Stosselectomy

GT12 Spent A wonderful Sunday afternoon and evening in Beautiful St. Charles IL, feasting with some of our favorite folks in the whole world. And of course talking and talking and talking Politics. One of our friends, a self described lifelong Republican who was in attendance When Pat Buchanan gave that legendary 'Culture War' Speech at the '92 Rep convention (she was aghast) as us about John Stossell's recent exploration of our Education System. We had missed it. Sad that we at GT12 are not more interested in Education since we spend so much of our time being appalled at stupidity.

Anyway, Mr. S has always struck me as a Geraldo-like fame seeker, but with a little more taste and a much greater need to be seen as a rebel. A rebel against the 'Liberal Media' which of course doesn't really exist. A bit of an empty hat. None-the-less, I haven't watched him or listened to him much.

But David Sirota has and has some observations at the Huff Post:

John Stossel Is A Pathological Liar
... Stossel, in many ways, is exactly why I wrote my new book Hostile Takeover - to strip bare the opportunists, shills and half-wits who dominate our political debate and show them for what they really are: pathological liars.

Here's what I mean. According to the right-wing, Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Stossel appeared on ABC's "The View" to talk about his book's assertion that the minimum wage supposedly hurts low-income workers. The host was surprised that someone could make such a ludicrous claim. "Why does raising the minimum wage -- this one I don't get -- actually hurt poor people?," she asked Stossel. "I don't understand that one at all."

Stossel replied with a straight face: "The truth is that people on the margins lose jobs when minimum wages go up. We used to have people washing windshields at gas stations. We don't anymore because of the minimum wage. There's no opportunity for kids, for entry-level workers."

Mind you, Stossel is making this claim at the very same time President Bush is claiming we need a guest worker program because there are actually too many entry-level, low-wage jobs that aren't being filled. But beyond that, the actual data exposes Stossel's pathological lying. As I note in my new book's section on this very lie about minimum wages supposedly hurting the job market:

"In a comprehensive 2004 study, the nonpartisan Fiscal Policy Institute reported that since 1997, states that had boosted their minimum wage above the federal minimum actually created jobs faster than those that did not. In higher minimum wage states, employment grew by 50 percent more than it did in states still at the pathetic federal level. Even in tough economic times, the minimum wage doesn't hurt jobs: Princeton University economist David Card found that even the minimum wage increases during the 1990-91 recession 'were not associated with any measurable employment losses.'

As Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (PA) once noted, "history clearly demonstrates that raising the minimum wage has no adverse impact on jobs."...In Oregon, for instance, the state raised its minimum wage in 1998, and the average earnings of newly-employed welfare recipients climbed by 9 percent, while the percentage of welfare recipients who found a job actually rose."

Stossel's latest pathological lie followed one from a few weeks ago when he used ABC's Good Morning America to claim that it is a "myth" that "women earn less" than men for "doing the same work." Yet, as Media Matters noted, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) 2004 wage data shows definitively that women earned on average 80.4 percent of men's weekly median earnings in virtually every occupation listed regardless of job title. Again, Stossel used ABC's airwaves to peddle a pathological lie.

This all may seem surprising. After all, how could one of the major networks employ a person with such disdain for the truth and then call him a "journalist?" It's a good question - but Stossel has made a nice career behaving this way. For instance, Stossel has tried to deny the scientific consensus surrounding global warming, despite 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming published between 1993 and 2003 all concluding that global warming is real, and human-caused.

It was Stossel who penned a column during the Hurricane Katrina energy crisis entitled "In Praise of Price Gouging." Instead of being a "consumer watchdog" as he is regularly billed, Stossel was using his platform to publicize all sorts of reasons why oil industry profiteering at the time was patriotic and heroic.

Read the rest here and then call your school board (and your local ABC Station) and ask about accountability