1. The Tea Party is a grass roots movement.
REALITY: The Tea Party is a rebranding effort by the Republican Party, led by the billionaire Koch Brothers and their organization, Americans for Prosperity. Read this report, and don't forget to look at this fabulous graphic, which is worth at least 10,000 words all by itself. The corporate takeover of our government is in process.
2. The stimulus was a failure.
REALITY: Not only was it not a failure, but a huge number of Republicans not only had their hands out to grab the money while the "failure" word came flying out of their mouths at regular intervals, 114 of them took credit for the same stimulus that they voted against. Additionally, the stimulus cost $787 billion, not $1.2 trillion, and created 3.3 million new jobs, and prevented an even deeper recession.
3. The President is a Muslim Kenyan Socialist who has never produced his birth certificate.
REALITY: The President is an American Christian centrist who produced his birth certificate for public display when this ridiculous meme first began during the 2008 election. Socialism requires a more left wing point of view, and this president is not even center left, much less far left.
4. Nowhere in the constitution does it state that there must be a separation between church and state.
REALITY: It is important to understand that this meme was not born out of ignorance, but out of a desire to intertwine religion and government, and thus the Far Right has re-interpreted the first two clauses in the First Amendment to be more to their liking. Constitutional scholars agree that these clauses denote the doctrine of the separation of church and state. Because our SCOTUS is Far Right, it is a dangerous meme.
5. The health care reform bill enacted by Democrats hurt Medicare and recipients of Medicare.
REALITY: Not only did it not harm the Medicare program, it actually strengthened it.
6. There is no difference between union funding of election ads and funding by secretive Super PACs.
REALITY: The difference between them is enormous. Union funding comes from the workers, the people who belong to the unions, and thus we know who is funding these ads. Secretive Super PACs, on the other hand, are funded by anyone, including in some cases foreign interests or multi-national companies, and no disclosure is required. There is also NO limit on donor contributions. Individuals funding union pacs are limited to specific, and low, dollar amounts, and there is disclosure.
These last two are from Dave Johnson, in his words.
REALITY: Social Security has run a surplus since it began, has a trust fund in the trillions, is completely sound for at least 25 more years and cannot legally borrow so cannot contribute to the deficit (compare that to the military budget!) Life expectancy is only longer because fewer babies die; people who reach 65 live about the same number of years as they used to.
Please re-blog this post, email it, and link to it. This stuff matters.
Links to Obama Administration / Democratic Party Accomplishments:
~ Rachel Maddow recounts what the Democrats accomplished in the past two years, and in the face of unrelenting opposition from the Republican Party. Maddow says that the Democrats, who controlled both Housees and the Presidency, were about policy, not politics.
~ Crowd-sourced on Twitter, a well sourced listing of the achievements of the Obama administration.
~ WTF has Obama done so far?.com
And finally, go VOTE!
Former President John F. Kennedy on why the press is the only business in America to be protected by the Constitution during a speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961:Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed — and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment — the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution — not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply "give the public what it wants" — but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.
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