Guess Who The Lying Hypocrites Are About Reconciliation. That's Right, Republicans

34 Of 41 Senate Republicans Supported Passing Major Domestic Policy Legislation Through Reconciliation

As the outlook on passage of health reform improves, Republicans have shifted to a new obstructionist strategy: attacking the process of reconciliation. Republicans claim that reconciliation was only intended to be used for bills dealing closely with the budget. In fact, when Republicans were in power, GOP lawmakers used reconciliation numerous times to pass major domestic policy legislation, including the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 and important changes to health care policy. In fact, 34 of the 41 Senate Republicans have used reconciliation in the past to pass major pieces of domestic policy.

In 2005, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) famously defended reconciliation as “majority rules.” Think Progress has compiled a video of some of these 34 senators who have, in the past, defended reconciliation and railed against the filibuster. Some highlights:

– “If you’ve got 51 votes for your position, you win.” — Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), 3/15/05

– “For some time, I hoped that my colleagues who oppose reform would allow a majority in both bodies to prevail and do what the vast majority of the American public desires.” — Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), 10/15/99

– “It [the filibuster] is the product of a rule of the Senate passed many years after the ratification of the Constitution. This rule does not derive from the authority of the Constitution.” — Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), 5/19/05

– “Filibusters are neither an idea of the founding fathers nor a historical tradition of the Senate.” — Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), 4/27/05


Major domestic policy legislation that these 34 Senators have voted for through reconciliation in the past 20 years: Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1989, Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, Balanced Budget Act of 1995, Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Balanced Budget Act of 1997, Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, Taxpayer Refund and Relief Act of 1999, Marriage Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2000, Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003, Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005, College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007

Some suggested names changes that would more aptly describe the "Republican" Party - The Party of Pants on Fire Liars, Right-Wingers Without Honor Party, Two Faced Hypocrite Conservatives, Wing-Nuts Against Democracy and Health-Care.

"Fact-checkers say Rove is rewriting history" on "controversial moments of the Bush presidency" - Bush's former Chief of Staff writes a book that reads like a bizarre fairy-tale. Who would have guessed.

Karl Rove's New Book Repackaged Propaganda

Going Rove: Courage and Consequence is full of falsehoods

Karl Rove's forthcoming memoir Courage and Consequence purports to respond to critics by "putting the record straight," but Media Matters has found that Rove's book is full of falsehoods. Below is an ongoing list of Rove's misinformation in the book, which Media Matters obtained in advance of its scheduled release.

1. Rove distorts Senate report to claim Bush didn't "lie us into the war"

2. Rove falsehood: Obama claims "Obamacare would not add to the deficit ... evidence shows just the opposite"

3. Rove revives tired smear that Gore wrongly said "that he had created the Internet"

4. Rove revives Gore-Love Story smear

5. Rove falsehood: Gore said he had "discovered the Love Canal chemical disaster"

6. Rove pals around with falsehood that Ayers was "Obama's great friend"

7. Rove wrong on number of presidents who left office by "assassination or resignation"

Stupak and Conservatives are Lying About Government Funded Abortions in Health-care Reform

Slate's Noah takes apart Stupak's mandatory abortion fund falsehood
From Noah's March 4 Slate post titled, "Why Stupak is Wrong":

Stupak is right that anyone who enrolls through the exchange in a health plan that covers abortions must pay a nominal sum (defined on Page 125 of the bill as not less than "$1 per enrollee, per month") into the specially segregated abortion fund. But Stupak is wrong to say this applies to "every enrollee." If an enrollee objects morally to spending one un-government-subsidized dollar to cover abortion, then he or she can simply choose a different health plan offered through the exchange, one that doesn't cover abortions. (Under the Senate bill, every insurance exchange must offer at least one abortion-free health plan.)

One dollar exceeds health insurers' actual cost in providing abortion coverage. In fact, it's entirely symbolic. The law stipulates that in calculating abortions' cost, insurers may consider how much they spend to finance abortions but not how much they save in foregone prenatal care, delivery, or postnatal care. (This is on Pages 2074-2075.) This is to keep insurers from pondering the gruesome reality-one they surely know already-that covering abortions actually saves them money. For health insurers, the true cost of abortion coverage is less than zero, because hospitals and doctors charge less to perform abortions than they do to tend pregnant women before, during, and after childbirth. (Ironically, only the Senate bill-not the House bill-provides some small counterweight to this calculus by increasing aid for adoption assistance.)

What really rankles Stupak (and the bishops) isn't that the Senate bill commits taxpayer dollars to funding abortion. Rather, it's that the Senate bill commits taxpayer dollars to people who buy private insurance policies that happen to cover abortion at nominal cost to the purchaser (even the poorest of the poor can spare $1 a month) and no cost at all to the insurer. Stupak and the bishops don't have a beef with government spending. They have a beef with market economics.

The BB Lie : Beck and Brietbart Caught Again Editing Video to Lie.

How very Joseph Goebbels, or Joseph Stalin for that matter, for Fox's in house clown Glenn Beck and the Right's unhinged netmaster of smears and prpoganda Andrew Breitbart to repeat their ACORN tactics to attack Senator Harry Reid(D-NV), Glenn Beck and right-wing media grossly distort Reid's jobs comments

Glenn Beck played doctored audio of Sen. Harry Reid saying it is "good" news that the economy lost only 36,000 jobs in February -- an assessment many economists agree with. Beck criticized Reid's statement, but Beck's audio cut out Reid's accurate explanation that the "good" news was that unemployment and job losses were lower than economists had expected.

Reid's actual statement: "Good" news that unemployment rate and job losses are lower than expected

From Reid's March 5 floor speech:

REID: Unemployment compensation -- today is a big day in America. Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good. Unemployment rate around America has not changed. Prognosticators thought it would go up; it has not. So, we need to extend -- there are about 15 million people in America out of work. These extended unemployment benefits will help millions of those people.

Audio Beck played cropped and distorted Reid's comments. The audio Beck played appears to be from a seven-second YouTube video promoted by Andrew Breitbart and right-wing bloggers, which includes only the following portion of Reid's statement: "[T]oday is a big day in America. Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good." The video cuts out Reid's explanation that the "good" news is that unemployment and job losses were lower than expected.
Reid is correct: Economy "lost fewer jobs than expected" in February

NY Times: "American economy lost fewer jobs than expected last month." Reid's statement that the 36,000 jobs lost in February were fewer than expected is correct. As The New York Times reported on March 5, "The American economy lost fewer jobs than expected last month and the unemployment rate remained steady at 9.7 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday, bolstering hopes that a still-tenuous recovery may be starting to gain momentum."

Its anyone's guess as to why radical ideologists such as Beck and Breitbart hate America.

Liz Cheney and Karl Rove have an Addiction to Fact Twisting

How a smearing of Justice Department lawyers as "terrorist sympathizers" traveled from the conservative media to the United States Senate.

“These lawyers were advocating on behalf of our Constitution and our laws. The detention policies of the Bush administration were unconstitutional and illegal, and no higher a legal authority than the Supreme Court of the United States agreed,” says Ken Gude, a human-rights expert with the Center for American Progress, of the recent assault on the Justice Department. “The disgusting logic of these attacks is that the Supreme Court is in league with al-Qaeda.”

That would be a very Conservative Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice Roberts.

Even former military prosecutors have expressed views similar to those of the “Gitmo Nine.” Col. Morris Davis (retired) served as the former chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo Bay military commissions and has since argued that they should be abandoned. But initially, when the commissions were formed, he volunteered to be chief defense counsel. “I thought for the good of our system, they needed zealous representation,” says Davis. He dismissed the charge that having represented a detainee indicated “sympathy” for terrorist goals. “I don’t think that anyone, because they signed up to represent a detainee means they’ve signed up with al-Qaeda.”

“[McCarthy]- ( of the right-wing National Review) was a prosecutor for a number of years, so he knows better than that,” Davis adds. “I think he’s just saying it for the shock value of it.”

Will Liz Cheney Attack Rudy Giuliani’s Firm For Representing ‘Terrorist Detainees’?

It turns out that among the many high-profile lawyers who have represented so-called “terrorist detainees” is a top attorney with Rudy Giuliani’s firm, Bracewell Giuliani, according to court documents examined by TPMmuckraker.

Why Do Lynn Cheney and the unhinged conservatives at National Review hate traditional American values.

Karl Rove and his boss Bush 43 are no George Washingtons. They would have cut down the cherry tree, hide the ax, made up twenty different spins on what actually happened and than claimed that cherry tree was evil so any actions they took were justified, Rove Book: No Pushback on Iraq WMD My Bad

But in one area, the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Karl Rove will do what George W. Bush never did: admit a mistake. Sadly, the error Rove confesses is the uniquely Republican sin of not lying more.

As the AP described it, Rove's tall tale can be summarized as "if lying about WMD is wrong, I don't want to be right":

The former White House political adviser blames himself for not pushing back against claims that President George W. Bush had taken the country to war under false pretenses, calling it one of the worst mistakes he made during the Bush presidency. The president, he adds, did not knowingly mislead the American public about the existence of such weapons.

Of course, it's hard to imagine how the Bush administration could have pushed back any harder against charges that the President misled the nation into war. When Ambassador Joseph Wilson revealed the fraud that was Bush's 16-word claim about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger, the retribution included the outing of his wife Valerie Plame, covert CIA operative. The White House initially opposed the creation of the independent Silberman-Robb commission, later agreeing only on the conditions that its report be released after the 2004 elections and exclude any investigation of the uses of pre-war intelligence. Thanks to the obstructionism of Bush ally Pat Roberts, the Senate Intelligence Committee's Phase I report on Iraq war intel played the same game.

The Media, Reconciliation and Working Class Americans

How did media cover GOP's 2003 use of reconciliation? They didn't

For weeks, the news media have been obsessed with the question of whether congressional Democrats would use a legislative mechanism known as "reconciliation" to pass changes to the health care reform legislation that passed the Senate in late December.

Unfortunately, that obsession has not actually resulted in reporters consistently getting the story right. Basic facts that should be central to the debate over the propriety of reconciliation have gotten lost in the mix. First, nobody is talking about passing the entire health care reform package via reconciliation -- the Senate has already passed its bill, and did so by overcoming a filibuster. Reconciliation would, instead, be used to pass a much smaller package of changes to that legislation via majority vote. Second, there is nothing hasty or debate-stifling about using reconciliation in this case: Congress has been considering health care reform for more than a year. Finally, reconciliation isn't all that unusual, having been used in connection with some of the highest-profile legislation in recent decades, including President Bush's tax cuts and the welfare reform bill President Clinton signed. Those are facts, and they are not in dispute.

And yet the media are referring to reconciliation as the "nuclear option" and portraying it as an obscure procedural gimmick being considered in an attempt to circumvent Senate rules and "ram" health care legislation through Congress. The conservative media are going so far as to claim that use of reconciliation would be "unprecedented."

Funny, I don't remember this level of media outrage in 2003, when Republicans passed President Bush's tax cut legislation via reconciliation.

But what's really striking about the media's approach to reconciliation is how much it differs from the way they treated the Republicans' use of reconciliation to pass President Bush's 2003 tax cut legislation. Only two Democrats voted for that bill -- one of whom, Georgia Sen. Zell Miller, doesn't really count, as he was a de facto Republican -- and Vice President Dick Cheney had to break a 50-50 tie. (Three Senate Republicans joined 46 Democrats and one independent in voting against the bill, which these days would be described as "bipartisan opposition.")

Right-wing media praise, defend UnAmerican Weasel Jim Bunning's (R-KY) Obstruction of federal jobs and unemployment benefits
There is nothing inherently wrong with being a millionaire. There are generally two types - millionaires that realize a combination of work and luck have given them a nice life, free of the worries that plaque most Americans. Then there are the millionaire elitist such as Rush Limabugh who really believe they worked for every dollar of their millions just by prattling away at a microphone and writing a few few poorly written books grabbed up by his sheeple listeners. Limabaugh and his ilk refuse to acknowledge that luck plays a big role in their fortunes - its not like Limbaugh is an irreplaceable world class brain surgeon or an air traffic controller that has guided millions of planes to safety. Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly etc simply babble away with their frequently deranged and ignorant opinions and load up their bank accounts. They do not feel they owe the country that made that wealth possible anything - talk about sunshine patriots.

Republicans Continue to Hate America

Right-wing media praise Bunning for blocking worker pay, relief to unemployed

Right-wing media have praised Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) for blocking legislation that would extend unemployment benefits for hundreds of thousands of Americans, prevent rural areas from losing local television, and prevent cuts in Medicare reimbursements to doctors. The Department of Transportation also reportedly furloughed nearly 2,000 workers without pay as a result of Bunning's action.

And related - SHOCKING REPUBLICAN VIEWS EXPOSED! CONSERVATIVES THINK AMERICAN WORKERS LAZY AND DISHONEST

Where were these people when conservatives were lying us into a three trillion dollar war based on a pack of lies and Bush was giving the richest 10% of America the biggest tax break in history, Conservative Rage: Hate Groups, Vigilantes and Conspiracists on the Verge of Violence

The signs of growing radicalization are everywhere. Armed men have come to Obama speeches bearing signs suggesting that the "tree of liberty" needs to be "watered" with "the blood of tyrants." The Conservative Political Action Conference held this February was co-sponsored by groups like the John Birch Society, which believes President Eisenhower was a Communist agent, and Oath Keepers, a Patriot outfit formed last year that suggests, in thinly veiled language, that the government has secret plans to declare martial law and intern patriotic Americans in concentration camps. Politicians pandering to the anti-government right in 37 states have introduced "Tenth Amendment Resolutions," based on the constitutional provision keeping all powers not explicitly given to the federal government with the states. And, at the Web site titled "A Well Regulated Militia," a recent discussion of how to build "clandestine safe houses" to stay clear of the federal government included a conversation about how mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh and Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph were supposedly betrayed at such houses.