INDEPENDENT SENTINEL
"Liar, Liar, pants on fire!"
1984 by George Orwell should be mandatory reading in every school across the United States. The date might have been off, but the story isn’t. Obama’s campaign seems to have taken at least one idea from the Orwell novel in the form of the “Truth Team,” which is nothing more than an online propaganda mill.
The “Truth Team” is comprised of Keeping the GOP Honest, Attack Watch, and Keeping His Word.They are all inaccurate but the goal isn’t accuracy as the names would imply. The goal is to sell Obama at all costs.
Attack Watch, the Orwellian “fact checker,” has some new, very glaring lies popping up in the last few days.
One “Truth” is the claim that Obama supports the coal industry.
They posted the following paragraph followed by some dubious claims -
Republicans are dredging up false attacks on the Obama administration, claiming that the Environmental Protection Agency is cracking down on coal. Conjuring up a “war on coal.” Mitt Romney’s campaign and the GOP are trying to convince Americans that President Obama has a “disdain towards coal and coal jobs.”
It doesn’t matter what diversionary tactics Obama’s Attack Watch uses, there is a war on coal and the proof is in the fact that no new plants are being built and existing ones are heading for retirement thanks to overreaching EPA regulations. Click here for information from Independent Sentinel on the beginning of the end of coal.
The outcome is that the price we pay for electricity is about to “necessarily skyrocket” as President Obama promised nearly four years ago – his words, not mine.
We are about to see increases from $16 per megawatt to as much as an astrounding $357 megawatts in the northern Ohio territory as we switch from cheap coal to natural gas and alternative energy with irrational and unnecessary haste.
Since last year alone, coal-fired plants have gone from generating 44.6% of the country’s electricity to 36%. That is stunning!
Instead of a gradual transition to natural gas and pricey alternative energy, we are being hurled into it with no regard for the expense and the consequent job losses. The devastation to coal-producing states cannot be underestimated.
Here are the actual sales numbers for 2015 when existing coal plants will be forced to retire -
Fox News: …Last week PJM Interconnection, the company that operates the electric grid for 13 states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia) held its 2015 capacity auction and the market-clearing price for 2015 ( almost all for natural gas) is now $136 per megawatt. Last year, it was $16 per megawatt.
In the mid-Atlantic area covering New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and DC the new price is$167 per megawatt. For the northern Ohio territory served by FirstEnergy, the price is a shocking $357 per megawatt.
This drastic change is the direct result of EPA regulations meant to keep new coal plants from being built. By 2015, the new EPA regulations on existing coal-fired plants will go into effect and many existing coal-fired plants will be retired, particularly in Northern Ohio where the prices will of necessity be the highest…
More information and a link to write your Senators about a new bill to stop the onslaught can be found at American commitment.
Articles on the Internet about natural gas appear on sites as far left as Think Progress or as professional as Bloomberg Businessweek and they all sing the same refrain – natural gas is cheap. It is – in relation to oil – especially with new drilling techniques, but it can’t compare to the price of coal, which, by the way, is not that dirty thanks to, ironically, EPA regulations (from the last administration) to tighten the pollution they give off.
The issue is that everyone is into alternative energy right now and they will proceed no matter what the cost.
The public is being fed misinformation on this. I support natural gas and alternative energy but not at the cost of the rapid destruction of the coal industry.
Then there is the next absurd lie extrapolated from an inaccurate Market Watch article that appeared recently.
Attack Watch would have us believe that President Obama is the thriftiest president since Eisenhower. Mitt Romney talking about Obama’s “inferno of spending” is, according to them, an invention.
This paragraph is from Attack Watch -
Mitt Romney continues to mislead Americans about the President’s record on spending and deficit reduction, falsely attacking the President for creating a “spending inferno.”
They then go on to quote a bogus and debunked Market Watch article claiming that Obama has reduced government spending more than any President since Eisnehower. Jay Carney has even gone so far as to tell the press to report it that way.
The “facts” they use blame Bush for the bailouts, the Stimulus, the one-half of TARP which Obama is responsible for. They count the partial paybacks as “spending cuts.” There is more and you can check it out on Jake Tapper’s article below. This story has been debunked by numerous sources such as the Associated Press, not a right-wing organization by any means.
Jake Tapper of ABC News summed it up yesterday -
ABC News: …In the note, sent later in the day today, Obama campaign deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter invites supporters to “report an attack” at the Truth Team report page.
“Received a robo-call or an email forward full of falsehoods?” the page asks. “Found a misleading leaflet in your mail? Tell us about it, and help fight back against the attacks on President Obama and his record.”
Cutter in her email hammers Mitt Romney for saying “Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history,” which she refutes with a Market Watch blog saying that federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since President Eisenhower.
Here’s the problem: the Market Watch item has been refuted by several fact checkers as severely flawed, notwithstanding its citation by White House press secretary Jay Carney along with the assertion that reporters should “not buy into the BS that you hear about spending and fiscal constraint with regard to this administration. I think doing so is a sign of sloth and laziness.”
The Washington Post’s Fact Checker gave Carney three Pinocchios, writing that the “data in the article are flawed, and the analysis lacks context — context that could easily could be found in the budget documents released by the White House.”
The Associated Press came to a similar conclusion, saying that “the problem with that rosy claim is that the Wall Street bailout is part of the calculation. The bailout ballooned the 2009 budget just before Obama took office, making Obama’s 2010 results look smaller in comparison. And as almost $150 billion of the bailout was paid back during Obama’s watch, the analysis counted them as government spending cuts. It also assumes Obama had less of a role setting the budget for 2009 than he really did. … The analysis simply looks at the year-to-year topline spending number for the government but doesn’t account for distortions baked into the figures by the Wall Street bailout and government takeover of the mortgage lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”
Cutter also hammers Romney on classroom size, saying, “Mitt Romney made some more ridiculous claims and assertions this week, this time on education policy. He even had the nerve to tell a group of educators that: ‘It’s not the classroom size that’s driving the success of those school systems.’”
Jake Tapper’s article also goes into Attack Watch’s misleading comments about classroom size.
We want schools where students can get individual attention when they need it, but research has shown that class size is only one variable among several. I personally had elementary classes of 50 and did quite well for myself as did most of my classmates. I’m not advocating class sizes of 50 but I am saying that there are other, perhaps more important factors that need to be examined.
The importance placed on class sizes has grown well beyond its real value.
Check out Tapper’s comments -
The problem is that Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, has also suggested classroom size isn’t as important as some necessarily think…There’s more and it is worth reading…
I don’t know how we can keep closing our eyes to the blatantly deceptive propaganda being pushed by the Obama administration. Is this what our country now finds acceptable?
