Looks like Romney straight out lied about Romneycare a few minutes ago (via — I know you all hate the guy, but his debate live-blogs are the best):
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — Gov. Mitt Romney abandoned plans Thursday to exempt Roman Catholic and other private hospitals from a new law requiring them to dispense emergency contraception to rape victims.
Baud
PolitiFact rates it Mostly True.
lamh34
If this was Wolf Blitzer, I’d actually expect that this would come up before the end of the debate.
but with John King…not so much.
rikyrah
a link to a good Willard lie, is still a link…no matter who shares it…LOL
ITD with you…the dude from The Guardian has the best live blogging of the GOP Clown Car.
freelancer (iPhone)
I hate to say it, but Motherfucking Yeah Ron Paul on Iran.
Ken
Always a tricky psychological question – can psychopaths who don’t distinguish truth and falsehood ever lie?
Zifnab25
@freelancer (iPhone): I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Ron Paul is the perfect “My New Republican Friend”. He’s just sane enough so that no one thinks you’re just trolling as a conservative, but not so sane that other conservatives can’t respect you for supporting him.
The perfect liberal man’s Republican.
Soonergrunt
@Ken: Psychopaths can tell the difference between the truth and lies. They just don’t care.
Southern Beale
Wow. All of a sudden Republicans don’t want to be talking about birth control, it was all a set-up by those crafty Democrats. Who knew?
Well then SHUT UP already!
freelancer (iPhone)
@Zifnab25:
I think he’s nuts, and as a student of history, medicine, and economics, he read all the wrong books. But his analysis of a war with Iran needed to be heard.
Mike in NC
This would not make for a good drinking game.
John Cole
@Baud: And the thread is done in one.
barath
@Soonergrunt:
Actually, that’s the definition of bullshit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
The difference is that with bullshit the person saying it doesn’t care about the truth or falsehood.
Scott de B.
Sully has come up with one memorable phrase: Republicans as the Etch-a-Sketch party.
FuriousPhil
@Southern Beale:
Some kind of polling lag? Suddenly, advisors told them it’s a losing issue – sheesh, do these guys even know what the internet is? Welcome to last week, Repubs.
Insular might be one way to describe it. “Head up your ass” might be another.
piratedan
@FuriousPhil: I’d like to offer “willfully ignorant” as a possibility.
Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water
@Ken. In the words of the philosopher George Costanza, “its not a lie if you believe it”
beltane
Did not watch, but I heard the camera panned to a person in the crowd who was waving a sign that said “Frothy Santorum”. This, it would seem, was the high point of the debate.
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
@Baud:
4 bagger, my friend.!
I once was a proponent of Politifact before they went wooly villagers.
Baud
@Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water:
That’s the George Costanza quote Romney should have used to start the debate–it’s much more apt.
kooks
ahaaaha Rachel Maddow in her closing said LOD was up next with coverage of the debates “in case you didn’t catch it or couldn’t stand it.” ha!
freelancer
@Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water:
Costanza was referenced twice tonight. The original reference where he was named, and then Santorum invoked “The Opposite” where you look at whatever Obama or Biden’s plan is and you do the exact opposite.
Baud
So the consensus is that George Costanza will be the GOP nominee coming out of a brokered convention in Tampa.
It will be a step up for them.
Anya
@Baud: LOL! You’re on a roll tonight.
ChrisB
@Baud: Will you be here all week?
Two gems in one thread.
“You can’t stop Baud, you can only hope to contain him.”
beltane
@Baud: Good, I look forward to Festivus being our new national holiday.
Baud
@Anya: @ChrisB:
Thank you, thank you very much. Please remember to tip your waitresses…
cmorenc
The GOP primary competition has induced Romney and Gingrich to walk ever-deeper explicitly toward the extreme right to win over the GOP primary electorate, by making debate and campaign pronouncements that will be impossible to walk back from in the general election. Both of them have gone all-in on the proposition that a winnable majority of the general electorate can be convinced that the extreme right is actually the middle in America. In other words, they’re counting on being able to move the electorate rightward to meet them, rather than them moving to the middle to meet the electorate in the general election. Santorum was already inescapably committed to extreme right territory and the same strategy to begin with.
IMHO Obama has already weathered the worst of what the GOP can possibly throw at him, at this point he’s not at all an unknown quantity with the general electorate, and will be difficult for the GOP to redefine. For once, the media has reacted quickly and harshly to various recent GOP attempts to paint Obama as not a valid Christian, possibly a Muslim, and in general “other”. IMHO Frankin Graham inadvertently did Obama a huge favor by coming out with such blatantly bigoted dog-whistles and airhorns on national TV. The GOP is going to have to hoist a brand new shiny object other than focusing on Obama’s person, such as gas prices; the smear shit won’t work this time around. The hard-core of the GOP may hate Obama, but the less ideological independents simply don’t, and will have to be sold on the notion that Obama has not been an effective President. BTW, did we mention that Osama Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is still alive?
Brandon
If SNL needs a Romney character, should he survive the primary, they should just recall Jon Lovitz. That’s the ticket!
The guy is a pathological liar and any more talk from DougJ about how he feels sorry for him because he seems decent or some such nonsense, is just that. Nonsense.
Fundamentally decent people don’t lie the way this guy does.
Bruce S
At this point Willard’s whole life is a lie…
Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water
@beltane: I can’t wait for the airing of the grievances
Brandon
@cmorenc:
This is about as accurate as Peak Wingnut. Lets see how you feel after $500m in 100% negative, completely untrue, and completely disgusting SuperPAC ads are aired against Obama after all this is over. The negative ads will be volumous and disgusting, and they are going to make that “Celebrity” ad from 2008 look like childs play. My guess is that we’ll have another summer and fall of progressive pant wetting.
James E. Powell
@Brandon:
But if the economy continues its slow but steady growth, if unemployment continues to go down, it will be $500 million worth of hot air.
Brandon
@James E. Powell: Negative ads will still have an impact. At the very least, they will cause progressive pant wetting. But they will be especially important in this coming election because the Republicans will have nothing to run on, so they will use negative ads to do what they do best, drive down turnout. Because that is Republican party’s main electoral strategy and they are going to need to rely on it this year more than any other in recent history.
But my point was more to demonstrate that the Republican nastiness has not yet even begun and Obama has by no means weathered the worst of it. Not by a long shot. There is hot air and then there is 200 degree air blowing straight from the boiler.
Emperor of Ice Cream
@jepowell (I have no idea how the “reply” works)
Yes, but that is the rub. It’s truly frightening to think that we are only a European crash or $5.00 per gallon gas away from one of these nutjobs being potus — along with GOP majorities in the congress and too many statehouses. Not to get all Goodwin on you, but I hear scary echoes from the 1930s in that kind of scenario.
shortstop
I couldn’t be arsed to turn it on, so tell me, y’all: did Santorum convince the priest to give him ashes from eyebrow to hairline this morning?
trollhattan
EJ Dionne in the Kaplan Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/on-the-president-as-alien/2012/02/22/gIQAces8TR_story.html?hpid=z2
Brandon
@efgoldman: I think you completely misunderstand me. There is no pant wetting here. But the notion that the worst of the shit that they can throw at him is over is ridiculous as the General Election is many months away. Just pointing that out.
FuriousPhil
@Brandon:
Sometimes I listen to AM news radio in my car. Tonight I hit the seek button and picked up one of the right-wing talk shows (Hannity I think). Mitt was talking about his “severe conservative” credentials. Even if he was lying, the stuff he rattled off disgusted, frightened and enraged me at the same time. There was once a time where I would at least listen to the other side, but they’re all raveled up in groveling and pandering to a tiny group of hard-core true believers, that they have no legitimacy whatsoever anymore.
The democracy idealist in me wants to see an opposition, but they should at least be sane and rational. The current crop seems to be neither. I’m really starting to believe this is some kind of grand strategic distraction so we’re paying less attention to the down ticket senate races. The GOP might be heinous and evil, but they never struck me as
particularly stupidthis deliberately miscalculating before.piratedan
@FuriousPhil: well you can’t underestimate the rank stupidity and whimsical nature of the American voting public. After all, in 2010 “we” elected a whole boatload of these batshit crazy teatards to Congress to “work” with the existing administration after two years of struggling to pull the economy back from the abyss. If you were the R’s, why change the playbook? lying, cherrypicking facts and divisive politics by pitting folks against their own best interests has worked before and now they’ve got a couple of years of experience on how to craft their lies to their best effectiveness.
Now, I’ll allow that the majority of the country appears to recognize that the last election had a “last call” quality to it and has a certain element of buyers remorse to it, but hey, since the R’s are willing to throw millions out of work and patently deny the obvious truths that the country needs more than a band aid to fix it, it doesn’t mean that one truly unlucky or tragic event could swing the pendulum back. What happens if there is a REAL scandal uncovered, or someone else flies a plane into a building or there is another issue that can be jinned up successfully against our current administration (see immigration, Arizona’s Gov Race). Then we’ll be facing some very dark times indeed.
nitpicker
I don’t hate Sullivan! Sure, he’s pretentious,unnecessarily contrarian and his thought process circles around and disappears up his own asshole sometimes, but he’s not a terrible thinker and he’s made up for the worst stuff he said at least as much as Cole has.
Rick Taylor
I’m more disturbed that Romney was eager to make up an insane story about Iran supplying nukes to members of Hamas and Hezbollah, which they’d bring into Mexico, to cross the border into the United states.