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Conservatives Attack Carly Fiorina for Being Pro-Islam

Mother Jones

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Carly Fiorina has had the wind at her back after the first Republican presidential debate. The former Hewlett-Packard CEO earned high marks for her appearance at the “kids table” forum for the least-popular GOP candidates, and she has been rising in the polls ever since. So it was only a matter of time before the knives came out.

On Sunday evening, former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who herself was doing well in the GOP presidential polls this time four years ago, drew her followers’ attention to a 14-year-old speech Fiorina had given in Minneapolis, in which she defended the cultural, legal, and scientific heritage of the Muslim world. The catch: It was delivered just weeks after 9/11. What nerve!

Fiorina’s speech reads as a thoughtful defense of the faith of many of her employees at Hewlett Packard. Her respect for Islam seems to come from personal experience. In her 2006 book, Tough Choices, she described the soothing effect of listening to Muslim prayers when she was a teen and her family lived in Ghana. (Her father was a law professor then on a teaching sabbatical at the University of Ghana). She wrote:

I remember hearing, for the first time, Muslims pray, and how over time their sound evolved from being frightening in its strangeness to comforting in its cadence and repetition—I would feel the same peace when I listened to the sound of summer cicadas around my grandmother’s house. I grew to love being awakened in the morning by the sound of the devout man who always came to pray under my bedroom window.

Uh-oh. That reminiscence may well provide Bachmann with more ammo. And it’s not just Bachmann who has called out Fiorina for being soft on Islam. Fiorina’s comments on Islamic civilization have also been criticized by fringe-right outlets like the American Thinker and Western Journalism Review.

Islam has once again become a wedge issue in the Republican primary. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, for instance, has called for a ban on certain kinds of Muslim immigrants. Fiorina, who tried (and failed) to ride the GOP tea party wave into the Senate in 2010 by fashioning herself as a stalwart conservative—is now the target of the extremists she once courted.

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Conservatives Attack Carly Fiorina for Being Pro-Islam

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How Michele Bachmann Inspired Factcheck.org to Debunk Lies About Science

Mother Jones

Four years ago, Michele Bachmann slammed Rick Perry—then the governor of Texas—for his executive order mandating HPV vaccinations. “I’m a mom of three children,” Bachmann said during a GOP presidential debate. “And to have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat out wrong.”

Bachmann, who at the time was a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, expanded on her allegations the next day. “I will tell you that I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Fla., after the debate,” she said on the Today show. “She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter. It can have very dangerous side effects.” (Watch it above.)

Bachmann’s suggestion that the HPV vaccine is dangerous was completely false. “There is absolutely no scientific validity to this statement,” explained the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The 2016 campaign is just around the corner, and even though the Iowa caucuses are nearly a year away, we are already being inundated with dubious claims from potential candidates. Frequently, those claims touch upon issues related to science. Just in the past few weeks, we’ve heard Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) questioning vaccine safety, potential candidate Ben Carson suggesting immigration could be spreading disease, and Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) claiming that global temperature data had been “falsified.”

Enter Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, which operates the nonpartisan Factcheck.org. Founded in 2003, Factcheck was one of the first websites devoted to refuting misleading assertions about US politics. Last month, Factcheck launched Scicheck, a new project that evaluates the scientific claims made by politicians. In just a few weeks, Scicheck has countered inaccurate statements about issues ranging from climate change to the economic impact of the Human Genome Project.

On this weeks’ episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, I asked Jamieson what inspired her organization to focus on scientific issues. She credits Bachmann.

“When Michele Bachmann in the last election made an allegation about the effects of…a vaccine, in public space on national television…the journalists in the real context didn’t know how to respond to the statement as clearly as they ought to,” explains Jamieson. “The time to contextualize is immediately. That should have been shot down immediately.”

So when the Stanton Foundation approached Factcheck to offer funding for a new initiative, the group decided that what it needed to do was hire “real science journalists” with the expertise to refute false claims and to get those corrections “into the bloodstream of journalism more quickly,” says Jamieson. “That’s how it happened. It’s thanks to Michele Bachmann.”

But Jamieson is keenly aware that it isn’t enough to simply rebut inaccurate claims in real time. One of the key challenges facing science communication is that voters frequently get their news from highly ideological media outlets that sometimes misrepresent the scientific consensus on controversial issues. This has contributed to substantial gaps between what the general public thinks and what scientists think on a wide range of issues, from evolution to the safety of genetically modified foods. To combat this problem, Jamieson recently proposed a new communication strategy called LIVA, an acronym that stands for leveraging scientific credibility (L), involving the audience (I), visualizing the data in a dynamic way (V), and creating relatable analogies for the reader (A). This method has shown promise in shifting people away from their partisan lens and helping them to better understand science. It even seems to work with one of the most polarizing scientific issues of all: climate change.

In Jamieson’s recent study, self-identified conservatives were shown a misleading article from Fox News with the headline “Arctic sea ice up 60 percent in 2013.” Part of this group was then shown additional information using the LIVA method, contextualizing the decades-long downward trend in sea ice and leveraging the credibility of NASA’s measurements. In the end, study participants who were subjected to the LIVA method were more likely to agree with the scientific consensus of a long-term decline in sea ice.

Gary L. Gehman/Annenberg Public Policy Center/PNAS

Jamieson is optimistic that these new science communication methods and sites like Scicheck will improve the overall political discourse. She has hired veteran science journalist Dave Levitan to lead this effort at Scicheck. And while it’s too early to tell if it will be successful, Levitan hopes that his work will make politicians “think more carefully when they talk about science.”

To listen to my entire interview with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, click below:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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How Michele Bachmann Inspired Factcheck.org to Debunk Lies About Science

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Iowa Swings Right, Elects Joni Ernst to Senate

Mother Jones

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Iowa’s next senator will be Joni Ernst, a one-term state senator who has endorsed personhood for fetuses, supported the government shutdown, said she wants to impeach President Obama, discounts climate change, insisted there were WMDs in Iraq, and once said she believes there’s a nefarious UN plan—Agenda 21—to rob Iowans of their farmland.

It’s hard to overstate just how much of a change she is from the senator she is replacing, Democrat Tom Harkin, a progressive hero during his 30 years in the chamber, who spearheaded the Americans with Disabilities Act and was a longtime champion of health care reform.

Ernst defeated her opponent, Rep. Bruce Braley, by playing up the grievances of Iowa’s rural population, which feels under siege from a growing urban population. She also used her military service in Iraq to revive Bush-era terrorism politics.

Ernst is the first woman Iowa has elected to Congress (leaving Mississippi as the only state that’s hasn’t yet put a women either in Congress or the governor’s office). But in getting there, she relied heavily on male voters. Even in polls that put her ahead by wide margins leading up to the election, she was losing female voters by double digits. “What we like to remind folks is that being a women candidate doesn’t make you a pro-women candidate in all circumstances,” Stephanie Schriock, the president of EMILY’s List, told me during a pre-election event in Des Moines late last month.

Iowa Republicans gathered Tuesday night at a Marriott in West Des Moines to celebrate their successes. (Incumbent Gov. Terry Branstad easily won reelection.) The crowd, packed into a too-small ballroom, erupted in cheers anytime Ernst appeared on the TV screens. Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'” piped through the speakers as they waited for Ernst to take the stage.

The last time I’d set foot in this particular hotel was in early 2012, when I watched Rep. Michele Bachmann end her presidential campaign the day after the Iowa caucuses. Bachmann’s drubbing in that contest appeared to represent a repudiation by state Republicans of the Party’s Fox News fringe. Two years later, voters have elected a candidate who represents that very fringe, for while Ernst may be the chosen candidate of the state’s supposed moderates, she readily attaches herself to just about any idea that bubbles up as a Fox News meme. As Tom Harkin put it to me earlier Tuesday afternoon, she’s not quite Ted Cruz, but she’s only an inch or so off.

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Iowa Swings Right, Elects Joni Ernst to Senate

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If Republicans Won’t Impeach Obama, Michele Bachmann Wants to Target His Cabinet Instead

Mother Jones

Impeachmania peaked last week. After the House approved Speaker John Boehner’s lawsuit alleging executive overreach by President Barack Obama, Democrats pounced, blanketing the media and donors’ inboxes with dire warnings that Republicans would soon resort to impeachment. Boehner, for his part, dismissed the hysterics as a fundraising ploy. “It’s all a scam started by the Democrats at the White House,” he said last week, vowing that the House had no intention to begin impeachment hearings while he still held the speaker’s gavel. But Boehner’s control over his unruly tea-party-tinged caucus has proved tenuous time and again, and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), the unofficial leader of the Impeach Obama Caucus, has floated a new (and no less quixotic) solution: If Boehner won’t let the GOP caucus impeach the president himself, Republicans should begin impeachment proceedings against members of Obama’s cabinet in his stead.

“I don’t think that John Boehner is going to bring about impeachment, which I understand, because what we really need is to remove Barack Obama from office, and the Senate has the power to remove the president, not the House,” Bachmann told activists on a call last Tuesday hosted by the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA. “The Senate is not going to remove him. So all we would do is effectively make the president a political martyr by impeaching him.” Instead, Bachmann suggested, the Senate might be more willing to take up articles of impeachment against the lower-level officials who follow Obama’s executive orders granting temporary reprieves from deportation to undocumented immigrants (why, exactly, Senate Democrats would be more amenable to this cause was left unclear). “For instance, I would nominate impeaching the head of Homeland Security who will execute the laws on the border,” she said, referring to Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. “I think that we need to have a hearing, and we need to, if need be, bring about articles of impeachment and tell the president that if you issue these work permits, we are going to hold the person accountable who is going to execute your lawless law, and we will bring that person up for betrayal of public trust and we’ll impeach that official.”

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If Republicans Won’t Impeach Obama, Michele Bachmann Wants to Target His Cabinet Instead

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