Southern Soul star Mel Waiters was born and raised in San Antonio, TX, where in 1974 he began his performing career at local teen clubs; after a stint as a radio DJ, he was awarded a government contract to entertain at military bases across the Southwest. With the exception of sax Waiters produced, played and wrote all the material for his first CD release in 1996. The slick “Hit It & Quit It” and “Whatever It Took” gave me his first Southern hits. He followed this up with his second for the Serious Sounds with “Suki Suki Man” that got his biggest song to date with the title track.
found this over at BalloonJuice in the comments about Willard:
ericblair Says:
This whole Rombot campaign is going to be one long Dukakis-in-a-tank moment with every issue that comes along. He can’t possibly take any position except the most looneytunes rightwing one, because his base doesn’t trust him, but it’s obvious that he doesn’t believe in it. And that’s obvious to his base, too, so it’s a long downward spiral.
So fuck Romney. He just wants to be President to put it on his resume, he’s got nothing to say about anything and no connection to anyone outside his own little fucking club of pampered simps. And now I’m all pissed off and haven’t even had my coffee yet.
Ledbetter matters
By Steve Benen
–
Fri Apr 13, 2012 3:30 PM EDT
About a year ago, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer appeared at the Netroots Nation conference, and mentioned the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act as one of the White House’s accomplishments.
Daily Kos Associate Editor Kaili Joy Gray, moderating the session, told Pfeiffer, “You mentioned Lilly Ledbetter. Frankly we’re a little tired of hearing about that one.”
The problem, of course, is that repetition is important, even with talking points most of us have heard many times, because while some get tired of hearing about accomplishments, some quickly forget all about them. For example, Politico’s Roger Simon tweeted this message today:
The measure some get “a little tired of hearing about” isn’t even recognized by Politico’s chief political columnist.
And while some in media don’t even know what the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is, some Republicans remain actively hostile towards it.
Former Republican congressman Pete Hoekstra, who is now running to unseat Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), weighed in on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act on Thursday, saying the law was a “nuisance” that shouldn’t be in place. […]
“Will, you know, will repealing it be a priority? If you came back and said, you know, that’s really the thing that’s hurting my business the most. My guess is there are other things that we can do that have a higher priority in terms of what I, what I believe might need to be done. I think you know we need to create — that thing is a nuisance. It shouldn’t be the law,” replied Hoekstra.
The Fair Pay Act may seem obvious and noncontroversial, but let’s not forget that when the bill came to the House floor in 2009, 172 out of 175 House Republicans rejected it. And one of them, Hoekstra, wants to go to the Senate next year to help repeal this “nuisance.”
Incidentally, Mitt Romney, who doesn’t want to say whether he supports the Ledbetter law or not, is quite friendly with Pete Hoekstra. I wonder if he agrees with the idea that the Fair Pay Act is a “nuisance”?
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/13/11185836-ledbetter-matters?lite
Posted at 10:41 AM ET, 04/13/2012
Tell us more about Romney’s ‘private’ views
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on Thursday, the veteran conservative journalist Fred Barnes offered Mitt Romney some advice for improving his campaign, including the sensible (and one might also say humane) suggestion that on immigration, the presumptive nominee “would be wise to move away from his harsh position in the primaries.”
Then Barnes included this fascinating sentence: “According to a Romney adviser, his private view of immigration isn’t as anti-immigrant as he often sounded.”
What exactly does that mean? Does it mean Romney said things that he doesn’t really believe? What are we supposed to make of a candidate who takes certain public positions to court one group of voters — and then tries to reassure an entirely different group of voters by leaking the fact that he doesn’t really believe what he said to win votes from the first group? How many other “private” positions does Romney hold that we don’t know about?
This is an important question because I think the Romney campaign will be engaged in a series of two-steps between now and Election Day. On the one hand, he needs to keep reassuring conservatives that he is really with them on a whole series of issues. But the whole premise that he was the most “electable” Republican rested on the unstated — was this “private,” too? — premise that he was the most “moderate” candidate in the field and could thus appeal beyond the conservative hard core. Romney wants the GOP base to think he’s a staunch conservative and swing voters to believe he’s a closet moderate. That’s why I suspect we’ll hear more hints about Romney’s “private” views on a lot of other matters.
Romney is not the first candidate to try to be all things to all people. But he has a special problem because he has taken a great many contradictory public positions over the years, depending upon whether he was trying to appeal to a general-election electorate in Massachusetts or a Republican primary electorate nationwide. Keep an eye out for more hints about Romney’s “private” views. At some point, he will have to reconcile what he says with what his aides hint at. And he will have to do this publicly.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/tell-us-more-about-romneys-private-views/2012/04/13/gIQA0Jz5ET_blog.html?tid=pm_opinions_pop
Posted at 01:47 PM ET, 04/12/2012
Republicans’ desperation exposed in Ann Romney ‘controversy’
By James Downie
Whether there’s a GOP “war on women” and whether it’s affecting Mitt Romney’s campaign is up for debate. (My short answers: yes to the first, no to the second.) Either way, Republicans clearly feel that the “war on women” issue is a problem: For evidence, look no further than their furious response to liberal pundit Hilary Rosen’s comments that Ann Romney doesn’t understand working women’s problems because she “has never worked a day in her life.”
On Rosen’s comments themselves, I can only echo my colleague Ruth Marcus. But more importantly, what, exactly, is Rosen’s role in the 2012 campaign? Is she an Obama adviser? No. (Though Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom “accidentally” labeled her as one.) Is she a close confidant of key Obama staff? No. (So far, conservatives have turned up exactly one article mentioning her as an actual adviser — at a health-care messaging meeting that took place three years ago.) Is she a leader either in the Democratic Party or of a liberal lobbying group? No. Has Obama or his staff expressed support for her opinion? No — in fact, three senior advisers have already criticized her. Is she a liberal talk show host, giving a platform to Obama staff or other Democrats? No. With respect to the presidential campaign, she is nothing but a person with an opinion. That’s it.
To tie so many talking heads who appear on cable every dayto either campaign is a preposterous exercise, and a standard neither side of the political debate should want. If the Obama camp is responsible for Rosen, is Romney responsible for GOP Rep. Allen West’s outrageous accusation that 80 Democrats are communists? Is he responsible for Sherriff Joe Arapaio (Romney’s ’08 Arizona campaign chairman) and his birther conspiracy theories? Absolutely not. If that were the standard, the campaign would just be day after day of candidates disavowing random pundits and supporters’ comments. That Republicans feel they have to stoop to this suggests a real desperation. Let’s not let this become the new normal.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/republicans-desperation-exposed-in-ann-romney-controversy/2012/04/12/gIQAnV86CT_blog.html
Obama paid higher rate than Mitt Romney, 2011 tax returns reveal
White House says president believes he should pay more tax as returns show he and Michelle paid 20.5% on $789,674
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/13/barack-obama-us-taxation
Swift Boat’ donor throws big money behind Romney
April 13, 2012|By Michael Levenson
The leading donor to Mitt Romney’s super PAC is not a hedge-fund manager or Bain Capital executive. It is Bob Perry, a Houston home-building magnate who was also the top donor to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, in 2004.
Along with Foster Friess, who was Rick Santorum’s benefactor, and Sheldon Adelson, Newt Gingrich’s patron, Perry has become one of the most important, if least known, members of an elite class of Republican moneymen who are almost single-handedly reshaping the race for the White House.
He has doled out $80 million to political candidates and committees over the last decade. That includes $4 million to Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting Romney that has systemically obliterated his opponents with negative ads.
http://articles.boston.com/2012-04-13/nation/31331806_1_major-ad-blitz-american-crossroads-romney
Notice the gender most prominent in the video above? Yep; Romney came to those towns and DESTROYED their jobs!
So much for job creation and concern for women and the economy
Mitt Romney delays filing 2011 income tax return
By Seema Mehta
April 13, 2012, 5:37 p.m.
Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney asked for an extension Friday to file his 2011 tax return.
The former Massachusetts governor and his wife, Ann, expect not to owe any further taxes, having estimated $3.2 million in liability and made $3.4 million in payments, according to the documents filed.
Romney will file his return prior to the November election, according to a spokeswoman.
Romney’s taxes have been a continual cause of controversy in the 2012 presidential campaign because of his reluctance to release details. Under pressure from his Republican primary rivals, he released his 2010 returns in January, which showed he paid about $3 million on nearly $22 million of income.
He also contributed about $3 million to charity, reducing his effective tax rate to less than 14%.
The disclosures prompted additional controversy, because some investments listed on the tax returns, such as a now-closed Swiss bank account and other overseas funds, were not explicitly disclosed in a personal financial disclosure statement Romney filed in August.
President Obama’s campaign as well as his GOP primary rivals have called on the multimillionaire to release more years of returns, notably from when he headed the private equity firm Bain Capital and when he was governor.
They point out that he released 23 years of returns to Sen. John McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, when he was under consideration to be his running mate; that his father, George, released 12 years of returns publicly during his presidential bid; and that former President George W. Bush released 17 years.
“Mitt Romney’s defiance of decades of precedent set by presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle, including his own father, begs the question — what does he have to hide?” said Obama campaign manager Jim Messina in a statement Friday. “Did he exploit loopholes in the tax code by keeping his investments offshore and is that why he’s protecting those loopholes now? Why did he open a Swiss bank account instead of an American bank account and establish a corporation in Bermuda instead of on our shores? Did he pay a lower income tax rate than the 13.9% he paid in 2010, and is that why he opposes the Buffett Rule to ensure millionaires don’t pay less taxes than middle-class families?”
“Gov. Romney may try once again to play by his own set of rules, but Americans will hold him accountable for trying to hide his record,” Messina said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-delays-filing-2011-taxes-expects-to-pay-32-million-20120413,0,4296566.story
pril 13, 2012, 1:02 pm
Wars: Imagined and Real
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL
Politicians are always declaring a “war” on something. Often the conflict is entirely in their imaginations– like the War on Christmas and the War on Religion. Sometimes it’s a label designed to lend a sense of urgency to a problem they are not going to fix – like the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs.
On rare occasions there actually is a war going on, like the War on Women, by which I mean the increasingly aggressive Republican-led assault on women’s rights, starting with access to abortion and contraceptives.
Just yesterday, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed a law banning abortions after 20 weeks except in life-threatening medical emergencies, and requiring ultrasounds before abortions.
Those on the right try to separate birth control issues from the broader spectrum of women’s issues, but they’re inextricably linked. I thought Gail Collins put it well in a recent installment of “The Conversation” with David Brooks:
If you look back on what’s happened to women over the last half-century – how the world has opened up for them to have adventures, pursue careers, make choices about the kind of lives they want to live – it all goes back to effective contraception. Before the birth control pill came along, a woman who wanted to pursue a life that involved a lot of education, or a long climb up a career ladder, pretty much had to be willing to devote herself to perpetual celibacy. That’s what contraception means to women.
These, of course, are not the only issues women care about or vote on. Basic economic issues are just as important and, guess what, Republicans want to slash every kind of program there is that helps working people house, feed, clothe and educate their children. They have even opposed the re-authorization of the Violence Against Woman Act because it would help non-citizens and people in same-sex relationships.
So we are indeed in the midst of a war, waged from the right, which has lately entered a new stage. First Republicans picked the fight. Next they admitted nothing and denied everything (earlier this month, the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, called the war “a fiction” and compared it to a “war on caterpillars.”). Now they’ve moved onto counterattacks.
“The real war on women has been waged by the Obama administration’s failure on the economy,” Mitt Romney said recently, claiming “92.3 percent of the job losses during the Obama years has been women who’ve lost those jobs.”
That’s highly misleading.
As several journalistic fact-checking sources have noted, Mr. Romney’s claim depends on starting the job-loss count in January, 2009, when Mr. Obama took office, and ignoring the fact that the Great Recession began in December, 2007, when George W. Bush was still president. Adding in the additional 13 months, it’s clear that men lost far more jobs than women.
Women have not recovered their jobs as quickly because, as ABC News pointed out, they’re more likely to work in retail or have government jobs. Retail has been slow to bounce back. As for government jobs, the Republicans have been cutting them right and left and aspire to cut many, many more.
http://loyalopposition.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/wars-imagined-and-real/?ref=politics
pril 13, 2012 12:23 PM 4\
Elections Are a Choice of Candidates
By Ed Kilgore
If the title of this post seems a bit self-evident, that is deliberate. It serves as a reminder that no matter how badly Republicans want to make the election of 2012 a simple up-or-down referendum on the happiness of Americans with life since the beginning of 2009, they cannot entirely evade responsibility their own records, agenda and candidates.
Lord knows they seem to want to. Jay Cost of The Weekly Standard, one of the more reasonable and empirically-oriented Republican analysts, did a column today where he in essence stamps his foot and demands that Barack Obama stop drawing attention to the GOP and to Mitt Romney. It’s really almost funny:
Typically, successful reelection campaigns – e.g. 1936, 1956, 1972, 1984, and 1996 – have been based on narratives about how the country has turned a corner, thanks to the incumbent’s greatness. Think “Nixon’s The One!” “It’s Morning In America” or “Bridge To The 21st Century.” None of that applies to President Obama, who instead looks to tar Mitt Romney as the evil stepchild of J.P. Morgan and Barry Goldwater….
This, put simply, is Barack Obama’s problem. If the 2012 election is framed on “are you better off than you were four years ago?,” then he is going to lose. His record on the economy, the deficit, energy policy, and health care are all very unpopular.
So, Obama’s objective is to get the country to think about other things. In particular, he has of late employed a series of gimmicks to induce the country to conceive of Mitt Romney in the above terms. The whole “war on women” is exactly along those lines, as is the Buffett Rule. Both speak to the core strategy – Romney is a conservative radical and tool of big business who wants to deprive women of birth control and help only the rich get richer.
Put aside the obvious quibbles with Jay’s characterization of every successful re-election as being the product of sunny, positive messages that ignore the opposition (Nixon ‘72, Clinton ‘96, Bush ‘04 obviously involved a lot of negative or “comparative” campaigning). More fundamentally, when you go to the polls, you are not going to be handed a ballot offering you an up-or-down vote on whether you think America is in better shape than it was four years ago. Of course incumbents are greatly affected by perceptions of their performance; it probably is the single most important factor affecting the outcome of the election, and if the economy just plain out tanks between now and November, we are likely looking down the long barrel of a Romney administration.
But the incumbent’s record is not the only factor, and it’s increasingly ridiculous to hear Republicans complain that Obama needs to just take his medicine and not try to confuse voters with information about the opposition. If they wanted a pure “referendum” election, they should have themselves performed a bit better during their last period in power, and should not have spent most of the Obama administration indulging themselves in an ideological bender that makes references to J.P. Morgan and Barry Goldwater all too credible.
In his determination to rule out the possibility that Obama’s reelection strategy could work, Cost even goes so far as to tell swing voters what they have to care about:
I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that the average swing voter does not want to talk about the “war on women,” the Buffett rule, or whatever else Team Obama is going to throw out there in the weeks and months to come. That voter wants to talk about jobs, the economy, the deficit, gas prices, the health care bill—in other words, all the issues where the president is vulnerable.
While I don’t know for sure what the mood of swing voters—defined, as Ruy Teixeira has recently explained, as all persuadable voters, not just some predefined class of center-right self-identified independents—is going to be this fall. But you know what? Neither does Jay Cost, much less Karl Rove, whose tirade against Obama’s comparative campaigning begins Jay’s column. Seeking to shape the perceptions of persuadable voters about the choices involved in an election is the primary task of political campaigns. And it’s absurd to expect the Obama campaign to just throw in the towel from the get-go.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_04/elections_are_a_choice_of_cand036672.php
Mystery donor gives $10 million to Crossroads GPS group to run anti-Obama ads
By T.W. Farnam, Published: April 13
An anonymous donor gave $10 million late last year to run ads attacking President Obama and Democratic policies, escalating the money race that is defining the 2012 presidential campaign. And in the new, free-wheeling environment of independent political giving, the identity of this donor, like many others, is likely to remain a permanent mystery.
The donation went to Crossroads GPS, the conservative nonprofit group founded with the support of political strategist Karl Rove. Another donor gave $10 million in the 2010 midterm elections, according to draft tax returns that provide the first detailed look at its finances.
rossroads GPS would not identify the donors, who could be individuals, corporations or other interest groups, and under tax and campaign laws, it is not required to disclose them. It is possible that both $10 million donations come from the same source.
The huge contributions, which make the donors among the top political givers in recent history, offer new evidence of the altered world of campaign finance: After the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, spending by interest groups has risen dramatically. The landmark ruling allowed corporations, unions and nonprofit groups such as Crossroads GPS to spend money directly on electoral politics. Crossroads GPS and its sister group, American Crossroads, hope to spend up to $300 million in the 2012 election cycle,promoting conservative ideas and helping elect Republicans up and down the ballot.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mystery-donor-gives-10-million-to-crossroads-gps-group-to-run-anti-obama-ads/2012/04/13/gIQAzdtdFT_story.html?hpid=z2
How Ted Kennedy Took On Mitt Romney’s Women Problem
by Michelle Goldberg Apr 13, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
A look at Romney’s previous campaigns shows how Ted Kennedy and other opponents targeted his weakness with female voters—especially when it came to the economy.
As the 1994 Senate election pitting Mitt Romney against Ted Kennedy approached, it was all coming down the women’s vote. “When the race drew close, in late August, early September, the biggest target group of voters were women, particularly non-college-educated working women,” says Tad Devine, who served as a senior Kennedy adviser.
Romney had reason to think he had a chance with this constituency. On abortion, there was little daylight between the two men. Kennedy, meanwhile, had an unhelpful reputation for womanizing and dissolution. Only three years earlier, he’d had to testify at the high-profile rape trial of his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, who had met his accuser during a night of carousing with his uncle. In the Republican primary, Janet Jeghelian had touted her ability to exploit Kennedy’s “trouble with women.” Romney, chiseled and wholesome, might have thought he could do the same by highlighting his evident devotion to his picturesque family. “They made a real point to paint him as a really dedicated family man and husband,” says Scott Helman, co-author of The Real Romney. “He really cast himself as a Kennedy foil.”
None of it mattered. When the election came, Kennedy crushed Romney among women, winning their votes by more than two to one.
Now, once again, we’re entering an election in which women voters are proving pivotal. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showed President Obama ahead of Romney with women, the majority of the electorate, by 19 percentage points. Democratic strategists see women as the key to victory; according to a recent report from Third Way, Obama’s electoral fortunes could depend on his ability to win over secular female swing voters.
Spooked, the Romney campaign has responded with projection, saying that it’s actually Obama who is waging a war on women through his economic policies. His advisers have deployed Romney’s wife Ann in an attempt to humanize the candidate, and when Democratic pundit Hilary Rosen said that Ann had “never worked a day in her life,” they seized on it, apparently hoping it would help them garner sympathy with mothers.
They seem to believe that now that the Republican primary is over and social issues like abortion and contraception have momentarily faded from the headlines, they can somehow change the narrative about Romney and women. Perhaps they’re right, but a look at Romney’s political career suggests that his problems with female voters long predate the current political season, and it will take more than a few spasms of manufactured umbrage on behalf of stay-at-home-moms to make them go away.
There was actually a moment in the 1994 race when many were predicting Kennedy’s defeat. In a desperate bid for women’s votes, he went after Romney’s religion, saying that he should explain his stand on the Mormon Church’s pre-1978 ban on black priests and its continuing refusal to ordain women. (The Catholic Church, of course, doesn’t ordain women either, but Kennedy said that it should.) That line of attack backfired, sparking bipartisan disgust. “Religious Politicking Could Seal Kennedy’s Doom,” ran one headline.
Then Kennedy’s campaign tried a new tack, prefiguring one we’re likely to see from Obama this fall. “We made a case against [Romney] focused first of all on his record on business,” says Devine. Kennedy’s staff zeroed in on two aspects of that record—layoffs, particularly of women, at companies taken over by Bain, and the absence of women in senior management positions at Bain itself.
According to a 1994 Boston Globe story, “The team [Romney] put together to manage Bain Capital is exclusively white and male, all educated at the best business schools, mostly Harvard. There are no minorities among the 95 vice presidents of Bain & Co. Only 10 percent are women, though a woman chairs the board.” In a rather insensitive response, Romney claimed that consulting is “a profession that has yet to attract many women and minorities.” All this made it into a Kennedy commercial.
Other ads were set in Marion, Indiana, the home of Ampad, a stationary factory that Bain bought under Romney. Since the takeover, The New York Times reported, “Management has shed 41 of 265 blue-collar jobs, cut wages, tripled some workers’ health-insurance payments, abolished most of their seniority rights, and junked the prior management’s union contract, which had two years to run.” In Kennedy’s commercials, a parade of white working-class people, many women, spoke bitterly about Bain’s record. “I would like to say to Mitt Romney, if you think you’d make such a good senator, come out here to Marion, Indiana, and see what your company has done to these people,” one woman said.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/13/how-ted-kennedy-took-on-mitt-romney-s-women-problem.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29
Posted at 03:45 PM ET, 04/13/2012
Yes, the Buffett Rule is `political.’ So what?
By Greg Sargent
Even commentators who are not overtly partisan have internalized GOP talking points about the Buffett Rule, which will be voted on in the Senate on Monday. Politico’s Jim VandeHei is describing it as “total gimmickry” and “insanely political.” You hear this far and wide.
Okay, then. Yes, the push is partly “political.” But that’s a good thing: Voters need to be told what the parties stand for in an election year. No, the Buffett Rule won’t wipe away our fiscal problems, and No, it won’t become law anytime soon. But a political fight over it will clarify and advance the larger policy dispute that simply must be resolved sooner or later: The battle over unshakable GOP devotion to the goal of reducing the amount the wealthy pay towards deficit reduction.
Many experts think the only way our fiscal problems can be solved is through a mix of new revenues and spending cuts — which requires the breaking of the GOP’s wall of opposition to new taxes on the rich. That won’t happen unless Dems make that continued opposition politically unsustainable. A fight over the Buffett Rule could conceivably help in that regard, or, if not, could help clarify that Republicans will pay no price for refusing to budge on this central priority.
“The Buffett Rule is a symbolic fight to expose Republican extremism,” says Jonathan Chait. “If Republicans are going to defend an unpopular position, Democrats will make them defend it to its most absurd lengths.”
Case in point: Scott Brown in Massachusetts. In local interviews, Brown and his opponent Elizabeth Warren have now staked out their positions on the Buffett Rule. Brown, predictably, is against it.
“If you want to have someone raise your taxes and have more regulation, you vote for Professor Warren,” Brown says. “To raise taxes on anyone is a jobs killer.”
In my view, that’s a pretty weak argument. But whoever you agree with, voters who keep being told the deficit is a threat to American civilization as we know it deserve to hear it. They should hear Brown defend the idea that the wealthy should not chip in a bit more to avert armageddon, so the burden of doing so doesn’t fall on those less equipped to bear it. They should hear Warren’s counter-argument. The Buffett Rule fight is just a chapter in that larger debate — one that must be resolved one way or another. If we’re not going to have this argument in a presidential election year, when are we going to have it?
Pundits who deride the Buffett Rule as “political” should be asked to explain either (1) how they think the country’s fiscal problems can be fixed without more revenues from the rich; or (2) if they think those revenues are necessary, how they think Republicans can be coaxed into dropping their opposition to this solution without coming under pressure in battles like this one. Even if they are — gasp! — political battles.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/yes-the-buffett-rule-is-political-so-what/2012/04/13/gIQAb88cFT_blog.html
ROMNEY, YOU’RE A LOSER. SANE WOMEN OF AMERICA WILL NOT VOTE FOR YOU!
RNC: Their Women’s Blog is Blank
by BooMan
Fri Apr 13th, 2012 at 12:11:37 PM
It doesn’t surprise me that the RNC created a blog to deal with women’s issues and then forgot about it. They don’t really have anything to say. It is, of course, hard to identify an issue about which all women agree. But a good start would be receiving equal pay for equal work. Another one would be having some recourse in the courts if they don’t receive equal pay for equal work. If you take a look at the roll call on the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, you’ll see that House Republicans voted against it 3-173. You might assume that those three Republicans were women, but they were actually two dudes from New Jersey and one from Kentucky. In the Senate, the Republicans voted against the bill 4-36. The four pro-votes? Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas.
Not a single House Republican woman voted for it, and not a single Senate Republican man voted for it. It’s really quite remarkable. I mean, consider for a moment how hard it is to find a woman in real life who will agree that she should be paid less for the same work as a man, and that she shouldn’t be able to do anything about it if she isn’t paid the same.
This is just the issue I think has the most consensus. I think strong majorities of women disagree with the Republicans’ positions on abortion rights, the availability of contraception, funding for Planned Parenthood, doctor/patient privacy and discretion, paid maternal leave, sex education, protecting against violence directed at women, and so on.
If you try to reduce the interests of women down do the strength of the economy and the availability of jobs, as Romney and the Republicans are attempting to do, you are effectively denying that women have any issues that are distinct from men. And if that’s the route you are going to take, then you naturally will have no content to post to a blog aimed specifically at women.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/4/13/121137/750
It’s clear that white males are running the show, and the GOP women “know their place.”
Casual Observation
by BooMan
Sat Apr 14th, 2012 at 07:40:57 AM EST
I hate to break it to poor Jennifer Rubin, but discussion of the War on Women will continue. It will continue for two reasons. First, the offhand comment of one Democratic pundit is nothing more than the offhand comment of one Democratic pundit. Second, both the GOP and women will continue to exist. Thus, the War on Women will continue and women will continue to notice.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/4/14/74057/6810#14
the GOP is accused of having a WAR ON WOMEN
because IT’S HAVING A WAR ON WOMEN.
it’s not something that’s been ‘ imagined’.
and, Rubin wrote some bullshyt that Willard would have to seal the deal with women himself, by talking about all the family friendly policies he put in place while at Bain..
but, guess what Rubin…
I guess he didn’t put any in place, because it was the club by which Ted Kennedy clubbed his ass with women back in 1994.
ROMNEY SUPPORTS:
GETTING RID OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD-* HURTS WOMEN WHO GET BREAST CANCER SCREENINGS, REGULAR CHECKUPS, AND DENIES REPRODUCTIVE CHOICES -ABORTIONS
SUPPORTS THAT SHITTY RYAN PLAN- *SUPPORTS RICH CORPORATE BUDDIES*
FAIR PAY FOR WOMEN- *WANTS TO GET BACK WITH US*
SUPPORTS NRA & SPEAKS AT THEIR CONVENTION-TROTS ANN ROMNEY ON STAGE BEFORE A GROUP OF GUN-TOTING MEN*
ANN CAN GO TO HELL; SHE DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME OR MY DAUGHTERS!
WAR ON WOMEN, MITT ROMNEY. NO VOTES FROM SANE WOMEN.
President Obama Speaks at CEO Summit of the Americas Cartagena, Colombia @ 11:10 a.m. EDT.
President Obama and President Santos of Colombia hold a Joint Press Conference
Audio Only. Cartagena, Colombia @ 4:35 p.m. today
Link here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/live
Good Morning, Everybody! :-)
Good Morning, Everyone:)