Blunt Assessment: "Pants on Fire"

Yesterday, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-K Street) issued a ridiculous press release claiming that Congressional Democrats want to "increase energy taxes on American families by an additional $3,100 a year."

This is false. In fact, the St. Petersburg Times' PolitiFact.com called this claim a bunch of "hot air," and gave the assertion their "Pants on Fire" award:

To back up the claim, their staff pointed us to an M.I.T. report that says a similar a cap-and-trade proposal (the administration has not yet detailed their own version) would raise $366 billion per year...

"It's just wrong," said John Reilly, an energy, environmental and agricultural economist at M.I.T. and one of the authors of the report. "It's wrong in so many ways it's hard to begin."

Not only is it wrong, but he told the House Republicans it was wrong when they asked him.

Despite the obvious, huge, enormous, embarrassing flaws in Blunt's release, we have no reason to think that he'll retract or revise his claims.

But it sure would be nice if someone in the mainstream press would ask him about some of these dishonest claims.

Here are a few to choose from in the past few weeks:

• Blunt says he wasn't thinking about running for the Senate in January, then says he's been planning to run since at least November.
• He didn't step down as Whip because Republicans got creamed in the 2008 elections -- even though he said that was exactly why he stepped down at the time.
• His completely absurd claims about never passing bills without bipartisan support.  
• His bogus statements about the economic recovery package.