Author: Papa Giorgio

Politifact Tells Whoppers! 2012 Lie of the Year

Published by Papa Giorgio

Via Breitbart’s article, “Reuters Debunks Politifact; Fiat Will Build Jeeps in China”

On Sunday, Reuters reported Fiat and Chrysler, which Fiat owns, are on the verge of signing an agreement to produce Jeeps in China, and they may make the announcement as early as Monday at the Detroit Auto Show: 

Italian carmaker Fiat and its U.S. unit Chrysler are set to sign a new agreement with Guangzhou Automobile Group Co to produce the Jeep vehicle for the Chinese market, Il Corriere della Sera said on Sunday.

In an unsourced article, the Corriere said the head of Fiat and Chrysler Sergio Marchionne could announce the agreement at the Detroit auto show, which kicks off on Monday.

Under the agreement, off-road vehicles under the Jeep brand will be produced at GAC’s Canton factory, the paper said.

This report debunks the supposedly neutral fact-checking organization Politifact’s claim that Mitt Romney’s campaign advertisement during the 2012 that alleged Obama sold Chrysler to Italians “who are going to build Jeeps in China” was 2012’s “Lie of the Year.”

Politifact announced that Mitt Romney’s “Jeep” ad was its “2012 Lie of the Year” even though the ad was factually true. 

Romney slightly misspoke on the stump about Fiat’s intention to produce Jeeps in China, but reports about Fiat, which owns Chrysler, building Jeeps in China surfaced as early as 2010. And the campaign ad simply stated: 

Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.

Even liberal publications like Mother Jones and mainstream newspapers like the Washington Post conceded the advertisement was factually true or true on the merits. 

This is not the first time Politifact’s “lie of the year” has been completely debunked after the fact. 

In 2009, Politifact announced that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s claim about “death panels” in Obamacare was its “Lie of the Year.” After Palin revealed what Rush Limbaugh said was a “hidden truth,” the Obama administration removed the so-called “death panels” from its initial Obamacare bill. And three years later, former Obama adviser Steve Rattner, in a New York Times op-ed, said the country actually needed “death panels” to ration health care.

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Here are some FACTS about death panels from an older post: Kirsten Powers says in this interview/debate that Bush made this law, Gateway Pundit has this correction:

Republican analyst Matt Schlapp corrected this latest lie [right around the 6:40 mark] by the Obama Administration. Bush vetoed the end of life provision that went into law in 2008.

[….]

RedState has more.

What The Hill’s Jason Millman forgot to mention in his article was that President Bush VETOED the 2008 bill and the Democrats, along with some “good-willed” Republicans OVERRODE Bush’s veto forcing him to sign the legislation into law. The bill dealt with doctors’ reimbursements and more, but the Democrats slipped in the end-of-life planning by opening up the Social Security Act, which I have stated many times is dangerous, because once changed, it is difficult to amend again and allows for tinkering with the Medicare fee schedule and covered services definitions and requirements.

The fact that the Obama Administration claimed that the Bush Administration supported the end of life provision is a complete lie. And, they know it.

Human Genome in Meltdown ~ Is the Genome Project Proving a Genesis Date?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here is some awesome info via Creation/Evolution Headlines:

According to a study published Jan. 10 in Nature by geneticists from 4 universities including Harvard, “Analysis of 6,515 exomes reveals the recent origin of most human protein-coding variants.”  By recent they mean really recent on evolutionary timescales:

We estimate that approximately 73% of all protein-coding SNVs [single-nucleotide variants] and approximately 86% of SNVs predicted to be deleterious arose in the past 5,000–10,000 years. The average age of deleterious SNVs varied significantly across molecular pathways, and disease genes contained a significantly higher proportion of recently arisen deleterious SNVs than other genes.

The authors explained this in evolutionary terms as the result of “explosive population growth” and that “selection has not had sufficient time to purge them from the population.”  They claimed Europeans had more variants “consistent with weaker purifying selection due to the Out-of-Africa dispersal.”  The last paragraph assesses the impact of their findings:

More generally, the recent dramatic increase in human population size, resulting in a deluge of rare functionally important variation, has important implications for understanding and predicting current and future patterns of human disease and evolution. For example, the increased mutational capacity of recent human populations has led to a larger burden of Mendelian disorders, increased the allelic and genetic heterogeneity of traits, and may have created a new repository of recently arisen advantageous alleles that adaptive evolution will act upon in subsequent generations.

As for advantageous mutations, they provided NO examples.

Dr. John Sanford Interviewed About His Book, “Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome“

Continuing with Creation/Evolution Headlines post:

The findings depend on models and assumptions, but appear to support the thesis of John Sanford’s book Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, which argues that the genetic load increases so rapidly that mankind could not have survived for tens of thousands of years, to say nothing of millions (see recent YouTube interview part 1 and part 2 [combined into one, above]).  How can such rapid rate of degradation be sustained over evolutionary time?

The authors seemed a bit baffled by their findings.  The following paragraph gives a hint of that (compare “expected” vs observed):

The site frequency spectrum (SFS) of protein-coding SNVs revealed an enormous excess of rare variants (Fig. 1a). Indeed, we observed an SNV approximately once every 52 base pairs (bp) and 57 bp in European Americans and African Americans, respectively, whereas in a population without recent explosive growth we would expect the SNVs to occur once every 257 bp and 152 bp in European Americans and African Americans, respectively (Supplementary Information). Thus, the European American and African American samples contain approximately fivefold and threefold increases in SNVs, respectively, attributable to explosive population growth, resulting in a large burden of rare SNVs predicted to have arisen very recently (Fig. 1b). For example, the expected age of derived singletons, which comprise 55.1% of all SNVs, is 1,244 and 2,107 years for the European American and African American samples, respectively. Overall, 73.2% of SNVs (81.4% and 58.7% in European Americans and African Americans, respectively) are predicted to have arisen in the past 5,000 years. SNVs that arose more than 50,000 years ago were observed more frequently in the African American samples (Fig. 1b), which probably reflects stronger genetic drift in European Americans associated with the Out-of-Africa dispersal.

…read more..

The 2nd Amendment Is NOT for Hunting ~ Walter Williams

Published by Papa Giorgio

Walter Williams article, “Why the 2nd Amendment”

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, said: “The British are not coming. … We don’t need all these guns to kill people.” Lewis’ vision, shared by many, represents a gross ignorance of why the framers of the Constitution gave us the Second Amendment. How about a few quotes from the period and you decide whether our Founding Fathers harbored a fear of foreign tyrants.

Alexander Hamilton: “The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed,” adding later, “If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government.” By the way, Hamilton is referring to what institution when he says “the representatives of the people”?

James Madison: “(The Constitution preserves) the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation … (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”

Thomas Jefferson: “What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.”

George Mason, author of the Virginia Bill of Rights, which inspired our Constitution’s Bill of Rights, said, “To disarm the people — that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”

Rep. John Lewis and like-minded people might dismiss these thoughts by saying the founders were racist anyway. Here’s a more recent quote from a card-carrying liberal, the late Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey: “Certainly, one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms. … The right of the citizen to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be always possible.” I have many other Second Amendment references at http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/quotes.html.

How about a couple of quotations with which Rep.

Lewis and others might agree? “Armas para que?” (translated: “Guns, for what?”) by Fidel Castro. There’s a more famous one: “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.” That was Adolf Hitler.

Here’s the gun grabbers’ slippery-slope agenda, laid out by Nelson T. Shields, founder of Handgun Control Inc.: “We’re going to have to take this one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily — given the political realities — going to be very modest. … Right now, though, we’d be satisfied not with half a loaf but with a slice. Our ultimate goal — total control of handguns in the United States — is going to take time. … The final problem is to make the possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition — except for the military, police, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs and licensed gun collectors — totally illegal” (The New Yorker, July 1976)….

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See also:

What “IS” Feminism?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Via CHICKS ON THE RIGHT

Liberal feminists like Ashley Judd want you to think there’s a Republican “War on Women.” They are wrong. They are hypocrites. They perpetuate the very “hypersexualization of women” that they complain about, while they use their sexuality to heighten their fame and fortune.

An extended version of this would include REAL feminists – like Malala Yousafzai – those who fight courageously for women’s rights, and NOT people like Sandra Fluke – who just want to whine about someone else paying for their birth control.

Rise up, conservative women. You’re better than the liberal harpies who insist you’re a victim. You don’t need the government to be your sugar daddy any more than you need a man to be.

Not “American Feminists” who cozy up to religious misogynists/abusers of children and females:

This has been a burning topic in my mind for quite some time. The reason being is that while Bush was President I was told all the time (by the Left) about his apparent connections to Wahhabism via Saudi Arabia… and how we shouldn’t support a President who has these ties. The Ground Zero mosque Imam said he would take funds from any country, and now he is a hero of the Left. Odd. This Imam has already accepted money from known terrorist funding conspirators and I am sure as the money trail is followed, more will come to light. A great article on Front Page Magazine stirs this up again in me. I will post some ideas to maybe get this topic stirred in your mind as well. Could you imagine though, if the Catholic Church executed homosexuals in 5 or 6 countries and then they wanted to build a catholic college on the site where Matthew Shepard was killed. WOW! The outcry from the Left would be deafening. (CAUTION, language in the following video.)

(SEE MORE)

Leftist would rather support dictatorial leaning murderers rather than true feminists fighting for real equality:

Here is a great interview of Christina Hoff Sommers speaking to “what feminism truly is,” one FREE OF POLITICAL MYTHS — via the Rubin Report:

France Entering Into African Theatre to Fight Back Islamists

Published by Papa Giorgio

“By Monday at the latest, the troops will be there or will have started to arrive,” said Ali Coulibaly, Ivory Coast’s African Integration Minister. “Things are accelerating … The reconquest of the north has already begun.” …. A spokesman for one of Mali’s rebel groups, Ansar Dine, warned that France’s intervention would have repercussions. “There are consequences, not only for French hostages, but also for all French citizens wherever they find themselves in the Muslim world,” Sanda Ould Boumama said. — Reuters

French Mirage 3000

I am sure we will see France’s large Islamists population start to cause a ruckus (beheadings?) in France. The other African nations are down because they see the dangerous fascist doctrine coming to them already or soon.

France bombs Mali rebels as more troops arrive in Bamako

BAMAKO/PARIS (Reuters) – French fighter jets bombed Islamist rebels in Mali for a third day on Sunday as Paris poured more troops into the capital Bamako, awaiting the arrival of a West African force to dislodge al Qaeda-linked insurgents from the country’s north.

French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said France’s dramatic intervention on Friday to bomb a convoy of heavily armed Islamist fighters sweeping southwards had stopped them from seizing Mali’s capital Bamako within days.

Western countries fear Islamists could use Mali as a base for attacks on the West, forming a link with al Qaeda militants in Yemen, Somalia and North Africa….

[….]

A French pilot was killed on Friday when rebels in Mali shot down his helicopter.

President Francois Hollande has made it clear that France’s aim in Mali is to support the deployment of a West African mission to retake the north, endorsed by the United Nations, the European Union and the United States.

The 15-nation West African bloc ECOWAS convened a summit for Saturday in Ivory Coast to discuss the military campaign.

With Paris pressing West African nations to deploy troops quickly, Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara, who holds the rotating ECOWAS chairmanship, has kick-started the operation to deploy some 3,300 African soldiers.

Ouattara was himself installed in power with French military backing in 2011 after a brief civil war triggered by former president Laurent Gbagbo’s refusal to step aside after losing a late 2010 election.

“The troops will start arriving in Bamako today and tomorrow,” Ali Coulibaly, Ivory Coast’s African Integration Minister, said. “They will be convoyed to the front at Sevare.”

HOUSE-TO-HOUSE SEARCHES

Under cover from French fighter planes and attack helicopters on Friday, Malian troops drove the Islamists out of the strategic central town of Konna, which they had seized a day earlier. A senior Malian army official said more than 100 rebel fighters had been killed.

Military analysts expressed doubt, however, that this was the start of a swift operation to retake the whole of northern Mali – a harsh, sparsely populated terrain the size of France – as neither equipment nor ground troops were ready.

In Nigeria, which will lead the ECOWAS force, a military official who asked not to be identified said it would take time to train and equip the troops.

…read more…

Finally! One Of Gore`s Trained Presenters Debates A Climate Skeptic (h/t `What’s Up With That`)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Varying audio levels) From video description: “Heartland Institute Senior Fellow James Taylor debates Ray Bellamy, M.D., a Tallahassee Orthopedic Surgeon at the Elks Club Lodge at 276 North Magnolia Drive in Tallahassee, Florida on Jan. 8, 2013.” (Posted by: Religio-Political Talk) One commentator said this of the debate:

  • Thanks Anthony. No wonder the alarmists don’t like debating. In the closing remarks, after Taylor summarises the science, Bellamy just engages in a series of ad homs against Dr Soon and Dr Singer, and then admits what he had just claimed was a direct quote was ‘paraphrased’, to a chorus of boos from the audience. Epic fail! A shame the bootlegged video ends at that point, but we may look forward to many more such debates in future. /sarc

Another said, “As an Orthopaedic surgeon myself, I am embarrassed.” Still another, “No wonder Gore sold out and cashed in…” All I have to say is thatthe only thing Gore’s student learned was to be boring.

From What’s Up With That:

————————————-
Finally, one of Gore’s trained presenters debates a climate skeptic

Finally … finally! … a person trained by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project agreed to face off in a public debate on global warming.  As WUWT readers may know, trying to get one of these folks to debate a skeptic has been an impossible task…until now. Full video follows, running about 59 minutes.

While I don’t know the details, I suspect the video quality has to do with an apparent long standing policy of Gore’s presenters refusing to allow their presentations to be video taped. My impression is that this appears to be a clandestine recording made by an audience member.

From an email I [http://wattsupwiththat.com/] received:

======================================

Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project squared off against The Heartland Institute in a global warming debate January 8 in Tallahassee, Florida. More than 260 people attended the hour-long debate, which resulted in standing room only at the Tallahassee Elks Club Lodge, which hosted the debate.

Ray Bellamy, a Florida State University faculty member who gives public presentations on behalf of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, argued humans are causing a global warming crisis. Taylor countered that global warming activists have proven none of four important factors they need to show in order to demonstrate a human-induced global warming crisis.

“I am very happy that this debate is now available on the Internet so people can see the for themselves, without having to wade through media filters, who possesses and presents the best evidence in a fair and balanced debate,” said Taylor.

“I encourage people to watch the debate and then share it with friends, family and acquaintances. So long as people have access to the truth, I believe the truth will always prevail,” said Taylor.

`Reality Check` of Piers Morgan by Fox 19 (Cincinnati, OH)

Published by Papa Giorgio

While this video is uploaded to critique (well) Piers Morgan, it in no way should be seen as endorsement by me of Alex Jones. (Posted by: Religio-Political Talk) I think he is a nut and deal with him and many conspiracy theories on my “C-O-N Debunker Page.” Okay, on to some stats in text form via The National Review:

When it comes to the question of violent crime, the British are fairly smug. Why? Because, well, there’s less of it in Britain than in America. Bunch of cowboys over there, right?

Wrong. Per the Daily Mail:

—————–
Britain’s violent crime record is worse than any other country in the European union, it has been revealed

Official crime figures show the UK also has a worse rate for all types of violence than the U.S. and even South Africa – widely considered one of the world’s most dangerous countries.

The Tories said Labour had presided over a decade of spiralling violence.

In the decade following the party’s election in 1997, the number of recorded violent attacks soared by 77 per cent to 1.158million – or more than two every minute.
—————–

According to the Mail, Britons suffer 1,158,957 violent crimes per year, which works out at 2,034 per 100,000 residents. By contrast the number in notoriously violent South Africa is 1,609 per 100,000.

The U.S., meanwhile, has a rate of 466 crimes per 100,000 residents, which is lower than France’s, at 504; Finland’s, at 738; Sweden’s, at 1123; and Canada’s at 935.

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See also Fox 19’s article on this. They cite the following articles for the piece:

Ben Shapiro Wipes the Floor with Piers Morgan

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Gateway Pundit) This was textbook material — Ben Shapiro was on with Piers Morgan tonight to discuss his new book “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” and talk gun control. Right from the start of the interview Ben took it to the anti-gun bully – calling him a bully. And, it was all downhill for Piers for the next 13 minutes.

Breitbart writes about Larry Kings comments about Piers:

For those who remember, Larry King was more about being a conduit for the guests to entertain and enlighten viewers. His idea, perhaps an old fashioned TV ideal, was to make the show less about Larry King and more about the guests his viewers tuned in to watch.

King was old school in that way. We never learned much about the life or personal opinions of Jack Parr or Johnny Carson when they were hosting the Tonight Show, either. Those two icons let the guests speak and made their shows about the entertainment. For the most part, Larry King modeled himself on that classic version of the TV interview show.

But Larry King was quick to point out that Piers Morgan isn’t like that at all. Morgan is more about Morgan than he is about the guests, King said.

“I never gave opinions,” King said of his own CNN show. “Piers gives his opinions. The show is a lot about him as much as the guests… He’s so different from me,” King lamented.

King also worried over the state of TV today, saying, “It’s not the quality that counts anymore. It’s how loud did you yell, how vituperative can you be.”

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