The Jack Kelly "US Slavery Was Bad, But..." Monument

Yet another great read on this here: http://verysmartbrothas.com/jack-kelly-of-the-pittsburgh-post-gazette-is-a-fucking-disgrace-and-probably-needs-to-get-fired/

Jack Kelly Sunday

A brief fact-check.

This tiny mistake is most embarrassing for the Post-Gazette's main conservative columnist.  Most embarrassing.

This Sunday, he wrote:

Hamas (the Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement”) was founded in 1987 with initial funding from Saddam Hussein, according to Discover the Networks, a website that tracks the political left. Hamas is an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan Muslimin) founded in 1928, which received initial support from Adolf Hitler.

I'm not here to defend Hamas or Israel or the Muslim Brotherhood or Saddam Hussein or Adolph Hitler.  Let's just get that out of the way.  I'm just doing what my good friends at the Post-Gazette should be doing: Fact-checking Jack Kelly.

Let begin.  Jack says that Hamas was founding in 1987 with initial funding from Saddam Hussein and uses as a source this website, Discover the Networks.

Well, let's go see what DtN has to say about Hamas.  At the top of the page there's a set of bullet points - and this, I believe, is where Jack made his embarrassment:

• Islamic terrorist group founded in 1987
• Received funding from Saddam Hussein

But once we look just a few inches down the page, we'll see how badly Jack screwed this one up.  While the page does say that Hamas was formed in 1987 and it does say that it received some funding from Saddam Hussein, it does not say that that funding was in any way "initial."

Take a look at the "Saddam" passage:

Some clandestine fundraising takes place in Western Europe and North America as well. When the United Nations Oil-For-Food program was in effect, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein skimmed more than $21 billion from its coffers and sent some of it directly to Hamas.

So according to the website Jack cited as saying the funding was "initial," whatever Saddam money that made its way to Hamas came from the UN's Oil for Food program.  And when you follow DtN's link above, among the first things you read is this:

Established in 1995 by U.N. Security Council Resolution 986

But how can that be "initial funding" if Hamas was founded eight years earlier?  In any event, how much of the Oil for Food billions were sent to Hamas?  As far as I can tell, not much.  Take a look at this from the Council on Foreign Relations:

Iraq has also supported the Islamist Hamas movement and reportedly channeled money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. A secular dictator, however, Saddam tended to support secular terrorist groups rather than Islamist ones such as al-Qaeda, experts say.

In fact, the only reliable corroborating info I can squeeze out of the internets reference those payments to the families of some suicide bombers.  Like this from CBS:

Saddam Hussein has distributed $260,000 to 26 families of Palestinians killed in 29 months of fighting with Israel, including a $10,000 check to the family of a Hamas suicide bomber.

So while Jack mis-cites DtN, and DtN talks billions, the real number may, in fact be in the thousands.  Remember, Saddam was secular and supported secular terror - not faith-based terror.  Initial or otherwise.

Which leads me to the next "initial" reference of Jack's.  The "initial support" Hitler gave the Muslim Brotherhood.  Jack says the Brotherhood was founded in 1928 and "received initial support from Adolph Hitler."

This is surprising since Hitler's Nazi party only held 12 of the 491 seats in the German Parliament after the elections of May 1928.  They only rose to power 5 years later.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the first thing they did was to support the brotherhood, how can that possibly be "initial" support??

It's a small point, but AGAIN, DOESN'T ANYONE FACT-CHECK JACK KELLY?

And now the useful post script.  What is "Discover The Networks" anyway?  From its website we learn:

Welcome to DiscoverTheNetworks, a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This website is a "Guide to the Political Left." It identifies the individuals and organizations that make up the left, and also the institutions that fund and sustain the left; it maps the paths through which the left exerts its influence on the larger body politic; it defines the left's (often hidden) programmatic agendas; and it provides an understanding of the left's history and ideas.

How that overlaps any discussion of Saddam Hussein's interactions with Hamas are anyone's guess.  And who is David Horowitz?  The Southern Poverty Law Center has an idea:

Horowitz, who spent his young years as a Marxist, has in recent years become a furious far-right antagonist of liberals and leftists. He also provides some funding support for other anti-Muslim ventures, including, according to the blog SpencerWatch.com, paying Spencer $132,537 to run the JihadWatch website. Horowitz sees no philosophical gradations; if you're not in total agreement with his view of Islam, you're in favor of Muslim hegemony. He believes the Muslim Brotherhood and "Islamofascists" control most American Muslim organizations, especially Muslim student groups on college campuses.

Do I need to mention that the David Horowitz Freedom Center is a hard right organization?  One that's received about 36% of it's foundational suport from the Scaife Foundations?

So can hardly be a balanced and thoughtful information source, can it?

If all of that is the case, then HOW CAN JACK KELLY USE IT AS A CREDIBLE SOURCE FOR A COLUMN?

Doesn't ANYONE check these things on the Boulevard of the Allies?

Doesn't Anyone At The P-G Fact-Check Jack Kelly?

How surprising is this?

In a column titled "The facts don’t add up for human-caused global warming" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette comedy writer conservative columnist Jack Kelly gets, well, his facts wrong.

Which facts?

Well, let's start with HIS FIRST PARAGRAPH:

The first five months of 2014 have been the coldest since the National Weather Service began keeping records in 1888. If “climate change” alarmists got out more, they might have noticed.

I am not really sure where he got his data, but it simply doesn't conform to the "year-to-date" data at NOAA. Here's the YTD for Jan-Apr, 2014:

See that last red column wa-ay over on the right?  That's this past January-April.  As far as I can tell, it says that globally (and that's the only data that counts) it was about 1 degree Fahrenheit above average. See all those blue columns on the left?  Those are all the years colder than the average.

Show me where, Jack, it says that it was colder globally than 1888?

So I'm not sure where Jack got his data.  Given the extraordinary claim, shouldn't this be backed up by some sort of reference?  Where did he get this?  How does he explain how it's at odds with the expert's data?

Shouldn't this have been checked at the P-G?

Then there's Jack's SECOND PARAGRAPH:

Between 1979 — when weather satellites started measuring temperatures in the lower troposphere — and 1997, they rose about 1.1 degrees Celsius (1.98 degrees Fahrenheit).

This was explained in 2006:

In November 2005, Carl Mears and Frank Wentz at Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) performed an independent analysis of the satellite data. In the process, they found an algebraic error in the UAH [University of Alabama in Huntsville]analysis. With the correction made, the UAH trend was now 0.12°C per decade - larger but still less than the surface trend. However, RSS released their own results based on their data analysis - a trend of 0.19°C per decade.

And:

Part of the discrepancy between UAH and RSS was the methods used to splice the data from different satellites together. However, the major source of discrepancy was the way they corrected for diurnal drift (Mears et al 2005). The satellites orbit the earth from pole to pole. The satellites possess no propulsion so slowly over time, the local equator crossing time (LECT) changes. This is exacerbated by decay of the satellites orbital height, dragged down by the thin atmosphere. As a satellite's LECT changes, it takes readings at changing local times, allowing local diurnal cycle variations to appear as spurious trends (Christy et al 2000).

So once they corrected for diurnal drift and orbital drag, in 2006, this discrepancy dissolved.

And that's just Jack's first two paragraphs.

Didn't anyone at the P-G bother to check his science?

Someone once said that you're entitled to your own opinion but you're not entitled to your own facts.

But if you're named Jack Kelly and you're a conservative columnist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, apparently you are.

Jack Kelly Sunday

This week in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, conservative columnist Jack Kelly's asking all sorts of deep questions about (now wait for it) BENGHAZI!

Jack starts with the by hopeful conservative frame:

“It is, to me, equivalent to what was discovered with the Nixon tapes,” said columnist Charles Krauthammer.

He was referring to an email Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes wrote two days after Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the attack on our consulate in Benghazi on 9/​11/​2012.

Senior officials should stress “these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy,” Mr. Rhodes said. His email was among 41 obtained by a conservative watchdog group and made public April 29.

Here's the set of Judicial Watch emails that Jack references - just in case you want to check his work.

Let's start with the quotation and Jack's context:

This was intended to mislead to protect the president’s re-election. At the time Mr. Rhodes wrote his email, the CIA, the military’s African Command and senior Pentagon and State Department officials knew the Benghazi attack was mounted by an affiliate of al-Qaida. [Emphasis added.]

Actually, that's just not the case.  From the Senate Report:

It remains unclear if any group or person exercised overall command and control of the attacks or whether extremist group leaders directed their members to participate. Some intelligence suggests the attacks were likely put together in short order, following that day's violent protests in Cairo against an inflammatory video, suggesting that these and other terrorist groups could conduct similar attacks with little advance warning.

And in any event, at the time that Rhodes was writing his email (8:09PM on September 14, 2012) this was the first talking point coming out of the back and forth between all the intelligence/government agencies crafting them:

The currently available information suggests that the attacks in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the US Consulate and subsequently its annex. (Pg 46)

And immediately following:

The investigation is on-going as to who is responsible for the violence although, the crowd was almost certainly a mix of individuals. That being said, there are indications that violent extremists participated in the demonstrations.

Note the "currently available" phrase as well as the use of the term "on-going" in the discussion of the talking points to be released to the public.

As Dave Weigel points out at Slate.com:

Rice was saying that protests in Cairo broke out over the video, and that protests in Benghazi copied them. (A month later, the New York Times was reporting that the Benghazi militants were also inspired by the video.) The CIA's talking points referred to "protests" at several embassies, and the Rhodes email added that "these protests are rooted in an Internet video."

Are you lost yet? OK—the entire argument is about Rhodes mentioning, hours after the CIA had suggested the Benghazi attack grew out of demonstrations in several countries, that the immediate inspiration for the demonstrations was a video. That's the scandal—that by giving the video all this credit, the administration was distracting people from the real story that terrorism was surging again. Even though the subsequent 19 months have seen no more attacks on embassies. Even though reporting at the time said the excuse for the protests was said video.

Hardly Nixonian, doncha think?

We gotta continue this demolition of Jack's attack a bit more, though. He asks:

The military should have attempted a rescue, said the AFRICOM intelligence chief mentioned above. Why didn’t it?

What Jack's referring to, of course, is this quotation from Brigidier General Robert Lovell, who said:

The point is we should have tried.

However, Jack fails to inform his reading public (and AGAIN his fact-checkers at the P-G fail to check him on) that in testimony that same day said:

CONNELLY: I want to read to you the conclusion of the chairman of the [Armed Services] Committee, the Republican chairman Buck McKeon, who conducted formal briefings and oversaw that report he said quote "I'm pretty well satisfied that given where the troops were, how quickly the thing all happened, and how quickly it dissipated we probably couldn't have done much more than we did." Do you take issue with the chairman of the Armed Services Committee? In that conclusion?

LOVELL: His conclusion that he couldn't have done much more than they did with the capability and the way they executed it?

CONNELLY: Given the timeframe.

LOVELL: That's a fact.

CONNELLY: Okay.

LOVELL: The way it is right now. The way he stated it.

CONNELLY: Alright, because I'm sure you can appreciate, general, there might be some who, for various and sundry reasons would like to distort your testimony and suggest that you're testifying that we could have, should have done a lot more than we did because we had capabilities we simply didn't utilize. That is not your testimony?

LOVELL: That is not my testimony.

CONNELLY: I thank you very much, general. [Emphases added.]

And then there's this question from Jack:

President Barack Obama wasn’t in the White House situation room during the seven-hour siege, said former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor. Where was he?

Um, Jack? He was in the Oval Office.

And so, what sort of contact did the White House have at that point, monitoring the situation?

Here's General Martin Dempsey, testifying before Congress:

I would, if I could just, to correct one thing. I wouldn't say there was no follow-up from the White House. There was no follow-up, to my knowledge, with the president. But his staff was engaged with the national military command center pretty constantly through the period, which is the way it would normally work. [Emphasis added.]

I'll ask it again: Doesn't anyone at the P-G fact-check Jack Kelly?

THE IRS SCANDAL!!

Hey, remember when the P-G's Jack Kelly wrote this?

Who in Washington ordered special scrutiny of Tea Party groups, pro-Life groups, pro-Israel groups and donors to Freedom Watch, an organization which supported the Iraq troop surge?

Lois Lerner, director of the Exempt Organizations Division in Washington, was placed on administrative leave (with full pay) after she invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination rather than answer questions from the House Oversight Committee. But it's doubtful the buck stops with her. [Emphases added.]

Or this?

The Internal Revenue Service demanded of some conservative groups (but not liberal groups) applying for tax-exempt status the names and addresses of their members and donors, and their contacts with journalists and legislators.

"Please detail the content of the members of your organizations' prayers," the IRS asked a pro-life group in Iowa.

Tax collectors have no right to demand such information from Americans. We must find out who is responsible for targeting critics of the Obama administration, and hold them accountable.[Emphases added.]

And how about our friends on Scaife's braintrust? Remember when they wrote this?

This is government thuggery at among its worst — siccing the tax man on those with political views opposite of those in charge of the executive branch and in the middle of a presidential election year. [Emphasis added.]

Or this?

Not only did the Internal Revenue Service target conservative groups for harassing and illegal scrutiny of their tax-exempt status, it appears to have lied about how far up the food chain knowledge of this thuggish practice went. [Emphasis added.]

And when Ruth Ann Dailey wrote this?

The cacophony has grown louder and wilder in recent days due to a quick succession of executive branch debacles: the cynical cover-up of the Benghazi assault; the IRS oppression of conservative and independent nonprofits...[Emphasis added.]

Or this?

The bolder and more troubling intrusion is the Internal Revenue Service's clearly ideological targeting of conservative and libertarian groups. Bureaucrats grilled nonprofit applicants on matters of conscience up to and including the specific content and wording of their prayers. [Emphasis added.]

Remember all this?  It was only in the last coupla months.

Now take a look at this from the New York Times:

The instructions that Internal Revenue Service officials used to look for applicants seeking tax-exempt status with “Tea Party” and “Patriots” in their titles also included groups whose names included the words “Progressive” and “Occupy,” according to I.R.S. documents released Monday.

The documents appeared to back up contentions by I.R.S. officials and some Democrats that the agency did not intend to single out conservative groups for special scrutiny. Instead, the documents say, officials were trying to use “key word” shortcuts to find overtly political organizations — both liberal and conservative — that were after tax favors by saying they were social welfare organizations.

The Times has an example:

“Common thread is the word ‘progressive,’ ” a lookout list instructs. “Activities appear to lean toward a new political party. Activities are partisan and appear as anti-Republican.”

Now that it looks like Obama Administration (or at least the IRS) was not (repeat: NOT) targeting conservative groups with their offensive and intrusive inquiries - they were targeting groups across the political spectrum - will we see a clarification from Jack Kelly?  The Braintrust?  Ruth Ann Dailey?

And what would these clarifications look like?  And how long will it take?

There are reputations at stake here.

Jack Kelly: Science Denier

Today was supposed to be a nice restful day.  The weather's getting better, the Pirates have won 2 in a row, and our taxes are all efiled.

Then I read this.

It's Jack Kelly's latest attempt to debunk the climate science.  He fails, by the way as he has failed before.

But let's get started in his latest failure.  He begins:

March was cold in Pittsburgh. Britain had its coldest March since 1962. In Germany, this was the coldest March in 130 years.

"Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth's surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar," The Economist magazine noted March 30.

Ok, there are already two fallacies already.  Did you spot them?  One in each paragraph.

In the first, he's (apparently on purpose) confusing weather and climate.  Weather is the localized stuff you see when you look out the window.  Climate is the overall system.  Just as it was cooler in Pittsburgh earlier this morning (say, at 2am) than it was yesterday during the day (say, at 2pm), the globe is still warmer now than it was 100 years ago.  See how that works?

There's more.  According to Anthony Watt's (who's also something of a skeptic when it comes to climate science) global temperatures for March, 2013 are:

+0.18 C (about 0.32 degrees Fahrenheit) above 30-year average for March.

So, even if "March was cold in Pittsburgh" and even if "Britain had it coldest March since 1962" it doesn't matter over the larger frame of global temperatures.  March 2013 is still about a quarter of a degree Fahrenheit above average.

Then there's the second fallacy - the quotation from The Economist - that the warming "stopped" about 15 years ago (that would be 1997 or so).

You'll note that the point of Jack's column is to declare that global warming doesn't exist.  He writes:

In fact, "global warming" has existed essentially only in computer models.

The reason the science deniers go all the way back to 1998-1997 is that they're "cherry-picking" the data.  From Grist.org:

At the time, 1998 was a record high year in both the CRU and the NASA GISS analyses. In fact, it blew away the previous record by .2 degrees C. (That previous record went all the way back to 1997, by the way!)

According to NASA, it was elevated far above the trend line because 1998 was the year of the strongest El Nino of the century. Choosing that year as a starting point is a classic cherry pick and demonstrates why it is necessary to remove chaotic year-to year-variability (aka: weather) by smoothing out the data.

Clearly 1998 is an anomaly and the trend has not reversed.

There's even a chart showing the anomaly.


See that long tall red line over on the right?  That's the El Nino year of 1998.  See how the line trends upward for 50 or so years before '98?

Jack even ties both fallacies together:

March temperatures were just 0.18 degrees Celsius (.32 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average for the last 33 years, about 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.7 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than when warming peaked in 1997 -- well within the range of natural fluctuations.

Take a look again at that chart. And now notice that Jack fails (utterly) to give you, his reading audience, any justification for how or why those numbers are "well within the range of natural fluctuations."

That should tell you something - he doesn't have any.

There's something else to notice.  He's saying that global warming never existed (it's only found in flawed computer models, he said) and that it stopped in 1997.  Um, Jack?  You can't have it both ways, my friend.  You can't say it never existed AND say it stopped 15 years ago.

But I also want you all to notice something else: Jack Kelly for all his discussion of the computer models "full of fudge factors" he fails (again, utterly) to address the evidence of the globe's past warming.  Let's assume that the models are incorrect AND the warming's leveled off (perhaps for good) for a decade and a half.

That still leaves all the evidence that the planet's warmed up over the last century.

Yea, Jack doesn't talk much about that, does he?

10 Years Later - Who Was Right, Who Was Wrong

Local edition.

First, we'll start with one guy who was right - Tony Norman:

Last week was the 10th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. With few exceptions, most of the media commentary about its own credulousness was self-serving when it wasn't simply dishonest.

After all, nothing guarantees a trip down the collective memory hole faster than an unambiguous failure like Iraq and the stinging memory of one's own complicity in that failure.

Still, print journalists are compelled to look back on what we've written, if only to figure out how to move forward with some integrity. During the lead-up to the war, those of us who argued that invading Iraq would be a treasury-emptying disaster were vilified as unpatriotic. The letters page of this newspaper was dominated by those who took the Bush administration's word as gospel.

He then goes on to quote large chunks of this column from March, 2003.  It was stuff that turned out to be completely correct.  Stuff like this:

This weekend, an army of peacemakers will converge in Pittsburgh to protest the Bush administration's plan to vanquish the exaggerated threat of Saddam Hussein's fourth-rate military. Such a lopsided war will decimate much more of the country than the Gulf War did, leading to the kind of political and military destabilization in the region that terrifies Iraq's neighbors. Who knows? Perhaps a Greater Kurdistan will be a shining beacon of democracy in the tribal cauldron that is the Near East, but somehow I doubt it.

And so on.  Tony's always worth a good read.

But I want to take a look at who got it wrong ten years ago.

Fellas like Jack Kelly - here he is from December 2002:

Few besides Iraqi functionaries maintain that Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction. U.N. weapons inspectors found thousands of tons of chemical and biological weapons and their precursors, and a well-funded nuclear development program. At the time they were kicked out in 1998, all the inspectors were convinced that there was more to find. Presumably, Saddam would not have run the risk of war by expelling them if he didn't have something to hide.

Except that in September 2002, the Guardian published this:

[Scott Ritter]: Iraq manufactured three nerve agents: sarin, tabun, and VX. Some people who want war with Iraq describe 20,000 munitions filled with sarin and tabun nerve agents that could be used against Americans. The facts, however, don't support this. Sarin and tabun have a shelf-life of five years. Even if Iraq had somehow managed to hide this vast number of weapons from inspectors, what they are now storing is nothing more than useless, harmless goo.

Chemical weapons were produced in the Muthanna state establishment: a massive chemical weapons factory. It was bombed during the Gulf war, and then weapons inspectors came and completed the task of eliminating the facility. That means Iraq lost its sarin and tabun manufacturing base.

We destroyed thousands of tons of chemical agent. It is not as though we said, "Oh we destroyed a factory, now we are going to wait for everything else to expire." We had an incineration plant operating full-time for years, burning tons of the stuff every day. We went out and blew up bombs, missiles and warheads filled with this agent. We emptied Scud missile warheads filled with this agent. We hunted down this stuff and destroyed it.

[William Rivers Pitt]: Couldn't the Iraqis have hidden some?

R: That's a very real possibility. The problem is that whatever they diverted would have had to have been produced in the Muthanna state establishment, which means that once we blew it up, the Iraqis no longer had the ability to produce new agent, and in five years the sarin and tabun would have degraded and become useless sludge. All this talk about Iraq having chemical weapons is no longer valid.

The discussion of nuclear and biological weapons is the same: eliminated programs with no evidence (and the  evidence would be easily detectable) of any restart.

Also, it turns out after the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction.  (It also turns out that Scott Ritter ran into his own rather disgusting mess - but that doesn't mean he was wrong about the WMD)

Jack Kelly was wrong about that.

Then there's Jack's claim about the linking of Iraq and al-Qaida:

So debunking evidence of ties between Iraq and al-Qaida has become an urgent task for anti-warriors. The New York Times has three times published stories casting doubt on a report that Sept. 11 hijack leader Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague last year, each time to have its debunking debunked by the head of the Czech intelligence service, the Czech interior minister, and the Czech prime minister at the time. All maintain to this day that the meeting took place.

The task of the debunkers is getting more difficult. In the current issue of Vanity Fair, David Rose reports that a special intelligence unit in the Pentagon has found nearly 100 separate examples of Iraq/al-Qaida cooperation going back to 1992.

Jack was wrong about this, too.  There was no meeting between Iraqi Intelligence and Mohammad Atta.  From the Washington Post May 1, 2002 (a few months before Jack published his column, by the way):

There is no evidence that the alleged leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta, met in April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, a finding that eliminates a once-suggested link between the terrorist attacks and the government of President Saddam Hussein, according to a senior administration official.

And:

But after months of investigation, the Czechs said they were no longer certain that Atta was the person who met al-Ani, saying "he may be different from Atta," the administration official said. More recently, FBI and CIA analysts who went over thousands of travel records concluded that "there was no evidence Atta left or returned to the U.S." at the time he was supposed to be in Prague, the official said.

That determination was first disclosed in Newsweek magazine this week.

"We ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on, from flight reservations to car rentals to bank accounts," FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said in a speech in San Francisco last month, setting out for the first time the extent of the investigation and its results.

Huh. FBI Director Robert Mueller said that?

Jack was wrong.

Turns out we were right and Jack Kelly and those cheering for invasion in 2003 were wrong.  There were no WMD and there was no operational connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda.  And all of the death and suffering that happened because they insisted they were right and we were wrong was all completely necessary.

Yea, that's not really something to be celebrated, of course.

But it still nice to know that George W Bush has a pleasant hobby.

Jack Kelly Sunday

Jack Kelly, conservative columnist over at the Post-Gazette, is at it again.  And again there's more proof that his columns are never fully checked by my friends over at the Post-Gazette.

Take a look at the first two paragraphs from today's column:

At the time they met with President Barack Obama on 9/11/2012, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knew it was terrorists who were attacking our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Mr. Panetta testified Feb. 7.

Their pre-scheduled meeting in the Oval Office took place about 90 minutes after the attack began. The president "left it up to them" whether to respond, Mr. Panetta told the Senate Intelligence Committee. The fighting would last for six hours more, but neither he nor Gen. Dempsey heard from the president again that night, Mr. Panetta said.

Most of it is demonstrably false.

But there's no reason for you, my audience, to simply take my word for it that I write is true - that's what Jack does with his audience.  No, let's go to the facts.

Starting with that second paragraph - specifically this sentence:

The president "left it up to them" whether to respond, Mr. Panetta told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Note the word "whether" after the quotation. And note the quotation for that matter.  Now you'd think that in a newspaper (even if it is only an "opinion" column found in that newspaper) when a Secretary of Defense is quoted the writer gets the quotation right - or at least it's close enough not to be misleading.

By phrasing it the way he does, Jack leaves his audience with the impression that the President left the decision to respond up to Panetta and Gen. Dempsey.  This is false.

My evidence?  Let's roll the tape:


At about 38 seconds in, Panetta testifies:

We had just picked up the information that something was happening, that there was an apparent attack going on in Benghazi. And I informed the president of that fact, and he at that point directed both myself and General Dempsey to do everything we needed to do to try to protect lives there. [Emphasis added.]

And then at about 1:09, Panetta reiterated that the President:

...basically said, 'Do whatever you need to do to be able to protect our people there.'

Panetta also said this in his prepared remarks:

By our best estimate, the incident at the Temporary Mission Facility in Benghazi began at 3:42 p.m. eastern daylight time on September 11th. The Embassy in Tripoli was notified of the attacks almost immediately and within 17 minutes of the initial reports – at 3:59 p.m. – AFRICOM directed that an unarmed, unmanned, surveillance aircraft that was nearby to reposition overhead the Benghazi facility.

Soon after the initial reports about the attack on Benghazi, General Dempsey and I met with President Obama and he ordered all available DoD assets to respond to the attack in Libya and to protect U.S. personnel and interests in the region. [Emphasis added.]

And yet despite all this evidence, Jack Kelly tells his readers that the President of the United States left the decision to respond to the Benghazi attacks up to the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - a falsehood.

Then there's the sentence, immediately following:

The fighting would last for six hours more, but neither he nor Gen. Dempsey heard from the president again that night, Mr. Panetta said.

Another falsehood as General Dempsey said on CNN three weeks ago:

CROWLEY: But when did you learn, if this was a seven-hour battle, we don't know when people died, and there when the ambassador died, but if this was a seven-hour battle, a U.S. strike force couldn't have gotten there in time to be of some service?

DEMPSEY: You know, it wasn't a seven-hour battle. It was two 20-minute battles separated by about six hours. The idea that this was one continuous event is just incorrect.

And yet, Jack Kelly informs his readers that "the fighting" would "last" for more than six hours.

And that's just the first two paragraphs - this is how he frames the rest of the column.

I'll ask it again: Doesn't anyone at the Post-Gazette fact-check Jack Kelly?  Completely fact-check, I mean.  Fact-check him enough so that everything he presents as a fact is, in fact, true.

It just doesn't look like it, guys.  Sorry.

Jack Kelly...Friday?

On Friday, our trusty conservative columnist at the P-G posted a column that began thusly:

Team Obama has rushed out an unintentionally hilarious ad attacking Mitt Romney for quoting the president verbatim. It is revealing in multiple ways:

The ad charges, falsely, that Mr. Romney distorted what President Barack Obama said in Roanoke, Va., last Friday: "If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

There's nothing new about the mendacity. Since May, Team Obama has spent about $100 million on ads attacking Mr. Romney for jobs cut at firms acquired by Bain Capital. The jobs were cut after Mr. Romney left to head up the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. Jonathan Lavine, the Bain executive who made the cuts the ads decry, is a major Obama fundraiser.

But this new ad is so poorly edited it is self-refuting. Included in it is footage that shows Mr. Obama saying exactly the words Mr. Romney said he said.

And in doing so, he joined a distinguished crowd of conservatives who are content with disregarding the truth  in order to try to make some political points.  They'll snip away context and in doing so make one thing sound like another.

It's another form of a lie of omission.  Let me explain.  Again.

Here's the ad that Jack misreads:


You will notice the deception that Jack is foisting upon you.  The part where the ad says "exactly the words Mr. Romney said he said" are the words that come directly from the deceptive Romney campaign ad.  The point of the "tampered" ad is to show, well, that the Romney camp tampered with what Obama actually said.

Jack's hoping his audience doesn't check his work.  Luckily for his audience, I will.

(Didn't I already do this?  That's right - for Selena Zito.  I guess this is yet another right wing zombie lie.)

What, exactly was tampered with?  This is the speech from which the snipped sentence was taken:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires. [emphasis added.]

Take a look at the paragraph the Romney folks snipped (I bolded the snipped sentences to make them easier to find).  It's about infrastructure.

Factcheck.org agrees with me, Jack.  As do the fact checkers at the Washington Post:

The biggest problem with Romney’s ad is that it leaves out just enough chunks of Obama’s words — such as a reference to “roads and bridges”— so that it sounds like Obama is attacking individual initiative.

It's taken out of context. It's deceptive.  It's a lie.

Jack Kelly is lying to you, folks.

Ruth Ann Dailey On "Facts" and Facts

In today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, columnist Ruth Ann Dailey writes:

The Obama administration and its media partisans now navigating the "Fast and Furious" drama and looking ahead to the far more scandalous matter of classified intelligence leaks should remember this name: Valerie Plame.

And then a few paragraphs later:

The truth is in the details, but in political theater the truth rarely matters.

Which is followed by some examples, including this one:

It didn't matter that her husband Joe Wilson's investigation and subsequent New York Times editorial had actually bolstered the claim of British and Italian intelligence that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium in Niger.

Which is why, of course, that Joe Wilson wrote in the New York Times:

In late February 2002, I arrived in Niger's capital, Niamey, where I had been a diplomat in the mid-70's and visited as a National Security Council official in the late 90's. The city was much as I remembered it. Seasonal winds had clogged the air with dust and sand. Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger River (over the John F. Kennedy bridge), the setting sun behind them. Most people had wrapped scarves around their faces to protect against the grit, leaving only their eyes visible.

The next morning, I met with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick at the embassy. For reasons that are understandable, the embassy staff has always kept a close eye on Niger's uranium business. I was not surprised, then, when the ambassador told me that she knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq -- and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington. Nevertheless, she and I agreed that my time would be best spent interviewing people who had been in government when the deal supposedly took place, which was before her arrival.

I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place. [emphasis added.]

So how does that bolster the (incorrect, as it turns out) claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger?  Dailey never explains, she just assumes that you, her loyal reading public, will assume that her incorrect claim is actually correct and, y'know, factual.

Then there's this:

It didn't matter that the source for Robert Novak's column identifying Ms. Plame as a CIA employee was the State Department's Richard Armitage, not vice presidential aide Scooter Libby.

You'd think that Libby was charged with leaking Ms Plame's identity and that the conveniently avoided "facts" showed otherwise.  That's certainly what Dailey is implying.

Except Libby wasn't charged with leaking Plame's identity.  He was charged with Obstruction of Justice, Perjury and Making False Statements.

For Ruth Ann Dailey to get some easily researched facts wrong in a column about how facts are ignored by the partisan media is both sadly humorous and completely unforgivable.

Perhaps Jack Kelly's fact checker is doing double duty as Ruth Ann Dailey's fact checker.

But If It's A HOAX...

Our good friends on the other side of the political aisle (aka the anti-science wing of the GOP) are usually more than happy to proclaim the science of climate change to be a hoax.  For instance, Senator Inhofe some time ago called it the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" and more recently P-G columnist Jack Kelly wrote that it was "the most harmful hoax" in history.

 But if it is indeed a hoax then why is the Defense Science Board looking into it?

From DiscoveryNews.com:

The United States' Department of Defense needs to know more about how climate change affects global security, recommends a report by the the department's science advisers, the Defense Science Board (DSB).

Why waste all that time (and money) looking into something that Climategate proved to be a fraud?

Here's the report, if you wanted to read it yourself.

If this general argument of mine looks familiar, it's because it is.  I made it way back in August, 2009.  Then it was the National Intelligence Council - from the last months of the Bush Administration.

Still not a hoax.

Jack Kelly Debunked In The P-G

While I've been debunking Jack Kelly for some time now (and Ed Heath's been doing a bang up job over at Cognitive Dissonance as well), it's always good to read other debunkings - especially when they're by real honest to goodness experts.

Witness Wednesday's piece in the P-G from Brenda Ekwurzel (Ph.D. in isotope geochemistry from Department of Earth Sciences at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, by the way). No ambiguity in her point of view when she opens with:

Post-Gazette columnist Jack Kelly may feel comfortable using inaccurate statements and cherry-picked data to attack climate science and scientists ("Chicken Little Gore Goes on a Tirade," Aug. 24), but as one of those scientists, I can look at the Pittsburgh streets I grew up on and see how climate change is already shifting the baselines of "normal" weather.

"[I]naccurate statements and cherry-picked data"? Really?? That sound an awful lot like Jack to me.

Ekwurzel thumbnails the science and starts in on our Jack:

Scientists have been studying climate change for a very long time. The idea that adding extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere could trap heat and drive climate change has been known by scientists since 1896. Over the past 150 years, burning coal and oil and destroying tropical forests has increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere 38 percent, to more than 385 parts per million, its highest level in more than 800,000 years.

The result is a warming world. The four scientific agencies that track global temperature all agree that the 2000s were the hottest average decade since reliable record keeping began in the late 1880s. Before that the hottest average decade was the 1990s and before that it was the prior decade. Scientists know it's better to take a long view to identify climate trends, but Mr. Kelly cherry-picked figures from 1998 to draw misleading conclusions about climate change.

That would be when Jack wrote:

Global temperatures peaked in 1998. People have noticed winters are getting colder.

Note he's using anecdotal evidence ("People have noticed...") to support his argument. Which people? When? Where?

Reminder to Jack: Anecdotal evidence is not scientific evidence.

Back to Ekwurzel:

That was just one of many misleading aspects of Mr. Kelly's column. He also pointed to previous eras in Earth's history when carbon dioxide levels and global temperature differed greatly. But he failed to acknowledge that natural climate change in the past was due to changes not only in carbon dioxide levels, but also in the planet's orbit, the sun's output of energy and even the shifting of continents over thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands and millions of years. Modern climate change is different because we are rapidly introducing extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and seeing resulting changes in our own lifetimes.

Whah? So Jack left stuff out?? Inconceivable! She addresses Jack's take on Climategate:

Further, Mr. Kelly personally attacks scientists based on a misreading of emails that hackers stole from a British university in late 2009. Yet he fails to mention that no less than six independent investigations have cleared the scientists involved, including a three-part investigation by Penn State University.

Like this one.

Dr. Ekwurzel ends with this:

In order to succeed with anything, we need to start with facts. Misleading columns like Jack Kelly's are a harmful distraction from the challenge we face when it comes to climate changes.

Unfortunately as we've seen over the years, Jack Kelly is more likely to mislead than he is to accurately reflect reality.

Chris Potter Does It Again

Slag Heap, today.

Potterman deconstructs BOTH Jack Kelly AND Jerry Bowyer. The topic? The high cost of higher education:

Let's acknowledge the obvious: Whatever else these guys are, they're conservative ideologues, and they aren't writing in a vacuum. After all, even Phyllis Freakin' Schlafly has begun asking questions about whether a college education is worth it. And when folks like Phyllis Schlafly start expressing concern for the poor and indebted, you know something is up.

One gets the sneaking suspicion, in fact, that what really bothers Schlafly & Co. is not the cost of education per se, but the fact that Barack Obama has done something about it. Back when giant for-profit enterprises like Sallie Mae were raking in fees, massive student indebtedness was, presumably, just the free market at work. Now that Obama has cut the banks out of student lending, you'll hear conservatives begin to wring their hands about whether those poor first-years are getting their money's worth.

(I mean after all, when Kelly complains that "it is virtually impossible to discharge student loan debts in bankruptcy," he might have felt obliged to mention the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. That 2005 measure, passed by a Republican-led Congress and signed by a Republican president, made it difficult to discharged loans even when they were issued by Sallie Mae and other for-profit lenders.)

So I can't blame those who wonder about Kelly's motivation here. Does his concern stem from the fact that college campuses are among the few places where liberal ideas are not roundly dismissed ... where they even predominate? Is it any wonder that Kelly -- a global warming denier in the face of strong scientific consesnsus -- doesn't see the value in book-larnin'?

So, yet again Potter shows us all how it's done.

The Trib Gets It Wrong. Again.

While I am off for a few days taking care of some important (non-blog related) business, I have to take a few minutes to point out how wrong the Trib got another story. Completely wrong.

From the yesterday's Whispers column:

The check's in the mail -- or will be soon.

That's what U.S. Sen. John Kerry's staff essentially is saying regarding his stall tactics on making tax payments on his $7 million yacht, a Friendship sloop featuring a varnished teak interior, wet bar and cold wine storage area.

Kerry, D-Mass., originally ported the tony craft in Rhode Island in an apparent attempt to get out of paying taxes on it in his home state. But when the Boston Herald disclosed the boat's location in July, Kerry agreed to promptly pay the equivalent of all taxes owed had the boat been ported in Massachusetts.

Didn't happen.

But it did - we'll get to that in a second.

This story first bubbled up here at 2PJ in regards to a Jack Kelly column in August. From that blog post we discover that the Boston Herald reported in late July that the Kerry's were under no obligation to pay the Massachusetts sales tax on the boat they owned, as it was ported in Rhode Island.

Would have saved them $500,000. After a very public smear, the Kerrys pointed out that they were always planning on paying the tax they weren't obligated to pay.

Cost them $500,000.

So what's the story now? Had the Trib braintrust actually and honestly referenced the Boston Herald article, they would have told their audience:

A spokesman for the state Department of Revenue confirmed that “a sales tax return was filed” by Kerry last summer to cover state taxes that would have been owed, had he kept the Isabel in his home state’s waters.

So they did pay the state taxes. Now go back and take a look at what the Trib wrote. The piece is written so that you'd think he didn't pay any of the taxes on the boat. That's what's known as a lie of omission, my friends.

So what's the point of the latest Herald Story? Town excise taxes from the town of Nantucket.

That's on a $500 bill the Kerrys haven't received yet.

Once you peek under the Scaife veneer (and the braintrust is always betting you won't bother) you'll usually see all sorts of facts that get in the way of their story.

What are facts when you can smear?

Can I get back to my life now? Please?

Jack Kelly CORRECTION

Remember this column by Jack Kelly?

Both Ed Heath and I blogged on it.

BTW, if you don't already know Ed's blog, go take a look. The wanker does a really really good job taking down Jack. I find myself grumbling, "Why the f**k didn't I think of that??" whenever I read his stuff. The wanker.

Anyway, back to Jack the Hack. The P-G published this in yesterday's paper:

Editor's Note / This column was changed to reflect this clarification, which was published on June 8:

Sunday Perspectives. Rep. Joe Sestak told Philadelphia radio host Larry Kane that he was offered a job by the Obama administration if he didn't run for the Senate seat held by Arlen Specter, but when asked if it was a high-ranking job, Mr. Sestak did not say "yes," as reported in a Jack Kelly column Sunday. The original account posted by the radio program on its website did have Mr. Sestak answering "yes" to the question. But a transcript subsequently posted on the site showed that Mr. Sestak refused to comment on whether it was the job of Navy secretary and a short time later responded this way when asked if it was a "big" job: "It was - never - let me not comment on it. We had a closed comm ... " The conversation was interrupted at this point by Mr. Kane's next question.

Something, I have to say in all honest, I had nothing to do with. But with glee in my heart and a twinkle in my eye I have to ask, "Another Jack Kelly correction?"

Kudos to the P-G for this one.

Jack Kelly CORRECTION

Ah...

Somedays it all seems worthwhile.

Yesterday I posted this. In which I find an error in Jack Kelly's most recent column. He stated that the Times Square Bomber was a registered Democrat in Connecticut.

Problem? There's just no evidence that that's true - and even the right wing blog that started the story back has since pedaled on it. Jack, however, went ahead and used it anyway.

I summed it all up with this:

Note to my good friends at the P-G: THIS REQUIRES A CORRECTION/RETRACTION.

ON MONDAY.

Well, today (and that would be Monday) the P-G posted this:

Correction: This column originally described Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad as "a registered Democrat in Connecticut." Voter registration officials in Bridgeport and Shelton, the two communities in which Mr. Shahzad lived, say he was not registered to vote there.

Of course it would be a logical fallacy to automatically assume that my blog posting had anything to do with the P-G spanking Jack Kelly with a correction.

On the other hand, I'll be sporting a smug "I made them issue another correction on another Jack Kelly column" grin for the next few days.

Now That Hoffman Lost...

From Mediamatters:

Right-wing media figures enthusiastically endorsed and boosted the failed Conservative Party candidacy of Doug Hoffman in the race to fill a vacant seat in New York's 23rd Congressional District, with several of them hosting Hoffman on their radio or television shows. Media figures who boosted Hoffman include Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Mike Huckabee, Michelle Malkin, and Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com.

To that heady list we can add a local: Our Very Own Jack Kelly. Here he was just this past Sunday:

Political soothsayers will be studying the returns Tuesday from Virginia and New Jersey for omens that could predict the outcome of the midterm elections next year. But the race with the greatest national implications is for the House seat in upstate New York because of what it portends for the relationship between the Washington GOP establishment and an increasingly restive base.

Republicans have held the seat for 100 years. With public opinion turning against Democrats, it should have been easy to retain it. But local GOP bosses botched that when they selected DeDe Scozzafava as their candidate. Ms. Scozzafava is to the left of the Democrat in the race. She's for abortion and gay marriage, backed the stimulus bill every Republican in the House voted against and supports "card check," which effectively would abolish the secret ballot in union elections.

The Washington GOP establishment quickly lined up behind Ms. Scozzafava. The National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican National Committee have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her behalf.

But the locals haven't been eager to support someone who is clearly a Republican In Name Only. Hence the candidacy of businessman Doug Hoffman, running on the Conservative Party line. [Emphasis added.]

And he ended the column with this:

The Republican Party may be saved from its "leaders" by the woman they love to hate. The Beltway Brahmins can't stand Sarah Palin because she isn't one of them, doesn't aspire to be one of them and isn't afraid of them.

If Mr. Hoffman wins, Sarah Palin will deserve the lion's share of the credit. She made her bones in Alaska politics by taking on a smug, corrupt, complacent GOP establishment and beating it. A larger reform opportunity beckons.

And if Mr. Hoffman loses? That must've never occurred to the folks backing Hoffman.

The GOP, as Jack rightly points out, should have had no trouble keeping the seat. But they chose instead to impose a political purity test and purge the infidel.

And they lost. They lost the seat they held for, as Jack points out, 100 years.

But I'll go with Jack on this one. In an election year where the GOP took the Governor's mansions in VA and NJ, perhaps the election with the greatest national implications is the one where the GOP fed on its own and because of that lost.

Lost a seat they'd held for a long long time.

I Guess They Pulled Jack Kelly's Column

Yesterday, I wasn't sure what had happened to Jack Kelly's most recent column. Now I have a better idea. It's my understanding the column was pulled off-line. It was on-line Sunday at the Post-Gazette and by Wednesday, it was gone.

Matt Hogue (of the Pittsburgh Hoagie) posted this comment on my blog post:

I was told by someone on the PG Editorial board that it was pulled.

Jack Kelly also sent me the following E-mail:

"I phrased the sentence poorly. I wanted to convey that it was the Rodney King riots that radicalized him. We've issued a correction."

The sentence Jack admits to phrasing poorly is this one:

Mr. Jones was arrested during the rioting in Los Angeles in 1992 that followed the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King.

If he was aiming to show what radicalized Jones, he was way way off. But this is not the place to rehash Jack's column. I did that already. On Sunday. And then they pulled the column off the website.

Not sure how rare pulling a column is in newspaper columnist-ville, but I suspect it doesn't happen often. Usually they post a correction and move on. This time they yanked the whole thing.

Should I be gloating now? Not sure.

So why did they pull the column off the P-G's site? Who knows? Could it be they pulled it because it had more errors than usual? Could it be that they're suddenly more sensitive to charges that they don't fact-check Jack? I don't know for sure but let's hope so.

And if my blog posting played some small part in this, then I am gratified beyond belief. Having a column at a major metropolitan newspaper does not give anyone the authority to make stuff up or to otherwise spread unfounded rumors as truth. As the man said, you're entitled to your own opinion but you're not entitled to your own facts. Holding a columnist's feet to the fire and demanding his (or her) "facts" more or less conform to reality is a good thing. A necessary thing. A thing to be done more often regardless of political the columnist's ideology.

Perhaps NOW Jack will check his sources a little better. Perhaps NOW Jack's editors will watch over his shoulder a little more diligently.

Today, I'll be smiling a little more today thinking about how they yanked Jack's column off-line.

And yea, I'll be gloating a little.

What Happened to Jack's Column?

Ok so this evening (Tuesday, September 15 at 10:40pm) I decide to take a look at the Jack Kelly column I blogged on this Sunday.

That was the column (and you can still see it here at the Toledo Blade) where Jack makes some rather stunningly simple mistakes about the recently resigned Van Jones.

Jack said Jones was arrested during the LA riots when he wasn't. He was arrested a week later in San Francisco (he was released a few hours later with all charges dropped). Jack said Jones was arrested in Seattle in 1999 during a WTO protest. No record of that happening anywhere outside of Glenn Beck's fevered imagination.

Well Kelly fans, as if this moment, the column's GONE.

The page I linked to pulls up this:

And the column is gone from Jack's archive.

I wonder what happened to it. It's completely possible that there's a glitch at the P-G's server and the column will be returned to it's former glory on the Boulevard of the Allies. In fact that's what I am guessing.

They would not have pulled it, would they?

Probably not - it's probably just a glitch.

I'd bet a dollar to donuts (mmm...donuts) that the column will be back tomorrow.

But as of right now (11:08pm Tuesday night), the column's G-O-N-E gone.

What Will Jack Kelly Say?

Sarah Palin Resigns

Given that our good friend Jack is a huge Palin booster from way back, we wonder how long it'll take for him to blame her resignation on:

1. The Obama administration
2. The liberal media
3. Our permissive culture
4. ACORN
5. Liberals in general
   
6. All of the above.

Only time will tell.