U.S. Senate passes the nefarious CISA bill by a 74-21 margin. Yay bipartisanship! Democrats and Republicans coming together to screw their constituents! The good news? We managed to get it put off this long, and the Senate and the House still have to conference out a bill that can avoid the President's veto pen. One hopes they just say fuggedaboutit since there's an election on, but we're better off counting on our action than on their laziness.
Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches a factoid from a satire website making its way not just onto Sean Hannity's TV program, but Donald Trump's stump speeches and mainstream TV news. Real News Right Now is yet another "satire" site that just isn't good enough at satire to avoid this kind of confusion and you have to wonder if that's the point. Will Sean Hannity ever offer a correction to his viewers? Will his viewers ever wonder why Mr. Hannity might have been a little less-than-stringent about his fact-checking in that particular instance? I kid, of course.
The EPA will propose a rule that would compel plants processing natural gas to report their release of toxic chemicals. Gas drilling corporations get to keep the chemicals they use a secret from the public, thanks to that energy bill from 2005, but I presume that the plants processing the gas don't enjoy the same protection from the law. At best, it's a lateral move against gas drilling pollution; it may work, but I prefer to hit these things head-on.
Hey, were you just wondering how Gravity Payments, the corporation whose CEO decided to raise his employees' minimum wage to $70,000 annually over the next few years, was doing? Well, their revenues and profits have doubled since the announcement, while customer retention also went up and new customer inquiries went sky-high. Don't shed a tear for the two employees who quit, though, since (as you may recall) in July the New York Times was perfectly happy to air their grievances like they were the only grievances that mattered.
Finally, Ben Carson instructs us that not only wouldn't he sign a budget that raises the debt ceiling as President (though his wording leaves open the possibility that he'd sign a debt ceiling hike in separate legislation), but also that "I think the time to address that is at the beginning of the fiscal period, not at the end, because then you have other options." That's yet another statement that, back in the day, would have finished a Presidential campaign -- tell us, again, Dr. Carson, how it's more prudent to get things done early! -- but it also ignores the fact that Republicans wanted a government shutdown crisis and a debt ceiling crisis intertwined, because they thought it would make President Obama fold.
UPDATE. Mr. Hannity claims he got the "250,000 new refugees" figure cited above not from the Real News Right Now site, but from a September AP report quoting Secretary of State Kerry. I'll happily concede it's possible he got the number there, and maybe even that he or someone on his staff did the addition, but of course his defense opens him to new charges. For one, he did not previously say the 250,000 refugees represented three calendar years' worth of refugees, nor did he mention that the average number of refugees accepted by the United States annually since 1980 is about 83,000, which (surprise!) is almost 250,000 when multiplied by three years -- and both of these are, sadly, standard stratagems for folks both left and right who employ scare numbers. He is also incorrect to suggest that he had always said the refugees weren't just coming from Syria and Iraq; on both October 19 and 20, he offered the figure in the context of discussing Syrian and Iraqi refugees. One cannot read these statements differently without willfully misinterpreting them. So, as long as Sean Hannity commits larger crimes with numbers and context, he can take his little addition lesson and cram it.
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