Impeachment: Myths, Facts, and History
More Empty Impeachment Threats from the GOP Right-wingers trembled with glee when Sen. James Inhofe said that President Obama might be impeached for the events in Benghazi. Few rank-and-file Americans understand impeachment or the odds of it happening. It does not mean that the president is fired. Most members of Congress and the media understand what impeachment means, but our schools work very hard to produce politically ignorant citizens. Impeachment means charging a public official with an offense. Impeachment does not mean firing a public official from her/his job. Constitution and Procedures The U.S. Constitution states that: The House of…
Find Out What Congress Is Doing
Free. Easy. All Online. Public interest in Congressional activity surged in recent years. Confusion, misinformation, and outright lies abound. But we can get accurate information without extensive web searches. All official Congressional activity is available on one website. Have you ever wanted to read the text of a bill for yourself, while Congress debates it? Do you want to know which committees consider nominees for particular cabinet positions? Or the status of the federal budget? It’s much easier to find that information than you might think. Thomas.gov. It’s easy to remember. And it’s your link to all Congressional activity. Article…
Cypriot ‘Haircut’ Rattles International Community
Cypriots with €100,000 euros or more in their accounts, will soon start feeling the pinch from coming bank levies, required under Cyprus’ new bailout restructuring plans. Once finalized, all depositors with accounts containing over €100,000 euros will find themselves subject to the “haircut,” with 22.5% of their account holdings being “taxed” to make up the down payment on the bailout. An additional 37.5% will be frozen for what E.U. and Cypriot officials are calling “liquidity reasons,” however unlike the previous “taxed” amount, these frozen assets will earn interest to the tune of ten percent, so long as the banks in question…
Sequester On Sanity
“Perhaps no words more accurately and succinctly illustrate the confusion about economics than “Monetary Sovereignty.” It is not a theory or a hypothesis or a philosophy. In its essence, it merely is a description of the way federal financing actually works.” ~Rodger Malcolm Mitchell Back in 2011, the idea of “sequestration,” or the implementing of harsh spending cuts that would automatically go into effect on March 1st, was floated in an effort to force the two political parties to get together and make a deal to work towards decreasing government debt. A telling sign for many of the increasingly broken…
Standardized Testing: More Harm Than Good
Early in 2013, Seattle high school teachers boycotted their annual standardized test. This brave and necessary move has reignited public debate about the place of standardized testing. School reform has gone back and forth for over a century and a half, between the 19th century, Prussian military-industrial model to Dewey’s individualized, “special snowflake” philosophy and back again to factory- and business-preparedness treatment of children. Because neoliberalism is the winning philosophy at the moment, the worth of schools is tied to how well they can churn out identical cogs to plug in to the economic machine. Schools around the country have…
Explaining Socialism To Conservatives
Guest Author: Pam B. Facebook.com/RealTruthNow Recently, I was talking with a new friend whom I’m just getting to know. She tends to be somewhat conservative, while I lean more toward the progressive side. When our conversation drifted to politics, somehow the dreaded word “socialism” came up. My friend seemed totally shocked when I said “All socialism isn’t bad”. She became very serious and replied “So you want to take money away from the rich and give to the poor?” I smiled and said “No, not at all. Why do you think socialism means taking money from the rich and giving…
Myth: “Obamacare Forces Me to Pay for Other People’s Health Care”
Long before the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, you were paying for other people’s healthcare in many different ways. When you pay insurance premiums, that money doesn’t only go towards your healthcare, it helps pay medical costs for every person insured by that company. Likewise, when someone without health insurance received care in an emergency room, and they couldn’t pay their bills, the hospital didn’t just write off those costs. They passed that expense on to you and every other patient in the form of higher medical costs, higher insurance premiums, and higher deductibles. However, the Affordable Health…
Myth: “Gun Control Laws Only Affect Law-abiding Citizens”.
Myth: “Gun control laws only affect law-abiding citizens. Criminals can just ignore gun control laws.” This can be easily disproved. Background checks, like in the Brady Law, do not prohibit law-abiding citizens from buying guns, but they do succeed at making it much harder for a criminal to get a firearm. In 1999 alone, nation-wide background checks combined with waiting periods, stopped 200,000 gun sales to felons and other prohibited people. Read about it here. The Brady Law was intended to make it harder for criminals to easily obtain a gun but background checks have had the added effect of leading to…
Myth: “President Obama is Secretly a Muslim”.
It’s amazing that we still have to explain this, but many people still insist with great certainty that President Obama is a Muslim, without offering any evidence to support this claim. First off, let me say that if President Obama were indeed a Muslim, it would not disqualify him from being president nor would it imply that he is not a loyal American. There is nothing in the US Constitution that indicates Presidents will be tested on their religious beliefs. Additionally, the term “Muslim” should not be used as an insult or to imply that someone supports terrorism. Having said that, I am…
Myth: “Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican”
Republicans, many of whom have spent decades telling us Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist, now suddenly feel that it gives them credibility on social and racial issues if they maintain that Dr. King was a Republican. Once this claim was made, it spread like wildfire through the conservative media and has been reported extensively on conservative web sites and Facebook pages. The only problem is, it’s not true. Although his father, Martin Luther King Sr. had registered as a Republican, there is no evidence that MLK Jr. was ever a Republican. He never endorsed any Republican candidate, and…
Myth: “Tax Cuts For The Rich Create Jobs.”
Myth: “Wealthy people are job creators. When you give tax cuts to the wealthy, it creates jobs. When you raise their taxes, it destroys jobs.” When we look at the US economic history, overall economic growth has been stronger during periods of higher tax rates. After Ronald Reagan cut taxes 25% in 1981, unemployment continued to rise for another year and a half and the budget deficit tripled. Two years after the Reagan tax cuts, unemployment was still higher than when he took office. Bill Clinton raised taxes on the wealthiest 1% of Americans (called the biggest tax increase in history at…
Myth: “The Second Amendment is to Overthrow the Government.”
In the debate about gun control, many gun enthusiasts argue that the Second Amendment to the Constitution was written, not for the purposes of hunting or even self-defense, but specifically to give people the ability to rise up against the government when they no longer support that government. These gun enthusiasts further hold the reference to the word militia in the Second Amendment refers to the armed populace in general. As such, this militia has the right to own the type of weapons that would be required to overthrow the government if need be. Let’s take a look at exactly what the…
Myth: “Democrats didn’t even read the Health Care Reform bill before they passed it”.
Nancy Pelosi even said ‘We have to pass the (health care) bill so we can find out what is in it”. The claim that Democrats never read the Health Care Reform bill is an often repeated falsehood. Democrats did, in fact, read the bill before they voted on it. What Nancy Pelosi actually said was “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it away from the fog of controversy.” She wasn’t talking about members of Congress. She was speaking to the American people, saying that the American people didn’t know what was in the bill and…
Myth: “President Obama gutted welfare reform by removing the work requirement”
“President Obama gutted welfare reform by removing the work requirement” This falsehood was frequently uttered by Mitt Romney during the 2012 election. Here is what the truth is. At the request of some state governors, Obama allowed states to relax certain regulations in order to increase the number of people who are working. The purpose of this change was to allow states to try new methods to increase employment in their states and get people off of Welfare. Under the new policy, states can now seek a federal waiver from work-participation rules that, among other things, require welfare recipients to engage…
Myth: “Obamacare will add billions to the deficit and drive up our national debt.”
“Obamacare will add billions to the deficit and drive up our national debt.” This often repeated lie is one of the easiest to disprove. The Congressional Budget Office confirms that the healthcare reform legislation does not add a dime to the deficit. In fact, the law will reduce the deficit by $143 billion in its first decade and by a whopping $1.2 trillion in the second decade. The Congressional Budget Office even said that repealing the Affordable Care Act would add hundreds of billions to the national debt. Here is a letter from the Congressional Budget Office to House Speaker…
Myth: “Obamacare is a Socialist government takeover of the health care system”.
“Obamacare is a Socialist government takeover of the health care system”. The Affordable Health Care Act signed by president Obama protects Americans from the abuses of insurance companies and enables more people to have access to health care, but it does not change much of anything about our health care system. Doctors are still in business for themselves. Hospitals and clinics are still privately owned and run. Pharmaceutical companies are also still privately owned and run. We still use private, for-profit insurance companies to pay the bills. There is no public option or government run single payer system as many…
Myth: “President Obama went all over the world apologizing for America”.
(Video is from Young America’s Foundation) Republicans continue to claim President Obama went on a worldwide “Apology Tour” telling the rest of the world how wrong we’ve been. Even after the recent election, they insist on this claim and widely accept it. PolitiFact and TruthorFiction.com both checked out this claim and declared it to be untrue. This was dreamed up by Republicans who couldn’t find other things to criticize Obama, so they made up this story. The President never apologized for America. No conservative has offered a legitimate example of Obama apologizing for America but they continue to repeat this…
Myth: “Obamacare” Will Put The Government Between Me And My Doctor
Just the opposite is true. Before Obamacare, Americans had an insurance company or an HMO between them and their doctor. These companies tell you which doctor you can see, what prescription medicines you can take, what procedure you can have and how long you can stay in the hospital. They have a financial incentive to deny payment or limit your health care, and they do this every day. The Affordable Health Care Act removed the limitations that insurance companies put on you. It removed the barriers between you and your doctor and gives you better access to health care. You…
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