Invested in Lies While Being All Indignant About Lies

For a group that insists on pointing out supposed lies, they sure belong to a political party that tells a lot of them.


Thursday, Feb 6, 2014 06:45 AM CST
R.I.P. Republican credibility: Why their latest blatant lies show they’ve given up

From Obamacare to Keystone, here's why they're no longer a legitimate entity that deserves to be taken seriously VIDEO

Brad Friedman
Rand Paul, John Boehner, Ted Cruz (Credit: AP/Ed Reinke/J. Scott Applewhite/Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)
This post originally appeared on The BRAD BLOG.
We’ve long argued that the Republican Party is no longer a legitimate governing party. Never mind whether we agree with them on any particular policy issue, they are simply no longer a serious organization.
That fact was underscored again this week and over the weekend, in light of the release of two different official reports, one from the U.S. State Department on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline project and another from the Congressional Budget Office on the economic outlook in light of the Affordable Care Act.
Never mind whether you agree with the Republican position on either of those two policies. The fact that the party feels it necessary to blatantly lie about what’s in each of those reports, specifically with regard to “job creation,” in order to advocate for their own policy positions, underscores yet again that these are simply not serious people are worth being taken seriously anymore …

Keystone XL Jobs Lie
If it receives approval from both the State Department and the White House, the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would ship dirty tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, down to the Gulf of Mexico to be shipped overseas.
After years of claims by Republicans that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would “create tens of thousands of jobs,” we now have some hard numbers on that, at least from the U.S. State Department, if you choose to believe them.
Last year, while pushing for the KXL, House Speaker John Boehner released a statement claiming that the pipeline “will create over 20,000 direct jobs and 100,000 indirect jobs.” On Friday, as the State Department released its “Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement” on the project, Boehner once again released a statement reiterating his previous claim that the pipeline would bring “more than 100,000 jobs.”
The trouble is, that’s not true. At least according to the actual State Department report, which was the occasion for Boehner’s Friday statement.

The report is long and in many pieces, so, naturally, it’d be too much to ask of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives or anybody in his office to actually read it before issuing a statement about it. Nonetheless, it comes with a reasonably brief Executive Summary [PDF] (just 44 pages) in which it speaks directly to the issue of jobs in relation to KXL.
In the section on “Economic Activity During Construction” (page 26), the report estimates that “Construction spending would support a combined total of approximately 42,100 jobs throughout the United States for the up to 2-year construction period.”
That sounds pretty good! Until one bothers to keep reading. “A job consists of one position that is filled for one year. The term support means jobs ranging from new jobs (i.e., not previously existing) to the continuity of existing jobs in current or new locations.”
Approximately 16,100 of those temporary jobs would be “direct jobs at firms that are awarded contracts for goods and services, including construction” and the rest, “approximately 26,000,” would be the result of “indirect or induced spending.” In other words, that would be “goods and services purchased by the construction contractors and spending by employees working for either the construction contractor or for any supplier of goods and services required in the construction process.”
So, in addition to people who work for suppliers (where they may already be employed prior to the approval of KXL), people who work at restaurants or motels near the construction site or for any of the suppliers, also count as “jobs” in this estimate. For example, the report cites “ranchers providing beef for restaurants and construction camps.”
Fair enough. Two years of jobs for those folks, many of whom will be able to continue working in the jobs they already have (so those jobs are not “created,” per se, by the construction of the pipeline.)
After it’s built, however, either one or two years later, according to the very next section of the Executive Summary titled “Economic Activity During Operations,” the report states quite clearly [emphasis added]:

Once the proposed Project enters service, operations would require approximately 50 total employees in the United States: 35 permanent employees and 15 temporary contractors.​

That’s it. The Keystone XL Pipeline will offer 35 permanent jobs in the U.S. for the life of the pipeline, according to the U.S. State Department’s final analysis.
That’s a far cry from Boehner’s claim on Friday, after the report came out, that KXL would bring “more than 100,000 jobs … with it.”
Of course, Boehner’s hardly the only one in the Republican Party disingenuously making such unsupported claims about KXL. Last year, GOP Chairman Reince Priebus took to Facebook to claim that “The Keystone Pipeline would create thousands of jobs.” Last week, he took to Twitter to claim that “721,000 construction jobs have been lost, #Keystone remains unapproved.”
Perhaps Priebus was referring to something other than Keystone with that 721,000 number — it’s unclear from his tweet — but if his message was unclear, that would be no accident. His quarter of a million followers on Twitter heard it loud and clear. He, like Boehner, was willing to lie to them in order to advocate for the pipeline — a pipeline that would result in 35 permanent American jobs.
Again, whether you support or oppose the pipeline doesn’t really matter. Whether you feel temporary jobs are good enough, that’s fine. But knowingly lying about the jobs that it will or won’t “create” is what we find grotesquely offensive here.

Obamacare Jobs Lie

This one was a doozy. On Tuesday, a new report on the economic outlook for the U.S. through 2024 was released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Republicans couldn’t wait to mischaracterize lie about what it said.

As usual, Fox “News” led the charge on behalf of Republican officials (who repeated the lie all day), claiming that “ObamaCare could lead to loss of nearly 2.3 million US jobs, report says.”
The National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) was just one of dozens of other official GOP mouthpieces to echo the completely misleading claim.

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/06/r_i...eir_latest_blatant_lies_show_theyve_given_up/

 

a) That does not count the secondary jobs.
b) That does not count the shipping jobs. (Remember, you say it is all going to be exported and it has to be exported on American ships with American crews by law.)
c) There is no way that much crude can be refined by no additional staff.
d) And just for good measure, someone in the government has to take care of all the export/import papers and all of the EPA regulation enforcement.
e) Even if everything I have said is wrong, why should those jobs go elsewhere? If you are really concerned with it environmental impact, tell me why you think China would refineries would be capable of doing it with fewer releases?

 

The point you're missing is that at most, 50 or so jobs will be created. The rest of the jobs already exists. And they will most likely exist with or without this pipeline being built. House Speaker John Boehner released a statement claiming that the pipeline “will create over 20,000 direct jobs and 100,000 indirect jobs.”
The operative word there "create". Not so much.

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The point you are missing is that your are claiming political jargon as facts and they are nothing but BS. You cannot point to a single point I made and say it was wrong, but everyone one of them makes you post a lie.

 

If you'll notice, my point is that the GOP lies constantly and Boner lied blatantly. I couldn't care less about your points when you choose to ignore mine.

 

All you have shown is that your sources lie! PROVEN!

 

Did the report have any information on the hazard crews necessary to clean-up all the leaks, spills and dead animals?

I bet that alone would be the 100,000 Boner-boy was talking about.

Nah, he's republican, so he wouldn't even think of it.

 

Everyone knows all forms of oil transport are perfectly safe. No need for hazmat.

 

I did some work for a huge refinery. Something I learned amazed me. They really had no way to know based on pressures and flows if any given transcontinental pipeline was leaking. Their most effective detection method was to periodically fly the line routes and look for pooling of product at the surface. I kid you not.

 

There is tons of info about pipeline leaks easily available for anyone to research. I suggest they do, and then they'd see just how primitive the standards are for transporting oil.

 

If you can't notice from an airplane at 200 MPH it ain't a spill, next.