WSJ op-ed distorted right-wing poll of women to attack health care reform

WSJ op-ed falsely claimed right-wing poll shows two-thirds of women "less likely to back candidates who support government care"

WSJ op-ed subhead: "Two-thirds are less likely to back candidates who support government care." The November 3, 2009, Wall Street Journal op-ed by IWF chairman Heather Richardson Higgins on the poll's findings carried a subhead falsely suggesting that "[t]wo-thirds [of women] are less likely to back candidates who support government [health] care."

In fact, poll question asked women if they would support candidates who favored "moving people" from private to public health care

Right-wing poll asked respondents whether they would support candidates who favored moving people to the public option:

And, would you be ... more likely or less likely to support a candidate for Congress knowing he or she favored moving people from their private healthcare plans to government-run healthcare plans?

WSJ op-ed presented actual question in the article. Despite the WSJ subhead's distortion of the poll results, Higgins' op-ed acknowledged the actual question in the article:

And when asked if they would be more or less likely to support a congressional candidate if the [sic] knew that he or she supported moving people from their private health-care plans to government-run care, two out of three (67%) said it would either probably (26%) or definitely (41%) make them less likely to support the politician.

Proposal does not require people to take public option. Neither the current House bill, its predecessor in the House, the Senate HELP Committee bill, nor the Finance Committee bill require anybody to purchase insurance through the public option. 

Conway previously said Palin governed "like a man," decried "political correctness" toward non-English speaking workers

Conway thinks Palin "governed like a man ...didn't raise taxes and throw all this money into social programs." On the October 30 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, Conway stated:

LAURA INGRAHAM (fox News host): But if a conservative guy had told a liberal woman to stay home and take care of the kids, I'm sure Maureen Dowd, Sally Quinn, and the whole elite Washington journalistic establishment would have been down their throats, saying you don't tell this woman what to do.

CONWAY: Actually, Sally wrote a piece --

INGRAHAM: I imagine you would.

CONWAY: Sally wrote a piece called "Palin's Pregnancy Problem," it was kind of mean and it ended up being untrue that the base did not leave Sarah Palin because her daughter Bristol was going to have this child out of wedlock. The whole crisis pregnancy culture is to embrace young girls who have unexpected pregnancies. And, look, I just want to say this, that, with Palin, she looks so feminine, she acts like a woman, but she governs like a man. She didn't take -- she didn't raise taxes and throw all this money into social programs, instead she put the governor's jet on eBay, makes her kids' own lunches.

Conway: Being politically correct and hiring people who don't speak great English will lead to "two planes crashing." During a discussion of a lawsuit over two employees fired for speaking Spanish in the workplace, Conway said: "[W]hat starts out as maybe the person doesn't speak English, getting -- putting mayonnaise instead of mustard as you requested on your sandwich is one day going to blossom into two air traffic controllers who don't speak great English because political correctness has made us appoint them to those positions. They're going to have two planes crashing in the sky."

In fact, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as amended in 1991, which prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of national origin specifically includes an exception for "those certain instances where ... national origin is a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise." And indeed, the lawsuit specifically alleged that the ability to speak English "was unrelated to the job they had been performing since 1999."