Republicans

The Fake "Congressional Budget Office Report" Now Fully Assimilated Into Boner Village

Boner, CBO, Congressional Budget Office, GOP, John Boehner, Partisan Politics Prevail, Republicans, The Village

Such a Boehner

Bush Economic Issues

Of course it doesn’t matter that the report simply didn’t say what George Stephanopoulos, David Brooks and the rest of the Villagers Said it did.

The figure they cited wasn’t just out of context and just plain old misleading- it was wrong.

In fact, as the initial AP report noted, the CBO analysis did not take into account all aspects of the recovery plan — while it found that “only $26 billion out of $274 billion in infrastructure spending would be delivered into the economy by the Sept. 30 end of the budget year,” it did not “cover tax cuts or efforts by Democrats to provide relief to cash-strapped state governments to help with their Medicaid bills,” among other provisions. Nonetheless, in echoing aspects of the AP’s original report about the CBO analysis, numerous media figures and outlets left out the fact, reported by the AP, that CBO analyzed only part of the bill.

As the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim reported in a January 23 article: “[T]he nonpartisan CBO ran a small portion of an earlier version of the stimulus plan through a computer program that uses a standard formula to determine a score — how quickly money will be spent. The score only dealt with the part of the stimulus headed for the Appropriations Committee and left out the parts bound for the Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce Committee.” The article continued: “Because it dealt with just a part of the stimulus, it estimated the spending rate for only about $300 billion of the $825 billion plan. Significant changes have been made to the part of the bill the CBO looked at.”

And it looks like Good Ol’ Ed Henry has taken one for the team in his first Official Reacharound for The Village:

Media Matters:

On the January 23 edition of CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, White House correspondent Ed Henry referred to a “study” from the Congressional Budget Office that Henry claimed “showed” that Obama’s economic stimulus package “may not really stimulate the economy.” Henry later asserted that the study “was suggesting that a lot of the spending proposals in the original plan would not really take effect for a couple of years, so it wouldn’t clearly help create jobs in the first two years of the president’s administration.”

David Brock and the writers and researchers at Media Matters For America have all the details

Election 2008's Best Douchebag Moment | That Baldwin Brother Challenges Obama To A Fight

Barack Obama, Douche-Chills, Election 2008, GOP, Joe Biden, John McCain, Neocon, Republicans, Sarah Palin

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Stephen Baldwin, who has threatened to move to Canada if Barack Obama is elected, has now challenged the candidate to box for charity. “I’d like to knock some good sense into Barack,” Alec’s right-wing bro said at the Printing House Gym in the Village. “I wouldn’t hurt him. But if he wins the election, he’ll hurt me. He’s a cultural terrorist.” This from the man who enriched us all with “Sex Monster” and “Snakeman.”


McCain Campaign Has Hands All Over Hoax Story: The Madness of the College Republicans

McCain Campaign, Republicans

McCain Communications Director Gave Reporters Incendiary Version Of “Carved B” Story Before Facts Were Known

TALKING POINTS MEMO
By Greg Sargent – October 24, 2008, 5:12PM

John McCain’s Pennsylvania communications director told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story about the attack on a McCain volunteer well before the facts of the case were known or established — and even told reporters outright that the “B” carved into the victim’s cheek stood for “Barack,” according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.

John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain’s Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, “You’re with the McCain campaign? I’m going to teach you a lesson.”

Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the “B” stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax.

The KDKA reporter had called McCain’s campaign office for details after seeing the story — sans details — teased on Drudge.

The McCain spokesperson’s claims — which came in the midst of extraordinary and heated conversations late yesterday between the McCain campaign, local TV stations, and the Obama camp, as the early version of the story rocketed around the political world — is significant because it reveals a McCain official pushing a version of the story that was far more explosive than the available or confirmed facts permitted at the time.

The claims to KDKA from the McCain campaign were included in an early story that ran late yesterday on KDKA’s Web site. The paragraphs containing these assertions were quickly removed from the story after the Obama campaign privately complained that KDKA was letting the McCain campaign spin a racially-charged version of the story before the facts had been established, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

The story with the removed grafs is still right here. We preserved the three missing grafs from yesterday:


A source familiar with what happened yesterday confirmed that the unnamed spokesperson was communications director Peter Feldman. Feldman was also quoted yesterday making virtually identical assertions on the Web site of another local TV station, WPXI. But those quotes, which we also preserved here, are also no longer available on WPXI’s site, for reasons that are unclear.

This is problematic because the McCain campaign doesn’t want to have been perceived as pushing an incendiary story that not only turned out to be a hoax but which police officials said today risked blowing up into a “national incident” and has local police preparing to file charges against the hoaxster.

There’s no evidence that anyone from McCain national headquarters put out a version of events like this.

After the story appeared on KDKA’s site and this and other pieces in the local press started flying around the political world, an Obama spokesperson in the state angrily insisted to KDKA that it was irresponsible for the station to air the McCain spokesperson’s incendiary version of events before the facts were fully known, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

After that, KDKA went back to McCain’s Pennsylvania spokesperson, Feldman, and asked if he stood by the story as he’d earlier told it, but he started backing off the story, a source familiar with the talks says. That prompted KDKA to remove the grafs.

Feldman couldn’t immediately be reached, and a McCain HQ spokesperson declined to comment.