iTuned Out: John McCain Falsely Claims That iPad And iPhone Are ‘Built In The United States’
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on March 7th, 2011 5:35 am by HL
iTuned Out: John McCain Falsely Claims That iPad And iPhone Are ‘Built In The United States’
This morning on ABC’s This Week, host Christiane Amanpour devoted a portion of her show to discussing the declining trend of manufacturing in America, showcasing the problem by emptying a house of all the goods that were not made in America. “In 1960, foreign goods made up just 8 percent of Americans’ purchases. Today, nearly 60 percent of everything we buy is made overseas.”
Amanpour invited Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to discuss the topic, who exhibited his own faulty understanding of the problem:
McCAIN: I would also point out that if you’d emptied that house there, if you’d left a computer there or an iPad or an iPhone, those are built in the United States of America.
Later in the show, Leo Gerard, the president of the United Steelworkers Union, corrected McCain. “The reality is that when you talk about the high-end stuff — the iPad and the iPhone are made in China, they’re not made in America,” he noted. Watch it:
In fact, the Taiwanese-based electronic manufacturing company Foxconn makes the iPad and the iPhone. Foxconn gained notoriety last year when its overworked employees began committing a rash of the Apple supply chain.
McCain is hardly the expert that political shows should turn to when discussing technology. As former FCC chairman Reed Hundt told Amanda Terkel in 2008, “Basically, John is a technological troglodyte and proud of it.” McCain said during the campaign that he “never felt the particular need to e-mail.” McCain has admitted to being a computer “illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all the assistance I can get.”
Fox Hosts Hate-Church Lawyer Who Claims Obama Is ?The Beast Spoken Of In The Revelation?
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court held that even the most repulsive hate speech — Westboro Baptist Church’s anti-gay rallies at military funerals — is entitled to First Amendment protection. At the top of its show this morning, Fox invited one of the leading purveyors of such repulsive speech, Westboro’s attorney Margie Phelps, as its sole commentator on this Court decision. Phelps, who is the daughter of hate church leader Fred Phelps, provided exactly the same kind of thoughtful legal analysis that Americans expect from Fox News:
QUESTION: Are the nine justices going to Hell?
PHELPS: I have no objective indicator otherwise. The default for mankind is Hell. […]
QUESTION: So the justices are going to Hell? The President is going to Hell?
PHELPS: Absolutely on the President. That’s a big ten-four. I already answered on the justices. The President is going to be king of the world before this is all said and done and he is most likely the Beast spoken of in the Revelation.
Watch it:
It’s telling that in a week which featured deeply manipulative anti-worker tactics by the Ohio GOP, growing unrest in the Middle East, a court decision allowing implementation of the Affordable Care Act to move forward, and the Main Street Movement’s first steps to recall eight anti-worker lawmakers in Wisconsin, Fox decided to ignore these stories in order to focus on the important question of whether President Obama is the Antichrist.
