Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax's Ronald Kessler appears to have little problem with letting false or misleading claims he quotes in his columns regarding Barack Obama stand uncorrected.
He does so again in his Feb. 9 column, in which he quotes Ken Klukowski, " a legal expert who consults for major conservative interest groups," as saying of Obama: "Remember, Barack Obama has spoken out in terms of redistributive justice and considered it a shame that the Warren Court, which is the most liberal court in American history, did not engage in wealth redistribution."
That is false -- Obama never said that. As we've repeatedly noted, the context of Obama's words clearly demonstrate that he said the civil rights movement relied too much on the court system to advance its agenda instead of promoting change from the bottom up, i.e., legislatively, and that the Warren Court did not address it was a sign that it was not as radical as right-wingers have claimed it to be.
In a Feb. 10 column, Kessler uncritically passes along a claim by Republican Rep. Paul Ryan that "spending stimuluses were tried in Japan in the 1990s and in America in the 1930s, but they never have worked." In fact, as Media Matters has pointed out, New Deal and Japanese stimulus packages were shown to fail only when their implementation was abandoned in an attempt to reduce deficits.
Kessler also repeats Ryan's claim that "7 percent of the money gets spent this year and 31 percent next year. The majority of the money doesn’t even get spent for two or three years." In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, 64 percent of the stimulus is scheduled to be spent by the end of fiscal year 2010.
