From Dollars To Death Panels: How Republicans Distorted Debates On Capitol Hill

Another distortion, particularly by Southern and Sunbelt conservatives, is decrying pork spending and earmarks yet greedily accepting defense industries and military bases in their districts.

as i watched a neighbor hang their american flag upside down, i was reminded of the aldous huxley quote, "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored," along with "don't confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up," or those who are non-democrats, will believe anything but the truth.

the good ol' gop learned quite well, after successfully lying this country and the world into an unnecessary and unpaid for war, they could lie about anything; in fact the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.

has there ever been a president, elected by an overwhelming majority of americans, who has been so criticized so soon on everything? of course, though, credit must be given where credit is due and that is clearly at the feet of the msm and their enabling and validating these lies.

Another TMP obsession with their covergirl Palin.....

Sarah SquareGlasses has aged 12 years in the past 12 months. Tabloids should have fun kicking her around for another couple years.

One lesson to be learned from this: Ignore Palin's FB page and maybe she'll sink back into her hole.

The Big Lie is so effective because once you've conned them, the dupes will walk through fire rather than walk it back.

It's called cognitive dissonance. Between that and homophobia, the Republicans don't have any issues left.

It's just embarrassing when the opposition party has no responsible adults left to front for them.

I'm all for reporting news. But this "big scandal" just pales in comparison to Abramoff, et al.

Lying, factmaking, fearmongering gives the GOP and its downwind relations a larger political playbook.

ObamaCare’s Cost Could Top $6 Trillion

November 27, 2009
by Michael F. Cannon

Congressional Democrats are using several budget gimmicks to disguise the cost of their health care overhaul, claiming the House and Senate bills would cost only (!) about $1 trillion over 10 years. Now that critics have begun to correct for those budget gimmicks, supporters of ObamaCare are firing back.

One gimmick makes the new entitlement spending appear smaller by not opening the spigot until late in the official 10-year budget window (2010–2019). Correcting for that gimmick in the Senate version, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) estimates, “When all this new spending occurs” — i.e., from 2014 through 2023 — “this bill will cost $2.5 trillion over that ten-year period.”

Another gimmick pushes much of the legislation’s costs off the federal budget and onto the private sector by requiring individuals and employers to purchase health insurance. When the bills force somebody to pay $10,000 to the government, the Congressional Budget Office treats that as a tax. When the government then hands that $10,000 to private insurers, the CBO counts that as government spending. But when the bills achieve the exact same outcome by forcing somebody to pay $10,000 directly to a private insurance company, it appears nowhere in the official CBO cost estimates — neither as federal revenues nor federal spending. That’s a sharp departure from how the CBO treated similar mandates in the Clinton health plan. And it hides maybe 60 percent of the legislation’s total costs. When I correct for that gimmick, it brings total costs to roughly $2.5 trillion (i.e., $1 trillion/0.4).

Here’s where things get really ugly. TPMDC’s Brian Beutler calls “the” $2.5-trillion cost estimate a “doozy” of a “hysterical Republican whopper.” Not only is he incorrect, he doesn’t seem to realize that Gregg and I are correcting for different budget gimmicks; it’s just a coincidence that we happened to reach the same number.

When we correct for both gimmicks, counting both on- and off-budget costs over the first 10 years of implementation, the total cost of ObamaCare reaches — I’m so sorry about this — $6.25 trillion. That’s not a precise estimate. It’s just far closer to the truth than President Obama and congressional Democrats want the debate to be.

Beutler and other supporters of ObamaCare can react to this news in two ways. They can continue to deny the enormous cost of the legislation they support. Or they can question how President Obama’s health plan came to be so blessedly expensive, and how (and by whom) they were duped into thinking it wasn’t.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/11/27/obamacares-cost-could-top-6-trillion/

* re: the graph. The bump from 20% of GDP to nearly 30% is done. Only the foolish should believe it's ever going to go lower.
* Yes Healthcare will cost almost triple the projections. The projections are based on unrealistic assumptions.
* Yes, there are death panels.
* Cap and Tax is mortally wounded and dying a slow but certain death.

Keep up the good work.