One last stimulus post and then I promise I’ll take a break.  I have been utterly amazed at the creative reading skills of stimulus opponents over the last few weeks.  As they say a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has finished putting its shoes on.  And the four outrageous claims discussed here have been passed around virtually unchallenged for a while now.

ACORN Nuttiness

The idea that there was money for ACORN in the stimulus was first invented by Fox news in the run up to the stimulus debate and its since been parroted by republican legislators including John Boehner and David Vitter.  In reality, of course, ACORN is not mentioned at all in the bill but what worries republicans is that 4.2 billion is set aside for local governments and (gasp) non-profit organizations to help them buy up foreclosed homes, fix them up, and sell them or rent them out.  So the logic goes 1.There is money in the bill for non-profits to buy up homes,   2. ACORN is a non-profit organization that does things vaguely housing related   3. The democrats are trying to sneak money to their buddies at ACORN!!!!!

Lest you think I’m exaggerating here is a quote from Louisiana Republican David Vitter on the subject: ”$4.2 billion dollars would be available to organizations like ACRON for so-called neighborhood revitalization. That’s just political payoff, quite frankly, not in spite of their voter registration fraud activity, really because of it, in my opinion, in terms of support from some of the liberals in Congress.”  … Wow.   That’s quite a conspiracy theory he’s put together there.  Never mind the fact that “ACORN Housing” is an entirely different organization than the ACORN that committed voter fraud, never mind that ACORN housing has never purchased a foreclosed home in its history and has no plans to do so, and never mind that…no liberal politicians benefitted in any way from the poorly conceived voter fraud committed by low-level ACORN employees.  Of course David Vitter and John Boehner know all that, but providing that kind of context would hurt their case.

Field Mouse Fiasco

This one originated with Rep Steve King of Iowa but was also picked up by the illustrious John Boehner, and has been featured on the Drudge report.  It all started with this memo from the house, brought to you via Politifact.com:

“Appropriations Republicans, concerned with this irresponsible process and possible abuse of taxpayer funds, have asked various federal agencies how they intend to spend the windfall of cash that Congress may approve in the ‘stimulus’ bill,” said a memo posted to the site. “One peek behind the bureaucratic curtain has yielded the following examples of hidden program information that isnot included in the language of the bill or report. These are programs which various federal agencies have privately indicated they will fund with ‘stimulus’ money.”

The memo lists a number of projects, including up to $37.5 million for “wetland restoration in the San Francisco Bay Area – including work to protect the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse.”

Basically, unable to find pork in the bill, House republicans decided to ask states and federal agencies what they were planning on using their money for.  On a list of possible projects put forward by CA was this wetland restoration project, a small portion of which focused on protecting this marshy rodent.  Of course with Ms Pelosi being the rep from San Francisco her name was quickly attached to this project as the originator of this trumped up “pork”.  An article yesterday in the Washington Times was headlined ”Pelosi’s mouse slated for $30M slice of cheese.”  and included the blatant falsehood that the stimulus bill, ”includes $30 million for wetlands restoration that the Obama administration intends to spend in the San Francisco Bay Area to protect, among other things, the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse.”

This is really a good example of how many of the “pork” rumors about the stimulus have been invented.  Once again, the creativity evident here is impressive.

Banning Prayer

And of course a great way to get Americans frothing at the mouth is to push the old “democrats are silencing religion” button.  This myth seems to be sole property of South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, perhaps because its so ill-conceived that no one else wants to be associated with it.  Basically the stimulus contains standard boilerplate prohibiting federal funds going to colleges from being used to refurbish “buildings used for religious worship”.  Sen DeMint has (willfully?) misinterpreted this to mean that students would be barred from praying in their dorm rooms.  Of course there’s oodles of Supreme Court precedent that says otherwise and phrases exactly like this one have been included in hundreds of spending bills gone by without the world crashing down.  I think that’s all that needs to be said about that one.

The Stimulus will Override Your Doctors and Kill Your Parents!

Of all the myths surrounding the stimulus bill this one is perhaps most widespread right now, and simultaneously most insane.  The stimulus smartly establishes a “Health Technology Czar” to oversee the much-needed and long-overdue national transition to electronic health records.  There was a bloomberg article posted a few days back (found here) in which the author used a combination of astonishingly poor reading skills and skillful alarmism to claim that the Health Tech Czar would be empowered to review the decisions of all doctors in America, overrule their diagnosis, and enforce efficiency.  I’m not kidding.  Conservative pundits immediately ran with the story, before checking to see if her claims were correct.

Ann Coulter said Health and Human Services “bureaucrats will soon be empowered to overrule your doctor” and “cut off treatments that merely prolong life.” She also claimed, “Doctors who don’t comply with the government’s treatment protocols will be fined.”  Lousiana Republican John Fleming went on Glenn Beck’s show and said the ”health technology czar” will “oversee what procedures doctors are doing and help decide at what point in life they will receive certain treatments and perhaps what treatments are acceptable and not acceptable for payment.”  Beck, disappointingly, didn’t challenge those claims but made this “outrage” the focus of the remainder of his show.  This culminated in an article in the Washington Times two days ago that ran a story about how the stimulus was leading us towards Nazi-Era Eugenics and it featured a large picture of Hitler.   The story has since been picked up by The Drudge Report, Lou Dobbs, Fox News Anchor Bill Hemmer, and Rush Limbaugh.  All this from one little poorly-researched article that nobody bothered to double check.

But the author’s one mistake was that she provided references to the page numbers in the stimulus that “supported” her claims.  While all those pundits were apparently too busy to glance over them, I found five minutes to look them up.  And I would invite you too as well.  I read the indicated pages with curiosity and found them to be very clear in saying nothing of the sort.  All of the Health Tech Czar’s powers related to enforcing adoption of electronic medical records and nothing more.  But I wasn’t the only one.  One of CNN’s medical correspondents had a similar experience:

When challenged the bloomberg author’s reaction was essentially that the wording of the bill may not actually say anything like that but it leaves that possibility open because it doesn’t specifically rule it out.  All the talk of the elderly and sick being euthanized is just extrapolation from the author’s apocalyptic fantasy.  Believe me, if anything like this was going to be happening, the AMA would be going nuts.  Nobody, democrat, republican, or canadian wants to see government dictating healthcare decisions.  Besides, that role is already filled by your friendly neighborhood insurance company.

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