The Ft. Hood shooting was a tragedy. We can all agree on that. But to place the blame on President Obama to fuel some sick agenda is also tragic. Here’s a recent quote from Sean Hannity, trying to tie the shooting to the current president.

HANNITY: This Fort Hood situation is really beginning to disturb me and should disturb everybody. And that is that there is a chance our government knew all about this guy Hasan and did nothing because nobody wanted to be called an Islamophobe. We’re not talking about Islam, we’re talking about radical Islam. You know, this guy going in there, god is great, etc., etc., and all the things he’s saying. But everybody hat worked with him, Bob, knew ahead of time, our government apparently knew and did nothing. Now, this is a terrorist act, if in fact this was motivated in such a way. What does it say about Barack Obama and our government?

Of course, Hannity doesn’t provide any proof that Obama knew anything about Hasan, or the emails to Anwar al-Awlaki. He also conveniently ignores the fact that the emails were reportedly intercepted in late 2008, while Bush was in office.

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Fox News Channel anchor Martha Maccallum had this to say about what Obama did when election results were coming in from N.Y. & N.J.:

MACCALLUM: Robert Gibbs said, well, he was actually watching, you know, the HBO special about his year-long campaign and how it all went…we know that Michelle and the girls went to the Miley Cyrus concert last night… So he’s all alone in that big house, right? Nothing to do but sit back and watch – reminisce about the long campaign and watch HBO and the special.

Not true. FNC’s Major Garrett stated that he “misheard” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. ABC News White House Correspondent Jake Tapper stated, “Gibbs did NOT say that POTUS [President Obama] watched the HBO film last night… I think someone must have misunderstood” and that “all Gibbs said is he didn’t watch election returns, got [election] info emailed to him.”

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James O’Keefe’s visited a Philadelphia ACORN office. Subsequently, Fox News ran what even they referred to as “heavily edited tape.” Captions aired on Fox News Channel stated, “Exposing ACORN: New Video Shows Unlawful Actions.” The problem? The video shows no such thing. Additionally, ACORN workers filed an incident report with Philadelphia police following O’Keefe’s visit.

Many of Russell’s statements in the video of the office visit were edited out and replaced with audio of O’Keefe purporting to explain what she said, but nothing in the video supports the claim that Philadelphia ACORN workers actually assisted O’Keefe and Giles with any “unlawful actions.” As Fox News reported: “The new eight-minute video depicts O’Keefe and Giles entering ACORN’s Philadelphia office and meeting with Conway-Russell. O’Keefe and Giles are seen speaking with Conway-Russell, but audio portions of the video are missing or edited in some portions.” O’Keefe later stated, “We muted the audio of the ACORN employees on the video” because of “ACORN’s legal attack upon us.”

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It’s a wonder that there are still so many people who don’t question Fox News Channel’s honesty, but rather question why it’s criticized so much lately. Considering they get their news from FNC they wouldn’t know that shows like Fox & Friends get caught doing things like using an outdated poll to show that they’re “much more balanced.” Of course, these polls don’t dig too deep and definitely don’t show a full picture, but the issue here is the fact that Fox & Friends is being dishonest in their presentation.

Here is what you’d see if you watched Fox & Friends:

Here is the reality – in other words, using a poll that’s not a year old:

The survey found: “More than three times as many Republicans (34%) as Democrats (10%) say they get most of their national and international news from Fox. By comparison, Democrats are more than twice as likely than Republicans to cite CNN (29% vs. 13%). A similar pattern is evident for MSNBC, with more Democrats (9%) than Republicans (3%) citing it as a main news source.” Nineteen percent of independents said they get most of their national and international news from Fox.

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2009 Pulitzer Prize winning PolitiFact.com has taken a look at six statements made by Glenn Beck and rated their truthfulness on their Truth-O-Meter. They found that none of those statements were more than half true.

• Forty-five percent of doctors “say they’ll quit” if health care reform passes. FALSE – A questionable assertion based on questionable data
• “You don’t know if this (the H1N1 vaccine) is gonna cause neurological damage like it did in the 1970s.” BARELY TRUE – Three decades of flu shots since then without problems
• Van Jones “is an avowed, self-avowed radical revolutionary communist.” BARELY TRUE – “Was,” not “is”
• Van Jones signed a petition indicating he “thinks the Bush administration blew up the World Trade Center and covered it up.” HALF TRUE – A conspiracy theory of the left
• John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, “has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.” PANTS ON FIRE – Holdren never endorsed these ideas
• “Why do we have automatic citizenship upon birth? We’re the only country in the world that has it.” FALSE – Brazil, Canada, Guatamala, Romania…We could go on.

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Sean Hannity asked at the beginning of his show, “Does Kevin Jennings support the group NAMBLA?” Karl Rove makes the false claim that Jennings is guilty of “high-profile, in-your-face advocacy of things like NAMBLA and gay rights and queering elementary school curricula.” Of course, neither Hannity, nor Rove, can provide any proof, whatsoever.

Of course, the typical right wing extremist view that gay rights is automatically and directly connected to NAMBLA, which stands for North American Man/Boy Love Association, is a blatant smear tactic. At best, it’s pure ignorance.

HANNITY: Tonight — shocking new allegations about President Obama’s safe schools czar. Does Kevin Jennings support the group NAMBLA? The FBI agent who infiltrated that organization is here.

ROVE: I can’t imagine that President Obama lacked the sensitivity to think that somebody who had said the things that Mr. Jennings had said, had done the things that Mr. Jennings had done, had taken the sort of high-profile, in-your-face advocacy of things like NAMBLA and gay rights and queering elementary school curricula — that the president of the United States would think this was a person that he ought to put in charge of safe schools, and yet he did.

Where does this come from? Hannity & Rove are referring to the foreword that Jennings wrote for the book Queering Elementary Education: Advancing the Dialogue about Sexualities and Schooling. The forward had nothing to do with statutory rape. As for the the 15 year old that they say Jennings counseled about involvement with an older man – the boy was actually 16, which is the age of consent in Massachusetts, when/where the conversation took place 21 years ago. The claims have more to do with hate, homophobia and anti-Obama smears.

Furthermore, take a look at Hannity’s question: “Does Kevin Jennings support the group NAMBLA?” Glenn Beck supporters got upset about an obvious parody asking why Glenn Beck has not denied raping and murdering a young girl in 1990… Where is their outcry about Hannity making such a false assertion, not as parody, but on a “news” channel? Where is his disclaimer?

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The Fox Nation web site posted a headline reading, “Obama Triples Budget Deficit to $1.4 Trillion,” which linked to an AP article that suggested anything but that claim. The AP’s exact wording: “[t]he federal budget deficit tripled to a record $1.4 trillion for the 2009 fiscal year that ended last week.”

In fact, the article stated that the Congressional Budget Office’s most recent estimate shows that only a small part of the FY09 deficit can be attributed to Obama’s policies. Before he even took office the CBO projected that the deficit would increase to $1.2 trillion based on Bush’s policies and the economy, at that time.

CBO Report from January 7, 2009:

The ongoing turmoil in the housing and financial markets has taken a major toll on the federal budget. CBO currently projects that the deficit this year will total $1.2 trillion, or 8.3 percent of GDP. That total, however, does not include the effects of any future legislation. Enactment of an economic stimulus package, for example, would add to the 2009 deficit. In any event, as a percentage of GDP, the deficit will most likely shatter the previous post-World War II record high of 6.0 percent posted in 1983.

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The official White House blog, once again, takes Fox News to task over falsehoods and, this time, their partisan attack over the Olympics, of all things…

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ThinkProgress.org was able to catch up with Jesse Watters and ask him a few questions before he was able to hop in an elevator. He tried to avoid the questions, having had them asked numerous times, and was caught in a few lies. First he stated that he didn’t know who ThinkProgress.org was. Then he stated that he sat down with Amanda Terkel. And as he got in the elevator, he stated that he didn’t refuse to comment for the NY Times.

Of course Watters knows about ThinkProgress – he said he called them, though nobody at ThinkProgress agrees, and he followed Amanda Terkel for hours and then she stopped on the street to talk to him. She never “sat down” with him. As for the NY Times claim, reporter Brian Stelter stated, “I called Mr. Watters repeatedly at his office #, and he referred my calls to Fox’s PR people. He refused to comment.”

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Here’s a great video of Rick Sanchez on CNN showing video evidence of Fox News’ lie in their newspaper advertisement that claims that other networks did not cover the 9/12 protest. There are several clips of CNN reporters at the event, discussing the event, and showing an angle from their tower camera that is nearly identical to the picture used in the advertisement. Perhaps the best part is when he shows Bill O’Reilly stating that CNN covered the event. Ooops.

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Fox News and their related web sites, including The Fox Nation, have been on a crusade against ACORN for months, with personalities like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity devoting hours upon hours toward the witch hunt, which has uncovered some wrongdoing. But, this is a hilarious prank by an ACORN staffer against Fox News’ “gotcha” (to use a Palinism) style of journalism.

If you’ve seen any of the “reporting” about ACORN on FNC, chances are you’ve seen the video with the prostitution and murder confession. Serious crimes, right? They would be, if they really happened. Here’s how it went down…

ACORN’s Tresa Kaelke was the focus of a series of videos released by Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe wherein they posed as a prostitute and pimp. In the videos Kaelke said that she used to work for an escort service and that she wanted to cover up her prostitution business in order to buy a home. She also “confessed” that she killed her husband. Now that ACORN has released a press release stating that none of it was true, let the hilarity ensue…

“They were not believable”, said Ms. Kaelke of the two actors. “Somewhat entertaining, but they weren’t even good actors. I didn’t know what to make of them. They were clearly playing with me. I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me. Like Stephan Colbert does – saying the most outrageous things with a straightface.” While her sense of humor might not be funny to many people, the fact is that she spun false scenario after false scenario and the videographer ate them up.

Not only was this a witch hunt against ACORN, but also against the so-called liberal media, which Fox News repeatedly pointed out has not covered this story about ACORN. Obviously, it was for a good reason… Perhaps, Fox News should spend more time vetting its sources rather than slamming the mainstream media, of which they are a part.

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Sean Hannity has said, “[If health-care reform passes, we’re] gonna have a government rationing body that tells women with breast cancer, ‘You’re dead.’ It’s a death sentence.” Obviously, this is just his imagination because 1) it’s not likely and 2) the bill has not been passed, much less finished, so he has no evidence.

So, what can you do, besides boycott? You can use the form that Sojourners has set up to email Sean Hannity directly, and tell him the story of a cancer victim who was refused health care under the current system.

Here is part of the email being sent out:

In May 2008, I went to the dermatologist for acne. A word was written on my chart and interpreted incorrectly as meaning pre-cancerous. Shortly thereafter, I was diagnosed with Invasive HER-2 Genetic Breast Cancer, a very aggressive form of breast cancer. I was told I needed a double mastectomy. When the surgeons scheduled my surgery I was pre-certified for my two days hospitalization.

The Friday before the Monday I was scheduled to have my double mastectomy, Blue Cross red flagged my chart due to the dermatologist report. The dermatologist called Blue Cross directly to report that I only had acne and please not hold up my coming surgery. Blue Cross called me to inform me that they were launching a five-year medical investigation into my medical history and that this would take approximately three months. I was frantic. I did not know what to do or where to turn. I knew I could not pay for the surgery myself …

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Sean Hannity, on his attack against so-called “czars,” or advisers, has targeted John Holdren with the following bit of misinformation:

HANNITY: So we know the White House sought out Van Jones, which begs the question: How many more like him are serving in our government? Is Van Jones just the tip of the iceberg? We know for example there’s John Holdren, the science and technology adviser, who has advocated compulsory abortion. And then there’s Cass Sunstein, the Harvard law professor, who wants to ban hunting and grant rights to livestock, wildlife, and pets. Now we can only conclude that it’s time to take a much closer look at who exactly this president has now serving in our government.

What the heck is Hannity talking about. Apparently Holdren co-authored a book on environmental sciences over 30 years ago that discusses “compulsory control of family size” for countries populations with expanding birth rates that cannot be curbed by “milder methods.” That is not the same thing as “advocating compulsory abortion.” PolitiFact gives this claim “pants on fire” status.

Here is a statement from Holdren’s office:

The quotations used to suggest that Dr. Holdren supports coercive approaches to limiting population growth were taken from a 1977 college textbook on environmental science and policy, of which he was the third author. The quoted material was from a section of the book that described different possible approaches to limiting population growth and then concluded that the authors’ own preference was to employ the noncoercive approaches before the environmental and social impacts of overpopulation led desperate societies to employ coercive ones. Dr. Holdren has never been an advocate of compulsory abortions or other repressive means of population limitation.

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