Although a surfeit of numbers are being bandied, a pertinent one is missing — the number of legislators who have pledged to Norquist not to raise taxes. The number is: Zero. All pledges have been to voters.

–George Will

There are lies that are petty. There are lies that are outrageous. But some lies are just perplexing. Conservative commentator George Will’s laughable claim that Republican legislators who signed Grover Norquist’s pledge not to raise taxes, were not actually signing a pledge to Norquist not to raise taxes, falls into the latter category. Who is the audience for this disingenuous nugget of sophistical nonsense?  Surely Will cannot expect that there’s a single progressive reading his column who’ll buy the silly claim. Surely he doesn’t expect to convince recalcitrant Republican Senators and Congressmen who are publicly repudiating the pledge they made to Norquist, and insisting that it is to the voters in their district to whom they owe their allegiance. The Zombie army of Teabaggers? They need no convincing, whether the pledge was signed to Norquist, the voters, or the Dali Lama, it’s all the same to them. So one can only conclude that, stunned by the results of the last election that saw voters rejecting even a “moderate” GOP candidate by a significant margin, our addle-brained, shell-shocked protagonist is simply lying to himself these days.

The Fields Medal is awarded every four years on the occasion of the International Congress of Mathematicians to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement.

Let me hereby nominate Kentucky Senator Rand Paul:

We currently give about $4 billion annually to Israel in foreign aid. But we give about $6 billion to the nations that surround Israel, many of them antagonistic toward the Jewish state.

Giving twice as much foreign aid to Israel’s enemies simply does not make sense. Our aid to Israel has always been to a country that has been an unequivocal ally. Our aid to its neighbors has purchased their temporary loyalty at best.

Outstanding mathematical achievement, indeed.

What “un-skewed polls” was telling us:

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…if Mitt Romney loses Ohio. According to Karl Rove’s own final prediction for Fox News. If you look at the numbers, Obama wins with 271 if he takes Ohio, according to Rove.

Considering Karl Rove’s job is GOP spin, it’s pretty significant that he doesn’t give Mitt a path to victory without Ohio. And when you consider that Nate Silver has Obama ahead by three in Ohio, and the even the Rightward leaning Rasmussen has that race tied, Rove’s view of the election isn’t that rosy for Republicans. Oh, one more thing: Rove’s map has Romney winning 6 of the 8 states that Fox has declared tossups, a tall order given that Obama leads Romney in 23 of 26 polls in swing states.

Will that make tonight any less brutally agonizing? Probably not. I still haven’t decided if I’m staying up to watch, or or downing a few cocktails and putting myself to sleep before the results start rolling in.

Remember back when fact check site Politifact.org rated an objectively factual statement of Barack Obama’s as “Half True” then had to revise its judgement after they were called out on the absurdity of the grade?

Well, it seems that the fact check site that tries so hard to ensure methodological “balance” that it heavily weights the scales against Democrats, is up to it’s old tricks again. In one of its fact checks of Wednesday’s debate, Politifact examined Barack Obama’s claim that the Romney/Ryan 20% across-the-board tax cut would cost $5 trillion dollars, and concluded that it was only Half-True. I’ll take the liberty of quoting the  Politifact piece directly:

Obama said: “Governor Romney’s proposal that he has been promoting for 18 months calls for a $5 trillion tax cut, on top of $2 trillion of additional spending for our military. And he is saying that he is going to pay for it by closing loopholes and deductions. The problem is that he’s been asked over 100 times how you would close those deductions and loopholes, and he hasn’t been able to identify them.” Read more »

“I just want to make sure I got this straight… He’ll get rid of regulations on Wall Street, but he’s going to crack down on Sesame Street?!”

-Barack Obama, thinking of the perfect comeback… the next day.

(Source: Eric Zorn)

The folks over at Think Progess have put together a minute by minute compendium of the lies that Mitt Romney told in Wednesday’s debate. An example:

7) “And the reason is because small business pays that individual rate; 54 percent of America’s workers work in businesses that are taxed not at the corporate tax rate, but at the individual tax rate….97 percent of the businesses are not — not taxed at the 35 percent tax rate, they’re taxed at a lower rate. But those businesses that are in the last 3 percent of businesses happen to employ half — half of all the people who work in small business.” Far less than half of the people affected by the expiration of the upper income tax cuts get any of their income at all from a small businesses. And those people could very well be receiving speaking fees or book royalties, which qualify as “small business income” but don’t have a direct impact on job creation. It’s actually hard to find a small business who think that they will be hurt if the marginal tax rate on income earned above $250,000 per year is increased Read more »