It Wasn’t Me

Ron Paul was quite the racist and still is since he hasn’t the integrity to apologize for it written in his name. Only repentance brings redemption.

Ron Paul’s Shaggy Defense:

Racism, like all forms of bigotry, is what it claims to oppose–victimology. The bigot is never to blame. Always is he besieged–by gays and their radical agenda, by women and their miniskirts, by fleet-footed blacks. It is an ideology of “not my fault.” It is not Ron Paul’s fault that people with an NAACP view of the world would twist his words. It is not Ron Paul’s fault that his newsletter trafficked in racism. It is not Ron Paul’s fault that he allowed people to author that racism in his name. It is anonymous political aids and writers, who now cowardly refuse to own their words. There’s always someone else to blame–as long as it isn’t Ron Paul, if only because it never was Ron Paul.

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic)

Ron Paul was quite the racist and still is since he hasn’t the integrity to apologize for it written in his name.  Only repentance brings redemption.

Yes, Macroeconomics 101 is Correct

“Some Simple Deficit Reduction Arithmetic”:

Kash Mansori notes that it takes more than a $100 cut in government spending to cut the deficit by $100. The reason is fairly simple. A cut in government spending causes output and income to fall, and the resulting fall in tax revenue increases the deficit offsetting some of the gain from the cut in spending…

When the policies they want to pursue have large negative effect on the deficit, the economy, employment etc. Republicans invent a story where the pain goes away. Somehow, the deficit actually falls, output goes up, and employment is stimulated even if it runs counter to obvious intuition. When tax cuts are the goal, we are told that tax cuts lead to so much additional effort that revenues actually go up and this reduces the deficit. We can cut taxes, and reduce the deficit! This magical answer is, of course, nonsense, but Republicans were able to hoodwink quite a few people into believing this.

(Via Economist’s View (Mark Thoma).)

Read Mansori’s entire article.  It’s worth it.  A few nuggets:

Somehow, this simple exercise in macroeconomic math seems beyond the reach of policymakers around the world.

  • Many Republicans (and some Democrats) in Washington continue to believe that they can close a $1 trillion deficit by simply cutting $1 trillion in spending, and are apparently hoping to use the debt ceiling vote to do exactly that.
  • The Cameron government in the UK embarked on an austerity program last year to try to reduce its budget deficit, and now mysteriously keeps missing its deficit reduction targets as the UK economy shrinks.
  • The Greek government was forced into enacting a number of austerity measures last year, and… surprise, surprise… is now missing its deficit targets.

Do Conservatives Ever Tell the Truth?

Yes, but not for long.  Mark Thoma shoots down the conservative think tank site that caught the Wall Street Journal, a paper I no longer subscribe to, in a lie and immediately reversed itself for “editorial reasons.”  There is no truth in conservative ideology when intellectual dishonesty of this sort is the rule.

“The Disappearing Tax Foundation Blog Post”:

I recently noted a post from The Tax Foundation accusing the Wall Street Journal editorial page of of ‘a textbook example of how to lie with statistics.’

Bruce Bartlett points to a Tax Foundation article that accuses the WSJs editorial page of ‘a textbook example of how to lie with statistics.’: The Wall Street Journals Misleading Income Chart. When the Tax Foundation questions someones reliability, you know a line has been crossed.

Brendan Nyhan notes today that the Tax Foundation post has been taken down [cached copy]:

… At this point, youre probably wondering why this post doesnt contain any links to the Tax Foundation website. The reason is that this sort of intra-movement criticism has a short shelf life — so short that the post had already vanished by this morning. Scott Hodge, the president of the Tax Foundation, confirmed that the post had been removed: ‘we withdrew the post for editorial and content reasons.’ He did not elaborate further.

Then, later, he does elaborate further — that is, if we never got around to it qualifies as elaboration:

Update 5/16 4:51 PM [EST]: More from Hodge via email:

Like all organizations we have an editorial process. The piece was posted before I could edit it. I thought it needed revision and editing. We never got around to posting a satisfactory version. Its a moot point now.

Leaving the original post up, and then doing a follow-up post explaining the problem with the first post (which has not yet been explained other than someone thought ‘it needed revision and editing’) would have been a more honest approach.

Either the editorial process is so bad that false claims appear on the site that are later removed without explanation — not a very encouraging sign for the site — or the post was removed because it told the truth. In any case, my statement that the Tax Foundations reliability is questionable is certainly validated by this episode.

(Via Economist’s View (Mark Thoma).)

Budget Sense and Nonsense « The Baseline Scenario

Budget Sense and Nonsense « The Baseline Scenario:

“So, let’s recap. The medium-term deficit problem was created by Bush tax cuts and by an unfunded Bush-era expansion of Medicare. The long-term deficit problem is all about Medicare. Yet the only solution that Republicans can think of is reducing spending–but not Medicare spending. Of course, this shouldn’t surprise us; Mitch McConnell gave us this, after all:*”
CBPP Deficit Analysis
Mitch McConnell Flip Flop Press Releases

(Via The Baseline Scenario.)

A picture is worth a thousand words.

MSNBC’s Ratigan battles McCaughey – Ben Smith – POLITICO.com

MSNBC’s Ratigan battles McCaughey – Ben Smith – POLITICO.com:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

(Via Politico.com.)

McCaughey gets her rear end handed to her. This is what happens when someone demands an actual answer to a question.

Technorati Tags:

On Liars

Twenty-six Lies About H.R. 3200 | FactCheck.org:

“A few readers alerted us to the fact that a state representative in North Carolina, Rep. Curtis Blackwood, published a version of the e-mail in a newsletter to constituents, telling them that while going through e-mail, he came across ‘some interesting information on the Democrats’ big health care bill, H.R. 3200. … While this is federal legislation and not state, the topic is of enough significance that I thought many of you would be interested in reading it.’ We’d refer Rep. Blackwood to our special report on viral messages titled, ‘That Chain E-mail Your Friend Sent to You Is (Likely) Bogus. Seriously.’
We can trace the origins of this collection of claims to a conservative blogger who issued his instant and mostly mistaken analyses as brief ‘tweets’ sent via Twitter as he was paging through the 1,017-page bill. The claims have been embraced as true and posted on hundreds of Web sites, and forwarded in the form of chain e-mails countless times. But there’s hardly any truth in them.”

(Via FactCheck.org.)

And this is why I said that the GOP leadership is behaving in a fashion devoid of morals, truth, and decency. A congressman, with access to the actual bill and the staff to read it, sends a chain email (!) from a conservative blogger, one with a reading comprehension problem, to his constituents. Now that’s constituent service for you.

Faux News

Media Matters – Goler reverses meaning of Obama quote to falsely suggest he supports European-style health care:

(Via Media Matters.)

Now they are just straight lying. How can this network have any credibility?

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive – Fact Check: Is Obama ‘palling around with terrorists’? « – Blogs from CNN.com

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive – Fact Check: Is Obama ‘palling around with terrorists’? « – Blogs from CNN.com:

“Verdict: False. There is no indication that Ayers and Obama are now ‘palling around,’ or that they have had an ongoing relationship in the past three years. Also, there is nothing to suggest that Ayers is now involved in terrorist activity or that other Obama associates are.”

(Via CNN Political Ticker.)

Palin supporters call her “real.” My question is: Real what? Nasty? Liar? Honorless? A candidate for the presidency with terrorists? I can’t even say it without laughing.

FactCheck.org: Energetically Wrong

FactCheck.org: Energetically Wrong:

“Palin claims Alaska ‘produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy.’ That’s not true.
Alaska did produce 14 percent of all the oil from U.S. wells last year, but that’s a far cry from all the ‘energy’ produced in the U.S.
Alaska’s share of domestic energy production was 3.5 percent, according to the official figures kept by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
And if by ‘supply’ Palin meant all the energy consumed in the U.S., and not just produced here, then Alaska’s production accounted for only 2.4 percent.”

(Via FactCheck.org.)

I sure hope Obama gets his a$$ in gear and stops letting these people get away with public bald faced lies. The media is impotent in the face of it.

FactCheck.org: McCain-Palin Distorts Our Finding

FactCheck.org: McCain-Palin Distorts Our Finding:

“A McCain-Palin ad has FactCheck.org calling Obama’s attacks on Palin ‘absolutely false’ and ‘misleading.’ That’s what we said, but it wasn’t about Obama.
Our article criticized anonymous e-mail falsehoods and bogus claims about Palin posted around the Internet. We have no evidence that any of the claims we found to be false came from the Obama campaign.
The McCain-Palin ad also twists a quote from a Wall Street Journal columnist. He said the Obama camp had sent a team to Alaska to ‘dig into her record and background.’ The ad quotes the WSJ as saying the team was sent to ‘dig dirt.’
Update, Sept. 10: Furthermore, the Obama campaign insists that no researchers have been sent to Alaska and that the Journal owes them a correction.”

(Via FactCheck.org.)

If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, then blind them with …