Welcome to your Friday open thread. Have you all recovered from your post-Canada Day hangover? I’m on vacation today (w00t 4-day weekend!) so maybe I’ll be here and maybe I won’t.
Having already declared health care reform a failure just three months after it passed, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) wants to alert the public that today is the day the Affordable Care Act begins to destroy America, one tanning salon at a time. Boehner blasted out a press release and tweet warning about a 10 percent tax on indoor tanning beds, which goes into affect today, to help fund the Affordable Care Act. Citing a Wall Street Journal article, Boehner wrote, the tax is “causing all kinds of problems for business owners who provide tanning services.” Indeed, the Journal notes the horror one owner of a video store that also offers tanning beds will have to deal with:
Today, she wants to offer one free tan for every three rentals. Should that freebie be taxed? Ms. Chamberlain doesn’t know.
Meanwhile, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee cried, “no amount of sunscreen or Aloe will relieve the pain of the Democrats’ impending 10 percent tax on indoor tanning beds.” The Heritage Foundation blasted the tax as well, while Fox News dutifully whined on behalf of the tanning industry. The network reported live from a tanning salon, declaring the tax to be “unfair,” “confusing,” and even “discriminatory”
I would like John Boehner to know that the Sun is still free.
When is torture not torture? When the American government does it.
As Glenn Greenwald explained in his piece on the study’s findings, the research examined “how waterboarding has been discussed by America’s four largest newspapers over the past 100 years, and finds that the technique, almost invariably, was unequivocally referred to as ‘torture’ — until the U.S. Government began openly using it and insisting that it was not torture, at which time these newspapers obediently ceased describing it that way.”
The results were strikingly one sided. In the New York Times, when other countries waterboarded, it was labeled accurately as “torture” 85.8% of the time. And then there was a shift in the Bush/Cheney era — the NYT called “waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles” between 2002 and 2008. That’s 1.4%.
The NYT said they didn’t want to take sides in a “political dispute” but ended up taking sides.
The paper’s explanation is wholly unsatisfying. Let me see if I understand the pitch here:
1. The NYT defines waterboarding as torture, which is consistent with the law and the technique’s history.
2. The Bush/Cheney administration decides it wants a new definition of “torture.”
3. The NYT can’t “take sides” in a “political dispute,” so, in news stories, it stops defining waterboarding as torture, even if the editors/publishers know better.
Does the NYT understand that by accepting the Bush/Cheney language, they actually came down on the Bush/Cheney side of the dispute? This incident just shows you how effective the rightwing noise machine really is. They just whine and moan about something and suddenly actual facts become disputes, which requires “he said/she said” coverage from the media. It’s quite depressing, actually.