The Republi-CON-Hedgehog News Benghazi 'Stand Down' Myth

UPDATE:  "You’ll never guess who comes off as a hero of the Republican-drafted House Benghazi committee’s majority report: President Obama.

Within 90 minutes of the Sept. 11, 2012, surprise attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and an aide, the report tells us, Obama had told his secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to do everything possible, implicitly including using military force, to protect Americans.

These were 'very clear directions,' according to Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), one of Obama’s harshest critics on the panel.

How different from the version of the president’s conduct propounded on right-wing talk radio and TV in the aftermath: that he and his aides coolly watched live video of the mayhem in Benghazi, supplied by drones flying overhead, but declined to order a rescue mission.

Not only does this new Republican report debunk that smear, but it actually shifts blame from Obama to 'a rusty bureaucratic process not in keeping with the gravity and urgency of the events happening on the ground.'"

Read the Washington Post, The dangerous delusion that the Americans in Benghazi could have been saved.

"A just-released Senate Intelligence Committee report . . . explored claims that there was a 'stand down' order given to the security team at the Annex. Although some members of the security team expressed frustration that they were unable to respond more quickly to the Mission compound, 12 the Committee found no evidence of intentional delay or obstruction by the Chief of Base or any other party.The situation on the ground that night was chaotic and unclear: A call to the CIA annex near the under-attack diplomatic compound came in at 9:40 p.m., and it took the security personnel about 25 minutes to move in.

The original Fox News 'stand down' story still hangs on the Fox News Web site, unmolested by these factual challenges."

Read the Washington Post, Benghazi: More 'stand down' fallout for Fox News.

That article has links to twenty other articles regarding the many 'stand down' lies by the Republi-cons and their masters at Hedgehog News.

Read also, Republi-CON Political Opportunism and Hypocrisy

The Republi-CON 'Hillary Will/Will Not Be Indicted' Myths

"If you’ve spent any time inside the conservative information bubble, among the things you know is that not only did Hillary Clinton commit all manner of nefarious crimes with relation to the emails she sent and received as Secretary of State, but she will be indicted for those crimes soon, and that indictment will throw the 2016 to the Republican presidential nominee. If you inhabit the world outside that bubble, you may know that the chances of such an indictment are infinitesimal.

But conservatives hold on to the possible indictment like a life raft amid swelling seas, the one thing that can save them from the horror of a Clinton presidency. . .

Just to be clear, I’m not defending Clinton’s decision to set up her own email server. That was a violation of departmental policy, and she shouldn’t have done it. But that’s very different from saying it was a crime, or even that it jeopardized national security in some way (there’s been no evidence that Clinton’s server was hacked or that anyone even tried to hack it, unlike the State Department’s own systems, which are constantly targeted by hackers).

But if you’re a Republican pundit, you know that the idea of Hillary Clinton being led away in handcuffs is just too tantalizing for your audience to resist. . .

For the most part, the Clinton email story has been a disappointment to Republicans. They were desperately hoping that the emails would reveal some kind of ghastly malfeasance on Clinton’s part, some smoking gun that would make all Americans realize that she should never be elected president. When that turned out not to be the case, they pinned their hopes on the idea that she would just have to be charged with a crime eventually. . .

But having gone this far, they need to keep up appearances, and they also know that just talking about her emails serves to convince people that something scandalous must have happened. So they are laying the groundwork to argue, if and when she doesn’t get indicted, that it must only be because Barack Obama’s corrupt administration quashed the investigation and hid the truth from the public.

And down where the conservative rank and file get their information — the talk radio rants, the right-wing blogs, the breathless chain emails — these two contradictory ideas are both widely circulated. Clinton is about to be indicted, and Clinton won’t be indicted because the fix is in. The assumption in either case is that of course she committed crimes, even if no one can say exactly what they were. Because she’s Hillary Clinton, right? What more do you need to know?"

Read the Washington Post, Republicans know Hillary Clinton is not going to be indicted. They just can’t say so.

The Republi-CON States' Rights Hypocrisy & Myth, Flint Edition

I've not posted many Republi-CONisms lately, but this one is too good to pass up.

"Congress has hamstrung the federal government, giving states the authority to enforce drinking-water standards and all but eliminating the EPA’s power to intervene. This is a pure expression of the conservative doctrine of federalism: States handle things better than the feds because they are closest to the people.

But then came the debacle in Flint, when Michigan authorities embraced cost-saving changes in the city’s water supply and caused mass lead poisoning. Now members of Congress are blaming the EPA for failing to stop the problem — oblivious to the irony that they and their predecessors were the ones who denied the federal government the ability to enforce drinking-water standards in the first place."

Read the Washington Post, The poisonous conservative thinking that caused the Flint crisis.

Red State Hypocrisy

Sometime a picture is worth a thousand words.

From the Washington Post, Some of the most conservative states rely most on federal government aid:

Read also The Republi-CON "Hardscrabble, Up-By-Your-Bootstraps Ethos" Myth.

More proof that God hates the South.

The Republi-CON "Western Moral Superiority" Myth

"Guests at a Jewish wedding in Jerusalem in December 2015 celebrated and mocked "the death of 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh. 

One guest danced while a holding a knife through picture of the young boy.

The toddler and his parents died after an arson attack on their home in July."

Read the Daily Mail Shocking footage from Israeli Jewish wedding shows guests celebrating the death of a Palestinian baby burned alive in an arson attack.

Read also the story of a Northwest Florida Muslim family "confronted in a grocery store [that same week]. A man threw bacon in [their] cart and said 'Merry Christmas.' It was an unmistakable slur, as Muslims don't eat pork, it's considered unclean in their religion."
Read WEAR ABC 3, Local Muslim stands up for dad after offensive incident at a grocery store.

And don't forget America's own sordid history, including "The Scalp Industry".

"For example, Confederate guerrillas led by Bloody Bill Anderson were well known for decorating their saddles with the scalps of Union soldiers they had killed."

The Republi-CON "Obama Never Says Merry Christmas" Myth

Watch "[o]ur current president . . . swallow his secret Muslim pride and wish the country well in its celebration of Jesus' birthday consistently throughout his two terms:



And read Slate, Here's a Video of President Obama Saying "Merry Christmas" Over and Over and Over.

Don't Blame Obama For Bush's Iraq Hangover

UPDATE VIII:  "It was not so much the invasion [of Iraq] itself, however, as the policies implemented afterward that are mainly to blame for Iraq and Syria lying in pieces. What President George W. Bush’s administration did was to foster sectarian divisions and create a long-lasting insurgency.

At every point along the way, the Bush administration made choices that exacerbated sectarian tensions in Iraq and set the country on the path to break-up. The assertion by some observers that the country is riven by age-old hatreds, is ahistorical and incorrect. In previous decades, political passions centered on anti-colonialism or big landlordism and socialism. The vacuum of power created by the U.S. dissolution of the secular Baath Party encouraged Iraqi politicians to play on sectarian passions in unprecedented ways. Provoking a violent insurgency was likewise fateful. Once an insurgency comes into being, it typically does not subside for 10 to 15 years."

Read the Washington Post, How the United States helped create the Islamic State. 

UPDATE VII:  "The former veep's record is marked by false claims, erroneous predictions, and catastrophic results. Now he's urging more wars. Has his audience learned its lesson?

Read The Atlantic, The Farce of Dick Cheney Giving Foreign-Policy Advice.

UPDATE VI:  "Why should we fight the inevitable break-up of Iraq?"

Read The Atlantic, The New Map of the Middle East, which notes "the imperial hubris that motivated the Sykes-Picot division of the Middle East by the British and French. . . . The makers of the modern Middle East roped together peoples of different ethnicities and faiths (or streams of the same faith) in what were meant to be modern, multicultural, and multi-confessional states. It is an understatement to say that the Middle East isn’t the sort of place where this kind of experiment has been shown to work. (I’m thinking of you, one-staters, by the way.) I don’t think it is worth American money, or certainly American lives, to keep Iraq a unitary state. It is, of course, important to invest in plans that forestall the creation of permanent jihadist safe havens, and about this the U.S. should be vigilant, more vigilant than it has been. But Westphalian obsessiveness—Iraq must stay together because it must stay together—just doesn’t seem wise."

UPDATE V:  "Maliki’s primary goal to be protecting his own rule rather than combating existential threats to the security of Iraq. . .

[A]uthoritarian rulers—and Maliki is clearly at least headed in that direction—often prefer not to have a strong and professionally organized military. As Hosni Mubarak learned a few years ago, strong militaries can turn on you when the going gets tough. But such 'coup-proofing' obviously comes at the expense of the military’s preparedness for outside threats.

Read Slate, Iraq’s Built-to-Fail Military.  

UPDATE IV: Glenn "Beck was speaking about the war in Iraq on his radio program Tuesday when he made the statement, saying liberals knew over a decade ago that 'we shouldn’t nation-build, and there was no indication the people of Iraq had the will to be free.'

'I thought that was insulting at the time — everybody wants to be free,' Beck said. 'Let me lead with my mistakes. You are right. Liberals, you were right.'

Beck said he now sees that 'you cannot force democracy on the Iraqis or anybody else,' . . .

'Not one more life, not one more dollar, not one more airplane, not one more bullet, not one more Marine, not one more arm or leg or eye. Not one more.' As the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria threatens to overtake Baghdad, Beck stood firmly against sending thousands of American troops back into the country.

'The only way to prevent Baghdad from being overrun is stay there and continue to fight this, militarily, in perpetuity,' Beck said. 'Are you willing to do that?'"

Read The Blaze, What Glenn Beck Admitted About the Iraq War That Has the Huffington Post and ‘The View’ Talking.

UPDATE III:  There were many lies by Chickenhawks Bush and Cheney leading to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. 

The one I remember best is when Chickenhawk Cheney leaked false intelligence about aluminum tubes to the New York Times, then on the day the article was published, he made an appearance on Meet the Press, and citing the NYT article, claimed "that Iraq had been procuring aluminum tubes to use in an enrichment process designed to yield fuel for nuclear weapons." 

UPDATE II: Chickenhawk Cheney (you remember him, he did everything humanly possible -- short of fleeing to Canada -- to avoid military conscription during Vietnam) and his daughter wrote op-ed in the Wall Street Journal lamenting the state of affairs in Iraq.

"The Cheneys offer no discussion of the disastrous decision to invade Iraq in the first place (though they still surely believe the war was a great idea, they apparently realize most Americans don’t agree). But anything that happened afterward can only be Obama’s fault. . .

[T]he Cheneys’ op ed is silent on what they would do differently in Iraq today. The op-ed contains nothing even approaching a specific suggestion for what , other than to say that defeating terrorists 'will require a strategy — not a fantasy. It will require sustained difficult military, intelligence and diplomatic efforts — not empty misleading rhetoric. . .'

Watch closely as Republicans troop to the TV studios in the coming days, because they’ll be saying much the same thing. They won’t bring up what a disaster the war was; they’ll hope you forget that they supported it, and they won’t mention that it was Bush who signed the agreement to remove all the troops from Iraq. They will say almost nothing about what they would do differently now, other than to say we have to be “strong” and “send the right message” to the terrorists.

When it comes to being wrong about Iraq, Dick Cheney has been in a class by himself. It was Cheney who said, 'Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.'

It was Cheney who said: 'it’s been pretty well confirmed' that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta 'did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service.'

It was Cheney who said: 'we do know, with absolute certainty, that [Saddam Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon'

It was Cheney who said in 2005: 'I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.'

All those things, and many more, were false. There is not a single person in America — not Bill Kristol, not Paul Wolfowitz, not Don Rumsfeld, no pundit, not even President Bush himself — who has been more wrong and more shamelessly dishonest on the topic of Iraq than Dick Cheney.

And now, as the cascade of misery and death and chaos he did so much to unleash rages anew, Cheney has the unadulterated gall to come before the country and tell us that it’s all someone else’s fault, and if we would only listen to him then we could keep America safe forever. How dumb would we have to be to listen? "

Read the Washington Post, Maybe listening to Dick Cheney on Iraq isn’t a good idea.

Update:

Don't let Republi-cons kill more American soldiers for their delusions of democracy in the Middle East!

"Eleven years ago, we invaded Iraq, deposed its government, and disbanded its army. Then we tried to build the country back up. We kept troops there for years, policing sectarian violence, facilitating elections, and training new security forces. Three years ago, President Obama offered to extend the “status of forces” agreement under which some of our troops would stay there with Iraq’s approval. Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, didn’t accept the deal.

Everyone told Maliki that to keep his country together and peaceful, he had to build relationships with Iraq’s Sunnis and Kurds. As Slate’s Fred Kaplan explains, Maliki ignored the advice. He didn’t just neglect the Sunnis. He mistreated and alienated them. That’s a big reason why a Sunni extremist group, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, now controls much of Iraq’s territory and is advancing on Baghdad. . .

For nearly a decade, we tried to manage Iraq. What we got was dysfunction. Maybe it’s time to let Iraq learn to manage itself."

Read Slate, Don’t Save Iraq.

Also watch the "the old gang of warmongers gets back together to voice their opinions on the crisis."

Watch The Daily Show, Mess O'Potamia - Now That's What I Call Being Completely F**king Wrong About Iraq:

The Daily Show
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The Republi-CON 'Media Bias' Myth

UPDATE VI:  "QUOTE OF THE DAY: President Obama at a DNC fundraiser late Monday: 'Have you noticed that every one of these candidates says, ‘Obama’s weak. Putin’s kicking sand in his face. When I talk to Putin, he’s going to straighten out’? Then it turns out they can’t handle a bunch of CNBC moderators at the debate. Let me tell you: if you can’t handle those guys, then I don’t think the Chinese and the Russians are going to be too worried about you.'"

UPDATE V:  "The problem isn’t that CNBC engaged in 'gotcha' questions meant to 'embarass' the Republican candidates. It’s that any serious look is a fatal blow to GOP plans and proposals, which don’t deliver on promised substance. Trump can’t deport millions of immigrants; Carson can’t raise enough revenue to fund the federal government; and the 'middle-class' tax plans of Bush, Rubio, and others shower most of their benefits on the rich. And as long as this is true, GOP candidates will have a hard time with all but the most friendly moderators."

Read Slate, Why the GOP Won’t Like Any Honest Debate Moderators.

Read also Slate, Ben Carson’s Winning GOP Debate Strategy: Flat Out Lying About Mannatech.

UPDATE IV:  "When the candidates were pressed on Wednesday to explain their “vision for America’s future,” most simply decided it was more advantageous to use their allotted time to rally their base (and bolster their campaign coffers) with anti-mainstream-media tirades. Yes, the CNBC debate was a hot mess, but any journalistic sins committed by John Harwood and co. were far outweighed by the candidate’s stonewalling. The biggest problem was not what the moderators asked but that they were unprepared for the candidates to deny the very premise of their questions. Exhibit A: Ben Carson flat out lied about his relationship with a shady nutritional company. Exhibit B: Donald Trump denied he ever said something his own website quotes him as saying. Exhibit C: Chris Christie reacted to a question about the possible financial regulation of fantasy football by lamenting they weren’t talking about ISIS—an odd response given it came after the participants were already complaining they weren’t being asked enough about the economy and finance."

Read Slate, The Republican Revolt Against the Media Is Empty, Grandstanding Nonsense.

BTW, the focus of the CNBC was "on the economy", ergo, no questions about ISIS.

UPDATE III:  "The Republican presidential candidates are right. The media does suck.

But not for the reasons the candidates complained about Wednesday night.

We in the media suck because we have rewarded their rampant dishonesty and buffoonery with nonstop news coverage. Which, of course, has encouraged more dishonesty and buffoonery.

Hence the aggravating behaviors that candidates doubled-down on during the debate, based on lessons that we in the media taught them. To wit:

Lesson No. 1: Lie, but lie confidently. . .

Lesson No. 2: Invent your own math.

This is related to Lesson No. 1, but more quantitative. Or less, depending on how you look at it. . .

Lesson No. 3: If you can’t think of something better to say, just bash the media. . ."

Read the Washington Post, The Republicans are right. We in the media do suck. 

UPDATE II:   The new Republi-con debate strategy -- lie and attack the questioner.

Read the Washington Post, A peevish pack of GOP contenders.

UPDATE:  Republi-con claim that the questions asked by CNBC were "Nasty? Prejudicial? Shameful? Now compare [them] to a question[s] posed by Fox News" hosts.

Read the Washington Post, CNBC is getting hammered because it’s not Fox News.

"What happened in this debate wasn’t an attack by the press on the candidates. It was an attack by the candidates on the press. Harwood, Quick, and the other CNBC panelists were no harsher to the Republicans on Wednesday than CNN’s Anderson Cooper was to Clinton and other Democrats in their debate two weeks ago. What was different this time was the reaction. Presented with facts and figures that didn’t fit their story, the leading Republican candidates accused the moderators of malice and deceit. . .

Yes, reporters sometimes screw up. But they have a troublesome habit of checking things. That’s what makes their statements, on the whole, more reliable than yours. It’s not true, as Stephen Colbert once joked, that reality has a liberal bias. But it is true that reality has a bias toward journalists. That’s because journalists spend a lot of time with reality. They get to know it."

Read Slate, Reality Sucks. 

The Many, Many Republi-CON 'Benghazi' Myths and LIES

UPDATE V:  "The Republican candidate’s claims about Hillary Clinton and Benghazi fall apart under scrutiny."

Read Slate, Rubio Is Lying About Hillary Lying.

UPDATE IV:  After years of investigations, and an eleven hour hearing, "the truth about Benghazi: Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong. And Republicans can’t stand it."

Read Slate, The Benghazi Hearings Sham.

UPDATE III: "If there were some truly damning piece of information that the committee had discovered about Clinton in the course of their investigation, then all the public relations and spin in the world wouldn’t save her from their efforts. For instance, for some time Republicans have been obsessed with a conspiracy theory which has it that Clinton issued a 'stand down' order to the military, telling them not to go save the Americans who were in danger in Benghazi. Had that been something other than a bizarre fantasy of the most fevered quarters of the right, Benghazi would have been her undoing.

But that turned out to be fiction, and all the other efforts to find some shocking malfeasance on her part failed. Why did it have such a profound effect when Kevin McCarthy justified the Benghazi committee’s work by saying it had brought down Clinton’s poll numbers? Not because he provided some theretofore unknown piece of information, or because everyone was shocked at the very idea that the committee was political. It had an impact because it supplied a vivid illustration of a fundamental truth. That meant reporters could repeat it, refer to it, and use it to frame their subsequent discussion of the issue.

Read the Washington Post, Why the Clinton Benghazi testimony isn’t accomplishing what Republicans hoped, which notes at the end:

"[O]ver the long run, the facts can’t be escaped."

UPDATE II:  "So now we know: One of the principal reasons Republicans spent so much public money investigating the tragic Benghazi episode was to bring down Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers.

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the likely successor to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), told Fox News’s Sean Hannity explicitly on Tuesday night that the Clinton investigation was part of a 'strategy to fight and win.' . .

McCarthy’s statement gave Democrats what they have long sought: a rather strong public hint that this investigation was never on the level. 'This stunning concession from Rep. McCarthy reveals the truth that Republicans never dared admit in public,' said Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the committee’s ranking Democrat. 'The core Republican goal in establishing the Benghazi committee was always to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and never to conduct an evenhanded search for the facts.' Clinton’s defenders hope McCarthy’s statement might prod the media to pay attention to the current behavior of the accusers and not just the past behavior of the accused."

Read the Washington Post, Kevin McCarthy’s truthful gaffe on Benghazi.  

UPDATE:  Read also, the Wall Street Journal, House Report Finds No Attempt to Mislead Public Over Benghazi (subscription required).

"A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.

Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria. . .

The House Intelligence Committee report was released with little fanfare on the Friday before Thanksgiving week. Many of its findings echo those of six previous investigations by various congressional committees and a State Department panel."

Read AP, House intel panel debunks many Benghazi theories.

The article quotes Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., the committee's chairman, and Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the ranking Democrat, in a joint statement saying that the committee "spent thousands of hours asking questions, poring over documents, reviewing intelligence assessments, reading cables and emails, and held a total of 20 committee events and hearings."

The "Republi-CONs Are Better for the Economy" Myth

UPDATE:  "Since the Second World War, the economy has done better when Democrats are in the White House . . .

Read the Washington Post, Hillary Clinton was right: The economy has done better under Democrats.

The chart below shows that the economy under Carter did better than under any Republi-con president since WWII, even better than under Reagan.

Trump is right when he says that "the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans. . .

Here's a chart showing the average rate of economic growth under each president since the Second World War, taken from a recent paper by Princeton University economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson. They note that when a Democrat was in the Oval Office, the average rate of growth was 4.4 percent. Under Republicans, the average rate was just 2.5 percent.

It's not just broad measures of economic growth, either, Blinder and Watson observe. Industrial production increased at an average rate of 5.6 percent under Democrats, compared to 1.8 percent under Republicans. The unemployment rate under Republicans averaged 6 percent, compared to just 5.6 percent under Democrats. The average return on the stock market has been 8.1 percent under Democrats, and 2.7 percent under Republicans.

Inflation is only measure by which the economy's performance under Democratic and Republican presidents is more or less equal. Prices have increased an average rate of 3 percent under Democrats, compared to 3.3 percent under Republicans — not a significant difference.

You might be thinking that even if the economy as a whole does worse under Republican presidents, the wealthy do better, since Republicans tend to favor low-tax policies on the wealthy. That's not true either, though.  As the political scientist Larry Bartels shows in this chart, things have been better for Americans under Democrats, now matter how much money you make.

"

Read the Washington Post, Rand Paul is attacking Donald Trump for making a 100% true statement about the economy. 

Be Very Very Afraid of 'The Invisible [Republi-CON] Bond Vigilantes'

UPDATE XII:  What ever happened to those preditions of hyperinflation?

Read the Washington Post, And now let us remember the worst economic prediction ever.

UPDATE XI: "When it comes to views on economics, Republicans have been consistent, clear and wrong."

Read The New York Times, G.O.P. Monetary Madness, which notes "that hard-money doctrine and paranoia about inflation have taken over the party, even as the predicted inflation keeps failing to materialize. For example, in February, Representative Paul Ryan, who is somewhat inexplicably regarded as the party’s deep thinker on matters economic, harangued Mr. Bernanke on how terrible it is to “debase” a currency and pointed to a rise in commodity prices in late 2010 and early 2011 as evidence that inflation was finally coming. Commodity prices have plunged since then, but there is no sign that Mr. Ryan or anyone else is having second thoughts."


UPDATE X: How about those invisible Republi-CON bond vigilantes. Read the Washington Post, Average rate on 30-year fixed mortgage ties low of 3.94 pct.; 15-year also hits record.


UPDATE IX: For all the anti-Keynesian folks out there, please explain:




UPDATE VIII: A told ya so by the 2008 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, in The New York Times, One Point Seven Seven:

"That’s the current interest rate on 10-year US bonds.

Remember, back in 2009 there was a big debate between people like me, who said that we were in a liquidity trap and that interest rates would stay low as long as the economy was depressed, and people like the WSJ editorial page and Niall Ferguson, who said that government borrowing would bring on the bond vigilantes and send rates soaring.

How’s it going?

And just to be clear: this isn’t just about I-told-you-so. We’re talking about different models, different visions of how the economy works. Their vision led to calls for austerity now now now; mine said that the overwhelming danger was that we wouldn’t provide enough stimulus, and that we would pull back too soon. Sure enough, we didn’t and we did. And now catastrophe looms."

Republi-cons continue to sacrifice workers to appease their imaginary inflation gods.


UPDATE VII: It has been several weeks since the so-called downgrade. So how are those bond vigilantes doing? Read The New York Times, Mortgage Rates Hit 50-Year Low.


UPDATE VI: "Fitch Ratings said Tuesday it will keep its rating on U.S. debt at the highest grade, AAA, and issued a 'stable' outlook, meaning it expects the rating to stay there." Read The New York Times, Fitch Ratings Keeps U.S. at Top Credit Rating.


UPDATE V: "Thirty years ago, it became clear that defeating inflation was crucial, even if the means needed to accomplish that would cause a deep recession. . . . [But i]t is time for a new lesson to be learned. Sometimes we need inflation, and now is such a time. " Read The New York Times, Sometimes, Inflation Is Not Evil.


UPDATE IV: "Behold the power of a stupid narrative, which seems impervious to evidence." Read The New York Times, The Downgrade Doom Loop.


UPDATE III: More from that 'liberal' commentator won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics:

"[T]here is no reason to take Friday's downgrade of America seriously. These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.

And yet America does have big problems.

These problems have very little to do with short-term or even medium-term budget arithmetic. The U.S. government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its current deficit. It's true that we're building up debt, on which we'll eventually have to pay interest. But if you actually do the math, instead of intoning big numbers in your best Dr. Evil voice, you discover that even very large deficits over the next few years will have remarkably little impact on U.S. fiscal sustainability.

No, what makes America look unreliable isn't budget math, it's politics. And please, let's not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided - specifically, they're caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

The truth is that as far as the straight economics goes, America’s long-run fiscal problems shouldn’t be all that hard to fix. It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs will, under current policies, push spending up faster than tax receipts. But the United States has far higher health costs than any other advanced country, and very low taxes by international standards. If we could move even part way toward international norms on both these fronts, our budget problems would be solved.

So why can’t we do that? Because we have a powerful political movement in this country that screamed “death panels” in the face of modest efforts to use Medicare funds more effectively, and preferred to risk financial catastrophe rather than agree to even a penny in additional revenues.

The real question facing America, even in purely fiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there from deficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsible policy can be defeated and marginalized. "

Read The New York Times, Credibility, Chutzpah And Debt.


UPDATE II: "Virtually unnoticed last week was that [another ratings agency] kept a Triple A rating on the United States." Read The New York Times, Moody’s: Why the U.S. Is Still AAA.


UPDATE: So much for the inflation fear-mongers.

Today the Bank of New York began charging a fee on large deposits. Read the Wall Street Journal, BNY Mellon Deposit Fee: Life in the Liquidity Trap.

BTW, a liquidity trap, "in Keynesian economics, is a situation where monetary policy is unable to stimulate an economy, either through lowering interest rates or increasing the money supply. Liquidity traps typically occur when expectations of adverse events (e.g., deflation, insufficient aggregate demand, or civil or international war) make persons with liquid assets unwilling to invest."

I guess John Maynard Keynes was right after all.

Of course, one 'liberal' commentator has been scoffing at inflation concerns for years.

From more than two years ago, read The New York Times, The Big Inflation Scare, where he speculates that "inflation fear-mongering [was] partly political, coming largely from economists who had no problem with deficits caused by tax cuts but suddenly became fiscal scolds when the government started spending money to rescue the economy. And their goal [seemed] to be to bully the Obama administration into abandoning those rescue efforts."

I guess that's why that 'liberal' commentator won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

I wonder what the Hedgehog News prize winning economist would says now.

(Warning, that is a satirical comment.

Hedgehog News doesn't have any prize winning economist on the payroll.

But Hedgehog News does have many Republi-con candidates on the payroll.)

"S&P has triggered another invisible attack by the invisible bond vigilantes." Read The New York Times, What If They Announced A Downgrade And Nobody Cared?

BTW, a bond vigilante "is a bond market investor who protests monetary or fiscal policies they consider inflationary by selling bonds, thus increasing yields."

If you don't understand this post, you should refrain from debating fiscal policy issues.

Remember All That Republi-CON Doom and Gloom on Obamacare

UPDATE VI:  "Remember how much Republicans wanted to repeal Obamacare?

The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has voted more than 50 times to repeal the law. Conservatives have twice brought challenges to the Supreme Court — a court with powerful voices that often lean in their direction — only to be largely rebuffed both times. The last government shutdown was driven by Republicans who insisted on defunding Obamacare . . .

When it comes to meeting one of its most important goals — providing coverage to the uninsured — it is working extremely well."

Read the Washington Post, The success of the Affordable Care Act is a hugely inconvenient truth for its opponents, which notes that "the success of the ACA strikes at the heart of the dysfunction strategy employed extremely effectively by anti-government conservatives. This is the self-fulfilling-prophecy strategy that campaigns on: 'Washington is broken!' . . .

Never mind that those making that case are the ones doing the breaking."

UPDATE V:  So much for that Republi-con "Obamacare would destroy the economy" myth.

"In a 2011 press conference, John Boehner used the phrase "job killing" once every two minutes. Then in 2012 we had the best year of job creation since 2005. In 2013 we had an even better year of job creation. Then in 2014, we had an even better year, the best since 1999."

The article included this graph:

Read also, the Washington Post, Can someone please print this graph on a T-shirt?! Sharp decline in the uninsured since the ACA came online, which included this graph:

Read Vox, A chart that Obamacare's fiercest critics will have a hard time explaining.

UPDATE IV:  The "uninsured rate has dropped over four points since Obamacare went into effect a year ago — and that the uninsured rate, now at 12.9 percent, is at its lowest point since Gallup began to 'track the measure daily in 2008.'

Gallup describes its findings this way: 'The Affordable Care Act has accomplished one of its goals: increasing the percentage of Americans who have health insurance coverage.'"

Read the Washington Post, As GOP continues denouncing Obamacare as failure, uninsured rate falls yet again. 

UPDATE III:  It's the 2014 election, curious why you haven't heard more about Obamacare, because it is working.

Read Topix, Stunning Admission From This Republican Governor: Obamacare Helps People.  

UPDATE II:  "One of the many, many, many predictions of Obamacare failure made by conservatives is that insurance companies would systematically drop out of the exchanges. They made this prediction many, many, many, many, many times. The data is starting to come in and, guess what, insurance companies are joining the exchanges. Dan Diamond reports that, in every state that has reported information so far, the number of insurance companies competing in the exchanges will expand in year two."

Read New York Magazine, Today’s Obamacare Non-Train-Wreck News. 

UPDATE:  Saved by Obamacare:

"Dean Angstadt fells trees for a living.

He's a self-employed, self-sufficient logger who has cleared his own path for most of his 57 years, never expecting help from anyone. And even though he'd been uninsured since 2009, he especially wanted nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.

'I don't read what the Democrats have to say about it because I think they're full of it,' he told his friend Bob Leinhauser, who suggested he sign up.

That refrain changed this year when a faulty aortic valve almost felled Angstadt. Suddenly, he was facing a choice: Buy a health plan, through a law he despised, that would pay the lion's share of the cost of the life-saving surgery - or die. He chose the former.

'A lot of people I talk to are so misinformed about the ACA,' Angstadt said. 'I was, before Bob went through all this for me. I would recommend it to anybody and, in fact, have encouraged friends, including the one guy who hauls my logs.' . .

Read The Philadelphia Inquirer, Once opposed to ACA, now a convert.

Angstadt  now realizes it was Republi-con lies repreated on Hedgehog News that almost got him killed.  

"All the disasters conservatives have predicted to date have failed to materialize. The website did not have to be rebuilt from scratch. The exchanges did not have to push back their start date. The administrative fix did not render the law unworkable. There has been no actuarial death spiral. Democrats have not called for repeal. All the disasters have simply been pushed further into the future. . .

[N]one of the things conservatives warned about happening have actually transpired. The evidence to date is completely consistent with the hypothesis of success. Costs and premiums have come in under projections, young people have signed up, insurers plan to expand their participation, and actuaries project stable premiums."


Read New York Magazine, Obama Declares Obamacare Victory.

The Republi-CON "Less Goverment, More Freedom" Myth, As Told By the Story of Gefilte Fish

"While combing through the most recent Hillary Clinton e-mail dump, a certain, seemingly non-political, but potentially highly controversial message stands out. . .

The subject line, meanwhile, says only: 'Gefilte fish.' . .

[So] why the leading Democratic presidential candidate sent an e-mail with gefilte fish in the subject line while she was serving as secretary of state. "

Read the Washington Post, The story behind the funniest e-mail Hillary Clinton has ever sent.

It seems that under a so-called 'free-trade' agreement Illinois fish was subject to an import tax on entry to the 'Promised Land, and then-Illinois Rep. Don Manzullo, a Republican, "was fretting over the potential tax."

No doubt as a favor to wealthy constituent.  

The story is a sad commentary on politics and power.

The Republi-CON 'We Love the Military' Myth (They Don't Even Like Ordinary Citizens)

UPDATE:  "Tucked into a dusty corner of the Senate’s Highway Trust Fund bill — legislation that must pass before the fund runs dry on July 31 — is a zombie proposal to hire private debt-collection agencies to hound delinquent taxpayers on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service.

The IRS has actually tried outsourcing tax collection activities to private debt collectors before, at Congress’s behest. Twice, in fact, over the last two decades.

Both times, the experiment was a disaster.

Privatizing delinquent tax collections led to complaints from taxpayers who got harassed and bullied by an industry known for rampant harassment and bullying, articularly of low-income people who don’t know their rights. In one oft-cited case, a private debt collector made 150 calls to the elderly parents of a taxpayer even after the collection agency learned that the taxpayer was no longer living at that address.

Perhaps more important, at least from a fiscal responsibility perspective, both times the program was scrapped because it actually cost taxpayers money on net, despite assurances ahead of time of the huge bounty it would lasso in."

Read the Washington Post, The Senate’s wrongheaded IRS proposal.

Republi-cons only love their corporate benefactors.

"House Republicans are pushing legislation to block predatory lending protections for American soldiers, under pressure from the banking lobby."

Read The Huffington Post, House Republicans Want To Block Predatory Lending Protections For American Troops.

The Test of The Republi-CON Myth of Expansionary Austerity, Greek Edition

UPDATE:  "It’s astonishing even now how blithely top European officials dismissed warnings that slashing government spending and raising taxes would cause deep recessions, how they insisted that all would be well because fiscal discipline would inspire confidence. (It didn’t.) The truth is that trying to deal with large debts through austerity alone — in particular, while simultaneously pursuing a hard-money policy — has never worked. It didn’t work for Britain after World War I, despite immense sacrifices; why would anyone expect it to work for Greece?"

Read The New York Times, Europe’s Impossible Dream.

As noted before, expansionary austerity is a Republi-con myth.

There was the limited experiment on Kansas that failed.

Now for the grand test, "[i]t could be a chapter in an economics textbook: What happens when severe austerity is imposed on an economy that’s already lost a quarter of its output?

Greece will find out how bad it could be."

Read Bloomberg, Greece Rewrites Economic Textbooks With Austerity on Austerity.

Read also, the Washington Post, Europe’s dirty little secret is Greece will never pay back its debt, which notes that "if Greece can't cut its way out of debt and it can't grow its way out of debt, its only option is to default its way out of debt. There are more and less painful ways of doing this. Least among them is for the two sides to work together, so both can keep getting at least some money from the other. That's a polite default, or a restructuring. And the IMF has suggested three ways that might work. Europe can either give Greece money every year; give Greece a pass on some of what it owes; or give Greece far more time to pay what it owes, with a 30-year grace period at the start. But in any case, Europe is effectively going to have to give—notice how that word keeps popping up—Greece money. It just depends on how they want to do it."

And here's a dirty little secret for you -- well not really a secret, just something Republi-cons would never admit -- the United States of America only works because of money subsidies/transfers from rich, prosperous states to poor, needy states and labor mobility from poor, needy regions to wealthy, prosperous regions.

Read The New York Times, The Problem With a Euro Fix: What’s in It for the Dutch? and the Washington Post, The four ways to end the Greek crisis, from Obama’s former top economist.

And in the U.S., it is the Blue states that are rich and prosperous; the Red states that are poor and needy.

Read Slate, How The US Currency Union Works—Endless Subsidies To Low-Productivity Areas.

Read also, Rich state, poor state, red state, blue state: What’s the matter with Connecticut?

The Republi-CON 'Creationism' Myth

UPDATE:  For "a striking example of Darwinian evolution in humans", read the Washington Post, How a history of eating human brains protected this tribe from brain disease.  

It is also interesting if you have any interest in religion and societal development.

UPDATE:  A new video from science advocates Stated Clearly provides an 11-minute examination of the evidence behind the theory of evolution that should come in handy for anyone debating the issue with creationists.

"Thousands of observable facts from completely independent fields of study have come together to tell us the exact same story: all living things on Earth are related," the group’s founder, Jon Perry, states.

Read Raw Story, Next time your creationist friends reject evolution, show them this video:

"Evolution is nothing more than a fairly simple way of understanding what is unquestionably happening. You don't believe in it — you either understand it or you don't. But pretending evolution is a matter of faith can be a clever way to hijack the conversation, and pit it in a false duality against religion. And that's how we end up with people decrying evolution, even as they eat their strawberries and pet their dogs, because they've been led to believe faith can only be held in one or the other.

But there's no reason for people of faith to reject the mountains of data and the evidence of their own senses. Reconciling is easy: Believe, if you want to, that God set up the rules of evolution among His wonders, along with the laws of physics, and probability, and everything else we can see and measure for ourselves. But don't deny evolution itself, or gravity, or the roundness of Earth. That's just covering your eyes and ears. And only monkeys would do that."

Read The Week, Why you should stop believing in evolution.  

Read also National Geographic, Was Darwin Wrong?

For less technical detail, read George Johnson, The Evidence for Evolution.

For more technical detail, read The TalkOrigins Archive, 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution, The Scientific Case for Common Descent.

The Republi-CON "Guns Make You Safer" Myth

UPDATE:  Read also the Los Angeles Times, We all pay: The high costs of gun violence, which notes, "[g]un violence's cost: About $229 billion a year".

"After the Sandy Hook tragedy, reporters often called me to ask for information on firearms. They wanted to know whether strong gun laws reduced homicide rates (I said they did); and, conversely, whether permissive gun laws lowered crime rates overall (I said they did not). . .

[A] large majority of gun researchers have arrived at the same conclusion about firearms . . .

[A] gun in the home increases the risk that a woman living in the home will be a victim of homicide (72% agree, 11% disagree) and that a gun in the home makes it a more dangerous place to be (64%) rather than a safer place (5%). There is consensus that guns are not used in self-defense far more often than they are used in crime (73% vs. 8%) and that the change to more permissive gun carrying laws has not reduced crime rates (62% vs. 9%). Finally, there is consensus that strong gun laws reduce homicide (71% vs. 12%)."

Read the Los Angeles Times, There's scientific consensus on guns -- and the NRA won't like it.

Read also, How Dare He Try To Prevent Another Massacre of Little Children

The Republi-CON "Obama Hates America" Myth

UPDATE:  "Conservatives will harrumph to the contrary, but relative to his peers, Obama has had a remarkably clean, scandal-free presidency."

Read Slate, Obama’s Gift to Hillary Clinton.  

"There is simply no question that, in his own telling, Barack Obama believes that the United States is an exceptional, great, splendiferous nation—the world's most powerful force for good. And he will be happy to explain to you, at great and occasionally repetitive length, why he holds that belief, as the video above indicates. (Among his America-themed speeches, some of which we took clips from: Obama's 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote in Boston, his March 2008 speech on race relations in Philadelphia, his 2008 nomination-acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, his election night remarks at Chicago's Grant Park in 2008, his inaugural address in 2009, his June 2009 speech in Cairo, his 2012 State of the Union address, his 2012 Democratic National Convention speech in Charlotte, his 2012 election-night speech in Washington D.C., his 2013 inaugural, his September 2013 address to the United Nations, his December 2013 speech on economic mobility in D.C., his 2014 State of the Union, his May 2014 commencement address at West Point, and his post-election press conference in November 2014; click links for transcripts.*)

. . . [N]no one could seriously read or watch Obama's remarks and come away with the overall impression that he is anything but relentlessly positive about the United States."

Read Slate, Watch Barack Obama Talk About How America Is the Greatest Country on Earth in 13 Different Speeches, or watch

The Republi-CON 'January 2014 Disproves Global Warming' Myth

UPDATE III:  So, because it is cold outside, global warming is a hoax.

"As Stephen Colbert wrote, brilliantly mocking this kind of ridiculosity, "Global warming isn't real because I was cold today! Also great news: World hunger is over because I just ate.'

Read Slate, Ted Cruz Goes Full Orwell.

UPDATE II:  Read USA Today, Earth had warmest winter on record.

Read also, So You Don't Believe in Global Warming, Then Explain What Happens to 35 Gigatons of CO2 Each Year.  

UPDATE:  "The climate numbers are in from January and, on a global perspective, it actually wasn’t that cold at all.

In fact, for the 347th month in a row, planet Earth was downright toasty.

Yep, the last month in which Earth’s average temperature was below the 20th-century average was during the Reagan administration. February 1985, to be exact: 'I Want to Know What Love Is' by Foreigner was the No. 1 song in the country. Sally Field had just been nominated for best actress for Places in the Heart. The author of this piece celebrated his fourth birthday party. That’s a long time for a planet to run a fever.

Since that moment 29 years ago, there’s been an unbroken stretch of planetary warmth. Almost as if the entire globe was warming. Hey, maybe we can call it 'global warming'".

Read Slate, Don't Let the Snow Fool You. January Wasn't Cold at All.  

In the continental U.S, the "average temperature of the U.S. was just 0.07°F below the 1981-2010 average according to NCDC. . .

[In fact Alaska] had its 3rd-warmest January, with temperatures 14.8°F above average. During a late January warm spell, the daily high reached 62°F in Port Alsworth, tying the highest January temperature recorded in the state."

Read Climate Central, Never-Ending Winter? Nah, January in U.S. Was Average.  

The Republi-CON "Hardscrabble, Up-By-Your-Bootstraps Ethos" Myth

"Delivering the official Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst related tales of a hardscrabble upbringing in which she 'worked construction' with her father, took a job in the fast food industry, and placed plastic bread bags over her one pair of shoes so as to keep them dry when it rained. 'Our parents may not have had much,' Ernst said of herself and her schoolmates’ families, 'but they worked hard for what they did have.'

The takeaway, of course, was that we should all be so self-reliant, not depending on government handouts to get by. In her speech, Ernst denounced 'wasteful spending' and vowed that Republicans would cut it. The new GOP Congress, Ernst said, would work toward an America in which 'you don’t need to come from wealth or privilege to make a difference.' . .

Here’s what the GOP rising star omitted from her paean to gritty self-reliance: Hard as her family may have worked, and fierce as Ernst may be in her opposition to big government spending, her family benefited more than $460,000 in federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009, per the District Sentinel. Beneficiaries included Ernst’s father, Richard Culver, uncle Dallas Culver, and late grandfather Harold Culver. The Culvers’ subsidies hardly set them apart from their neighbors; as the District Sentinel notes, Iowa ranks second only to Texas in farm subsidies, with the largely rural and agricultural state receiving $24.9 billion in subsidies between 1995 and 2012.

The revelation comes three months after Salon reported that Richard Culver’s construction company received more than $200,000 in Montgomery County contracts while Ernst was the county auditor, despite a state conflict of interest law that voids contracts awarded to family members of any county employee.

Ernst isn’t the first Republican to lambaste government spending, even as her family feeds at the federal trough. Four House Republicans who voted in 2013 to drastically cut spending on food stamps had received farm subsidies worth at least $7,883,824 combined, BuzzFeed reported at the time."


Read Salon, Joni Ernst’s family received nearly half a million dollars in federal farm subsidies.