The biggest Pinocchios of 2013.

WaPo's Fact Checker Glenn Kessler has a top 10 biggest lies list.

President Obama ended up with three of the most misleading claims of the year. But, despite the urging of some readers, his statement that “I didn’t set a red line” on Syria is not among them. We had looked closely at that claim and had determined that, in context, it was a bungled talking point, so that statement actually earned no rating.

"National Security Agency officials are considering a controversial amnesty that would return Edward Snowden to the United States..."

"... in exchange for the extensive document trove the whistleblower took from the agency."

So the message is: If you take enough, you can get away with it simply by giving it back.

This is a variation on the big lie ("a lie so 'colossal' that no one would believe that someone 'could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously'").  Go big enough, and you can get away with what the small time liars/cheats/thieves/monsters must pay for.

Or what was it Donald Trump — I think it was Donald Trump — said? The bank turns down people who ask for small loans, but if you ask for a yoooge enough loan, they don't say no. Can't find the precise thing I'm looking for, but I did find:

"As long as you are going to be thinking anyway, think big."

Back to Snowden. I thought when he first took it on the lam, he said that there were copies distributed to various persons for safekeeping, so that if he were killed, it would all come out. How is the NSA to know whether all those copies are called back?

ADDED: Meade, reading this out loud, helping me proofread, said: "'a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence'.... how about the audacity?"

I'm irritated for a second by his discontinuity and say "It's a quote," as if I think Meade is offering me writing advice and there's a better word than "impudence," and then I realize that Meade is gesturing at Obama — "Audacity of Hope" — and the colossal Lie-of-the-Year lie that Obama told.

"You do realize that's a Hitler quote?" I ask, unnecessarily.

"Hire me. You know, I'm a rather brilliant sign linguist. Perhaps I can explain Obamacare to the deaf."

Says Meade:

☝ IF YOU
☺ LIKE YOUR DOCTOR,
♺ YOU CAN KEEP
☃☮♬✈ YOUR DOCTOR.

PERIOD.

The Moon Museum.

A tiny little tile that might be on the moon.

There are six artworks located on the ceramic tile, each one in black and white only... [T]he last drawing in the upper left is by Andy Warhol. He created a stylized version of his initials which, when viewed at certain angles, can appear as a rocket ship or a crudely drawn penis. "He was being the terrible bad boy." says Myers. Warhol's work is covered by a thumb in the image often associated with Moon Museum, but other images with the drawing visible can be found.

Forrest "Frosty" Myers, who came up with the idea to get six great artists together and make a tiny little museum that would be on the moon." I find it very amusing that a little tile — it's 3/4" X 1/2" of  — should be called a "museum." For some reason, for the longest time, I've had a special love of humor that plays with or flips the largeness and smallness of things.

The discovery of The Moon Museum by chance today — why hadn't I heard of it before? — got me searching for "moon" in Andy Warhol's diaries, and I found this about some party in Aspen in 1982:

Buzz Aldrin came, from the moon. The astronaut. Took a lot of photographs of him. He’s aged but he was cute and glad to meet us. We decided to start lying that night— Chris told people he had a twelve-month-old baby and that he was watching it while his wife was back in New York and they all believed him. And I told them I was a deep-sea fisherman, and this lady invited me to Boca Raton. I haven’t been drinking at all.

"What would Machiavelli have thought when President Obama apologized for the fiasco of his health care rollout?"

"Far from earning respect, he would say, all he received was contempt. As one of Machiavelli’s favorite exemplars, Cesare Borgia, grasped, heads must sometimes roll. (Though in Borgia’s case, he meant it quite literally, though he preferred slicing bodies in half and leaving them in a public square.)"

A paragraph from the op-ed titled "Why Machiavelli Still Matters," published in the NYT, marking the 500th anniversary of Machiavelli's letter announcing the existence of his work, "The Prince."

The authors, John Scott and Robert Zaretsky, professors of political science and history, respectively, tweak Americans for their moralistic demands for virtues like honesty and generosity.

The proper aim of a leader is to maintain his state (and, not incidentally, his job)... [even] pursuing what appears to be vice [to achieve] security and well-being.

Even in a constitutional republic? And did Obama receive only contempt because he was honest or because he was dishonest? It seems to me that the contempt arises from our discovery of the dishonesty, not from his punctilious pursuit of virtue. Also, you have to take into account that Obama was elected — he did not seize power — and he was elected because people saw him as a repository of virtue. How does someone who was given power because of his perceived virtue retain power when a lack of virtue becomes apparent? How can he shore up his power by looking even less like the person people thought they had elected?

What would Machiavelli have thought? He'd have to do quite a bit of rethinking to make that Cesare Borgia stuff into advice for an American President.

"It seems the woman who falsely claimed she received an anti-gay 'tip' from two patrons..."

"... never donated the money she received from supporters to help wounded vets like she promised."

Liars lie.

In other news, Bill Clinton doodled a penis.

"Crazy, I know, but I've actually been encouraging my son and his friends to use sexting — minus the lewd photos — to protect themselves..."

"... from being wrongly accused of rape. Because just as damning text messages and Facebook posts helped convict the high-schoolers in Steubenville of rape, technology can also be used to prove innocence."

Writes Roxanne Jones of ESPN. She's getting some attention for this, notably from Melissa McEwan, who's the type of blogger who, approaching this topic, begins with "[Content Note: Rape culture.]," which is — if I understand the culture of people who say "rape culture" —an enactment of the belief that encountering the topic of rape triggers a post-traumatic experience. Why doesn't the warning itself cause alarm? Isn't that the nature of warning? I suspect that the message isn't so much to the individuals who experience post-traumatic stress but to everyone: Never forget how deeply rape hurts.

After the warning, McEwan writes:

This is an actual fucking article authored by former EPSN [sic] vice president Roxanne Jones and printed at CNN in the year of our lord Jesus Jones two thousand and thirteen: "Young men, get a 'yes' text before sex."

Hey, why didn't we get a warning that you were going to use vulgar language and mock Jesus? Because McEwan is selective about which sensitivities to pet and which to kick in the ribs. It's a way to be funny, and fuck you if you don't laugh. Plus, some people like Jesus Jones. I kinda do. Saying "Jesus Jones" is like saying "Jiminy Christmas" or whatever cornball/hip substitution for "Jesus Christ" amuses you.

[Roxanne Jones] actually posits that a text message can verify consent, as though it's not possible to ask "Do you want to have sex with me?" followed by a series of any other conceivable questions that might elicit a yes, and then delete the interceding messages to make the "yes" look like a direct reply, irrespective of what the actual reply was.

But what Jones — Roxanne, not Jesus — wrote was: "Never have sex with a girl unless she's sent you a text that proves the sexual relationship is consensual beforehand." All McEwan is saying is that some efforts at concocting text evidence could be fake. But Jones said "a text that proves," without elaborating what text would be adequate proof. And McEwan doesn't seem to realize that deleted interceding messages would be recoverable, and the deletions themselves would be evidence against the accused. If Jones's idea is any good, it's because she's encouraging building relationships — however minimal — around sexual encounters and doing so in writing so you can defend yourself if you are falsely accused.

Give Jones some credit for saying "relationship." She also recommends "follow[ing] up any sexual encounter with a tasteful text message saying how you both enjoyed being with one another — even if you never plan on hooking up again." That's also about maintaining relationships. If your concern is avoiding accusations — false, true, or true-ishly false — don't do things that provoke the person who might go on the attack. Telling males to send some nice texts is interestingly similar to telling females not to go traipsing about in short skirts. It's don't-be-a-victim advice that some people find aggravatingly close to letting the victimizer off the hook.

But, of course, McEwan doesn't want to talk about the potential for false or false-ish accusations. She rails at Jones for talking about "stupid girls" who get drunk, throw themselves at young men, and then accuse them of rape:

Ms. Jones, I was not raped because I am stupid. I was raped because I had the misfortune of being in the presence of a rapist who was determined to rape me. Fuck off.

McEwan is an enforcer of the doctrinaire position that the issue of false accusations is such a distraction from the real problem that anyone who mentions it should be slammed down hard. Isn't it odd that extreme sensitivity about rape is expressed by telling another woman to "fuck off"? Why is fucking used as the metaphor for the expression of extreme hate? It sounds as though, in the mind of the person deploying the metaphor, fucking equals rape. It's a violent hateful action directed at the woman's body.

What is the true scope of this "rape culture" we are being warned about?

"Though you haven't heard of it, there are some fundamentalist churches that encourage dating and marrying nonbelievers and trying to convert them."

"It's called 'missionary dating' and it's a real thing."

Pre-election jobs numbers fabricated.

The NY Post reports.

Björk explains television from the poetic perspective but warns you not to let poets lie to you.

All those dots that make up the picture are "millions and millions of little screens," and so "you are watching very many things when you are watching TV."

Your head is very busy all the time to calculate and put it all together into one picture. And then because you're so busy doing that, you don't watch very carefully what the program you are watching is really about. So you become hypnotized. So all that's on TV, it just goes directly into your brain and you stop judging it's right or not.  You just swallow and swallow. This is what an Icelandic poet told me....

Full text at the link, but it's better in video form (if you can handle all those tiny little dots):

What's happening with charging smokers extra under Obamacare?

I was noticing this in an old post:

The Affordable Care Act... allows health insurers to charge smokers buying individual policies up to 50 percent higher premiums starting [Jan. 2014]. For a 55-year-old smoker, the penalty could reach nearly $4,250 a year. A 60-year-old could wind up paying nearly $5,100 on top of premiums.

At the time, I wondered about picking only on smokers and also whether this sort of targeting would move on to other sinners in the Religion of Health.

But now I'm just wondering who will admit to smoking? When they're fiddling around on a website that's known to be a disaster and they see they'll pay thousands more if they check "yes" for smoking, are they really going to resist switching to "no"?

The whole system was built on a lie — IYLYPYCKYP — and the system provokes and antagonizes people who are being trusted to be truthful. And you know smokers are rebels.

ADDED: That James O'Keefe Project Veritas video has Obamacare "navigators" advising the undercover investigator to lie about smoking: "You lie because your premiums will be higher... Don’t tell them that.... I always lie on mine."

"Whatever Bill Clinton’s motives — Republicans say he is distancing his wife, Hillary Clinton, from the ObamaCare debacle in advance of a White House run..."

Says Jonathan Easley at The Hill in a piece titled "Obama is boxed in by Bill Clinton."

Do we really need Republicans to explain that Bill is out to help Hillary? How could anyone begin to analyze Bill Clinton's remarks about Obamacare without the assumption that he's positioning Hillary for 2016?

Now, Bill's main quote was: "I personally believe, even if it takes a change in the law, that the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they’ve got." And I think we know that it's not really possible to keep Obamacare and somehow force private insurance companies to re-activate all the plans that have been canceled. What Bill is really saying is Obama lied. Obama made promises he knew would be broken, because that's what it took to get the government's health-care machine going.

Hillarycare failed, but the up side of that is that Hillary isn't loaded with the political damage that had to happen in the process of dragging everyone into the machine. That's all on Obama. Millions feel the pain and the anger as the big machine grinds into motion and pulls them in. In retrospect, it's a benefit to Hillary that Obama got the win in '08 and that his name went on the "care" that's hurting so much.

Once Obamacare is in motion and everybody's in and the screaming at the intake point has given way to muffled groaning from inside the grinding machinery, a beneficent Hillary will sweep forward with plans for easing that pain. The competent one is here at last, now that you're all in there and can't complain to her about that nasty, deceitful intake process.

ADDED: Jonathan Cohn explains how "Bill Clinton Is Wrong" about "How Obamacare Works." But Cohn is assuming (or pretending) that Bill isn't smart, devious, and political (which I'm taking for granted).

"Is he a fool or is he lying? I'm leaning toward lying..."

Here's an old post of mine, from July 21, 2009:

"You know, I have to say that I am not familiar with the provision you are talking about."

Obama answering the question: "Will people be able to keep their insurance and will insurers be able to write new policies even though H.R. 3200 is passed?"

Is he a fool or is he lying?

I'm leaning toward lying because of the way his answer emphasizes keeping insurance — which (I think) the bill permits — and avoids talking about writing new policies — which (I think) it forbids.

AND: Remember Obama's program to collect information on "fishy" things people were saying about Obamacare?

ALSO: From August 2009, a discussion of how the health-care debate would have gone if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency:

She wouldn't have blithely assumed Americans would quietly accept the vast, complex restructuring of health care that the congressional Democrats dumped on us. Obama naively thought that he was enough, and the more-liberal-than-America Democrats imagined they could get by on the magic of our admiration for the charming new President, who would look even lovelier as he amassed glittering accomplishments. Wouldn't he be wonderful? Wouldn't America be wonderful to have elected such a fine man President?

MORE: Now, this is what I was really looking for when I went back into my old posts under the Obamacare tag. I took a "cold look" at a speech Obama gave on September 9, 2009. I quoted him:

[I]f you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.

And I said:

I get it. Nothing will require anything of me if I have what I like (and I do). But if you change the structure of the insurance market, my insurance company may not survive or it may be forced to change. Then how do I keep what I have? What I have now may not exist in the future. This is why I do not feel secure.  

I quoted him again: "What this plan will do is to make the insurance you have work better for you." And I said: "But I like my plan now. You admit you're going to change it."

I quoted him: "Under this plan, it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition." And I said:

Not just me, but anybody. The health insurance business will have to change.  I understand the good of helping people with medical conditions, but I wonder what it will do to the private business to suddenly change this.  

I can see very clearly that I never believed the lies he's apologizing for now. Much more at that link.

From "Change" to "Exchange" — the deflation of Obama elation and how can old enthusiasts find comfort.

Surely, it must be happening, an emergent Obama nostalgia, to take the edge off the dreariness of what the Obama administration has become. There must be those who, seeking solace, are looking back to old comforts like Obama Girl:



Let's close in on that 4th verse:

You’re into border security
Let’s break this border between you and me
Universal healthcare reform
It makes me warm
You tell the truth unlike the right
You can love but you can fight
You can Barack me tonight
I’ve got a crush on Obama

Oh, it's so hard to keep nostalgia pure. Can you watch — and by "you," I mean only those who have loved Obama — and not talk back? Universal healthcare reform/It makes me warm. Yeah, "warm" as in: overheated with anger. You tell the truth unlike the right... Yeah, that's true if you read it the right way. It could mean that all politicians talk at us in a manner that is intended to be received as "truth-telling," that contains elements of truth, exaggeration, and falsehood, and that there are different ways to perform this necessary political activity, and the politicians on the right do it one way, and the way Obama does it is a different way.

3 Pinocchios for "The White House effort to blame insurance companies for lost plans."

From WaPo's Fact Checker Glenn Kessler, who, you may remember, gave 4 Pinocchios (the max) to Obama's "if you like your plan, you can keep it." Why did he back off a Pinocchio on this but not that? The official distinction between 3 and 4 is: 3 means "Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions" and 4 is "Whoppers."

What Kessler says today about blaming the insurance companies is:

First of all, the administration wrote the rules that set the conditions under which plans lose their grandfathered status. But more important, the law has an effective date so far in the past that it virtually guaranteed that the vast majority of people currently in the individual market would end up with a notice saying they needed to buy insurance on the Obamacare exchanges.

The administration’s effort to pin the blame on insurance companies is a classic case of misdirection. Between 75 and 95 percent of the problem stems from the effective date, but the White House chooses to keep the focus elsewhere.

"I’m pro-choice... Sometimes in my darker moments, I’m anti-choice. I think abortion should be mandatory for about 30 years."

Said Dan Savage, when invited to express a "dangerous idea" that might "change the world for the better."

So, obviously, he's kidding, but what springs to a person's mind upon a particular prompting says something about that mind. You can't know exactly what, and, in fact, even when a person wants to be taken seriously and literally, you can't know that he's conveyed precisely what's in his mind.

We can only speculate what lies behind the outburst "abortion should be mandatory for about 30 years." I'd speculate that Savage isn't just pro-choice, he's pro-abortion. Not that he would require women to get abortions.

Mandatory abortions, of the sort done in China, are terrible impositions on a woman's bodily integrity. I doubt if Savage likes that idea  — although it's possible that he gets a kick out picturing a forced abortions performed on socially conservative women whose offspring are too likely to grow up to be socially conservative voters.

Having voted to legalize marijuana, Coloradans now vote to tax it.

Heavily.

Well, of course. You legalize it so you can tax it. To repurpose an old Obama-and-marijuana quote: That was the point.



Obama's appearance arrives at 0:57, after which a commenter (Howard Fineman) opines: "One of the reasons Barack Obama is so popular, especially among younger people, is that he seems so real, he seems to acknowledge the reality of things. It's kind of almost like a dog whistle kind of thing. Older people can't hear it. Younger people hear it. And that's one of the things that they hear. He seems to be willing to be honest."

I need some medical marijuana for my hearing. I'm old. I was old back in 2006 when that clip came out. Yes, I voted for him, but not because I believed he was a new kind of honest. And now, in 2013, watching that, what I hear — on the sound wavelengths that penetrate my old head — is the word "seems," screeching out of Fineman's word montage: He seems so real... he seems to acknowledge... He seems to be willing to be honest.

"Seems" and "willing."

Willing... like: Okay, I'll go along with this looking-honest bullshit for you folks for a while. So follow me, little puppies. I've got a new kind of reality kind of thing to kind of like show you. Can you, like, you know, hear it, kids?

And I got a big laugh out of Kathleen Parker, at the very end saying, "The thing people can't stand is the lies." I then rewatched the clip and lingered over the part where they showed Bill Clinton saying he "experimented" with marijuana and "didn't like it" and "didn't inhale." I found that very refreshing.

That's the kind of honesty I like right now. It was a lie, and you knew it was a lie when he told it. There was none of this feeling of oh, wow, look at the reality, man. What felt real was: There's a politician that will smile and lie straight to our faces. He's a liar.

Those were the days.

The Sebelius lie: "We didn't have the luxury of [more website testing] with the law that says, it's go time on October 1."

On "Fox News Sunday" today, Chris Wallace played a video clip:

KATHLEEN SEBELIUS, SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: I think that there -- in an ideal world would have been a lot more testing. We didn't have the luxury of that with the law that says, it's go time on October 1.

He then said:

But it turns out, that is just not true. Take a look at this. "According to the law, the enrollment period shall be, "as determined by the secretary." Secretary Sebelius. Nothing about October 1. So, she decided to go ahead with this plan of October 1ST.

Incredible... not just that she would lie but that she'd lie about something so easily shown to be false. Just astounding.

Should we bully Rand Paul about plagiarism for cutting and pasting 3 pages of Heritage Fund text into his book "Government Bullies"?

Buzzfeed uses the word "plagiarism," but there is an endnote to the Heritage Fund report and Heritage Fund itself is only saying "we like when people cite our work."

How bad is this? (Multiple answers allowed.)
	If only he'd blocked and indented it would have been nothing, but as it is, it's plagiarism.
	Makes him less of a distinctive character, more like a name to be slapped on a group project.
	Puts him in a category with other middling politicos, like Joe Biden.
	It's a mark of dishonesty, but a mild one, and politicians are always at least somewhat dishonest.
	As dishonesty, this is nothing compared to Obama's lies about Obamacare.
	I'll be honest. This was dishonest, and it should be held against him.
	More evidence that political books are unreadable trash.
	A writer worth reading, even if dishonest, would never leave someone else's sentences verbatim.
	What's truly unoriginal is a book where someone else's prose seems to blend right in.
pollcode.com free polls

Bill Scher does not accept that it was a lie to say "if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it."

IN THE COMMENTS, pm317 said: "If you like your plan Video montage from NYMag. What did that Scher guy say -- Obama didn't say it like it was some talking point and that he said it because he was asked about it? How dumb can he be?"