2010 Republican Lies We Can Look Forward to Seeing Repeated, and Repeated Some More, in 2011

"Since January 2008 the private sector has lost nearly 8 million jobs while local, state and federal governments added 590,000."
Tim Pawlenty, then Governor of Minnesota
The Wall Street Journal, OpEd, Dec. 13, 2010

For some reason, Republicans love to try to make unions, especially public employee unions, out to be the villain of their alternate reality narrative.  Politifact gave T-Paw a pants-on-fire rating, the most severe category, reserved for calling the perpetrator of the false statement an outright liar.

Politifact.com wrote:

'Pawlenty wrote that government employees, especially those who are unionized, have become unfairly advantaged compared to private-sector workers, through a "silent coup, an inside job engineered by self-interested politicians and fueled by campaign contributions.

"Across the country, at every level of government, the pattern is the same: Unionized public employees are making more money, receiving more generous benefits, and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt," Pawlenty wrote. He even repeated what has become a major Republican talking point -- that "federal employees receive an average of $123,049 annually in pay and benefits, twice the average of the private sector."

"The majority of union members today no longer work in construction, manufacturing or 'strong back' jobs," Pawlenty wrote. "They work for government, which, thanks to President Obama, has become the only booming 'industry' left in our economy. Since January 2008, the private sector has lost nearly 8 million jobs while local, state and federal governments added 590,000."

Remember, these are 'pants-on-fire' lies, not honest factually inaccurate statements.  Let me remind our readers that the current crop of Republicans don't have any of those 'new ideas' they kept promising they were going to unveil.....eventually.  All they have are the failed policies of George W. Bush, and in a few cases, the failed trickle-down policies of Ronald Reagan, vehemently being discredited by their designer, David Stockman.  These lies are the set up for the ill-informed to be sold another pack of the same lies by the incoming members of Congress, much like the nonsense spouted by that other inaccurate Republican from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann.  It's not a coincidence that TPaw is the writer; this is part of his set up for his presidential bid.  TPaw is not popular in Minnesota as a presidential candidate; his only hope is to go outside of Minnesota - travel which has characterized his last term as governor.

Back to the politifact.com analysis of Pawlenty's claims.

In January 2008, total private-sector employment in the United States stood at 115,562,000. By November 2010, the most current month available, that number had sunk to 108,278,000 -- a drop of roughly 7.3 million jobs. That pretty close to the "nearly 8 million" figure that Pawlenty cited. (Almost two-thirds of those job losses, incidentally, happened while George W. Bush was president.)

But Pawlenty's public-sector figures were problematic. The BLS has a category called government employment -- which encapsulates local, state and federal employment, just as Pawlenty had defined it. Over the same period, the number of government jobs went from 22,379,000 to 22,261,000 -- a decrease of 118,000, rather than an increase of 590,000, as Pawlenty had written.

At first we were flummoxed about how Pawlenty got the numbers so wrong. We called BLS to make sure we weren't overlooking another data set that measured the same subject, and spokesman Gary Steinberg confirmed that we were using exactly the same numbers he would use.

We also looked at federal employment trends over the same period, on the guess that Pawlenty might have meant to refer to federal jobs, rather than all government jobs. By this calculation, the number of jobs did increase, rather than decrease, but the amount was only one-sixth of what Pawlenty had indicated. Over that period, federal employment rose from 2,739,000 to 2,837,000 -- 98,000 jobs in all.

Tim Pawlenty wasn't quoting an objective, fair, neutral or reliable source. Tim Pawlenty was quoting another Republican, Congressman Steve LaTourette of Ohio, John Boehner's home state (Boehner got busted by the Ohio branch of politifact.com as well).  Republicans LOVE to parrot each other, quoting these lies.  What LaTourette said was, ""since the president became the president, we have lost 3.3 million jobs in the private sector. But you know who's done okay and who's not complaining today? The public sector. We've gained 590,000 public sector jobs."  Except that he left out that those were temporary, Census-related jobs.

Whenever Bachmann or Pawlenty make statements, either in some written piece, or in a television interview, Politifact.com tries to contact them, to clarify their sources, and to give them a chance to share their side of the story, their justification for what they claim. 

Consistently, neither of them, nor anyone who is a spokesperson from their respective offices, usually respond.  That suggests to me that  Bachmann and TPaw know darn well that their claims are wrong.  They don't respond to their constituents inquiring about the inaccuracies either.

And in this case, TPaw was even more wrong than Congressman La Tourette, as Politifact noted:

• When we see Pawlenty saying "since January 2008," we assume he means from January 2008 to the present. But the numbers he used appeared to be based on the change from January 2009 to May 2009.

• Pawlenty specifically wrote that his job numbers referred to "local, state and federal government" employment, but LaTourette's 590,000 only counted federal workers.

• Pawlenty's statement doesn't account for the tremendous -- and now vanished -- bump from hiring Census workers.

Right on target to repeat the lie like a good little trained parrot, Michele Bachmann spouted on Sunday about her ideas about moving away from public sector jobs to private sector jobs. Meanwhile,according to the Monday, January 3, 2011 Star Tribune,

"Manufacturing activity has expanded in every month since the recession ended a year and a half ago. The big difference now is that the growth is being driven by higher sales and more confident consumers_ not just businesses rebuilding the stockpiles that they slashed during the recession.
Steady hiring is likely to follow. Economists caution that it will only be enough to chip away at the 9.8 percent unemployment rate this year."

and in another article, in the same issue of the STrib, about the three month growth in the construction sector,

"Builders began work on more homes and the government boosted its investment in federal construction projects in November, marking a third straight monthly increase in construction activity after a dismal summer....The strength in November came from a 0.7 percent rise in private residential construction which increased to $235.7 billion at an annual rate. That marked the third straight gain."

That is manufacturing, and residential construction that grew under a Democratic president, and congress; you know, the PRIVATE sector jobs.  The ones the Republicans like to LIE about Democrats creating.

Why is it that the Republican base, and the Tea Partiers, and the other conservatives welcome and support the lies and the liars?  Why don't they want to be reality based like the rest of us?  Why?