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There are a number things the public "knows" as we head into the election that are just false. If people elect leaders based on false information, the things those leaders do in office will not be what the public expects or needs.Here are eight of the biggest myths that are out there:

The 30-minute speech I gave last month at the Symphony Space in New York is now available on video, and is posted below in three YouTube segments (the first segment also contains the 4-minute introduction of my speech). The speech pertains to the evolution of my views on media criticism, the nature of media propaganda and what drives it, and what can be done to combat it. A DVD of the entire event -- featuring the three other speeches: from Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore -- is available at FAIR's website. I want to note one example, from today, that vividly illustrates many of the themes I discussed in that speech.  It is found in the following passage from this Reuters article on Obama's escalation of the covert war in Yemen and his targeting of U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki for assassination: A U.S. official confirmed to Reuters that a U.S. strike last Friday killed Abu Ali al-Harithi, a midlevel al Qaeda operative, which followed last month's attempted strike against Anwar al-Awlaki, the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Whether Awlaki has any operational role in Al Qaeda at all is a matter of intense controversy.  The U.S. Government has repeatedly asserted that he does, but has presented no verifiable evidence to support that accusation.  But what is not in dispute is the notion that Awlaki is "the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."  He unquestionably is not, and never has been, as multiple Yemen experts have repeatedly noted.  The Reuters claim is factually and entirely false. Whatever one's views are on Obama's assassination program, targeting U.S. citizens without due process obviously raises extraordinary and vitally important questions.  As The New York Times' Scott Shane put it when confirming Awlaki's inclusion on Obama's hit list: "The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen. . . . It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an America

Under the guise of religious consciousness and First Amendment rights, Conservatives are mounting yet another assault on women's health and freedom that would deny millions of women access to affordable contraception. While the challenge scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court was not brought by Catholics, it's all the same to me. Besides, they were the loudest and most aggressive in their objections. So, I decided to repost this information I presented during the 2010 debate because the objections represents the epitome of hypocrisy and false morality to me.

A top Obama official offers justifications which are, at once, irrelevant and false

In response to the Harvard study documenting how newspapers labeled waterboarding as "torture" for almost 100 years until the Bush administration told them not to, The New York Times issued a statement justifying this behavior on the ground that it did not want to take sides in the debate. Andrew Sullivan, Greg Sargent and Adam Serwer all pointed out that "taking a side" is precisely what the NYT did: by dutifully complying with the Bush script and ceasing to use the term (replacing it with cleansing euphemisms), it endorsed the demonstrably false proposition that waterboarding was something other than torture. Yesterday, the NYT's own Brian Stelter examined this controversy and included a justifying quote from the paper's Executive Editor, Bill Keller, that is one of the more demented and reprehensible statements I've seen from a high-level media executive in some time (h/t Jay Rosen):

Jon Stewart strains to make his March of the Moderates include targets on the left and right

On the eve of a new leak, widely trumpeted Pentagon accusations about the whistleblowing site have proven false

The rich and their paid false prophets are doing a bang-up job deceiving the poor and middle class. They have convinced many that an evil socialism is alive in the land and it is taking their fair share. But the deception cannot last - facts say otherwise.

Lawrence O'Donnell spends the night spouting a theory as trite as it is false

Last night, Bill Maher went off on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally for Sanity, and the resulting monologue was predictably funny and utterly brilliant. He's not completely discounting the impact of the rally-he's psyched that it had twice the attendance of Glenn Beck's. But he makes the important point that the Rally didn't: the right wing and the left wing are not separate but equal entities, taking down the false dichotomy between the two, and criticizing the Rally for even suggesting as much. "Two opposing sides don't necessarily have two compelling arguments," he said. "This isn't Team Edward and Team Jacob." Awesome. Check it:

Why do so many working class Americans hold such detrimental false assumptions about their place in American society? Why this disconnect between self-interest and voting patterns?

A new investigation of the media's false reporting of the Saddam-statute story reveals ongoing press pathologies

On January 26, 2011, Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell stood before the Pentagon press corps and made a series of patently false statements about Bradley Manning (the video is here).  Even taking into account the position Morrell occupies -- in which a penchant for telling the truth is not exactly a job requirement (it actually would be disqualifying) -- this Press Conference was an extraordinary display of pure official mendacity.   Morrell was asked several times about the evidence -- first reported here -- that Manning was being held in repressive and inhumane conditions:  specifically, 23-hour/day solitary confinement, a prohibition on exercising in his cell, and being allowed out only 1 hour per day to "exercise" which entails walking around alone in a room, shackled.  Morrell repeatedly insisted that everything being done to Manning was being done to all of the other detainees at the brig; in his words:

The rapid and terrifying acceleration of global warming, which is disfiguring the ecosystem at a swifter pace than even the gloomiest scientific studies predicted a few years ago, has been confronted by the power elite with two kinds of self-delusion. There are those, many of whom hold elected office, who dismiss the science and empirical evidence as false. There are others who accept the science surrounding global warming but insist that the human species can adapt. Our only salvation-the rapid dismantling of the fossil fuel industry-is ignored by both groups. And we will be led, unless we build popular resistance movements and carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, toward collective self-annihilation by dimwitted pied pipers and fools.

Senator Islamuddin Sheikh PPP, Iqbal Zafar Jhagra PML-N and Kashmala Tariq PML-Q in fresh episode of Siyasi Log discussing Friends of Pakistan false promises for financial aid with Quatrina Hussain.

"In just a few short months, we've witnessed people power in action. From the Middle East to the Midwest, movements have risen up to overturn tired dogma and challenge entrenched power. Many of us were inspired by these events. And many of us were surprised. Perhaps we were growing skeptical that people power could still work. Maybe we had forgotten a vital fact about our world: that bold citizens, united around a common mission, can still come together to create major change against enormous odds." - 350.org (April 7, 2011) "Even when people are willing to take action in concert to redistribute the pie, whether by Gandhian mobilization or use of force, this may resonate falsely, for the pie is disintegrating. Its recipe and ingredients are obsolete. And freedom attained in harsh austerity, characterized by intense competition for food, will be doubtful or of little comfort." - Jan Lundberg ("Social Justice Activists Must Take Into Account Ecological, Cultural, and Economic Transformation")

The most important moral and intellectual voices within a disintegrating society are slowly discredited when their nonviolent protests and calls for justice cannot alter intransigent and corrupt systems of power. The repeated acts of peaceful civil disobedience, efforts at electoral and political reform and the fight to protect the rule of law are dismissed as useless by an embittered, dispossessed and betrayed public. The demagogues and hatemongers, the purveyors of violence, easily seduce enraged and bewildered masses in the final stages of collapse with false promises of vengeance, new glory and moral renewal. And in the spiral downward the good among us are reviled as naive and ineffectual fools.

It's important, yes, and must be addressed. But by a wide margin, it's not the nation's most pressing economic problem. That would be the widespread and persistent joblessness that has plagued the labor market since the Great Recession began in 2008. Almost 14 million people - 9.1 percent of the labor force - were officially counted as unemployed last month. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. There were almost 9 million part-time workers who wanted, but couldn't find, full-time jobs; 28 million in jobs they would have quit under normal conditions; and an additional 2.2 million who wanted work but couldn't find any and dropped out of the labor force. If the economy could generate jobs at the median wage for even half of these people, national income would grow by more than 10 times the total interest cost of the 2011 deficit (which was less than $40 billion). So anyone who says that reducing the deficit is more urgent than reducing unemployment is saying, in effect, that we should burn hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods and services in a national bonfire. We ought to be tackling both problems at once. But in today's fractious political climate, many promising dual-purpose remedies - like infrastructure investments that would generate large and rapid returns - are called unthinkable, in the false belief that they would impoverish our grandchildren. Yet there are other ways to attack unemployment that could garner bipartisan support. Perhaps the most promising is a payroll tax holiday.