Politico's Super-Awesome SOTU Fact-Check Is Super-Awesome, A Fact-Check

What is the first fact Politico gets wrong in its "State of the Union Fact-Check" ? Using the wordfact in the title. And if you can't trust a title ... well then you are probably reading Politico! What is the second "fact" Politico gets wrong in its "State of the Union Fact-Check"? Well, let us let them tell it:

The climate straw man

Obama: “I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago. But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.”

Cap-and-trade legislation akin to McCain-Lieberman has been dead for some time, and Obama’s one of the guilty parties.

Let us investigate this, together!

Yes, the president helped get a climate bill through the House in 2009. But he let other priorities like health care and Wall Street reform go first in the Senate, siphoning momentum from a chamber where coal- and oil-state Democrats and reluctant Republicans like McCain were all too willing to let the issue slip away.

McCain has shown little interest since in taking the lead on global warming legislation, while Lieberman is off in retirement. So far, the only lawmakers even proposing bills that look like McCain-Lieberman are liberal lions like Sens. Barbara Boxer and Bernie Sanders, not exactly hope for bipartisan legislation. It’s not clear Obama will invest any political capital to push for that or other climate change legislation.

Any action on the issue will likely have to come from the president alone, via executive order and regulations that will no doubt be controversial.

Let us make sure we are reading you right, Politico: Climate change is a strawman because Obama passed too much stuff his first term, and now he is saying if Congress doesn't act he will and you are saying he would have to do that through executive order and regulations, like he says, but that it would be "controversial"? And that makes it a "strawman"?

DO YOU UNDERSTAND WORDS???

Let us look at another such "strawman." (We do not even know what Politico thinks "strawman" means, but it is not making regulations via executive order, if that is what they think?) Remember back to the heady days of the Pelosi House, when in like the first three days they passed everything in the world, and then tackled climate change because they had a couple hours left before going home for dinner? Well eventually the Senate caught up with most of it, but the two things that were left over and did not get through the Senate were the DREAM Act and climate change legislation. So Barack Obama used executive orders to implement most of the DREAM Act. Was it controversial? Sure! Did that mean somehow that he did not do it? No, so shut the fuck up Politico.

Anyway, the rest of the "fact-check" goes on like that, but we will give you one more.

$9.00 minimum wage, not so bold

Obama: “Let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour….Working folks shouldn’t have to wait year after year for the minimum wage to go up while CEO pay has never been higher.”

Obama’s proposal Tuesday night to increase the federal minimum wage to $9 sounded bold and it was one surprise element of the address the White House managed to keep under wraps until the speech. But it turns out it’s less than what Obama campaigned on four years ago.

In 2008, Obama favored raising the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011. However, when he became president, he did little to deliver on the pledge as the economic crisis unfolded.

So, he campaigned for more, so he is lying? Or did he say it was "bold," thus earning your refutation? We were not listening, so we don't know, but shut the fuck up, Politico.

[ Politico ]