Progressive Book Club is proud to announce the launch of a new partnership with Media Matters for America: Right Wing Book Watch.  Each month, Right Wing Book Watch will feature a thorough fact check of a prominent conservative book,  and rebuttals by leading progressive thinkers, authors, and experts.

The first book in our sites is Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue.

Get the real facts about Palin’s revisionist history of her personal and political life at Right Wing Book Watch.  More details on the official launch below:

Right-Wing Book Watch: Palin Goes Rogue with the Facts

Progressive Book Club and Media Matters Launch New Project to Separate Fact from Fiction

Log onto RightWingBookWatch.com for more information.

Today Progressive Book Club and Media Matters for America announces the launch of Right-Wing Book Watch RightWingBookWatch.com – a new joint project that will monitor the release of conservative books and provide detailed fact checks, research and thematic rebuttals from progressive experts.

First in the project’s sights is former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s memoir Going Rogue: An American Life, which hits bookshelves across the country today.

Despite enormous advances in technology, books continue to serve as the primary means to legitimize political and policy ideas. Under the guise of “non-fiction,” conservatives use books to force misinformation into the media and the public discourse.

These books can be devastating to good policy and decent political discourse – as illustrated by such notorious examples as The Bell Curve, which misused data to resuscitate racialist ideas about intelligence, and Unfit for Command, the “Swift Boat” fraud that smeared Senator John Kerry.

All too often these kinds of works, riddled with fictitious claims supported by sloppy research, go unchecked. Or their falsehoods are broadcast without contradiction until it is too late. The same could have been true of Palin’s new memoir – until now.

Since obtaining a copy of Going Rogue days in advance of its public release, Right-Wing Book Watch has posted and disseminated more than a dozen Fact Checks, all of which can be found here, with still more to come including a review of the memoir by Max Blumenthal, an award-winning journalist and author of the recently released book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party.

http://rightwingbookwatch.com/

Palin is just one of the many conservative authors Right-Wing Book Watch will be keeping an eye on in the weeks and months to come. Like so many other conservative authors, Palin has consistently shown a willful disregard for simple facts – even when it comes to her own life story.

Conservative books are the life’s blood of the right-wing media attack machine. For decades the right has used works of supposed ‘non-fiction’ to advance misinformation and outright lies on every issue imaginable” said David Brock, founder and CEO of Media Matters. “This new partnership will bring the progressive movement’s ability to hold conservative authors and the publishing world accountable to a whole new level.”

The right-wing has used books, talk radio, cable television and the internet to disseminate and legitimize their ideas with no regard for the truth or damage to our country,” said Governor Howard Dean, chairman of The Progressive Book Club. “For too long their misuse of information has gone unchecked and unchallenged.  Progressives now have a powerful tool to use in taking the right head on as we work to repair the damage of conservative rule and move America forward.

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The revered religious scholar Harvey Cox, in his new book The Future of Faith, argues that a transformation is taking place in the nature of religiousness–a shift away from an understanding that emphasizes belief and toward one defined by faith. Cox acknowledges that for many people “faith” and “belief” are the same thing. “But they are not the same thing,” he writes, “and in order to grasp the magnitude of the religious upheaval now under way, it is important to clarify the difference.

Accordingly, Cox writes:

Faith is about deep-seated confidence. In everyday speech we usually apply it to people we trust or the values we treasure. It is what the theologian Paul Tillich called “ultimate concern,” a matter of what the Hebrews spoke of as the “heart.”

Belief, on the other hand, is more like opinion. We often use the term in everyday speech to express a degree of uncertainty…. Beliefs can be held lightly or with emotional intensity. We can believe something to be true without it making much difference to us, but we place our faith only in something that is vital to the way we live.

To illustrate this distinction, Cox cites a short story by the Spanish writer Miguel Unamuno (1864-1963). A young man returns to the city to his native village where his mother lays dying. The mother clutches his hand, in the presence of the local priest, and asks him to pray for her. The son does not answer. As he leaves the room he tells the priest that he’d like to pray for his mother but can’t because he doesn’t believe in God. The priest’s response: “That’s nonsense. You don’t have to believe in God to pray.”

Cox: “The priest…recognized the distinction between faith and belief. He knew that prayer, like faith, is more primordial than belief.” Later he writes that quarrels about beliefs “can never be finally settled. But faith [...] is more closely related to awe, love, and wonder.”

In 1999, just a year after Google was founded, twelve of the company’s earliest employees locked themselves in a break room and spent eight hours coming up with a three-word company motto: “Don’t be evil.”

For Google’s founders, this wasn’t just a cute slogan. It was to serve as a reminder for a quickly growing company with idealistic roots that no matter how high its ambitions or how great its success, it was to be a force for good.

A decade later, Google has exploded from a well-designed search engine into a media-technology hegemon, with leading products in advertising, e-mail, online video, cloud-computing, news dissemination and even publishing. The company’s triumphant rise is traced by Ken Auletta in Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.

Not surprisingly, Google’s growth has invited a more skeptical look at its intentions, particularly regarding the incredible amount of data it collects from its users. Every time a person performs a Google search, sends something through Gmail or looks up directions on Google Maps, the activity is recorded and used to guide future search results and advertising directed toward that user. It is the technology behind Google’s AdSense, which now accounts for half of its revenue. Read More

Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker columnist and the author of ¡OBÁMANOS!, talks to PBC about Barack Obama’s memoirs, “Dreams From My Father”. Hertzberg argues that the qualities that Obama (the author) displayed then were the initial signs of “a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe.”

For many Americans of a certain sensibility, there was no more frightening prospect in 2008 than that of Sarah Palin coming within a heartbeat of the presidency.

As much as Barack Obama promised to change the status quo, Palin – who has thrust herself back in the spotlight with the release of her new book tomorrow, Going Rogue – represented a continuation of Bush-era fundamentalism.

Yet if Obama himself shared those apprehensions, the public was not going to hear about it. The Alaska governor had obvious vulnerabilities, but as former campaign manager David Plouffe writes in The Audacity to Win, Obama saw an advantage in avoiding direct engagement.

Even as Palin was lighting up the news cycle, Obama advised not attacking her inexperience or fringe viewpoints, even publicly contradicting an early statement released by his campaign. The governor’s personal and family life, he declared, were strictly off limits. Instead, the Obama team was to let the Palin drama evolve on its own and continue to push its message. Plouffe recalls:

“I think we just need to sit back and play our game,” said Obama. “It actually won’t be bad to be off Broadway for a few days. We should just leave her out of the equation. This is a race between John McCain and me. To the extent we talk about Palin, I think it should be about the differences in our selection processes – it illuminates differences in how we’d make decisions in the White House.”

One of the many issues President Obama sought to address on his trip to China this week was the country’s record of Internet censorship, telling an audience of university students in Shanghai:

“I’m a big supporter of non-censorship. I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.” (NPR)

China’s censorship laws have posed dilemmas for American companies looking to do business in the region. One notable instance is recounted in Ken Aleutta’s Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.

As Google has grown into a global media titan, its idealistic mission (”Don’t be evil” is the company’s motto) has bumped up against colder business realities. A striking example came in the early part of this decade when Google complied with requests from the Chinese government to censor search results.

Google was launched in China in 2002 and quickly began to catch on. In a country notorious for its tight stranglehold on all kinds of media, government officials were unnerved by the breadth of information the search engine could provide. They began banning certain terms and diverting traffic to other more acquiescent search engines. Though Google initially resisted interfering with searches, it became clear the company had a choice to make: tailor their search engine to comply with Chinese censorship laws or have their Chinese operation scuttled entirely. Read More

Media Matters for America have documented numerous falsehoods in Sarah Palin’s memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life. Below is a list of what they’ve found so far.

1. Palin: Obama “admitted” cap and trade will cause “electricity bills to ’skyrocket’ ” and “those hit hardest will be those who are already struggling to make ends meet.” Palin falsely suggests that “those hit hardest [by cap and trade] will be those who are already struggling to make ends meet” and that Obama “has already admitted that the policy he seeks will cause our electricity bills to ’skyrocket.’ ” She added: “So much for the campaign promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. This is a tax on everyone.” [Going Rogue, Pages 390-391]

CBO says poorest quintile will benefit from Waxman-Markey. The Congressional Budget Office found that in 2020, the version of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that passed the House in June with the support of the Obama administration would result in a $125 average annual benefit to the quintile of households with the lowest income and a $160 average annual cost to all American households.

Obama was talking about a different plan causing energy costs to “skyrocket.” As the Associated Press noted in fact-checking Palin’s book, Obama was not talking about the cap-and-trade legislation that has since passed in the House when he referred to energy costs “necessarily skyrocket[ting].” When Obama made that statement to the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board in January 2008, he was describing a cap-and-trade proposal that would auction off 100 percent of available carbon allowances, and he made no mention at the time of a plan to compensate consumers for potential cost increases. But as PolitiFact.com noted, the Waxman-Markey bill initially would distribute most of the carbon allocations for free and contains
substantial provisions to offset costs to consumers, and thus “should reduce costs to consumers.”

2. Palin still falsely claiming stimulus money for energy efficiency she vetoed required tougher building codes

Palin: “One-size-fits-all codes” required to get funds “simply wouldn’t work.” Palin claims that she vetoed a $25 million “earmark for energy conservation” available through the stimulus because Alaska would have needed to adopt “universal energy building codes” to be eligible for the funds. She
comments: “Universal building codes — in Alaska! A practical, libertarian haven full of independent Americans who did not desire ’help’ from government busybodies. A state full of hardy pioneers who did not like taking orders from the feds telling us to change our laws. A state so geographically diverse that
one-size-fits-all codes simply wouldn’t work.” [Going Rogue, Pages 361-362]

PolitiFact: Palin’s claim that funds were “tied to universal energy building codes” is ”false.” After Palin made similar comments
on Fox News’ Hannity, PolitiFact said she was “wrong” because “municipalities are not forced to accept the specific standards and, given that local governments set their own codes, the feds would be satisfied if Alaska merely promoted such building codes [emphasis in original].” PolitiFact also reported that in a letter to Palin’s chief of staff, a Department of Energy official “wrote that the provision ‘provides flexibility with regard to building codes’ and ‘expressly includes standards other than those cited so long as the standards achieve equivalent energy savings.’”

Read More