GOP Presidential Candidates’ Lies
The GOP presidential candidate debate on August 23 was rife with lies, but a really big one was Ron DeSantis’ attempt to justify his new law of no abortions after six weeks—although women might not even know they are pregnant by that time. DeSantis said:
“I know a lady in Florida named Penny. She survived multiple abortion attempts. She was left discarded in a pan. Fortunately, her grandmother saved her and brought her to another hospital.”
The Miami Herald tracked down “Penny” and discovered this:
“Penny is real and her last name is Hopper. But DeSantis failed to note key details from her remarkable story: The person who tried to end Penny’s life in the womb was not a doctor or even an illegal abortion provider—it was her father. And his effort to abort his daughter with a coat hanger took place almost two decades before the Supreme Court’s seismic Roe v. Wade decision, which established a woman’s right to an abortion.”
A family member of Hopper stated:
“She doesn’t want to be used as a political pawn…. Hopper prefers to work quietly behind the scenes to help those she sees as victims of botched abortions.”
Hopper said that her mother went to a clinic in 1955 at 23 weeks of pregnancy from bleeding and other complications. The doctor induced labor and told a nurse to discard the baby—“dead or alive” because he couldn’t hear a heartbeat. Hopper weighed one pound 11 ounces at birth. Her grandmother and aunt found her “in a bedpan on the back porch of the clinic,” and her grandmother called the police. Her mother, taken to a hospital, survived several bouts of pneumonia.
In a 2013 interview, Hopper said that her father, raised during the Great Depression, didn’t want another child, and she suspected a botched abortion. Hopper’s story has varied. Another time she has said she was placed in a basket, not a bedpan.
DeSantis has told his story at campaign events in an attempt to be personal. On August 23, he added that he had met Hopper but his campaign didn’t provide details about the meeting. DeSantis’ story seems to support legal abortion to protect women from the brutality of illegal procedures.
Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy told so many lies on August 23 that an article devoted to him politely calling them “unorthodox positions.”
“The reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.” Extreme weather events, heightened by climate change, caused almost 12,000 disasters and two million deaths between 1970 and 2021. In the U.S., extreme heat causes about 600 annual deaths, one-third of them from climate change.
The focus on protecting water rights “led to a five- to six-hour delay in the critical window of getting waters to put out those fires [and] very well could have avoided those catastrophic deaths, many of them, if water had made it to the site of the fires on time.” There is no evidence to Ramaswamy’s assertion, and the tie between Hawaii’s Commission on Water Resource Management deputy director and President Obama was highly overstated. He wasn’t an “Obama appointee.” Last year, Ramaswamy ridiculed the deputy director for saying native Hawaiians consider water something to “revere” and something that “gives us life.”
“[At the January 6 insurrection] what percentage of the people who were armed were federal law-enforcement officers? I think it was probably high, actually. Right? There’s very little evidence of people being arrested for being armed that day. Most of the people who were armed, I assume the federal officers who were out there were armed.” This statement has been judged false. Of 1,100 total defendants entering restricted areas that day, 104 were charged with a dangerous or deadly weapon, and at least 13 fact gun charges.
Ramaswamy called Deposed Donald Trump (DDT) “the best president of the 21st century,” opposite to his 2022 book Nation of Victims in which he wrote that despite voting for DDT in 2020, “what he delivered in the end was another tale of grievance, a persecution complex that swallowed much of the Republican Party whole.”
President Joe Biden ordered AG Merrick Garland and special counsel Jack Smith to indict DDT. There is no evidence for this assertion.
More of Ramaswamy’s falsehoods are here.
House GOP Members Taking Credit for Laws They Oppose
Six months ago at his State of the Union address, Biden predicted that Republicans voting against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act would claim credit with their constituents for the funding. Biden’s latest example is House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) who went to a Syracuse (NY) factory stumping for Rep. Brandon Williams (R-NY). In Syracuse.com, Glenn Coin covered McCarthy’s with this headline: “House Speaker McCarthy tours Syracuse factory benefiting from legislation he voted against” and a report on information about “Buy America” provision of the infrastructure law benefitting JMA Wireless. Coin wrote that “McCarthy also opposed the CHIPS and Science Act, which Micron Technology said is essential to its plan to invest up to $100 billion in a semiconductor plant in the town of Clay.”
McCarthy tried to avoid the criticism:
“I don’t want government controlling and picking the winners and losers. I actually like the private sector, exactly what JMA is doing. It’s their investment of $50 million that created something, and now government can be a partner.”
McCarthy voted against the law building ways for the government to “be a partner” in boosting U.S. manufacturing, including at the plant he visited.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called the GOP approach “vote no and take the dough”:
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL): praised investments in broadband technology in the state, where he was elected although he is a Florida resident, although he voted against the funding.
Sens. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and John Boozman (R-AR): praised federal money coming to their states.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX): touted a Tesla factory in his state using IRA’s clean energy tax credits to expand U.S. manufacturing after lamenting the Inflation Reduction Act offering “handouts for rich folks who want to buy electric vehicles.”
Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA): called the IRA irresponsible and the “Green New Deal in disguise” but took credit for a $70 million expansion of Norfolk’s Port of Virginia.
Rep. Gary Palmer (R-AL): celebrated hundreds of millions in funding for a stalled highway project in Birmingham.
Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX): condemned the IRA as a “so-called infrastructure bill” but bragged about getting new funding for a flood control project.
Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA): praised new “game-changing” funding to upgrade locks along the Upper Mississippi River.
Only 13 House Republicans and 19 Senate Republicans voted with Democrats for the funding bill, leaving hundreds of other Republicans to take credit for its successes.
Reasons for Tuberville’s Boycott of Military Promotions
Tuberville, whose single-senator boycott of all promotions for military officers has gone past 300, has come up with new excuses. Moving on from objecting to travel expenses for troops needing abortions; he uses the “woke” complaint—one officer “joined a ‘Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion panel,’” and another one “celebrated Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” He ranted about the military being “overloaded” with four-star generals and the Senate not following the U.S. Constitution since DDT left the White House. “I’m trying to keep politics out of the military,” Tuberville claims.
Thomas Hartmann reported about a growing concern that Tuberville keeps military positions open for DDT or another MAGA president to appoint them after the 2024 election—as then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) blocked a Supreme Court nominee during President Obama’s second term. MAGA military could take over the country under presidential martial law orders as DDT proposed after losing the 2020 election.
Tuberville’s boycott leaves three of eight chiefs of staff positions empty with another vacancy when Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley retires in September. Secretary of the Defense Department Lloyd Austin called empty leadership for the Navy, Army, and Marine Corps “unprecedented.” Tuberville’s recalcitrance could impact over 650 military nominations by the end of the year and affect 3,000 to 4,000 lives.
Claiming that he has wide support, Tuberville said that he might reverse his hold if the public wanted him to drop it, until they do. Public Policy Polling found that 58 percent of Alabamans think the senator “has made his point” and should drop the hold. Only 29 percent approve of his position. Fifty-five percent think that unfilled senior positions hurt national security, and a huge majority, 72 percent to 14 percent believe military promotions should not be politicized. Tuberville’s radical tactics led 45 percent of Alabamans to view the coach-turned-politician less favorably.
Tuberville’s military experience is coaching the losing team in the 2014 Military Bowl. Trying to burnish his military cred, he lied about his father’s record during World War II. No military supports his statement that his holds are inconsequential and he isn’t “holding up readiness.” Retired two-star Marine Gen. Arnold Punaro compared the need for leaders to perform two different jobs at the same time as “asking the Auburn quarterback to play offensive tackle and quarterback at the same time.”
Tuberville displayed his ignorance by identifying the three branches of government as the House, the Senate, and the executive branch, skipping the judicial branch and not specifying the legislative branch. Ignoring science, Tuberville joked that the the “scientific” term for the 2023 long-lasting heat wave is “summer.” Yet the Arizona heat is so severe that saguaro cactuses are dying. And the heat wave continues into September.
Nel's New Day 