Cheap shots: The Detroit debate

No offense to gorillas meant. I really, really love gorillas. I just don't think their behavior is appropriate for humans to emulate. Image via Gorillas344.

Hard as it may be to believe, it wasn't all Trump's penis, big as that is, or may conceivably be. Some of my favorite big lies of the evening follow.

Trump math

TRUMP: Let me explain something. Because of the fact that the pharmaceutical companies — because of the fact that the pharmaceutical companies are not mandated to bid properly, they have hundreds of billions of dollars in waste.

We don’t bid properly. We don’t have proper bidding procedures. The reason we don’t is because they take care of all of the senators, all of the congressman, and they don’t bid. They don’t go out to bid. WALLACE: Mr. Trump...

TRUMP: Take a look — excuse me. You are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars...

WALLACE: No, you are not.

TRUMP: ... if we went out to the proper bid. Of course you are.

WALLACE: No, you’re not, sir. Let’s put up full screen number 2.

You say that Medicare could save $300 billion a year negotiating lower drug prices. But Medicare total only spends $78 billion a year on drugs. Sir, that’s the facts. You are talking about saving more money on Medicare prescription drugs...

TRUMP: I’m saying saving through negotiation throughout the economy, you will save $300 billion a year.... I’m not only talking about drugs, I’m talking about other things.

I'm not talking about what I just said I was talking about. Isn't that obvious?

Simplifying the income tax

Senator Cruz, one of the centerpieces of your campaign, in fact, you mentioned it again tonight, is that you will abolish the IRS. Question though, who will collect the taxes that you are still calling for? Who will oversee to make sure that people pay the taxes that they rightfully owe? And who will check on the various tax deductions and tax credits that you still want?

CRUZ: So my simple flat tax I have rolled out in precise detail how it will operate where every American can fill out our taxes on a postcard. And if you want to actually see the postcard, see all the details, you can find them on our Web site. It’s tedcruz.org.

When he we get rid of all the corporate welfare, all the subsidies, all the carve-outs in the IRS code, it dramatically simplifies it. And under Obama, the IRS has become so corrupt and so politicized we need to abolish it all together.

Now, at the end of that there will still be an office in the Treasury Department to receive the postcards but it will be dramatically simpler.

You see, they won't need to collect the taxes. They won't need to oversee the payments. They won't need to check the deductions and credits. They'll just have to collect postcards.

Rubio dispels with fiction, denounces partisanship over Flint lead poisoning

RUBIO: We know I’ve talked about it, and others in our campaign have talked about it, and other candidates have talked about it, as well. What happened in Flint was a terrible thing. It was systemic breakdown at every level of government, at both the federal and partially the — both the state and partially at the federal level, as well.

And by the way, the politicizing of it I think is unfair, because I don’t think that someone woke up one morning and said, “Let’s figure out how to poison the water system to hurt someone.”

(APPLAUSE)

But accountability is important. I will say, I give the governor credit. He took responsibility for what happened. And he’s talked about people being held accountable...

(APPLAUSE)

... and the need for change, with Governor Snyder. But here’s the point. This should not be a partisan issue. The way the Democrats have tried to turn this into a partisan issue, that somehow Republicans woke up in the morning and decided, “Oh, it’s a good idea to poison some kids with lead.” It’s absurd. It’s outrageous. It isn’t true.

He's right. That story he made up and memorized enough to repeat robotically in fewer than two minutes is not true. Though it is true that some Republican in Governor Snyder's office woke up in April 2014 and decided "Oh, it's a good idea to make the residents of Flint get their water supply from the Flint River water that we in the governor's office decided in December 2012 was unsuitable for human use," and ignored immediate complaints of discolored and foul-smelling water from the residents (though not the presence of e. coli, advising them to boil the water), ignored a warning from the governor's own counsel Michael Gadola in October 2014 that Flint should go back to using the Detroit water supply, ignored warnings from February 2015 made directly to the governor about contaminants including the corrosion of cast-iron pipes that would lead to lead poisoning (in a memo that also told them that these particular aspects of water quality were not regulated by federal authorities), ignored March 2015 warnings of an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease related to the Flint water supply, ignored a memo from the federal Environmental Protection Agency published by the ACLU in July 2015 on elevated lead levels in the Flint water supply and further warnings from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality that August (all these from yesterday's Guardian article), until Snyder finally acknowledged the problem in October claiming he'd just learned about it, and immediately "acted aggressively" by waiting until January 2016 to declare a state of emergency and apologize. No, they didn't do it "to hurt someone". They did it to save money (about $5 million over a two-year period). But they clearly didn't care whether they hurt someone or not.

And though someone else deserves some blame (Politifact blames local officials for acquiescing, without noting that Snyder had taken all their power away, consigning Flint's government into the hands of an unelected city manager, and the EPA official, who seems to have been applying Rubio's proposal in advance: "For every dollar in costs regulators want to impose, they have to find a dollar in existing costs that they’ll repeal"), surely Snyder and his flunkeys get so much that the rest is trivial.

More on the Snyder administration in Flint from Shakezula at LGM. Five months since they acknowledged that the water system is poisoning Flint's families, they still can't say when it will be safe to drink.