LIAR’S POKER

Paul Junge

Brighton Republican Paul Junge, running against incumbent north Oakland County Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin has had an ongoing Pinocchio problem – you know, where his nose grows every times he tells a lie. At this point, he may be having trouble getting in the door. His latest untruths range from alleging that Slotkin failed to push for an extension of the Payroll Protection Program loans; that the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare in everyday parlance) has led to more Americans without healthcare – “One of the chief complaints was that there were, I forget the exact number 35, 40 million uninsured Americans. Well that number today is still at about 30 million Americans,” Junge said – in actuality, there were 46.5 million Americans without health coverage in 2010, before Obamacare, and 26.7 million in 2016, with Obamacare. In mid-September he began airing TV ads aligning Slotkin with the most progressive wing of the Democratic party, that “Slotkin voted 96 percent of the time with Speaker Pelosi and 90 percent ‘squad’ members like Rashida Tlaib.” Slotkin responded that she is a moderate, and voted over 800 times, and “640 of those votes are bipartisan where we’ve got Democrats and Republicans voting for the same bill,” including 55 times where she voted against her own party. At a debate on WDIV-channel 4 on September 27, Slotkin eviscerated Junge when he stated her mother, who Slotkin has stated in campaign ads died of ovarian cancer because she could not afford insurance due to pre-existing conditions from previous bouts of breast cancer, maybe couldn’t have affordable insurance because of undue regulations. “Every time we ask you about an issue...that matters to people... you deflect and start attacking me and raising my mother.”