Donald Trump is a prolific liar. That’s neither an opinion nor a criticism, but a statement of scientific fact. In the midst of the presidential campaign, Politico analyzed a few hours of Trump’s speeches and found he lied once every five minutes on average.
PolitiFact gave Trump its Lie of the Year Award for 2015, and has since determined that only 15 percent of Trump’s words are true or even mostly true. Toronto Star journalist Daniel Dale, who fact-checked Trump for 33 days and found he told as many as 25 lies in a 24-hour period (excluding debates, when he crammed up to 34 lies into 90 minutes), wrote that Trump “lies strategically. He lies pointlessly. He lies about important things and meaningless things. Above all, he lies frequently.” Trump lies so effortlessly and consistently that the Washington Post created a plug-in that, lacking the human tendency to grow fatigued, fact-checks Trump’s lie-filled tweets in real time.Strategic lying. Trump's lies are in fact habitual at this point, but that's only because he's had lotsa practice at lying by design. Because it works.
The increasingly reckless House of Representatives, caught up in a public mutiny, may have walked back its abandonment of congressional ethics. But it simultaneously took several other steps that will enable corruption and greatly expand political influence over the work of experts at NASA, NOAA, EPA, and other science agencies, compromising their ability to serve the public interest.
This week, the House made significant changes to the rules under which it operates. First and foremost is the Holman rule, resurrected from the 1870s, just at the end of Reconstruction. This rule allows Congress, through spending bills, to target specific initiatives and reduce the salaries of individual federal employees whose work they find irksome to $1.
Does your research suggest a chemical company that happens to be located in the district of a powerful member of Congress is responsible for environmental contamination? You could be on that list.So, Repubs are saying they'll keep science from becoming politicized by subjecting scientists to political pressures and ideological tests.
Hillary was so flawed Putin, Trump, Wikileaks, Comey, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein had to join forces just to keep her under 70 million votes— Boney Hurdle (@eclecticbrotha) January 7, 2017
Trump seems even more terrifyingly uninformed when you read his words as text. Here is the ONLY thing he’s ever said about the war in Yemen: pic.twitter.com/qyP7xyXDjV— Jonathan Riley (@JonRiley7) January 6, 2017
