Tag Archives: liar

Fiscal cliff: “You can’t make big deals with a totally untrustworthy negotiating partner.”

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Steve Benen: “To understand why constructive negotiations between the parties have proven to be so very difficult, look no further than this message from one of the Republican Party’s purported “rising stars.”

[...]  Either way, the far-right Floridian has summarized a larger problem in just 135 characters. Rubio wants Americans to believe Republicans didn’t push for chained CPI — which would reduce Social Security benefits — as part of the ongoing fiscal talks. We know this isn’t even close to being true — indeed, by yesterday afternoon, GOP senators had agreed to drop this demand that they’d fought for earlier in the day.

Paul Krugman added that Rubio’s bizarre falsehood is a reminder why it’s “crazy” to think Republicans would ever agree to a sensible Grand Bargain: “You can’t make big deals with a totally untrustworthy negotiating partner.”

It’s this kind of nonsense from the FOXpublicans that ensures we’ll be going over the cliff today. Fortunately, going over won’t be the end of the world.

Jon Stewart: Mitt Romney–top notch Bain Capital venture capitalist

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Source: sandandglass

What great business “experience” Mitt would bring to the White House!

Mitt Romney proves that right wing, tea party ideology is dead in America

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The right wing has lost the election of 2012.

The evidence for this is overwhelming, yet it is the year’s best-kept secret. Mitt Romney would not be throwing virtually all of his past positions overboard if he thought the nation were ready to endorse the full-throated conservatism he embraced to win the Republican nomination.

If conservatism were winning, does anyone doubt that Romney would be running as a conservative? Yet unlike Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, Romney is offering an echo, not a choice. His strategy at the end is to try to sneak into the White House on a chorus of me-too’s.

The right is going along because its partisans know Romney has no other option. This, too, is an acknowledgment of defeat, a recognition that the grand ideological experiment heralded by the rise of the tea party has gained no traction. It also means that conservatives don’t believe that Romney really believes the moderate mush he’s putting forward now. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if the conservatives are forgiving Romney because they think he is lying, what should the rest of us think?

— E.J. Dionne: How the right wing lost in 2012

You know what’s disgraceful? Mitt Romney.

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John Avlon:

“At a moment when sovereign U.S. soil was under attack by Islamist radicals, the Romney campaign tried to tie the president to those extremists attacking us, saying that he had “sympathy” with their cause. And then, in the clear light of morning, Mitt Romney doubled-down on the claim, repeating it — perhaps for fear of appearing weak — and his campaign released talking points to hammer home the point. He picked precisely the wrong time, and over the wrong issue, to go ‘bold.’”

“This is not just politics as usual, but something far lower. By point of comparison, when Ronald Reagan was confronted with the downed-helicopter rescue mission ordered by President Jimmy Carter to save the American hostages in the U.S. Embassy in Iran, he did not see it as opportunity to score political points. Instead, Reagan said, ‘This is the time for us as a nation and a people to stand united.’ Likewise, George H.W. Bush, then also running for president, said ‘I unequivocally support the president of the United States — no ifs, ands or buts — and it certainly is not a time to try to go one-up politically. He made a difficult, courageous decision.’

“[...] The dishonest drumbeat that Obama travels around the world compulsively apologizing for America is a core Romney campaign tactic. This time, he went definitively too far — trying to score petty political points with incomplete information at a time when our nation’s embassies were being attacked overseas on the anniversary of September 11. It was disgraceful.”


souce: stfuhypocrisy


via: isensechange


via: Bob Cesca

Romney’s long-planned, politically-coordinated “outrage” over Libya: the Apology Meme

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Kevin Drum: The Romney campaign was so eager to issue its statement of outrage that they initially scheduled it for release at 12:01 am. Why? So that no one could claim they were trying to score political points on 9/11. But eventually their giddiness got the better of them and they let it go late Tuesday night. These guys just don’t know when to quit. I don’t think there’s anything left that they won’t say or do if they think it might give them a 1% pop in the polls. They really don’t respect anything at all anymore. — There’s Nothing Left That the Romney Campaign Respects | Mother Jones

If you’re still not convinced that Romney’s ‘outrage’ over the embassy attacks was a long-planned and coordinated political opportunity — to be revealed when the right situation came along — see the RNC’s Chair’s tweet at 12:01 AM ET on 9/12/2012:

Dave Weigel | Timeline: The Romney Campaign’s Odd Response to the Embassy Protests | Slate - At 12:01 a.m. ET, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus tweets:

Screen shot 2012-09-12 at 9.29.46 AM

Notice that the timestamp says “9:01 p.m.” Twitter’s website is cued to Pacific Time. Both the RNC and the Romney campaign were honoring a 9/11 embargo that ended only when 9/12 came to the Eastern time zone.

John Caissidy: Think about that for a moment. Sometime on Tuesday evening, presumably, the best minds that Romney has gathered around him, convened by conference call, or offered their thoughts individually, and all of them thought it was a capital idea, solely on the basis of statements from the Embassy in Cairo, to accuse Obama and his Administration of expressing sympathy “with those who waged the attacks.” Not only that, but there’s no suggestion that the following morning—as Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, and others were busy paying tribute to Ambassador Stevens—any of these sages thought to call Romney up and persuade him to zip it. Why? Well, it is widely thought that Romney’s political advisers aren’t the brightest bulbs—his entire campaign has been a litany of errors. What has been less remarked upon is the makeup of Romney’s foreign-policy team. For a former businessman who claims to willing to hire the best and smartest regardless of background, it is a remarkably unimpressive and ideologically driven group, consisting largely of washed up neocons and Cold Warriors, many of whom served in the Administration of George W. Bush. — Mitt Romney’s Libya Blunder Reflects Larger Failings : The New Yorker

The Washington Post: Minutes after Romney’s news conference [Wednesday, when he doubled-down], inside a small campaign office in a drab Jacksonville strip mall, a door down from the Blazin Reptiles exotic pet shop, Obama addressed the nation surrounded by the grandeur of his office. In the Rose Garden, with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at his side and the White House behind him, the president mourned the loss of American lives and vowed that “justice will be done.” [...] About 150 supporters had assembled at Romney’s campaign office here, expecting a small rally. Volunteers sat at phone bank tables, supporters held up campaign signs that read, “Florida Loves Mitt,” and shiny patriotic bunting lined the walls. But aides quickly transformed the room into a setting more suitable for a formal news conference. They removed the signs and erected a blue curtain that covered the patriotic bunting. Four American flags were posted behind the wooden lectern where Romney would speak. Aides escorted supporters outside to wait on the sidewalk, where dozens pressed their faces against the storefront windows to watch the candidate, dressed in a dark suit, crisp white shirt and blue tie, deliver his remarks. “Americans woke up this morning with tragic news and felt heavy hearts as they considered that individuals that served in our diplomatic corps were brutally murdered across the world,” Romney said. “This attack on American individuals and embassies is outrageous. It’s disgusting. It breaks the hearts of all of us.” — Romney repeats sharp criticism of Obama after Benghazi, Cairo attacks

Now we know the story behind those people pressed to the windows outside:

Mitt Romney scored huge tax benefits in 2010 using an “active” status at Bain Capital

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DID YOU KNOW that while Mitt Romney tells us he isn’t involved with Bain Capital and his ‘blind trust’ investments there, he tells the IRS that he’s an active participant. Why? Because you get more money from the IRS with an active, rather than passive, investment status:

The distinction is valuable, for the IRS treats passive and active income and losses differently. If a passive investment loses money, the taxpayer can only write off that loss if passive gains have also been made. But active losses can be written off at a 35 percent rate and deducted from the taxpayer’s ordinary income. In other words, a taxpayer wants active losses, not passive losses. So by describing many of his investments as active, Romney saves himself millions of dollars in taxes.

With those active investments, he is also securing a tax break few Americans enjoy: When he wins, he’s paying a 15 percent rate on the gain. When he loses, he’s writing it off at 35 percent, meaning that tax policy is subsidizing Romney’s risk in his Bain investments.

In other words, Romney didn’t build that, at least not without taxpayer backing.

So while Romney tells us he retroactively retired from Bain in 1999 (to avoid criticism about layoffs and other controversies) – and as Huffington Post notes when “tax experts charged that he benefited from legally dubious tax avoidance strategies employed by Bain, his campaign noted that the investments are kept in a blind trust completely out of his control” — we now learn that as recently as 2010 he was telling the IRS that he was actively involved so that he can grab the better tax rates on investment wins and losses.

That doesn’t sound like a retirement or a “blind” trust. Unbelievably, this man will be nominated as the GOP’s presidential candidate this week, and you have to ask: who is he lying to — the American public or the IRS?

And where are the rest of his tax returns?

On Medicare: Romney and Ryan are “very similar” and “very different”

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Steve Benen reports on the impressive clarity of Team Romney-Ryan on Medicare:

Mitt Romney, yesterday, asked about Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan: “[M]y plan for Medicare, it’s very similar to his plan for Medicare.”

Romney surrogate John Sununu, this morning, asked about the similarities in Romney’s Medicare plan to Paul Ryan’s policy: “But it’s very different.”

I’m glad we got this straightened out. Here I thought the Romney-Ryan campaign might have a muddled message on the issue they’ve put at the center of the 2012 presidential race.

To help clarify matters, Romney’s policy director, Lanhee Chen, told TPM, “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have always been fully committed to repealing Obamacare, ending President Obama’s $716 billion raid on Medicare and tackling the serious fiscal challenges our country faces.”

Except, as even the most ignorant policy directors surely know, every penny of savings Obama found in Medicare has been included in Paul Ryan’s budget, which Romney endorsed. (And if they repeal Obamacare, they’ll take away benefits for seniors.)

Andrew Sullivan reviews Romney’s new Medicare ad:

…$716 billion is how much Obamacare cuts from Medicare spending – but the ad implies this is some kind of cut to Medicare recipient’s benefits; it’s not. Pema Levy explains: Cuts made in the Affordable Care Act are to future growth and come from reimbursement reductions to hospitals, Medicaid prescription drugs and private insurance plans under Medicare Advantage. Ryan’s cuts come from shifting Medicare from its current form to subsidies for seniors to buy care themselves.

The Ryan plan also makes the same cuts, only by instituting a voucher program, all of which Romney is trying to murky-up by saying he’ll put that $716 billion “back”. The bottom line is they’re spinning another whopper here, just like in the welfare ads.

If the Romney campaign didn’t spin whoppers daily, they’d have nothing to deflect attention away from his business “experience” with Bain Capital and the 2002 Olympics, or why he won’t release his tax returns like every other presidential candidate. And Romney would also have to actually talk about how different his vision for America is from President Obama’s.

Mitt Romney’s bid to become liar-in-chief

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“When challenged about an untruthful statement, Romney’s tactic is to deny he said it – lie trumping lie.”

Michael Cohen summarizes the lies which Romney has been repeatedly called out for, yet he continues to use:

President Obama:

  • “My personal favorite in Romney’s cavalcade of untruths is his repeated assertion that President Obama has apologized for America. [...] President Obama never went around the world and apologized for America – and yet, even after multiple news organizations have pointed out this is a “pants on fire” lie, Romney keeps making it. Indeed, the “Obama apology tour”, along with the president bowing down to the King of Saudi Arabia, are practically the lodestars of the GOP’s criticism of Obama’s foreign policy performance (the Saudi thing isn’t true either).”

The stimulus / private-sector / public-sector jobs:

  • “According to Romney, “that stimulus didn’t put more private-sector people to work.” While one can quibble over whether the stimulus went far enough, the idea that it didn’t create private-sector jobs has no relationship to reality. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus bill created more than 3m jobs – a view shared by 80% of economists polled by the Chicago Booth School of Business (only 4% disagree).”
  • “Romney also likes to argue that the stimulus didn’t help private-sector job growth, but rather helped preserve government jobs. In fact, the Obama years have been witness to massive cuts in government employment. While the private sector is not necessarily “doing fine”, as Obama said in a recent White House press conference, it’s doing a heck of a lot better than the public sector.”

Taxes:

Auto bailout:

Obamacare / Affordable Care Act:

  • “Then, there is the recent Romney nugget that the Obama administration passed Obamacare with the full knowledge that it “would slow down the economic recovery in this country” and that the White House “knew that before they passed it”. It’s an argument so clearly spun from whole cloth that according to Jonathan Chait, the acerbic political columnist for New York Magazine, Romney is “Just Making Stuff Up Now”.”
  • “Also of Obamacare, Romney has said that it will lead to the government taking over 50% of the economy (not true) – its true cost can’t be computed (that’s why we have a Congressional Budget Office in the United States); that it will create to “a massive European-style entitlement” (many liberals wish this were true, but alas, it is not); and that it will lead to a government-run healthcare system (a lie so pervasive that it’s practically become shorthand for Republicans – yet it too, like the infamous made-up death panels of the health care debate, is simply not accurate).”

Why does Romney lie? Cohen explains: “The lying from the Romney campaign is so out-of-control that Steve Benen, a blogger and producer for the Rachel Maddow show compiles a weekly list of “Mitt’s Mendacity” that is chockfull of new untruths. [...] Romney has figured out a loophole – one can lie over and over, and those lies quickly become part of the political narrative, practically immune to “fact-checking”. Ironically, the more Romney lies, the harder it then becomes to correct the record. Even if an enterprising reporter can knock down two or three falsehoods, there are still so many more that slip past. [...] As… Steve Benen told me: ‘Romney gets away with it because he and his team realize contemporary political journalism isn’t equipped to deal with a candidate who lies this much, about so many topics, so often.’“

“Quite simply, the United States has never been witness to a presidential candidate, in modern American history, who lies as frequently, as flagrantly and as brazenly as Mitt Romney.”

Mitt Romney is constantly lying: the one about tax cuts for the one percent

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Mitt’s huge, fat whopper of a lie: “One of the absolute requirements of any tax reform that I have in mind is that people who are the high end, whether you call them the 1 percent, 2 percent, half a percent, the people at the high end will still pay the same share of the tax burden they’re paying now. I’m not looking for a tax cut for the very wealthiest.” — Mitt Romney on CBS’ Face the Nation 

Bob Cesca says “unless Romney just yesterday revised his tax plan, he lied about it on national television.” That’s based on [an] analysis from Citizens for Tax Justice [from] a couple weeks ago:

Romney wants to lower current tax rates for everyone by 20 percent. This benefits the wealthy most: Dropping the highest bracket from 35 percent to 28 percent, for example, yields a much bigger savings for those at the top than lowering the 15 percent bracket to 12 percent brings for taxpayers in that group.

Pat Garafalo explains: Romney himself has admitted that his tax plan can’t even be scored due to its lack of specificity. The few deductions he has mentioned would come nowhere close to covering the cost of his massive tax cut for the rich. And even if Romney did manage to close enough loopholes and eliminate enough deductions so that the rich were paying the same amount that they are today, the economy would have to grow at a record rate to keep his tax plan from adding to the deficit.

Romney economics: fire people for the simple crime of working in government

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NOTE TO ALL GOVERNMENT WORKERS: Mitt Romney hates you.

Jed Lewison points out the alarmingly stupid lie that Mitt Romney told his audience in Craig, Colorado last week:

That stimulus he put in place, it didn’t help private sector jobs, it helped preserve government jobs, and the one place we should have cut back was on government jobs. We have a 145,000 more government workers under this president. Let’s send them home and put you back to work!

Mitt Romney’s 145,000 claim isn’t accurate, but even if it were, it’s amazing that Romney believes firing tens of thousands of Americans would be good for the economy. The way Romney puts it, firing public sector workers would create jobs in the private sector, but that’s nonsense. The economy isn’t zero-sum game: You don’t need to fire someone to create a job. In fact, every time someone loses their job, no matter whether they are in the private or public sector, the economy as a whole takes a hit.

But Romney’s crazy economic theory is not even grounded in reality—under Obama, public sector employment has dropped, while private sector employment has grown. Obama signed the stimulus in February of 2009. Since then, public sector employment has dropped by 608,000.Private sector employment, meanwhile, has increased by 760,000. Even if you just look at federal employment (which is but a small fraction of the overall public sector workforce), only 26,000 jobs have been added, a slower pace of growth than in the private sector.

Just as Paul Krugman recently said, Obama’s actually “been the one who’s been doing what Republicans say is the right answer:”

Just over three years into Reagan’s first term, government jobs grew by 3.1 percent; at the same time during Obama’s tenure, they’ve been cut by 2.7 percent. Hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs have been shed in recent years. Government jobs also grew under President George W. Bush, which helped keep unemployment down during most of his two terms. “After there was a recession under Ronald Reagan, government employment went way up. It went up after the recessions under the first George Bush and the second George Bush.”

FACT: The only time government employment has gone DOWN during a recession has been under Obama.

Romney is using the old “Republican Strategy” on the GOP’s working class, trailer park dwelling base voters — all of whom have been conditioned to believe that if others have something they don’t (like a job with a living wage), it’s because those ‘others’ have taken something away from them personally. How else are you going to justify to people who will never be rich, who are living paycheck to paycheck, that the wealthiest need more money and they will need to get by on less?

It would seem Romney has some kind of personal vendetta for public sector workers. Mitt’s worth about $250 million and has said federal workers make more than him. Despite all of this, how many working and middle class conservatives will vote for him anyway? (ALL of them.)

The ‘new Romney math’ on jobs he created: 100,000 is now thousands, and that number is also questionable

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Romney lies about pretty much everything — of course he’s going to claim he created 100,000 jobs! Which one of his potential voters would bother to look that up or care?

Besides, if Mitt is elected president and taxes are cut further for the one-percent, himself included, maybe he’ll hire another housekeeper for that house they’re remodeling — the one with the car elevator. And maybe they’ll need a pool boy too. Lower unemployment numbers are just an election away, people.

Romney Campaign Massively Downgrades The Number Of Jobs It Claims He Created From 100,000 To ‘Thousands’

BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller reports that, in the wake of the Obama campaign’s new ad attacking Romney’s record at Bain, the “new Romney jobs math” is significantly more modest than the old. This time, the campaign is asserting that Romney created a meager and vague “thousands of jobs” at Bain and “tens of thousands” of jobs as governor of Massachusetts.

This is nothing less than an admission from the Romney campaign that their 100,000 jobs claim was entirely bogus, and acceptance that Romney created vastly fewer jobs than he claimed he had just a few months ago. It’s a welcome return to reality, but calls into question any piece of evidence the campaign puts forward. (In 1994, he claimed in an ad that he created 10,000 jobs at Bain.)

Meanwhile, even the “thousands of jobs” figure should be suspect, as the evidence the campaign offers to support it is an editorial from the right-wing Washington Examiner endorsing Romney.

[...] And his assertion on his record as governor also fails to include the context that his state was 47th out of 50 on job creation.

You know what? The only jobs we know for sure that Romney has ‘created’ are four housekeeping positions for the personal homes of Mitt and Ann “Hardest Job in the World!” Romney. And those four lucky, lucky working women are paid only half of the lowest range of an average housekeeper’s salary by Mitt and Marie Antoinette who, out of an income worth a quarter-billion, paid their four housekeepers a whopping $20,603 –between the four of them.

Mitt also keeps people like these men gainfully employed as well:

VIDEO: In 1995, Ron Paul was very excited about his newsletter “The Ron Paul Survival Report”

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In 1995 Video, Ron Paul Takes Credit For The Ron Paul Survival Report: Under fire for racist articles, Ron Paul has distanced himself from newsletters that went out for years under his name. But this previously unnoticed video reveals that before the controversies, Paul eagerly took credit for the newsletters.


…
Recently, Ron Paul has blamed ‘ghost writers’ for the content of those newsletters:

In an apology for racist newsletters that went out under his name twenty years ago, GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul’s campaign issued a statement on Friday acknowledging that Paul had been guilty of a “lack of oversight” and should have paid more attention to the “ghost writers” who were responsible for the distasteful articles.

According to Reuters, in addition to the newsletter, whose contents have been known and discussed for years, a direct-mail ad for the newsletter has now surfaced that warns about a “coming race war” and a “federal-homosexual cover-up” to play down the impact of AIDS. The ad was sent out over Paul’s signature in 1993, at a time when he was not a member of Congress..

“Dr. Paul did not write that solicitation,” Paul spokesman Jesse Benton wrote in an email on Friday. “It does not reflect his thoughts and is out of step with the message he has espoused for 40 years.”