June 8, 2012 – EzKool

Mitt Romney Is A Liar – Here’s Even More Proof

A couple weeks ago, Mitt Romney quoted Noam Scheiber’s book about the Obama administration’s economic rescue, The Escape Artists, in a highly misleading way. Yesterday he did it again, only this time Romney altered his description so that whatever shred of truth that once existed in his telling is gone, and nothing remains but a pack of lies. Here’s Romney’s incredibly false account:

A book that was written in a way that’s apparently pro-President Obama, was written by a guy named Noam Scheiber and in this book he says that there was a discussion about the fact that Obamacare would slow down the economic recovery in this country and they knew that before they passed it. But they concluded that we would all forget how long the recovery took once it had happened, so they decided to go ahead. The idea that they knowingly slowed down our recovery in order to put in place Obamacare, which they wanted and they considered historic but the American people did not want or consider historic, is something which I think deserves a lot of explaining …

The lies. Let us tote them up.

First, and most importantly, at no point did anybody in the Obama administration ever believe that passing the Affordable Care Act would “slow down the recovery.” Nothing close to that is ever described. Romney presents the book as revealing that Obama believed health-care reform, through its “big gummint” regulations, would harm the recovery, but cackling that he wanted to pass it out of some belief that Americans wouldn’t notice mass economic suffering. This bears no relationship to anything the book says.

In the book, Noam Scheiber asked Larry Summers if he believed that the decision to pass health-care reform cost Obama the chance to pass a second stimulus, and thus came at the cost of a faster recovery. Summers answered that he did not think the health-care law prevented a second stimulus, but that even if that were the case, he would have supported it anyway.

Not only is it false for Romney to say Obama “knowingly slowed down our recovery,” it’s not even true that Obama knowingly passed up a chance to accelerate the recovery. The notion that anybody in the administration believed that the health-care law would actually slow down the recovery is complete fiction. It does not appear in the book anywhere and it’s pretty obviously untrue.

[The New York Mag]

Preacher Says People Are on Welfare Because They Don’t Read The Bible

I grew up in the Church. Before they passed, my father was a Preacher and my mom was an Evangelist. I am sure that makes me somewhat of an anomaly with Republicans, because I have a Christian background but I am a Democrat. This mixture confuses these Republicans because as far as they are concerned, you cannot be a Democrat and a believer in Christ at the same time. But I’m not here to pacify their confusion, so I’ll go on to the point of this blog.

It really irks me when I come across wolves in sheep’s clothing, that is, people who call themselves preachers but take to the pulpit and “preach” nothing but hate and ignorance. I’ve used past blog-posts to highlight some of the idiotic statements these “pastors” have made in the past and sadly, here is another.

His name is Pastor David Barton and part of his message to his congregation was that people are on welfare because they don’t read the Bible. “I really believe this,” Barton said. Here’s his full statement;

Wouldn’t it be interesting to do a study between those that are on welfare and see how much and how often they read the Bible. You know, if Booker T. Washington is right that Christianity and reading the Bible increases your desires and therefore your ability for hard work; if we take that as an axiom, does that mean that the people who are getting government assistance spend nearly no time in the Bible, therefore have no desire, and therefore no ability for hard work? I could go a lot of places with this. I would love to see this proven out in some kind of sociological study, but it makes perfect sense.

While real preachers use the Bible to get their sermons, Barton – a Conservative Republican – allows his politics to dictate what and how he preach. Too bad he hasn’t paid attention to a particular political document by one of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson – the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States – who in 1802 wrote, “… I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”