September 13, 2005 -- Open Thread

If it weren't for Media Matters the news from winger talking heads would go completely unchecked. I'm signed up for their daily emails that send revisions on at least two serious media mis-statements per day. That means hundreds of thousands of Americans don't hear the corrections (that would be the facts). So maybe I'll just be including those updates into Open Threads...you never know when all the facts just might make it into American minds (for a change).

• CNN contributor Watkins falsely claimed poverty reduction under Bush rather than Clinton:: CNN contributor, talk radio host, and Bush-Cheney '04 campaign adviser Rev. Joe Watkins falsely claimed that the United States has experienced a "reduction" in poverty under President Bush. Misleadingly citing poverty statistics on the September 12 edition of CNN's Paula Zahn Now, Watkins stated that "under Bill Clinton, 15.1 percent of the population was poor; under President Bush, 12.7 percent of the population is poor. That's a reduction, that's a good thing." But the poverty rate declined every year Clinton was in office, from 15.1 percent when he took office in 1993 to a low of 11.3 percent in 2000; it has risen every year that Bush has been in office, from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.7 percent in 2004.

• Limbaugh falsely claimed "there never was a surplus" under Clinton: Describing the claim that "the Bush administration squandered this giant surplus left by the Clinton administration" as a "Democrat [sic] mantra talking point," nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh falsely asserted that "there never was a surplus" under President Clinton. In fact, from 1998 to 2001, the federal government ran total annual budget surpluses of between $69.2 billion and $236.2 billion, according to figures from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).