Republican Lies category archive

FactCheck dot org. Follow the link for the full analysis:

Our inbox has been overrun with messages asking us to weigh in on a mammoth list of claims about the House health care bill. The chain e-mail purports to give “a few highlights” from the first half of the bill, but the list of 48 assertions is filled with falsehoods, exaggerations and misinterpretations. We examined each of the e-mail’s claims, finding 26 of them to be false and 18 to be misleading, only partly true or half true. Only four are accurate. A few of our “highlights”:

• The e-mail claims that page 30 of the bill says that “a government committee will decide what treatments … you get,” but that page refers to a “private-public advisory committee” that would “recommend” what minimum benefits would be included in basic, enhanced and premium insurance plans.
• The e-mail says that “non-US citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free healthcare services” but points to a provision that prohibits discrimination in health care based on “personal characteristics.” Another provision explicity forbids “federal payment for undocumented aliens.”
• It says “[g]overnment will restrict enrollment of SPECIAL NEEDS individuals.” This provision isn’t about children with learning disabilities; instead, it pertains to restricted enrollment in “special needs” plans, a category of Medicare Advantage plans. Enrollment is already restricted. The bill extends the ability to do that.
• It claims that a section about “Community-based Home Medical Services” means “more payoffs for ACORN.” ACORN does not provide medical home services. The e-mail interprets any reference to the word “community” to be some kind of payoff for ACORN. That’s nonsense.

It’s not about the cost of medical care. It’s about the cost of affording medical care.

In the last 10 years, the healthcare insurance industry has increased their profits by 450%..

They just can’t stop.

One wish these sorts of denunciations weren’t necessary, but a spokesman for the American Medical Association writes in to rebut the RNC’s suggestion that “GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system.”

Repeating incredible lies is its own reward.

It is a perverse aspect of our discourse that, the bigger the lie, the bigger the speaking engagements and the more uncritical column inches one gets.

Skippy quotes a Politico commenter who pretty much nails it:

besides, we all know what this is really about, as nobody cared about any presidents birth certificate until we elected a black one.

It’s all about the hate, the bigotry, and the odious Southern Strategy of the Party of Old White Men, Rich Folks, and Haters Republican Party.

Growing up white under Jim Crow, I heard all kinds of rationales about why white folks were superior and needed to keep black folks in line to preserve Our Way of Life(TM). A lot of the arguments involved “mongrelization” (for heaven’s sake, look around you: mongrelization was apparently quite all right when worked it in one direction, just not in the other. Jesus, deliver me from the hypocrites and liars, especially those who invoke Your Name.)

Aside: My parents were children of their times, but thank God I didn’t hear that stuff at home. They taught me through example to be equally polite to everyone and to treat everyone with respect.

Somewhere I have a copy of George Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All, a justification of chattel slavery written shortly before the Civil War. I bought it for one of my courses in Southern History, my field of study in college. I was never able to read it, not because I was or am any kind of enlightened angel, but because it must be one of the worst-written books ever published.

It’s still all about bigotry, plain and tall.

Pah!

’nuff said:

The notion that we should respect the ideas of others, listen to their reasoning and embrace our diversity has taken a beating lately.

People like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and the eternally puzzling Glenn Beck pile up tens of millions of dollars by flouting those rules every day.

Teaching children tolerance in modern America is like trying to teach an inner city kid he shouldn’t aspire to be a pimp: If the only successes he’s ever seen are people doing the opposite of what Mom and Dad preach, who’s he going to believe?

Here come the e-mails: “Why single out conservatives? Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are just as bad.”

Fair enough — but there’s still a difference: Taken as a whole, the conservative screamers are either lying or shockingly, incomprehensibly wrong. As a result, their lockstep followers are making decisions based on beliefs that don’t pass the laugh test.

The Guardian looks at health care for the uninsured in America. Read the whole thing. Here’s a doctor’s comment on the fight against reform:

Such scaremongering has dismayed and infuriated Sharon Lee, the doctor who now treats Manley in Kansas City. “I’m very angry, very angry,” she says. “Many of the people I treat have already been in front of a death panel and have lost – a death panel controlled by insurance companies. I see people dying at least monthly because we have been unable to get them what they needed.”

Revealed in an article at MasterNewMedia. A snippet:

• A potentially dangerous news story may be ignored by mass media. Most people believe that something which has not been reported just does not exist.
• A news story may be presented as a “wild accusation”, especially by someone authoritative. People that have a large consensus or cover important positions in politics, economics or the military may leverage their reputation to label a a fact as false and preposterous.
• A big media coverage of an important event may create enough distraction to deviate the attention of people from a real issue.
• A rumor that is neither confirmed or denied may generate confusion and doubts in a large audience.
• An individual or group of people may be forced or payed to provide false information that generate fake news stories.

Sound familiar?

Via GNC.

At Guardian, Michael Tomasky comments on the poll that showed that persons who get their news from Fox are not only uninformed, but fervently believe stuff that just isn’t true about the current kerfuffle over health care:

I guess I say this often, but if one group of people are so intent on telling blatant lies, what can be done? I mean, if I were to allege that the Guardian has a secret plot to charge you 10 quid a day to look at my blog, and I were given TV time to trumpet this charge, and I lodged it fiercely and insistently, and the Guardian came back and said that’s not true and where’s your proof, and I said something like, I can’t reveal my proof because the ruthless agents of the Guardian will try to destroy my career, but anyway just look at the Guardian’s history, because the Guardian is a liberal/left publication and you just know from that history that they want to impose a tax on everything; and the Guardian still denied it, and I kept repeating it and repeating it, and I got other people to repeat and repeat it, eventually, a huge percentage of people inclined to be suspicious of the Guardian would believe me, even though I was talking completely out of my ass, pardon me.

From Kiko’s House:

Of all of the ruthlessly despicable things that right wingers have said and done in recent years, nothing can top the lie that President Obama’s health-reform legislation contains “death panels” that will determine who among the elderly will be denied medical care and be euthanized.

Follow the link and learn why he says that.

Then read his next.

They can’t tell the truth because they are not on the side of truth.

In their world, money trumps truth.

Paul Krugman:

It was the blooper heard round the world. In an editorial denouncing Democratic health reform plans, Investor’s Business Daily tried to frighten its readers by declaring that in Britain, where the government runs health care, the handicapped physicist Stephen Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance,” because the National Health Service would consider his life “essentially worthless.”

Professor Hawking, who was born in Britain, has lived there all his life, and has been well cared for by the National Health Service, was not amused.

These guys will do or say anything to monger fear and hate. Conviction and truth have nothing to do with it.

Via John Cole.

Dick Polman recounts what happens when a Town Hall Teabagger is interviewed by someone knowledgeable (hint: It wasn’t Lou Dobbs). Follow the link to read the whole thing which leads him to his conclusion; it’s worth it to see how far removed from reality the wingnutosphere has made itself. His conclusion:

But I was most struck by one particular exchange. Abram had indicated at the town hall that her fight against health care reform marked her debut in the political sphere, at the age of 35. O’Donnell, picking up on that, asked how she “as an adult” could have lived through the contentious Iraq war without paying any attention to politics. (He could have pointed out that the government she so fears has actually been paying out roughly $3 billion each week since 2003 to fight a war that was falsely sold to people like her, thereby indebting the children she invoked.)

So, his question in essence was: If you’re so steamed up now about the cost of health care reform for Americans, how could you have not been steamed up about the cost of that war?

Her answer: “Honestly, I didn’t really care.”

And then this, moments later: “Maybe I’m just not that smart.”

Bingo! And the frightening thing is, there are so many mobbers just like her. Where have you gone, James Madison?

Here’s the actual interview:

Go here to see the wingnut-edited version.

Via Eileen Davis.

Scientific Blogging looks at end-of-life consultations as in a social context.

They report that, while most persons want an explanation of the alternatives as death approaches, only about half want an actual recommendation:

“This is an important article that has changed my clinical practice,” said J. Randall Curtis, M.PH., M.D., president of the American Thoracic Society and Professor of Medicine Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Section Head, Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, WA”I had previously assumed that almost all families would want physicians’ recommendations, but these findings indicate that there is no such consensus among surrogates. I suspect that physicians can do more harm by withholding a recommendation that is desired than by providing a recommendation that is not desired, but this study suggests we should ask rather than assume.”

Just over half (51 percent) of the surrogates expressing a preference for receiving their doctors’ advice believed that it was the doctor’s role to provide that opinion, whereas nearly four of five (79 percent) who preferred not to receive the advice saw it as overstepping.

I mentioned yesterday that my father had a Living Will and an Advance Directive, as do I. I do not know whether he consulted anyone. I know I didn’t–I know I do not want to end my life as an experiment in how long the shell of my body can be preserved after all pretense of consciousness or soul are long gone.

Too often, though, such decisions must be made by “surrogates” (relatives) who must act in the absence of any guidance from the person who is dying.

To this link in perspective, the whole “euthanisizing grandma” hysteria that the wingnuttiest have embraced has to do with a proposal that Medicare be allowed to pay for a patient’s consulting with a doctor about “end-of-life” issues such as hospice care, living wills, and the like, so that, when the time comes, the sick person’s wishes are known. Since doctors are paid under a “fee for service” model, if payment is not allowed, doctors have no fiduciary reason for providing such a service.

The harsh truth is that the death rate is, to paraphrase Mark Twain, one per person. Not talking about it doesn’t make it go away.

Not talking about dying and issues around dying is, in fact, silly and stupid; it is living with blinders on.

Much like the teabagger movement itself.

Then, again, Mencken was right.

DoughJ has details.

Yes. They were as bad as we lefties said they were.