Why Are Republican Congressional Leaders Stocking Up On Nexium?

Hot new poll from ABC and the Washington Post must be painful for GOP leaders who put all their eggs into the Trumpanzee basket. Disapproval is at a new all-time high (60%), support for the Mueller investigation is broad and-- at long last-- half of Americans favor Congress initiating impeachment proceedings against the Putin puppet and illegitimate occupant of the White House. Just 36% of Americans approval of the way Trump has been performing in the White House, so-- by his own flawed logical-- he can be impeached. And 49% think he should be (although 46% still aren't ready for that).

Suspicions of the president relating to the Mueller investigation are substantial. Sixty-one percent say that if assertions by Cohen are true, Trump broke the law. Fifty-three percent also think Trump obstructed special counsel Robert Mueller’s work... Americans overall back Mueller’s probe by 63-29 percent. Fifty-two percent support it strongly, a high level of strong sentiment.

...In Trump’s dispute with Attorney General Jeff Sessions for allowing the investigation to proceed, the public sides with Sessions, 62-23 percent. Sixty-four percent also oppose the idea of Trump firing Sessions; just 19 percent support it.

Further, while Trump has railed against the Manafort prosecution, Americans call it justified by an overwhelming 67-17 percent, including nearly half of Republicans. The public opposes Trump pardoning Manafort by essentially the same margin, 66-18 percent, with 53 percent strongly opposed. Even among Republicans, 45 percent oppose a Manafort pardon; 36 percent support it.

So why is this so important? At the heart of the matter is the fact that normal Americans don't trust Trump and don't believe anything he says. His claims have always been self-serving bullshit that only his drug-addicted, low IQ and alternative-fact reality show fans can believe. This is important:

Only 5% of Trump's assertions and utterances are true, 16% if you include the stuff that's mostly true. And more and more Americans have come to realize virtually anything he says is likely to be a blatant, self-serving lie. He's an untrustworthy source of information. Normal people may not like the media, but they trust the media more than they trust Trump. Only Republicans trust Trump over the media. Registered voters, asked who they trust more, CNN or Trump, went 53% CNN to 38% Trump. The number was almost identical for the NY Times-- 52% picked The Times to 38% for Trump.

Joe Walsh is a right-wing Chicagoland radio host now. He used to be a right-wing member of Congress. Trump drives him crazy even though they agree on so many issues. In fact, this week he explained to his twitter followers exactly what it is about Trump that drives him crazy:

Yesterday, Ashley Parker at the Washington Post pointed out that "Over roughly the past day, President Trump has decried the 'totally dishonest' media, with its 'fake news' and 'fake books.' He has argued that Google is biased against conservatives. And he has accused NBC News of 'fudging' the tape of an interview with him that has been available online for more than a year. His supporters buy into this crap. Luckily, no one else does.

The president has even declared there is no chaos in his White House, which he claimed is a 'smooth running machine with changing parts,' despite the tumult that emanates almost daily from within its walls.

Trump’s assertions-- all on Twitter, some false, some without clear evidence-- come just over nine weeks before the midterm elections that could help determine his fate, and they are bound by one unifying theme: All of his perceived opponents are peddling false facts and only Trump can be trusted.

Salvatore Rizzo, at the same paper, connected the dots and came to a practical conclusion: GOP campaign ads can't be trusted either. Ryan's SuperPAC is a lie-manufacturing and dispersal machine. It's been "running a series of negative ads about Democratic candidates in close races across the country. The super PAC has raised more than $100 million and, with control of the House up for grabs in November, the group’s wall-to-wall advertising strategy seems to make sense... But the attack ads themselves don’t make much sense… The ads almost unfailingly portrayed Democrats as dangerous and outside the mainstream… For all six ads, we found that the Congressional Leadership Fund took a sliver of accurate information and spun it in a misleading way."

Trump is the Republican Party and the Republican Party is Trump. Yesterday we saw that in Pennsylvania voters are starting to admit to pollsters that as important as the issues are-- healthcare, jobs, etc-- what ties everything together is Trump and that he is now the essential motivating force in the upcoming mid-term elections. That leads to a double-digit preference for congressional Democrats over Republicans. This is what Americans want, not Trump's alternative reality. In southeast Wisconsin, Randy Bryce's campaign manager, David Keith, told us that what he finds most sad and pathetic is that "people are holding out hope for the Republican Party to follow its better history and be a respectable bunch of people. Hell, even MSNBC is trying to convey that hope publicly by allowing folks like Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace to drum up sympathy on TV for the small #NeverTrumper slivver of their party. People are forgetting that this Republican Party-- now commonly referred to as Trump's party-- has been the same party for a as long as I've been alive. How long ago were they an Eisenhower Party? This is still the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove party. It’s just on steroids now. These people have wanted to abandon political correctness for years and they finally have permission."

I asked some of the congressional candidates endorsed by Blue America how all the lies are playing out in their districts.

Do Republicans Not Know Trump Is A Congenital Liar? Or Do They Just Not Care? Or Even Approve?

If you input "Big Lie" into Google, the first thing that pops up is Post Malone's song.

Say you flexin' that's a big lie, when I pull up give that bitch my line
And you know that I'ma get mine, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, when I pull up give that bitch my line
And you know that I'ma get mine, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you got the shit you don't got
Heard you say that shit a hundred times, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you flexin' that's a big lie
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you flexin' that's a big lie

Right after that you get the wikipedia definition-- including the original German große Lüge-- explaining that the Big Lie is a propaganda technique that was coined by Hitler in 1925 for his book, Mein Kampf, the only book that Trump is known to have read and which is first wife says he keeps on his night stand. Hitlerexplained that the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." Sound familiar?

Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, a forerunner of Huckabee's daughter, "put forth a slightly different theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the expression 'big lie'. Goebbels wrote the following paragraph in an article dated 12 January 1941, 16 years after Hitler's first use of the phrase. The article, titled Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik (English: "From Churchill's Lie Factory") was published in Die Zeit ohne Beispiel.

The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

During World War II the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, a precursor to the CIA) prepared a report on Hitler's psychological profile, that included this-- "His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it." Who does that sound like?

Last year, Emily Dreyfuss, writing for Wired, explained how the Big Lie technique is used by people like Trump: repetition.

You only use 10 percent of your brain. Eating carrots improves your eyesight. Vitamin C cures the common cold. Crime in the United States is at an all-time high.

None of those things are true.

But the facts don't actually matter: People repeat them so often that you believe them. Welcome to the “illusory truth effect,” a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth. Marketers and politicians are masters of manipulating this particular cognitive bias-- which perhaps you have become more familiar with lately.

President Trump is a "great businessman," he says over and over again. Some evidence suggests that might not be true. Or look at just this week, when the president signed three executive orders designed to stop what he describes-- over and over again-- as high levels of violence against law enforcement in America. Sounds important, right? But such crimes are at their lowest rates in decades, as are most violent crimes in the US. Not exactly, as the president would have it, "American carnage."

...Repetition is what makes fake news work, too, as researchers at Central Washington University pointed out in a study way back in 2012 before the term was everywhere. It's also a staple of political propaganda. It's why flacks feed politicians and CEOs sound bites that they can say over and over again. Not to go all Godwin's Law on you, but even Adolf Hitler knew about the technique. "Slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea," he wrote in Mein Kampf.

The effect works because when people attempt to assess truth they rely on two things: whether the information jibes with their understanding, and whether it feels familiar. The first condition is logical: People compare new information with what they already know to be true and consider the credibility of both sources. But researchers have found that familiarity can trump rationality-- so much so that hearing over and over again that a certain fact is wrong can have a paradoxical effect. It's so familiar that it starts to feel right.

I'm going to guess this works even more effectively as you descend the intelligence curve and get to the average Trump voter.

This week presidential historian Jon Meacham castigated Trump for calling the media an "enemy of the people," pointing out that the phrase itself and that the whole reason authoritarians use it is part of a "totalitarian" strategy. "It’s an elective kind of base management. It’s pernicious, it’s dangerous... It’s simply a Stalinist phrase, for God’s sake. It comes out of totalitarian regimes to declare that a free press is the enemy of the people."

Early yesterday morning The Atlantic published an essay by Olivia Pascall, Trump's Tweets and the Creation of 'Illusory Truth', asserting that Trump's repetition of words like "witch hunt" could have a psychological effect on Americans-- say it enough, and people might start to believe it... Trump’s consistent tweeting-- and the constant media coverage of those tweets-- makes his favorite phrases familiar to the American public. And that familiarity could be key to making his claims seem plausible, even believable."

Every time a Trump tweet calling the investigation a “witch hunt” flashes up on people’s Twitter feeds or television screens-- regardless of the context-- it’s becoming more and more familiar to them. They’re becoming increasingly fluent in the language of Trump’s claimed innocence. Even if they don’t think Mueller’s investigation is a rigged witch hunt, they are becoming more and more familiar with the idea that it could be.

... [T]he way to combat this effect would be for people to stop responding directly to the president’s charges. “It’s actually very ineffective to say, ‘Oh, this isn’t a witch hunt,’ because what you’re doing is reinforcing the ‘witch hunt’ frame,” he says. “You can’t just get people to stop believing something by contradicting it.” [A more effective response is] creating a positive, alternative story, such as “Mueller’s investigation is aimed at safeguarding America’s elections.” But that’s not always a natural position for the president’s opponents, or the media, to take. What effect all of this repeated language could have on public opinion of the investigation itself is unclear. It probably won’t turn public opinion in the president’s favor anytime soon, but it might mean that people take the Russia investigation less seriously-- the most recent Suffolk poll is already indicating that it’s a relatively unimportant issue for voters in the midterms. It’s almost certainly succeeding in framing the debate around whether it’s a witch hunt. And maybe, for the president’s purposes, that’s enough.

Yesterday everyone was talking about Susan Glasser's New Yorker piece about Trump lying more... and purposefully. "In his first year as President," she wrote, "Trump made 2,140 false claims, according to The Post. In just the last six months, he has nearly doubled that total to 4,229. In June and July, he averaged sixteen false claims a day. On July 5th, The Post found what appears to be Trump’s most untruthful day yet: seventy-six per cent of the ninety-eight factual assertions he made in a campaign-style rally in Great Falls, Montana, were 'false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.'" The Post fact-checkers never refer to his lies as "lies," although their chief, Glenn Kessler pointed out that Señor T "has a habit of repeating the same falsehoods over and over again, especially as they concern his core political causes, such as trade or immigration or getting European allies to contribute more to NATO."

History books will likely declare the last few months a turning point in the Trump Presidency, and Kessler’s laborious work gives us metrics that confirm what is becoming more and more apparent: the recent wave of misstatements is both a reflection of Trump’s increasingly unbound Presidency and a signal attribute of it. The upsurge provides empirical evidence that Trump, in recent months, has felt more confident running his White House as he pleases, keeping his own counsel, and saying and doing what he wants when he wants to. The fact that Trump, while historically unpopular with the American public as a whole, has retained the loyalty of more than eighty per cent of Republicans-- the group at which his lies seem to be aimed-- means we are in for much more, as a midterm election approaches that may determine whether Trump is impeached by a newly Democratic Congress. At this point, the falsehoods are as much a part of his political identity as his floppy orange hair and the “Make America Great Again” slogan. The untruths, Kessler told me, are Trump’s political “secret sauce.”

...Other metrics make clear the significant changes in Trump’s approach to the Presidency in recent months, as he has become more confident, less willing to tolerate advisers who challenge him, and increasingly obsessed with the threats to his Presidency posed by the ongoing special-counsel investigation. One is the epic turnover rate of Trump’s White House staff, which as of June already stood at the unprecedented level of sixty-one per cent among the President’s top advisers.

...The previous gold standard in Presidential lying was, of course, Richard Nixon. Barry Goldwater, the Republican Presidential nominee four years before Nixon won the White House in 1968, famously called Nixon “the most dishonest individual I ever met in my life.” Writing in his memoirs, Goldwater observed that Nixon “lied to his wife, his family, his friends, longtime colleagues in the U.S. Congress, lifetime members of his own political party, the American people, and the world.”

There have been comparisons between Nixon and Trump since Trump first entered office, but these, too, have escalated in recent months as the President has been shadowed by the threat of the ongoing special-counsel investigation into the electronic break-in of the Democratic National Committee (another eerie Watergate echo) and whether Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia. Trump’s obsession with the special counsel, Robert Mueller, also comes with metrics: he has called the Mueller probe a “witch hunt” on Twitter more than twenty-one times a month on average this spring and summer, compared with an average of just three times a month in the previous nine months.

A little entertainment?

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

As the new week begins, we look back at Herr Trump's biggest lie of last week and await, with grim anticipation, what lies he will spew upon America this week.

Some might say that a dishonorable mention should go to his related lie that only Congress could fix the situation, a situation his policy created, and then pretending to make everything all better with a toothless executive order that was only designed to deflect and quiet down the angry reaction to his policy. That was just smoke and mirrors. However, I will give Señor Trumpanzee a little slack on this one. You see, Congress could fix the situation, just not in the way he and his supporters would like.

People Who Tell You Trump Can Win Reelection In 2020 Are Using Some Very Powerful Drugs-- Get Some

The Tiki Torch Leader by Hugh Brown

In his Wall Street Journal column yesterday, Steve Bannon’s Motley Crew of Challengers-- One is fresh out of prison. Another held a town hall to discuss ‘chemtrail’ theories, Karl Rove basically said the Republican establishment is fine fighting a war against Bannon's brand of fascism: Bring It On, Asshole! "Steve Bannon, the failed presidential adviser and alt-right sympathizer," he wrote pointedly," has declared war on incumbent Republicans, particularly Sen. Mitch McConnell. From his perch at Breitbart, Mr. Bannon is vowing to defeat officeholders who back Mr. McConnell as majority leader or who won’t sign onto Mr. Bannon’s populist agenda. So what kind of challengers is Mr. Bannon marshaling for the midterms?" Staten Island Mafioso Mikey Suits made great target for Rove's outrage and went on to suggest "Bannon has picked a team... of misfits and ne’er-do-wells."

I would bet Rove didn't read Charles Blow's NY Times column before he wrote it... but he should have. Señor Trumpanzee is certainly laying to rest myriad conventional norms and one is Godwin's Law, which Godwin himself has said is suspended while Trump is in politics. And Blow went there-- pr almost did. I think he isn't aware Godwin has said his Law is more... flexible for Trump than it was for, say, Bush or Cheney. "It is a commonly accepted rule among those who are in the business of argument," wrote Blow, "especially online, that he or she who invokes Adolf Hitler, either in oratory or essays, automatically forfeits the argument. The reference is deemed far too extreme, too explosive, too far beyond rational correlation. No matter how bad a present-day politician, not one of them has charted or is charting a course to exterminate millions of innocent people as an act of ethnic cleansing. Hitler stands alone in this regard, without rival, a warning to the world about how evil and lethal human beings can be, a warning that what he did can never be allowed again."

That said, there are strategies that Hitler used to secure power and rise-- things that allowed his murderous reign-- that can teach us about political theory and practice. And very reasonable and sage comparisons can be drawn between Hitler’s strategies and those of others.

One of those lessons is about how purposeful lying can be effectively used as propaganda. The forthcoming comparison isn’t to Hitler the murderer, but to Hitler the liar.

According to James Murphy’s translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf:

“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”

...“It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”

This demonstrates a precise understanding of human psychology, but also the dangerously manipulative nature that operates in the mind of a demon.

And yet, as many have noted, no person of sound reason or even cursory political awareness can read this and not be immediately struck by how similar this strategy of lying is to Donald Trump’s seeming strategy of lying: Tell a lie bigger than people think a lie can be, thereby forcing their brains to seek truth in it, or vest some faith in it, even after no proof can be found.

Trump is no Hitler, but the way he has manipulated the American people with outrageous lies, stacked one on top of the other, has an eerie historical resonance. Demagogy has a fixed design.

It should be mentioned that Vanity Fair reported in 1990 that Trump’s first wife, Ivana, “told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.” The magazine pointed out that “Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.”

...Trump has found a way to couch the lies so that people believe they don’t emanate from him but pass through him. He is not a producer but a projector.

One way he does this is by using caveats-- “I was told,” “Lots of people are saying” -- as shields. Jenna Johnson of the Washington Post addressed this in June 2016, writing about Trump’s use of the phrase “a lot of people are saying”:

“Trump frequently couches his most controversial comments this way, which allows him to share a controversial idea, piece of tabloid gossip or conspiracy theory without technically embracing it. If the comment turns out to be popular, Trump will often drop the distancing qualifier-- ‘people think’ or ‘some say.’ If the opposite happens, Trump can claim that he never said the thing he is accused of saying, equating it to retweeting someone else’s thoughts on Twitter.”

...He even projects his own ignorance onto others with his lies. As Steve Benen pointed out in July on MSNBC.com, Trump’s “awkward process of discovery has, however, produced a phrase of underappreciated beauty: ‘A lot of people don’t know that.’ These seven words are Trump’s way of saying, ‘I just learned something new, and I’m going to assume others are as ignorant as I am.’”

This is not a simple fear of the truth; it is a weaponizing of untruth. It is the use of the lie to assault and subdue. It is Trump doing to political ends what Hitler did to more brutal ends: using mass deception as masterful propaganda.

Maybe I have crossed the ink-stained line of the essay writer, where Hitler is always beyond it. But I don’t think so. Ignoring what one of history’s greatest examples of lying has to teach us about current examples of lying, particularly lying by the “president” of the most powerful country in the world, seems to me an act of timidity in a time of terror. It is an intentional self-blinding to avoid offending frail sensibilities.

I have neither time nor patience for such tiptoeing. I prefer the boot of truth to slam down to earth like thunder, no matter the shock of hearing its clap.

The world has seen powerful leaders use lying as a form of mass manipulation before. It is seeing it now, and it will no doubt see it again. History recycles. But the result doesn’t have to be-- and hopefully never will be again-- a holocaust. It can manifest as a multitude of other, lesser horrors, in both protocol and policy, including the corrosion and regression of country and culture.

That is the very real threat we are facing. Trump isn’t necessarily a direct threat to your life-- unless of course you are being kept alive by health care that he keeps threatening, or if you’re in Puerto Rico reeling in the wake of two hurricanes-- but he is very much a threat to your quality of life.

The only question is: Are enough Americans sufficiently discerning to understand that this time they are the ones being manipulated?

Now consider the latest Granite State Poll, released this week. A tad early for 2020 primary polling? Yes, absolutely. BUT... one gets a good look at what New Hampshire Republicans are thinking about their party's leader right now. And it's pretty shocking. Trump almost won New Hampshire last year. The state was certainly not Hillary country. Bernie won the primary 151,584 (60.4%) to 95,252 (38.0%). Although Trump came in first on primary day with 100,406, Bernie bested him and runner up, John Kasich combined (145,315). On election day Hillary pulled 348,521 votes (47.6%) to Trumpanzee's 345,789 (47.2%), the closest state in the country.

Inasmuch as I've seen this poll discussed, it's because of the Democratic presidential primary results, for which-- much to the chagrin of the corrupt Democratic establishment-- has Bernie way out ahead, leading Joe "Mr credit card bankruptcy bill" Biden 31% to 24%. The only declared candidate, self funding multimillionaire New Dem shithead John Delaney (D-MD) is polling at exactly what he deserves to be polling at: ZERO. But today I want to look at the polling of New Hampshire Republicans.

Only 18% of Republican primary voters say they have definitely decided whom they will support for the 2020 Republican Presidential Primary. Five percent say they are leaning toward someone while 77% say they are still trying to decide. Just under half (47%) of likely Republican primary voters say they plan on voting for Donald Trump.

Republican North Carolina Senate Candidate Thom Tillis Caught Blatantly Lying About The Affordable Care Act Again

It may be hard for normal people to understand that there are actually candidates to the right of Thom Tillis running for Senate in North Carolina and that he's playing the role of the Establishment (Art Pope) shill. Tillis was first elected to the North Carolina legislature by beating a more mainstream Republican, John Rhodes, in a primary in 2006 and 4 years later was elected by the far right as Speaker. Most people in North Carolina view the General Assembly as far too radical for North Carolina and are horrified at how radical and extreme Tillis' GOP-controled legislature has been. A recent poll showed that a whopping 62% of North Carolina voters disapprove of the legislature and only 15% approve. Asked specifically about Tillis' caucus, 51% of North Carolina voters said they have an unfavorable opinion of the Republicans in the legislature and only 36% had a favorable opinion.

The ad Tillis began running against conservative Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan this morning, typifies his cynical and dishonest approach to politics. He's the first the employ the fully discredited Republican Party Big Lie about the CBO report on Obamacare and employment. Yesterday in the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne was still marveling at the sheer mendacity of Republicans like Tillis, twisting the facts into their own baseless Foxified reality.

By broadening access to health insurance, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) ends the tyranny of “job lock,” which is what the much-misrepresented Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study of the law released Tuesday shows. The new law increases both personal autonomy and market rationality by ending the distortions in behavior the old arrangements were creating.

But that’s not how the study has been interpreted, particularly by enemies of the law. Typical was a tweet from the National Republican Congressional Committee, declaring that “#ObamaCare is hurting the economy, will cost 2.5 millions [sic] jobs.”

Glenn Kessler, The Post’s intrepid fact checker, replied firmly: “No, CBO did not say Obamacare will kill 2 million jobs.” What the report said, as the Wall Street Journal accurately summarized it, is that the law “will reduce the total number of hours Americans work by the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time jobs.”

Oh my God, say opponents of the ACA, here is the government encouraging sloth! That’s true only if you wish to take away the choices the law gives that 64-year-old or to those parents looking for more time to care for their children. Many on the right love family values until they are taken seriously enough to involve giving parents/workers more control over their lives.

And it’s sometimes an economic benefit when some share of the labor force reduces hours or stops working altogether. At a time of elevated unemployment, others will take their place. The CBO was careful to underscore-- the CBO is always careful-- that “if some people seek to work less, other applicants will be readily available to fill those positions and the overall effect on employment will be muted.”

…The reaction to the CBO study is an example of how willfully stupid-- there’s no other word-- the debate over Obamacare has become. Opponents don’t look to a painstaking analysis for enlightenment. They twist its findings and turn them into dishonest slogans. Too often, the media go along by highlighting the study’s political impact rather than focusing on what it actually says. My bet is that citizens are smarter than this. They will ignore the noise and judge Obamacare by how it works.

The most recent polling in the North Carolina Senate race shows Tillis leading a pack of drooling teabaggers and next and neck in the general with Hagan.

Despite Tillis' increased support this primary would still be headed to a runoff if the election was today. If the undecided voters broke proportionately to their current candidate preferences it would only be enough to get Tillis to 34%, well short of the 40% needed in North Carolina to win the primary outright.

…"The North Carolina Senate race continues to look like a toss up," said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. "It would help Kay Hagan if the electorate shifted its attention to something other than Obamacare."

I wonder if Republicans lying about Obamacare would qualify.

Have You Read The 15 Biggest Lies?

When Europeans start killing their plutocrats in the next few days, none should be allowed to jump to the front of the line and immigrate here

I hope you didn't miss Josh Holland's incisive book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy: And Everything Else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs, and Corporate America. When I picked it up I wondered how he can possibly narrow it down to only 15 lies. And, sure enough, not even halfway through the introduction, he was laying them out-- and brilliantly. I don't think he's counting the meta-lies as part of the 15-- like how propagandists set out to pervert the meanings of words to make an unpopular position seem ordinary and acceptable to the very people it would prove most harmful.

In the spring of 2010, after a bitter yearlong debate over health-care legislation, congressional Democrats set their sights on financial reform. Most analysts agreed that new rules of the road were needed for the Wall Street high-flyers who had almost brought the global economy to a screeching halt in 2008.

Chris Dodd, the Democrat from Connecticut who chaired the Senate Finance Committee, offered up a package of rather mild reforms that most progressive analysts immediately criticized for not going far enough to rein in the banks. The bill would have created a new financial consumer protection agency, allowed the feds to dissolve insolvent banks in an orderly way, and created a new body that would oversee risky behavior on Wall Street.

As you might imagine, it didn’t sit well with the financial industry. The American Bankers Association-- the leading industry group-- released a statement calling the proposals “unwarranted, detrimental regulatory structures” and adding, “we are strongly opposed to the draft regulatory
reform proposal that... Christopher Dodd has advanced.”

Dodd’s bill came amid almost unprecedented public hostility toward Wall Street, so opposing the measure as some radical socialist endeavor-- the usual rhetorical strategy-- was unlikely to get much traction. But an unknown advocacy group calling itself (ironically) the Committee for Truth in Politics took a different tack. The group, organized by a former North Carolina Republican Party operative, started running a series of ads suggesting that Dodd’s reforms were, paradoxically, a gift to the banking industry-- a rich, undeserved bailout that only Wall Street executives could love. The reality, as FDIC chair Sheila Blair put it, was that the bill made bailouts “impossible,” as “it should.” She explained that lawmakers had “worked really hard to squeeze bailout language out of this bill... In a true liquidity crisis, the [government] can provide systemwide support in terms of... lending and debt guarantees-- but even then, a default would trigger resolution or bankruptcy.”

In technical terms, this particular lie might be called a classic example of “chutzpah.” But it wasn’t being uttered only by shady right-wing front-groups. Minnesota representative Michelle Bachmann, one of the most reactionary members of Congress and a darling of the Tea Partiers, had called an earlier version of the bill a “permanent bailout” for Wall Street. Soon after that, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-TN) made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows to spread the meme. All were playing off a script developed by Frank Luntz, the GOP’s super-pollster, who prepared a memo in early 2010 suggesting that opponents of the bill paint it as “punishing tax-payers” while rewarding the very “big banks and credit card companies” that were at that very moment furiously
trying to kill the bill.

It’s likely that nobody would even have thought of characterizing new regulations as a giveaway to the banks if not for the success the conservative movement (backed by corporate America’s deep pockets) has had in framing the economic issues of our day. When the ads went up, Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum commented,

And that, boys and girls, is how the game is played. Just portray a bill meant to rein in banks as a bill meant to bail out banks... Maybe suggest that instead of protecting consumers, it will remove consumer protections. Or that instead of regulating derivatives, it will set them free. Simple. Why bother making up complicated lies when simple ones will do just fine?

Turning reality on its head is nothing new for Frank Luntz, a key figure in the conservative message machine. He’s probably best known for penning an influential 2002 memo to then president George W. Bush suggesting that conservatives undermine the scientific consensus on global warming. He also played a pivotal role in popularizing the term “death tax,” which is much easier than explaining why ordinary Americans should oppose a modest inheritance tax on a few thousand of the richest families in the country.

In other words, the mendacity of the Committee for Truth in Politics was standard fare. And when you pause for a moment to examine this kind of spin, a few themes emerge. Every progressive policy is decried as a “job killer” or an act of wild-eyed social engineering. Almost without exception, those policies are painted as “radical.” Conversely, every measure that affects the wealthiest Americans is spun as an assault on the working class. Minimum wage increases, environmental protections, and even paid sick days “kill jobs,” and anything that impacts huge multinationals’ bottom lines is spun as an issue of vital concern to “small business owners.”

The message is clear-- the United States may be a hyper-individualistic country, but when it comes to our economic policies, somehow we’re all in it together. Bill Gates’s interests always dovetail neatly with those of Joe and Jane Six-Pack.

How do Republicans get away with it? Are people that stupid? Actually, many aren't. Yesterday President Obama's new budget proposed taxing dividends for the wealthiest Americans at a more equitable rate than conservatives prefer. So Republicans accuse him of being a "job destroyer." Most voters aren't buying this bullshit, which is clearly reflected in the 10% approval rating for the Republican-controlled Congress. In fact, many voters-- particularly progressives voters-- are unhappy with Obama's and the Democrats' half measures. Recall-- from the quote just above-- that most progressive analysts of Dodd's financial reform package "immediately criticized [it and him] for not going far enough to rein in the banks. It was the same with the health care bill-- hard to defend a half measure (or a quarter measure) that could just as well been the real single-payer reform the country needs if the cost of health care inflation is ever going to be solved. And did Big Pharma and the insurance industry really need the kind of sweetheart deal Obama tacked onto the bill? None of these "compromises"-- if that's what they were-- got him any more votes in Congress. They didn't stop the Republicans from making up lies and they didn't stop Wall Street from financing a multimillion dollar campaign against them. I bet if Obama proposed taxing dividends for the top 2 percent of income-earners at 60% instead of 39.6%, the Republicans would be happy willing to compromise at 39.6%. James Fallows' most talked about Atlantic piece last week, Obama, Explained concludes with the notion that Obama is getting better as a president. Makes sense. I still want to see him negotiate with the conservatives in such as way that he doesn't wind up giving away the whole store the way he has in the past three years time and time again. Then I'll go along with Fallows that he's on his way to chess master status.

Pope Pius Baloney XIII

Newt and other Republicans, frustrated with Romney's impenetrably slick Teflon® exterior, have called him a liar before, but this weekend [see video above] Newt let loose on the GOP front-runner and aloof, condescending Mormon bishop at an official Republican Party debate on national TV. Previously, Newt was just looked at as a misfit grousing because Romney was getting the best of him.

“He’s not telling the American people the truth. It’s just like his pretense that he’s a conservative,” Mr. Gingrich said on CBS’s The Early Show. “I just think he ought to be honest to the American people and try to win as the real Mitt Romney, not try to invent a poll-driven, consultant-guided version that goes around with talking points.”

The volume of Mr Gingrich’s complaining has gotten louder and louder each day.

At a stop in Marshalltown, Iowa, on Monday, Mr. Gingrich complained that he has been “Romney-boated,” a reference to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads that helped derail Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004.

Appearing on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight on Monday, Mr. Gingrich repeated his complaints about Mr. Romney’s refusal to disown the negative ads being run by a “super PAC” supporting his campaign.

“If he would be willing to just be man enough to say, ‘You know, this is my negative campaign and I admit it,’ I’d be a lot happier,” Mr. Gingrich said. “What I find very frustrating, and frankly irritating,” he said, is someone who “wants to run for president of the United States who can’t be honest with the American people.”

...“Here is my simple tag line: Somebody who will lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when they are president."

Not exactly the most trustworthy of organizations when it comes to calling out Republicans on their lies, even FactCheck.org was stunned by the stream of bullshit flowing off the ABC stage Saturday night and the NBC stage Sunday morning. "Less than 12 hours after the ABC News/Yahoo! debate in Manchester ended, the Republican presidential candidates were at it again-- debating on NBC’s Meet the Press. As they did the night before, the candidates at times distorted the truth on a variety of topics, including Medicare, job creation, gasoline prices and environmental regulations."

And of course it isn't only Romney who lies virtually every time he opens his mouth. ABC News fact-checked its own debate with this pack of liars, and the report was... well, just what one should expect from a gaggle of Republican stooges. From the Romney Big Lie about creating jobs at Bain instead of killing them to Santorum's eye-popping ethics violations and Perry's inchoate, barely decipherable nonsense, not one of these guys, other than perhaps Ron Paul, allows truth to get in the way of what how he wants to present his talking points.

The Romney lies about being a job creator, instead of the more accurate description as a jobs cremator, have a special place in my heart, since Bain used the Romney model to destroy my old company, Warner Bros Records. Matt Negrin reports for ABC that he continued to advance false claims on Saturday night.

Newt Gingrich raced out of the gate in tonight’s debate by being skeptical of Mitt Romney’s claim that Bain was responsible for creating 100,000 jobs, and he pointed to scrutiny of the firm in a recent New York Times article and a documentary.

In response, Romney repeated a familiar talking point-- that Bain, under his leadership, was responsible for creating 100,000 jobs at companies in which it invested. Romney was asked tonight if the 100,000 jobs are discounting the number of jobs that were lost at companies backed by Bain. He said the figure includes “both” and that it’s a “net” tally. He rattled off some talking points on companies that added jobs, like Sports Authority and Staples.

Bain was not the sole investor in Staples (which Romney said added 90,000 jobs) nor Sports Authority (which he said added 15,000). In 2002, for example, Staples founder Tom Stemberg wrote on CNN Money that Bain “gave us a boost.” Though the company also had help from two other firms. Sports Authority, too, was started with financial help from a few other investors.

Democrats were quick to respond to Romney’s claim tonight. In an email to reporters, the party pointed to a number of quotes the candidate has made years ago about that figure-- including this part from a 1994 Boston Globe article: ”In a telephone interview late yesterday, Romney dismissed the characterization of Staples and his other investments as streamlining, saying that what he has done is ‘build and grow businesses,’ not shrink them. He asserted that there is no way to calculate whether jobs have been lost or gained economy-wide as a result of his ventures, and noted his 10,000-job figure simply measures what happened to employment at companies in which Bain invested.”

FactCheck.org checked Romney’s 100,000 jobs claim earlier this week and found it to be “unproven and questionable.”

Rick Santorum, standing to Romney’s left on the stage, was asked early in the debate whether his comment that the United States doesn’t need a CEO (it needs a leader) was directed at Romney; he confirmed that, yes, it was.

And speaking of Santorum, the dust-up over his character as one of Washington's sleaziest operators was interesting. His behavior as a bribe-taker in office and a corrupt lobbyist as soon as he was defeated by Pennsylvania voters is pretty standard fare among Republicans, and it can be expected that he would be pounded a lot more heavily if he were debating a Democrat. But he still managed to lie his ass off and come out looking as bad as Romney.

During the debate, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum sparred over Santorum’s ethics record. Who characterized it more accurately?

Moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Ron Paul about this ad, which the Texas congressman’s campaign will begin airing in South Carolina on Monday:



The ad accuses Santorum of corruption and states that he took the most money from lobbyists of any member of Congress, during his time in Washington.

Paul stood by the ad tonight, noting that the “corruption” allegation originally came from an independent group. Santorum protested that the group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), had leveled “ridiculous” charges against him and that CREW disproportionately makes such charges against conservatives.

Both are (mostly) right.

On the topic of lobbyist cash: Santorum did receive the most contributions from lobbyists and lobbying groups in the 2006 election cycle, when he lost to Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Santorum’s objection-- that the total was based on PAC donations-- is partly true. Center for Responsive Politics counts both PAC and individual (over $200) donations, according to its listed methodology.

On the topic of corruption, CREW did file a complaint against Santorum, and it did list Santorum on its “most corrupt” members of Congress list in 2006. But the complaint was never taken up by the Senate Ethics Committee and Santorum lost his reelection campaign, as noted in this ABC News story. CREW’s complaint alleged that a loan violated the Senate gift rule and that Santorum appeared to have traded legislative action for donations. Santorum did write a letter to Pennsylvania newspaper protesting the allegations.

As for CREW’s partisanship: Santorum is probably right about CREW’s reputation among Republicans, but the group focuses its criticism on both parties. Its current “most corrupt” list includes 10 Republicans and four Democrats.

When Santorum made the list, in an election cycle marked by GOP ethics scandals, the list included 21 Republicans and four Democrats.

One more great big Romney lie everyone noticed early in the debate: his claim that no states want to ban contraceptives. Technically, no state does, but hundreds of Republican Party officials do all over the states-- including, oddly enough, Romney himself!

Romney backed Mississippi’s ultimately failed (it was voted down in a referendum) Personhood Amendment, which if passed would have defined life as having begun at the point of conception.

Such language “could potentially ban common forms of contraception like the birth control pill, as well as prevent a pregnant woman experiencing complications that threaten her life or health to obtain safe abortion care,” Molly A.K. Connors wrote in New Hampshire’s Concord Monitor.

In 2005, Romney, then the governor of Massachusetts, vetoed a bill meant to expand emergency access to the “morning after pill.” The law would have required hospitals to offer the pill to rape survivors and allowed for certain state-sanctioned pharmacists to sell it without asking for a prescription.

“The bill does not involve only the prevention of conception: The drug it authorizes would also terminate life after conception,” Romney wrote, defending the veto in this op-ed piece.

For his part, Santorum has often spoken out against the Supreme Court’s ruling in Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965). That decision, which stated that the constitution protected “the right to privacy,” was inspired by an ultimately overturned state ban on contraception.

Santorum and many anti-Abortionists feel that the ruling paved the way for Roe v. Wade.

The Griswold case, he said yesterday, “created a new Constitutional right, which in my opinion is judicial activism.”

So while it would be unfair to say Santorum wants to ban contraception, he has been and remains a vocal opponent of the most prominent court ruling in its favor.

Meanwhile right-wing bloggers are on suicide watch over the incompetence of their preferred lunatic fringe candidates to take on the craven Willard and today's tweets from rightist Dan Riehl portend a seriously disillusioned base.

Counting down to 2010 with -- what else? -- the craziness of "Big Dick" Cheney

Just the other day I was bitching about the failure of the Obama campaign or administration to create a plain narrative of the ideological catastrophes of the Bush regime's ideological catastrophes. One consequence of the failure to do so is that we continue to be stuck listening to the lies and inanities of its vilest actor, despite the sub-zero approval ratings to which he seemed to be sinking back when he was still fixed inside the public's increasingly shorter window of memory. -- Ken

Dick Cheney's lies about President Obama

By Eugene Robinson
Thursday, December 31, 2009; A17

It's pathetic to break a New Year's resolution before we even get to New Year's Day, but here I go. I had promised myself that I would do a better job of ignoring Dick Cheney's corrosive and nonsensical outbursts -- that I would treat them, more or less, like the pearls of wisdom one hears from homeless people sitting in bus shelters.

But he is a former vice president, which gives him a big stage for his histrionic Rottweiler-in-Winter act. It is never a good idea to let widely disseminated lies and distortions go unchallenged. And the shrill screed that Cheney unloosed Wednesday is so full of outright mendacity that, well, my resolution will have to wait.

In a statement to Politico, Cheney seemed to be trying to provide talking points for opponents of the Obama administration who -- incredibly -- would exploit the Christmas Day terrorist attack for political gain. Cheney's broadside opens with a big lie, which he then repeats throughout. It is as if he believes that saying something over and over again, in a loud enough voice, magically makes it so.

"As I've watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war," Cheney begins.

Flat-out untrue.

The fact is that Obama has said many times that we are at war against terrorists. He said it as a candidate. He said it in his inaugural address: "Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred." He has said it since.

As Cheney well knows, unless he has lost even the most tenuous grip on reality, Obama's commitment to warfare as an instrument in the fight against terrorism has won the president nothing but grief from the liberal wing of his party, with more certainly to come. Hasn't anyone told Cheney that Obama is sharply boosting troop levels in Afghanistan in an attempt to avoid losing a war that the Bush administration started but then practically abandoned?

Cheney knows this. But he goes on to use the big lie -- that Obama is "trying to pretend we are not at war" -- to bludgeon the administration on a host of specific issues. Here is the one that jumps out at me: The president, Cheney claims, "seems to think that if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won't be at war."

Interesting that Cheney should bring that up, because it now seems clear that the man accused of trying to blow up Northwest Flight 253, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was given training -- and probably the bomb itself, which involved plastic explosives sewn into his underwear -- by al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen. It happens that at least two men who were released from Guantanamo appear to have gone on to play major roles as al-Qaeda lieutenants in Yemen. Who let these dangerous people out of our custody? They were set free by the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

The former vice president expresses his anger that the Obama administration is bringing Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, to trial in New York. Cheney is also angry that Obama does not use the phrase "war on terror" all the time, the way the Bush administration used to. But Obama just specifies that we're at war against a network of terrorists, on the sensible theory that it's impossible to wage war against a tactic.

Toward the end of his two-paragraph statement, Cheney goes completely off the rails and starts fulminating about how Obama is seeking "social transformation -- the restructuring of American society." Somehow, this is supposed to be related to the president's alleged disavowal of war -- which, of course, isn't real anyway. It makes you wonder whether Cheney is just feeding the fantasies of the paranoid right or has actually joined the tea-party fringe.

I can find reasons to criticize the administration's response to the Christmas Day attack. Obama and his team were slow off the mark. Their initial statements were weak. Obama shouldn't have waited three days to speak publicly, and when he did he should have shown some emotion.

But using a terrorist attack to seek political gain? I have a New Year's resolution to suggest for Cheney: Ahead of your quest for personal vindication, put country first.

YOUR BRAIN LIES TO YOU-- AND SO DOES JOHN CULBERSON (R-TX)

Houston lunatic John Culberson (center)

Last night, when commenting on Cook's rating change for Texas' 7th CD, from Solid Republican to Likely Republican, I mentioned that incumbent wingnut John Culberson is "one of the most bigoted and ignorant men to ever serve in the House." I don't want you to think that was just some off-the-cuff, gratuitous ad hominem remark. I meant it quite literally.

And it is more than Culberson's breathtaking but predictably atrocious voting record that has earned him such epithets. (And he's bad, voting somewhere between Roy Blunt and Michele Bachmann-- not exactly as reactionary as Patrick McHenry or Steve King but more reactionary than Marilyn Musgrave and Tom Feeney.

I want to tell you something about crazy Congressman Culberson but first allow me to introduce you to a study I've been meaning to bring up all week, Your Brain Lies To You by Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, and Sandra Aamodt, former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience. "False beliefs," they begin, "are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim." In today's NY Times Paul Krugman looks at the Rovian poison that has infected half the country with the absurd and unfounded propaganda that General Wes Clark impugned John McCain’s military service. I wish they would have told us, since I can't remember, what percent of voters in 2000 thought they were casting a vote for George H.W. Bush when they actually voted for George W. Bush-- was it 8% or 14%? But that isn't their point, anyway. It's about "source amnesia" and how the brain stores and reprocesses information.

A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength.

...Even if they do not understand the neuroscience behind source amnesia, campaign strategists can exploit it to spread misinformation.

They know that if their message is initially memorable, its impression will persist long after it is debunked. In repeating a falsehood, someone may back it up with an opening line like "I think I read somewhere" or even with a reference to a specific source.

Even though Culberson went to a college (yes, Southern Methodist University... but still a college), I sincerely doubt he has any understanding of neuroscience or source amnesia. He has, however, been somewhat successful in what Hitler defined in his 1925 autobiography, Mein Kampf as "The Big Lie:" a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

One such "Big Lie" that has gained a certain amount of currency in certain Republican circles is how the border patrol arrested members of al-Qaeda coming across the Mexican border. You may even recall having seen it on TV (so it must be true, right?) But it wasn't just far right propaganda agents and hatemeisters like Hannity, Dobbs and O'Reilly who were pushing this GOP talking point. Three far right extremists in Congress (Sue Myrick (R-NC), John Cornyn (R-TX) and-- you guessed it-- John Culberson) have all pushed this as hard as they could.

Even after North Carolina newspapers had exposed Myrick's lie about arrests and after Cornyn was forced to admit that he had no knowledge of any al Qaeda members being arrested at the border, Culberson was sending out a press release to push the discredited story down the food chain. According to David Sirota (in his new book, The Uprising, Culberson made up some baseless story about 3 al Qaeda terrorists being held in Texas jail. Texas is pretty big but it isn't infinite and his silly story was soon shown to have no basis in fact whatsoever. Of course that didn't stop Culberson, who jumped at the opportunity to go on Fox and repeat his story to a national audience, where he played the part of a credible U.S. congressman.

But just a few weeks later, the Houston Chronicle reported that the law enforcement authorities Culberson said were holding the supposed terrorists refuted his entire story. "Congressman Culberson has two or three stories confused," said the local sheriff. "We have no terrorist in our jail."

Culberson isn't one to learn from his mistakes and anyway, he soon realized that his constituents didn't care if a story was actually true or not, so long as it was exciting. He soon joined up with Colorado's lunatic fringe Senator Wayne Allard to demand that the Minutemen vigilantes be funded by the government. "According to the Brownsville Herald, Culberson authored a bill proposing to hand over up to $6.8 billion to 'volunteer militias' like the Minutemen and grant them authority to 'use any means and any force' that is already granted to state and federal law enforcement officials." Although his crackpot bill drew 47 xenophobic Republican co-sponsors, it never became law. His stories did, however, become lore-- in militia circles where if you don't know about the captured al Qaeda members and the mosque that was found in the California desert, you are just a dupe of the liberal media.

I don't know if Arianna Huffington knows John Culberson-- as far as I've read so far he hasn't come up in her awesome new book, Right Is Wrong-- How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, And Made Is All Less Safe (And What You Need to Know to End The Madness). But for all I know Chapter 5, "The Right's War On Science," could have been written with him in mind.

To drag us all back to the pre-factual, pre-science Stone Age where divinely inspired shamans who commune directly with God lead unquestioning masses, the War on Science, didn't have to be won outright, just fought to a stalemate. Because science requires questions about how the universe works to be decided through the scientific method, persuading the public that matters of science are really just matters of opinion, even of you don't persuade them to accept a particular opinion, is to achieve a victory of sorts. The thin edge of the wedge is once again the faux reasonable position that there are two sides to every question and that it's useful to hear from multiple points of view before making up one's mind. Once you can get equal time for the insane positions that the principle of evolution is debatable and global climate change is unverified alarmism, the you've begun the process of turning back the clock of history and human progress.

More insane positions than what Culberson spews out, you will not find. But the man is in the Halls of Congress, not running down the hall of an insane asylum in his pajamas, shouting that terrorists and little green men are chasing him. In fact, Culberson has been quite the favorite of special interests in Washington looking for congressmen willing to sell out their constituents' interests for a few silver coins. Culberson has gotten more than a few. Big Oil and Gas, for example, have handed him $287,961 so far and the good folks in the real estate industry-- eager for the economy-wrecking deregulation he unflinchingly supported-- has given him almost as much, $276,336. One of his biggest donors was AT&T ($26,500), desperate for the retroactive immunity he was delighted to vote for.

For all his shouting about "support the troops," you would probably guess... well, that he does. But he doesn't-- not even a little. Since 2003 he has participated in 20 roll call votes pertaining to the well being of active duty military personnel. He has voted against their well being all 20 times-- against pay raises, against upgrades in active duty servicemen's living quarters, against protecting active duty servicemen's families from bankruptcy, against extending full retirement and disability benefits to servicemen wounded in battle, etc. But it isn't only active duty military servicemembers he hates. He also sports the worst voting record in Congress when it comes to U.S. military vets. Since 2002 Culberson has voted in 22 roll calls regarding veterans. And he voted against veterans all 22 times. He may hate the unemployed, but he sure loves those folks at the Big Oil who have given him so much money. There have been 32 bills that have come up to ease the burden of unemployed Americans-- many of them unemployed because of ill-advised legislation that Culberson has supported (like giving tax breaks to American companies that outsource jobs). Culberson has voted badly every single one of them. Big Oil, on the other hand, has had an easier time of it. Of the 20 special interest roll calls on that industry since 2003, Culberson has been a faithful servant to these profiteers and price gaugers every single time.

Although Culberson is best known as a crazed xenophobe and shrill racist, he has worked hard to promote himself as a hipster who, like Democrat Tim Ryan, Tweets. Reading his school girlish Twitter archive, which features pictures of Confederate soldiers, makes you wonder what kind of people vote for a lunatic like this, who claims "the survival of the Republican ticket depends on re-electing him," and that includes fellow Big Lie specialist John Cornyn.