Republican Lies category archive

The more they talk, the more they indict themselves. Senator Leahy starts to speak sense at about the one minute mark.

The Secretary of State on rudeness as a diplomatic technique:

Via Delaware Liberal.

Noz on the plight of the right:

that’s basically the dilemma of the modern right. they’re building their own alternate reality that they really believe to be true. and they believe that repeating these “facts” is the best roat (sic) out of the political wilderness. except that to everyone else, the repetition of stuff like this look like rants.

Shorter version:

1. They believe the stuff they make up.

2. They think everyone else will too.

Toyota Motor Corp.’s production in Japan for fiscal 2009 will likely drop below the 3 million unit level for the first time in 31 years, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources.

Toyota’s domestic output would fall to about 2.8 million units, marking a decline of more than 30% from the company’s peak production in fiscal 2007, the report said.

What’s that you say?

But the Republicans tell us it’s all the UAW’s fault. What’s with that?

Q. Name one dishonest and three honest breeds of nuts.

Via Delaware Watch.

Out of ammo:

“We have very, very little (ammunition) of any caliber,” said Larry Baity, a 74-year-old counter clerk at Gun City who said he has waited on Williams. “We’re virtually out. We’ve got a lot of bare shelves.”

The scene at Gun City is playing out across the U.S. as record gun sales deplete stocks from ammunition makers Alliant Techsystems Inc. and Olin Corp. Demand for firearms is being driven in part by concern that U.S. President Barack Obama may impose new controls, said Matt Rice, a spokesman for Springfield, Massachusetts-based Smith & Wesson Holding Corp.

Where these folks got the notion that their precious warm guns are in danger is beyond the rational.

Facts below the Fold

The spirit of McCarthyism is alive and well in Wingnuttia:

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) puts the number of socialists in the House at 17.

“Some of the men and women I work with in Congress are socialists,” Bachus told local government leaders on Thursday, according to the Birmingham News.

Bachus gave the specific number of House socialists when pressed later by a reporter.

Have they no shame?

Read more »

From FactCheck dot org:

Some Republicans have been quick to blame Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut for allowing big bonus payments to AIG executives. They get the facts backward.

The public record shows Dodd authored an amendment that would have prevented “any bonus” being paid to top executives of firms getting bailout money. It was the White House and the Treasury Department that insisted Dodd’s amendment be watered down to apply only to bonuses paid under agreements signed in the past five weeks. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has taken public responsibility for that.

We lay out the full story in our Analysis sectiom.

(Yeah, I know the category for the post is a redundancy.)

The Sunday Breakfast Mission is overwhelmed by ReagoBushonomics (emphasis added):

The emergency shelter holds 20 adults and a handful of children, depending on their ages. There are transitional apartments for families headed by single mothers, and housing for families moving into their own homes. And there are plans for a six-unit apartment building, though it’ll be another year before ground is even broken.

But that capacity is far outstripped by the need. In January and February alone, the shelter had to turn away 103 men, 76 women and 73 children — more people than went through its doors in all of 2008.

It’s the only shelter in Sussex County that accepts children, said Program Director Michele Stewart.

The office gets 15 to 20 calls a day, and most get the same answer.

“We don’t have space,” Morole says flatly, and sadly. “The way the economy has turned, it has increased. The kind of help people want has changed.”

John Cole surveys a new batch.

I’m not going to try to improve on this on how the same story gets spun in opposite ways.

Words matter. Words can hide or conceal reveal the truth.

Read more »

The Booman documents the facts.

Steve sums up the successes of “abstinence only” sex education:

It took a while, but the statistics are finally showing that abstinence only education is a success! It is doing exactly what it is designed to do, leave boys and girls with too little information to control their own lives. Now the kicker is that teen preganacies are on the rise for the first time in well over a generation.

Later on, he has this quotation from the news story that prompted his post.

“Believe it or not, kids today get less information in schools about birth control than their parents did,” Columbia University professor Leslie M. Kantor said.

If they are getting less information than I did, they are truly in deep yoghurt. Or Jello. Or something.

And quite willing to pander.

The Glorious and Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq.

From the Left Shue:

Iraq Body Count: 2/22/09
Americans Killed: 4247
Americans Wounded: 50,000
http://icasualties.org/
Iraqis Killed: 1,000,000+
http://www.thelancet.com
“…a small price…” Rep. John Boehner

Honest(er) accounting:

For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller. The price of more honest bookkeeping: A budget that is $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would otherwise appear, according to administration officials.

(snip)

“The president prefers to tell the truth,” he (Peter R. Orszag, Director of the Office of Management and Budget–ed.) said, “rather than make the numbers look better by pretending.”

You can’t deal with stuff that you can’t see.

It’s a Republican thing. They dumped the country down the toilet, got nothing on their side, so they return to their tried-and-true tactic: Making stuff up.

From FactCheck dot org (emphasis added):

Republican politicians have claimed that the stimulus bill requires that doctors follow government orders on what medical treatments can and can’t be prescribed. But the bill doesn’t say that.

• Rep. Tom Price of Georgia says the measure creates “a national health care rationing board.” Not true. What it creates is a council to coordinate research into which treatments work best, and are most effective for the money. And in fact, the new law states quite specifically that the council has no power to “mandate coverage” and that its recommendations are not to be construed as “clinical guidelines for … treatment.

”

• Betsy McCaughey, a Republican former lieutenant governor of New York, claims that the bill creates a “new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology.” Not true. The office was created in 2004 by President Bush. McCaughey also says the office “will monitor treatments” and ” ‘guide’ your doctor’s decisions.” But that’s nothing new. Bush’s initiative called for creating a health IT system to transmit information to “guide medical decisions.”

Critics of comparative effectiveness research, which the government has been funding for decades, claim that it will lead to treatment being approved or denied based on costs. Proponents say it will improve the quality of care and can, in some cases, show that more costly treatments aren’t as effective as less expensive alternatives.

We can’t predict what will happen in the future, but we can say that several claims being made about the impact of the bill are simply opinions being passed off as facts.

“. . . opinions being passed off as facts.”

Yeah.

Right.

There’s a nice short pithy word for opinions passed off as facts.

Backstory: The Republican myth that autoworkers make $70.00 an hour was created by taking the full personnel costs of the United States unionized auto manufacturers, including all retiree costs (such as pensions and health care negotiated in good faith) and dividing it by the number of active non-exempt employees.

The actual take home pay of an autoworker is less than half that figure on an hourly basis or slightly more than $61,000 a year without overtime.

In other words, the $70.00 per hour thing is a lie.

The lie distracts persons from the vision of old folks losing the retirement homes and health care which they worked honestly to earn. Yes, earn. It pollutes policy discourse while demonizing working persons.

Like any good lie, it has a very Nixonian plausible deniability.

But it’s still a lie.

Here is how to respond to a lie:

Role Model below the Fold

It’s a long report, worth the seven or eight minutes it takes to read it. From TPM Muckraker:

At least nine Bush administration officials refused to cooperate with various Justice Department investigations during the final days of the Bush presidency, according to public records and interviews with federal law enforcement officials and many of the officials and their attorneys. In addition, two U.S. senators, a congresswoman, and the chief of staff to one of them, also refused to cooperate with the same investigations.

In large part because of that noncooperation, Justice Department officials sought criminal prosecutors in at least two cases so far to take over their investigations so that they can compel the testimony of many of those officials to testify through the use of a federal grand jury.