of academics and commentators have already expressed skepticism about the paper’s assumptions and conclusions, though. In a series of tweets, New York Times columnist Nate Cohn focused his criticism on Richman et al’s use of Cooperative Congressional Election Study data to make inferences about the non-citizen voting population. That critique has some merit, too. The 2008 and 2010 CCES surveyed large opt-in Internet samples constructed by the polling firm YouGov to be nationally representative of the adult citizen population. Consequently, the assumption that non-citizens, who volunteered to take online surveys administered in English about American politics, would somehow be representative of the entire non-citizen population seems tenuous at best.

That was October 27.  Didn't Jack know about any of this stuff?  For example this info (from the "skepticism" link in the second paragraph) from the Early Voting Information Center:

I discussed the Electoral Studies article that the Monkey Cage posting is based on at Early Voting.net, and expressed concerns then that the article made a number of very heroic assumptions to be able to claim that non-citizens were voting in significant numbers, and even more heroic assumptions to assume that these votes “created the filibuster proof majority in 2008,” as the authors claim.

Then there's this fact-checking piece at the Reno Gazette-Journal which rates it a 4 out of 10:

This is a great example of how science works. Someone does a study and it sparks conversation and likely more research. Even if the Richman-Earnest study fails to withstand academic scrutiny, that doesn't mean they're bad people or this study was bad. In fact, it very well could be an extremely valuable step in leading to future research that better informs policies on voter ID laws, voter fraud and the inclusion of noncitizens in the voting process (some countries allow legal nonresidents to vote).

Regardless, at this point in time, it's a lone study on a controversial subject with data that even the authors admit is not ideal. It's fodder for discussion but not for fears of election fraud.

So the authors of the study Jack's relying on admit the data's "not ideal"??

Yeppers.  In fact they agree with the 4 out of 10 score:

Science is a process of finding, validation, replication and rebuttal. We are at the very beginning of the process. Colleagues have raised reasonable questions about the data we used--problems that we acknowledge in both the study and the Monkey Cage. It will take some time and additional research to increase confidence in our findings."

This was October 30 - two and a half weeks ago.

And yet Jack Kelly's using it as "settled science" in order to prove that there's voter fraud.

Didn't he know that there were questions about the study he was using?  If he did, then how does he explain using it anyway?  And if he didn't then why the heck not??

And as always: Doesn't anyone fact-check Jack Kelly at the P-G?

If they are, they're doing a lousy job.  If they're not, then WHY THE HECK NOT?

Jack Kelly Sunday

Here's a few things we know already - a few things that this column in today's Post-Gazette utterly fail to convince us otherwise - about Jack Kelly:

• He doesn't understand the science
• No one at the P-G fact-checks him

Put those two things together and you've got yet another embarrassment for what the Trib calls "The Block Bugler."

Let's begin:

Climate change is as grave a threat as the Ebola virus or the terrorists of the Islamic State, Secretary of State John Kerry said in anticipation of the United Nations conference in New York last week.

All but a “tiny minority” of “extreme ideologues” in the “Flat Earth Society” think the planet is warming dangerously, he said in speeches in Indonesia and Hawaii.

This is going to be a teensy bit of a challenge for us as the speeches in Indonesia and Hawaii aren't actually the same speeches. Nor are they even very close chronologically.  The speech in Indonesia was in February, 2014 and the speech in Hawaii was 6 months later in August.  So how they both can be made in anticipation of the UN conference this week is beyond me.

In any event, Jack quickly pulls out his "expert" and we've met him before:

If Mr. Kerry were to attend a meeting of the Flat Earth Society, “his presence might lower the level of discourse,” said Myron Ebell, gobsmacked by two in particular of the many things the secretary of state said that aren’t true.

And a paragraph or two later, Jack characterizes Mr Ebell this way:

...an environmental expert for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Ok, then let's go see what sort of "expert" this Mr Ebell is.  His page at CEI says:

Ebell holds a B.A. from Colorado College and an M.S. from the London School of Economics. He also did graduate work at the University of California at San Diego and at Peterhouse, Cambridge University.

So no PhD in science. But this doesn't tell us much about what degrees he does have. For that we can turn to Vanity Fair:

Though he likes to bash scientists for working outside their degreed fields, Ebell, it turns out, isn't a scientist at all. He majored in philosophy at the University of California in San Diego, then studied political theory at the London School of Economics and history at Cambridge.

And then a few paragraphs down, Ebell is quoted as saying:

"I'm not claiming to be a climate authority—the way Jim Hansen is, or Robert Corell," says Ebell. "Every interview I do, when I'm asked about scientific issues, I say I'm not a climate scientist." [Emphases added.]

Which is completely different from Hansen, and Corell who actually do have Phd degrees and actually are authorities on climate science.  But hey, one man's ignorance is just as real to him as another man's science - if that first man's a science illiterate.

And yet, Jack refers to Ebell as "an environmental expert" even when Ebell himself says he's not a climate scientist.

Doesn't anyone at the P-G look into these things?

But let's take a look at some of the things Jack thinks of as "facts" and see whether they correspond with reality (ie "science").  Jack writes:

There’s been no warming for 18 years, according to weather satellite measurements. It’s about 0.4 degrees Celsius cooler in the United States now than in 2005, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This year has been the chilliest since the federal government began keeping records in 1871.

Sentence 1 is simply untrue.  But this is, I think, what Jack is referencing:

See that brownish line in the upper right?  That's about the past 18 years.  See the rest of the line?  That's the trend since 1880 or so,  So even if the statement "There’s been no warming for 18 years" is true, it still doesn't deny the upward trend of the past century or so.

Climate.gov has some more info on this supposed "no warming for 18 years" thing:

Earth has warmed by 1.5°F (0.85°C) since 1880 and most of that warming has occurred since 1976.[1] Each of the last three decades has been warmer than the one prior—the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s and the 2000s were the warmest decade on record.[1, 2] Such a dramatic rise in temperature in three consecutive decades is a clear indicator that the globe is warming.

However, the most definitive warming has been happening in the ocean, which has absorbed more than 80% of the additional energy in the climate system.[2,3] Measurements show that while the rate of air temperature warming slowed in the early part of the 21st century, the ocean continued to warm at an unusually rapid rate. [Links and italics in original]

So how much are we talking here?  How much of the heat is stored in the ocean as opposed to being stored on land where it would show up as "surface" temperatures?  This much:

His next two statements confuse climate with weather (if, indeed, his numbers are accurate).  If it is the case that .4 degrees Celsius cooler now in that small portion of the Earths total surface called "The United States" than it was 9 years ago, so what?  It says nothing about the global temperatures over a span of more than a century.  Jack's insulting our intelligence if he thinks that that's even an adequate fact in this context.

Doesn't anyone even both to let Jack Kelly know how wrong he is?  If he wants to present his case (rather than tossing off unsubstantiated statements) let him do that.  Let him present us with the peer-reviewed articles.  Let him present us with the authors of those peer-reviewed articles (rather than non-scientists from CEI).  In the meantime, let's not think he's actually presenting science.  Let's not let him get away with thinking that he is.

But he's not done with his dishonesty.  Let's take a look at some of the things he said Secretary of State John Kerry said.  For example:

Warming “will make it much more difficult for farmers to be able to grow the regular things we grow,” Mr. Kerry said.

This came from the speech in Indonesia.  But take a look the rest of Kerry's sentence:

Scientists predict that, in some places, heat waves and water shortages will make it much more difficult for farmers to be able to grow the regular things we grow, like wheat or corn or rice. [Emphasis added.]

Note that Jack follows Kerry's phrase with this:

Carbon dioxide is to plants what oxygen is to us. Warmer temperatures at higher latitudes extend growing seasons. More CO2 and more warmth should mean more food production. The planet’s gotten greener since 1980, satellite measurements indicate.

So while John Kerry was talking about how climate change-caused heat waves and water shortages will make it more difficult for farmers in some places, Jack leaves that out to talk about CO2 and "warmer temperatures."  By leaving out what Kerry actually said and then responding to the incomplete utterance, Jack's committing a logical fallacy known as the "straw man argument."

Doesn't anyone at the P-G even bother with this stuff anymore?  If not, why the heck not, and if so, why the heck are they letting him get away with it?

Jack Kelly Sunday

In this week's Post-Gazette, there's another column by Jack Kelly that clearly shows, yet again, that no one over there on the Boulevard of the Allies adequately fact-checks Jack Kelly.

But then again, we've known this for years.

It's made all the more delicious when the smaller headline below the main headline (I'd love to thus call it a "neckline" but I've been told it's called a subhead) reads:

They’re lying about GOP foreign policy

Yea but Jack's got some credulity issues of his own in this column.  For example, his first paragraph:

Rand Paul, who will likely run for president as a stay-at-home Republican, went to Guatemala recently and performed eye surgeries as a means of displaying his foreign-policy bona fides,” wrote New Yorker editor and Barack Obama hagiographer David Remnick. “Was Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s ophthalmologist-in-chief, impressed?”

Now about that term, "hagiographer" - what does Jack mean by saying that David Remnick is an "Obama hagiographer"?  Merriam Webster defines hagiography as:

a book about someone's life that makes it seem better than it really is or was : a biography that praises someone too much

If that's the case, then I suppose Jack hasn't actually read the Remnick piece he so dutifully quotes. It begins with this:

Even the most forgiving judge of Barack Obama, one willing to overlook his preference for chipping onto the sunlit greens of Martha’s Vineyard rather than brooding in the fluorescent glare of the Situation Room, must admit that the President has sometimes been a thick-tongued steward of his own foreign policy.

Yea, that's hagiography, alright.

But once you dig deeper into Jack's main complaint in this section of his column, you'll see the extent of his awkward relationship with the truth.  Jack's complaint:

It’s kosher to criticize Sen. Paul’s foreign policy views, to suspect expediency motivated the recent shift in them and to consider his inexperience in foreign affairs a handicap. (I have, I do and I do.) But to attack him for his charitable work is vile.

I'm not exactly sure that Remnick is attacking Paul simply for his charitable work.  Looks more like he's pointing out Paul's use of the charitable eye-surgeries as some sort of political photo-op (in this case, to bolster some sort of foreign policy credibility).  And that is something to at the very least be cynical about.

But if the trip wasn't about politics then why did Senator Paul travel to Guatemala with a political entourage?  From the Washington Post:

The doctor and his patients greeted each other beneath the gaze of three television cameras, three photographers, six reporters, a political aide, two press secretaries, conservative activist David Bossie...

And:

...Bossie’s presence cast aside any doubt that the trip was merely an opportunity for the senator to reconnect with his medical roots. Bossie is the founder of Citizens United, the group whose lawsuit led the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that corporations and labor unions can spend unlimited funds on direct advocacy for or against political candidates. A documentary filmmaker who has shadowed Paul before, he traveled here with his daughter and a film crew equipped with lights, cameras and an unmanned aerial drone for overhead shots. Bossie said little about his plans, other than that his footage would appear in a film either about Paul or an issue of importance to him.

Paul’s entourage included family members and friends; his top political aide, Doug Stafford; and political ad makers Rex Elsass and Rick Tyler, the latter a former close aide to Newt Gingrich. The ad team was joined by a Spanish-speaking colleague who was responsible for trailing behind another film crew with legal release forms that needed to be signed by anyone interviewed or appearing in their footage. It wasn't clear whether Guatemalans presented with the release forms understood what they were signing.

So it wasn't a purely charitable trip then, was it?  Now go back and look at how Jack Kelly characterized Remnick's description of the trip.  Wouldn't it have been much better to know more of the details before reading that it was "vile"?  That's the set of facts that Jack left out - the stuff he doesn't think you need to know about before reading his opinion.

Then there's this:

Mr. Remnick also mocked New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for saying Russian President Vladimir Putin wouldn’t push him around the way he has President Obama and snarked at former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s prediction that the invasion of Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” [Emphasis added.]

Mr. Remnick’s snark is sustained only by his ignorance of or disregard for facts.

And:

The invasion of Iraq was a cakewalk. Saddam Hussein’s regime was ousted 21 days after the U.S. coalition attacked. Just 172 coalition soldiers were killed. The Six Day War between Israel and Arab states in 1967 probably was the only victory in the history of warfare won more swiftly or easily.

The troubles came during the occupation afterward, which Mr. Rumsfeld — who wanted the United States to set up a coalition government and then leave — had opposed.

So Jack is saying that Rumsfeld wasn't wrong to say that the invasion would be "a cakewalk" right? Jack then foils that with Rumsfeld's opposition to the Iraq occupation.  So Remnick must be wrong, right?

But this is what Remnick actually wrote:

Chris Christie insists on the efficacy of big men and tough talk—the Great Jersey Guy theory of history. Recently, he suggested that Vladimir Putin would not dare sponsor the bloody destabilization of Ukraine were Christie in charge. “I don’t believe, given who I am, that he would make the same judgment,” Christie said at a meeting of Republican activists. “Let’s leave it at that.” Christie is trying to bone up on world affairs by reading Kenneth Adelman’s book on Ronald Reagan. Adelman was the cheerful adviser to Donald Rumsfeld who insisted that the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003, would be a “cakewalk.” [Emphasis added.]

But let's be sure.  Was it Rumsfeld or Adelman who said the invasion would be "a cakewalk"?

Guess.  From The New Yorker:

More than a year ago, Kenneth Adelman, a prominent national-security official in the Reagan Administration who now serves part time, with Richard Perle, on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, wrote a piece for the Washington Post. Its title was “Cakewalk in Iraq,” and its payoff went like this: “I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk. Let me give simple, responsible reasons: (1) It was a cakewalk last time; (2) they’ve become much weaker; (3) we’ve become much stronger; and (4) now we’re playing for keeps.” [Emphasis added.]

So whose "ignorance of or disregard for facts" are we talking about when Jack said (incorrectly) that Rumsfeld said the invasion of Iraq was (and Jack even used the quotation marks) "a cakewalk"?

Doesn't anyone at the Post-Gazette fact-check Jack Kelly? Evidently not.

Jack Kelly Sunday

Ah, Jack.  Selective evidence only discredits those who make the selections - once they are found out.

So let's take a closer look at your "evidence" in this week's column at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Jack's first point, dear readers, is to try to erase the connection drawn between Jerald and Amanda Miller, the Las Vegas shooters, and The Tea Party. And here's his evidence:

Alas for liberals, reality — as it has so often before — soon harshed their mellow. Jerad and Amanda took part in a lot of anti-government activities, including Occupy Wall Street.

Setting aside the oh so subtle yet smugly patronizing counterculture drug reference, we have to ask what is the connection between The Millers and Occupy.

This is probably the source of this information:

While living in Lafayette, Jerad and his wife Amanda took part in last November’s “Million Mask March” – a gathering of protesters from the Occupy movement, anarchists, and hacktivists.

Nick Wertz, one of the organizers of the Lafayette march, said it attracted many people upset over a lot of issues.

Um.  So if that's the case, it wasn't exactly an Occupy Wall Street occupation, right?  But it's there and it's documented.  Does that mean that the murdering Millers were actually leftists?  As Jack wants you to believe?

Well let's take a look at the counter evidence.  What did Jerad Miller leave on his facebook page?

This, for one.  He shared it on June 7 (shared, meaning someone else posted it on Facebook and he agreed with it enough to pass it along):

But that's just a 2nd Amendment thing.  Miller was a gun guy so that part fits. Did he share any other non-firearm artwork?

Why, yes he did.  On June 3 he posted this image:

And this one:

Let's see on top of the 2nd Amendment stuff we have a Benghazi truther and a Climate science denier.  The only thing missing is a demand to see the "real" Birth Certificate and it would be an Fox "News" Trifecta.

So, Jack? I hate to be a buzz kill and everything, but Jared Miller was a right wing nut job.  An armed right wing nut job who killed a pair of police officers for the sake of "freedom."

Misconstruing his presence at a Million Mask March in order to characterize him as an Occupy supporter ain't gonna change that.  Selecting the evidence (badly) to support your argument is nothing new for you.  Still doesn't work at proving what you're looking to prove, of course.  But you keep trying (and failing), don't you?

But let's move on.  Here's more of Jack:

Rick Santelli’s epic rant on CNBC Feb. 19, 2009, triggered the largest grassroots political reform movement since the People’s Party of the 1890s. Between 440,000 and 810,000 people attended Tea Party rallies on Tax Day 2009, according to a Harvard study.

The rallies were peaceful. Those who attended picked up after themselves.

Liberals, terrified by their numbers, rushed to demonize and suppress. The IRS went after them.

Tea Partiers are “racists” and “domestic terrorists,” some liberals charged, without a shred of evidence.

Let's start with the obvious.  The IRS also "went after" progressive groups:

In an apparent contradiction with earlier comments made by House Oversight Committee chair Darrell Issa, new documents obtained through a FOIA request by ThinkProgress show that yes, the IRS targeted both conservative and liberal groups for extra scrutiny. According to ThinkProgress's analysis of the heavily redacted "be on the lookout" lists, the IRS may have targeted a higher number of progressive groups than conservative groups overall.

There's that.  Then there's the issue of how there's not "a shred of evidence" of Tea Party racism.  Take a look at this:

This is a real thing, by the way. It's creator doesn't see it as "racist" however. From Talkingpointsmemo:

The creator of the now-infamous "Tea Party Comix" has spoken. The response, sent to Comics With Problems' Ethan Persoff last week, ends speculation by some that the black-and-white comics featuring a racist caricature of President Obama might be a liberal parody gone wrong (or just misunderstood). In the rambling email sent early Thursday morning, the unnamed creator of the comics (the name was withheld by Persoff) suggests that they were created out of anger at Obama, but -- according to the creator -- not out of any intention to make a racial statement.

Of course not.

Do I need to continue, Jack?  Do I really need to keep going to show how you're picking and choosing your evidence to support your feeble argument no matter how different reality might be?

UPDATE: Thanks Ed for the grammar correction, ya bastid.

Jack Kelly Sunday

Sometimes, after digging around a little, you find a small bit of info that invalidates an entire column.

Well for Jack Kelly this Sunday, it's here.

In a piece about how bad things will become, Jack's wrote:

“We expect the bottom to fall out by the second quarter of 2014,” Trends Research Institute founder Gerald Celente predicted last October.

So where did this quotation come from?

Here - The Alex Jones Show.

Alex Jones?  That's a acceptable source for Jack Kelly?  More importantly, that's a acceptable source for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette?

About 28 minutes in, after the warnings about how by Alex Jones (and uncorrected by Jack's source, Gerald, by the way) tells us how "the establishment is running al-Qaeda" we hear Celente near-scream:

Any self-respecting adult that hears McConnel, Reid, Boehner, Ryan, one after another, and buys this baloney… they deserve what they get.

And as for the international scene… the whole thing is collapsing.

That’s our forecast.

We are saying that by the second quarter of 2014, we expect the bottom to fall out… or something to divert our attention as it falls out.

And don't be fooled by the ellipses. They're not masking content, they're merely pauses in Celente's rant.  And what was he ranting about?  The vote in October to raise the debt ceiling.  That's why he's blaming both sides for whatever he thinks is going to happen.

Funny that Jack didn't tell you that part.  Either he didn't know where the quotation came from and its context or he did know and decided not to tell you.  Which is it?  I'd think that for a political columnist, either is equally damning.

Some Gerald Celente highlights:

• Members of the press are routinely referred to as "presstitutes"
• BOTH Democrats are Republicans in Congress are referred to as "clowns" 
• And finally when he sarcastically yells "salute the Commander-in-Chief" he's got his right hand up in a Nazi salute.

That's who Jack Kelly decided was an acceptable source for a quotation for a Post-Gazette column.

Doesn't anyone at the P-G check these things?

Jack Kelly Sunday

I guess I have to ask it again:

Doesn't anyone at the P-G fact-check Jack Kelly?

Why am I asking this, yet again?

Because this showed up in today's column:

But his small ball, recycled initiatives — he even plagiarized lines from Mr. Bush’s 2007 SOTU, according to former Bush speechwriter Mark Thiessen...

Except he didn't.  Thiessen was wrong and Jack is wrong for passing it along.

Let me show you why.

According to David Weigel of Slate.com:

This one comes from Fox News, which hosted former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen after he claimed that President Obama's speech had been lifted from the 2007 State of the Union.

The link above leads to this Breitbart page. Here's what it says:

Following President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, former George W. Bush speechwriter Mark Thiessen told Fox News Channel’s “The Kelly File” host Megyn Kelly that Obama’s speech plagiarized lines from Bush’s 2007 speech, for which he said he was the lead speechwriter.

“It was eerily familiar,” Thiessen said. “There were lines like, ‘Our job is to help Americans build a future of hope and opportunity. A future of hope and opportunity begins with a growing economy. A future of hope and opportunity requires our citizens have affordable and available health care.’ ‘Extending opportunity and hope depends on a stable supply of energy.’ All of that came from the 2007 State of the Union address by George W. Bush. So, Barack Obama has gone from blaming George W. bush to plagiarizing George W. Bush.”[Emphasis added.]

Ok, so let's go to Obama's State of The Union Address to see if those lines are actually in there.

Guess what?  They're not.

Weigel's done almost all of the heavy lifting here, so I'll just add a few details of my own.

Asserted plagiarism #1 ("Our job is to help Americans build a future of hope and opportunity.")  And to that Weigel writes:

This appears in the Bush speech: "Our job is to make life better for our fellow Americans, and to help them to build a future of hope and opportunity—and this is the business before us tonight." Nothing like it appears in the Obama speech—the closest is "Opportunity is who we are."

In fact, the only time the phrase "our job" shows up in Obama's SOTU is in response to this passage:

Today, after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better. But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled. The cold, hard fact is that even in the midst of recovery, too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by – let alone get ahead. And too many still aren’t working at all.

To which the President follows:

Our job is to reverse these trends. It won’t happen right away, and we won’t agree on everything. But what I offer tonight is a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class, and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class. Some require Congressional action, and I’m eager to work with all of you. But America does not stand still – and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that’s what I’m going to do.[Emphasis added.]

That's it.  That's the overlap - and it's hardly plagiarism.  No mention of "hope" in that section Bush's SOTU, by the way.  How telling.

Asserted plagiarism #2 ("A future of hope and opportunity begins with a growing economy -- and that is what we have.").  And to that Weigel writes:

That's the next line in the Bush speech. Nothing like it appears in the Obama speech. He doesn't even use the phrase "growing economy."

In fact there's only one use of the word "hope" and it's in this sentence:

That’s what most Americans want – for all of us in this chamber to focus on their lives, their hopes, their aspirations.  [Emphasis added.]

No overlap here at all.

Asserted plagiarism #3 ("Extending opportunity and hope depends on a stable supply of energy.").  And to that, Weigel writes:
Also in the Bush speech. Obama—see the pattern?—does not repeat this. He says instead that "one of the biggest factors in bringing more jobs back is our commitment to American energy," which is a similar sentiment. In fact there's no usage of the phrase "extending opportunity" or "stable supply of energy."  In fact the word "stable" shows up only once in Obama's speech at all.  Here:

But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact. And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did.

Again, no overlap, no plagiarism.

Now if you wanna talk about something far closer to actual plagiarism, I bring up something I wrote five and a half years ago.  The P-G's Jack Kelly wrote this about then-Governor Sarah Palin:

When she was leading her underdog Wasilla high school basketball team to the state championship in 1982, her teammates called her "Sarah Barracuda" because of her fierce competitiveness. Two years later, when she won the Miss Wasilla beauty pageant, she was also voted Miss Congeniality by the other contestants.

Compare that to something Fred Barnes wrote a year or so before:

Gov. Palin grew up in Wasilla, where as star of her high school basketball team she got the nickname "Sarah Barracuda" for her fierce competitiveness. She led her underdog team to the state basketball championship. Palin also won the Miss Wasilla beauty contest, in which she was named Miss Congeniality, and went on to compete in the Miss Alaska pageant.

Jack, that's far closer to actual plagiarism than anything Marc Theissen alleged.  And you did that.

I'll ask it again:

Doesn't anyone at the P-G fact-check Jack Kelly?

I guess the answer is, "no, not so much."

Jack Kelly Sunday

In his column this week in the Post-Gazette, our good friend Jack Kelly makes this charge:

Ms. Sebelius is fortunate she works in government, where there is no accountability.

Criticism of Secretary Sebelius aside, this is a remarkable thing to say coming as it does from a columnist who has, repeatedly and over a long number of years, distorted, mangled and otherwise deformed the truth for the P-G's readers.

For example only almost exactly a month ago Jack published this column on Lara Logan's now discredited 60 Minutes story on Benghazi.

By the 8th of November, CBS retracted the story with an apology from Lara Logan.

On the 26th of November the Washington Post reported that Ms Logan and her producer will be taking a leave of absence:

...in the wake of an internal review that found numerous flaws in their reporting of a story about the terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya.

And yet there's no comment from Jack Kelly on this at all.  Does he still agree with his column now that it's main source has been debunked?  And if so, why?  And if he does not agree with his column, then were is his apology?  Or at least his explanation as to how he got it wrong?

Then there was Kelly's distortions regarding Hurricane Katrina, so easily debunked by Mediamatters - while he did issue a correction of sorts, as I wrote later, "even his corrections could have used some corrections."

Then there was the column on Van Jones.

Which was yanked a few days later from the P-G website.

That was the column (and you can still see it here at the Toledo Blade) where Jack makes some rather stunningly simple mistakes about the recently resigned Van Jones.

Jack said Jones was arrested during the LA riots when he wasn't. He was arrested a week later in San Francisco (he was released a few hours later with all charges dropped). Jack said Jones was arrested in Seattle in 1999 during a WTO protest. No record of that happening anywhere outside of Glenn Beck's fevered imagination.

Well Kelly fans, as if this moment, the column's GONE.

It's still gone.. Yanked because it was riddled with errors and falsehoods.

Where is Jack Kelly's accountability?

Jack Kelly Sunday

Well, it's been 10 days since I posted this.  That was the blog post where I pointed out how the CBS Benghazi "story" that the P-G's Jack Kelly built his entire column on had been retracted by CBS.

When will the column be retracted by Jack Kelly?  I asked but to no avail, it seems.  So far, it's still up - and with no correction or anything to indicate an update to reflect the reality of the situation - that CBS retracted the 60 Minutes Benghazi story.

So what does the Post-Gazette's Jack Kelly do today?

Opens up with another debunked CBS "news" story:

The personal information you give to Healthcare.gov “is protected by stringent security standards,” said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

Not so.

“Software experts tell CBS News they have identified multiple security issues,” Jan Crawford reported Nov. 5. “We gave one technology expert the real HealthCare.gov user name of a CBS employee. Within seconds, he identified the specific security question she selected to reset her password.”

“Four days before the launch the government … granted itself a waiver to launch the website,” said CBS investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson. “The final required top-to-bottom security tests never got done.”

The top operations officer for the Obamacare websites told the House Oversight Committee that he was never given a Sept. 3 memo that detailed six security problems which pose “limitless” risk.

This is the CBS report to which the intrepid Jack is referring.  That last paragraph, however, refers a subsequent CBS report by Attkisson - and that's where the whole thing falls apart.

The public debunking happened in public at a Congressional hearing four days ago on November 13:


Here's my transcript of the discussion between Representative Gerald Connolly and Henry Chao (the top operations officer for the Obamacare websites, Kelly's referring to) and starting at about 1:44 in we hear:

CONNOLLY: Mr. Chao, during your interview with committee staff on November 1, you were presented with a document you had not seen before. And it was entitled "Authority to Operate," signed by your boss on September 3, 2013, is that correct?

CHAO: Correct.

CONNOLLY: The Republican staffers told you during that interview that this document indicated there were two open high-risk findings in the federally facilitated marketplace launched October 1. Is that correct?

CHAO: Correct.

CONNOLLY: This surprised you at the time.

CHAO: Can I just qualify that a bit? It was dated September 3 and it was referring to two parts of the system that were already--

CONNOLLY: You are jumping ahead of me. We are going to get there. So when you were asked questions about that document, you told the staffers you needed to check with officials at CMS who oversee security testing to understand the context, is that correct?

CHAO: Correct.

CONNOLLY: The staffers continued to ask you questions, nonetheless, and then they - or somebody - leaked parts of your transcript to CBS Evening News, is that correct?

CHAO: Seems that way.

CONNOLLY: Mmm. Since that interview, have you had a chance to follow up on your suggestion to check with CMS officials on the context?

CHAO: I have had some discussions about, uh, the nature of the high findings that were in the document.

CONNOLLY: Right. And this document it turns out, discusses only the risks associated with two modules, one for dental plans and one for the qualified health plans, is that correct?

CHAO: Yes.

CONNOLLY: And neither of those modules is active right now, is that correct?

CHAO: That's correct.

CONNOLLY: So the September 3 document did in fact, not apply to the entire federally facilitated marketplace despite the assertions of the leak to CBS notwithstanding, is that correct?

CHAO: That's correct.

CONNOLLY: And these modules allow insurance companies to submit their dental and health plan information to the marketplace is that correct?

CHAO: Correct.

CONNOLLY: That means that those modules do not contain or transmit any personally identifiable information on individual consumers, is that correct?

CHAO: Correct.

CONNOLLY: So to be clear, these modules don't transmit any specific user information, is that correct?

CHAO: Correct.

CONNOLLY: So when CBS Evening News ran its report based on a leak, presumably from the majority staff, but we don't know, of a partial transcript, expert- excerpts from a partial transcript, they said the security issues raised in the document, and I quote, "could lead to identity theft among buying insurance," that cannot be true based on what we just established in our back and forth, is that correct?

CHAO: That's correct. I think there was some rearrangement of the words that I used during the testimony in how it was portrayed and-.

CONNOLLY: So to just summarize, correct me if I'm wrong, the document leaked to CBS Evening News didn't in fact not relate to parts of the website that were active on October 1. They did not relate to any part of the system that handles personal consumer information, and there, in fact, was no possibility of identity theft, despite the leak.

CHAO: Correct.

CONNOLLY: Thank you, Mr. Chao. I yield back. [Emphases added.]

Seeing that Jack has yet to correct the record of his flawed CBS sourced Benghazi column, I don't have much faith that he'll be correcting the record of this flawed CBS sourced Affordable Health Care security risk column anytime soon.

Jack Kelly Sunday

I have assumed that the standard operating procedure for right wing pundits is to simply assert something as true and trust that few readers in the audience would bother to check the facts.

This assumption is not at all challenged by these paragraphs found in today's Jack Kelly column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

We must intervene in the civil war in Syria because "if a thug and a murderer like Bashar al-Assad can gas thousands of his own people with impunity," it would set a bad example for others, Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday.

Secretary Kerry's moral outrage would have been more moving if Sen. Kerry -- who met with the Syrian dictator six times and urged "engagement" with his regime -- hadn't said so many kind things about Mr. Assad in the recent past.

And Secretary Kerry's assertion that the use of chemical weapons justifies U.S. military intervention would be more persuasive if Sen. Kerry hadn't taken the opposite stance. Many more were killed when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurdish village of Halabja than in the sarin gas attack in a Damascus suburb Aug. 21, but Sen. Kerry didn't think that justified U.S. intervention in Iraq.

By the way, I am leaning against any sort of intervention into Syria, but I am conflicted.  On the one hand something has to be done to punish a regime that uses chemical weapons, on the other I can't see anything good coming out of it.  By hurting the Assad regime, we'd end up helping the rather nasty folks he's fighting.  Given the "law" of unintended consequences, I'm sure lotsa bad stuff would follow - all with our name on it.  But doing nothing seems wrong as well.

So you see my issue.

But let's get back to Jack.  He's contrasting Secretary of State Kerry's response to Syria's use of gas with the then Senator Kerry's "opposite stance" regarding Saddam Hussein's use of gas in Halabja in 1988.  In doing so, he leaves out a few things:

• As Senator Kerry cosponsored SR 408 - a condemnation of Iraq's use of chemical weapons.
• Iraq was an ally of ours at that time during the Iran-Iraq war.

Hmm...military intervention with an ally.  That's what Jack thinks Senator Kerry should have been calling for back in 1988 in order for Secretary Kerry to sound credible now.

But let's take a deeper look at Halabja in 1988.  First some background from Foreign Policy:

In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq's war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein's military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.

The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to tilt the war in Iraq's favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they ensured that the Reagan administration's long-standing policy of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed. But they were also the last in a series of chemical strikes stretching back several years that the Reagan administration knew about and didn't disclose.

And:

By 1988, U.S. intelligence was flowing freely to Hussein's military. That March, Iraq launched a nerve gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in northern Iraq.

And:

According to recently declassified CIA documents and interviews with former intelligence officials like [Air Force Col. Rick] Francona, the U.S. had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks beginning in 1983.

And yet at the same time:

President Reagan yesterday condemned the use of outlawed chemical weapons in the Persian Gulf war, especially against the Kurdish minority in Iraq, and called for new global ban on such warfare.

"We condemn it," Reagan told the 43rd General Assembly in his final speech to the world body as president. "The use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war - beyond its tragic human toll - jeopardises the moral and legal strictures that have held these weapons in check since World War I."

Reagan indirectly criticized Iraq's use of poison gas against Iraqi Kurds and Iranians. He cited the Kurdish area of Halabja in Iraq and Maidan Shahr on the border as "terrible new names added to the roll call of human horror."

Something that's been known for more than a decade:

A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program.

So yea, Secretary of State Kerry's the one whose credibility should be questioned here.

By the way, Jack Kelly was an deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration - starting in December 1983.  Considering that the Reagan Administration had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks since, well, more or less exactly when Jack started working for it, did he know that the Reagan was lying through its teeth when his administration was both aiding Iraq's use of chemical weapons and yet condemning it all at the same time?

Jack Kelly Sunday

Oh, the hypocrisy!

In his column at the Post-Gazette this Sunday, Jack Kelly swerves a full 180.  He starts with:

Is obeying the law optional?

President Barack Obama seems to think it is -- at least insofar as it applies to him.

The administration announced this month that it plans to delay enforcement of the provision in Obamacare which requires employers with 50 or more full-time employees to provide them with health insurance (which contains certain government-mandated provisions), or pay a fine of $2,000 per worker.

Section 1513(d) of the Obamacare law states clearly that "The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013."

This is important because the Constitution says the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed" (Article II, Section 3).

Jack's fellow travelers over on the Scaife editorial board have already tried this one and in general I am surprised that our friends on the right would even think of writing this.

Where the hell were they when this happened?

In October, 2005 Senator John McCain (a well-known Republican) offered up an amendment to the Department of Defense, Emergency Supplemental Appropriations to Address Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and Pandemic Influenza Act, 2006 (H.R. 2863) which became Title X of the bill.  It states:

No person in the custody or under the effective control of the Department of Defense or under detention in a Department of Defense facility shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the United States Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation.

And specifically:

(a) In General.--No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.

(b) Construction.--Nothing in this section shall be construed to impose any geographical limitation on the applicability of the prohibition against cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment under this section.

(c) Limitation on Supersedure.--The provisions of this section shall not be superseded, except by a provision of law enacted after the date of the enactment of this Act which specifically repeals, modifies, or supersedes the provisions of this section.

(d) Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Defined.--In this section, the term ``cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment'' means the cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December 10, 1984.

The Amendment was agreed to overwhelmingly by the Senate (The vote was 90-9. Even Rick Santorum voted for it).

The whole bill passed both the House and the Senate and was signed by President George W. Bush, who included this section in the now infamous "signing statement" attached to the bill:

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks. Further, in light of the principles enunciated by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2001 in Alexander v. Sandoval, and noting that the text and structure of Title X do not create a private right of action to enforce Title X, the executive branch shall construe Title X not to create a private right of action. Finally, given the decision of the Congress reflected in subsections 1005(e) and 1005(h) that the amendments made to section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, shall apply to past, present, and future actions, including applications for writs of habeas corpus, described in that section, and noting that section 1005 does not confer any constitutional right upon an alien detained abroad as an enemy combatant, the executive branch shall construe section 1005 to preclude the Federal courts from exercising subject matter jurisdiction over any existing or future action, including applications for writs of habeas corpus, described in section 1005.

You may need to read that twice to get a better idea of what's in there.

But here's how Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe described what Bush did:

When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.

After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a ''signing statement" -- an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law -- declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.

Though they try to reassure the skittish terrorist-enablers:

''We are not going to ignore this law," the official said, noting that Bush, when signing laws, routinely issues signing statements saying he will construe them consistent with his own constitutional authority. ''We consider it a valid statute. We consider ourselves bound by the prohibition on cruel, unusual, and degrading treatment."

But, the official said, a situation could arise in which Bush may have to waive the law's restrictions to carry out his responsibilities to protect national security. He cited as an example a ''ticking time bomb" scenario, in which a detainee is believed to have information that could prevent a planned terrorist attack.

Not that means much:

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit.

''The signing statement is saying 'I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it's important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me,' " he said. ''They don't want to come out and say it directly because it doesn't sound very nice, but it's unmistakable to anyone who has been following what's going on."

Interestingly, something Savage writes in the very next paragraph also resonates this story:

Golove and other legal specialists compared the signing statement to Bush's decision, revealed last month, to bypass a 1978 law forbidding domestic wiretapping without a warrant. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without a court order starting after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Authorizing previously unauthorized NSA eavesdropping?  Ignoring laws banning the torture of human beings?  Anyone remember those offenses?  Jack?  Don't you?

And yet when the Obama Administration delays by a year the implementation of a section of the Affordable Healthcare Act, that's when the conservatives from Maine to Malibu judge as the time to point out the President's legal obligations under Article II.

Oh, the hypocrisy!

Jack Kelly Sunday

A message to my friends at the Post-Gazette:

This is how you fact-check Jack Kelly.

In today's column on the "cost" of ObamaCare, Jack writes:

The Congressional Budget Office estimated a loss of 800,000 jobs over 10 years.

Luckily for you, me, Jack and everyone else, the Washington Post fact-checked this more than two years ago.

Here's how they set up the checking:

A long and rather dry discussion of nation's budget outlook at the House Budget Committee has exploded with a frenzy of politics after a brief exchange, highlighted in the video clip above, between Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) and Congressional Budget Office director Douglas W. Elmendorf. The CBO last August had estimated that the new health care law over the next decade would reduce the number of overall workers in the United States by one-half of one percent, and Campbell got Elmendorf to utter the words "800,000."

And the facts:

The CBO first discussed this issue, briefly, in a budget analysis last August. Boiled down to plain English, the CBO is essentially saying that some people who are now in the work force because they need health insurance would decide to stop working because the health care law guaranteed they would have access to health care.

Think of someone who is 63, a couple of years before retirement, who is still in a job only because they are waiting to get on Medicare when they turn 65. Or a single mother with children who is only working to make sure her kids have health insurance.

And yet this debunked factoid shows up in a Jack Kelly column about how ObamaCare is going to cost the president's "young supporters."

Huh?

To my friends at the Post-Gazette: THIS IS HOW YOU FACT-CHECK JACK KELLY.

Jack Kelly Sunday

It's been some time since I deconstructed a Jack Kelly column. So let's get started with this week's.

This week, Jack goes after Attorney General Eric Holder.  Some things stick and some things don't - and those that don't undermine Jack's credibility (what's left of it, of course).  We'll start here:

If timely military aid could have been sent to Benghazi, the president was likely in on the decision not to send it. IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House 157 times, so it's hard to believe Mr. Obama knew nothing about IRS intimidation of his political enemies.

Ah, Benghazi and the IRS.  Jack's making two serious charges (both of which have been debunked).  Let's start with what Jack's hoping (despite his hiding behind the "If...then..." rhetoric) you'll take from that first sentence: that "timely" military aid could have been sent to Benghazi but that aid was denied by the president.

But look at this from the screamingly lib'rul USNews:

At roughly 6 p.m. local time, the defense attaché at the American Embassy in Tripoli confirmed that the Libyan government would be willing to fly a C-130 cargo plane into Benghazi to evacuate the American wounded and deceased who had rallied at a U.S. annex there.

"We wanted to send external support forces," along with the C-130 and Libyan forces to assist with the efforts, Hicks testified on Wednesday. Hicks, who was in Tripoli, was standing near a "Lt. Col. Gibson," who commanded a four-person Special Forces team. These troops were what remained from a 14-person security team tasked with establishing security at the U.S. diplomatic presence following the 2011 Libyan revolution.

The remaining Special Forces soldiers' mission had changed in August 2011 from providing security to offering training. Command of this team also switched from the embassy, under Ambassador Stevens, to Army Gen. Carter Ham, then-commander of U.S. Africa Command.

Hicks testified these troops had highly trained skills that would have been useful to the personnel in Benghazi, who were "exhausted from a night of fighting against very capable opponents."

"There was every reason to believe our personnel was still in danger," he says, adding he does not know why the Special Forces troops were not allowed to get on the C-130.

He says Lt. Col. Gibson was "furious" that he could not assist the Americans in Benghazi. "That's what he wanted to do."

Pentagon spokesmen had previously stated that no U.S. assets were ever told to "stand down" the night of the attack in Benghazi. Air Force Maj. Rob Firman told USA Today Tuesday that the military's account of this response "hasn't changed."

"There was never any kind of stand down order to anybody," Firman said.

Firman reaffirmed this statement to U.S. News following Hicks' Wednesday testimony.

"Were these guys told not to do anything? No. They were in Tripoli, supporting the U.S. security in Tripoli, and they were told to stay there," Firman says. Special Operations Command Africa leadership told them to remain where they were, and "it was more important for those guys to be in Tripoli."

"I look at that as not so much a stand-down order, as it is a 'stay where you are,'" says Firman. "Those guys met the planes and continued to support."

Firman adds that the C-130 was tasked with picking up the American personnel at the Benghazi airport and leave immediately. These Special Forces troops would not have been on the ground long enough to have contributed significantly to the operation.

"There was a very limited amount of time that they could have done anything," he says.

And yet Jack...well you know how this sentence ends.

But let's look at Jack's next bit of misinformation - where he tries to tie the White House to the IRS scandal by how many times IRS Director Schulman visited to the White House (he says it was 157 them!!!)

Uh, wrong.

The Atlantic has already dispensed with this:

The latest twist in the conservative effort to tie the IRS tax-exempt targeting scandal to the president is to focus on public visitor records released by the White House, in which former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman's name appears 157 times between 2009 and 2012. Unfortunately, few of those pushing this line have bothered to read more than the topline of that public information.

Few, like the P-G's Jack Kelly.

Turns out that the lists upon which Schulman's name appear only show the meetings he was cleared to attend - not those he actually attended:

He was cleared 40 times to meet with Obama's director of the Office of Health Reform, and a further 80 times for the biweekly health reform deputies meetings and others set up by aides involved with the health-care law implementation efforts. That's 76 percent of his planned White House visits just there, before you even add in all the meetings with Office of Management and Budget personnel also involved in health reform.

Complicating the picture is the fact that just because a meeting was scheduled and Shulman was cleared to attend it does not mean that he actually went. Routine events like the biweekly health-care deputies meeting would have had a standing list of people cleared to attend, people whose White House appointments would have been logged and forwarded to the check-in gate. But there is no time of arrival information in the records to confirm that Shulman actually signed in and went to these standing meetings.

Indeed, of the 157 events Shulman was cleared to attend, White House records only provide time of arrival information -- confirming that he actually went to them -- for 11 events over the 2009-2012 period, and time of departure information for only six appointments. According to the White House records, Shulman signed in twice in 2009, five times in 2010, twice in 2011, and twice in 2012. That does not mean that he did not go to other meetings, only that the White House records do not show he went to the 157 meetings he was granted Secret Service clearance to attend. [Italics in original.]

Jack, 11 not 157.

Such a huge amount of misinformation in such a small space - doesn't anyone at the Post-Gazette fact-check Jack Kelly?

Unfortunately, we already know the answer to that question.

Though I will leave Jack with two others:

• Wasn't Douglas Shulman a Bush Appointee? (Hint: Yes, he was.)
• Isn't it the IRS supposed to screen out organizations who've applied for tax-exempt status but who shouldn't get it? (Hint: Yes, it is - though in this instance, it was the way they screened that's offensive.)

More evidence that no one fact-check's Jack Kelly at the P-G. Or if they do, what he submits must be so hugely fact free that this is the best they can get out of it.

Also, Eric Holder's on his own for the AP story - he'll get no help here.

Jack Kelly UPDATE!!

Hey, remember this blog post?

It's the blog post where I quote Jack as writing this:

At the time they met with President Barack Obama on 9/11/2012, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knew it was terrorists who were attacking our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Mr. Panetta testified Feb. 7.

Their pre-scheduled meeting in the Oval Office took place about 90 minutes after the attack began. The president "left it up to them" whether to respond, Mr. Panetta told the Senate Intelligence Committee. The fighting would last for six hours more, but neither he nor Gen. Dempsey heard from the president again that night, Mr. Panetta said.

And I wrote:

Note the word "whether" after the quotation. And note the quotation for that matter. Now you'd think that in a newspaper (even if it is only an "opinion" column found in that newspaper) when a Secretary of Defense is quoted the writer gets the quotation right - or at least it's close enough not to be misleading.

By phrasing it the way he does, Jack leaves his audience with the impression that the President left the decision to respond up to Panetta and Gen. Dempsey. This is false.

Well guess what?

[This is where you'd say, "What?"]

Guess what I found at the P-G this evening?

[This is where you'd say "What?" again, only slightly annoyed.]

Take a guess what I found?  GUESS!

[This is where you'd say, "If you don't tell me right now, I'm gonna break your arm!"]

Ok, ok - Sheesh!  Might wanna lay off the espresso, (or maybe try some decaf).  Anyway, here's what I found at the Post-Gazette this evening:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told the Senate Intelligence Committee that President Obama had "directed both myself and [Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] to do everything we needed to do to try to protect lives there" when told of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. A Jack Kelly column published Sunday said Mr. Panetta had testified that the president had "left it up to them" whether to respond.

You're welcome.

Now if I can only get them to do this BEFORE Jack's columns are published.

Jack Kelly Sunday

Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to reintroduce you to Jack Kelly, swiftboater.

Embedded in this week's column in the Post-Gazette, we find this curious paragraph:

Mr. Kerry exaggerated his heroism to get medals, according to some naval officers who served with the senator in Vietnam. He promised to authorize release of his military records, but didn't release all of them until after he ran for president in 2004.

Jack just can't resist the swiftboating, it seems and this isn't the first time.  Who can forget this column from August, 2008 (the one that declared, a mere two months before the 2008 election that "Democrats know their man is faltering")?

I realize the swiftboat lies are more than 12 years old, but a lie's still a lie.  So let's look at them one by one.

Jack says that Kerry exaggerated his heroism to get medals - so let's start there.  Which medals did he get?  According to his Senate website, he was awarded "a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Combat V, and three Purple Hearts."

A "Silver Star" is, according to the Manual of Military Decorations and Awards, "the third highest military valor decoration that can be awarded to a person serving in any capacity with the U.S. Armed Forces." And is awarded to any individual who "distinguishes himself or herself by gallantry in action."  "Gallantry" in that same document is defined as "Nobility of behavior or spirit.  Heroic courage."

Senator Kerry was awarded the Silver Star for his actions on 28 February, 1969.

A "Bronze Star" is, according to the same manual, is awarded to "any person who, while serving in any capacity with the U.S. Armed Forces, distinguishes himself or herself by heroic or meritorious achievement or service..."

Senator Kerry was awarded the Bronze Star for his actions on 13 March, 1969.

His three Purple Hearts were awarded for events that occurred 2 December 1968, 20 February 1969 and 13 March 1969.

We can trace our way through the documents (like they have here) OR we can look to what the Navy's own Inspector General concluded 8 years ago:

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Navy's chief investigator concluded Friday that procedures were followed properly in the approval of Sen. John Kerry's Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart medals, according to an internal Navy memo.

Vice Adm. R.A. Route, the Navy inspector general, conducted the review of Kerry's Vietnam-ear military service awards at the request of Judicial Watch, a public interest group. The group has also asked for the release of additional records documenting the Democratic presidential candidate's military service.

Judicial Watch had requested in August that the Navy open an investigation of the matter, but Route said in an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press that he saw no reason for a full-scale probe.

"Our examination found that existing documentation regarding the Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart medals indicates the awards approval process was properly followed," Route wrote in the memo sent Friday to Navy Secretary Gordon England.

So when Jack weaselwords his way through the swiftboat smear with a cowardly "according to some naval officers who served with the senator" while omitting the part about how the official position of the United States Navy (by way of its Inspector General) is exactly the opposite, we can question both Jack Kelly's honesty and the ability of his fact checkers at the Post-Gazette to actually "check" his "facts."

Jack Kelly, Swiftboater - the Post-Gazette must be so proud.