President Barack Obama samples a baked zucchini fry in the Old Family Dining Room of the White House after dropping by the Epicurious Kids’ State Dinner in the East Room, Aug. 20 (by Pete Souza)
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Tuesday:
9:15: President Obama departs the White House
10:40: Arrives in Columbus, Ohio
1:00: Delivers remarks at a campaign event at Capital University in Columbus
1:30: VP Biden delivers remarks at a campaign event at The Depot, Minneapolis
2:50: PBO departs Columbus
5:15: VP Biden delivers remarks at a campaign event at the Olmstead County Fairgrounds, Rochester, Minn.
6:55: PBO arrives in Reno, Nev.
8:00: Delivers remarks at a campaign event at Truckee Meadows Community College, Reno
9:40: Departs Reno en route Las Vegas
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Steve Benen: …. Ferguson’s new cover story marks an ignominious low for the once-great magazine, tarnishing the publication’s reputation in ways likely to do lasting, irreparable harm.
…. in the course of launching his lengthy, 3,300-word attack, Ferguson publishes a series of claims with no foundation in reality …. But there’s one problem in particular that helps capture why Ferguson’s piece represents political journalism at its most atrocious.
Ferguson argues that President Obama promised the Affordable Care Act wouldn’t add to the deficit. In reality, this is a promise Obama has kept …. In order to publish this lie, Ferguson counted up the costs, ignored the savings and receipts, and presented a bogus net total….
Making matters much, much worse, Ferguson decided to challenge Krugman’s facts with an angry response, pointing to a CBO report that he’s certain proves him right.
It doesn’t. As Dylan Byers explained, “In order to get himself out of that predicament, Ferguson decides to edit the CBO report to satisfy his own conclusions…. Ferguson cut the CBO excerpt off mid-sentence and changed the meaning entirely…. So, one more time: The Oxford-trained, Harvard-employed, Newsweek contributor Niall Ferguson just edited the CBO report to change its meaning.”
What Ferguson and Newsweek published isn’t journalism; it’s a joke.
Full post here
The Atlantic: ….. In the world as Ferguson describes it, Obama is a big-spending, weak-kneed liberal who can’t get the economy turned around. Think Jimmy Carter on steroids. But the world is not as Ferguson describes it. A fact-checked version of the world Ferguson describes reveals a completely different narrative — a muddy picture of the past four years, where Obama has sometimes cast himself as a stimulator, a deficit hawk, a health care liberal and conservative reformer all at once. And it’s a world where the economy is getting better, albeit slowly.
It would have been worthwhile for Ferguson to explain why Obama doesn’t deserve re-election in this real world we actually live in. Instead, we got an exercise in Ferguson’s specialty — counterfactual history.
More here
James Fallows: Yes, I know, you could imagine many sentences that would follow that headline. But here is what I have in mind right now: A tenured professor of history at my undergraduate alma mater has written a cover story for Daily Beast/Newsweek that is so careless and unconvincing that I wonder how he will presume to sit in judgment of the next set of student papers he has to grade.
More here
Brad DeLong: …. Fire his ass from Newsweek, and the Daily Beast. Convene a committee at Harvard to examine whether he has the moral character to teach at a university. There is a limit, somewhere. And Ferguson has gone beyond it.
Full post here
Noah Opinion: I have been known to tease a fellow blogger or two, but there is really only one writer who makes me truly mad, and that is British historian Niall Ferguson. I will explain exactly why he makes me so mad at the end of this post. First, though, I want to say a few words about Mr. Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek magazine, entitled “Hit the Road, Barack”. I should note that it imposes a heavy psychic cost for me to do so, since it requires that I actually read Niall Ferguson. But the public duty to expose BS and promote truth and intellectual honesty overrides such selfish concerns.…. The British Empire is over, Niall. It had its day. We can debate eternally how much good it did, but now it is done, and it is not coming back. Stop trying to screw up my Republic in your doomed effort to bring it back.
Full post here (with links to other takedowns of this right wing nutjob lying scumbag)
Charles P. Pierce: I’m late to the party in regards to Niall Ferguson’s egregious cover on the weekly grocery shopper once known as Newsweek magazine ….
…. Krugman — and Jim Fallows, and Andrew Sullivan, and The Atlantic in general — are not after Ferguson because they disagree on the advisability of re-electing the president. They are after him because what he wrote was… not… true.
Full post here
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You know the most striking thing about Ferguson’s piece? He had to lie to make a case against PBO.
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The Political Carnival
Thanks Desertflower
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Cagle
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Mediaite: Speaking to Fox News’ Carl Cameron Saturday morning, Republican VP nominee Paul Ryan made the case for why he believes his foreign policy credentials are stronger than President Obama’s, emphasizing that he has been a voting member of Congress longer than the president. Ryan cited his votes in favor of the Iraq War as evidence that he has had more foreign policy experience than Obama.
“I’ve been in Congress for a number of years,” he told Cameron. “That’s more experience than Barack Obama had when he came into office.”
“I voted to send people to war,” he added.
(Seriously, that’s not from The Onion)
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Cagle
White House.gov
