PolitiFact.com

Barack Obama has won Polifact’s lie of the year award.

Bernard Goldberg explains.

My daughter came home from tennis camp with a trophy when she was just five years old. ?She walked in the house and immediately dumped it in the garbage.? When asked why, she simply said, ?They gave one of these to everybody.?

About 12 seconds after he took the oath of office, Barack Obama got a trophy too.? It was the Nobel Peace Prize.? Even he knew he didn?t deserve it.? But he accepted it anyway even though, as my then five-year old daughter understood, it?s embarrassing to accept an award you don?t deserve.? But narcissists are rarely embarrassed.

I bring this up because President Obama has just won another major award.? But this time he deserves it.? For saying, ?If you like your health care?plan, you can keep it,? President Obama has been awarded the Lie of the Year award, handed out by PolitiFact, the organization that monitors the veracity of what public people say.

And unless you?ve either been in a coma or have been visiting your cousin Lenny on Neptune you know that he didn?t just say it once or twice or ten times.? We might, if we were feeling especially generous, simply forgive that as a few slips of the tongue. No, Mr. Obama said it over and over and over and over again in one form or another.? My personal favorite is when he added the ?Period? at the end of the lie.? Nice touch, Mr. President.? Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.net.nz

Politicians seem to lie with impunity. We have seen David Cunliffe and his carry on over his CV…and that is a just a small lie…Len Brown constantly lies about rates increases…Winston Peters lies to a Privileges Committee about his donations and to the media as well….Matthew Hooton about his National party connections

They just don’t just don’t seem to care…or do they?

New research seems to find that they do care if they think they will get caught.

A couple of political scientists, Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth and Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter, recently set out to test this despairing?view with a field experiment. Their findings suggest it’s not so hopeless after all: Politicians actually do seem to care whether they get caught lying, and they lie less when they know they’re being watched.

During last year’s election, Nyhan and Reifler picked nearly 1,200 state legislators in states with active affiliates of PolitiFact, the nonpartisan website based in Florida that seeks to evaluate politicians’ claims and rate their validity. To one-third of the lawmakers, chosen at random, Nyhan and Reifler sent a vaguely threatening letter. It alerted the lawmakers that PolitiFact was monitoring them and speculated about the potential consequences to their careers: ? Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.net.nz