Anne Landman's News Articles

Republicans and conservative news media outlets like Fox News keep repeating the error made by newly-elected Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, when he mistakenly called the Senate process of reconciliation "the nuclear option." The term the "nuclear option" was coined in 2005 by then-Majority Leader Trent Lott, when Democrats used the filibuster to block the appointment of appeals court judges nominated by George W. Bush. This prompted Republicans to threaten to change the Senate rules so they could cut off debate on judicial nominees using a simple 51-vote majority instead of the required 60-vote majority needed to end a filibuster. The momentousness of this change -- effectively blocking the stalling technique known as the filibuster -- moved some Democrats to dub the Republicans' threat the "nuclear option." Thus, the phrase "nuclear option" refers to a major change in the rules of the Senate, not passing a bill using reconciliation. Passing a bill -- even a large and important bill -- through reconciliation is fairly standard procedure, and has been used many times before to approve major health care reform initiatives.

It's getting clearer that conservatives would rather sling around a scary, loaded old term and hope to elicit some emotional effect than come up with a new term -- or use the right words -- to communicate what they mean.

In April, 2009, former vice president Dick Cheney called for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to release classified memos he said demonstrated how well "harsh interrogation methods" -- torture -- worked to prevent terrorist attacks and save lives. But investigators with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) just released a report saying that the CIA memo Cheney cited as justifying U.S. torture contains "plainly inaccurate information" that undermines its conclusions.

In a video posted on YouTube on February 3, House Representative Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) explains how the right wing media machine creates and spreads disinformation in an effort to smear the left. "Disinformation" should not be confused with "misinformation," the unintentional form of wrong information. Disinformation is produced by people who intend to mislead their audience.

Step 1: Fabricate the Lie

Frank tells how John Fund, an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, told a lie about him in November of last year: In a speech at a conservative function in Florida called "Restoration Weekend," Fund claimed that, after losing the special election in Massachusetts, Democrats Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank were going to propose a bill to create universal voter registration. Fund further stated that Democrats were going to add all welfare recipients and unemployed people to the voter rolls, and he called it "felon re-enfranchisement."

In reality, Frank explains, there was no such bill.

On her January 12 show, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC reviewed a portion of the new book about the 2008 Presidential election, Game Change, by political reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. The section was about Sarah Palin. The authors discuss Palin's prep and tutoring for the campaign trail, and conclude that "her grasp of rudimentary facts and concepts was minimal." They allege Palin didn't know why North and South Korea were separate nations, didn't know what the Fed does, and couldn't explain who her son, Track, was going to fight in Iraq. Maddow played a video clip of Palin, taped during her appearance on the Bill O'Reilly show shortly before Maddow's show that same night, in which Palin admitted that she didn't know who perpetrated the 9-11 terror attacks against the U.S. In another clip, Palin was giving a speech to American troops as they prepared to ship off to Iraq. In her speech, Palin suggested Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11, even though her campaign prep team had carefully explained to her the day before her speech that Iraq was not involved in planning or perpetrating 9-11.