CNN's Ali Velshi calls out Republican Congressman ON THE AIR for misleading the American people.

Courtesy of Mediaite:

CNN’s Ali Velshi tore into GOP Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KN) Monday night about his claim that a tax hike on small business would hurt job creation. Telling Huelskamp he didn’t “believe” his numbers to be true, Velshi mockingly asked, “The vast majority of those businesses are in fact not job creators. You understand that to be the case?” 

Huelskamp disputed Velshi’s claim and said that he had “seen research” that raising taxes would impact “41% of business income.” Velshi called him out on his language, saying “41% of business income is not 41% of business, that’s a very, very different and somewhat misleading statistic.” Again Velshi asked, “You understand the distinction, right?” 

Velshi then proceeded to silence Huelskamp from speaking any further, saying, “Sir, you put out information to our viewers, you’re on CNN right now. I would like the information to be accurate.” Huelskamp fought to answer, and when he was asked by Velshi whether he wanted to stand by his information, he said, “That’s our best guess. We’re still working on that.” 

“I think that’s a guess,” Velshi retorted. 

According to Huelskamp, part of the difficulty in obtaining accurate information is that the Obama administration won’t tell his team anything. Velshi slammed him for this misstatement, saying, “We actually don’t have any difficulty getting that information, sir. We don’t need it from the administration, that information is public.”

Yes! This is the kind of thing that we need to see MUCH more of from our journalists, ESPECIALLY after we saw jut how allergic to actual facts they were, and how determined they were to lie to the American people.

Having said that I think Velshi did an excellent job here and even followed it up later in the hour and reported this: 

VELSHI: Wolf, I just want to... I've been doing some research as I promised I would do in the conversation that we had with Congressman Tim Huelskamp, quoting what he said was a study by Montana State University. We're working our way through that study, but I'll tell you the facts that we have right now. 

If businesses... if everybody who earned more than $250 thousand saw an increase in the top tax rate from 36 percent to 39.6 percent, that would be 3.5 percent of all small businesses. That would be 940,000 businesses. That's I think a number that the Congressman was quoting. So at $450,000, it is nowhere near the number that the Congressman was quoting. 

But let's just be generous and say that it was that. Of that number, only a very small proportion are not hedge funds, partnerships, law firms, companies that don't employ a whole lot of other people. So the Congressman's facts are just incorrect on this. There is nowhere near a million businesses that will be affected by this increase of taxing people above $450,000.

And THAT my friends is how you do it!

You know now that Velshi has joined Soledad O'Brien with this whole "holding Republicans accountable for their bullshit thing," I am thinking of possibly tuning in to CNN once in awhile. You know, when MSNBC is once again broadcasting that stupid Lockup series perhaps.

Maybe since they have seen how quickly Fox is losing viewers they might be reconsidering this whole idea of becoming Fox-lite.