We are seeing three common techniques used by the right wing to distort the facts:

1) Taking statements out of context

2) Ignoring alternate meanings of words (for example, when scientists use “trick” in informal communications they are  talking about finding a clever way to make things work, not trying to deceive people or distort data), and

3) Ignoring the science. There is a strong body of scientific evidence supporting climate change and this is the consensus view of scientists working in the field from different institutions from around the world. The science is not altered by anything in these emails.

The Republicans probably do receive more votes from doctors than they deserve considering their poor track record on health care issues. This will hopefully serve as one more wake up call for my colleagues who still support the GOP. The Republicans did try unsuccessfully to explain their flip flop on this issue, as is explained by Suzy Khimm.

I have set up another emergency site in case this blog is down:  http://liberalvalues.wordpress.com/

The emergency site will have recent posts and possibly new posts if this is down for a prolonged period.

There’s a new slogan making its way onto car bumpers and across the Internet. It reads simply: “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8”

A nice sentiment?

Maybe not.

The psalm reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”

Presidential criticism through witty slogans is nothing new. Bumper stickers, t-shirts, and hats with “1/20/09” commemorated President Bush’s last day in office.

But the verse immediately following the psalm referenced is a bit more ominous: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

The slogan comes at a time of heightened concern about antigovernment anger. Earlier this year, the president’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, said that Tea Parties could lead to something unhealthy. In September, authorities shut down a poll on Facebook asking if President Obama should be killed.

Still, that doesn’t push the Psalms citation into the realm of hate speech, says Chris Hansen, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The use of Psalm 109:8 is ambiguous as to whether its users are calling for the President to serve “only one term, or less than one term,” he says.

Deborah Lauter, director of civil rights at the Anti-Defamation League agrees that the bumper sticker falls within acceptable political discourse.

For it to be considered hate speech, it “would advocate actual violence or cite scripture that was more clear in its message.”

But that doesn’t mean that it’s completely innocent.

Disgusting but clever. No civil liberties organization would tolerate suppressing someone’s right to quote their religious views (despite the occasional claim from Republicans that Democrats want to take away their Bibles). This just might be as close as is possible to publicly call for the assassination of the president and avoid a visit from the Secret Service.

Posting of these pictures does not represent endorsement of PETA. Posting of these pictures could be taken as an endorsement of the use of nude models in such campaigns.

Their provision would restore a program called Title V, which, since the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, has allocated a yearly $50 million in grants to abstinence-only education programs. Obama let the program lapse in June, leaving some abstinence-only groups in dire straits. So in September, Sen. Orrin Hatch offered an amendment to restore Title V via heath-care reform, which (much to the outrage of liberal groups) just squeaked through the Senate Finance Committee with a 12–11 vote. A similar amendment, offered in the House by Rep. Terry Lee from Nebraska, died in committee.

If the Senate language survives reconciliation, the Title V program will be extended through 2014. This will not, however, bring abstinence funding back to the levels of the past decade. In 2008, Title V grants accounted for just under 25 percent of the federal abstinence budget (the rest of the budget came from other abstinence-only funding sources not restored in the Senate bill, including Community Based Abstinence Education Grants and the Adolescent Family Life Act).

How do Republicans, who claim to be fiscal conservatives, justify spending money for abstinence-only programs when such programs have repeatedly been proven to be ineffective? What is the point of offering Republicans such compromises when they won’t vote for the final bill regardless of what is in it?

The New York Daily News reports that authoritarian war monger Rudy Guiliani plans to announce that he will not be running for Governor of New York as many have speculated. They report that instead he will announce plans to run for the Senate. A Senate seat might be used as a spring board for a future presidential run.

There’s no word as to whether Giliani’s announcement will be in English or German. The speeches he gave at the Republican National Convention in 2004, along with many of his subsequent speeches, did sound much better in the original German.

Fox has been embarrassed again for using old video to exaggerate turn out at a recent event. Sean Hannity was recently caught doing this.  The Swamp reports on the latest case:

FOX has done it again, and this time, once again, FOX says its misplay of the wrong crowd video was another regrettable mistake.

Today, FOX News host Gregg Jarrett was talking about Republican Sarah Palin’s book tour and the crowd she is drawing at the start of it – no small turnout, with some 1,500 people lining up early this morning for a chance to get into this evening’s premier book-signing for Going Rogue in Grand Rapids.

“Sarah Palin continuing to draw huge crowds while she’s promoting her brand new book,” FOX’s Jarrett told his viewers. “Take a look at — these are some of the pictures just coming into us… The lines earlier had formed this morning.”

But it turns out that Happening Now had pulled some video of something that happened last year: Displaying video today from Palin’s campaign for the vice presidency, on the ticket with the GOP’s Sen. John McCain – which also drew considerable crowds, as shown today in video of a smiling Palin before an adoring campaign crowd.

“This was a production error in which the copy editor changed a script and didn’t alert the control room to update the video,” Michael Clemente, senior vice president of news at FOX, sad this evening. “There will be an on-air explanation during Happening Now on Thursday.”

TV Guide reports that Aaron Sorkin (Sports Night, The West Wing, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip) will be returning to television:

Sorkin tells TVGuideMagazine.comthat – like his previous series Sports Night (set around an ESPN-style sports news show) and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (set around a Saturday Night Live-esque sketch comedy show) – his next effort will take place backstage on yet another TV series.

“I’m going to be starting on a new TV series” when filming is done on the upcoming movie “The Social Network,” the Sorkin-penned account of the founding of Facebook directed by David Fincher, he says. “It’s going to be what turns out to be the third in the trilogy of TV shows that take place behind the scenes of a TV show, but this will be a different kind of TV show. That’s all I can let out of the bag right now.”

Sorkin said he “hopes” to reunite on the project with at least some of the actors he’s worked with previously. “If you’re a writer, when you’re find an actor like Josh Malina, Felicity Huffman, Brad Whitford, Matt Perry, Allison Janney, Richard Schiff, all these great actors that I’ve worked with, you just want to stick them in your pocket and work with them forever, so I hope so.” He also expects to be working with director and longtime collaborator Tommy Schlamme “for sure.”

I hope that whatever type of TV show it is set in lends itself to considering political issues.  Watching Studio 60 I often felt that Sorkin would have preferred writing The West Wing.

Update: The Waters of Mars was fantastic. Sadly it leads us towards The End of Time and the end of David Tennant’s run as The Doctor, but I also anticipate great things from Matt Smith with Steven Moffatt becoming show runner after The Doctor’s next regeneration.

Update II: In the past twenty-four hours I have watched Doctor Who and The Prisoner. I also bought a copy of the Star Trek movie. Ignoring the fact that there was no Blu-ray back then, I feel like I’m back in the 1960’s. I never would have guessed around 40 years ago that I’d be watching the same shows now which were showing back then. While more recent, in the past day I’ve also watched V.

Talking Points Memo summarizes a study which shows why I doubt that Democrats should have voted for any bill containing  the Stupak Amendment as it risks making it impossible for all women to purchase insurance which includes coverage of abortion:

A new study by the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services adds some expert imprimatur to what many progressives have been saying all along: The Stupak amendment to the House health care bill–which will prevent millions of women from buying health insurance policies that cover abortion–is likely to have consequences that reach far beyond its supposedly intended scope.

The report concludes that “the treatment exclusions required under the Stupak/Pitts Amendment will have an industry-wide effect, eliminating coverage of medically indicated abortions over time for all women, not only those whose coverage is derived through a health insurance exchange.”

In other words, though the immediate impact of the Stupak amendment will be limited to the millions of women initially insured through a new insurance exchange, over time, as the exchanges grow, the insurance industry will scale down their abortion coverage options until they offer none at all.

“As a result, Stupak/Pitts can be expected to move the industry away from current norms of coverage for medically indicated abortions. In combination with the Hyde Amendment, Stupak/Pitts will impose a coverage exclusion for medically indicated abortions on such a widespread basis that the health benefit services industry can be expected to recalibrate product design downward across the board in order to accommodate the exclusion in selected markets.”

It is disappointing that the Democrats have so far voted for a bill which contains such an amendment. This is about the fundamental right of a woman to control her own body. Democrats should not be willing to compromise over such fundamentsl rights. Rather than compromising, they should have spoken out against this attempt by Republicans to control health care and interfear in the decisions made between a patient and her doctor.

The Republican Party in recent years has become the organ of an authoritarian movement. The Democrats need to present a clear alternative to their views, not compromise over basic rights. Offering a clear voice in support of individual liberty, on abortion rights as well as other issues where the Republicans desire increased government intervention in the lives of individuals (despite their hypocritical adoption of the language of liberty), might also give independents a reason to stick with the Democrats.  If the Democrats fail to offer a clear contrast between themselves and the Republicans we are likely to continue to see stories about the loss of independent support.

Well, I’ve now made it through all six hours of the remake of The Prisoner. It wasn’t easy. As a huge fan of the original I had to see this, but it was a real bore. I’ll probably write a more detailed review later, but the main problem is that it totally missed the meaning of the original. A lot was thrown in which simply made no sense. In the end the Village revealed to be helping people but besides being a radical change from the original this did not even seem consistent with the prior episodes.

Some remakes make sense but this did not. It didn’t matter that Ron Moore totally changed the concept of Battlestar Galactica in his remake since the original was such a weak show, but there’s no point in re-imagining a show as great as The Prisoner and minimizing what made it great. This included aspects such as the attempt to discover why Six resigned and, more importantly, the underlying theme of fighting for the right of the individual to be individual.

The remake took as much from The Matrix as from Patrick McGoohan’s original version of The Prisoner. The two actual sequels to The Matrix were already pretty bad.  This was worse. Besides similarities from the pills to the Village existing in the mind , this remake and the sequels to The Matrix have something else in common: they should never have been made.

The picture of Sarah Palin on the cover of Newsweek has elicited some selective outrage from the right. In a post entitled Newsweek Photo of Palin Shows Media Bias and Sexism, David Brody begins “For all of you who live in a dream world and think the mainstream media isn’t biased, get a load of the latest cover of Newsweek…”

This is far more a case of conservatives loving to play the victim than anything meaningful. Max Blumenthal has written far more on how Palin plays on such victimization:

By emphasizing her own crises and her victimization by the “liberal media,” Palin has established an invisible, indissoluble bond with adherents of that subculture — so visceral it transcends any rational political analysis. As a result, her career has become a vehicle through which the right-wing evangelical movement feels it can express its deepest identity in opposition both to secular society and to its representatives in the Obama White House. Palin is perceived by its leaders — and followers — not as another cynical politician or even as a self-promoting celebrity, but as a kind of magical helper, the God-fearing glamour girl who parachuted into their backwater towns to lift them from the drudgery of everyday life, assuring them that they represented the “Real America.”

The cover is somewhat sexist but if  Sarah Palin did not want to be shown in pictures of this nature she should not have posed for this photo. Sure Newsweek could have used a number of other pictures available of her but Palin’s own behavior encourages covers such as this. Her winks and use of sex appeal are part of her act. Besides, as Steve M. points out, such sexist cover shots are hardly limited to conservatives.

A sexist photo or article hardly proves media bias in any one ideological direction. You can also ask Hillary Clinton about this.

The claim by David Brody that this cover proves any sort of liberal bias on the part of Newsweek or the mainstream media is also contradicted by this report of what appears to be anti-Obama conservative bias at Newsweek. It is possible to show some examples of bias in all directions, but there is hardly any case to support the conservative myth of the mainstream media having an overall liberal bias. The myth of a liberal media is just another example of conservatives claiming to be victims.

Update: Sarah Palin is also attacking the picture on Facebook.