• “Did Bush lie us into war? Absolutely not.”
• “The president never authorized torture. He did just the opposite.”
• Did Bush drag his feet about global warming? No. “He was aggressive and smart on this front.”
• Rove even claims that spending was “far below average” under Bush, even though Bush turned a budget surplus into a record deficit, and nearly doubled the national debt.
• Rove doesn’t regret the Iraq war (although he does admit that it might not have been waged if it had been known that there were no WMDs there), but he does regret that he didn’t attack the war’s critics more fiercely. Seriously.
• Claims that Bush administration officials tried to establish a link between Iraq and 9/11? Rove says that those accusations were a “dangerous falsehood”.
• Bush’s slanderous attacks on McCain during the 2000 presidential primary? Rove claims that Bush apologized (he didn’t) and that McCain rejected Bush’s apology as inadequate.
• Rove claims that Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” bill was “one of the great modern domestic policy successes”.
• Bush kept reading “My Pet Goat” after being told of the first 9/11 attack because he “wanted to project calm”.
• Rove tries to blame the outing of Valerie Plame on Bob Novak, who is conveniently now dead.

UPDATE: More quotes from Rove on CNN.

Related posts:

1. On Second Thought… © Jim Morin Please Share / Save...
2. What a difference a new administration makes © Daryl Cagle Please Share / Save...
3. A Farewell to Bush I have often complained that the American media isn’t doing...

For example, did you know that “carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life on earth”? I don’t disagree, but manure is also a highly beneficial ingredient for plants, but that doesn’t mean that I want to be covered in it. And water is arguably the most important ingredient for all life, but if the ice caps keep melting it is going to cause floods of biblical proportions. Just because something is essential for life, doesn’t mean that more of it is always better. You can have too much of a good thing (for example, salt).

The biggest argument presented by the resolution is:

WHEREAS, more than 31,000 American scientists collectively signed a petition to President Obama stating: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, or methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide will produce many beneficial effects on the natural plant and animal environments of the earth”

They fail to mention that said petition was circulated in 1998, ten years before Obama was elected president, and was debunked even back then (before the bulk of the research confirming global warming was done).

But my favorite part of the resolution is this line:

That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative;

Wow, the use of all those big words almost convinced me that they must know what they are talking about, until I noticed that they used the word “astrological” rather than “astronomical”. I guess this bill was just born under a bad sign.

And just to be picky, someone should learn the difference between the words “effect” and “affect”.

UPDATE: A reader points out that the use of the word “thermological” is a gaffe as well — thermology is the medical use of infrared imaging for diagnostic purposes (often used to detect breast cancer), and has nothing to do with global warming.

Oh, and they appear to have just made up the word “interrelativity”. Not in any dictionary I know of. Not sure what it would mean if it was a word!

Related posts:

1. White Corpuscles Attempt to Rid America of Festering Infection From Pundit Kitchen Please Share / Save...
2. If something is too big to fail, all it can do is fail A fascinating article in Ars Technica about Internet Service Providers...
3. West Virginians, in their own words http://www.236.com/news/2008/05/14/west_virginian_voters_greatest_1_6518.php I guess because he is another race, I’m sort...

Note that this is a followup to this video.

Related posts:

1. Republicans are fearful of health care reform not because it will be bad, but because it will be good Senator Bernie Sanders makes the excellent point. The Republicans try...
2. Reforming Health Care Reform The media has been concentrating on the more lurid and...
3. The Senate health care reform bill doesn’t fund abortions One of the big issues surrounding health care reform is...

© Tom Toles

Not only was Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) singlehandedly blocking unemployment benefits for millions of Americans, he also put a hold on all of Obama’s nominees last week. The Senate ground to a halt, with the economy following closely. This is what some politicians will do in the name of partisan bickering.

The only good news is that Bunning apparently finally realized how much he was pissing everyone off, and ended his filibuster on the unemployment benefits. But he had one last procedural maneuver up his sleeve: an amendment to the bill that was ironically quickly scuttled by a procedural maneuver. Of course, that didn’t stop Bunning from hypocritically deriding the move as “a procedural gimmick”. I guess it isn’t a procedural gimmick when the Republicans do it.

No related posts.

There is only one problem. Almost everything he says is a complete fabrication. As has been already pointed out, the Republicans have used reconciliation in order to avoid filibusters four times as often as the Democrats, and the majority of health care legislation in the last 30 years has been passed using budget reconciliation.

Not only that, but Hatch himself has often voted for the use of reconciliation in the past, when it favored Republicans.

Why are Republicans so blatantly lying about the use of reconciliation? They must be awfully afraid of health care reform passing.

UPDATE: As usual, Rachel Maddow says it far better than I did:

UPDATE2: Newsweek has an excellent article on the history of reconciliation. Needless to say, they describe what the Republicans are parotting against reconciliation as “ludicrous talking points”.

Related posts:

1. Nuclear Reconciliation Republicans are having a nuclear meltdown about Democrats using the...
2. If You Voted for the Medicare Drug Benefit, Shut up about Health Care Reform In Forbes Magazine, Bruce Bartlett (an advisor to Ronald Reagan...
3. Republicans don’t want to cut Medicare, they want to gut it Many of the Republican talking points during the Health care...

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) wrote a letter to Obama this week, urging him to rule out the possibility, saying:

The use of expedited reconciliation process to push through more dramatic changes to a health care bill of such size, scope and magnitude is unprecedented.

My favorite quote, however, is from Senator John Kyl (R-AZ), who doubles down on his whoppers, saying that budget reconciliation “was never designed for a large, comprehensive piece of legislation such as health care, as you all know. It’s a budget exercise, and that’s why some refer to it as the ‘nuclear option.’”

Note how he says “as you all know” when (as we shall see in a minute) what he is really saying is “as you all know is false”. But the killer line is when he says “some refer to it as the ‘nuclear option’”. The “some” (he cunningly doesn’t name) is actually Fox News. Fox News, in their official capacity as the propaganda arm of the Republican party, has been trying to make it sound like the Democrats are being hypocritical by proposing the use of budget reconciliation, because they opposed the “nuclear option” a few years ago when Republicans were in power:

• In a Fox News Special Report, they “report” that reconciliation “was once called the nuclear option” and show video clips of Democrats criticizing the nuclear option when Republicans were trying to use it. Their special (fair and balanced) report then concludes “Thank you for establishing beyond all doubt that politicians are hypocrites.”
• Speaking on the same topic, Sean Hannity asks “What do you make of the hypocrisy?”.
• Greta Van Susteren’s show talks about “Democratic hypocrisy” noting that “years ago when it came to Republicans using reconciliation, many Democrats were singing a different tune.”
• Glenn Beck asks “Why are they threatening this so much? Especially when they all stood up and said it was such a bad idea.”
• And in a statement that is inherently ironic, host Brian Kilmeade of Fox and Friends says “The problem with reconciliation is the Republicans say it’s an outrage.” Oh, I see, according to Fox News the problem is what Republicans say about something, not that there is any actual problem.

In fact, Fox News is just plain lying when they say that budget reconciliation is the same thing as the “nuclear option”. They think that their viewers are too stupid to remember that the “nuclear option” was a Republican scheme to change Senate filibuster rules on judicial nominees so they could stack the courts with right-wing ideologues. The term itself was coined by former Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) and has absolutely nothing to do with budget reconciliation.

The Budget Reconciliation process is not a change to Senate rules at all. Republicans themselves have used the budget reconciliation process many, many times, including to pass Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 as well as the 2005 “Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act” (note the word “Reconciliation” in the title of the bill). Republicans also tried to use budget reconciliation to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling (but failed since some Republicans opposed it).

So equating budget reconciliation with the “nuclear option” (which Democrats rightly opposed) is just a lie. What about claims that budget reconciliation isn’t used for health care bills? That one is laughably false. A story in (of all places) NPR points out, the overwhelming majority of health care legislation in the past 30 years has been passed using budget reconciliation.

For example, take COBRA, the law that allows you to keep your company’s health care plan for a limited time after you are laid off. The only reason it is called COBRA is because it was a (small) part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985. The name COBRA has nothing to do with health care, it is all about budget reconciliation. Not only that, but COBRA was passed when the Republicans were in power.

In addition to COBRA, the childrens’ health program called CHIP, major expansions of medicare, and many other bills were passed using reconciliation. Not only have most recent major pieces of health care legislation been passed using budget reconciliation, but the majority of those were passed when Republicans controlled at least one chamber of Congress.

Bottom line: budget reconciliation is not the “nuclear option”. It is not new, and it is not a change to Senate rules. In fact, it is used all the time, by both Republicans and Democrats. It has been used to pass the majority of health care legislation in the past 30 years, by Republicans more often than by Democrats. So for the Republicans to accuse the Democrats of hypocrisy for using budget reconciliation is the height of hypocrisy!

Note that it is also instructive to examine how the Republican propaganda machine works. Step one: Andrew Breitbart shows a video on his blog equating budget reconciliation with the ‘nuclear option’. Then Fox News piles on with story after story, even though it is clear that they know they are lying. Hannity, Van Susteren, Dick Morris, Bret Baier, and Bill Sammon all falsely compared budget reconciliation with the “nuclear option”. They even use a graphic of a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb:

And finally, a Republican senator, picking his words carefully to ensure plausible deniability, says that “some refer to it as the ‘nuclear option’”. He doesn’t say that reconciliation is the same thing as the nuclear option, because he knows that is false and he could get called on it. The other mainstream media (other than NPR) don’t bother to point out the lie, and stupid voters end up thinking that the Democrats are being hypocritical, when it is the Republicans who are knowingly lying through their teeth.

UPDATE: PolitiFact rates as True the claim that Republicans have used budget reconciliation more than Democrats. In fact, they looked at the cases where budget reconciliation was specifically used to avoid a Senate filibuster, and find that Republicans used it four times more often than Democrats.

Related posts:

1. McCain swings Nuclear McCain is trying to make energy the centerpiece of his...
2. Do As I Say, Not As I Do The Washington Post published a long op-ed piece by Senator...
3. The Republican Spirit of Cooperation You might recall the term “nuclear option” from 2005, back when the...

Does this photo of President Obama in the Oval Office convey anything to you about his attitude? Would you speak with the Chief of Staff, your Chief Economic Adviser, and your Senior Adviser with your feet up on the Resolute Desk — a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880?

We should inundate the White House with emails demanding he keep his feet off of our furniture. This arrogant, immature & self-centered man has no sense of honor, or of simple decency. While this posture is disrespectful in any culture, it is absolutely never done in any executive setting. Further, in over half of the cultures of the world, it is recognized not only as disrespectful, but as an extreme insult.

He thinks of himself as a king — and not as a servant of the people, humbly occupying our White House for his term in office. Electing him was an enormous mistake — and will cost us in many ways, for generations.

There is a slightly longer version of the same email on the wonderful urban legend site Snopes.com, along with a clear rebuttal of the points in the email.

But the best part are these photographs:

Now, I’m not willing to go so far as to accuse the people who are forwarding this letter of racism, since it is clear that Bush and Ford were being respectful when they put their feet on “our” desk, while Obama’s feet were getting all uppity on the furniture.

No related posts.

I am convinced that history will judge President Bush far more kindly — he pulled us from a deepening recession following the attack of 9-11, he overcame teachers unions to test schoolchildren and evaluate schools, he took down the Taliban, waged a war against the jihadists and was not afraid to call it what it is — a war, and he kept us safe. I respect his silence even in the face of the assaults on his record that come from this administration.

In other words, black is white, night is day. Taking these claims from bottom to top:

• Romney is trying to pin blame for Dubya’s bad reputation on Democrats, hypocritically adding “When it comes to pinning blame, pin the tail on the donkeys.” But he ignores the many conservatives who were vocal about the failures of the Bush administration. Romney wants to blame the Democrats, for blaming Bush. Blame game!
• “He kept us safe”? Seriously? What about 9/11, anthrax in the mail, and the shoe bomber? Not to mention hurricane Katrina and mad cow disease.
• “not afraid to call it what it is — a war”. Dubya wanted badly to be a war president. I guess he wasn’t afraid to lie his way into becoming one.
• “took down the Taliban”? Then why are we still fighting a war in Afghanistan? Bush distracted himself with a stupid war in Iraq; he was too busy to take down the Taliban.
• “he overcame teacher’s unions to test schoolchildren”. If Romney wants to claim “No Child Left Behind” was a success, I guess that’s his right. And I suppose Romney can claim that fighting teacher’s unions is an accomplishment, since we all know that those bad, evil teachers are to blame for what’s wrong with America.
• “he pulled us from a deepening recession following the attack of 9-11″. By spending trillions of dollars on two wars, which increased the deficit astronomically. In the same speech Romney attacked Obama for adding “to the burden of debt we will leave future generations.” And then, to top it off, Bush presided over the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Romney also attacked health care reform, claiming “Obamacare is bad care for America.” But he failed to mention that he worked for health care reform in Massachusetts, which was used as one of the primary models for what he now derisively calls “Obamacare”.

Of course, the real reason Romney is saying these things is to kiss up to the old Republican establishment, so he can become their candidate for president. The traditional Republican political machine must be desperate for an alternative to Sarah Palin.

© Mario Piperni

Related posts:

1. Romney says McCain earned his homes, Obama didn’t Every once in a while you see a story that...
2. Romney starts flip-flopping; it must mean he is running again Not that there was ever any doubt whether Mitt Romney...
3. Reality in the age of Reality TV © Jen Sorensen Next we’ll be hearing that the...