Republican Lies category archive

The largest civil rights group in America, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), is petitioning the UN over what it sees as a concerted efforted to disenfranchise black and Latino voters ahead of next year’s presidential election.

(snip)

Fourteen states have passed a total of 25 measures that will unfairly restrict the right to vote, among black and Hispanic voters in particular.

The new measures are focused – not coincidentally, the association insists – in states with the fastest growing black populations (Florida, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina) and Latino populations (South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee).

Follow the link for details.

You know that the petition is justified. The record makes that clear.

Tennessee brings back the poll tax in sheep’s clothing.

Remember that the purpose of the poll tax was not to collect money; it was to keep poor folks from voting.

Psychology Today considers how to lie with statistics, using one of Texas Governor Rick Perry’s campaign claims as its primary example (surprise, surprise). A nugget:

Here is one current example. Several weeks ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry made headlines when he pointed out that the affluent pay most of the Federal income taxes in this country while 47 percent of the earners pay none at all. He called this an “injustice”. What’s wrong with this statistic: First, it begs what should be the first question about any statistic: “Why would this be the case?” The answer is that our income taxes are progressive. Those who have more pay more. So the tax burden simply reflects the highly skewed income distribution in this country. (snip income data)

The other problem with Governor Perry’s fine sense of justice is that he was engaging in a statistical charade. It was a prime example of statistical cherry picking. If you look only at Federal income taxes paid you get a very different result than if you consider the total tax burden of our income earners. Counting payroll taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes for gasoline, and the like, you get a very different result.

Print the article out and keep it by your television for use while watching Fox.

Steve Benen comments on Mitt Romney’s prevaricating advertisement:

A liar makes false claims. A b.s. artist doesn’t much care what’s true or false, because facts are irrelevant in the person’s larger agenda. Liars care what’s true and deliberately say the opposite; b.s. artists are indifferent to what’s true and tend to see facts as inconveniences that simply get in the way.

In light Mitt Romney’s obvious and glaring falsehood in his first television ad, take a wild guess which camp the Republican’s presidential campaign falls into.

Mitt the Flip. There’s no there, there.

New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran said earlier this year that her state had a “culture of corruption” and referred 64,000 voter registration records to police that she thought were possible cases of voter fraud. Now a new report from her office proves she was completely right, 0.0296875 percent of the time.

Duran’s interim report now alleges that 104 voters — about one for every 10,577 on the rolls — were illegally registered to vote. Of that group, just 19 — or approximately one for every 57,894 registered voters — actually allegedly cast a ballot they shouldn’t have.

The real voter fraud happens in the counting room (and, occasionally, in the Supreme Court).

The underlying Republican definition of voter fraud is a catch-22: Republicans have decided that no legitimate voter could possibly disagree with them, thus persons who might disagree with Republicans must be kept from voting, thus the Republican keep-out-the-vote effort.

Fabrication and falsification is what they do.

The Commander Guy discusses the Wingnut World of Fantastickal thinking, using the Wingnut faith that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac somehow caused the crash. A nugget:

However this myth has been thoroughly debunked. It was Wall Street financiers that developed the securitized mortgage products that were responsible for the housing bubble and the ultimate collapse of the economy. Fannie and Freddie belatedly followed Wall Street’s lead and was a bit player at that. It was not the lowly bureaucrat in a cubicle that discovered a way to game the system for the super rich. It was ravenous packs of overeducated financiers with ivy league degrees in finance and the like that devised this scheme to line their pockets with millions. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure this out.

Follow the link for his discussion of faith-based political fakirs of Wingnuttery.

Lila Garret interviews Robert Greenwald on Republican keep-out-the-vote efforts:

Asia Times looks at the neocon warmongers who have started a campaign to keep the Great and Glorious War for a Lie in Iraq in perpetuity. A nugget:

Others have cited another irony: the fact that, in the words of James Traub of foreignpolicy.com, “Today’s saber-rattlers are, of course, the same folk who urged president George W Bush to go to war [in 2003]. None of the hawks warned then that toppling Saddam [Hussein] could embolden Iran, and yet Iran has turned out to be the greatest beneficiary of that massively botched undertaking.” For them to blame “Obama for a problem created by Bush is a switcheroo of breathtaking proportions.”

Click for a larger image.

Via BartBlog.

More here.

Robert Reich points out the many ways in which the flat tax is yet another fraudulent Republican scheme for robbing the poor to give to the rich.

Click to read.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., sums up the war in Iraq. A nugget:

The surge worked? We should not have been there.

Americans killed by roadside bombs? We should not have been there.

Iraq becoming more stable? We should not have been there.

Service personnel coming home? Great. But we should not have been there.

Moreover, once there, we should have been universally appalled at the breathtaking cynicism with which the war was prosecuted.

Bloomberg takes a look at flat taxes. They conclude (my words, not theirs) that it’s one more trick for making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Read the whole thing:

People want their taxes simpler, fairer and lower. A flat tax promises all three and would deliver on none.

(snip)

Would a flat tax be “fairer” than the current system? Perry plans to call for a rate of 20 percent, which is lower than today’s top rate of 35 percent and higher than today’s lowest rate (which is zero). If your income currently puts you in a bracket higher than 20 percent, a 20 percent flat tax constitutes a tax cut. If you’re in a bracket lower than 20 percent, a flat tax will constitute an increase, unless it comes with lots of deductions, in which case it’s no longer flat. If lowering taxes on high incomes and raising taxes on low incomes would be an improvement, then a flat tax is fairer than the current code. Otherwise, it isn’t.

The undercurrents of bigotry in the voting I. D. laws are rapidly becoming overcurrents:

If you’re trying to avoid being disenfranchised by your state’s voter ID law, it’s usually a good idea to avoid being a minority, a college student or poor. As it turns out you also probably shouldn’t be 91-years-old and have trouble standing for a long period of time.

Tennessee resident Virginia Lasater found out the hard way after she was unable to get the photo ID required to vote in her state because she wasn’t able to stand in a long line at a DMV . . .

The DMV staff said there was nothing they could do.

Clarissa is busy, so Zandar explains it all.

At Science 2.0, Patrick Lockerby discusses the closed mind:

A closed mind is totally incapable of being shown real world facts. Lead a person with a closed mind step by step through a very logical process; show them a simple experiment in actual progress; show them what every kid learns in science class: what happens? The closed mind, having seen proof that a thing is real, must employ a strange chain of illogic to show that the proof was not merely impossible but unpossible. A thing which has just been shown to be possible can only be shown to be unpossible by a reverse logic in which thoughts themselves are shown to be unpossible. It takes a special thinking process to deconstruct a scientific proof and replace it with diametrically opposed dogma.

He follows with an example of contemporary Christian fundamentalists who claim that plants do not consume carbon dioxide or give off oxygen (and therefore there is not global climate change) because the Bible tells them so.

If you wonder at the wingnut ability to believe stuff that just ain’t true, click to read.

In another real life demonstration of dealing with unpossibility, Andrew Brown responds to a Creationist at the Guardian.