Romney beat McCain, but not in the mind of Donald Trump

2012

2008

Trump said just now on the Laura Ingraham show that Romney got fewer votes than McCain.

See how a falsehood repeated endlessly by Rush Limbaugh becomes the truth?

It speaks volumes about our society that Rush Limbaugh has never been able to count in Roman numerals

Under his "Pearls of Wisdom" no less, here, last week:

"Is this Super Bowl XLIX? Super Bowl XLIX. I've lost track of the ability to count the Roman numerals. Not that I ever did know."

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Maybe he'll finally figure it out next year at "Super Bowl L".

Oops, sorry. The NFL is giving up the Roman numeral counting system for Super Bowl 50, according to Wikipedia, here:

"Instead of naming it Super Bowl L with Roman numerals like in previous Super Bowls, this game will be marketed with the Arabic numeral '50'. The game is scheduled to be played on February 7, 2016, at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, the home stadium of the San Francisco 49ers. This will be the first Super Bowl held in the San Francisco Bay Area since Super Bowl XIX in January 1985."

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I guess you'll still need to know the Roman numeral system to count Super Bowl XIX.

Surely The Apocalypse is nigh.

But to me it will still be "Super Bowl L", not to be confused with the official name of the trains of the Chicago Transit Authority:

Only in the United States of Moronica.

Hey Rush you lazy, mouth-flapping idiot: the French Muslim bike cop was armed and fired at the terrorists before they offed him

So says the BBC here.

Rush Limbaugh used the incident to say all French cops are unarmed because France is a sadly misguided liberal country.

Dumb shit.

Rush Limbaugh is a buffoon who just makes stuff up about the two dead policemen at Charlie Hebdo

Here, doing his very best to misinform as usual, and making a fool of himself:

"The two cops who were shot, do you know how they arrived on the scene?  They rode their bicycles.  That's right.  They came pedaling up.  After hearing about this attack, and the cops are dispatched, the two who were shot showed up on bicycles."

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One of the two dead policemen was a body guard of one of the employees of the French satirical publication targeted by two Muslim fanatics. He was already in the office when he was gunned down. He wasn't outside on a bicycle.

If there were two officers of the municipal police on bicycles dispatched to the scene, obviously only one of them was shot, and the other escaped.

The intricacies of the French police force obviously don't interest Rush Limbaugh, either. He would rather ridicule and caricature the French police as mindless victims of liberalism who must do their jobs without being able to defend themselves, when the fact is municipal police are typically unarmed but can choose to carry if they wish. Nevertheless the municipal police, which are basically the traffic division in France but enforce the local laws at the behest of mayors, represent barely 7% of the police force in France.

The national police are all armed, and the militarized units especially so.

Rush Limbaugh is back for 2015 and he's dumber than ever, just like Zero Hedge

Here:

And the second thing I saw was the economy is growing at this 5% rate.  By the way, do you know how that happened, folks?  Do you know what the bulk of the economic growth -- I mean, what is the economy?  The economy is consumer spending, essentially, consumer spending and consumption, commerce.  You know what the majority of spending was in the fourth quarter was people spending money on Obamacare, mandated by law.  The vast majority of our economic growth -- this was made public by Tyler Durden at -- I forget the website.  It's off the top of my head.  Well-known business website.  Over half of the spending in this country in the fourth quarter was you and me and everybody else spending money on health care. ... Well, some economic growth, when over half of it is essentially required by the government? 

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Aside from the fact that the quarter in question is stated in error as the fourth, the idea that "the majority of spending . . . was people spending money on Obamacare" is ludicrous.

Line 17 in the snapshot above from the GDP report shows that 3Q2014 healthcare spending was $2.0089 trillion. Line 2 shows the total of all personal spending at $12.002 trillion. Healthcare spending thus represented just 16.7% of that in 3Q. And that percentage is identical to the percentage spent also on healthcare in 2013. Healthcare spending is not anywhere near "over half of the spending in this country in the fourth [sic] quarter".

ObamaCare hasn't suddenly driven up healthcare spending in 2014 at all. Maybe after the fourth quarter is over and we get the final number for that in March 2015 we will be able to say that Obamacare has driven up healthcare spending overall, but so far we cannot say that. So far such increases have been born by too small a percentage of the adult population to show up in the data.

What we can say is that so far healthcare spending is growing at a pace slightly behind the pace of the overall economy, which grew at 4.96% annualized in 3Q. Healthcare spending grew at a slightly less robust 4.6% rate.

It is likewise incorrect to say as Rush Limbaugh says that healthcare spending accounts for "the bulk of the economic growth" in 3Q. Healthcare spending grew $88.6 billion in 3Q2014 from 2013, which represents just 10.65% of the $831.7 billion overall increase in GDP over 2013 in the latest report. Over 89% of the increased growth thus came from other categories.

Conservatism is not about fighting lies with more lies.

Erick Erickson asserts a difference between libertarianism and libertinism

Today filling in as guest host of the Rush Limbaugh Show in response to a caller recommending the Republican Party move in a more specifically libertarian direction.

The comment was more diplomacy than wisdom.

In the Molly Ball feature on Erickson for The Atlantic here, Erickson more than once eschews libertarianism, let alone libertinism:

“Nationally, people think of me as a Tea Party person, and I am,” Erickson told me. “But in Georgia, the Tea Party can’t stand me.” The local movement, he explained, is dominated by libertarian followers of former Congressman Ron Paul, and Erickson has opposed many of its chosen candidates. Erickson’s conservatism is of a more traditional bent, deeply informed by his evangelical faith. He believes Republicans must not yield in pursuit of small government, strong national defense, and the primacy of the traditional family.

Erickson sounded almost gleeful as he told me about the Tea Party hating him. He seems to delight in confounding expectations, and in almost every way, he refuses to be pigeonholed: he is a southerner who defines himself by his small-town sensibility, but he spent most of his childhood in Dubai. He speaks for the conservative grass roots, but he pals around with cable-news regulars and Beltway elites. He’s a strict no-compromises ideologue, but during his one foray into elected office, he was a model of bipartisan cooperation. ...

When I pressed him on whether his zeal for regulation while on the city council was at odds with his less-government philosophy, he said he believed human trafficking was a problem that government should have a role in solving. “I’m not a libertarian,” he said. Even small-government absolutists, after all, can agree that sexual slavery ought to be prevented.