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Bachmann Lies About Census’ American Community Survey, Claims It Doesn’t Ask About Citizenship

By Matt Corley on Jun 30, 2009 at 8:00 pm

As ThinkProgress has previously noted, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has been fearmongering about the 2010 Census and bragging that she plans to break the law by refusing to answer it. “I know for my family, the only question we will be answering is how many people are in our home. We won’t be answering any information beyond that,” said Bachmann recently.

On Sean Hannity’s radio show yesterday, Bachmann continued to attack the Census, repeatedly insisting that people should go to her website to “see the Census form for themselves.” Listing off a few questions from the American Community Survey (a long-form survey sent out to one in 40 households each year) that she considers invasive, Bachmann claimed that it doesn’t ask “are you an American citizen”:

BACHMANN: Twenty-eight pages. Sean, you know the one question they don’t ask? They don’t ask, “are you an American citizen?” They don’t ask if you’re here on a visa or when it expires. We have no real idea how many illegal aliens are in our country. But wouldn’t you think, here they are asking every personal question about our lives, they could at least ask if we’re an American citizen? They don’t bother to ask for that. That’s why I think people need to read this census for themselves. If you go to my website, michelebachmann, you can read it.

Listen here:

In fact, the American Community Survey does ask about U.S. citizenship and it has since 1890:

American Community Survey question about citizenship

Additionally, though Bachmann repeatedly directed Hannity’s listeners to her website, michelebachmnann.com, in order to view the Census questions, the questions aren’t actually available on her website. A press release on her congressional website, however, does encourage citizens to read the Census and ACS questions. Apparently Bachmann has yet to take her own advice.

Transcript: Read more

Politics

Beck Falsely States The U.S. Bought Alaska In The ’1950s’ So We Could Drill

By Nate Carlile on Jun 30, 2009 at 6:30 pm

While appearing on Fox & Friends this morning, Glenn Beck managed to make a trio of mistakes when he attacked the Waxman-Markey clean energy bill passed by the House last week. The Fox News pundit falsely asserted the legislation’s effect on our oil dependency would be “none.” Beck then pointed out, incorrectly, that the U.S. purchased Alaska in the “1950s” and that we did so because of our interest in its “resources,” a subtle way of advocating for more drilling in Alaska:

CARLSON: But nowhere in that bill is anything about reducing our dependence on foreign oil.

BECK: None. […]

You know Donald Trump, I want to talk to this guy. When he was on the show just a few minutes ago I was thinking how can you not be laughing at us? How can the world not be laughing at us? We have all these resources. Why did we buy Alaska in the 1950s? We bought Alaska for the resources. And now we say no!

Watch it:

During his weekly address on Saturday, President Obama specifically focused on how the legislation would help lift “our dependence on foreign oil.” Obama said the bill would “spur the development of low carbon sources of energy,” which includes wind, solar, and geothermal power. He added the bill would result in “new energy savings like the efficient windows,” thereby reducing “heating costs in the winter and cooling costs in the summer.”

Beck’s attempt to rewrite history to fit his talking point is also troubling. For clarification, Alaska was purchased in 1867 for $7.2 million and soon became known as “Seward’s Folly,” named for Secretary of State William H. Seward, because at the time it was widely regarded as foolish to spend so much money on remote tundra. (Perhaps Beck was thinking of Alaska becoming the 49th state in 1959.) The resources the U.S. was after in 1867 weren’t oil, but fish, furs, and the prospect of closer proximity to Russia from the North American continent.

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 30, 2009 at 6:13 pm

Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap:

— Martha Nussbaum’s brilliant and comprehensive brief for marriage quality.

— Transportation in ACES.

— Womenomics is full of wishful thinking.

— Has the coalition in a box model run its course? Seems very premature to me to proclaim HCANN a failure.

— Ezra Klein says reform is impossible because the political system is so screwy, which is probably true but it’s worth noting that specific senators have agency and moral responsibility and always could choose to do the right thing.

— Cap & Trade lessons from Europe.

Song of the day: St Vincent “Actor Out of Work”.

Climate Progress

Memo to media: When the EPA ignores internal non-expert comments filled with falsehoods cut-and-paste from anti-science deniers, that isn’t “suppressing a report.” And why have you completely ignored a major scientific report revealing what a sham that “EPA report” is?

By Joe Romm on Jun 30, 2009 at 5:38 pm

Many of the top climate scientists in the world issued a major synthesis report reviewing the scientific literature since the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).  They found “greenhouse gas emissions and many aspects of the climate are changing near the upper boundary of the IPCC range of projections.”  In short, actual observations show things are much worse than the IPPC found.  Duh! and Duh! and Duh! Media coverage level — bupkis!  Technorati links to report released June 18 — 6.

One EPA economist,  Alan Carlin, cuts and pastes some disinformation from a denier blog post in order to (falsely) assert that the EPA’s endangerment finding is flawed because

  • “In the rapidly evolving field of climate change, by grounding its TSD Technical Support Documents in the IPCC AR4 the EPA is largely relying on scientific findings that are, by early 2009, largely 3 years or more out of date.”
  • “Important developments” since the IPCC cast doubt on its conclusions.

Media coverage level of this crap, whose entire conclusion was vitiated by the earlier synthesis by real scientists — Michael Jackson [adjusted for subject area]!  Technorati links to “report” posted by deniers on June 25 — 61.

THE MEDIA PREFERS FABRICATED DRAMA TO GENUINE FACTS

When a government agency doesn’t incorporate plagiarized disinformation into their work product, is that suppression — or your tax dollars working the way they’re supposed to, with decisions based on sound science?   Deniers like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Roger Pielke, Jr. say it’s the former, and they have spun some of the more gullible members of the status quo media, like CBS, who reported Friday:

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”

Well, this “report” was actually first just “proposed comments” and then actual “Comments on the Draft Technical Support Documents for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air.”

I worked in a federal agency for five years.  Lots of internal people provide comments on draft documents.  Some of it’s good, some of it’s irrelevant, and some is outright disinformation — typically the latter is from holdovers from a previous administration.  In this case, it actually looks like the comments were

  1. Unadulterated and long-debunked disinformation
  2. From someone unqualified on the subject they are writing
  3. Cut and paste from a blog without attribution
  4. Delivered too late and not actually germane

Such comments should not be incorporated into an official government document — certainly not without a serious inquiry first.  They might, however, be the basis of an advserse employment action, as the euphemism goes.

You can read a thorough debunking of these “comments” at the RealClimate Post, “Bubkes.”  A brilliant piece by Deep Climate showed that this so-called “suppressed report” is

largely lifted from an attack on the EPA published last November in climate science disinformation specialist Pat Michaels’ World Climate Report [WCR]. And all this came without any attribution of the large swathes of copied material to WCR or the original author (presumably either Michaels or sidekick Chip Knappenberger).

I won’t repeat the entire Deep Climate analysis, but let me quote from the central thesis of the WCR November 19, 2008 post:  Why the EPA should find against “Endangerment”:

Read more

Yglesias

McCain Confuses on Health Care

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 30, 2009 at 5:26 pm

McCain Funny Face

More adventures in tweeting from Senator John McCain (R-AZ) who tells us: “It’s not the quality of health care it’s the cost – wellness and fitness!” Like Ezra Klein I don’t really understand what that means.

One possible reconstruction is that McCain is saying that our problem is that health care costs are too high because of insufficient attention to wellness and fitness. This is, I think, a bit of a misunderstanding. It’s true that investments in wellness and fitness would be highly cost effective ways of improving public health. But it’s in the nature of the human species that even very healthy people eventually get sick and die. Consequently, it’s often far from clear whether or not healthier behavior reduces health care costs in the long run. Dying of lung cancer at 57 could be cheaper than developing Alzheimer’s and living to 97. Which isn’t to downplay the importance of “wellness and fitness”—these can do a lot to improve quality of life. But they’re more-or-less separable from the issues of who gets health insurance, what does it cover, what does it cost, and how efficiently are health care services directed.

Politics

Pennsylvania State Senator Refuses To Apologize For His Remarks About Gays: ‘We’re Allowing Them To Exist’

By Amanda Terkel on Jun 30, 2009 at 5:25 pm

During a June 19 radio debate, Pennsylvania State Sen. John Eichelberger (R) repeatedly asserted that same-sex marriage is wrong, “dysfunctional,” and would lead to “polygamy, marrying younger people.” (Eichelberger is “sponsoring a Constitutional amendment to redefine marriage as between a man and a woman.”) But perhaps his most shocking comments came when fellow lawmaker Sen. Daylin Leach (D) asked him how gay men and women should be treated:

Leach: Should our only policy towards [same-sex] couples be one of punishment, to somehow prove that they’ve done something wrong?

Eichelberger: They’re not being punished. We’re allowing them to exist, and do what every American can do. We’re just not rewarding them with any special designation.

Listen to excerpts of the debate here:

LGBT activists were incensed by Eichelberger’s comments, calling on him to apologize for his “insensitive remarks.” Yesterday, gay and straight protesters briefly met with Eichelberger, “after [he tried] ducking them twice.” They presented him with 5,000 signed petitions asking him to apologize. Eichelberger refused to do so:

EICHELBERGER: You know, the public process is very important in this country. That’s what my bill does. It allows the public to make a decision, which I think is a healthy thing. So I appreciate your support of at least that concept.

SPEAKER: So are you going to apologize to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender people in Pennsylvania — and all the people in Pennsylvania for those comments about allowing to exist and calling them dysfunctional.

EICHELBERGER: No, I think you know my answer to that. Thank you very much.

Watch it:

John Morgan of the Pennsylvania Progressive, who was at the Eichelberger confrontation and captured the exchange on video, said, “The fact he knew we would be at his office at noon and chose not to be there showed his cowardice. It was not until we waited an hour and returned that his receptionist allowed us a few minutes with the Senator in an additional hour.”

Eichelberger has said that his June 19 remarks have been taken out of context. ThinkProgress contacted the senator’s office, asking for clarification and whether he would be issuing an apology. Chief of staff Jason High simply said that the Eichelberger “has already clarified his statement in multiple media outlets.” He pointed us to a June 27 Altoona Mirror story. However, while Eichelberger repeatedly says that his comments are being misinterpreted, nowhere in that article does he shed any more light onto what he actually meant:

He [Eichelberger] said members of Keystone Progress have taken what he said out of context. He said Thursday afternoon he has no intention of taking back or apologizing for anything he stated during the discussion with Leach about heterosexual marriage, bigamy, polygamy, other different forms of marriage and procreation. … Eichelberger said Morrill and his group are purposefully misinterpreting his comment.

Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents, an LGBT blog in Pennsylvania, writes, “It is one thing to disapprove of my identity or believe it is a choice, but quite another thing to suggest that I am permitted to exist in spite of my identity. Should I be grateful to Senator Eichelberger for not condoning someone taking away my existence?”

Politics

Wal-Mart embraces the employer mandate.

By Igor Volsky on Jun 30, 2009 at 4:51 pm

walmartToday, Wal-Mart, the largest private employer in the country wrote a letter (along with the Center for American Progress and SEIU) to the Obama administration expressing its support for the employer mandate:

We are for an employer mandate which is fair and broad in its coverage, but any alternative to an employer mandate should not create barriers to hiring entry level employees….Support for a mandate also requires the strongest possible commitment to rein in health care costs.

Read the full letter HERE.

As the Hill’s Jeffery Young observes, “The decision by Wal-Mart to break away from the Chamber and its ilk marks the first visible crack in the business coalition on healthcare reform.” Indeed, Wal-Mart’s embrace of the employer mandate enhances the existing system of employer-based coverage, levels the playing field between employers and preserves the employer contribution that will help finance health care reform. The Wonk Room has much more here.

Security

The Challenges Of Post-Occupation Iraq

By Peter Juul on Jun 30, 2009 at 4:45 pm

maliki-troopsToday is June 30, the day earmarked by the U.S.-Iraq security agreement for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraqi cities. Despite entreaties from U.S. military commanders to permit exceptions (as allowed in the agreement), Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki chose instead to reject these requests and declare June 30 “National Sovereignty Day.” Some Iraqis took to the streets to celebrate, while Maliki delivered a nationally televised valedictory address. Iraqi security forces are now responsible for security in Iraq, and U.S. combat forces can now only operate with the assent of Iraqi authorities.

Iraq has already seen its first post-withdrawal violence, with at least 15 people reported killed by a car bomb in the contested northern city of Kirkuk. The specter of continued and possibly increased violence in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq’s cities reflects the failure of U.S. strategy to resolve the fundamental intra-Iraqi tensions driving the conflict. While a combination of the surge, the Awakenings, and the marginalization of the Mahdi Army led to today’s low levels of violence, the lack of a political settlement has frozen existing conflicts -– particularly the Sunni-Shia sectarian war and the intra-Shia fight –- while allowing long-standing problems –- namely the Arab-Kurd divide –- to fester.

This reduction in violence has corresponded to an increase in political power for Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. With relatively successful campaigns against the Mahdi Army in Basra and Baghdad and the successful negotiation of a withdrawal agreement from the United States, Maliki has gone from a weak and ineffectual leader to Iraq’s most powerful political figure and, in the view of some, nascent strongman. Maliki has staked his legitimacy on two pillars –- the ability to achieve security and reclaiming national sovereignty from the United States. Read more

Media

Richard Posner Proposes Link Ban

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 30, 2009 at 4:43 pm

newspapers-1

Richard Posner’s sense of pragmatism seems to have entirely escaped him as he offered up this bizarre suggestion last week about how to maintain the financial viability of newsgathering:

Imagine if the New York Times migrated entirely to the World Wide Web. Could it support, out of advertising and subscriber revenues, as large a news-gathering apparatus as it does today? This seems unlikely, because it is much easier to create a web site and free ride on other sites than to create a print newspaper and free ride on other print newspapers, in part because of the lag in print publication; what is staler than last week’s news. Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

This just seems to totally misunderstand the relationship between the linked and the linker. In my years of blogging, I have never once heard the author of an article or the editor of a publication complain to me about having linked to an article. By contrast, on a daily basis authors and editors ask me to link to their articles. This is because having published the article on the World Wide Web, the authors and editors in question want people to read the articles. If they didn’t want to get links, they wouldn’t put the article online. If they put the article online, they want to get links. And certainly if any publication were to request that I stop linking to or otherwise mentioning their content, I would be happy to grant that request without any legal coercion.

Paraphrase is a somewhat different manner, but attempting to ban it would be wildly impractical. The Posner proposal would make it illegal for me to debate the merits of Posner’s argument without first securing Posner’s specific approval. Online dialogue about political topics would grind to a halt. It would become impossible to review movies, recommend TV shows, praise songs, etc.

Politics

Coleman concedes to Sen. Al Franken.

By Amanda Terkel on Jun 30, 2009 at 4:25 pm

Republican Norm Coleman conceded the 2008 election to Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) today. “It’s over,” Coleman said at a press conference in Minnesota, adding that he had called and congratulated Franken. Watch it:

President Obama issued a statement reading, “I look forward to working with Senator-Elect Franken to build a new foundation for growth and prosperity by lowering health care costs and investing in the kind of clean energy jobs and industries that will help America lead in the 21st century.”

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