Republican Lies category archive

Takers take from those who make, in this case, from someone who made sandwiches.

Behind the counter at a convenience store in Princess Anne, Elvira Orellana worked 72 hours a week, making sandwiches, cleaning the kitchen and ordering the ingredients to prepare oxtail, curry chicken and cheese steaks.

Her employer paid her $648 a week — $324 less than she was owed under laws that require that workers earn time and a half for clocking more than 40 hours a week. When she complained, Orellana said, her boss threatened to cut her wages and then fired her.

More tales of the takers at the link.

TPM tells me that

Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) on Friday warned students at an elementary school that newspapers represent a menace to the state, the Bangor Daily News reported.

“My greatest fear in the state of Maine: newspapers,” LePage told students at St. John Catholic School in Winslow, Maine. “I’m not a fan of newspapers.”

which leads in nicely to Harvard professor Lawrence Bobo’s (no relation to David Brooks) discussion of rightwing intellectual inquiry as something hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar and buried under Funk and Wagnall’s back porch. If you wonder why Republicans so easily tout and believe stuff that just isn’t, that hermetic seal explains a lot.

A snippet:

Of course, there are those who will claim that MSNBC — the cable news network of the left — is at least as biased as, if not even more biased than, Fox News. They can even point to a Pew Research Center report, “Winning the Media Campaign 2012,” that shows that the “tone” of MSNBC coverage of Romney was more negative than Fox News coverage of Obama. One has to wonder if this is because the basic accuracy or truth quotient from the Obama campaign itself was higher?

There is a deeper problem of delusion here, fed by a closed, self-reinforcing sound bite universe of howling distortions that span television news (e.g., Fox), radio (e.g., Limbaugh) and the right-wing Internet (for example, Public Policy Polling shows that half of GOP voters believe that ACORN stole the 2012 election for Obama). Ironically, the depth of this problem is revealed by the suggestion from Jindal and Barbour that stupid comments alone are what got the Republicans in trouble and is keeping them in trouble. I don’t think so (though this doesn’t help).

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Paul Krugman reminds that, when it comes to Republicans, watch what they do, not what they say,

So when Mr. Romney made his infamous “47 percent” remarks, he wasn’t, in his own mind, saying anything outrageous or even controversial. He was just repeating a view that has become increasingly dominant inside the right-wing bubble, namely that a large and ever-growing proportion of Americans won’t take responsibility for their own lives and are mooching off the hard-working wealthy. Rising unemployment claims demonstrate laziness, not lack of jobs; rising disability claims represent malingering, not the real health problems of an aging workforce.

And given that world view, Republicans see it as entirely appropriate to cut taxes on the rich while making everyone else pay more.

Now, national politicians learned last year that this kind of talk plays badly with the public, so they’re trying to obscure their positions. Paul Ryan, for example, has lately made a transparently dishonest attempt to claim that when he spoke about “takers” living off the efforts of the “makers” — at one point he assigned 60 percent of Americans to the taker category — he wasn’t talking about people receiving Social Security and Medicare. (He was.)

In a similar vein, Guardian columnist Ha-Joon Chang explains that the folks who flatter themselves that they are the “makers” are actually the takers.

Ta-Nehisi Coates tears the sheet off the Republican gut-out-the-vote efforts:

I’d like to double-down on that point. Efforts to disenfranchise black people, have always been most successful when they worked indirectly. After the initial post-war Black Codes were repealed, white supremacists turned to less obvious modes of discrimination–poll taxes, grandfather clauses and literacy tests.

These were cloaked under a colorblind argument–“We don’t discriminate against black people, we discriminate against people who can’t read the Constitution.” By “read the Constitution,” they meant “recite the Bill of Rights by heart.” And they’d ask you to do this after reducing your school funding to a pittance. I say this to point that this is not a “new” racism. This is how it scheme went before the Civil Rights movement, and this is how the scheme works today.

Thom reviews the history of the Electoral College and its roots in chattel slavery, as well as Republican efforts to use the voter fraud fraud to institutionalize actual election fraud.

Aside:

WordPress says it has fixed the bug that was messing up scheduled posts with video embeds. This post is also a test of the fix. If the embed doesn’t work, click here to view it.

Update:

The bug appears to have been exterminated.

Darryl Lease, in my local rag, excoriates the Republican gut-out-the-vote efforts.

No summary or excerpt can do it justice. Just read it.

Addendum, Early That Same Evening:

In related gut-out-the-vote news, in Florida:

Analyzing data compiled by the Orlando Sentinel, Ohio State University professor Theodore Allen estimated last week that at least 201,000 voters likely gave up in frustration on Nov. 6, based on research Allen has been doing on voter behavior.

The Republican steal-the-vote campaign is reheating up.

Orly Taitz, birther babe extraordinaire, gets thrown out of yet another courtroom.

The judge was less than charitable. Scathing, even.

It’s a little late for this Christmas, there’s always that birthday . . . .

The San Jose Mercury-News investigates why the Republican Party has lost Silicon Valley. It seems to be another manifestation of Stephen Colbert’s observation that reality has a liberal bias.

A nugget:

“We all work on evidence-based reasoning, and that’s much more of a Democratic mindset than a Republican mindset,” said Johnvey Hwang, 34, a San Francisco software engineer who volunteered with the Obama campaign. “It’s hard to side with a party that’s still trying to reach out to their base of creationists.”

Mosque arsonist: “I only know what I hear on Fox News.”

Via C&L. IF the embed doesn’t work, follow the link to C&L.

Dick Polman shares this nugget:

Anyway, at a Pew-sponsored forum on Monday, Republican campaign consultant Scott Tranter uttered this gem:

“A lot of us are campaign officials – or campaign professionals – and we want to do everything we can to help our side. Sometimes we think that’s voter ID, sometimes we think that’s longer lines – whatever it may be.”

From the Philly Daily-News: The phony phiscal cliff is a steamy pile of Republicanism, nothing else.

Remember, Congress set the deadline and could extend it – or make adjustments after it has passed. Congress could allow all, some or none of the cuts to take place. It could restore some or none of the Bush tax cuts. It’s totally in its own hands.

Read the rest.

The gut out the vote movement is alive and well.

Virginia’s voter identification policy will become tougher than it currently is if Del. Mark Cole has his druthers.

Cole wants to remove several forms of ID now accepted for voting based on his belief that the recently revised law doesn’t do enough to thwart potential voter fraud. The Republican legislator would like the General Assembly to strike provisions that allow voters to present a current utility bill, bank statement, government check or pay stub with an address as valid ID at the polls.

These folks won’t be happy until they are able to guarantee stealing elections.

Things people say about the election that aren’t true, but that make them feel good:

Via Raw Story.

Watch Soledad O’Brien reduce hack Republican Congressman to incoherent doubletalk over Republican attempts to gin up a scandal over Susan Rice and Benghazi:

He’s a member of the House Intelligence Committee. Same like Michelle Bachman.

Via ABL.