Here's Blunt's lie, first reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in their editorial of Aug. 17:

"I'm 59," Mr. Blunt said last week during a meeting with Post-Dispatch reporters and editors. "In either Canada or Great Britain, if I broke my hip, I couldn't get it replaced."

And Blunt told the same lie to his hometown paper, the Springfield News-Leader, according to their reprint today, Aug. 19, of the St. Louis editorial, with this note added:

Editor's note: U.S Rep. Roy Blunt also made the same claim about hip surgery to editors and editorial advisory board members at the News-Leader during a recent interview.

Of course, Blunt's claims about hip surgery were TOTAL LIES, as the St. Louis newspaper discovered when they checked Blunt's claim. Their editorial called Blunt out using cold hard facts:

We fact-checked that. At least 63 percent of hip replacements performed in Canada last year and two-thirds of those done in England were on patients age 65 or older. More than 1,200 in Canada were done on people older than 85. "I didn't just pull that number out of thin air," Mr. Blunt said in a subsequent interview. It came, he said, from testimony before the House Subcommittee on Health by "some people who are supposed to be experts on Canadian health care." "I had been given that example. I was told that 59 is the cutoff," he said.

Of course, even Blunt's excuse is a lie. I did a little extra work beyond the newspapers' reporting, and checked the testimony and coverage of the House Subcommittee on Health's hearings on healthcare reform. There was no mention at all of Canada or Great Britain refusing hip surgery for 59-year-olds. Sheesh.

When caught in a lie, Roy just lied some more! No, Roy, "some people who are supposed to be experts" didn't tell you that. So yes, you did just pull that number out of thin air.

And the St. Louis paper reported more of Blunt's ugly, obvious lies:

Mr. Blunt was asked how long an uninsured American would wait for a hip replacement. "If they go to the emergency room, I think they can get that done," he said.

The paper's editorial quickly slapped down that whopper with more facts:

Emergency rooms don't do hip replacements, which require both hospital care and weeks of rehabilitation. They do emergency surgery, necessary to save a life.

Here's what's sad. Roy Blunt was the GOP Whip. He is the Republican Party's lead guy on healthcare reform, the chairman of the House Republican Health Care Solutions Group. He is supposedly writing the GOP version of a healthcare reform bill, which we will never see. Blunt has facts and information he could use, if he wanted to.

Instead, he lies and lies and lies. Not just to some poor constituent like me, who may call his office looking for information or help with a problem. Not just to FireDogLake's video guy, to whom Blunt said just last month,

"What I don't know is why the president can't produce a birth certificate. I don't know anybody else who can't produce one. I think that's a legitimate question."

No, Roy Blunt lies even to the editorial boards of Missouri's largest and third-largest newspapers while he's campaigning for a Senate seat.

Here's another one of Blunt's lies to the St. Louis paper:

In the same interview, Mr. Blunt minimized the number of people without health insurance in part by maximizing the number who are illegal immigrants. "Ten to 12 million of them are in the country illegally. Everyone sort of agrees on that," Mr. Blunt said.

And here's the truth, (thank God for the St. Louis paper):

In fact, the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation puts the number of uninsured who are immigrants both legal and illegal at about 9 million.

Here's the link to today's editorial in the Springfield News-Leader, Roy's hometown paper, reprinting the St. Louis paper's editorial from earlier in the week. Be sure to read the comments posted by Springfield readers. Only a few are offering any support at all for Roy. Most are pretty unhappy with him. Good!

Springfield News-Leader editorial "The (un)truth about health reform"

We have to stop this liar. The Missouri Senate race is number one on FiveThirtyEight's list of Senate rankings. Blunt is hauling in money from his fatcat friends and his tobacco-lobbyist wife. Please donate to his opponent, Robin Carnahan, if you can.