Democracy Has Prevailed.

June 21, 2007

Fred Honsberger Still Spins

Good to know the ole Honzman can still spin the quasi-factoids like the best of them.

I took a listen yesterday to his show and heard him berate the Clintons for owning stock in companies they'd denounced: Fox News, Walmart and so on. He said they were dissolving the trust in order to avoid any election year embarrassments. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth over the millions made by the hypocritical Clintons.

Too bad only part of the story got out on the KDKA airwaves. Take a look.

CNN/AP:
Bill and Hillary Clinton liquidated the contents of their blind trust upon learning it contained investments of $5 million to $25 million that could pose conflicts of interest or prove to be embarrassing to her presidential campaign.
Notice what my friend Fred left out? The five letter word "blind." It turns a "trust" into a "blind trust." A couple of paragraphs later:
The Clintons looked at the contents of the blind trust in April under instructions from the Office of Government Ethics and sold the assets in May, according to a disclosure form filed Friday. The Clintons had the blind trust since former President Clinton was governor of Arkansas in 1983 and had no control over its transactions.
Fred must've missed those last few words: "had no control over its transactions."

So you'd think blaming them for what was in the blind trust would be, well, absurd. Wouldn't it?

Once this point was raised by a caller (not me, by the way), Fred moved the goal posts. He said he was using the same criteria that anti-war critics use when talking about the Iraq war: They say Bush invaded Iraq to get more profits for his oil company buddies, but HIS money's also in a blind trust!

So...yea you got me. I don't understand the Fred-logic either.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's to understand? The words "Fred" and "logic" should never appear in the same sentence when one is referring to the Honz.

Anonymous said...

What's to understand? The words "Fred" and "logic" should never appear in the same sentence when one is referring to the Honz.

It's an understandable mistake. In a media market where the airwaves are saturated with troglodytes like Jim Quinn, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, and Rush Limbaugh, Honsberger can sometimes seem almost rational by comparison.

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

Perhaps now that the Clinton's know that the blind trust contains investments in "evil" companies, they will donate the profits from the "evil" companies to charity like Cheney did.

This will happen the day that John Kerry releases this full Navy service record to public.

Anonymous said...

Freds spin is no surprise, but what bothers me is this...

I'm not sure who the "Office of Government Ethics" is, but isn't the concept of a blind trust that it remain blind? If they didn't know what was in the trust, how could its contents/investments ever be seen as crossing any sort of ethical line?

I just don't get it...but maybe that's must me.

Piltdown Man

Anonymous said...

Mein Heir, you're off-topic as usual, but thanks for the news.

I didn't know that Cheney contributed all those Halliburton options to charity. That's probably hundreds of millions of dollars! Mazel tov, Dick!

Anonymous said...

Dave, isn't that a bit like saying that compared to the oceans of the world, Lake Superior seems dry by compairson?

Anonymous said...

Dave, isn't that a bit like saying that compared to the oceans of the world, Lake Superior seems dry by compairson?

Maybe not dry....more like a little drip ;)

Anonymous said...

I am still waiting for David DeAngelo's comments to this:

"The latest congressional job approval rating (24%) is the lowest for the institution since Democrats took control of both houses in January, and is far below the 37% registered in February. The decline has been most evident among Democrats, whose ratings of Congress now match those of Republicans. Congressional job approval ratings are typically not positive, but ratings as low as the current one are uncommon. The poll also finds that only about one in four Americans say they are satisfied with the way things are going in this country, little changed since last month but still at its lowest point in over a decade."

http://galluppoll.com/content/?ci=27937

TWENTY FOUR PERCENT? OUCH!

Nothing to say, have you? What's wrong, David? Are you biased? Are you embarrassed?

Still waiting ....

Dayvoe said...

I'm not really sure what the troll is trying to say here. Can someone help me out?

As they point out in the article the troll so graciously gave us:

The current 24% rating is similar to the poor ratings Congress received last year, with Americans essentially voting to take control of Congress away from the Republicans in November.

You have to go all the way back to December of 2006 to see worse numbers (Disapprove 74% - Approve 21%). And that's when the Republicans ran the show.

It's obvious that Dems are disapproving of the actions of the Congress because they didn't stand up to the corrupt, arrogant, criminal, unbelievably unpopular Bush Administration.

But the troll should take a look at the chart. Between June 2006 and now, the only time the approval ratings for Congress were above 30% was when the Democrats first ran the show. All other times (including when his Republicans were running things) the numbers were worse. And the only time the disapproval ratings were below 60% was when the Democrats first ran the show. All other times (including when his Republicans were running things) the numbers were worse.

So again, I'm not sure what the troll is trying to say. If the congress should be criticized because the American people don't like the way it's doing it's job, fine.

But did we ever hear our troll point out the bad approval ratings of the Congress when they were shielding Mark Foley? Selling themselves to K Street? Allowing dubya to shred the Constitution?

Didn't think so.

Anonymous said...

Leave it to David DeAngelo to put a spin on the truth, and that truth to be that his congress that he helped elect is suffering from piss poor approval ratings. David DeAngelo ignores that fact, and yet when the facts presented to him, he finds a way to put a spin on the truth because he cannot bring himself to face up to those very same facts.

"The current 24% rating is similar to the poor ratings Congress received last year, with Americans essentially voting to take control of Congress away from the Republicans in November."

Yes, and what else does that tell you, David? In less THAN A YEAR'S time the approval ratings of Congress have plummeted that far in so little time. I get the feeling that this is going to be one of the most short lived Democrat controlled Congresses when I watch the Democrats get voted out in 08. Of course, you David, will be scratching your head as you try to figure out why when in essence you'll simply put a spin on that fact as you cry voter fraud of some other associated nonsense which sounds like a good enough excuse for their loss.

David, you cannot admit to yourself that a majority of the American people are conservatives. How can I say that? Easy. Look at Air America Radio and the millions of dollars put into it by rich liberals attempting to keep it alive. Look at Air America's lineup as they attempted to put famous liberals on the air. It STILL flopped. Dude, people don't want to hear the crap coming from the liberal left, and the failure of talk radio proves it being that the liberal talk radio market consistently flops. Oh, you'll have a few liberal talk radio markets which survive such as those in San Fran. and Seattle, but look at those areas, no more needs to be said there.

But then again, Hillary and "Babba" Boxer will talk about how "legislation" is needed to deal with conservative talk radio and you'll not say a thing about since what they just said violates the First Amendment rights of those talk radio shows....but even still, that doesn't matter to you because as a liberal, you know that the law doesn't apply to liberals, it only applies to everyone else.

David, let me ask you this: You claim conservatives to be "*insert cuss word here* right wingers." Excuse me, the term "right wingers" didn't exist until people like you showed up and labeled true Americans as such. Oh yes, you liberals claim to be Americans and such, but that's in bare bones citizenship status only, none of you are Americans from the heart because you have no idea what it means to be an American anymore. If you all did, you'd be demanding victory during a time of war, and you'd be demanding a border fence. So far, I've heard nothing in terms of demand of victory, and demand of a border fence. What do I hear? All I hear is admission of defeat and admission of defeat by setting a time line on the war in Iraq.

There are your liberal Americans.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Dayvoe said...

All we need to know about the troll can be found in these two paragraphs. The first has already been debunked and the second is just reprehensible. The first:

But then again, Hillary and "Babba" Boxer will talk about how "legislation" is needed to deal with conservative talk radio and you'll not say a thing about since what they just said violates the First Amendment rights of those talk radio shows....but even still, that doesn't matter to you because as a liberal, you know that the law doesn't apply to liberals, it only applies to everyone else.

This comes from Senator Jim ("global warming's a hoax") Inhofe has already told two separate and incompatible stories about this. In one telling it happened "the other day" and in the other telling it happened in the last three years.

Doesn't he know the difference between last week and a third of a decade? Inhofe also claims to have told this story "over a 100 times" in the radio. And no one's noticed until now?

Not a credible source for the troll's story. Oopsie.

http://electioncentral.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2007/jun/22/inhofe

And in the second paragraph, I love the way the troll defines "true Americans" to be just those citizens who agree with...the troll.

The word "fascist" comes to mind here.

So really, that's all you need to know about the troll. He's quite willing to pass along untruths as long as they come from the republican noise machine and he's a fascist.