Doctoring the Facts

From THINK PROGRESS:

The Senate health care bill makes massive cuts to Medicaid. But you wouldn’t know that just from listening to Trump administration officials on the Sunday shows.

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Giving Herman a Pizza His Mind

From Timothy Egan at Opinionator at The New York Times:

By almost any measure — social, political, economic, logical — Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan is nuts, nuts, nuts. Go ahead and jack up the price of nearly everything that moves in the United States with a 9 percent national sales tax on all new purchases and services. Talk about instant branding: every time you buy something, you’ll be hit with the Herm Cain tax at the checkout line.

And this is just the start. The nearly 50 million filers whose main federal tax is now a payroll deduction and not an income tax would see their overall bill from the government increase by nearly 100 percent. This conclusion comes from the economists and fact-checkers who have actually looked at the napkin sketch of a plan Cain got from some accountant friend of his in Cleveland.

Kick Rick

From GULF TIMES:

Republican front-runner Rick Perry came under heavy fire on Social Security, jobs and his record in Texas in a heated US presidential debate on Monday as rivals tried to halt the governor’s momentum.

…snip…

Perry’s rivals questioned his claims about Texas job creation, his stance on illegal immigrants and an executive order he gave as governor, which he admitted was a mistake, that young girls be vaccinated for a sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.

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Debate of Duh Nation

From POLITICO:

Rick Perry battled a withering barrage of attacks in his first debate as a presidential candidate Wednesday night, at times stumbling in the face of harsh criticism – and difficult questioning – at the POLITICO/NBC debate.

But Perry proved himself to be an aggressive, often caustic debater, waiting only a few moments to go on the attack against his top rival, Mitt Romney, for his jobs record as governor of Massachusetts.

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If Rick Santorum isn’t sexy enough for you, here’s Thaddeus!

From The CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR:

Thaddeus McCotter, a US Representative from Michigan whose agenda appeals to tea party activists, announced his bid Saturday to win the Republican presidential nomination.

Rep. McCotter champions lower federal taxes, energy independence from foreign sources of oil, he is against illegal immigrants receiving government benefits and he endorses the concept of American “exceptionalism” regarding foreign policy.

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Screwing America, One School at a Time

From AlterNet:

Since the 2010 elections, voucher bills have popped up in legislatures around the nation. From Pennsylvania to Indiana to Florida, state governments across the country have introduced bills that would take money from public schools and use it to send students to private and religious institutions.

Vouchers have always been a staple of the right-wing agenda. Like previous efforts, this most recent push for vouchers is led by a network of conservative think tanks, PACs, Religious Right groups and wealthy conservative donors. But “school choice,” as they euphemistically paint vouchers, is merely a means to an end. Their ultimate goal is the total elimination of our public education system.

The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business.

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The Hot Seat

From TALKING POINTS MEMO:

The resignation of scandal-plagued Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), and the expected appointment of current Republican candidate Rep. Dean Heller to the seat, could portend a political mess of a wholly different sort: A special election for Heller’s House seat — and the conundrum for Republicans posed by the potential candidacy of their losing U.S. Senate nominee from 2010, Sharron Angle.

Angle, who lost the 2010 Senate race despite the national Republican wave — due to controversy over extreme statements about “Second Amendment remedies” to Democratic policies, and her statements in favor of phasing out Social Security and Medicare — has already been running for the House seat, along with retired Navy Commander Kirk Lippold, who was chief officer of the U.S.S. Cole when it was attacked by al Qaeda in 2000. In addition, Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki and state GOP chair Mark Amodei are reportedly considering the race.

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The Gang’s All Somewhere

From the Los Angeles Times:

For months, as a group of senators known as the “Gang of Six” secretively holed up in the Capitol, their unusual bipartisan meetings frequently included some version of the doomsday speech.

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