Boehner Gets Embarrassed by Reporter’s Question, Blatantly Lies About Obstruction of Immigration Reform

I think it’s safe to say that House Speaker John Boehner is as disliked by many far right conservatives as he is by most liberals. I honestly believe he’ll go down as probably the worst Speaker of the House of Representatives in United States history. Not only has he presided over one of the least productive congresses in our history, he’s often failed to even maintain control of his own party.

And even if someone disagrees with everything I just said, there’s at least one thing which is 100 percent indisputable – he’s the reason why we haven’t passed immigration reform.

That’s not a partisan statement, that’s just fact.

Over a year ago the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration reform bill which John Boehner refused to even let come up for a vote in the House. The general feeling was that if he allowed the bill to come up for a vote, it would pass, President Obama would sign it and it would become law.

Seems pretty much like how our government is supposed to work, right? Apparently not if you’re a House Republican.

Well, a reporter confronted Boehner on his blatant obstruction of a comprehensive immigration reform bill and Boehner did what he does best - lie. Boehner insisted that he “doesn’t trust” President Obama to properly enact immigration reform because of some of the issues “Obamacare” has experienced, which prompted the reporter to ask a few follow-up questions.

“Since when does Obamacare have anything to do with immigration reform?” Jorge Ramos asked.

Boehner sarcastically responded, “Me? Blocking? The issue of immigration reform is an issue I’ve talked about for 18 months.”

“The Senate passed it a year ago, and you haven’t moved on that,” Ramos continued.

“I just gave you an answer,” Boehner said. “There’s nobody more interested in fixing this problem than I am.”

“You can do it, and you really haven’t done it,” Ramos persisted.

Even now, Romney just can’t help himself

The Mitt’s Mendacity project ran its course a couple of years ago, and it will not return. But just for old times’ sake, let’s pause to note that the poor guy is still truth-challenged.

Romney, who seems to spend a little too much time thinking about ways to condemn the president who defeated him, has run into trouble once more, this time in an interview with Mark Leibovich. The twice-defeated candidate is apparently still thinking about the “47 percent” video that helped drag down his candidacy.

“I was talking to one of my political advisers,” Romney continued, “and I said: ‘If I had to do this again, I’d insist that you literally had a camera on me at all times” – essentially employing his own tracker, as opposition researchers call them. “I want to be reminded that this is not off the cuff.” This, as he saw it, was what got him in trouble at that Boca Raton fund-raiser, when Romney told the crowd he was writing off the 47 percent of the electorate that supported Obama (a.k.a. “those people”; “victims” who take no “personal responsibility”). Romney told me that the statement came out wrong, because it was an attempt to placate a rambling supporter who was saying that Obama voters were essentially deadbeats. 

“My mistake was that I was speaking in a way that reflected back to the man,” Romney said. “If I had been able to see the camera, I would have remembered that I was talking to the whole world, not just the man.” I had never heard Romney say that he was prompted into the “47 percent” line by a ranting supporter.

No, that’s a new one. It’s also patently false.

Since David Corn first helped shine a light on the infamous “47 percent” video, in which Romney told a group of wealthy donors that nearly half of Americans are lazy parasites, the Republican has struggled to come up with a coherent response. Initially, Romney actually endorsed the sentiments on the video and said they reflected his core beliefs.

He later changed his mind, saying his remarks were “completely wrong” and the result of misspeaking. Later still, Romney switched gears again and said the comments were taken out of context. Now he’s come up with an entirely new explanation: Romney’s not responsible for what Romney said; some guy in the audience deserves the blame.

Ironically, in the video itself, Romney says of struggling Americans, “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility.” Funny, he doesn’t seem to be a big fan of personal responsibility, either.

The facts here are obvious and easily checked.

Romney now believes a rambling supporter caused the trouble, but David Corn checked the video itself and found that’s simply not what happened. The question was actually quite succinct.

To recap: Romney has gone from side-stepping the remark, to owning the thrust of this comment (though noting it was not well articulated), to saying he was wrong, to denying he said what he said (and contending his words were distorted), to claiming he was only mirroring the rambling remarks of a big-money backer. This last explanation is certainly not fair to the 1-percenter who merely expressed his very 1-percentish opinion. Does this mean that Romney was thrown off his game by a simple question – or that he was trying to suck up to a donor? 

In the two years since Romney was caught on tape, he just cannot come up with a clear explanation of an easy-to-understand short series of sentences that were responsive to the question presented. But there is one possible explanation he hasn’t yet put forward: He said what he believed.

Of course he did. Romney was speaking in a relaxed setting, free to say whatever he pleased. He shared his contempt for nearly half the country, which went a long way towards explaining the Romney campaign’s policy platform. Indeed, it’s why the failed Republican candidate immediately responded to the video by saying he agreed with the sentiments it captured. 

 Lying about it now doesn’t help Romney’s case.

As Regnerus Testifies Against Marriage In Court, His University Denounces His Research

Mark Regnerus, the man whose name seems to have become synonymous with bad research, was allowed to deliver testimony in federal court today in a case that will decide the fate of same-sex marriage in Michigan. Many wondered if Judge Bernard Friedman, who barred one “expert” witness from testifying earlier in the day, would allow Regnerus, whose own work has been discredited, to testify. The case, Deboer v. Snyder, involves two nurses, Jayne and April DeBoer-Rowse, who wish to marry and jointly-adopt their three adopted children.

Friedman did, and Regnerus, according to many tweets and reports of journalists in the courtroom, told the judge that there’s just no conclusive evidence that there’s no difference between same-sex and different-sex parents raising children, and that “the most prudent thing to do is wait and evaluate some of these changes over time before making any radical moves around marriage.”

HRC’s Ellen Kahn issued a statement saying that “Mark Regnerus’ testimony today in this trial is, in many ways, a culmination of exactly what the anti-gay funders of his work intended when they conceived the New Family Structures study. Make no mistake about it – Regnerus is not offering valid, scientific data. In fact, his study is a clear outlier among 30 years worth of social science that suggest children thrive equally well in two parent households, regardless of the genders of their parents. He is simply carrying out the harmful rhetoric of organizations that seek to demonize LGBT people and their families.”

HRC added:

According to reports from the courtroom today, provided by the Detroit Free Press, Regnerus again stated that he believed marriage was between one man and one woman. He also admitted that the report’s chief funder, the anti-gay Witherspoon Institute, wanted the study completed before the U.S. Supreme Court took up marriage equality. That’s a reference to a remark from Witherspoon President Luiz Tellez. That exchange, as well as many other examples of the conflicts of interest surrounding the report, is available at HRC’s Regnerus Fallout website. Through the Regnerus Fallout site, HRC continues to track the study’s funding and flaws, as well as calling out where it is cited in new court cases around the country.

Meanwhile, apparently in response to Regnerus begin accepted as a witness and to the testimony he delivered, Regnerus’ own university issued a statement distancing itself from his work.

The University of Texas at Austin and the College of Liberal Arts issued a statement saying “Dr. Regnerus’ opinions are his own. They do not reflect the views of the university. Like all faculty, he has the right to pursue his areas of research and express his point of view. We encourage the community of scholars and society as a whole to evaluate his claims.”

Ouch.

And if that weren’t sufficient, the Chairman of the University of Texas at Austin’s Sociology Department issued a statement today denouncing Regnerus’ work.

Like all faculty, Dr. Regnerus has the right to pursue his areas of research and express his point of view. However, Dr. Regnerus’ opinions are his own. They do not reflect the views of the Sociology Department of The University of Texas at Austin. Nor do they reflect the views of the American Sociological Association, which takes the position that the conclusions he draws from his study of gay parenting are fundamentally flawed on conceptual and methodological grounds and that findings from Dr. Regnerus’ work have been cited inappropriately in efforts to diminish the civil rights and legitimacy of LBGTQ partners and their families. We encourage society as a whole to evaluate his claims.

The Sociology Department at The University of Texas at Austin aspires to achieve academic excellence in research, teaching, and public service at the highest level in our discipline. We strive to do so in a context that is based on the highest ethical standards of our discipline and in a context that actively promotes and supports diversity among our faculty and student populations.

Ouch.

So much for being an “expert witness.”

WaPo Gives Senator Ted Cruz’s Obamacare Video Three Pinnochios

We all know that popular Tea Party adage, don’t we? “If at first you don’t repeal, lie, lie again.” Perhaps no one personifies their expertise in such matters than the neo-McCarthyite smarm king himself, Senator Ted Cruz. The Canadian Senator from Texas has just released a new one-minute video about his opposition to the Affordable Care Act, known more commonly as Obamacare, and it was so full of lies that The Washington Post gave Cruz three of their “Pinnochios” for his effort. In other words, Cruz’ video is worthless for anything other than propaganda distribution.

Cruz starts by taking Senator Max Baucus ridiculously out of context with a quote from around April of this year where Baucus said the way that information was getting to the public about Obamacare was a “train wreck.” Cruz took that one snippet and just like the Romney campaign did with Obama’s “You didn’t build that” sound byte, he created an entire premise of his video that one of the people who helped craft the bill himself thinks that Obamcare is a “train wreck.”

But that wasn’t all. He lied about large corporations quietly being excused from the mandate (the employer requirement side of Obamacare was delayed for all employers, and the news was anything but quiet). He lied about the teamsters being opposed to the ACA because it would destroy the 40-hour work week. While the quote Cruz used from Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. was correct, the context was once again completely wrong. Hoffa and the teamsters he represents were concerned about regulations and there are economists who say what the unions were pushing for was “double-dipping” into benefits anyway. In any event, the president of the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest labor organization, says that great progress has been made, so pretty much from start to finish this new ad from Cruz is one lie after another…and the sad part is many of his constituents probably have no clue just how mendacious it is.

Rand Paul Struggles To Tie Obama To IRS Scandal

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) went on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday to use the IRS scandal to attack the Obama administration, but flubbed a key part of his case: he couldn’t defend the claim that IRS was targeting conservative groups as part of a political strategy to help the White House.

Paul, like most Republicans, has been spinning the scandal as an Obama Administration attack on dissenters. “What the IRS did is how the KGB used to target dissidents,” he wrote in a CNN op-ed. “It is how they deal with troublemakers in China.”

Some have argued the extra IRS scrutiny was part of a failed attempt to implement election law, as opposed to a political crackdown. Host Candy Crowley asked Paul why this interpretation was wrong. He couldn’t give her a reason:

CROWLEY: We do know this one place processes 70,000 applications. Can you see in your mind’s eye a way this might not have been political, that this was a misguided stupid way to sort but that they didn’t intend it to be some kind of political attempt to harass the Tea Party?
PAUL: I would think if there’s any chance that this was a mistake, the Investigator General wouldn’t be coming out and saying otherwise, and the IRS themselves wouldn’t be saying –
CROWLEY: They say it’s a mistake. I think the question is whether it’s political.
PAUL: Well, I think we’re going to have to see the memorandum. Apparently there is a policy, and I think we’re going to find there’s a written policy that says we were targeting people who were opposed to the President. And when that comes forward, we need to know who wrote the policy and who approved the policy…now there’s rumors who wrote the policy is the person running Obamacare, which doesn’t give us a lot of confidence about Obamacare.
CROWLEY: Senator, I have to run. I’m way over on this, but I have to just go back to something you said. Are you telling me you think there’s a memo somewhere in which someone said in the memo we’re targeting people going after the president? Is that what I heard you say?
PAUL: Well, we keep hearing the reports and we have several specifically worded items saying who was being targeted. In fact, one of the bullet points says those who are critical of the President. So I don’t know if that comes from a policy, but that’s what’s being reported in the press.

It’s unclear what Paul’s source for that last claim is, but the Investigator General’s report Paul references found no evidence that conservative groups were targeted as part of a political strategy to weaken the president’s political opponents. The report blamed independent IRS management for allowing the practice to go on in the lower-level Cincinnati office.

Republicans, by contrast, have tended to portray this as part of a concerted Obama Administration strategy to attack conservatives. They have also used the controversy to attack Obamacare.