I have a game to play with you today. It’s called “Which Lie Is Worse?” I will give you two situations where a politician or apparatus of government lied. It is up to you to decide which lie was worse. I’ll change the names to protect the guilty, but the photos I’ll use in this post will probably give them away.
rahm2The first is a lie told by the mayor of a town that begins with “C”, ends with “O” and has a “hicag” in the middle. (Anyone remember the super-fans out there?) For the purposes of this game, I will call him “Tahm” Emanuel. Mayor Emanuel (shucks, I gave him away) created a new speed camera system in Chicago that places cameras a certain points in the city that are in the vicinity of schools for the purposes of catching speeders near schools that may be endangering children. It just so happens that the radius being monitored near schools encompasses about 90% of the city of Chicago. That isn’t the lie. That’s just an unfortunate (if you are a lead foot) circumstance. The lie comes from where the money collected from the speeding tickets is supposed to go. See, Mayor Emanuel sold the speed camera concept on the promise that the money collected from the fines would go into a special fund for the children of Chicago. A few days ago the mayor unveiled his 2014 budget. Strangely, there was no line item in his budget for a fund for children. Instead, nearly $70 million dollars will go into the general fund. I guess that’s one way to get people to vote for their own tax increases. Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-rahm-emanuel-speed-camera-funds-1119-20131119,0,7114410.story?r=5779D8151256F1Y
censusThe second lie comes from the “Consensus Bureau.” The Consensus Bureau takes a census every month (Doh! Did I give it away?) of people and their employment status each month. This data is used to help create our monthly unemployment report that we hear on the news outlets. It turns out that for some time, the bureau had directed one of its people to fabricate data used to create the unemployment statistics. This fabrication escalated as we got closer to the presidential election. This resulted in a 3 point drop just before the election that made it appear that President Obama’s economic policies were working. It can be strongly argued that these better unemployment figures stole an election and changed history. Source: http://nypost.com/2013/11/18/census-faked-2012-election-jobs-report/
 
So we have a tough one here. You decide which one is worse: Raising taxes in the name of children and using the money elsewhere, or lying to a nation in order to steal an election.
nixon