Jack Kelly Sunday

Sometimes, after digging around a little, you find a small bit of info that invalidates an entire column.

Well for Jack Kelly this Sunday, it's here.

In a piece about how bad things will become, Jack's wrote:

“We expect the bottom to fall out by the second quarter of 2014,” Trends Research Institute founder Gerald Celente predicted last October.

So where did this quotation come from?

Here - The Alex Jones Show.

Alex Jones?  That's a acceptable source for Jack Kelly?  More importantly, that's a acceptable source for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette?

About 28 minutes in, after the warnings about how by Alex Jones (and uncorrected by Jack's source, Gerald, by the way) tells us how "the establishment is running al-Qaeda" we hear Celente near-scream:

Any self-respecting adult that hears McConnel, Reid, Boehner, Ryan, one after another, and buys this baloney… they deserve what they get.

And as for the international scene… the whole thing is collapsing.

That’s our forecast.

We are saying that by the second quarter of 2014, we expect the bottom to fall out… or something to divert our attention as it falls out.

And don't be fooled by the ellipses. They're not masking content, they're merely pauses in Celente's rant.  And what was he ranting about?  The vote in October to raise the debt ceiling.  That's why he's blaming both sides for whatever he thinks is going to happen.

Funny that Jack didn't tell you that part.  Either he didn't know where the quotation came from and its context or he did know and decided not to tell you.  Which is it?  I'd think that for a political columnist, either is equally damning.

Some Gerald Celente highlights:

• Members of the press are routinely referred to as "presstitutes"
• BOTH Democrats are Republicans in Congress are referred to as "clowns" 
• And finally when he sarcastically yells "salute the Commander-in-Chief" he's got his right hand up in a Nazi salute.

That's who Jack Kelly decided was an acceptable source for a quotation for a Post-Gazette column.

Doesn't anyone at the P-G check these things?

Jack Kelly Sunday

I guess I have to ask it again:

Doesn't anyone at the P-G fact-check Jack Kelly?

Why am I asking this, yet again?

Because this showed up in today's column:

But his small ball, recycled initiatives — he even plagiarized lines from Mr. Bush’s 2007 SOTU, according to former Bush speechwriter Mark Thiessen...

Except he didn't.  Thiessen was wrong and Jack is wrong for passing it along.

Let me show you why.

According to David Weigel of Slate.com:

This one comes from Fox News, which hosted former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen after he claimed that President Obama's speech had been lifted from the 2007 State of the Union.

The link above leads to this Breitbart page. Here's what it says:

Following President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, former George W. Bush speechwriter Mark Thiessen told Fox News Channel’s “The Kelly File” host Megyn Kelly that Obama’s speech plagiarized lines from Bush’s 2007 speech, for which he said he was the lead speechwriter.

“It was eerily familiar,” Thiessen said. “There were lines like, ‘Our job is to help Americans build a future of hope and opportunity. A future of hope and opportunity begins with a growing economy. A future of hope and opportunity requires our citizens have affordable and available health care.’ ‘Extending opportunity and hope depends on a stable supply of energy.’ All of that came from the 2007 State of the Union address by George W. Bush. So, Barack Obama has gone from blaming George W. bush to plagiarizing George W. Bush.”[Emphasis added.]

Ok, so let's go to Obama's State of The Union Address to see if those lines are actually in there.

Guess what?  They're not.

Weigel's done almost all of the heavy lifting here, so I'll just add a few details of my own.

Asserted plagiarism #1 ("Our job is to help Americans build a future of hope and opportunity.")  And to that Weigel writes:

This appears in the Bush speech: "Our job is to make life better for our fellow Americans, and to help them to build a future of hope and opportunity—and this is the business before us tonight." Nothing like it appears in the Obama speech—the closest is "Opportunity is who we are."

In fact, the only time the phrase "our job" shows up in Obama's SOTU is in response to this passage:

Today, after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better. But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled. The cold, hard fact is that even in the midst of recovery, too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by – let alone get ahead. And too many still aren’t working at all.

To which the President follows:

Our job is to reverse these trends. It won’t happen right away, and we won’t agree on everything. But what I offer tonight is a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class, and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class. Some require Congressional action, and I’m eager to work with all of you. But America does not stand still – and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that’s what I’m going to do.[Emphasis added.]

That's it.  That's the overlap - and it's hardly plagiarism.  No mention of "hope" in that section Bush's SOTU, by the way.  How telling.

Asserted plagiarism #2 ("A future of hope and opportunity begins with a growing economy -- and that is what we have.").  And to that Weigel writes:

That's the next line in the Bush speech. Nothing like it appears in the Obama speech. He doesn't even use the phrase "growing economy."

In fact there's only one use of the word "hope" and it's in this sentence:

That’s what most Americans want – for all of us in this chamber to focus on their lives, their hopes, their aspirations.  [Emphasis added.]

No overlap here at all.

Asserted plagiarism #3 ("Extending opportunity and hope depends on a stable supply of energy.").  And to that, Weigel writes:
Also in the Bush speech. Obama—see the pattern?—does not repeat this. He says instead that "one of the biggest factors in bringing more jobs back is our commitment to American energy," which is a similar sentiment. In fact there's no usage of the phrase "extending opportunity" or "stable supply of energy."  In fact the word "stable" shows up only once in Obama's speech at all.  Here:

But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact. And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did.

Again, no overlap, no plagiarism.

Now if you wanna talk about something far closer to actual plagiarism, I bring up something I wrote five and a half years ago.  The P-G's Jack Kelly wrote this about then-Governor Sarah Palin:

When she was leading her underdog Wasilla high school basketball team to the state championship in 1982, her teammates called her "Sarah Barracuda" because of her fierce competitiveness. Two years later, when she won the Miss Wasilla beauty pageant, she was also voted Miss Congeniality by the other contestants.

Compare that to something Fred Barnes wrote a year or so before:

Gov. Palin grew up in Wasilla, where as star of her high school basketball team she got the nickname "Sarah Barracuda" for her fierce competitiveness. She led her underdog team to the state basketball championship. Palin also won the Miss Wasilla beauty contest, in which she was named Miss Congeniality, and went on to compete in the Miss Alaska pageant.

Jack, that's far closer to actual plagiarism than anything Marc Theissen alleged.  And you did that.

I'll ask it again:

Doesn't anyone at the P-G fact-check Jack Kelly?

I guess the answer is, "no, not so much."

Jack Kelly Sunday

In his column this week in the Post-Gazette, our good friend Jack Kelly makes this charge:

Ms. Sebelius is fortunate she works in government, where there is no accountability.

Criticism of Secretary Sebelius aside, this is a remarkable thing to say coming as it does from a columnist who has, repeatedly and over a long number of years, distorted, mangled and otherwise deformed the truth for the P-G's readers.

For example only almost exactly a month ago Jack published this column on Lara Logan's now discredited 60 Minutes story on Benghazi.

By the 8th of November, CBS retracted the story with an apology from Lara Logan.

On the 26th of November the Washington Post reported that Ms Logan and her producer will be taking a leave of absence:

...in the wake of an internal review that found numerous flaws in their reporting of a story about the terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya.

And yet there's no comment from Jack Kelly on this at all.  Does he still agree with his column now that it's main source has been debunked?  And if so, why?  And if he does not agree with his column, then were is his apology?  Or at least his explanation as to how he got it wrong?

Then there was Kelly's distortions regarding Hurricane Katrina, so easily debunked by Mediamatters - while he did issue a correction of sorts, as I wrote later, "even his corrections could have used some corrections."

Then there was the column on Van Jones.

Which was yanked a few days later from the P-G website.

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.

It's still gone.. Yanked because it was riddled with errors and falsehoods.

Where is Jack Kelly's accountability?

Jack Kelly Sunday

Well, it's been 10 days since I posted this.  That was the blog post where I pointed out how the CBS Benghazi "story" that the P-G's Jack Kelly built his entire column on had been retracted by CBS.

When will the column be retracted by Jack Kelly?  I asked but to no avail, it seems.  So far, it's still up - and with no correction or anything to indicate an update to reflect the reality of the situation - that CBS retracted the 60 Minutes Benghazi story.

So what does the Post-Gazette's Jack Kelly do today?

Opens up with another debunked CBS "news" story:

The personal information you give to Healthcare.gov “is protected by stringent security standards,” said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

Not so.

“Software experts tell CBS News they have identified multiple security issues,” Jan Crawford reported Nov. 5. “We gave one technology expert the real HealthCare.gov user name of a CBS employee. Within seconds, he identified the specific security question she selected to reset her password.”

“Four days before the launch the government … granted itself a waiver to launch the website,” said CBS investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson. “The final required top-to-bottom security tests never got done.”

The top operations officer for the Obamacare websites told the House Oversight Committee that he was never given a Sept. 3 memo that detailed six security problems which pose “limitless” risk.

This is the CBS report to which the intrepid Jack is referring.  That last paragraph, however, refers a subsequent CBS report by Attkisson - and that's where the whole thing falls apart.

The public debunking happened in public at a Congressional hearing four days ago on November 13:


Here's my transcript of the discussion between Representative Gerald Connolly and Henry Chao (the top operations officer for the Obamacare websites, Kelly's referring to) and starting at about 1:44 in we hear:

CONNOLLY: Mr. Chao, during your interview with committee staff on November 1, you were presented with a document you had not seen before. And it was entitled "Authority to Operate," signed by your boss on September 3, 2013, is that correct?

CHAO: Correct.

CONNOLLY: The Republican staffers told you during that interview that this document indicated there were two open high-risk findings in the federally facilitated marketplace launched October 1. Is that correct?

CHAO: Correct.

CONNOLLY: This surprised you at the time.

CHAO: Can I just qualify that a bit? It was dated September 3 and it was referring to two parts of the system that were already--

CONNOLLY: You are jumping ahead of me. We are going to get there. So when you were asked questions about that document, you told the staffers you needed to check with officials at CMS who oversee security testing to understand the context, is that correct?

CHAO: Correct.

CONNOLLY: The staffers continued to ask you questions, nonetheless, and then they - or somebody - leaked parts of your transcript to CBS Evening News, is that correct?

CHAO: Seems that way.

CONNOLLY: Mmm. Since that interview, have you had a chance to follow up on your suggestion to check with CMS officials on the context?

CHAO: I have had some discussions about, uh, the nature of the high findings that were in the document.

CONNOLLY: Right. And this document it turns out, discusses only the risks associated with two modules, one for dental plans and one for the qualified health plans, is that correct?

CHAO: Yes.

CONNOLLY: And neither of those modules is active right now, is that correct?

CHAO: That's correct.

CONNOLLY: So the September 3 document did in fact, not apply to the entire federally facilitated marketplace despite the assertions of the leak to CBS notwithstanding, is that correct?

CHAO: That's correct.

CONNOLLY: And these modules allow insurance companies to submit their dental and health plan information to the marketplace is that correct?

CHAO: Correct.

CONNOLLY: That means that those modules do not contain or transmit any personally identifiable information on individual consumers, is that correct?

CHAO: Correct.

CONNOLLY: So to be clear, these modules don't transmit any specific user information, is that correct?

CHAO: Correct.

CONNOLLY: So when CBS Evening News ran its report based on a leak, presumably from the majority staff, but we don't know, of a partial transcript, expert- excerpts from a partial transcript, they said the security issues raised in the document, and I quote, "could lead to identity theft among buying insurance," that cannot be true based on what we just established in our back and forth, is that correct?

CHAO: That's correct. I think there was some rearrangement of the words that I used during the testimony in how it was portrayed and-.

CONNOLLY: So to just summarize, correct me if I'm wrong, the document leaked to CBS Evening News didn't in fact not relate to parts of the website that were active on October 1. They did not relate to any part of the system that handles personal consumer information, and there, in fact, was no possibility of identity theft, despite the leak.

CHAO: Correct.

CONNOLLY: Thank you, Mr. Chao. I yield back. [Emphases added.]

Seeing that Jack has yet to correct the record of his flawed CBS sourced Benghazi column, I don't have much faith that he'll be correcting the record of this flawed CBS sourced Affordable Health Care security risk column anytime soon.

Jack Kelly Sunday

I have assumed that the standard operating procedure for right wing pundits is to simply assert something as true and trust that few readers in the audience would bother to check the facts.

This assumption is not at all challenged by these paragraphs found in today's Jack Kelly column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

We must intervene in the civil war in Syria because "if a thug and a murderer like Bashar al-Assad can gas thousands of his own people with impunity," it would set a bad example for others, Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday.

Secretary Kerry's moral outrage would have been more moving if Sen. Kerry -- who met with the Syrian dictator six times and urged "engagement" with his regime -- hadn't said so many kind things about Mr. Assad in the recent past.

And Secretary Kerry's assertion that the use of chemical weapons justifies U.S. military intervention would be more persuasive if Sen. Kerry hadn't taken the opposite stance. Many more were killed when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurdish village of Halabja than in the sarin gas attack in a Damascus suburb Aug. 21, but Sen. Kerry didn't think that justified U.S. intervention in Iraq.

By the way, I am leaning against any sort of intervention into Syria, but I am conflicted.  On the one hand something has to be done to punish a regime that uses chemical weapons, on the other I can't see anything good coming out of it.  By hurting the Assad regime, we'd end up helping the rather nasty folks he's fighting.  Given the "law" of unintended consequences, I'm sure lotsa bad stuff would follow - all with our name on it.  But doing nothing seems wrong as well.

So you see my issue.

But let's get back to Jack.  He's contrasting Secretary of State Kerry's response to Syria's use of gas with the then Senator Kerry's "opposite stance" regarding Saddam Hussein's use of gas in Halabja in 1988.  In doing so, he leaves out a few things:

• As Senator Kerry cosponsored SR 408 - a condemnation of Iraq's use of chemical weapons.
• Iraq was an ally of ours at that time during the Iran-Iraq war.

Hmm...military intervention with an ally.  That's what Jack thinks Senator Kerry should have been calling for back in 1988 in order for Secretary Kerry to sound credible now.

But let's take a deeper look at Halabja in 1988.  First some background from Foreign Policy:

In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq's war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein's military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.

The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to tilt the war in Iraq's favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they ensured that the Reagan administration's long-standing policy of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed. But they were also the last in a series of chemical strikes stretching back several years that the Reagan administration knew about and didn't disclose.

And:

By 1988, U.S. intelligence was flowing freely to Hussein's military. That March, Iraq launched a nerve gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in northern Iraq.

And:

According to recently declassified CIA documents and interviews with former intelligence officials like [Air Force Col. Rick] Francona, the U.S. had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks beginning in 1983.

And yet at the same time:

President Reagan yesterday condemned the use of outlawed chemical weapons in the Persian Gulf war, especially against the Kurdish minority in Iraq, and called for new global ban on such warfare.

"We condemn it," Reagan told the 43rd General Assembly in his final speech to the world body as president. "The use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war - beyond its tragic human toll - jeopardises the moral and legal strictures that have held these weapons in check since World War I."

Reagan indirectly criticized Iraq's use of poison gas against Iraqi Kurds and Iranians. He cited the Kurdish area of Halabja in Iraq and Maidan Shahr on the border as "terrible new names added to the roll call of human horror."

Something that's been known for more than a decade:

A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program.

So yea, Secretary of State Kerry's the one whose credibility should be questioned here.

By the way, Jack Kelly was an deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration - starting in December 1983.  Considering that the Reagan Administration had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks since, well, more or less exactly when Jack started working for it, did he know that the Reagan was lying through its teeth when his administration was both aiding Iraq's use of chemical weapons and yet condemning it all at the same time?

Jack Kelly Sunday

Oh, the hypocrisy!

In his column at the Post-Gazette this Sunday, Jack Kelly swerves a full 180.  He starts with:

Is obeying the law optional?

President Barack Obama seems to think it is -- at least insofar as it applies to him.

The administration announced this month that it plans to delay enforcement of the provision in Obamacare which requires employers with 50 or more full-time employees to provide them with health insurance (which contains certain government-mandated provisions), or pay a fine of $2,000 per worker.

Section 1513(d) of the Obamacare law states clearly that "The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013."

This is important because the Constitution says the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed" (Article II, Section 3).

Jack's fellow travelers over on the Scaife editorial board have already tried this one and in general I am surprised that our friends on the right would even think of writing this.

Where the hell were they when this happened?

In October, 2005 Senator John McCain (a well-known Republican) offered up an amendment to the Department of Defense, Emergency Supplemental Appropriations to Address Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and Pandemic Influenza Act, 2006 (H.R. 2863) which became Title X of the bill.  It states:

No person in the custody or under the effective control of the Department of Defense or under detention in a Department of Defense facility shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the United States Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation.

And specifically:

(a) In General.--No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.

(b) Construction.--Nothing in this section shall be construed to impose any geographical limitation on the applicability of the prohibition against cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment under this section.

(c) Limitation on Supersedure.--The provisions of this section shall not be superseded, except by a provision of law enacted after the date of the enactment of this Act which specifically repeals, modifies, or supersedes the provisions of this section.

(d) Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Defined.--In this section, the term ``cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment'' means the cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December 10, 1984.

The Amendment was agreed to overwhelmingly by the Senate (The vote was 90-9. Even Rick Santorum voted for it).

The whole bill passed both the House and the Senate and was signed by President George W. Bush, who included this section in the now infamous "signing statement" attached to the bill:

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks. Further, in light of the principles enunciated by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2001 in Alexander v. Sandoval, and noting that the text and structure of Title X do not create a private right of action to enforce Title X, the executive branch shall construe Title X not to create a private right of action. Finally, given the decision of the Congress reflected in subsections 1005(e) and 1005(h) that the amendments made to section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, shall apply to past, present, and future actions, including applications for writs of habeas corpus, described in that section, and noting that section 1005 does not confer any constitutional right upon an alien detained abroad as an enemy combatant, the executive branch shall construe section 1005 to preclude the Federal courts from exercising subject matter jurisdiction over any existing or future action, including applications for writs of habeas corpus, described in section 1005.

You may need to read that twice to get a better idea of what's in there.

But here's how Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe described what Bush did:

When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.

After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a ''signing statement" -- an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law -- declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.

Though they try to reassure the skittish terrorist-enablers:

''We are not going to ignore this law," the official said, noting that Bush, when signing laws, routinely issues signing statements saying he will construe them consistent with his own constitutional authority. ''We consider it a valid statute. We consider ourselves bound by the prohibition on cruel, unusual, and degrading treatment."

But, the official said, a situation could arise in which Bush may have to waive the law's restrictions to carry out his responsibilities to protect national security. He cited as an example a ''ticking time bomb" scenario, in which a detainee is believed to have information that could prevent a planned terrorist attack.

Not that means much:

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit.

''The signing statement is saying 'I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it's important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me,' " he said. ''They don't want to come out and say it directly because it doesn't sound very nice, but it's unmistakable to anyone who has been following what's going on."

Interestingly, something Savage writes in the very next paragraph also resonates this story:

Golove and other legal specialists compared the signing statement to Bush's decision, revealed last month, to bypass a 1978 law forbidding domestic wiretapping without a warrant. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without a court order starting after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Authorizing previously unauthorized NSA eavesdropping?  Ignoring laws banning the torture of human beings?  Anyone remember those offenses?  Jack?  Don't you?

And yet when the Obama Administration delays by a year the implementation of a section of the Affordable Healthcare Act, that's when the conservatives from Maine to Malibu judge as the time to point out the President's legal obligations under Article II.

Oh, the hypocrisy!

Jack Kelly Sunday

A message to my friends at the Post-Gazette:

This is how you fact-check Jack Kelly.

In today's column on the "cost" of ObamaCare, Jack writes:

The Congressional Budget Office estimated a loss of 800,000 jobs over 10 years.

Luckily for you, me, Jack and everyone else, the Washington Post fact-checked this more than two years ago.

Here's how they set up the checking:

A long and rather dry discussion of nation's budget outlook at the House Budget Committee has exploded with a frenzy of politics after a brief exchange, highlighted in the video clip above, between Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) and Congressional Budget Office director Douglas W. Elmendorf. The CBO last August had estimated that the new health care law over the next decade would reduce the number of overall workers in the United States by one-half of one percent, and Campbell got Elmendorf to utter the words "800,000."

And the facts:

The CBO first discussed this issue, briefly, in a budget analysis last August. Boiled down to plain English, the CBO is essentially saying that some people who are now in the work force because they need health insurance would decide to stop working because the health care law guaranteed they would have access to health care.

Think of someone who is 63, a couple of years before retirement, who is still in a job only because they are waiting to get on Medicare when they turn 65. Or a single mother with children who is only working to make sure her kids have health insurance.

And yet this debunked factoid shows up in a Jack Kelly column about how ObamaCare is going to cost the president's "young supporters."

Huh?

To my friends at the Post-Gazette: THIS IS HOW YOU FACT-CHECK JACK KELLY.

Jack Kelly Sunday

It's been some time since I deconstructed a Jack Kelly column. So let's get started with this week's.

This week, Jack goes after Attorney General Eric Holder.  Some things stick and some things don't - and those that don't undermine Jack's credibility (what's left of it, of course).  We'll start here:

If timely military aid could have been sent to Benghazi, the president was likely in on the decision not to send it. IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House 157 times, so it's hard to believe Mr. Obama knew nothing about IRS intimidation of his political enemies.

Ah, Benghazi and the IRS.  Jack's making two serious charges (both of which have been debunked).  Let's start with what Jack's hoping (despite his hiding behind the "If...then..." rhetoric) you'll take from that first sentence: that "timely" military aid could have been sent to Benghazi but that aid was denied by the president.

But look at this from the screamingly lib'rul USNews:

At roughly 6 p.m. local time, the defense attaché at the American Embassy in Tripoli confirmed that the Libyan government would be willing to fly a C-130 cargo plane into Benghazi to evacuate the American wounded and deceased who had rallied at a U.S. annex there.

"We wanted to send external support forces," along with the C-130 and Libyan forces to assist with the efforts, Hicks testified on Wednesday. Hicks, who was in Tripoli, was standing near a "Lt. Col. Gibson," who commanded a four-person Special Forces team. These troops were what remained from a 14-person security team tasked with establishing security at the U.S. diplomatic presence following the 2011 Libyan revolution.

The remaining Special Forces soldiers' mission had changed in August 2011 from providing security to offering training. Command of this team also switched from the embassy, under Ambassador Stevens, to Army Gen. Carter Ham, then-commander of U.S. Africa Command.

Hicks testified these troops had highly trained skills that would have been useful to the personnel in Benghazi, who were "exhausted from a night of fighting against very capable opponents."

"There was every reason to believe our personnel was still in danger," he says, adding he does not know why the Special Forces troops were not allowed to get on the C-130.

He says Lt. Col. Gibson was "furious" that he could not assist the Americans in Benghazi. "That's what he wanted to do."

Pentagon spokesmen had previously stated that no U.S. assets were ever told to "stand down" the night of the attack in Benghazi. Air Force Maj. Rob Firman told USA Today Tuesday that the military's account of this response "hasn't changed."

"There was never any kind of stand down order to anybody," Firman said.

Firman reaffirmed this statement to U.S. News following Hicks' Wednesday testimony.

"Were these guys told not to do anything? No. They were in Tripoli, supporting the U.S. security in Tripoli, and they were told to stay there," Firman says. Special Operations Command Africa leadership told them to remain where they were, and "it was more important for those guys to be in Tripoli."

"I look at that as not so much a stand-down order, as it is a 'stay where you are,'" says Firman. "Those guys met the planes and continued to support."

Firman adds that the C-130 was tasked with picking up the American personnel at the Benghazi airport and leave immediately. These Special Forces troops would not have been on the ground long enough to have contributed significantly to the operation.

"There was a very limited amount of time that they could have done anything," he says.

And yet Jack...well you know how this sentence ends.

But let's look at Jack's next bit of misinformation - where he tries to tie the White House to the IRS scandal by how many times IRS Director Schulman visited to the White House (he says it was 157 them!!!)

Uh, wrong.

The Atlantic has already dispensed with this:

The latest twist in the conservative effort to tie the IRS tax-exempt targeting scandal to the president is to focus on public visitor records released by the White House, in which former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman's name appears 157 times between 2009 and 2012. Unfortunately, few of those pushing this line have bothered to read more than the topline of that public information.

Few, like the P-G's Jack Kelly.

Turns out that the lists upon which Schulman's name appear only show the meetings he was cleared to attend - not those he actually attended:

He was cleared 40 times to meet with Obama's director of the Office of Health Reform, and a further 80 times for the biweekly health reform deputies meetings and others set up by aides involved with the health-care law implementation efforts. That's 76 percent of his planned White House visits just there, before you even add in all the meetings with Office of Management and Budget personnel also involved in health reform.

Complicating the picture is the fact that just because a meeting was scheduled and Shulman was cleared to attend it does not mean that he actually went. Routine events like the biweekly health-care deputies meeting would have had a standing list of people cleared to attend, people whose White House appointments would have been logged and forwarded to the check-in gate. But there is no time of arrival information in the records to confirm that Shulman actually signed in and went to these standing meetings.

Indeed, of the 157 events Shulman was cleared to attend, White House records only provide time of arrival information -- confirming that he actually went to them -- for 11 events over the 2009-2012 period, and time of departure information for only six appointments. According to the White House records, Shulman signed in twice in 2009, five times in 2010, twice in 2011, and twice in 2012. That does not mean that he did not go to other meetings, only that the White House records do not show he went to the 157 meetings he was granted Secret Service clearance to attend. [Italics in original.]

Jack, 11 not 157.

Such a huge amount of misinformation in such a small space - doesn't anyone at the Post-Gazette fact-check Jack Kelly?

Unfortunately, we already know the answer to that question.

Though I will leave Jack with two others:

• Wasn't Douglas Shulman a Bush Appointee? (Hint: Yes, he was.)
• Isn't it the IRS supposed to screen out organizations who've applied for tax-exempt status but who shouldn't get it? (Hint: Yes, it is - though in this instance, it was the way they screened that's offensive.)

More evidence that no one fact-check's Jack Kelly at the P-G. Or if they do, what he submits must be so hugely fact free that this is the best they can get out of it.

Also, Eric Holder's on his own for the AP story - he'll get no help here.

Jack Kelly UPDATE!!

Hey, remember this blog post?

It's the blog post where I quote Jack as writing this:

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.

And I wrote:

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.

Well guess what?

[This is where you'd say, "What?"]

Guess what I found at the P-G this evening?

[This is where you'd say "What?" again, only slightly annoyed.]

Take a guess what I found?  GUESS!

[This is where you'd say, "If you don't tell me right now, I'm gonna break your arm!"]

Ok, ok - Sheesh!  Might wanna lay off the espresso, (or maybe try some decaf).  Anyway, here's what I found at the Post-Gazette this evening:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told the Senate Intelligence Committee that President Obama had "directed both myself and [Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] to do everything we needed to do to try to protect lives there" when told of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. A Jack Kelly column published Sunday said Mr. Panetta had testified that the president had "left it up to them" whether to respond.

You're welcome.

Now if I can only get them to do this BEFORE Jack's columns are published.

Jack Kelly Sunday

Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to reintroduce you to Jack Kelly, swiftboater.

Embedded in this week's column in the Post-Gazette, we find this curious paragraph:

Mr. Kerry exaggerated his heroism to get medals, according to some naval officers who served with the senator in Vietnam. He promised to authorize release of his military records, but didn't release all of them until after he ran for president in 2004.

Jack just can't resist the swiftboating, it seems and this isn't the first time.  Who can forget this column from August, 2008 (the one that declared, a mere two months before the 2008 election that "Democrats know their man is faltering")?

I realize the swiftboat lies are more than 12 years old, but a lie's still a lie.  So let's look at them one by one.

Jack says that Kerry exaggerated his heroism to get medals - so let's start there.  Which medals did he get?  According to his Senate website, he was awarded "a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Combat V, and three Purple Hearts."

A "Silver Star" is, according to the Manual of Military Decorations and Awards, "the third highest military valor decoration that can be awarded to a person serving in any capacity with the U.S. Armed Forces." And is awarded to any individual who "distinguishes himself or herself by gallantry in action."  "Gallantry" in that same document is defined as "Nobility of behavior or spirit.  Heroic courage."

Senator Kerry was awarded the Silver Star for his actions on 28 February, 1969.

A "Bronze Star" is, according to the same manual, is awarded to "any person who, while serving in any capacity with the U.S. Armed Forces, distinguishes himself or herself by heroic or meritorious achievement or service..."

Senator Kerry was awarded the Bronze Star for his actions on 13 March, 1969.

His three Purple Hearts were awarded for events that occurred 2 December 1968, 20 February 1969 and 13 March 1969.

We can trace our way through the documents (like they have here) OR we can look to what the Navy's own Inspector General concluded 8 years ago:

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Navy's chief investigator concluded Friday that procedures were followed properly in the approval of Sen. John Kerry's Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart medals, according to an internal Navy memo.

Vice Adm. R.A. Route, the Navy inspector general, conducted the review of Kerry's Vietnam-ear military service awards at the request of Judicial Watch, a public interest group. The group has also asked for the release of additional records documenting the Democratic presidential candidate's military service.

Judicial Watch had requested in August that the Navy open an investigation of the matter, but Route said in an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press that he saw no reason for a full-scale probe.

"Our examination found that existing documentation regarding the Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart medals indicates the awards approval process was properly followed," Route wrote in the memo sent Friday to Navy Secretary Gordon England.

So when Jack weaselwords his way through the swiftboat smear with a cowardly "according to some naval officers who served with the senator" while omitting the part about how the official position of the United States Navy (by way of its Inspector General) is exactly the opposite, we can question both Jack Kelly's honesty and the ability of his fact checkers at the Post-Gazette to actually "check" his "facts."

Jack Kelly, Swiftboater - the Post-Gazette must be so proud.

Jack Kelly Sunday

In this week's column in the Post-Gazette, columnist Jack Kelly comes to the conclusion:

But if we want to prevent future Newtowns, the facts must matter to us.

Too bad his own definition of "facts" and how they "matter" doesn't exactly correspond to everyone else's.

For example, Jack writes about a particular crime reporter of the New York Times:

Every year or so for nearly a decade, Fox Butterfield of The New York Times has written a story puzzling over what to him was a paradox: As the rate of violent crime went down, the prison population went up.

And then a few paragraphs later:

It never seemed to occur to Mr. Butterfield that crime went down because more criminals were being locked up. But at least he acknowledged the facts, and puzzled over them.

Now take a look at what Butterfield actually wrote in 2004. In the New York Times. While writing about the rise of the prison population/decline in the crime rate "paradox":

The number of inmates in state and federal prisons rose 2.1 percent last year, even as violent crime and property crime fell, according to a study by the Justice Department released yesterday.

The continuing increase in the prison population, despite a drop or leveling off in the crime rate in the past few years, is a result of laws passed in the 1990's that led to more prison sentences and longer terms, said Allen J. Beck, chief of corrections statistics for the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics and an author of the report.

Yea, he's puzzled.  But there's more here.  Unlike Jack, Butterfield looks deeper into what's going on.  Here's what he wrote in 1997:

Of course, the huge increase in the number of inmates has helped lower the crime rate by incapacitating more criminals behind bars, though there is no generally accepted way to measure the impact; crime rose sharply in the mid- and late 1980's, for example, even as the rate of imprisonment rose much faster.

But a growing number of criminologists say they are troubled by evidence that the spiraling growth of prisons is also causing unintended consequences that may actually contribute to increased crime as well as undermine families and inner-city neighborhoods.

And then there's this from 1998:

The nation's prison population grew by 5.2 percent in 1997, according to the Justice Department, even though crime has been declining for six straight years, suggesting that the imprisonment boom has developed a built-in growth dynamic independent of the crime rate, experts say.

In a new report, the Justice Department said the number of Americans in local jails and in state and Federal prisons rose to 1,725,842 in 1997, up from 1.1 million in 1990. During that period, the incarceration rate in state and Federal prisons rose to 445 per 100,000 Americans in 1997, up from 292 per 100,000 in 1990.

As for why the number of prisoners continues to grow while crime drops, Martin Horn, Pennsylvania's Secretary of Corrections, said: ''You have to understand that as incarcerating more people has helped reduce crime, the number of people we sent to prison in previous years is tending to build up, creating a delayed effect. So you've built in this escalating growth.''

And then:

Still another reason for the growth, while crime drops, is that an increasing number of prisoners are being incarcerated for parole violations, about 30 percent today compared with 15 percent in 1980, Mr. Beck said. That means that the larger the number of prisoners, the bigger the number of people who will someday be released, and then, either because of their own criminal propensities or their experience behind bars, will be likely to commit some new violation and be rearrested.

Not much of a paradox, huh?

Jack then uses the research of Marvin E. Wolfgang to support his general point that gun control is unnecessary and that they deliver a "false sense of security."

Perhaps Jack should have paid closer attention to Wolfgang's bio.  From his obit at the Times:

However dispassionate was the form of his testimony, its content was sufficiently stirring to provoke any number of mailed threats. ''We kept a folder of these loony letters,'' said Esther Lafair, who had been Mr. Wolfgang's secretary for 27 years.

She said the letters came in whenever he offered reasons that the death penalty should not be used or how the distribution of handguns should be curbed.

Uh-oh for Jack.

Doesn't he read his columns before submitting them?

Jack Kelly Sunday

In a column about a particular stream of liberal racism, Jack Kelly (conservative columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) ended things with these three paragraphs:

What does it say about liberals that so many think only losers and whiners can be authentically black?

To demand people think or act a certain way because of the color of their skin is the essence of racism. That's why Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when his children would be judged "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

But then, according to his niece, MLK was a Republican.

It's Sunday and I am in a particular antsy fact-checking mood.  So let me start with that last sentence and ask, is that true?

While it's certainly true that Dr. King's niece said that, a responsible columnist (or at the very least a responsible newspaper employing that columnist) would verify whether what Dr. King's niece said was actually true.  If it isn't, then passing along her falsehood conflicts with the mission of any newspaper: to inform the public.

Turns out what she said isn't true.

Politifact checked this story out 11 months ago and found it to be "false."  Part of their evidence goes back even further:

However, in a 2008 Associated Press story, King’s son and namesake Martin Luther King III said:"It is disingenuous to imply that my father was a Republican. He never endorsed any presidential candidate, and there is certainly no evidence that he ever even voted for a Republican. It is even more outrageous to suggest he would support the Republican Party of today, which has spent so much time and effort trying to suppress African American votes in Florida and many other states."

Then there's the letter of 1 October 1956 to Viva Sloan who asked him about the Eisenhower-Stevensen presidential race of that year. In the letter he wrote:

In the past I have always voted the Democratic ticket.

But that was 1956. What about the next election, in 1960?  In the book, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, there's this passage:

I was grateful to Senator Kennedy for the genuine concern he expressed in my arrest. After the call I made a statement to the press thanking him but not endorsing him. Very frankly, I did not feel at that time that there was much difference between Kennedy and Nixon. I could find some things in the background of both men that I didn't particularly agree with. Remembering what Nixon had done out in California to Helen Gahegen Douglas, I felt that he was an opportunist at many times who had no real grounding in basic convictions, and his voting record was not good. He improved when he became vice president, but, when he was a congressman and a senator, he didn't have a good voting record.

With Mr. Kennedy, after I looked over his voting record, I felt at points that he was so concerned about being president of the United States that he would compromise basic principles to become president. But I had to look at something else beyond the man-the people who surrounded him-and I felt that Kennedy was surrounded by better people. It was on that basis that I felt that Kennedy would make the best president.

I never came out with an endorsement. My father did, but I never made one. I took this position in order to maintain a nonpartisan posture, which I have followed all along in order to be able to look objectively at both parties at all times. As I said to him all along, I couldn't, and I never changed that even after he made the call during my arrest. I made a statement of thanks, and I expressed my gratitude for the call, but in the statement I made it clear that I did not endorse any candidate and that this was not to be interpreted as an endorsement.

I had to conclude that the then known facts about Kennedy were not adequate to make an unqualified judgment in his favor. I do feel that, as any man, he grew a great deal. After he became president I thought we really saw two Kennedys-a Kennedy the first two years and another Kennedy emerging in 1963. He was getting ready to throw off political considerations and see the real moral issues. Had President Kennedy lived, I would probably have endorsed him in 1964. But, back at that time, I concluded that there was something to be desired in both candidates. [Emphases added.]

Yea, Dr. King was a Republican.  Sure he was.  Perhaps in the alternate reality of right wing politics, but not in, you know, actual reality.

At best, Jack Kelly's guilty of a lie of omission (he knew that what Dr. King's niece said was inaccurate but went with it anyway, hiding behind some "according to..." weasel words) or simple bad reporting (he didn't bother to check the "fact" because it fit his story).  It's always the same question: Which is it, Jack?  Are you dishonest or incompetent?

On the other hand, the P-G should never have let this one off Jack's desk.  While I feel bad for whomever is entrusted with the impossible task of fact-checking Jack, sometimes the misinformation is just too much to allow.