#GOP Lies

[sher-ee]

Absolute idiots.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Rebecca Crosby and Judd Legum at Popular Information:

Donald Trump has created a powerful political base of supporters, many of whom are attracted to his swashbuckling style. But much of Trump's policy agenda is deeply unpopular — particularly with swing voters. There is little support for enacting tax cuts for corporations, repealing Obamacare, or rolling back environmental protections.   This is why Trump is attempting to distance himself from Project 2025, the radical blueprint for a second Trump administration. The 920-page document was written by his allies, more than 80% of whom worked in his administration. But Trump claims he has "nothing to do" with the people who wrote it because he does not want to be associated with unpopular policies. For Trump, the less people know about his plans for a second term, the better. 

This is particularly true on the issue of abortion. Trump gladly takes credit for the repeal of Roe, which was made possible through Trump's nomination of three anti-abortion Supreme Court Justices. The repeal of Roe has cleared the way for many states to enforce draconian abortion bans. But, for the leaders of the Republican Party, repealing Roe was only the first step. The ultimate goal is a federal abortion ban. This goal was included in the Republican Party platform in 2016, which was ratified again in 2020. Specifically, the platform said that abortion was prohibited by the Constitution's 14th Amendment and called for legislation and a Constitutional amendment to make that "clear." 

[...] Currently, 80% of Americans — including 66% of Republicans — oppose a national abortion ban.  The Trump campaign strategy for the 2024 GOP platform is to say much less about everything, including abortion. The previous GOP platform was 66 pages. The new GOP platform is 16 pages. The 2024 GOP platform continues to assert that fetuses are protected by the 14th Amendment. But it drops the explicit call for federal legislation and a Constitutional amendment. 

Donald Trump has deceived the American people that he is a “moderate” on abortion in relation to the rest of the GOP.

See Also:

Jill Filipovic: Has the GOP Moderated on Abortion?

[bouncinghedgehog]

[madammaursa]

IN GOP SPEAK 'CREATING STORIES' IS A BYWORD FOR LIES. DON'T BELIEVE THEM.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Meanwhile at Trump’s mini rally in Asheville. Best photo of the new billboard truck yet! Please help us fund the truck! Doug did great! Chip in https://maddogpac.com/products/quick-donate-1

* * * *

Republicans say, “It’s the economy, stupid” . . . unless the economy is strong, then it’s “Look, there goes Elvis!”

August 15, 2024

Robert B. Hubbell

I hurt my jaw on Wednesday. I was listening to MSNBC report on the drop in inflation below 3% when the news anchor asked an “expert” how the positive economic news would affect the election. With no sense of irony or memory, the “expert” said, “Well, of course, the election won’t be decided on the economy.”

My jaw hit the floor so quickly that I nearly chipped a tooth. Remember that time—for the last year-and-half—when political pundits told us that voters cared about inflation more than democracy itself?

Now that inflation is at the lowest level in the last three years, pundits are telling us that the economy doesn’t matter—or that the good news about inflation is actually bad news for Kamala Harris. See, e.g., Politico, Inflation is easing. Now, Harris has an even bigger problem with the economy. (Per Politico, the economy faces a possible recession—which is what economists have been predicting for the last year-and-half.)

To President Biden’s credit, he called out the media’s insistence on spinning all economic news as unfavorable. At an event at the White House, a reporter shouted a question, “Did the US beat inflation, Mr. President.” Biden responded,

Yes, yes, yes. I told you we were going to have a soft landing [and]we’re going to have a soft landing. My policies are working. Start writing it that way.” See President Biden on Easing Inflation: "My Policies Are Working" | C-SPAN.org.

But the press has no interest in reporting on a positive economic story. Kamala Harris announced that she would give a speech on Friday outlining her economic policies. The New York Times didn’t wait for the speech to give it a negative review, posting the headline Harris Is Set to Lay Out an Economic Message Light on Detail.

Per the Times,

In her speech, according to those familiar with her plans, Ms. Harris will call for expanding the child tax credit, along with higher taxes on corporations and high earners, in line with Mr. Biden’s budget proposals in office. She will also push for more affordable housing, among other measures. In her campaign, Ms. Harris has already called for raising the minimum wage and providing paid leave for workers. She has defended the independence of the Federal Reserve.

Other outlets reported that Kamala Harris will also introduce “anti-price gouging” legislation to prevent corporations from using inflation as an excuse to raise grocery prices faster than justified by cost increases. See The Guardian, Kamala Harris economic plan to focus on groceries, housing and healthcare

Hmm. Sounds specific to me. Perhaps if the Times had waited for the speech before declaring it was “light on details,” it would have had a firmer basis for its critique.

By comparison, when Trump gave a rambling speech on Wednesday that was billed as setting forth his “vision for the economy,” he descended into name-calling, conspiracy-mongering, and crowd-sizing. The Times’ headline was Trump Lobs Personal Attacks Against Harris in Economy-Focused Speech.

The Times summarized Trump's economic plans as follows:

During his speech, Mr. Trump vowed that he would end “costly, job-killing” regulations in order to bring prices down, though he did not specify which regulations. He promised to address housing costs by opening large tracts of federal land for development, imposing tariffs of up to 20 percent on America’s trading partners and expanding signature tax cuts he pushed while in the White House. He also said that his chief tool to fight rising prices would be boosting oil and gas production, even as the U.S. is currently producing significantly more crude oil today than it did under the Trump administration.

So, Trump's “economic” policy is (1) “Drill baby, drill,” (2) cut taxes for the wealthy, (3) reduce federal regulation, and (4) allow private developers to use federal land to build homes. Now that sounds “light on details,” no?

Ah, well! We aren’t going to fix the broken press before November. But the general acknowledgment that the media is broken is widespread and accepted as truth. See Jonathan Chait in NYMagazine, The Media’s Double Standard Favors Trump, Not Harris.

Per Chait,

If Harris avoids any substantive commitments by September and the media aren’t making a big issue out of it, I’d be surprised. Meanwhile, Donald Trump very much is skating by without serious policy commitments. He floated the idea of repealing Obamacare, then backed away, and is continuing to vaguely promise to make health care better for everybody without anybody paying for it. He has made positive noises about cutting retirement programs without specifying how. He is secretly promising huge tax cuts to wealthy donors, while saying he would “be okay” with setting the corporate tax rate just one point lower. The media are reporting on some of these questions . . . but most of Trump’s issue evasions have disappeared from the news, and the press has had almost no ability to force him to take a stand on any issue he prefers not to talk about. Harris, at least, is supposed to be working on an agenda. Trump won’t get more specific until he wins.

So, as the media whines about Kamala Harris's lack of a full-blown policy portfolio three weeks after entering the presidential race, it has failed to hold Trump to specifics on his grandiose, illusory promises.

One final note: Trump is touting “No taxes on Social Security.” Without regard to the merits of that proposal, Democrats introduced a bill in 2022 to eliminate taxes on Social Security. See Pensions & Investments, (1/31/2024), Bill reintroduced to eliminate federal taxes on Social Security benefits, extend solvency. (“Originally introduced in August 2022, the bill would repeal the taxation of Social Security benefits starting in 2025.”)

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[intelligentchristianlady]

What He Said

“We’re producing more energy than ever before in this nation. We have the strongest economy in the world, and we are beating China for the first time in decades. More people went to work this morning in America than at any other time in our nation’s history. So I’ve got a message to Donald Trump and all his negativity and his whining: Stop sh*t talking America. This is the greatest country on earth, and it’s time that we all start acting like it.”

– PA Governor Josh Shapiro

[meandmybigmouth]

Ask yourself America!. Was I better off when Trump was potus? because you truly were or? Because the GOP is telling you you were? did the 8+ trillion the gop stole from the treasury really get distributed evenly throughout all america?frigging churches got more money than a struggling american family!

[ausetkmt]

Nikki Haley Makes International Headlines After Stepping In Deep Doo-Doo...

Nikki knew exactly what she was doing

[top40gordy]

Watch "AOC brings the HOUSE DOWN with speech of the year" on YouTube

Legislative malpractice and journalistic negligence! We really need to pass an actual BUDGET! However, the debt ceiling crisis is manufactured. The majority of our lives that rely on the feds for salary, services, medical care, pensions, and Social Security⸺ which we all paid for BTW ⸺ are going to experience an existential threat in the next two weeks!

Please, listen up!

[theozgnomian]

The Slime Started With Reagan.

[grrlscientist]

Harris-backed filibuster change would ‘break’ the Senate, Moscow Mitch McConnell claims

Such a scenario would be likely only if Harris wins the presidency & Democrats keep the Senate & retake the House majority — currently a tall order

[sher-ee]

If the Trump Campaign has no connection to Heritage Foundation or Project 2025, and doesn’t know any of the people involved in it, how were they able to force the Director’s resignation?

That’s suspicious. That’s odd. 🧐

These idiots never think anything through.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Amanda Marcotte at Salon:

Republicans know that their war on legal, accessible birth control is unpopular. But that's not stopping them because, as they learned from convicted felon Donald Trump, the way to hide what you're up to is simple: Lie. Lie a lot. Lie every time you open your mouth. Lie with a straight face, and have faith that the weak "fact checks" offered by the mainstream media don't matter. The Republican comfort levels with lying are sky-high in the era of Trump. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., does it with a smirk, satisfied that no one can stop him. It is somehow still staggering how much they lie about birth control and their nefarious intentions toward it. The good news is that Democrats are taking action to cut through the GOP's thick forest of falsehoods.

On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., held a vote on the Right to Contraception Act, which guarantees the right of an individual "to obtain contraceptives and to voluntarily engage in contraception." The legislation also protects the right of licensed health care providers "to provide contraceptives, contraception, and information, referrals, and services related to contraception." Despite loudly insisting they have no desire to take away birth control, all but two Republicans voted against the bill. This follows a 2022 vote on the bill in the House, in which all but 8 Republicans voted against the right to use contraception.

Republicans' excuses this week ranged from obvious lies to obfuscation tactics which ultimately amount to lies. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tex., called the vote "phony" because "contraception, to my knowledge, is not illegal." But of course, no one is saying it's illegal — yet. The point of Wednesday's vote was preventive, to ensure the right to birth control in the face of overt calls, including from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to "revisit" the legality of contraception now that the right to abortion is no longer federally protected.  Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., whose State of the Union response introduced the nation to what a strange and dishonest character she is, went in for an appropriately weird lie. She falsely claimed the bill would "offer contraception like condoms to little kids." It does no such thing, though I have a lot more questions for Britt about how she thinks puberty works, and if it's induced by the sight of condoms instead of the natural process of growing up. 

Dishonest actors like Cornyn are being empowered by Trump, whose lies are even more hamfisted. Trump was recently asked by a reporter if he plans to restrict birth control and he simply said, "Some states are going to have different policy than others." Journalists know this is his way of avoiding a straight answer while letting the religious right know he supports any law they pass. Trump's campaign staff, clearly panicked that he'd let his anti-contraception stance slip, immediately took to Truth Social to claim he had "NEVER" and would "NEVER" support restrictions on birth control. This, however, is a blatant lie. During his time in the White House, Trump passed policies to cut off contraception coverage on health insurance, appointed health advisors who would like to see most methods banned completely, and ended federal funding for birth control at about 1,000 family planning clinics. 

Republicans use two big, interlocking lies to conceal an anti-contraception agenda from the public. First, they deny they intend to take birth control away, by limiting their definition of "birth control" to condoms and the rhythm method. To justify that shell game, they lie about how the most popular and effective forms of birth control work, claiming they are "abortion." They ping-pong between these two lies, so that the fact-checkers can never keep up. 

[...] So many lies in such a short sentence! Plan B is not an abortion. As the Washington Post noted, "Emergency contraceptive pills such as Plan B and Ella work by inhibiting or delaying ovulation, thereby preventing sperm from fertilizing the egg." The second lie is her implication that if folks "consider" something to be true, that makes it the equivalent of a fact. But many people also "consider" the Earth to be flat or believe Ernst is a hobgoblin in a lady suit. Doesn't make it true! Then there's the dishonesty of focusing only on Plan B, which is a drug stigmatized because it's taken after intercourse. What Ernst fails to mention, however, is that emergency contraception and the birth control pill are the same drug, just different doses. They work identically, by suppressing ovulation. The Christian right opposition to Plan B is a stalking horse for banning all hormonal contraception. Ernst's failure to admit that is a lie by omission. 

The Right To Contraception Act vote in the Senate laid bare the GOP’s hypocrisy on contraception: They seek to wage war on contraception and birth control by deceiving the people, including falsely equating most common forms of birth control and contraception to “abortifacients.”

[steve-pift]

[chuck-glisson]

Look what JD Vance "Did", he must have REALLY got his "Rock's Off" THAT NIGHT!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 29, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

“What a day we are having…. As a former director of emergency management, I know a disaster when I see one,” Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) said yesterday in the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, overseen by the Republican-led House Oversight Committee chaired by James Comer (R-KY). 

Moskowitz wasn’t wrong. After a hearing that lasted more than six hours, highlights of which Aaron Rupar of Public Notice reposted on social media, Neil Cavuto of the Fox News Channel was unimpressed. He said that although Comer had promised to present “a mountain of evidence” against President Biden, “none of the expert witnesses today presented…any proof for impeachment…. The way this was built up, ‘where there’s smoke there would be fire,’... but where’s there’s smoke today, we just got a lot more smoke.”   

The Republicans on the committee repeatedly talked about the volume of evidence they have uncovered, but they were never able to link their piles of evidence to the president. Under questioning, their own witnesses said there was not enough evidence to impeach President Biden.

It seemed as if Republicans have become so accustomed to being able to say anything they want to on right-wing media without being challenged they thought a congressional committee would operate the same way. When the Democrats pushed back, they seemed flummoxed. 

Comer lost control of the hearing as Democrats on the committee, thoroughly prepared, came out swinging. Representative Shontel Brown (D-OH) noted that “[t]he DOJ and FBI under former President Trump spent 5 long years looking into these Republican conspiracy theories, and debunked them. Repeatedly.” Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said, “The majority sits completely empty handed with no evidence of any presidential wrongdoing, no smoking gun, no gun, no smoke.” 

Representative Summer Lee (D-PA) called out the Republicans by name for holding a sham impeachment hearing instead of funding the government and working for their constituents. She noted that 217,583 people living in the districts of the Republicans on the committee would lose their paychecks because of the Republican shutdown.

Most notably, the Democrats called out the places where witnesses or committee members had deleted words in quotations that changed their meanings. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) emphasized that the four Republican witnesses said they had not presented any first-hand witness accounts of crimes committed by President Biden, while the committee was blocking the testimony of witnesses who could testify to actual facts. She also noted that members of Congress could say anything they wanted because they are covered by the Constitution’s Speech and Debate clause protecting them, 

Democrats also called out the many ways in which the Republicans were trying to discredit President Biden with speculation during an impeachment hearing to distract from the very real legal troubles of former president Trump. Representatives Mike Garcia (D-CA) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA) called out the Republicans for focusing on allegations about Hunter Biden and ignoring the very real issues involving Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who could not get a security clearance until Trump demanded he be given one, worked on Middle East issues in the White House, and then received a $2 billion investment from the Saudis shortly after Trump left office.

Most dramatically, Representative Greg Cesar (D-TX) asked the members of the Oversight Committee to raise their hands if they believe that both Hunter and Trump should be held accountable if they are found guilty on any of their indictments. The Democrats all raised their hands. The Republicans did not. 

One senior republican aide told CNN’s Melanie Zanona: “This is an unmitigated disaster.”

It did not get better after the hearing ended. A fact-check by CNN’s Daniel Dale, Marshall Cohen and Annie Grayer tore apart the committee’s “evidence.” Although Comer said in his opening remarks that the committee has uncovered how “the Bidens and their associates…raked in over $20 million between 2014 and 2019,” all but about $7 million went to Hunter Biden’s business associates, who according to the Washington Post had “legitimate business interests,” and there is no evidence that President Biden himself received any of this money. 

Comer’s accusation that money was wired to Joe Biden’s Delaware address did not note that the money was a loan, and it went to Hunter Biden’s bank account. Hunter Biden’s lawyers say that he used the Bidens’ Delaware home as his address at the time. 

Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) claimed that documents released Wednesday from 2020 showed that the Department of Justice was protecting President Biden. But in 2020 Trump, not Biden, was president, and the official who urged Biden senior’s name be kept off a search warrant did so because there was no legal basis to include him in a search warrant concerning a business involving his adult son. 

And on it went. 

Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark wrote: “The charitable view is that the first hearing was a dumpster fire inside a clown car wrapped in a fiasco. To put it mildly, the GOP did not bring their best.” 

At the end of the day, it seemed as if Democrats had flipped the script that has worked so well for so long on right-wing media. Rather than being on the defensive themselves, they put Republicans on the defensive. And because their hits were based in reality, rather than a false narrative, they left the Republican committee members with few options today other than to take to social media, once again, to boast of all the evidence they have accumulated against President Biden. 

The hearing was designed to give the extremists of the Freedom Caucus one of their demands, likely in the hope that they would agree to pass a stopgap funding bill that would at least make it look like the House Republicans were trying to fund the government. But today, when House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) brought to the floor an extreme bill that would have made 30% cuts to food assistance, housing, education, funding for border agents, and so on, and insisted on closing the border while funding the government for only another 30 days, 21 extremists voted with the Democrats to kill it by a vote of 198 to 232.

This was a harsh blow not only to McCarthy but to all the Republicans in swing districts. House leaders forced them all to vote for a measure chock full of enormously unpopular cuts and then snatched away the prize of funding the government. Such a political disaster speaks very poorly of McCarthy, who should have never put members of his conference in such a position. Losing 21 of his members in this vote is an embarrassment. The loss weakens the party for 2024: the Democratic ads will pretty much write themselves.

And the members refusing to fund the government simply don’t appear to care, either about their colleagues or their constituents.

At any point, McCarthy could bring up before the House the bipartisan measure already passed by the Senate. Democrats would then likely make up the votes he would lose in his own conference. But the extremists would then challenge his speakership, and that is apparently a challenge he is unwilling to brave.

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON