Another Messaging Problem For Democrats: 71% of Americans Think That It’s Important That Republicans Should Listen to TEA Party

It looks like the Democrats have another messaging problem. Despite the left’s attempt at trivializing and demonizing the TEA party for the past year or so, 71% of all Americans still believe that it is important for the Republicans to listen to the grassroots movement, according to a new Gallup poll:

About 7 in 10 national adults, including 88% of Republicans, say it is important that Republican leaders in Congress take the Tea Party movement's positions and objectives into account as they address the nation's problems. …

Although few Democrats (6%) are supporters of the Tea Party or even have a favorable view of it (11%), more than half say it is important that the Republican Party take the Tea Party’s positions into account. Why this is the case is unclear, although Democrats may simply feel that the opposing party should pay attention to all of its constituencies.

Perhaps underscoring the same principle, Republicans overwhelming feel their leaders should take the Tea Party’s positions into account, even though barely half are self-identified as Tea Party supporters."

This poll is especially telling, if you consider when the poll was taken. Ed Morrissey explains:

I’d somehow doubt that Democrats are really all that concerned about whether the GOP listens to “all its constituencies.” Their party leaders and the media spend most of their time sneering at the “teabaggers,” and dismissing them as cranks, or worse. The flip side to this analysis is that 44% of Democrats would think it unimportant for politicians to pay attention to their constituents, which seems unlikely to be the case.

“New survey” is somewhat relative. While Gallup published these results today, the survey itself was taken between January 14 and 16, within a few days after the shooting in Tucson and the media’s rush to smear the Tea Party as an unindicted co-conspirator. If those numbers were ever going to suffer, it would have been that week. Yet majorities in all party affiliations think that their ideas deserve important consideration, including 53% of Democrats, 72% of independents, and 88% of Republicans.

So, all of the left’s demagoguing and their attempt at convicting Palin and the TEA party for the Tucson Tragedy in the court of public opinion has fallen on deaf ears. Hopefully, the Democrats will stop their pointless finger-pointing, but I doubt that will ever happen. They’re hoping that if they repeat it long enough that people will eventually start to believe it, but they don’t seem to be having any luck.

Mission Not Accomplished: 57% of Americans Don't Blame Political Rhetoric For Gifford's Shooting

Seconds after the Giffords' shooting, the left immediately proceeded to blame the right, Sarah Palin and the TEA Party most of all, for shooting by claiming that their rhetoric creates a violent aura in government. Despite all of the political mudslinging from the left, the majority of Americans aren't buying what the media is selling, according to a new CBS poll:

Nearly six in 10 Americans say the country's heated political rhetoric is not to blame for the Tucson shooting rampage that left six dead and critically wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, according to a CBS News poll.

In the wake of the shooting, much focus has been put on the harsh tone of politics in Washington and around the country, particularly after a contentious midterm election. Rhetoric and imagery from both Republicans and Democrats have included gun-related metaphors, but the majority of the country isn't connecting the shooting to politics.....

Overall, 57 percent of respondents said the harsh political tone had nothing to do with the shooting, compared to 32 percent who felt it did. Republicans were more likely to feel the two were unrelated - 69 percent said rhetoric was not to blame; 19 percent said it played a part. Democrats were more split on the issue - 49 percent saw no connection; 42 percent said there was.

Independents more closely reflected the overall breakdown - 56 percent said rhetoric had nothing to do with the attack; 33 percent felt it did.

I'm ecstatic to see that people are seeing this huffing and puffing by the left for exactly what it is: BS. All evidence shows that he couldn't have cared less about Palin or the TEA Party. He was apolitical. His rants just seemed to be just rants of a madman, who had held a grudge since Giffords became US Representative in 2007. That was way before the rise of Palin or the TEA Party.

Democrats were hoping to not to "waste this crisis" and villanize and bully the right into silence and obscurity, so they could further their anti-2nd amendment agenda and more, but they failed big time.

H/T to Ed Morrissey

Clinton: Come On, Byrd Being in KKK Isn’t a Big Deal, He Only Did It to Get Elected

While in Charleston, West Virginia, Bill Clinton tried to explain away why we should just ignore that the late Senator Byrd was a member of the KKK:



Um, Bill, It is hard to believe that Bobby didn’t join the Ku Klux Klan back in 1942, a full four years before that he ever ran for anything, only to help himself get elected to office in a southern state. Furthermore, he recruited others to join them. One don’t actively urge other people to join an organization that one doesn’t believe in at all, and he raised in the ranks up to an Exalted Cyclops of that terrorist organization, as well. It doesn’t seem like he just had a “fleeting relationship” with the KKK.

Are we, also, supposed to forget that he, along with many other Southern Democrats, filibustered and arguing AGAINST the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for 14 hours? Is that how he “spent his life making it up”, Mr. President? Now, it is true that there are no perfect politician, but come on, this is more than just a slight oversight. It was a pattern of conduct that lasted decades.

He seemed pretty adamant about his disdain for blacks. He even went so far as to send a letter to the then-Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi expressing his contempt for blacks:

I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side ... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.
— Robert C. Byrd, in a letter to Sen. Theodore Bilbo (D-MS), 1944

Come on stopped trying to put sugar on this and calling it candy.

Boehner: We Need to Raise the Retirement Age to 70 & Other Things That'll Make Social Security Solvent| Update: Clyburn, Pelosi Twist Themselves Into Human Pretzel Rewriting Boehner's Statement

Yesterday, the House Minority Leader, John Boehner, said that we should be more like the French and raise our retirement age to 70, the point when one would be eligible for Social Security benefits:

A Republican-held Congress might look to raise the retirement age to 70, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) suggested Monday.

Boehner, the top Republican lawmaker in the House, said raising the retirement age by five years, indexing benefits to the rate of inflation and means-testing benefits would make the massive entitlement program more solvent.

We're all living a lot longer than anyone ever expected, Boehner said in a meeting with the editors of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. And I think that raising the retirement age — going out 20 years, so you're not affecting anyone close to retirement — and eventually getting the retirement age to 70 is a step that needs to be taken.

This makes perfect sense. With people living longer than we did when Social Security was started, it seems only logical that more money would have to be doled out for longer periods of time than the program was initially designed to would cause solvency problems. Also, with medical advancements, people are living better than they did and could work longer than previous generations could. That's only one of his ideas:

But Boehner also floated several other reforms to Social Security, paired with raising the retirement age, to make it more solvent. Boehner said benefits should be tied to increases in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) instead of wage inflation, and he suggested reducing or eliminating benefits to Americans with a substantial non-Social Security income while retired.

We just need to be honest with people, he said. I'm not suggesting it's going to be easy, but I think if we did those three things, you'd pretty well solve the problem.

Now, we all knew that the Democrats were going to jump on this like junkyard dogs on a steak bone. However, I expected some sort of "Why does the GOP hate old people?" type of talking points, but no, they threw a swerve on me with this one:

Democrats are slamming House Minority Leader John Boehner for reportedly saying the Social Security retirement age should be raised to pay for the Afghanistan war -- though Boehner's office vehemently denies he made that connection.....

"The House Republican Leader John Boehner and his GOP colleagues want to raise the Social Security retirement age to 70 and cut benefits in order to pay for George Bush's war and their failed policies of the past," House Democratic Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., said in a written statement. "Democrats will not stand for this."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office put out a "fact sheet" accusing Boehner of wanting to "slash" Social Security not to stabilize the program, but to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan - though Iraq was not mentioned anywhere in the Tribune-Review article. 

I can't find anywhere in Boehner's comments regarding his idea of raising the retirement age that has anything to do with Iraq or Afghanistan. In other words, they're lying.

Obama: Panel of Experts Said We Should Stop Drilling Off-Shore/Same Expert Panel: Um...No, We Didn't

Another member of the Obama Administration has being caught being less the 100% truthful in the execution of his duties in order to further advance his true liberal agenda. This time it was the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. In a report that he gave to Obama recommending that a halt to off-shore drilling, it has been discovered that he neglected to mention that the panel of experts that he claimed supported this ban didn't exactly think that a ban would do any good. In fact, they thought that it would be a horrible idea:

In a letter the experts sent to Salazar, they said his primary recommendation "misrepresents" their position and that halting the drilling is actually a bad idea.

The oil rig explosion occurred while the well was being shut down - a move that is much more dangerous than continuing ongoing drilling, they said.

They also said that because the floating rigs are scarce and in high demand worldwide, they will not simply sit in the Gulf idle for six months. The rigs will go to the North Sea and West Africa, possibly preventing the U.S. from being able to resume drilling for years.

They also said the best and most advanced rigs will be the first to go, leaving the U.S. with the older and potentially less safe rights operating in the nation's coastal waters.

So, not only will adversely affect our economy and domestic oil supply now and probably in the future, which will make us even more dependent on foreign oil, but it'll, also, be more dangerous and possibly cause more oil spills, if we stop drilling all of a sudden.

It's hard to imagine that Salazar could have misinterpreted what the experts meant. He outright twisted their words and left out vital parts of their report in order to make it say what he wants it to say to further his liberal agenda:

The experts, recommended by the National Academy of Engineering, say Interior Secretary Ken Salazar modified their report last month, after they signed it, to include two paragraphs calling for the moratorium on existing drilling and new permits.

Salazar's report to Obama said a panel of seven experts "peer reviewed" his recommendations, which included a six-month moratorium on permits for new wells being drilled using floating rigs and an immediate halt to drilling operations.

"None of us actually reviewed the memorandum as it is in the report," oil expert Ken Arnold told Fox News. "What was in the report at the time it was reviewed was quite a bit different in its impact to what there is now. So we wanted to distance ourselves from that recommendation."

This is a gross violation of the public trust. I have to wonder if Obama knew of Salazar's deception or that he neglected to not double-checking the validity of what Salazar said. I think that it was the latter because why wouldn't he trust someone in his Cabinet? He should be able to trust them, but this shows how far some liberals will go to enact their agenda to the detriment of the entire country. How can we trust the information that comes from the President, if the people around him are not trustworthy?

Obama's Fuzzy Math: He's 1.2 Million Short of the 1.6 Million Jobs He Were Claimed Created by Stimulus

The Obama Administration isn't only liberal with their policies, but they are liberal with their counting, as well:

A private-sector company that tracks government contracts says President Obama's $787 billion stimulus bill has created 407,000 private-sector jobs this year, much less than the 1.6 million jobs the Obama administration has claimed.

At the same time, the company's analysts are finding that many businesses are changing their strategies to take advantage of the government funds being dispersed.

Analysts at Onvia, a Seattle-based company, who monitor the government's contracting activity using specialized software say $37.5 billion of stimulus money has flowed to the private sector to date.

"This is quite different than the government's numbers, which claim as many as 1.6 million jobs already created," Onvia said. "The difference is due to the fact that the feds can track only two layers of stimulus money flow, far short of the full paper trail required. Therefore, a lot of guesswork and extrapolations go into the government's math, and the jobs numbers are forecasts more than anything else."

Onvia Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer Eric Gillespie explained to The Washington Times, "What the federal government is recording is largely dollars that have left the Beltway. They aren't tracking the projects and contracts on the ground."

"They don't know if those dollars landed on the ground because their reporting requirements say they only have to track two layers beyond the federal level," he said. "So if it goes from the state to a county, they will know that. But if it goes from a county to a city or from a county to a contractor there is no legal requirement for them to track that, which is why the federal views are latent and they get it three, six, or 12 months late."

So, Obama is basically guessing on how many jobs have been actually created by his deficit spendapalooza. He doesn't have any proof to back his claims.

This is why we need an investigation on what is really going on with the dispersion of the stimulus money. We can't totally trust this Administration's guestimations and suspect record keeping. We must know for sure whether Obama and the Democrats kept their promises to put America back to work or wasting all of our money of worthless government programs, yet again.

Proof-Positive That He Is An Idiot: Gibbs: What If They Would of Compared Bush to Hitler?

Was Robert Gibbs on Mars for the last 8 years? That is the only explanation that I can come up with that will explain how he can even say this:

Today, Robert Gibbs lamented some of the offensive signs at Bachmann's anti-health bill rally (of which there were some, but not enough to even fill out HuffPo's 12 Most Offensive slideshow):

"I will continue to say what I've said before. You hear in this debate, you hear analogies, you hear references to, you see pictures about and depictions of individuals that are truly stunning, and you hear it all the time. People -- imagine five years ago somebody comparing health care reform to 9/11. Imagine just a few years ago had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.

Hopefully we can get back to a discussion about the issues that are important in this country that we can do so without being personally disagreeable and set up comparisons to things that were so insidious in our history that anybody in any profession or walk of life would be well advised to compare nothing to those atrocities."

Right? Apparently, he hasn't seen these or these.

I, also, wonder where his outrage was when fellow Democrat Alan Grayson compared healthcare crisis to the Holocaust.

Mary Katherine Ham has many more examples on her post. He isn't entitled to his own set of facts from his own revisionist history.

Did Obama Just Imply That More Goverment in Healthcare Means Less Bureaucracy?

Something Obama said during a town-hall earlier today was very peculiar:

"(Cleveland Clinic) set up a system where patient care is the No. 1 concern, not bureaucracy, what forms have to be filled out, 'What do we get reimbursed for?"' Obama said. "Those are changes that I think the American people want to see."

Yes, Obama people want to see less bureaucracy and patient care to be #1, but what you are proposing won't lead to less bureaucracy.

This statement is a bit off an oxymoron when you consider that what Obama is proposing is at least a partial government takeover of the healthcare system. Have you ever hear of anything becoming less bureaucratic after government gets involved? I haven't. The inconvenient truth for Obama in this quote is that more government intervention never means less bureaucracy. It always means more red tape and paperwork. More people have to ok an expenditure when taxpayer money is involved.

Does Obama know how government programs work?

Tapper Exposes White House's "100 Days, 100 Projects" Fabrication, Severely Embellishes Accomplishments

Here is a patial transcript from the conversation between ABC's Jake Tapper and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. Tapper pointed out an embellishment in the booklet that the White House released to brag about the "successes" of the Recovery Act after 100 days:

Tapper: I looked at your "100 Days, 100 Projects" booklet yesterday, and the very first one says, quote, "Using $27 million of Recovery Act funding a public housing development in D.C., the Regency House, has undergone a green retrofit.  As part of this upgrade, the building installed solar panels, green roof, rainwater collection system, energy-efficient lighting, as well as water-conserving toilets, showerheads and faucets." But when I called the D.C. Housing Authority, they said only $59,000 was spent of stimulus money, not $27 million, and of these seven things mentioned, only two of the seven were actually done --

GIBBS:  I think the mistake -- mistake in that one, as you blogged about earlier, took a series of different projects in a cut- and-paste into one.

TAPPER:  OK.  So it wasn't as clear and -- it wasn't as accurate as it could have been?

GIBBS:  I -- I think that's accurate to say, yes.

"It wasn't as accurate as it could have been?" That is not just a slight understatement. It was an outright lie and total misrepresentation of the truth.

There is a huge difference between $27 M and $59 K. It's not just a slight miscalculation. Also, their claim of seven projects finished is a complete fabrication.

Obama's White House seems to be trying to rewrite history to make himself look good. Most of the press is so in love with him that they don't even think to thouroughly investigate his claims.

I understand why he feels like must do this. His stimulus package is a complete boondoggle, and everyone knows it. Now, he must do his best to portray it as beneficial to the economy when most of the evidence suggests otherwise.

After all, his porkulus package isn't even stimulus by definition. Stimulus is supposed to be that a massive amount of money is thrown into the economy in a short amount of time. The reality is that most of the money won't be spent for years.

Al Gore: I Waited 2 Years to Criticize Bush, Weekly Standard: Liar, Liar Pants on Fire

The Goracle scolded former VP Dick Cheney for speaking against Obama's policy:

“I waited two years after I left office to make statements that were critical,” Gore said during an interview on CNN, pointing out that his critiques were focused on “policy.”

Adam White of the Weekly Standard did a little research and found out something shocking. The Goracle lied. He found some quotes from him starting within Bush's first year in office:

Contra Costa Times, 1/10/02: "While praising President Bush for his leadership in the war effort, he went on to say that the economy was another matter. 'I'm not here to make a political speech, but I am concerned,' Gore said."

Boston Globe, 4/14/2002: "'They are wrong to vilify honorable men and women who oppose their right-wing domestic agenda and oppose a blatantly dishonest budget,' Gore said. 'They are wrong to imply that those who stand up to them are somehow unpatriotic.'" (Headline -- "Combative Gore Lashes Out At Administration Policies In Fla. Speech, He Hits Bush For 'Radical Agenda'") [Note: So much for his assertion today that his early criticism of the Bush Administration focused on policy.]

USA Today, 4/15/2002: "Gore's speech was the emotional peak of the convention. With practiced skill, humor and a passion some delegates said they did not see during the campaign, Gore denounced virtually every element of Bush's domestic policy." (Headline -- "Gore's fiery speech raises questions of plans")

NY Times, 4/23/2002: "Sounding very much like the candidate he was and may become again, Al Gore said today that the environment was a moral issue and the Bush administration was giving 'policy payoffs to polluters.' 'Our environment is under siege,' Mr. Gore , the former vice president, said in an Earth Day speech here to 400 students at Vanderbilt University. 'The Bush administration has chosen to serve the special interests instead of the public interests and subsidize the obsolete failed approaches of the past instead of the exciting new solutions of the future. Instead of ensuring that our water is clean to drink, they thought that maybe there wasn't enough arsenic in the drinking water.'"

LA Times, 6/30/2002: "In a speech Saturday night to local Democrats, Gore attacked Bush's economic policies as "a total catastrophe." He also noted that in the war on terrorism, the U.S. has yet to catch Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and he denounced the White House for "trying to use the war for political purposes.'" [I guess that's just more pure criticism of policy ... .]

So, apparently Pelosi isn't the only one who is having trouble keeping his foot out of his mouth lately.

What could he have been thinking? He had to know that this could be easily researched and disproved.

In-Fighting Starts Early in Obama Administration: Pelosi: CIA Lied, Leon Panetta: No, We Didn't

A firestorm of controversy has surrounded Nancy Pelosi about what she knew and when she knew about the use of water boarding. She has sudden outrage over the practice that many say she knew of years ago and said nothing about her disapproval.

Now, she said that when she was supposedly briefed about the subject the CIA lied to her and to the rest of Congress:

Under strong attack from Republicans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the CIA and Bush administration of misleading her about waterboarding detainees in the war on terror and sharply rebutted claims she was complicit in its use.

"To the contrary ... we were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used," she told reporters, referring to a formal CIA briefing she received in the fall of 2002.

Pelosi said she subsequently learned that other lawmakers were told several months later by the CIA about the use of waterboarding.

"I wasn't briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it," she said.

Huh?

She was the head of the Intelligence Committee in 2002. She had to have been briefed. She wouldn't have been briefed that someone else was briefed.

But Pelosi defended her own lack of action on the issue, saying her focus at the time was on wresting congressional control from Republicans so her party could change course.

"No letter could change the policy. It was clear we had to change the leadership in Congress and in the White House. That was my job—the Congress part," Pelosi said.

While it is true that no single letter could have changed the policy, she didn't have to stop at just one letter if she really cared as much as she says she does. She could've shouted it from the mountaintops, but she didn't say one word for years.

In response to her excuse of her only job being helping Democrats get elected, don't you think that if she would've blown the whistle about waterboarding in 2002-3 when she was told about the enhanced interrogation techniques, it would have possibly helped John Kerry and other Democrats get elected, assuming voters were actually on her side? If it was that egregious she should have talked about it back then in either role
she carried.

This is what Leon Panetta had to confute:

Pelosi was particularly harsh in describing the CIA.

"They mislead us all the time," she said.

And when a reporter asked whether the agency lied, she did not disagree.

Here is his rebuttal:

CIA Director Leon Panetta challenged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s accusations that the agency lied to her, writing a memo to his agents saying she received nothing but the truth.

Panetta said that "ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened."

So, he pretty much called Pelosi a liar. Leon went on in his agency-wide CIA memo:

Panetta, President Obama's pick to run the clandestine agency and President Clinton's former chief of staff, wrote in a memo to CIA employees Friday that "CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing 'the enhanced techniques that had been employed,'" according to CIA records.

"We are an agency of high integrity, professionalism and dedication," Panetta said in the memo. "Our task is to tell it like it is — even if that’s not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our national security depends on it."

In the pep talk-style memo titled "Turning Down the Volume," Panetta encourages CIA employees to return to their normal business and not to be distracted by the shout-fest Pelosi's remarks created."

My advice — indeed, my direction — to you is straightforward: Ignore the noise and stay focused on your mission," Panetta wrote. "We have too much work to do to be distracted from our job of protecting this country."

This whole thing has blown up to now include calls for her resignation and plenty of heat from the left and right. Maybe, Nancy can keep her foot out of her mouth long enough to have this blow over, but it seems to have possibly a life of its own. It could end up costing her chairmanship or even her seat in the House next year.

Pelosi: I Never Knew About Waterboarding In 2002, Former CIA Director: Yes, You Did

There is a classic case of he said/she said in Washington. Pelosi swears that she never knew that terrorists were being waterboarded:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she was never told during a congressional briefing in 2002 that waterboarding or other "enhanced" interrogation techniques were being used on terrorism suspects.

However, there has been some suspicion that she might have been less than truthful in that statement:

But in a story published in the Washington Post in December 2007, two officials were quoted saying that the California Democrat and three other lawmakers had received an hour-long secret briefing on the interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, and that they raised no objections at the time.

The clash of accounts has stirred Republican claims that Democrats have selective and politically motivated amnesia when it comes to who knew what, and when, about the Bush-era interrogation programs.

Yesterday, Porter J. Goss, one of the four lawmakers in the previously mentioned secret briefing and former CIA director, definitely blew her story out of the water, even though he never mentioned Pelosi by name:

A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation's intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA's "High Value Terrorist Program," including the development of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

-- The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.

What Goss leaves out is that the Dear Speaker was the ranking Democratic member on the House intel committee in 2002. As the ranking Democratic leader, she would have been told of such techniques in this briefing.

Goss goes on:

-- We understood what the CIA was doing.

-- We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.

-- We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.

-- On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.

I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed "memorandums for the record" suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately -- to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president's national security adviser -- and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.

So, not only did Pelosi lie and say that she didn't know when she did, but she apparently didn't have any problem with it.

If People Don't First Believe, Lie, Lie Again: Obama Purports Debunked 90% Mexican Gun Claim

"This war is being waged with guns purchased not here, but in the United States. More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border."-Obama

Obama seems to be determined to continue misleading the American people. FNC's Major Garrett has figured out how the Democrat's have pretzeled the facts to be able to make the claim that 90% of the Mexican drug cartel's guns come from the US with a straight face:

To some, it might sound as if Obama is saying 90 percent of all guns captured from the cartels originated in America. But that's not what the president means, senior National Security Council Spokesman Denis McDonough told FOX News on Saturday.

Of course, that's was people would think because that's the obvious meaning of what he said.

Is anyone else having Bill Clinton flashbacks? I'm remembering people having to ask him to define "sexual relations". Do we have to ask Obama to define "recovered"?

Never mind McDonough did that already:

"By recovered he means traceable, guns traced back to the United States," McDonough said. "These are ATF (Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms) numbers. These are the guns submitted to the ATF for tracing. That's what we mean by recovered."

So, he does not mean 90% of all recovered guns just the recovered guns that could actually traced back anywhere.

That's like saying that 90% of the peanuts in my apartment are Planters because of the ones that are still in its original container that percentage are Planters peanuts. I failed to recognize the peanuts that I might have already put in storage containers and are "untraceable". (Ya, I know stupid analogy, but that was the best I could do off the cuff.)

As FOX News has previously reported, a large percentage of firearms recovered in Mexico from the drug cartels are not submitted to U.S. officials for tracing because they lack the necessary markings.

In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Those 11,000 firearms were part of the 29,000 firearms Mexican officials recovered at crime scenes. According to the ATF, of the 11,000 submitted to U.S. officials for tracing, 6,000 could be traced somewhere because of the serial numbers or other distinctive markings. Of those 6,000 firearms, 5,114 or 90 percent, were found to have been smuggled from the U.S.

Oh, so I see how the math works now. Democrats sure had to twist the facts into a tangled web in order to get that 90% stat.

They wanted something to give their agenda of gun control and pipe dream of outlawing guns altogether some credibility. They can't get it from clear and concise stats. So, they had to gerrymander the numbers to get their desired outcome like they do most of the time. Why is it that they can rarely be straight with the facts in order to defend their ideas and beliefs?

Garrett sums it all up:

Just to repeat: recovered doesn't mean the percentage of all firearms confiscated at Mexican crime scenes. It doesn't mean the subset of these firearms traceable to any source. It does mean the percentage of traceable weapons linked to a U.S. source. And, again, that total is 5,114 out of 29,000 -- or 17.6 percent -- in the years 2007 and 2008.

Once again, Obama and the Democrats have been caught misrepresenting the truth...No, wait outright lying about where the Mexican drug cartels are getting their guns. Look at the old links below to see where they're really coming from, and it isn't the US.

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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/04/19/obama-repeats-percent-stat-guns-recovered-mexico/
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http://weeklypoliticalreview.blogspot.com/2009/04/democrats-pitch-fabrication-say-90-of.html
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2009/04/02/myth-percent-guns-mexico-fraction-number-claimed/
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Garofalo Echos Liberal Talking Down Points, Fallacies: TEA Protesters Stupid "Racists", Limbaugh Snub That Wasn't

Ya, I know this story is a few days old, but I've been avoiding it because I didn't want to give Janeane Garofalo the satisfaction, but it has blown up, probably rightfully so. Now, I'm forced to respond.

Thursday was a big day for Janeane. First, she had an interview with the "Village Voice" where she took a shot at Limbaugh. Then, she was on the Olbermann's show calling those that attended the TEA parties everything but a child of God.

Let's start with the fabrication that was the Village interview. While she was answering questions about how she can stand to be on a show that is run by a "right wing nutjob", she threw in a jab at Limbaugh and threw one at Lynne Cheney just for kicks:

Now, having said that, when Rush Limbaugh visited the set, and when Lynne Cheney visited the set, I refused to have my picture taken with them or meet them or anything. I didn't want to make a scene out of it and not even go meet them in front of people. When somebody came to me privately and said 'do you want to meet them', I said absolutely not. But I would never have made a big show of it and embarrassed people who worked there. Not that they were interested in meeting me. And, to tell you the truth, I doubt that Lynne Cheney even knew who I was...

However, Limbaugh came out later that day and said:

"The last time I visited the set of "24," [Ms.] Garofalo had not been hired to appear in the series. She was not there, she was not a member of the cast the last time I visited. I wouldn't have wanted to meet her anyway.

"The last time I visited the set, Kim Raver was still in the cast and CTU was the primary 'location' of the show. This current season, seven, has been in the can since last summer or fall and I have been nowhere near the "24" set for any shoots for this season, which is this lunatic's [Ms. Garofalo's] first season,"

As Garofalo demonstrated nicely, liberals will often lie just to take a shot at the right.

As a side note example of her lunatic thought process, she said that Al Franken was "qualified" to be senator. That had me busting a gut.

Now, on to the Olbermann interview. Janeane topped the whoppers that she told in the Village interview with some tall tales that makes her last bit of fiction look like a little white lie. She berates the people who went to the "tea parties" to protest over-taxation and out of control government spending:

You know, there's nothing more interesting than seeing a bunch of racists become confused and angry at a speech they're not quite certain what he's saying. It sounds right and then it doesn't make sense. Which, let's be very honest about what this is about. It's not about bashing Democrats, it's not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don't know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. And there is no way around that.

So, according to Ms. Garafalo, we're not only stupid but also racists. What proof does she have that they're all stupid white power racists?

None, zip, zero, zilch.

She never gives any proof just accusations. There wasn't one racist comment made by a speaker at one of the hundreds of rallies. There were no signs that used racial slurs. The only ones that were over the that had Obama linked to Hitler, but those were very few. The great majority didn't come close the offensiveness that the lefty protesters leveled at Bush. There were anti-Bush signs that linked Bush to Hitler and the Devil at the same time.

She followed the liberal way of thinking that if you disagree with someone of another race, you must be a racist. That kind of logic is illogical and groundless.

She went on to echo another favorite talking down point the left loves to throw at the right. She said that all conservatives have a neurological problem.

She, also, she misrepresented the attendance at the protests. She said that there were "literally tens of people" at the "parties". I think Janeane needs to retake 2nd grade math. There were around 300,000 people at the events nationwide.

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http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/19/picket-garofalo-lies-about-limbaugh/
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http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/archives/2009/04/interview_janea.php
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http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/04/16/garofalo-tea-partiers-are-all-racists-who-hate-black-president
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