Mitt Romney Earns ‘Lie Of The Year’ Award
Mitt Romney earned the “Lie of the Year” award from fact-checkers Politifact for his repeated “brazenly false” lie that Jeep was moving production to China. Romney told the lie on hi campaign stump, forcing Jeep’s parent Chrysler to respond publicly several times, labeling his lies as “extravagant comments,†and “unnecessary fantasies,†and forcing the Obama campaign to release an ad refuting the Romney lie.
It should be noted that Romney’s lie injected fear into thousands of auto workers, fearing they would lose their jobs. Not a good way to get votes, and a horribly mean attempt to do so.
“Bloomberg reported on Oct. 22 that the company was planning to restart production of Jeeps in China. The entirety of the Bloomberg report made it clear that Chrysler was considering expansion in China, not shuttering American production,” Politifact reports:
But one conservative news outlet seized on the report’s opening lines. The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard blogged on Oct. 25 about the Bloomberg story and incorrectly wrote that Jeep was “considering giving up on the United States and shifting production to China,” a move that would “crash the economy in towns like Toledo, Ohio … .” The conservative Drudge Report then linked to Bedard’s post under the headline, “Jeep eyes shifting production to China.”
Within hours, Chrysler spokesman Gualberto Ranieri responded on Chrysler’s company blog.
“Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China,” Ranieri wrote, adding, “A careful and unbiased reading of the Bloomberg take would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments.”
But later that night at a campaign stop in Defiance, Ohio, Romney added a new line to his stump speech:
“I saw a story today, that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China,” he said, to boos from the audience. “I will fight for every good job in America. I’m going to fight to make sure trade is fair, and if it’s fair, America will win.”
Reporters mentioned the mistake in their stories the next day, it lit up the Internet, and the liberal cable channel MSNBC attacked Romney for not knowing the facts.
“His lie is embarrassing, frankly, and it should be unsettling for the rest of the world,” said MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “Imagine Romney waking up in the Lincoln bedroom or whatever, checking his conservative Twitter feed and running with whatever he finds there.”
Romney’s campaign didn’t retreat, though. It doubled down with a TV ad for Ohio voters that weekend:
“Who will do more for the auto industry? Not Barack Obama,” the ad began, adding, “Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.” A similar radio ad soon followed.
That in turn prompted another unqualified denial, this time from Chrysler Chairman and CEO Sergio Marchionne, who said Jeep assembly lines “will remain in operation in the United States and will constitute the backbone of the brand. It is inaccurate to suggest anything different.”
PolitiFact and other fact-checkers weighed in and said the ad was inaccurate. PolitiFact rated it Pants on Fire because it “strings together facts in a way that presents an wholly inaccurate picture.”
Factcheck.org said Romney’s speech was “flat wrong” and the ad was misleading. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker gave the ad four Pinocchios, saying, “This ad shows that we have entered the final, desperate week of the campaign.”
When pinned down with questions on the ad, the Romney team either dodged or defended the ad as literally accurate. Stuart Stevens, a senior adviser to Romney, told the New York Times, “It would be better if they expanded production in the U.S. instead of expanding in China.” The automakers said that ignored common global trade practices.
There was no give from Romney. Maybe that wasn’t surprising.
At the Republican National Convention in Tampa, journalists had challenged the Romney campaign team about an ad that falsely claimed Obama was ending work requirements for welfare. Romney pollster Neil Newhouse responded by saying, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”
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President Donald Trump thrilled his supporters in New York on Friday as he shared how he came up with his latest nickname for Democrats — his explanation included a spelling lesson.
“Blue means Dumocrat,” the president said. “That’s a new name I came up with.”
“I was, I was thinking about this character we have in the House. His name is Hakeem Jeffries,” Trump said to boos from the audience.
“And he’s a low IQ person, very low IQ.”
“And I watched what he was saying, and what the horrible things he was saying, and I said, ‘He’s a dumb guy.’ I said, Wait a minute, he’s a Dumocrat. That’s how I got the name,” Trump excitedly said.
“You take the ‘e’ out, you don’t use the ‘b’. A lot of people don’t know ‘dumb’ has a ‘b’ in it, actually. You don’t need it. You discard the ‘b.’
“But you take the ‘e’ out, and you replace it with a ‘u.'”
“They are Dumocrats. You know why? ‘Cause their policies are dumb. Their policies are very dumb. All of their policies.”
Critics mocked the president.
“His uncle taught at MIT, but Trump just recently learned there is a b in dumb,” wrote political strategist Jeff Timmer.
“Dumbo @realDonaldTrump here is the only one who doesn’t know there’s a b in DUMB,” said former GOP Congresswoman Barbara Comstock.
“It’s impossible to overstate how f— — stupid Trump looks on the world stage,” wrote another online commenter.
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s controversial Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is resigning.
“Unfortunately, I must submit my resignation, effective June 30, 2026,” DNI Gabbard wrote to President Trump, Fox News reports. “My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer.”
“During pivotal moments,” NBC News reports, “as Trump deliberated over possible military action or watched live video feeds of operations in Iran or Venezuela, Gabbard was often not in the room, underscoring her outsider status.”
“Gabbard has had a tough tenure being sidelined on Venezuela and Iran. Last month, Trump floated replacing her with Pam Bondi, but some advisers saved her,” reported WIRED’s Hugo Lowell.
President Trump wrote that Gabbard had done an “incredible job,” and “we will miss her,” while Reuters reports that the White House ”forced” Gabbard “to resign from her post, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Dave Brown called Gabbard’s tenure “tumultuous.”
Critics were quick to respond.
“Good riddance. The Iran war has been the biggest display of intelligence incompetence in decades,” wrote U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI).
“Tulsi Gabbard leaves this administration in disgrace after helping Trump drag the country into yet another forever war in the Middle East,” wrote political strategist Mike Nellis. “She built her entire image on opposing these wars, then abandoned that principle the second it became politically inconvenient. That’s her legacy: a complete fraud, completely full of s— — about the one thing people thought she genuinely believed in. Good f— — riddance.”
“Also, is anybody in Congress or the media going to get to the bottom of the whistleblower’s story about Tulsi Gabbard withholding classified intercepted intel for political reasons?” Nellis continued. “What the hell happened there, or are we just going to pretend that didn’t happen?”
“Are we ever going to found out if Tulsi Gabbard broke how many different national security laws by allegedly refusing to hand over investigative documents, or is that just going away now?” asked writer Charlotte Clymer.
Professor and policy analyst Adam Cochran called Gabbard’s resignation “shocking,” and added: “Can’t imagine what they would ask to do that is too out of line for her…”
Associate Professor of Political Science Christopher Clary said Gabbard “will go down as perhaps the most ineffective and incompetent DNI in the short history of that position.”
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump managed to effectively raise taxes on the majority of Americans through his tax policies, while handing the richest five percent a tax cut. Now, many Americans want to see the rich pay their fair share — and that could mean increasing their taxes.
The former chief economist of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Professor Zachary Liscow, argues there’s a “slow, boring” yet “easy” way to do so.
“The United States is seeing an increasing concentration of wealth at the very top and a worsening national debt,” Liscow writes in an op-ed at The New York Times. “For many Americans, taxing the rich more is an obvious move.”
He details some of the “novel proposals to curb the many intricate ways the rich make and hide their money,” including a wealth tax, a tax on unrealized gains, and a tax on “loans that billionaires take against their stock.”
But, Liscow warns, while novel, these methods would not raise the substantial amount of money the U.S. needs.
“The boring truth is that Congress can accomplish a lot simply by raising the rates of the taxes already on the books,” Liscow explains.
He examines U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) proposal to tax “fortunes above $50 million,” and says there are “serious constitutional and policy arguments for this idea, but the Supreme Court’s current members would probably strike it down.”
There is a billionaire’s tax proposal by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) that would tax unrealized capital gains, “the appreciation in the paper value of assets such as stocks.” That would likely find a Supreme Court challenge.
There are other tax vehicles, like fixing the “buy, borrow, die” loophole, which would tax loans taken against stock portfolios, but that would likely not raise sufficient funds: “It’s just not where the money is.”
He finds that “the most powerful lever is also the simplest one,” and concludes that “Congress has a simpler, tried-and-true tax policy to choose from: raising the rates.”
Liscow is advocating to restore the “top marginal ordinary income tax rate to its pre-2017 level of 39.6 percent” — where it was before Trump’s first term in office.
“In addition, raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent toward the 35 percent it had been set at historically would add hundreds of billions in revenue for the government,” he says.
“Raising the rates,” Liscow concludes, “the simple, boring answer — is where the real money lies.”
Image: Christopher Penler / Shutterstock.com
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