Katie Pavlich Attempts Journalism Again, With Usual Results

Greetings, great Wonkespora, and welcome to another edition of That's Our Katie!, our semi-regular feature where we take a look at the lies and sloppy journalism spewed by wingnut dingbat Katie Pavlich in her never-ending quest to make us actually long for the reasonable and fact-based writing of Phyllis Schlafly. This is an awful series we proposed to write because it means we have to put on a Hazmat suit and dive into the viscera-soaked sewer of Townhall, but it is also an easy series to write because finding an issue Katie has misrepresented, distorted or lied about is simpler than finding water in the ocean. Let's see what she has in store for us today.

Here's a headline:  Get Ready to Bailout the Postal Service. It's no secret the United States Postal Service is in financial trouble and has been looking for ways to raise revenue without jacking up the price of a single stamp to roughly the equivalent of a Subaru. So what's going on here, Katie?

Now, lawmakers on Capitol Hill and the Government Accountability Office are warning about a potential Postal Service bailout footed by American taxpayers.

Earlier this year, Inspector General David Williams warned that unless Congress does something to help the troubled agency, it'll go out of business.

Katie links us to a UPI story from January of 2013, which is not exactly earlier this year, but it's really the least of her transgressions. See that first quote up there about taxpayers footing the bill to bail out the Postal Service? Let's take a look at that UPI story again (bolding ours):

The post office bailout would not require taxpayer dollars,Williams said, but rather congressional intervention to reduce USPS pension payments, which are about $5.5 billion a year.

So the story says the exact opposite of what Katie says it says? Color us shocked. But the word bailout sure gins up the rubes and keeps the Townhall hate-clicks coming. Wingnuts hate bailouts, and they really hate the post office except for when it delivers their social security checks or that totally rad set of Duck Dynasty camouflage beer koozies they ordered from Amazon. Of course maintaining a national postal service is a specific government mandate laid out in that Constitution thingy they claim to be defending more patriotically than us liberals. You could even argue that our most treasured founding document is more specific about the post office than it is about Katie's right to carry a semi-automatic Glock at all times into every public space in America. Man, being a wingnut is confusing. No wonder they all seem so angry all the time.

Back to Katie:

Again, the biggest issue facing the Postal Service? The incredible cost of government over promising healthcare benefits. The bigger challenge? Reforming those benefits.

"Government over promising healthcare benefits" is a pretty disingenuous way of describing the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which required the USPS to prefund health care benefits to future retirees for the next 75 years, an act of sabotage by a conservative Congress designed to drive the USPS into the ground, and which is the primary cause of its current financial troubles. We know Katie was busy trying to decide which tooled leather holster would look best with her prom dress in 2006, but a curious journalist might do some research -- hell, we did the research and we're a simple blogger with an inordinate supply of crude insults.

Katie could have also mentioned that there are quite a few   proposals floating around as to how to fix some of the Postal Service's finances by expanding its services (though the recent announcement by Staples that it plans to close 225 locations presumably will put the kibosh on one idea to locate some post offices in some Staples stores). Or she could have mentioned that the USPS is cutting 10,000 jobs in 2015, but we know those people don't count because they are public employee leeches who probably belong to the union. She could have even made sure her nitwit readers know that the postal service is entirely self-funded and does not rely on taxpayer money, so it's not as if we would be throwing more money down a rat hole that has already swallowed the Treasury. But giving people this information would have been hard work, and where's the fun in that?

The majority of the Townhall readers who rated this story on the little poll at the bottom of it said it was "Insane." For once, your Wonkette agrees with them.

[ Townhall / UPI ]

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