Repeating falsehoods does not make them come true

[Another rescued post, thanks to Facebook Notes. Yay, redundancy!]

JISHOU, HUNAN — I spent a couple of hours tonight trying to catch up on the post-election aftermath. It seems President Obama is going to visit India.

According to the right wing echo chamber, the trip will cost somewhere around $200 million a day! Such intellectual heavyweights as Sean Hannity of Faux News, Rush Limbaugh of the AM (blowhard) airwaves, and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) of the Crazy People have been repeating this dubious figure like it was the gospel truth.

Don’t people fact-check anymore? My editors years ago would have put a big CQ in a red circle if I reported such a ridiculous amount of money.

According to the mother of all fact-checkers, snopes.com, the estimate came from provincial official in India who clearly doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the wall. Our entire military presence in Afghanistan costs the USA less money each day than this fictionalized mega-junket to India!

(Actually, traveling in India is pretty cheap, I hear, but of course the people I know don’t fly in their own personal jetliner with an entourage of aides and Secret Service agents in tow. Still, $200 million a day?)

Ludicrous.

And guess what? We’ll get to hear more of this claptrap for the next two years, now the crazy wing of the Republican Party is so full of itself after Tuesday’s elections. It’ll be all-anti-Obama, all-the-time.

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India joins the (space) race

India launched its first unmanned space craft today, joining China in an Asian space race.

The Chandrayaan-1 is heading for the Moon, which China’s own Chang’e probe visited just last year. The Indian mission will orbit the Moon for two years, creating a three-dimensional atlas of the surface and prospecting for valuable minerals.

Two NASA experiments are also on board.

More details are here.

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