Let's be clear on this: OBAMA did NOT kill Bin Laden. An American sailor, who Obama, just a few weeks ago, was debating on whether or not to PAY, did. In fact, if you remember a little less than two years ago, his administration actually charged and attempted to court-martial 3 Navy Seals from Seal Team Six, when a terrorist suspect they captured, complained they had punched him during the take down and bloodied his nose. His administration further commented how brutal they were. The left were calling them Nazi's and Baby Killers. Now all of a sudden, the very brave men they vilified are now heroes when they make his administration look good in the eyes of the public. Obama just happened to be the one in office when the CIA finally found the bastard and our sailors took him out. Essentially, Obama only gave an answer. Yes or No, to him being taken out. This is NOT an Obama victory, but an AMERICAN victory!!

Ed Schreiber
Col. USMC (Ret.)
"Semper Fi"

OBAMA'S OWN WORDS TRAP HIM:
2008: "Navy Seal Team 6 is Cheney's private assassination team."
2011: "I put together Seal Team 6 to take out Bin Laden."

2008: "Bin Laden is innocent until proven guilty, and must be captured alive and given a fair trial."
2011: "I authorized Seal Team 6 to kill Bin Laden."
2008: " Guantanamo is entirely unnecessary, and the detainees should not be interrogated."
2011: "Vital intelligence was obtained from Guantanamo detainees that led to our locating Bin Laden."

Long live the U.S. Military and let's put someone other than the Idiot In Chief in the White House!

I just copied and pasted that to an email, then sent it to a lot of people. Love it.

while i find it interesting - and i wouldn't be surprised if he did actually say all of those things - in fairness to truth, i did a quick google search and turned up the following link:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/...sy-raid-o/

fyi - i know nothing about the politifact website; it could be garbage. but i figured i'd post it anyway in case it helps the discussion.

I copied and pasted this, and turned it into an email. I sent it to 4 members of my family, 3 friends, and several customers and subcontractors who I knew would appreciate it. My personal information was at the bottom including my work phone number.

Friday, I get a phone call from a man in West Chester that I don't know. He said this email has been forwarded all over the place and one of the people in his company down in Atlanta sent it to him. He saw my contact information as the first person who started it, so he called me to thank me for sending this around. No lie. His son is a Navy Seal. He said more people need to appreciate what our military does for this country.

Gave me goosebumps. First time that's ever happened to me.

Swift boat veterans for truth again? Of course, if Obama is in office it's an American victory. Maybe he should jump out of a jet and parade around saying this job is over. Now THAT'S presidential. goosebumpy even.

Ctip this is a chain email thats been going around but Obama actually has not said any of 6 quotes mentioned.

(02-10-2012 04:06 PM)JPBearcat3 Wrote:  while i find it interesting - and i wouldn't be surprised if he did actually say all of those things - in fairness to truth, i did a quick google search and turned up the following link:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/...sy-raid-o/

fyi - i know nothing about the politifact website; it could be garbage. but i figured i'd post it anyway in case it helps the discussion.

Politifact is a nonpartisan website. It is quite reliable. In any case, forget about this website, the truth is that simply all 6 quotes are fabrication as Politifact noted. A search of the public record indicates that Obama did not say any those 6 quotes.

(02-12-2012 01:25 AM)chicago bearcat Wrote:  

(02-10-2012 04:06 PM)JPBearcat3 Wrote:  fyi - i know nothing about the politifact website; it could be garbage...

Politifact is a nonpartisan website. It is quite reliable....

Let's see: politifact calls itself "non-partisan" and liberals call it "quite reliable". Why does that make me suspicious? Here's some fact-checking on the so-called "fact-checker" to help in deciding for yourselves:

Quote:"Non-Partisan"
Sometimes, I feel compelled to compile a list of my own "Iron Lawz" of politics and maybe of reality in general. If I did, one of them would be as follows:

Any time an organization must be cited as "non-partisan", it probably isn't.

I bring this up because of a post I read recently calling the website PolitiFact a "non-partisan" source for analysis about political decisions. But this is, itself, pretty misleading. For instance, when PolitiFact claimed that the "Biggest Lie of 2010" was the labeling of the healthcare reform bill as a "government takeover", the Wall Street Journal pointed out that:

"PolitiFact's decree is part of a larger journalistic trend that seeks to recast all political debates as matters of lies, misinformation and "facts," rather than differences of world view or principles. PolitiFact wants to define for everyone else what qualifies as a "fact," though in political debates the facts are often legitimately in dispute."

This is certainly the big problem with a lot of sites like PolitiFact. Defining phrases and philosophical viewpoints in literal terms not only misses the point, it also inherently exposes the biases of the definer.

If you're going to be a fact-checker, then you should probably stick to checking actual facts... For instance, if I said, "The national debt is $900 Trillion dollars!", you could say, "Uh, no... It's closer to $14.1 Trillion", and that would be fact-checking.

If, however, I said that "The national debt is a severe problem which can only be solved with substantial budget cuts, across-the-board reductions in spending and a serious re-adjustment in the currently accepted roles of government", that's an opinion based on a particular viewpoint (and yes, concluded from checkable facts). So you can't just declare it "a lie", and doing so would do nothing but demonstrate that you hold a different opinion based on a different philosophical viewpoint.

This might just make my point, but additionally, saying that last year's healthcare bill is a "government takeover" seems at least half-reasonable to me... As it did to Peter Suderman at Reason, who wrote an article titled; "Politifact’s Lie of the Year Is An Exaggeration With Elements of Truth":

"Say what you will about the rest of its accomplishments (or lack thereof), but the White House has proven a remarkably consistent and high-quality bull**** factory this year. The way they churn this stuff out, you might think they'd be up for an award! No such luck: According to the enlightened fact-checkers at Politifact, the number one lie of the year—the nastiest, falsest, untrue-est, lying-est line of sheer baloney in politics over the past 12 ugly and lie-filled months—was the Republican slogan that the health care law represents a “government takeover” of the health care system.

If you want to point out that the GOP stretched this one, then by all means go ahead. The PPACA wasn’t strictly a government takeover of the entire health care system. No, it was just a dramatic increase in government regulation, oversight, and control of many parts of the system."

Suderman goes on to point out the myriad things that PolitiFact ignores and simply leaves out about the bill in terms of the ways in which it represents a massive expansion of the state into the healthcare decisions of individuals across the United States.

This isn't the first time PolitiFact has been accused of somewhat explicit partisan bias, either. For instance they also supported Obama's nonsensical claim that his policies had "saved or created 2 million jobs". For godsake, there is no way to measure jobs "saved" by a stimulus package!

No one keeps, or is capable of keeping, those kinds of statistics.

We can only look at history, and use logic, to determine the potential success or likely failure of an economic policy, and stimulus packages just don't work. So not only is the "saved or created" nonsense impossible to prove or measure in the first place, all of the logic and historical evidence suggests that it's utter bollocks anyway. And of course, even though we can't see alternate futures exactly, we can always look back on these things after the fact and see the (failed) effects of other economic policies, like minimum wage laws or the endless "war on poverty".

The words, "non-partisan", conjure up some image of impartiality - but this isn't really how the world works, and anyone who needs to use "non-partisan" as a disclaimer is probably just hiding their biases. Thus, as a corollary, I must point out that even if an organization or an individual is "non-partisan", that doesn't mean they don't have a well-defined viewpoint.

I'm actually a perfect example of this point.

As anyone who knows me, or has spent much time reading this blog or looking at my media work should probably be able to tell, I hate political parties. I also really dislike false dichotomies and the "left" vs "right" nonsense that passes for a political spectrum analysis in the eyes of most of America.

I don't do candidate advocacy and I don't to party advocacy - not even for the Libertarian Party. I don't like it.

What I will do, however, is idea advocacy. I am in favor of Lockeian natural rights to life, liberty & property. I am in favor of freedom, of rational thinking, of the permanent reduction of religious & superstitious jive like palmistry, homeopathy and astrology. I'm in favor of free markets & free minds, which means that I am in favor of a society that interacts not through one-sided, state sanctioned acts of violence, but via mutual exchange and peaceful, contractual agreement... and that means that I'm in favor of an extremely limited government (or none at all).

I am in favor of all of these things, because first & foremost, I'm in favor of truth and reason and that's where those values have led.

The principles I believe in come through in nearly everything I do, and most certainly in everything I write or produce.

But that does not, for one second, mean that I am willing to lie, cheat or deliberately mislead in order to accomplish my goals. Fortunately, I strongly believe that my principles stand on their own merits, and no obfuscating is necessary in any case. But I make no pretense about my biases. They are right out in the open for anyone who wants to know what I think and why. However, I pride myself on always backing up my opinions with well-supported sources, facts & logical arguments.

I encourage everyone (as the note attached to Logicology can attest) to challenge me on the facts and on the logic if it is believed to be in error. I welcome and relish those challenges.

"Non-Partisan"

In this day and age of digital media- who in the hell knows what to believe? Stuff posted on the internet with no factual basis suddenly becomes fact. We have photo shop and voice-over dubs. I'm not believing anything unless I see it with my own eyes and hear it with my own ears. And then I'm second guessing it.

(02-12-2012 08:56 AM)Bearcatbdub Wrote:  In this day and age of digital media- who in the hell knows what to believe? Stuff posted on the internet with no factual basis suddenly becomes fact. We have photo shop and voice-over dubs. I'm not believing anything unless I see it with my own eyes and hear it with my own ears. And then I'm second guessing it.

Everything you see in the internet is not necessarily true - Abraham Lincoln.

Another nice, straight up lie of a chain email that claims Obama said certain things he never said, but gives no reference or links to any place in which he said them. Leave it to Bearhawkeye to question the political leaning of the fact check website, but not even try to show Obama quotes to prove it wrong.

(02-12-2012 10:58 AM)bearcatmark Wrote:  Leave it to Bearhawkeye to question the political leaning of the fact check website, but not even try to show Obama quotes to prove it wrong.

Read my post. I chose to make no comment pro or con on the truth of the Obama quotes. I did choose to address the characterization of politifact as "non-partisan" and "quite reliable" and I followed up with supporting sourced information. I was unaware of the rule that I have to address every issue raised on this board.

"Leave it to bearcatmark to question which issues I choose to comment upon, but not even try to address the actual point of those that I do." is a much fairer representation of the situation than your silly personal attack.