Republican Lies category archive

Follow this link or listen below:

Zachary Roth over at TPM runs down the sources of the latest lie, that the proposed health care bill will allow the Federal Government electronic access to private bank accounts (since I’m scheduling this to publish tomorrow, there may be a new latest lie by the time anyone reads this):

Where does it come from? It appears to have its roots in an email “analysis” of health-care reform that includes various lies and distortions about the bill. (Politifact, the fact-checking site run by the St. Petersburg Times, has called the email a “clearinghouse of bad information.”) One charge made in the email is that “the federal government will have direct, real-time access to all individual bank accounts for electronic funds transfer.”

What’s the truth? The section of the legislation on which this claim is based states that the bill will “enable electronic funds transfers, in order to allow automated reconciliation with the related health care payment and remittance advice.”

As Politifact points out, the bill’s legislative summary makes clear that the intent of this section is to “adopt standards for typical transactions” between insurance companies and health-care providers, and continues: “The legislation generically describes typical electronic banking transactions and does not outline any special access privileges.”

Read the Politicfact analysis of the email here.

The truly sad part is that some are so bigotted or stupid or afraid or some combination thereof as to believe the lies. DougJ reports from the field and explains why this should not surprise us.

Charles M. Blow on the anti-health care mobbery (emphasis added). Please follow the link for the full analysis:

Not only are anti-reformists showing up, they’re terrorizing legislators with their tomfoolery when they do. Blinded by fear and passion, armed with misinformation and misplaced anger, they descend on these meetings and hoot and holler in an attempt to shut down the debate rather than add to it.

I must say that this says more about them than it does about any forthcoming legislation. Belligerence is the currency of the intellectually bankrupt.

Trapped in their vacuum of ideas, too many Republicans continue to display an astounding ability to believe utter nonsense, even when faced with facts that contradict it.

I got nothin’ against demonstratin’. I’ve done plenty of it in my time. One of my favorite memories is of waving a picket sign in Richard Nixon’s face.

I got a lot against mobbery.

Jamie Sanderson has more.

They can’t help themselves.

Josh Marshall:

Grassroots activist and “just a mom” at town hall turns out to be GOP official and former staffer for candidate who the host of the town hall, Rep. Steve Kagen (D-WI) beat last year.

Rachel Maddow: “Politically, the facts don’t really matter . . . .” “This is professional corporate-funded Republican-staffed PR. And it should be reported as such.”

I tried to go to the website, Recess Rally dot com, but it seems to be inaccessible. It did not 404, so it may just be whelmed or down.

It should be out. After all, Rachel Maddow outed it.

Via Brendan.

Dick Polman analyzes the whoppers. His conclusion:

Democrats might be wise to heed this warning, penned in a letter in 1867: “The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a man only tells them with all his might.” Credit that one to Mark Twain. In their summer pitch for health care reform, Democrats need to refute the outrageous lies with, at minimum, equivalent fervor.

Because the lies can lead to bad things, such as, for example, the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq.

But Republicans can’t help the lies. It’s all they have left.

Over at the Great Orange Satan, percival constantine (the poster’s capitalization, not mine) looks at similarities between Orly Tait’s Kenyan Scam and the venerable Nigerian Scam and sees dollar signs.

YouTube link via the Huffington Post.

Dick Polman (emphasis added):

Her quote: “The health care reform bill would make it mandatory – absolutely require – that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner, how to decline nutrition, how to decline being hydrated, how to go into hospice care…all to do what’s in society’s best interest…and cut your life short.”

(Fred Thompson’s credulous reply was priceless. He said, “I didn’t know that,” thereby demonstrating what happens when you give a microphone to a failed politician who won’t even make a pretense of fact-checking.)

The lie soon traveled ’round the world, getting worse with each right-wing re-telling.

On the Media has more. Go to the website, where there’s a transcript, or listen below:

StevenD reports on the latest crazy conspiracy theory from the wingnut brigade: That the World Health Organization created the swine flu virus so as to commit genocide against honest, godfearing everyone all over the world.

His summation, well, sums it up:

And they call us Moonbats? I love how they manage to link Obama, Sibelius, the CDC, WHO, Pharmaceutical companies and George Soros to this master plan to commit mass murder across the globe, but particularly here in the United States. I’m just surprised they didn’t add Michael Moore and ACORN to the list of co-conspirators. At least most of the “conspiracy theories” from the left regarding Bush and his administration turned out to be true. They really did lie about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction in order to start a war. The NSA and other government organizations did carry out a massive and illegal warrantless surveillance program against Americans. We did torture prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions. White Phosphorus was used as a weapon against civilian populations. The White House really did out Valerie Plame as a covert CIA operative. Bush planned for war with Iraq back in 2002 and we have the British government’s “Downing Street Memos” to prove it.

More here.

Cartoon via BartCop.

On the Media takes out the Shona Holmes story–and story is the right word:

“It just makes me angry that the media isn’t looking into this any more. It wasn’t hard for me to find out what she actually had . . .”

Read the transcript here or listen below:

If there can be any such thing as an unAmerican activity, I nominate suborning lies. It’s a Republican thing.

Via Balloon Juice, where John Cole adds this comment:

The reason Republicans in DC are running from some guy on the street asking them whether or not Obama is an American citizen is because they have spent the last thirty years cultivating a base of insane crazy people, and while they may escape a reporter from FDL, they can’t escape the base.

After all, he’s got health care.

Read more »

The other day, I heard a caller to a radio show predict that getting to the bottom of the current rumors of a CIA assassination program would be like peeling an onion.

He based that, he said, on his experience as a contractor in Central America some years ago. Contracted to do what, he would not say. But I know from acquaintances of mine who were in Central America in that period that a lot of stuff that we never heard of went on during “drug interdictions” in Central America.

First, he predicted, we would learn that it was authorized to work in a wider field than currently reported.

Next, he predicted, we would learn that it wasn’t just in the planning stages. Rather, it had been “operationalized.”

Next, he predicted, we would learn that, not only had it been operationalized, it had actually assassinated people.

Then, he predicted, we would find that, not only had it assassinated people, but that it had assassinated the wrong people. For the wrong reasons.

Well, we’ve reached step one:

Reporter Joby Warrick added: “The finding imposed no geographical limitations on the agency’s actions, and intelligence officials have said that they were not obliged to notify Congress of each operation envisaged under the directive.”

This revelation, buried in paragraph 12 of the Post’s report, was highlighted by Talking Points Memo’s Zachary Roth later in the afternoon.

“‘No geographical limitations’ presumably means that operations could potentially be carried out in countries, friendly or unfriendly, that are far from any war zone — including even the US itself,” he opined. “And it seems likely that they would be carried out without notifying the foreign country in question.”

Something the Dog Said at the Great Orange Satan. It illustrates the laughable curve scam as well as anything I’ve seen (emphasis added):

In the 50’s we had 24 graduated brackets. This allowed a higher and higher level of tax up to the 90% at $300,000 and above. Which makes plenty of sense, when you think about the fact the lowest bracket when from $0 to only $2000 and was at 22.2%. Everyone in the nation was paying to fund the cost of our war and our debt, as a nation should do, but everyone was paying according the amount of money they earned. Just to give you a little idea of how much $300,000 was in the ‘50’s it would be equivalent to $6,390,000 (using a nominal GDP per capita calculation, you can find it here).The Dog has to ask is there anyone out there who does not think people who make 6.3 million a year of more should not pay something above 50% on the money over that level?

Today we have only five tax brackets and they top out at 35% at 372,000.

Those who would accept a society’s benefits without paying their fair share–oh, never mind.

What Digby said:

Liberals who follow politics closely are no doubt disoriented to see someone as accomplished as Sonia Sotomayor attacked for being a bullying racist by a bunch of racist bullies, but I think we should probably get a grip and understand that this is what racism looks like in 2009. The assertion of white male privilege through whining victimization is one of the main ways it will be manifested going forward. And it’s quite effective — it appeals to people’s own hidden prejudices in a way that doesn’t socially embarrass them and allows them to use fairness as a weapon, which is a great relief to bigots who have been on the defensive for decades.

But it’s important to remind good people who are possible recruits to the reverse discrimination claims that the world is still overwhelmingly run by wealthy white men and any protestation that they need affirmative action is laughable. The day that they become a minority in positions of leadership to the same extent that women are today, despite being half the population, is the day I will become sympathetic to the cries of unfairness coming from wealthy, white conservatives. Until then, all this rending of garments over a Latina being “biased” sounds suspiciously like Scarlett O’Hara’s lady friends chattering nervously about the slaves getting uppity.

There’s more at the link.

Media Matters:

In covering the Ricci case, reversing Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s decision, media should not promote the myth that the reversal represents a “historic rebuke” or that Sotomayor’s Supreme Court reversal rate is “high.”

The bottom line is that the Supreme Court does not accept cases unless it thinks there is a legal issue worthy of consideration. This means that any case it accepts has a good chance of being reversed.

Further down the page, see the bottom line (emphasis added):

. . . it also would not be unprecedented for the court to reverse a ruling reached by a justice before his or her elevation to the Supreme Court. As an appeals court judge, Chief Justice John Roberts was a member of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which, in its July 2005 unanimous ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, alBaswed a military commission to try Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Guantánamo Bay detainee.

Roberts was confirmed as chief justice several months later, in September 2005. Then, in 2006, the Supreme Court reversed the circuit court’s decision on a 5-3 ruling.

Moreover, contrary to the myth that it is unusual for the Supreme Court to reverse federal appellate court decisions, data compiled by SCOTUSblog since 2004 show that the Supreme Court has reversed more than 67 percent of the federal appeals court cases it considered each year, except 2007, when it reversed federal appeals court cases 61 percent of the time.

The United States can, from time to time, influence events in other countries, though the Bush Reign of Error has greatly weakened that influence.

One of the delusions of wingnut thinking is that the United States can somehow control–not influence, control–the world and every little thing that happens therein.

It can’t.

Winguttery is as absurb as Communism in its faith that Utopia will come simply because its theory says that Utopia will come. It is absurd as my asserting that a flower will grow out of my head simply because I believe a flower will grow out of my head. Even granting that my head my be full of manure, it still ain’t growing no flowers (at least not while I am alive to see them). For the very theory is flowed, being based on postulates that just ain’t so.

Witnesseth the delusion (follow the link for video):

Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, accused Barack Obama on Tuesday of allowing violence in Iran to get out of hand by not speaking out against the country’s leadership earlier.

What is happening in Iran is internal to Iran.

My first boss, Denny, who was a good boss, used to say that his own first boss was the best teacher he ever had.

Whenever Denny faced a quandary, he considered what his first boss would have done and did the exact opposite, leading to this analogy:

Republican Party:Decisions::Denny’s First Boss:Denny

Aside: I know what it feels like to be wrong; I’ve been wrong many times. But to know what it feels like to be wrong all the time and still be certain you’re right? Ask a wingnut.