Republican Lies category archive

“The most insidious form of fraud is people voting . . . wrong.”

Via TPM.

Thom Hartman reviews the history of predictions that Social Security and Medicare will go broke. They have been consistently wrong.

He also points out why the predictions keep coming. (Three hints: Banksters. Three-card monte. Country club memberships.)

Steven Conn, a professor at Ohio State, reviews recent economic history and then discusses the fallacy of Republican Economic Theory. He points out that, despite the Republican Party line (that’s “line” as in “pick-up,” with all the sincerity thereof) the past ten years of Republican tax cuts for the rich have led to the slowest job growth since the presidency of Herbert Hoover.

He stops short of calling it the “Big Republican Lie.”

I don’t.

A snippet:

And in all these places, we hear the same refrain: Tax cuts create jobs! But clearly, in the last decade, they haven’t – unless you’re looking for work in China.

Remember that old definition of crazy? It’s doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Given the evidence at hand, the Republican position on taxes – that if we keep moving money from the middle class to the rich, we’ll all benefit – starts to sound pretty crazy to me.

Follow the link. The article is worth the three minutes it takes to read.

Chauncey DeVega comments on the GOP’s new BBFF Herman Cain’s role as “the complexion for the protection” of the teabagger right:

Via Kiko’s House.

Lies and lying liars dept.

Via Balloon Juice.

Via Jack and Jill Politics.

Not who you think they are. Steve Chapman discusses this in the Chicago Tribune. A nugget:

Most GOP candidates, however, don’t care (about climate change–ed.). Rick Santorum dismisses such claims as “junk science.” Michele Bachmann derides the notion that carbon dioxide could be harmful. Tim Pawlenty’s campaign declined to answer when asked if he agrees with Romney.

During last year’s campaign, the National Journal reported, “Of the 20 serious GOP Senate challengers who have taken a position, 19 have declared that the science of climate change is inconclusive or flat-out incorrect.” (The exception: Mark Kirk of Illinois.)

Conservatives fear liberals will use climate change to justify heavy-handed intrusive regulation and wasteful subsidies, and they are right to worry. But that’s no excuse for pretending global warming is a myth or refusing to do anything about it. It’s an argument for devising cost-effective, market-based remedies that minimize bureaucratic control.

If today’s Republican attitude had prevailed four decades ago, Americans would not have such vital measures as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Then, many people worried that environmentalism would strangle economic growth and personal freedom. But both have survived and even flourished.

Conservatives once understood that corporations are not entitled to foul the environment, any more than individuals have the right to dump garbage in the street.

I remember my first trip to Los Angeles, thirty years ago.

The sky was a glorious orange; from my hotel in Little Toyko, I could barely see Dodger Stadium about two miles away; breathing was an exercise in filtering hazardous waste from each breath. At the time I lived in northern Virginia, where we had regular pollution alerts and orange skies of our own.

It’s much better now, though from Burbank in the hills east of downtown L. A., you can sometimes see the orange cloud down in the valley.

Republicans clearly long for those good old days when you couldn’t breathe air in Pittsburgh or eat fish pulled from the Delaware River (well, actually, you probably still shouldn’t [pdf], but it’s better than it used to be).

Chancey DeVega has an penetrating, acerbic review of the Teabagger circus Republican debate in New Hamphire the other evening. I commend it to your attention.

A nugget:

The Tea Party GOP wants to make her (Ayn Rand’s–ed.) dystopian vision of unregulated free markets and a further maldistribution of wealth upward into America’s salvation. In total (and despite three decades of evidence to the contrary), the Great Recession will be cured by less regulation and not more, where the State gives more resources to those with the most with the hope that they will somehow “trickle down” to the rest of us. Please don’t pee on my head and tell me that it is raining.

All sugar; no substance; rotten teeth a feature, not a bug.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

The Republican Party tried to block this ad, claiming that it was false:

As Kommandant Klink would have said, “Request denied!” because the ad isn’t false.

While the Republican plan would turn Medicare into an unrecognizable monster (while they try to slip it through by grandfathering anyone 55 or older), it would retain the name.

Their plan is to create a Mr. Hyde, but keep the name, Dr. Jekyll.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it’s a Republican thing:

Excerpt:

The conservatives and the right wing have been on the wrong side of history so long, their solution is change the facts.

One more time.

Pay attention to what Republicans do, not to what they say.

They just can’t help themselves. From TPM:

The national Chamber of Commerce is using misleading quotes from the local Tonawanda News in a TV ad to suggest the paper backs Republican Jane Corwin in the NY-26 election, according to the paper. Upset with what they claim is an intentionally phony endorsement, the newspaper’s editors are demanding that the Chamber pull the TV ad and that Corwin’s campaign disavow it.

(snip)

According to the paper, quotes referring to how Corwin will “end harmful spending” and support lower taxes are in fact from her own campaign appearances, thus putting the candidate’s words into the paper’s mouth. Local news outlet WKBW has video of the offending TV spot on its website.

Aside:

Regarding the Gingrinch and truth, as my old boss used to say, “Even a blind pig finds an acorn sometimes.”

Political blogs will frequently refer to rhetorical “dog whistles,” meaning statements that sound innocent until their connotations are dissected.

One famous “dog whistle” was Ronald Reagan’s references to “welfare queens.” It said, “welfare fraudsters,” (and anyone can deplore fraud, unless it’s committed by Wall Street banksters, apparently), but it meant “persons of the not-white persuasion.”*

At We Are Respectable Negroes, blogger chaunceydevega challenges us to understand the dog whistles, using the Gingrinch as his example:

As Darth Vader, Sith Lord, said to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, to expose Gingrich’s racism is all too easy. The more productive task is to challenge ourselves to understand the logic of the neo-conservative, neo-liberal, colorblind White racial frame. It would be easy to ether Gingrich for his obviously racist comments–comments which are part of a long tradition of Right-wing race baiting that predates both Reagan’s “welfare queen” and “black bucks buying T-bone steaks on welfare” memes.

I think it would be more fun to rehab Gingrich’s logic.

Follow the link to see the rehab treatment.

________________

*One attempt to trace the history of Mr. Reagan’s remark to see whether it contained any truth concludes that it did contain an eensy-weensy itty-bit, but that the facts were completely contrary to the tune played on the dog whistle.

Am I the only person who sees parallels between Republicans’ making up history to suite their cause and Soviet Russia’s making up history to suite its cause?

Click to see the image at its original size and location

August J. Pollack, the cartoonist, comments. A nugget:

Mike Huckabee, fresh off realizing that pretending he’ll become president pays far less than doing stuff like this, has done this. Apparently textbooks, teachers, the media, general knowledge, and of course that old enemy of the right, reality have for too long hindered the true history of our nation.

Follow the link for more about the cartoon.

If you feel particularly brave (or foolhardy) Mr. Pollack links to the Huckabee Hucksters History site.

I’m not going to help the Huckster’s Google juice.

This has been another edition of What Brendan Said.

Facing South reports on continuing Republican efforts to make it difficult for persons to vote. From the introduction:

With Republicans taking power or strengthening their hand in many state legislatures — and the 2012 elections looming on the horizon — GOP leaders are seizing the opportunity to push a raft of measures they claim will restore integrity to the voting process.

But the new voting bills share some important features: They all work to restrict the franchise and shrink the electorate — in most cases, in ways that would decrease Democratic votes.

Lots of details at the link.

He’s quite wrong you know.

Republican lies never die.

Video via Bob Cesca.

Afterthought:

For that matter, they don’t even fade away.