Levi Johnston admits he lied about the Palins

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Levi Johnston has admitted in a statement via People magazine that he lied about Sarah Palin and her family in media quotes and magazine interviews:

"Last year, after Bristol and I broke up, I was unhappy and a little angry. Unfortunately, against my better judgment, I publicly said things about the Palins that were not completely true. I have already privately apologized to Todd and Sarah. Since my statements were public, I owe it to the Palins to publicly apologize."

"So to the Palin family in general and to Sarah Palin in particular, please accept my regrets and forgive my youthful indiscretion. I hope one day to restore your trust."

In a highly publicized interview with Vanity Fair last year, Johnston claimed that neither Todd nor Sarah Palin cook, and their children had to prepare their own meals. He claimed that there was "a lot of talk of divorce" in the Palin home, and that Gov. Palin didn't hunt nor know anything about guns.

Common-sense Americans never believed Johnston's anti-Palin nonsense, but gullible leftists who hate Sarah Palin wanted Levi's lies to be true so much that they accepted them as truth without question. Among them, a group of bloggers in Alaska whose entire lives consist of trying to destroy Gov. Palin through the use of lies like those told by Johnston. Levi's mea culpa means they and other Palin-haters will no doubt be stuck on the spin cycle for an indefinite period of time. Now that Levi has admitted to bearing false witness against the Palin family, he will no long be the fair-haired boy of the drooling anti-Palin forces. Watch them turn on him like a pack of rabid wolves.

h/t: Conservatives 4 Palin

- JP

Debunking Two More Media Lies About Sarah Palin

The liberal media has no decency. It is so in the tank for our radical leftist president that it has been reduced to spreading lies about the political figure who represents the greatest threat to him. The editors of two other state-controlled media outlets -- the Soviet Union's cold war era Pravda and Izvestia -- could get away with such deception, but fortunately we still have some media watchdogs here in the USA who bark when they see a media lie.

CNN, Huffington Post and others have spread the lie that Sarah Palin recently posted her resume on LinkedIn because she's now out of work and looking for a job. While gullible "progressives" take such nonsense at face value, a thinking person questions why someone who just received a six-figure paycheck for a speech in Asia and a multi-million dollar book advance would be looking for a job. Actually, the Palins' are now enjoying their new financial security, and Todd Palin was able to resign from his position with BP to spend more time with his family and supervise some home improvements being made on their property in Alaska.

Fay at Sarah's Web Brigade and Mel at C4P have the facts: Sarah Palin was on LinkedIn long before she decided to resign as Alaska's governor. She wasn't sending out resumes; she was accepting them. 

Another media lie being spread by People Magazine, many gossip columnists and nutroots lefty blog goons is that Sarah Palin allegedly refused an invitation from Oprah Winfrey to appear on her show during the campaign last year. The well-documented truth is that it was Oprah that refused to have Palin on her show, not the other way around, as the revisionists would have you believe. Associate Editor Noel Sheppard has the true story at NewsBusters.com.

Bottom line: The media whores are so desperately in love with Barack Obama that they will tell any lie, distort any fact and just make things up about Sarah Palin when it suits their purposes, which is just about 24/7. Be ye not deceived.

Update: Leftist moonbat Celtic Diva flat-out lies, as usual:

"You can see that as much as the Palinista websites are claiming Oprah begged Palin to be on, they are incorrect."

Moonbat Manure! Here are Oprah's own words from last year, when she whined about trying to get Palin to come on her show:

"I went and tried to talk to Sarah Palin and instead she talked to Greta [Van Susteren]. She talked to Matt [Lauer]. She talked to Larry [King]. But she didn't talk to me."

How can you tell when leftist moonbat bloggers are lying? It's whenever they are using their keyboards...

- JP

Sarah Palin Was Right #2: Robert Tracinski on Death Panels

Robert Tracinski, former senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute and now editor and publisher of The Intellectual Activist, in a Real Clear Politics op-ed:

Here's a tip: when Barack Obama says, "So let me set the
record straight," he is about to lie to you about his past.

One of Tacinski's points in the opinion piece strongly supports Sarah Palin's warning about death panels:

Obama attacks the "bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost. The best example is the claim, made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Such a charge would be laughable if it weren't so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple."

But what is Obama's most plausible recommendation for cutting Medicare spending? "[A]n independent commission of doctors and medical experts charged with identifying more waste in the years ahead." How will they identify waste? By deciding which procedures are "cost effective" and should be covered by Medicare-and which procedures are "wasteful" and should not be covered.

Britain's National Health Service already has such a commission, established on precisely the same rationale. They call it the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, known by the Orwellian acronym NICE. It is becoming notorious for rules that deny care to older patients because they don't have enough "quality adjusted life years" left to justify the cost of their treatment.

If you read the British newspapers-and if you're concerned about what greater government control of medicine might look like, you should -- then you might have caught the latest development: a letter by a group of distinguished British doctors complaining that the Liverpool Care Pathway, a NICE-endorsed system for determining the care given to severely ill patients, is causing doctors to abandon care for patients who still have a chance of recovery.

If that's not a "death panel," I don't know what is. Yet it is precisely the system Obama advocates to cut costs under his plan.

Tracinsky makes such a compelling case that there's nothing we could or should add. It speaks for itself. But be sure to read his entire article. "You lie!" indeed.

h/t: Roger Kimball

- JP

AP, Alaska's Wyle E. Coyote Bloggers Lying Again

The Associated Press' Rachel D'Oro has written another Anti-Palin (AP) hit piece disguised as a legitimate news story:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Early estimates put the cost of Sarah Palin's midterm resignation as Alaska governor at a minimum of $40,000, not including a special legislative session partly linked to her departure.

D'Oro's crock is chock full o' lies to give the chock full o' nuts bunch of Palin-hatin' Alaskan bloggers something new to pass around their little blogging circle.

As Texas for Sarah Palin contributor upinak points out at The Palination:

When was Sarah stepping down and Governor Parnell sworn in? At the Governor's picnic in Fairbanks. A Governors Picnic is held every year and costs about the same every year, as the State of Alaska provides food and has to pay for the cost of set up on the picnic and such.

But that's just another inconvenient fact which gets in the way of a good smear job.

Among Rachel D'Oro's Facebook friends are Amanda Coyne (of the anti-Palin Alaska Dispatch, and a freelancer whose Palin hit pieces have appeared in the UK's leftist The Guardian and the USA's leftist Huffington Post), Brendan Joel Kelley (Associate Editor of the Anchorage Press, an-anti-Palin fish wrapper) and Linda Kellen Biegel (Palin-hatin' blogger at Celtic Diva's Blue Oasis whose idea of good, clean fun is to photoshop pictures of an innocent Down Syndrome baby).

There's nothing like fair and honest reporting, and when Rachel D'Oro's byline is on an AP story about Sarah Palin, it will be nothing like fair and honest reporting.

- JP

Liberati can't handle the truth

Why is the political Left so often at odds with facts, especially when the discussion involves Gov. Sarah Palin? There is no better example than the liberati meme, "you can see Russia from my house," which they attribute to the former vice presidential candidate.

The quote actually belongs to actress Tina Fey, who used the line while impersonating Gov. Palin in a Saturday Night Live comedy sketch. What the governor actually said, "You can see Russia from Alaska," is a statement of fact. U.S. and Russian territory are in such close proximity in the Bering Strait that an Alaskan island and a Russian one are within sight of each other.

The failure to recognize this simple fact of world geography by the governor's critics, rather ironically indicates a lack of intellectual curiosity on the part of those leftists who love to criticize Gov. Palin for what they claim is intellectual incuriosity. That one could gather the actual facts in just seconds with a web search matters not to the liberati. They believe what they believe, the facts be damned, because they so very much want to believe it. I think this is what Ronald Reagan was getting at when he said that the trouble with liberals is not that they are ignorant, but that they believe so much that isn't so. Their need to believe what they choose to believe without bothering to look it up in an actual book or something compels them to believe it. What's scary is that Reagan's famous quote comes from 45 years ago, and nothing has changed in the intervening period of nearly a half century. Learning from mistakes of the past is not a liberal strong suit, especially when the mistakes are their own.

The latest example of PFDS (Palin Fact Denial Syndrome) by the Left comes from the environmentalist website Red Green and Blue in an op-ed by Alan Smith titled "Sarah Palin on Energy: What a Switch!" Reuters picked up Smith's piece from the site and reproduced it on their wires verbatim. It seems the Watermelon Wing (green outside, pink inside) of the liberati is no better acquainted with facts than any other leftist, which is curious because they talk about "science" so often. Smith's op-ed attempts to contrast Gov. Palin's energy plan with the "Drill, baby drill" rhetoric from the 2008 campaign. Actually, an "all of the above" approach to energy means drilling now is not incompatible with planning for the use of more renewables in the future. The "switch" Smith perceives is not a switch after all. Early on in his opinion piece, Smith says this:

"But what didn’t get as much press during ‘08 was Sarah Palin’s dubious claim that her stewardship of Alaska means she 'knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.'"

Had Smith bothered to check, he may have learned that Sarah Palin never made such a claim. It rolled instead off of the lips of Sen. John McCain, in an interview with television station WCSH in Portland, Maine. Perhaps that's one reason why it didn't get much press, Mr. Smith.

Despite getting this all wrong, Smith was quick to highlight a error made by Gov. Palin when she said that the U.S. gets 20% of its energy from Alaska. Never mind that the governor obviously meant to say that her state accounted for nearly 20% of U.S. domestic oil production, which it did at its peak, according to Alyeska, the company that operates the Trans Alaska Pipeline System. Today that percentage is down to about 17 percent, but the point is that Gov. Palin, using information that came from Alyeska, misspoke. If you can't cut her some slack on that, they you have to believe that the United States has at least 57, perhaps 58, states, as the Senator who is now president once said when he - like Gov. Palin when she said "energy" instead of "oil" - was in campaign mode.

Such slips of the tongue are common on the campaign trail, and they are understandable. Saying that there are 57 states or saying "energy" instead of "oil" is no big deal, but the media, if it chooses, can make it so. The media chose to give Barack Obama a break, not so much Sarah Palin. That's par for their course.

But wrongfully attributing a quote to someone is a big deal. It matters because writers, unlike tired politicians weary from the campaign trail, have the luxury of being able to verify their claims before they publish them. It requires no more effort than moving a mouse and pushing its buttons. The problem is that the writer has to want to get the facts straight. He or she has to care about the truth more than any political means or ends. And that's where the Left and its scribes fail. Their political agenda means everything, so they could care less if they are truthful. President Obama has ushered in A New Age of Alinsky where the means is justified by the desired ends. Wouldn't Trotsky be proud?

- JP

HuffPo Distortion Contortion

Susan Crile proves that Huffington Post wilfully distorts any fact that can be found about Sarah Palin. In a HuffPo post about the attempted hijacking of a State of Alaska web page (See Web Page Hijack FAIL), Crile says:

"Sarah Palin's lawyers -- already busy handling the dozen legal complaints that are pending against the Alaska governor -- are now doing legal battle with a website called Crackho.com."

The Crile/HuffPo parenthetical prevarication - that there were a dozen legal comlaints pending against Gov. Palin- is easily exposed as moose manure. The post is time-stamped 05/12/09 04:40 PM. At that point in time, only five of the bogus "ethics complaints" could have reasonably be said to still be pending, nine having been disposed of with no finding that any law had been broken by the governor or her aides. 

Two more of the nuisance complaints were dismissed yesterday, bringing the number of pending baseless complaints down to just three. I haven't bothered to check whether the last two were thrown out before Crile's post went up, given the time zone difference between Alaska and whatever cukoo clock HuffPo uses, but it doesn't really matter. A lie is a lie. Huffington Post and its posting prevaricators have been busted yet again.  

- JP