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Someone on Twitter asked me last night if I’d heard about what was happening in Minnesota with the poor. I didn’t, so they sent me a link to Crooks & Liars that talked about a law proposed there that would make it illegal for poor people to carry more than $20 cash!

(Note : It’s a total lie, but play along with my fake outrage for now.)

Look!!! Here’s some headlines. Wow!!!

Minnesota GOP wants it to be illegal to carry cash if you’re poor

Minn. to Make it a Crime for Poor to Have More Than $20

Incredible!!!

And here’s what the first couple of paragraphs of the Crooks and Liars piece says…

First Susie Madrak writes…

They’re not just crazy, they’re evil — and un-Christian, should they have the audacity to claim otherwise. If only we could force them to live like this, they wouldn’t last a week:

And then quotes an article that says…

St. Paul, MN – Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all.

Wow!!! It would be a crime for people on public assistance to have more than $20 in cash in their pockets any given month! A crime!

And the article continues and there’s a ton of outraged comments, too – starting with Karoli, who I’ll talk about in a minute.

So that’s the claim. I sort of skimmed it and thought to myself “Sounds like a serious charge. “ Up until quite recently, I would have left it at that because Crooks and Liars was one of my go-to sites for information.

Now I think they might want to shorten their name to the more concise and appropriate Liars.

After a few minutes, I did some research. The name of the law in question is House File 171, so I did a Google search on that. I found the story was making quite a stir in the left wing blogosphere – you can see that from the headlines I quoted above.

You can do a Google Blog search yourself for House File 171 – here are screengrabs of what I found.

That’s a lot of left wing blogs from Marxist ones to ‘moderate left ones. One interesting thing is that they repeat the same story – like, literally cut and pasted. That’s what I would call ‘lockstep liberalism’ but it’s gone beyond that to mindless copycat liberalism.

Did anyone question the story at all or even read the law? Four pages, at the bottom – I found someone. A right winger who quotes the Bible and has a Hillary Clinton ‘Joker’ picture on his blog. The sort of fellow that liberals would call a right wing nutjob, if they were being kind.

Guess what? That’s the guy who had the story right. Hundreds of liberals get crazy about this story, with smugly violent comments about how stupid and evil the Republicans are…and a lone right winger absolutely nails the story. I present to you, The Catawissa Gazetteer., Tom Usher.

He quotes the law itself, including this relevant portion…

During the initial 30 calendar days of eligibility, a recipient may have cash benefits issued on an EBT card without the recipient’s name printed on the card. This card may be the same card on which food support is issued and does not need to meet the requirements of this section.(c) Notwithstanding paragraph (a), EBT cardholders may opt to have up to $20 per month accessible via automatic teller machine or receive up to $20 cash back from vendor.

Then he gives his opinion. Tom’s reading of the law is the same as mine…

…does it appear to you in any way that the Republicans are trying to limit the amount of cash anyone is allowed to carry? No. They are merely limiting the amount of cash that can be withdrawn from the state issued debit card.

Yep. That’s exactly what the law says. It doesn’t say (as Crooks and Liars reported) that it’s “a crime for people on public assistance to have more than $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. “

Tom closes with a statement I couldn’t have said better myself…

The internet is a wonderful way to stay on top of the issues of the day but all people, regardless of political persuasion, need to check their facts before running with a story. It’s way to easy to become party to the spreading of lies meant to harm one group or another.

The C&L story and all the left wing blog posts had it totally wrong. They had either not done basic research or they just didn’t care. Oh, man. Depressing.

A quick note about the law – I don’t know if this is a good law. Do some cash restrictions make sense? I think so but $20 seems a bit low given laundry or bus fare or whatever. There’s room for reasoned debate – except that’s not what the left wing blogs I read are doing. It’s all insults and lies and hype. So, while I am unsure about the law, I am 100% sure about the lie.

So I tweeted this info and got into a nice conversation or two about it. I wondered if Crooks & Liars would post a retraction or (more importantly) if their fans would ask for one, since the story was 1) blatantly misleading and 2) widely repeated. Nope.

In fact, the opposite. Karoli wrote a fast blog post about this called (ironically?) Because reading comprehension seems to be at a premium. I’ve know Karoli for a few years on  Twitter. She’s nice if you agree with her.

Let’s break down how someone who is pretty widely respected in the left wing blogosphere will just blatantly fabricate something. I mean, lie in an easily provable fashion that should be embarrassing to an adult.

Karoli’s post is a lesson in total denial and misdirection. She’s clearly counting on her readers not to check her work, link a link or call her on her bullshit. Here’s the opening to her piece…

See this title?  War On The Poor: Minnesota Republicans Want To Bust Poor People Who Carry Cash | Crooks and Liars

That title was written by Susie Madrak in a post at C&L yesterday. And here’s what Susie said:

They’re not just crazy, they’re evil — and un-Christian, should they have the audacity to claim otherwise. If only we could force them to live like this, they wouldn’t last a week:

Here’s the piece of the article Susie quoted:

“House File 171 would make it so that families on MFIP – and disabled single adults on General Assistance and Minnesota Supplemental Aid – could not have their cash grants in cash or put into a checking account. Rather, they could only use a state-issued debit card at special terminals in certain businesses that are set up to accept the card.”

Hey, wait! Karoli said ‘Here’s the piece of the article that Susie quoted”’….but she left out something. Something kind of important…

Here’s a screen grab I did of Susie’s article on C&L,  just in case anything suddenly changes. Look at the paragraph I highlight in the screen grab and its position, right at the top of the story.

So, when Karoli says ‘Here’s the piece” – she’s leaving out that piece. That’s the part that says…

Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month.

And as I pointed out, it’s just simply not true. It’s a lie that was repeated and now Karoli triples down on it by intentionally leaving it out of her article. It’s nowhere to be found. Huh!

Karoli then says…

Nowhere in that paragraph quoted or Susie’s opener does she say anything about being arrested. She does talk about being busted, and rightly so. However, some have interpreted her post and use of the word “busted” in particular as “arrested”. (Emphasis added.)

Karoli is correct – because she didn’t quote the paragraph that’s at issue and then she creates a totally made up semantic debate about the word ‘busted’ — an irrelevant point to try and misdirect what the debate is about. And even THAT is load of BS, because – yes, some interpret the word ‘bust’ as ‘arrested’ when the second ‘paragraph’ in your ‘article’ talks about it being a ‘crime’ for people to have more than ‘$20’ in their ‘pockets’ any given ‘month’.

My eyesight is horrible but I can read through that that just fine, thanks.

This misdirection is common tactic I’m seeing lately and I’ll have lots more to say about it in a future post.

Update: Corrections

Blogger BJ Keefe issues a correction.

Three questions for you.

1. Do you think of Republicans and the Tea Party as dangerous, violent extremists?
2. Do you think the Wisconsin protests over GOP Governor Scott Walker’s move to strip public sector employees of collective bargaining were peaceful?
3. Do you scoff at the right wing notion that mainstream media like the New York Times, the TV networks and NPR have a liberal media bias against the conservatives?

If you answered ‘yes’ to all three of those questions, then let me ask you one more…

Why isn’t the mainstream media talking about the death threats against Republican politicians in Wisconsin?

Try to set aside whatever biases or preconceptions you might have for a moment and ask yourself why death threats against politicians aren’t considered national news, especially in the wake of the all too fresh shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and other bystanders. And there hasn’t just been one death threat, but a number of them.

Here’s an example and it’s real. According to WisPolitics.com, authorities have found a suspect to admitted to sending the following email…

I want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and your republican dictators have to die. This is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records. We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, this isn’t enough. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the message. So we have built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent. This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you. If you and your goonies feel that it’s necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families and themselves then We will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) the 8 of you. Please understand that this does not include the heroic Senator that risked everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. The 8 includes the 7 senators and the dictator. We feel that it’s worth our lives becasue we would be saving the lives of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. Goodbye ASSHOLE!!!!

It’s impossible to just dismiss this threat as the work of a crazy person, especially since the person who shot Rep. Giffords seems pretty crazy. Crazy people sometimes do crazy things like shooting people. Nope, that threat is detailed and frightening – and unfortunately, motivated by exactly the kind of rhetoric that’s been used by many liberals against GOP officials over and over again during the Madison protests. And there are more, in varying degrees of scary..

If you read liberal blogs, you might have heard of some of these threats. Indirectly, anyway. Sarah Palin said the rhetoric should be toned down. The threats themselves were ignored and Palin was mocked.

On the other hand, if you read conservative blogs or listen to conservative media, you know all about these threats because people like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and websites like Newsbusters and BigJournalism have not only been talking about the death threats for days now but they’ve been talking about the mainstream and liberal media ignoring the threats for days.

Ignoring the story of these threats is deeply, fundamentally wrong. It’s bad, biased journalism that will lead to no possible good outcome and progressives should be leading the charge against it.

Just before writing this article, I did a Google search and it’s stunning to find out that the right wing media really isn’t exaggerating – proven death threats against politicians are being ignored by the supposedly honest media. If you’ve never agreed with a single thing that Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly et al have said about anything, you can’t in any good conscience say that they don’t have a point here. Death threats are wrong and if a story like Wisconsin is national news for days, then so are death threats.

I’m in an odd position. In the last few months, I’ve had one foot in the left wing news stream and one foot in the right. My media duality began when conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart hired me to work with him on the Pigford ‘black farmers’ settlement story. I’m a pro-choice, pro-single payer, anti-war, pro-gay rights independent liberal with years of work in print and film backing those positions. Breitbart hired me to bring a different perspective to the non-partisan issue of corruption in Pigford.

Since then, I’ve written both here for the left-leaning Huffington Post and at Breitbart’s right leaning BigGovernment.com. I’ve ended up reading a lot more conservative sites and dealing firsthand with a lot more conservatives than any time since I attended a high school dedicated to the principles of Ayn Rand about 30 years ago.

Unlike many on the left, I didn’t view the Wisconsin battle as the end of days. I wasn’t convinced that I had a dog in that hunt, in part because I think there’s a strong case to be made those public employees shouldn’t have the same collective bargaining rights as private sector workers – a case made well by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said…

“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress.”

Roosevelt’s statement makes sense to me; it does seem that public employees are different than private. I’m not at all anti-union. (I’ve publically supported unionizing the visual effects industry, for example.) I’m open to a good rational argument against the case FDR made but in discussions on Twitter and elsewhere, all I got in response from people on the left was anger and insults. I saw little light and felt much heat.

That tone of extreme hostility I experienced brings me back to the death threats in Wisconsin. Frankly, the bile and invective in that threat reminded me of the tone I saw directed at me from many so-called liberals because I committed the heresy of taking a different position from them on the issue of collective bargaining for public sector employees….based on something FDR said.

Is this really what liberalism has come to in 2011?

Since working with Breitbart, my position on political issues hasn’t changed but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m deeply disappointed by the virulent, lockstep attitude I see on the left. My experience in the last few months tells me what I would not have believed possible; on any number of issues (including Pigford, by the way) I’ve seen liberals act much nastier and with less factual honesty than the conservatives…and this includes on issues where I disagree with conservatives.

Burying the death threat story is a clear example of intellectual dishonesty and journalistic bias..

Don’t take my word for it, though. Look into the story of death threats in Wisconsin yourself and see who has been covering the story and who hasn’t. Try for a moment to see this story from the perspective of those who you may disagree with on policy and ask yourself how this looks to them. Can you blame them for feeling that way? Then take a few seconds and read those questions I asked you at the beginning of this article.

And then ask why progressives shouldn’t expect more from our media — and ourselves — than we expect from our political adversaries.

In testimony before a congressional committee in 2008, John BOyd introduced himself and said “I am Dr. john Boyd. I am President and founder of the National Black Farmers Association, which has more than 94,000 members in 46 states.”

In addition to my strong back in agriculture, I also founded the John Boyd Agricultural and Technology Institute to help educate farmers of all educational levels in order to fight illiteracy. to teach familiarity with and use of the internet, and much more. The program has assisted several thousand farmers and has been expanded to Denmark Technical College.

Boud’s National Black Farmers Association website has a page about John Boyd Argicultural and Technology Institute as well — complete with a photo showing a road sign pointing to the Institute.

In a ’10 Questions’ article in  2009, John Boyd says “Being a visiting professor and forming the John Boyd agriculture and technology institute”

As I was driving through Virginia yesterday, I devided to take a drive my the Boyd Institute and hoped to walk the hallowed halls that has taught thousands of farmers.  Boyd talked about the Boyd Institute so much that I was keen to visit this august institute.

But there’s no there there. Literally.

I went to the campus of St. Paul’s College, a small Christian college in southern Virginia.  There’s no Boyd Institute. The secuirty guard I spoke with had never heard of it but suggested I talk to someone in the administration building. I found a woman who know about it — she told me that Boyd had never taught classes there and that the ‘Institute’ was an office that Boyd kept for a few years that he would sometimes make phone calls from. She said she’d never seen thousands of farmers training there. Or any.

But what about the expanded program at Denmark Technical College in South Carolina that Boyd has told congress about in 2008? I phoned Denmark Tech and was told to visit Boyd’s website.  I asked if there was a john Boyd Institute on campus and was told that they just referred people to the website. I was told Boyd had never taught classes there.

I have no reason to believe that St. Paul’s or Denmark aren’t solid, small schools that do a good job for their students and I don’t want the fact that John Boyd founded pretend John Boyd Institutes at those schools  to cast any aspersions on them. Why did these two colleges ‘host’ the John Boyd Institute? There seems to be a link — a man named John Waddell.

Waddell has the president of St. Pails in 2001, when Boyd claims to have founded the Institute there. Waddell was president of Denmark at the time Boyd claimed to Congress that he had just expanded there. And although I currently have no clear link to Boyd related to the following charges, John Waddell was fired from his position at Denmark after an audit revealed irregularities, inclduing…

…a student recruitment program unlawfully paid for with about $52,000 in federal funds; financial aid given to ineligible students who did not have high school diplomas or GEDs; about $31,000 in fees incurred due to late filing of payroll taxes; and lack of compliance with state codes in the hiring of an Atlanta accounting firm.

I have calls out to both Mr. Boyd and Mr. Waddell for comment about their relationship and for clarification about the real facts about the john Boyd Institute.

John Boyd is the president of the National Black Farmer’s Association and has been the main media face of the Pigford settlement for over a decade. He’s been featured on numerous TV shows and in print. He’a been lauded by members of the Congressional Black Caucus and often appears beside them in public appearences. He’s been recognized by President Obama and was present at the private signing ceremony when the Pigford II settlement was signed.

Here’s a question that should be simple to answer — does he actually have a doctorate that allows him to refer to himself in professional situations ad Dr. John Boyd?

Hours of research show many contradictions in the way Boyd refers to himself but so far, I’ve found no evidence whatsoever that Boyd ever received any degree, either earned or honorary, much less any doctorate.

In testimony before the House of Representatives in 2008, he refers to himself as Dr. John Boyd .

But Boyd’s bio from Gale Contemporary Black Biography says the hollowing.

Education: Attended Southside Community College, 1983, and Clemson Univ., 1984-85.

Boyd’s Wikipedia entry makes no mention at all of any kind of doctorate nor does his biography on The Huffington Post.

Boyd’s own personal page refers to him as Dr. but there’s no mention of a doctorate of any kind on his biography page on the same site, despite a long list of his accomplishments. One of those listed accomplishments is thsat he was”vetted by President Obama’s transition team as a candidate for Secretary of Agriculture“.

When Anderson Cooper 360 brought in John Boyd to call Steve King a racist for questioning the numbers in Pigford, Cooper referred to him as Dr. three times. CNN describes the segment as…

“Rep. Steve King and Dr. John Boyd face off over proposed settlements for black farmers and whether fraud is a problem.”

This video report says that Boyd has a PhD in Agricultural Economics.

Maybe one degree that I can’t find any record of isn’t enough — let’s make it two! The Washington Post, in an article on Boyd, says he “didn’t attend college but has received two honorary degrees “

The announcement for Boyd’s recent press conference refers to him as Dr. John Boyd and he referred to that way at the press conference.

Yes, I haven’t seen a single article, press release or other information that shows where, when or why John Boyd began calling himself Dr. John Boyd.

I have left several messages for Boyd, sent him an email and received no response.

I spoke to Georgia farmer Lucious Abrams, who has known Boyd for over fifteen years.  Iasked why Boyd refers to himself as Dr. — Mr. Abrams’s told me “Well, that’s the million dollar question.” Abrams said he has no idea why Boyd began calling himself Doctor.

(Thanks to Laura and Mandy for their research on this.)