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I partially agree with you -- their non-editorial staff does a somewhat impartial job most of the time. But here's an example of outright lies:

http://mediamatters.org/research/200410040006

This is from their normal reporters -- not their night time editorial lineup.

Oh, all the time. Hannity routinely takes comments out of context to ascribe statements to people that the opposite of what they actually said. Obama had a speech where he said something to the effect of, "Some people say we're in decline. I disagree." Hannity quoted and ranted, "He said, '...we're in decline'! he hatez america!" They've edited video to distort the plain meaning of what someone was saying. And wasn't it them who touched up photos to make two journalists, who were reporting something embarassing to the Republican Party, look 'more Jewish' ? Why yes, Mr. Orwell, it was.
http://mediamatters.org/research/200807020002

Seriously, there's a conservative case to be made on most issues, but Fox news will not present it or anything else but the most brazen political propaganda. Other media outlets might get the story wrong, might emphasize something irrelevant (though usually in a rightward lean), but Fox is a party organ in the style of Pravda.

They lie.

Who was talking about $14/hour? The average is something like 25-33/hour.

I was talking about how widely debunked $70/hour is.

"I'm not supposed to say this but guess what? We legislate from the bench. Oops, I'm being recorded, I shouldn't say that."

This is another lie being spread in right-wing talking points. She's not my favorite pick either but this is a false justification for criticizing her. She never said this. What she actually said, in context, is far less controversial, and has been supported by conservatives as well as liberals. Read the details here.

Google News shows several variants of this headline, all of which come from Fox and Fox affiliates. Here's the real scoop: http://mediamatters.org/research/200905130010

>>The Democrats aren't much better, but at least they're trying to spend money on people in THIS HEMISPHERE, let alone in this country.

Well, then independent of who let this through (below), Bush's Admin. or the Democratic Congress ... maybe they should go kill this (heard about it on the radio):

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=47976&print=on
http://mediamatters.org/research/200905130010

Actually, it's none of the above - the queen specifically asked for the iPod (see here). I agree it would be nice to force the RIAA into commenting on legality, though.

I know, the "MSM" wouldn't dare criticize government policies that led to less profit for their advertisers...

Fox News contributor says comparing Obama to Adolf Hitler isn't out of bounds. (Which it isn't, but whatever.)
http://mediamatters.org/countyfair/200902200013

"Put away the "energy independence" conceit. This notion, a favorite of Tojo and Hitler, was debunked by Churchill, who reasoned that true energy security came from a diversity of suppliers, not the foolish pursuit of self-sufficiency."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123552068199964531.html

You could watch Fox News for a day and hear countless references complaining of the new administration being marxist, maoist, socialist, which represents evil in the eyes of neoconservatives. Every politician has a few things in common with Hitler and Stalin, but you think the comparison never happens to Obama only because someone told you so.

The comparison of Bush and Hitler happened for a good reason. They both created an atmosphere where questioning the government in regards to it's wartime policies wasn't tolerated. They're both ultra nationalist, believed in only military solutions, drove their respective economies into the ground with war spending and war itself, and used secrets courts, secret prisons, and torture to deny people their right to due process.

If you can come up with some better commonalities with Obama, I'd love to hear them.

That's not much of a study or report.

Hume's telecast had 39 per cent favourable comments for McCain and 28 per cent positive for the Democratic ticket.

It was the second study in two weeks to remark upon negative coverage for the McCain-Palin ticket. The Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded last week that McCain's coverage has been overwhelmingly negative since the conventions ended, while Obama's has been more mixed.

So. What. What if McCain were the antichrist (or, perhaps, not on par with Obama as the case might be)? If that were true, reporting mostly positive things (or at least as many positive things as were reported about Obama) about him would indeed significant bias. It's neither fair nor honest to say one is as good as the other if this is not true.

The documentary Outfoxed provides a worthy counterpoint here. Specifically they pointed out a few internal Fox News memos that required broadcasters to use loaded words instead of more neutral semantics (abortion clinic vs health clinic, homicide bombers vs suicide bombers, etc). The problem isn't that Fox is leaning one way or another, but the fact that Fox is leaning further than the other networks.

Have you ever seen the movie Broadcast News? There was a point in time when it was considered uncouth for reporters to editorialize. In fact you see Albert Brooks' character lambast William Hurt's character for injecting tidbits about himself into a story, and later for faking tears in another. Yet this is what Fox News does every single day.

I'd love to find a Fox News article to demonstrate my point. Unfortunately, most of the articles I could find on the top FN page were human interest pieces. As Brooks' character said "you really blew the lid off of nookie."

Lemmie give you an example of quality FN journalism. Look for all the uses of "some people", "some users", and the like. Clearly a newspaper isn't an academic article (and, yes, I pity the person writing an academic article about 4chan, but...). However, FN seemingly pulls most of this stuff out of their ass by deferring to "some people" for most of its points without ever backing a single thing up.

Fox News is not centrist news, it's garbage.

Unfortunately, most news sources in the US are biased, and the number of mainstream media outlets with liberal leanings appear to outnumber the conservative ones.

Except of course that is demonstrably false. Conservative writers dominate editorial pages and conservative commentators dominate TV.

On the national level: CNN, which has lost all credibility as a news source, is mostly iReporters and Hollywood gossip, and engage in constant concern trolling on Democrats

Fixed that for you.

I think you are confusing individuals with news organizations. For example, if you were to say that Jayson Blair was no better than Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, or Glen Beck, I would have to agree with you.

Oh look. Another non-climate-scientist who thinks nearly all of the climate scientists are wrong about the climate.

Non-experts who disagree with experts are a dime a dozen in any field, but for some reason, global warming seems to be the only field where they make headlines. Wonder why that is.

The sports writer who for some reason was tasked with writing this science article let Dyson get away with a couple of groaners. One was his comment:

The warming, he says, is not global but local, "making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter."

Climate scientists will be the first to tell you that global warming affects the poles disproportionately. That doesn't make it "local" -- and the fact that those words are not in quotes suggests to me that Dyson never said it. Dyson seems well aware that the climate is, in fact, warming.

Dyson's wrong to repeat the "global cooling" myth, and in his Salon interview a couple of years ago, he was wrong to assert that polar bear populations are increasing. But then, he didn't almost win the Nobel Prize for Polar Bears. He's undoubtedly a genius when it comes to physics, but why does the media love to find global-warming contrarians who are not experts on global warming? There's a question I'd like to see explored.

Oh look. Another non-climate-scientist who thinks nearly all of the climate scientists are wrong about the climate.

Non-experts who disagree with experts are a dime a dozen in any field, but for some reason, global warming seems to be the only field where they make headlines. Wonder why that is.

The sports writer who for some reason was tasked with writing this science article let Dyson get away with a couple of groaners. One was his comment:

The warming, he says, is not global but local, "making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter."

Climate scientists will be the first to tell you that global warming affects the poles disproportionately. That doesn't make it "local" -- and the fact that those words are not in quotes suggests to me that Dyson never said it. Dyson seems well aware that the climate is, in fact, warming.

Dyson's wrong to repeat the "global cooling" myth, and in his Salon interview a couple of years ago, he was wrong to assert that polar bear populations are increasing. But then, he didn't almost win the Nobel Prize for Polar Bears. He's undoubtedly a genius when it comes to physics, but why does the media love to find global-warming contrarians who are not experts on global warming? There's a question I'd like to see explored.

There are many varied viewpoints in the Republican party, from the wacky (and IMO quite stupid) Creationists to the pro-abortion, pro-gay-marriage Giuliani conservatives to the corrupt idiots like Ted Stevens who I'm happy to see go.

But when push comes to shove, Republicans reliably march in lockstep. The only time they really stood up to Bush during his entire 8 years in office was over the Harriet Meyers nomination.

the latter two of which supported this pork-laden stimulus package in the Senate

There is no pork in this bill. None. Just because there was a Bridge to Nowhere does not mean that all infrastructure spending is "pork".

And unfortunately, Barack was pitched to us as a messenger from fairy land sent to save us all

Liar. The only people who have ever called Obama "the savior" or "the one" or "the messiah" are right wing Republicans.

He can't even instill his own purported values of transparency, freedom of information and clean government in his own party members despite his sweeping election.

As the other guy said: it's been three frikkin weeks, dude. And he indisputably better on this front than Bush.

I highly recommend the book The Case Against Barack Obama [amazon.com] by David Freddoso who is an investigative reporter for NRO.

Why would you recommend a highly debunked piece of shit from a hack writer for a right wing rag, exactly?

There are many varied viewpoints in the Republican party, from the wacky (and IMO quite stupid) Creationists to the pro-abortion, pro-gay-marriage Giuliani conservatives to the corrupt idiots like Ted Stevens who I'm happy to see go.

But when push comes to shove, Republicans reliably march in lockstep. The only time they really stood up to Bush during his entire 8 years in office was over the Harriet Meyers nomination.

the latter two of which supported this pork-laden stimulus package in the Senate

There is no pork in this bill. None. Just because there was a Bridge to Nowhere does not mean that all infrastructure spending is "pork".

And unfortunately, Barack was pitched to us as a messenger from fairy land sent to save us all

Liar. The only people who have ever called Obama "the savior" or "the one" or "the messiah" are right wing Republicans.

He can't even instill his own purported values of transparency, freedom of information and clean government in his own party members despite his sweeping election.

As the other guy said: it's been three frikkin weeks, dude. And he indisputably better on this front than Bush.

I highly recommend the book The Case Against Barack Obama [amazon.com] by David Freddoso who is an investigative reporter for NRO.

Why would you recommend a highly debunked piece of shit from a hack writer for a right wing rag, exactly?

There are many varied viewpoints in the Republican party, from the wacky (and IMO quite stupid) Creationists to the pro-abortion, pro-gay-marriage Giuliani conservatives to the corrupt idiots like Ted Stevens who I'm happy to see go.

But when push comes to shove, Republicans reliably march in lockstep. The only time they really stood up to Bush during his entire 8 years in office was over the Harriet Meyers nomination.

the latter two of which supported this pork-laden stimulus package in the Senate

There is no pork in this bill. None. Just because there was a Bridge to Nowhere does not mean that all infrastructure spending is "pork".

And unfortunately, Barack was pitched to us as a messenger from fairy land sent to save us all

Liar. The only people who have ever called Obama "the savior" or "the one" or "the messiah" are right wing Republicans.

He can't even instill his own purported values of transparency, freedom of information and clean government in his own party members despite his sweeping election.

As the other guy said: it's been three frikkin weeks, dude. And he indisputably better on this front than Bush.

I highly recommend the book The Case Against Barack Obama [amazon.com] by David Freddoso who is an investigative reporter for NRO.

Why would you recommend a highly debunked piece of shit from a hack writer for a right wing rag, exactly?

There are many varied viewpoints in the Republican party, from the wacky (and IMO quite stupid) Creationists to the pro-abortion, pro-gay-marriage Giuliani conservatives to the corrupt idiots like Ted Stevens who I'm happy to see go.

But when push comes to shove, Republicans reliably march in lockstep. The only time they really stood up to Bush during his entire 8 years in office was over the Harriet Meyers nomination.

the latter two of which supported this pork-laden stimulus package in the Senate

There is no pork in this bill. None. Just because there was a Bridge to Nowhere does not mean that all infrastructure spending is "pork".

And unfortunately, Barack was pitched to us as a messenger from fairy land sent to save us all

Liar. The only people who have ever called Obama "the savior" or "the one" or "the messiah" are right wing Republicans.

He can't even instill his own purported values of transparency, freedom of information and clean government in his own party members despite his sweeping election.

As the other guy said: it's been three frikkin weeks, dude. And he indisputably better on this front than Bush.

I highly recommend the book The Case Against Barack Obama [amazon.com] by David Freddoso who is an investigative reporter for NRO.

Why would you recommend a highly debunked piece of shit from a hack writer for a right wing rag, exactly?

... this has been shown to be much less stimulative than public works type projects, as people tend to save the money (or equivalently, pay down debt) instead of spend it. See here:

http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.house.gov%2Fsmbiz%2Fhearings%2Fhearing-07-24-08-stimulus%2FZandi.pdf%23page%3D4

The problem is that tax cuts are not very stimulative when compared to federal spending:

http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.house.gov%2Fsmbiz%2Fhearings%2Fhearing-07-24-08-stimulus%2FZandi.pdf%23page%3D4

The link is from testimony to Congress about the stimulative effects of various measures (higher numbers are better). Looking particularly at the table on page 5, you can see that almost every type of spending beats almost every type of tax cut. And the guy giving the testimony (a guy by the name of Zandi, with Moody's - http://www.economy.com/dismal/bios.asp?author=25) is said to have been a McCain advisor, so it's not like this is a partisan thing.

We've been doing the tax cut thing for years. It didn't work. Now let's try something that does.

Obama or the guy he is appointing?

When has Obama run a software company?

The problem with a "Cult of Personality" President is that the usual concerns don't question or challenge him.

As is usually the case, take the opposite of the wingnut viewpoint and you have reality.

Which isn't what he actually said (or meant), but then again you knew that, didn't you?

Maybe this article can provide a balance to your $170M dollar talking point.

Also, who calls Barack Obama B. Hussein Obama except right wing talkshow hosts? Do you guys just like the name Hussein for some reason?

Regardless of your political leanings, when it comes to debunking media distortions Media Matters rules!

Oh please, this cost myth is just your average right wind Drudge myth garbage. Check this article out. They are claiming the Obama inauguration will be 160 million. Well the 2005 Bush inauguration was 157 million. Not much difference folks.

Was to stack the questions to prefer those who make you look good.

Of course, if you get caught then it might not look so great for you.

Detroit labor is not $75/hr. That's basically a made-up statistic (also). Detroit used to employ many, many more workers, to whom they promised a good retirement. Counting the cost of those retirees against the company's bottom line makes sense; saying it's part of the current worker's paycheck is not.

When you do the math properly, a line worker for the UAW and a Japanese plant in the South make very similar wages.

$36/barrel is still 50% above the $24/barrel that we had when Bush took office, and nobody is expecting these prices to survive even the lamest economic uptick. Try buying a barrel of oil to be delivered five years from now. I'll bet you can't get one for less than $80.

It gets worse because the current low prices aren't enough to fund the next round of exploration that would be needed to keep this unsustainable resource going another decade.

white applicants with similar financial characteristics and credit histories

So they said, "If you're going to make shitty loans to white people, you have to make shitty loans to black people, too." It sounds like they were making shitty loans already.

I know a lot of the more conservative folks around here don't believe racism is real, but here's my opinion: Making bad loans to poor people is stupid, but making bad loans to poor white people and not to poor black people is stupid and racist.

In any case, you're just proving my point even more. Do you really think that ACORN suing banks to force them to be equal-opportunity idiots is the sole cause of the crisis? According to this, this, and this, less than a quarter of the subprime loans were made by institutions that were covered by the CRA. Also, there's no data to suggest that CRA subprime loans have a higher default rate than the other 80% of subprime loans. And if ACORN sued Wells Fargo and CitiBank, how come Wells Fargo didn't go under because of all the bad loans it was forced to make in the last few years?

There's two sides to every story, and usually both sides are wrong. Certainly the government was stupid to encourage banks to make bad loans and are not without culpability here, but the banks were doing it anyway.

Fox & Friends complaining about Palin photos NOT being retouched.

Fox & Friends purposely retouching photos of NY Times columnists to make them look worse.

Fox & Friends complaining about Palin photos NOT being retouched.

Fox & Friends purposely retouching photos of NY Times columnists to make them look worse.

But of course, the ombudsman at the Washington Post took that into consideration in her article.

But of course, the ombudsman is a well known hack.

Of the old media, newspapers are the best. You can get right and left versions, and you will usually find the info they would rather hide buried at the end of the 3rd continuation of the article on page 25. There is still some remnant of journalistic integrity.

You can get a variety of newspapers - if you know where to get them and go through the trouble of ordering, say, Mother Jones. Otherwise, you'll probably get your local paper, and newspaper editorial pages are dominated by conservative pundits. And media consolidation hasn't done any more for newspapers than it did for TV or radio.

Of course, this is also easily explained by the fact that reality has a liberal bias.

And the fact that Deborah Howell is a complete hack.

See http://mediamatters.org/items/200811050005?f=h_latest and references there.

Honestly I can't even remember who Condit or Levy were, much less Scarborough, and I really don't feel like doing the research on it.

Sure, sure. Why not try and compare a few articles from Media Matters, here's a good one, to Media Research Council, the right wing's attempt at showing media bias. Or just skim MRC and then try watching this clip - still think media bias is a matter of he said/she said with no way to determine who's right?

Honestly I can't even remember who Condit or Levy were, much less Scarborough, and I really don't feel like doing the research on it.

Sure, sure. Why not try and compare a few articles from Media Matters, here's a good one, to Media Research Council, the right wing's attempt at showing media bias. Or just skim MRC and then try watching this clip - still think media bias is a matter of he said/she said with no way to determine who's right?

The latest from the Obama surrogates was $120,000 a year (Gov. Richardson), but I don't think many believe they will stop there.

To my knowledge this claim has been debunked, and the Obama campaign still firmly stands behind the original $250,000 cutoff.

If you don't want to believe them, that's fine, and another issue altogether; but this crap about "surrogates" is ridiculous. The Obama campaign has been clear and stable on their plans from the time they laid them out until now, all that's changing is how other people are talking about them or interpreting them (in particular, the press to some extent misinterpreted the original plan and presented it as a lot more win-win than it was). Regardless, Gov. Richardson has no authority to set Obama's policy, so I don't know why anyone considers that statement in any way indicative of Obama's stance.

But hey, you keep believing the $250,000 fairy tale, just like those who voted for Clinton to get that middle class tax cut -- NOT!

Frankly I don't care about whether anyone got a tax cut under Clinton - whatever he did, his tenure in office resulted in one of the most steady periods of economic growth that this country has ever seen, so his policies were clearly within the bounds of what we require to thrive (not to attribute the success of his economy to his policies or the failure of ours today to Bush's, though - I don't think presidential policy ultimately has a very large effect on the economy, at least in any predictable way, to be perfectly honest - if there was such an effect, we could calculate the "right" answer to these political questions, but every calculation I've seen comes up with a different result, so there's just way too much interpretation involved to be sure that there's any causative effect at all). I think that's the most we can hope for.

I'm not sure if Obama will cross that line or not; I suppose you probably think he will, and I sympathize a bit with that fear. It's not so much that I think his stated policies are over the line (we've had other periods with parameters at those levels and we came through them just fine), but that I worry that a full Democrat Congress will push things even further, to a ridiculous point. I half expect that things may get so nutso that we'll swing the other direction four years from now and play political ping-pong for the rest of my life, each party screwing the country further into the ground with each tap of the paddle.

Where's the freaking reasonable middle when you need it? Sheesh!

Palin never made any woman pay for any rape test. No one did. It's all bullshit.

Good job repeating the talking point, but that's a strawman, I'm afraid.

I'm quite sure you're correct that Mayor Palin never sat at her desk stuffing envelopes with bills for post-assault exam/evidence collection kits. She also didn't send out any water bills, right?

It doesn't work that way. It works this way: the city provides the kits to the hospital, or reimburses the hospital on a regular basis.

When the city *stops* doing that (and there is absolutely no disagreement from anyone that the city of Wassila did just that, and that the Mayor signed off on the budget changes that implemented it), then the hospital bills the patient instead.

Here's a thorough debunking of the debunking.

Debunked by media matters:

Summary: In a blog post, Jay Carney claimed that Sen. John McCain's "campaign has released a 60-second ad that uses Bill Clinton's words to pin the blame for the mortgage crisis on Democrats" without noting that in the interview clipped in the ad, Clinton actually said that "the biggest mistake" was the SEC's repealing of a regulation on short selling, when President Bush was in office.

Time's Carney falsely suggested Clinton "pin[ned] the blame for the mortgage crisis on Democrats

and could just as easily be used to make a person less attractive.

Fox "News" already does this when they're running stories about reporters from other news outlets.

--MarkusQ

I've seen a few instances where he's been caught off guard, and had to actually think. Whole lotta umming and uhhing going on there.

Are you talking about McCain, or Obama? Have you seen the tape of McCain talking - or rather, not talking - about health insurance and birth control?

Not to mention when he says things he'd like to take back (think pigs and lipstick).

Are you talking about McCain, or Obama? You know McCain used the "lipstick on a pig" cliche about a Hillary Clinton proposal, right?

The best thing he's got going for him is that the media loves him and handles him with kidd gloves.

Are you talking about McCain, or Obama? The media's loved McCain since the 2000 campaign. Do you think that if any other candidate had used a racial slur ("I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.") it wouldn't have dominated the news cycle for weeks to the point where the candidate had to retire in shame? When McCain recently made a major gaffe by saying our economy is fundamentally strong, ABC news failed to mention it. As MSNBC's Chris Matthews put it, "The press loves McCain. We're his base."

The "the media loved Obama and gives him special treatment" meme is just another incarnation of the "liberal media" myth that has served the GOP so well since the Atwater days.

I also worry about his simplistic view of raising taxes on the rich as though that would have no cascading effect on those of us who aren't.

Raising taxes on the wealthy back to what they were during the Reagan years is not going to have some "cascading effect" that will ruin the rest of us. Rolling back the Bush II tax cuts doesn't take us into unexplored territory, it returns policy back to what it was in a sounder era. (Of course, generating fiscal policy by rolling polyhedral dice would result in more sound policy than what we have now...)

Just out of curiosity, is your source for the claim of huge welfare administrative costs Rush Limbaugh? I ask this because I found your claim to be surprising. On searching Google, the first link is a well-sourced debunking of this claim.

> McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200806040002

Then why did he vote against so many bills that would've provided money for medical care? And seriously, there's got to be some kind of limit to how many things you can use the POW excuse for. Can you name even one fault of his that isn't allegedly due to his POW injuries? I'm happy to honor the man's service. But I think he cheapens the service of others by using it as a flimsy catch-all excuse. The other veterans don't deserve that.

I'm disgusted that McCain would cheapen the service of America's POWs by playing politics with their service.

> In certain ways, McCain was a natural Web candidate. Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and regarded as the U.S. Senate's savviest technologist

Ahh, Forbes. The place that trumpeted SCO's technology claims. But let's counter that claim with facts, not implication.

For one, Ted "The Internet is not a Big Truck" Stevens is in charge of the Internet in Congress in case you've forgotten. Is that supposed to inspire confidence!? Being in charge of something in Congress doesn't prove you know anything. It proves that you have seniority.

McCain is also against Net Neutrality and other "prescriptive regulation," thinks Ballmer would make good tech policy, etc. That's NOT what I'd call a "savvy technologist."

I note that you're trying to make your case by implication (because of X, he SHOULD know about Y), rather than citing anything specific that he knows. This is a common rhetorical trick, but it won't work on me. The more you rely on inference than direct evidence, the weaker I know your claims are.

It's true, a requirement for obtaining a high-level position in IT for a state govt. seems to be incompetence.

This was fun to watch unfold, first-hand. All of the systems designed and implemented by Accenture for the Colorado State Government were faulty. Every single one. Yet they kept getting contracts. No one even bothered to Google the company, they just bid low, said they could do it, and no one checked up on 'em until the systems started breaking. And I don't mean breaking like a small problem here, small problem there...the Dept. of Revenue computers (Dept. of A, T & F computers, DMV computers, tax computers, unemployment benefit computers, dept. of labor computers) would shut down and wouldn't fully come back on and be ready to use for a day or two at a time once or twice a month. Servers and workstations, just shutting down all over the place, for no discernible (at least by someone like me) reason. The computers in my office would shut down and I'd check cables 'n stuff and then call the IT dept. (the phone system is and always has been ok, at least) and you could feel the rage and shame oozing through the phone when the guy would say he didn't know what was wrong...the computer systems from Accenture came without usable documentation and without support agreements. Then I'd just tell everyone that we were getting another paid two-day break (union). Good times.

In the interest of "fairness" here's a response to the study. A brief quote:

Summary: News outlets including CNN cited a study of several major media outlets by a UCLA political scientist and a University of Missouri-Columbia economist purporting to "show a strong liberal bias." But the study employed a measure of "bias" so problematic that its findings are next to useless, and the authors -- both former fellows at conservative think tanks cited in the study to illustrate liberal bias -- seem unaware of the substantial scholarly work that exists on the topic.

Nonsense. They may die sooner, but it takes a long, long time to do so. Especially when we're talking about being overweight. Also, in the mean time, those same fat people are using health care much more often than people of normal weight, because they have much more health problems related to being fat.

http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029&ct=1

http://www.diet-blog.com/archives/2008/02/07/obese_people_have_lower_health_costs.php

http://ethxblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/help-your-country-smoke-drink-and-die.html

http://colorado.mediamatters.org/items/200701220003


The facts do not support your statement. The fact is, obese people who smoke cost society less.

I am very sorry for his family that he died. But Tim Russert was just another corporate media tool. Check out this link for insight on his tilt to the right:

http://mediamatters.org/sundayshowreport/

Tim Russert was not even-handed. He was a former White House staffer.

He typically softballed Republicans and turned his investigative skills loose only when interviewing Democrats. I know real even-handed journalists at (and above) Russert's level who have commented to me that they think he is a disgrace, even that there should be some prohibition on former political operatives taking jobs like moderator of Meet the Press, as it is clearly a conflict of interest for our Press to be in bed with our politicians.

I wish Media Matters went back farther than two years. It would be interesting to compare Scott McLellan's admissions of the lack of due diligence by the White House Press Corps with a log of Russert's failings in the days leading up to the war.

http://mediamatters.org/issues_topics/tags/tim_russert

During its 2004-05 term, the Supreme Court reversed 84 percent of the cases it chose to hear from appeals of 9th Circuit decisions... But the high court reversed 100 percent of the decisions it heard from the 1st, 2nd, and 10th Circuit Courts of Appeals

You must not have researched this very hard, or even looked carefully at that site, because this is a very well known case of outright fraud that was debunked years ago. People can add their names over the Internet without any fact checking. So how is anyone going to find the person who lied on a website form?

http://mediamatters.org/items/200706060009

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine#Case_Study:_The_Oregon_Petition

Not to mention the fact that McCain not only is for the warrantless wire taps,but the guy has begun to waffle so badly that he now says he wouldn't vote for his own bill,and is now saying he opposes views that he was resolutely for not 2 years ago. What happened to McCain being a "straight shooter"? This guy has begun to waffle so badly he makes Hillary "What do the polls say I'm for this week?" Clinton look like she has a spine of steel. As someone who is a conservative in the Goldwater sense I would have been happy to vote Ron Paul,but there is no way in hell I'm voting for "President Shrub,the sequel". But that is my 02c,YMMV