Joshua Keating at Slate writes—
The U.S. Government’s Anti-ISIS Twitter Account Is Full of Tabloid Garbage:
Compared to the immigrant-bashing and celebrity skin that makes up most of the Daily Express’s web content, last month’s story headlined “Up to 60 girls per MONTH committing suicide following vile Islamic State abuse,” isn’t that egregious. But as Vice’s Samuel Oakford points out, it’s pretty thinly sourced, relying solely on a pseudonymous aid worker in Canada, and there’s been no follow-up reporting on the story since it was published in April.
So it’s a little strange to see the story linked to from an official State Department Twitter account. It’s not the first time the English-language account, “Think Again, Turn Away,” part of the U.S. government’s effort to combat ISIS’s online propaganda, has featured Express coverage. It also linked approvingly to this questionable story from April about ISIS locking up weak-willed British jihadists to keep them from returning home. And today, the account linked to a year-old story about ISIS ordering the genital mutilation of 2 million girls, which was pretty thoroughly debunked when it first made the rounds last summer.
Given how many well-documented instances of ISIS’s barbarity there are, it doesn’t seem necessary to promote dubious rumors. The government doesn’t enhance its credibility (which is presumably already pretty minimal with the audience its trying to reach) by endorsing easily debunkable information. It’s also discouraging to see the U.S. government endorse such shoddy work given the difficulty and risks faced by journalists trying to document what’s really happening in Syria. [...]
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—House Republicans vote to gut health care programs, boost Pentagon:
On Thursday, in a razor-thin 218-199 vote of approval, the House passed another extreme bill that is destined to die: its Sequestration Replacement Act. The budget bill overriddes steep cuts to defense spending that were set to begin in January 2013, taking the money out of food stamps, Medicaid, Meals on Wheels and a raft of programs that help the poor and elderly. The Act replaces $109 billion in defense cuts that were triggered last fall under the Budget Control Act, when the super committee failed to agree on a $1.2 trillion deficit reduction plan.
Included in the $113 billion in cuts are Medicaid programs, allowing states to drop people who would currently be eligible, including a lot children. Two of the programs that are targeted have increased insurance rates for children to unprecedented levels, but the Republicans voted to repeal money in the Affordable Care Act that has maintained Medicaid and CHIP funding, and a new program that has rewards states for connecting eligible children to coverage. While the bill overrides the automatic cuts to the Pentagon included in the Budget Control Act, it keeps the Medicare cuts that were written into the bill. Oh, and of course it zeroes out the Prevention and Public Health fund in the health care law, the Republican's solution to paying for everything from payroll tax cuts to student loan interest rate cuts.
All this when, as Meteor Blades detailed, polling shows that the American public wants to see defense spending cut, by really big margins.
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today's Kagro in the Morning show, Allen West exposes the Sharia takeover of Walmart! Fox host wonders where all the defenders of white men are. (Hint: you can't see them because they're all wearing camo.) Some further consideration of the big bin Laden bombshell. George Zimmerman just has the worst luck around guns! Why does this keep happening to him? In better gun news: OR expands background checks. Then, we consider the obituary of former Speaker of the House Jim Wright, recount his political history, and wonder at what might have been had he not won the Majority Leadership by one vote in 1976 over liberal titan (and Pelosi mentor) Phil Burton.
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