O’Reilly lies: “Nobody” on Fox said failing to buy health insurance could result in jail time

Are you surprised that Bill O’Reilly lied when he claimed that no one on his propaganda, er, news channel had suggested that Americans could serve jail time for not having health insurance, given the recently passed health care reform act?

Here’s the transcript, via Media Matters:

O’Reilly: “[W]e researched” and “[n]obody” on Fox “ever said you are going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance.” On the April 13 edition of Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor, O’Reilly told Sen. Coburn: “[Y]ou don’t know anybody on Fox News — because there hasn’t been anyone — that said people will go to jail if they don’t buy mandatory insurance.” He added: “[W]e researched to find out if anybody had ever said you are going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance. Nobody has ever said it. What it seems to me is you used Fox News as a whipping boy when we didn’t qualify there … you were wrong to do that, Senator, with all due respect.”

Let’s consider the video evidence, clearly proving Bill O’Reilly an out right liar:

Celebrating America’s enemy

It’s said that history is written by the victors, thus they draw the outlines of how events are remembered and retold. Well, I think that’s not quite right or, at the very least, something has gone wrong when it comes to The War of Northern Aggression — otherwise known as The American Civil War.

I may be stereotyping, but it seems that many of the people that support American militarism and unapologetically celebrate what some critique as American imperialism, prefer to stand with the losing and treasonous side of the American Civil War, rather than with the Union.

I’m offended every time I see the so-called rebel flag plastered on bumpers, t-shirts, caps or unfurled in the median of a New England highway (or in the middle of any highway, for that matter). Do the people proudly displaying this treasonous symbol not realize that it’s akin to flying the Nazi flag? Do they not realize that, in spite of the misguided and romanticized version of the Confederate South that still lingers, that that flag represents an odious enemy of America — the country that many of them would claim to love?

Not only is the Confederate flag the symbol of a declared American enemy, it is also the anti-thesis of a founding American value: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The apologist for America’s enemy will likely respond, Well, the Civil War was not about slavery. It was about economics.

To them I say, Bullshit. The American soldier — the Union solider — does not fight and die for the nation’s GDP, or for the promotion of an industrial versus an agrarian economy. No, the American soldier fights and bleeds for their fellow citizens and for the common values that bind us.

The Confederacy, its army and its supporters everywhere — all declared enemies of America — not only committed acts of treason against the American government; but, by turning their back to the call to form a more perfect union, rejected America, its values and their fellow countrymen.

Amazing that to this day, America’s enemy is still celebrated, even by elected government officials:

RICHMOND, Va. – Virginia’s governor has brought Confederate History Month back to the state for the first time since 2001.

Gov. Bob McDonnell designated April to commemorate the secessionist, slaveholding South. His two Democratic predecessors had refused issue the proclamation sought each year by Confederate descendants.

Richmond was the Confederate seat of government.

McDonnell’s 368-word declaration does not mention slavery. The Republican governor said Tuesday that his intent was to honor the sacrifice on Virginia soil and promote tourism.

Since then the Republican governor of Virginia has gone on to include mention of slavery in his commemoration of the Confederacy. However, again, celebrating the Confederacy is akin to celebrating Nazy Germany. Thus, I ask, would mere acknowledgment of the concentration camps be sufficient to permit the commemoration of Nazism? Of course not. Therefore, how is mention of slavery sufficient excuse to carry forward with the celebration of the Confederacy?

Republicans: the party of typewriters in a PC age

I‘m not a fan of Thomas Friedman’s cheerleading of global capitalism, though I readily concede that he is a tremendous advocate for that world view. In his latest column he uses that talent to ridicule republicans for their myopic backwardness:

Imagine for a minute that attending the Republican convention in St. Paul, sitting in a skybox overlooking the convention floor, were observers from Russia, Iran and Venezuela. And imagine for a minute what these observers would have been doing when Rudy Giuliani led the delegates in a chant of “drill, baby, drill!”

I’ll tell you what they would have been doing: the Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan observers would have been up out of their seats, exchanging high-fives and joining in the chant louder than anyone in the hall — “Yes! Yes! Drill, America, drill!” — because an America that is focused first and foremost on drilling for oil is an America more focused on feeding its oil habit than kicking it.

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”

Of course, we’re going to need oil for many years, but instead of exalting that — with “drill, baby, drill” — why not throw all our energy into innovating a whole new industry of clean power with the mantra “invent, baby, invent?” That is what a party committed to “change” would really be doing. As they say in Texas: “If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.”

I dwell on this issue because it is symbolic of the campaign that John McCain has decided to run. It’s a campaign now built on turning everything possible into a cultural wedge issue — including even energy policy, no matter how stupid it makes the voters and no matter how much it might weaken America.

Republicans continue to sell resentment

Krugman, once more, insightfully describes what may very well be at play in the minds of the uber-conservatives that we saw in display at the republican convention this week:

What the G.O.P. is selling, in other words, is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it’s better than you. Or to put it another way, the G.O.P. is still the party of Nixon.

One of the key insights in “Nixonland,” the new book by the historian Rick Perlstein, is that Nixon’s political strategy throughout his career was inspired by his college experience, in which he got himself elected student body president by exploiting his classmates’ resentment against the Franklins, the school’s elite social club. There’s a direct line from that student election to Spiro Agnew’s attacks on the “nattering nabobs of negativism” as “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” and from there to the peculiar cult of personality that not long ago surrounded George W. Bush — a cult that celebrated his anti-intellectualism and made much of the supposed fact that the “misunderestimated” C-average student had proved himself smarter than all the fancy-pants experts.

And when Mr. Bush turned out not to be that smart after all, and his presidency crashed and burned, the angry right — the raging rajas of resentment? — became, if anything, even angrier.

And, again, Krugman poignantly asks the bottom line question:

Can Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin really ride Nixonian resentment into an upset election victory in what should be an overwhelmingly Democratic year? The answer is a definite maybe.

Yeah, I know, I didn’t want to hear that either. It’s going to be a bumpy ride from here until election day.

Sen. Obama goes on the offensive

I was concerned that Sen. Obama’s conciliatory tone earlier in the campaign signified that he would be reluctant to throw a punch. However, if this is any indication of how he’ll respond to republican attacks, well, then, I say Bring it! Because Sen. Obama is showing that he can counter punch, and that he’s not afraid to get bruised:

ABC News Sunlen Miller reports: Sen. Barack Obama went one step further today in his pushback against presumptive GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain and President Bush on appeasement, suggesting that both Republicans have a problem with presidents past who have engaged in direct diplomacy.

“If George Bush and John McCain have a problem with direct diplomacy, led by the president of the United States, then they can explain why they have a problem with John F. Kennedy because that’s what he did with [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev, or Ronald Reagan, ’cause that’s what he did with [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev, or Richard Nixon ’cause that’s what they did with [Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung],” Obama said in Roseburg, Ore. “That’s exactly the kind of diplomacy we need to keep us safe.”