I don’t know what the Palace Theatre is, but if it is a private building, then doesn’t that mean that whoever is renting it has a right to determine what happens there, just as you have a right to determine what happens in your own house? If the first amendment was held to apply to any heckler in any situation, then no one would ever be able to hold a political rally, discussion, or debate of any sort because opponents could simply send hecklers to disrupt it.
But all this is missing the point. We have an incident. As often happens, there are multiple different accounts of what exactly happened, with no possibility of finding out for sure. So it’s invalid to say, “Let’s assume the worst possible interpretation of Franken’s actions and motives. Aha, now we have proof that Franken is a bad person.”
And, just to point out, the Union Leader is no liberal newspaper itself! Isn’t it the one whose now-dead publisher was an arch-conservative … and whose attacks on Muskie’s wife in the N.H. campaign way-back-when brought Muskie to tears and pretty much did in his campaign? If you read their endorsement of Lieberman (“longshot that he is in a party race dominated by far-left views”), you’ll see they are still quite conservative.
I agree with your point, but generally you have the security detail deal with the heckler by escorting them out (which they later did.) Nobody criticized Dean’s security detail for taking action, even though they may well have been rough on him as they threw him out the door. There is a dangerous precedent with encouraging onlookers to take matters into their own hands under those circumstances, like Franken did IMHO. It wasn’t like he was rushing Dean with a knife.
As far as the ethics of dealing with hecklers: One could say, “Well, it is a disruption because the heckler was trying to prevent the right of Dean to speak freely - therefore it is OK to intervene,” but that same logic holds true for the WTO protests in Seattle, where the intent of the protestors was to shut down the WTO talks - they even admitted as such. Does that justify violence?
Actually, there was one fairly insignificant error. Only it wasn’t really an error, it really was a joke, playing on Ann Coulter’s extremely deceptive use of endnotes. And the best part about the joke was that SHE FELL FOR IT!
To me, it makes a big difference. It tells us to what the “them” in “Clinton thwarted them” is actually referring. It’s not the planned attacks on the Pope and twelve airlines, as frankenlies.com leads us to believe, but instead it’s referring to the future planned attacks at the “UN Headquarters, the LA and Boston airports, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the George Washington Bridge”.
Why am I not surprised that it’s actually the writer at www.frankenlies.com being rather . . . um . . “creative” with his claims?
According to Franken, the guy he accosted at the Dean rally was presenting a potential threat:
Second, if we’re gonna look at frankenlies.com, we should also look at the lying lies of frankenlies.com, a site that argues that these weren’t lies after all. The page only details arguments 1 through 10, but what it says looks pretty convincing.
Thanks to Max for starting this thread, although I don’t really have too much of a dog in this fight. As I mentioned in the other thread, I think Franken is funny (although I don’t agree with his politics), and I love Ann Coulter (although I in no way claim that she is 100% accurate in her books or interviews). She is (despite what many of you think ), human. So is Al. So is the individual who runs frankenlies.com. Same for the person who runs frankenlies.blogspot.com.
All of these individuals have political axes to grind, and they are bound to slip up. Some more than others. Their biases likely play a part in this as well.
But as to the OP: Does Al Franken lie? Well, duh! Of course he lies. We all do. Al isn’t above lying, nor is he incapable of lying. Personally, I believe that his “satire” regarding the fliers he sent out was dishonest and deceptive. He may throw his hands in the air and say “Just kidding!” after the fact, but it is still a lie.
Bottom line. We are all humans. We lie (intentional) and make mistakes (unintentional) everyday. Al Franken is no different.
This is disingenuous. Although probably everyone has told some lie in their lifetime, that’s clearly not the question at hand. The quesiton at hand is whether Franken dissembles often enough that he is to be considered unreliable.
Another useful question is whether he lies in his books as often as Coulter. From everything I’ve seen, he unquestionably doesn’t lie nearly as often.
This isn’t a matter of who has an axe to grind. Either he lies as often as Coulter or he doesn’t. To suggest it’s all a matter of bias is to take the worst of postmodernism to defend dishonesty.
I’d say that’s not a particularly useful question, because it’s goddamn near impossible to lie as often as Coulter. One would have to lie in several mediums simultaneously; typing lies, while lying on the phone, and maybe lying via American Sign Language.
Yeah, looks like this guy did his homework. Dang, I had just done some web research on point #1 and was going to post it, only to find out that this guy already covered it.
The only one I take issue with is #8, because in my mind, attributing a quote to an author who was in fact quoting someone else is more than an “extremely minor error”. That’s in fact a pretty serious error.
But looking at the whole picture, when the author of frankenlies.com makes more disingenuous arguments in one web page than he can find in Franken’s entire book, it tells you something.
Yes, this one is especially weak. frankenlies argues that Al Franken spins numbers in order to show the tax cuts favor the rich. But, his only evidence of this is to show a different way of looking at the numbers that makes it look like the rich are not getting a good deal. However, frankenlies way of looking at things is wrong for so many reasons it is not funny:
(1) It only considers some aspects of the Bush tax cuts, i.e., the marginal rate reductions, without considering the elimination of the estate tax, the dividends and capital gains tax cuts, etc. Also, it does a very simplistic analysis by just looking at these rate reductions and trying to conclude something about distributive effects, ignoring for example, that a cut on the lowest marginal rate reduces taxes for everyone on some of their income. [I think it might also have gotten the cut in the top rate wrong…Did it really go down only to 35% instead of 33% as Bush originally wanted.]
(2) It looks at things in the only possible way that the Bush tax cuts look good for the poor. That is, if you look at the percentage reduction in federal income taxes, then it did turn out that the lowest quintile got a somewhat larger cut than the rich. However, this is a pretty silly way of looking at things because the poor don’t pay much…many, not anything…in federal income taxes. Rather, they pay most of their federal tax in the payroll taxes. And, they also tend to pay a lot of the more regressive state taxes. So, if you take someone who is just barely paying federal income taxes…say $20…and get rid of it totally, then that is a 100% cut. But, he might have a total tax burden of a few thousand dollars, so percentage-wise you’ve barely dented his total tax burden. (Things get even worse once you realize this person has a good chance of seeing some state taxes rise.) On the other hand, for the rich, the federal income tax is usually the major part of their tax burden so even if you reduce it by a slightly smaller percentage than you did the poor person’s federal income tax burden, you have reduced the rich’s total tax burden by a larger percentage. Of course, if you look instead in terms of dollar amounts, the difference becomes ridiculously dramatic with the lowest quintile seeing reductions on the order of tens of dollars (if I remember correctly) and the top 1% seeing reductions of over $10,000. And, as a result, if you look at the share of the tax cuts that go to the top 1%, you also get very large numbers…depending on the year and whether the tax cuts sunset or not, we are talking on the order of 30-50% share for this top 1%.
So, in summary, you really have to jump through hoops to look at the numbers in any way that doesn’t make it look a mighty nice deal for the rich.
My point is obvious. Franken has an agenda. The cite attacking Franken has an agenda. The cite defending Franken from the attack has an agenda.
What does the fact that all these sources have clear agendas tell us about the data coming from them.
In science the concept of the double blind test is pretty much de rigeur. What that means is that any info coming from a biased source should be deeply discounted. Not having a clear agenda doesn’t necessarily make a source reliable either. As people analyze something, they tend to put their own spin on it, without even being aware of it. To be truly reliable a source needs to be blind as to what it is actually analyzing.
Obviously this is a difficult thing to do when we’re talking about political analysis. Maybe impossible.
But this kind thinking really should be telling us something, if we’re willing to be smart. Biased sources produced biased information. Biased information or information with an agenda is bad information.
A wise man does not make up his mind based on bad information.
Franken’s information and the information from these various cites both for and against him is pretty badly biased, and hence pretty poor.
Franken is selling something with his writing: as is Coulter and Moore and Limbaugh.
Read it as such and there’s no problem. Know it for what it is, and there’s no problem.
I myself have read the story of the Sneetches to my daughter.
Star-bellied Sneetches thing star-bellied Sneetches are inherently better. Sneetches without stars think non-starred sneetches are better or else they envy the star-bellied sneetches.
A wise salesman shows up and sells a machine that puts stars on sneetches. The ones with stars no longer feel special and the salesman sells them a machine which takes stars off.
The sneetches put stars on and stars off and the salesman takes all their money.
What the salesman is really selling is the stupidity of Sneetches. It turns out that’s it in endless supply.
Coulter, Franken, Moore et al are really selling the same thing. These cites are really selling the same thing.
If you love Coulter and despise Franken… or vice versa…
Congratulations you’re a sneetch.
So are you saying you never believe anybody with an agenda? That there are not people with agendas who are more or less reliable?
I agree with you on the issue of having healthy skepticism. But adopting a “they all lie” attitude neglects the fact that some lie way more than others.
Well, I’m confused again. (Not surprising really, is it? ;))
According to the CBO. From 1979 to 2000, the richest 5% increased their income from 45.5% to 54.8% (Table B1-C) of the total income earned. Meanwhile, they saw the total portion of the federal tax (total federal tax, not merely income tax) that they pay go from 56.4% to 66.7% (Table B1-B). Everyone else reversed this trend. That is, every other quintile paid less of the federal taxes than they earned as a percentage of the total income. For instance, the poorest 5% saw their share of the total income go from 5.8% to 4.0%. However, they saw the portion of the federal taxes they paid go from 2.1% to 1.1%.
So, if my math is correct (fat chance) the poorest 5% saw their share of the total income decrease about 30%, and their share of the total federal tax burden decreased about 50%. Meanwhile the richest 5% saw their share of the total income increase about 20.4% while their share of the total federal tax burden increased by about 18.2%.
Meanwhile, in constant 2000 dollars everyone earned more money over the same period of time.
As was the case the last time we discussed this, I do not have a good summary cite for the total amounts paid in State taxes. But it seems to me that (over this period at least) the total federal tax burden has been shifting to the rich.
After having said all that, I agree that characterizing the tax cuts as if the poor were getting more of a break than the rich is disengenuous. But it seems that characterizing the federal taxes as cut for the rich and raised for the poor seems to me equally disengenuous.
Do you have a good breakdown of the recent tax cuts by income group? Or even a good summary of the total amounts collected by the States?
BTW, I only looked through the CBO site and dug these numbers up because of our last conversation. You will smoke a turd in hell for makeing me do that.
On one hand, it’s hard to argue with this position. However, I still think that the difference between Al Franken and Ann Coulter, even if it is only one of degree, is still a frickin’ enormous one, in honesty, morality, reliability, and a variety of other metrics.
If I read an Al Franken book and he makes a non-satirical factual claim, I assume that that claim is basically true, which is not necessarily the case for any of the other three you mention.
Scylla, I don’t think your reasoning applies. In science, sure, you do what you can to minimize bias – but in politics, it’s pretty much impossible to do that. Applying scientific standards to politics just doesn’t work. Instead, you acknowledge that the stuff you look at is probably coming from someone with an opinion, you take that into consideration, and you look at what they’re saying to see if it seems accurate.
(1) While this relates in some way to previous things you and I have talked about, it does not relate in any way to the Bush tax cuts (except to the extent of understanding what happened before them) since it only goes up to year 2000.
(2) Your numbers for the “richest 5%” are actually the numbers for the top quintile…i.e., the richest 20%. For the top 1%, the share of income went from 9.3% to 17.8% for an increase of 91% while their share of taxes went from 15.4% to 25.6% for an increase of 66%.
(3) At any rate, my argument in the past was that the richest 1% saw their share of the tax increase because their share of the income increased, and in fact their share of the tax increased less than their share of the income. Thus, their increase in tax share had nothing to do with any increase in progressivity of the tax. What you now point out is at the bottom of the scale, there was some increase in progressivity…which is in fact something that I have occasionally noted in past discussions…although it may be before your time. This is presumably due to an expansion of the earned income tax credit. So, yes, at the very bottom of the scale, the federal tax system has become more progressive. However, there has been very little change in progressivity over the rest of the scale. And, to reiterate, the richest 1% are paying a higher share of the taxes than in 1979 because they are getting a higher share of the income…with their share of the income having increased faster than their share of the taxes.
Hope that clarifies and makes it worth your while to go delving into CBO data!
), human. So is Al. So is the individual who runs 