Swag from our POTUS.
U.S. President Barack Obama removes his jacket as he arrives in Tampa, Florida September 20, 2012. Obama will attend a campaign event there before returning to Washington.
—REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Good Morning. I hope you are enjoying today with family and friends.
Eight-year old Make-A-Wish child Janiya Penny reacts after meeting President Barack Obama as he welcomes her family to the Oval Office, Aug. 8, 2012.
—-Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
UPDATE; just had to add this video
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Mitt Romney and the 47 percent
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BY JOY-ANN REID
joyannreid@gmail.com
Right about now, it may be sinking in among some members of the Republican coalition: Your candidate, Mitt Romney, just might think you’re a loser.
Romney’s now infamous candid-camera moment at a May fundraiser held in the home of a Boca Raton hedge-fund manager and leaked to Mother Jones magazine, gave potential supporters a window into the King of Bain’s reptilian brain.
Asked by a beleaguered millionaire what he could do about the parasites who insist on having government take care of them, Romney said:
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you name it.
“ That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.”
Mitt went on to explain that his “job is not to worry about those people,” since the moochers will never be convinced to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Too busy gold plating their wheelchairs with those Willie Wonka foil food stamps.
With that, the man who would be the first U.S. president to stash his riches in overseas bank accounts; who partied on a yacht flying the Cayman Islands flag while his Tampa convention quaked at the approach of a hurricane; and who only seems to light up when talking about business, put half the country on notice:
He can’t be bothered with you.
Trouble is, Mitt — who thinks the “middle class” starts at around $250,000 — forgot who “you” are.
There has always been a risk that, after more than 30 years of messaging to working-class voters, particularly in the south (home to eight of the 10 states with the largest share of adults who pay no federal income taxes and who get more in services from the federal government than they pay in — the only non-Dixie states on the list are New Mexico and Idaho) that some “pol” would give away the game.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/19/3010936/mitt-romney-and-the-47-percent.html#storylink=cpy
Well stated, Ms. Joy Reid, WELL SAID.
September 22, 2012 4:36 PM
Reproductive rights for me, but not for thee: Mitt Romney edition
Oh my. I was not aware of this: in 2011, Mitt Romney’s son Tagg and Tagg’s wife Jen, who earlier this year had twins through a surrogate, signed a contract with the surrogate giving themselves and her the right to abort a pregnancy, even in non-life-threatening situations. And on top of that, Mitt himself subsidized the arrangement, since he helped pay for the surrogate’s services. Oopsy!
TMZ is reporting that the contract provided for the right to abortion if the pregnancy was judged to pose “potential physical harm” to the surrogate, or if the fetus was deemed to be less than genetically perfect. To be fair, it’s unclear whether Mitt or his lawyers actually read the contract. It’s also true that Tagg’s lawyer claims that the abortion provision was not something Tagg and his wife wanted and that it was kept in the contract by mistake, but that explanation sounds suspiciously like ex post facto ass-covering to me.
The contract’s provisions are eminently reasonable, because no one should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term against her will, no matter what the reason. Yet Mitt Romney has claimed that he supports abortion rights only in the event of rape, incest, or a threat to the health or life of the mother. I don’t doubt that, like the vast majority of elites, Romney would support abortion rights for his own family members for any reason, because rich white Christians by definition are not those slutty, trashy people running around having the “wrong” kind of abortions, just for the hell of it.
Still, these revelations pose a dilemma for Romney’s anti-choice supporters: by explicitly and personally subsidizing the right to abortion, as Mitt Romney did by paying the surrogate, is he better, worse, or no different than a nefarious outfit like Planned Parenthood? Inquiring minds want to know!
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
Mitt Romney Blames The ‘Victims’
By LOLGOP on September 22, 2012in Mitt Romney
299
REMINDER: People on welfare didn’t cost us 15 million jobs and trillions in savings. People on Wall Street did.
Mitt Romney released one doctored tax return this week but he also – accidentally – released something that no one expected: some truth.
Thanks to a waiter with a small camera and gigantic metaphorical testicles, James E. Carter and David Corn at Mother Jones, we finally got a peek at the way Mitt Romney actually regards 47 percent of American voters – the laborers, the janitors the home health care workers — the working poor who in the last two decades have seen their life expectancy shrink by four years.
With a confidence and fluency that eludes him when speaking about most anything, Romney told us that what he’s learned by becoming severely conservative is that these Americas – most of whom work and pay a higher tax rate than him due to payroll taxes – are people who see themselves “victims.” To him they’re dependent moochers who can’t be forced to take responsibly for their lives.
You’d have to work 7 million years at Walmart to earn as much as the Walmart heirs. But if you work there 40 hours a week, Mitt Romney thinks you’re a moocher.
Ezra Klein has pointed out that the working poor in America aren’t avoiding responsibility, they’re drowning in it. And that’s obvious to anyone who has any sense of what’s going on in our economy.
What’s also obvious is that the only thing the GOP has learned from a decade in which giant tax breaks for the rich created nothing but a financial crisis is that the people to blame for this are the disabled, union workers and the elderly.
No one and nothing will ever cost us as many jobs as the big banks can by holding our financial system hostage. And they’re bigger than ever.
Mitt Romney’s solution? He wants to cut a trillion from Medicaid. He wants to eliminate the reforms on Wall Street we’ve put in place. He wants to give millionaires more tax breaks.
Basically: He wants to reward the people who were responsible for the financial crisis and punish those who continue suffer because of it.
Of course, Mitt can’t blame the investor class or the conservative economists who actually created the economic catastrophe that George W. Bush left America drowning in. They’re his constituency, his donors. And, of course, he can’t see America’s actual crisis of responsibility.
It’s a crisis where scientists are blamed for noticing a climate crisis, where workers are blamed when management fails, teachers are blamed when poverty is ignored, where women are blamed when they don’t get the health care or education they need.
The worst possible tendency of those who are in power is the tendency to blame the powerless. And with this video we see that Mitt Romney is a man who does just that.
All we can do is thank fate for this rare opportunity where Mitt Romney shared a little truth.
http://eclectablog.com/2012/09/mitt-romney-blames-the-victims.html
What #RomneyShambles Looks Like, In Charts
Thursday, September 20, 2012 |
Posted by Deaniac83 at 6:30 AM
If you looked at the poll released from the Pew Research Center yesterday, there are a lot of things for Obama supporters to be pleased (but never complacent) about. President Obama leads by 8 points among likely voters, But perhaps none more glaring than this one:
That’s a 19-point gap among women in favor of Obama among registered voters, and the gap is 18 points among likely voters. Among men, Romney leads by 1 point, smaller than the margin of error.
Women aren’t Romney’s only problem, of course. The President holds a 45-point lead among registered Latino voters (69% to 24%), a lead that grows to 50 points (72% to 22%) among likely Latino voters. Romney’s support among black voters remains in the margin of error, and President Obama beats him by 93% to 2%. In contrast, Romney’s lead among white voters have shrunk to seven points. With this kind of a disaster among minorities, Romney needs to beat the President by more than 20 points among white voters to get to the White House. The problem for him is that half of those white voters also happen to be women.
……………………………….
The issue and trait identifiers are just as bad, if not worse, for Mr. Romney. Obama has a devastating 43 point lead among who voters think connects well with ordinary Americans – 66% say Obama does, as opposed to only 23% who say the same about Romney. Here’s what it looks like on that front:
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2012/09/what-romneyshambles-looks-like-in-charts.html
Swag is right, baby. Little Janiya was sooo precious with her little hands covering her little face. I can imagine how she felt. Bless her,
Twitters from TheToast:
@TheToast2012:
Been thinking more about Ann Romney’s #thisishard comments. The more I think, the more amused I get.
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You know what’s hard, Ann Romney? Having your wife & her family compared to a pack of gorillas by elected officials.
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You know what’s hard, Ann Romney? Having your 12 year old daughter called a ghetto slut for wearing a peace sign T-shirt.
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You know what’s hard Ann Romney? Having your husband be accused of not being an American citizen even after a U.S. STATE shows the certif.
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You know what’s hard, Ann Romney? Being called Stokely Carmichael in a dress and MOOchelle by a fat ass Jabba the Hut impersonator.
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You know what’s hard, Miss Ann? Having your husband disrespected by Supreme Court Justices & shouting congressmen in the middle of the SOTU.
***
You know what’s hard Miss Ann? Having your mother in law said to have slept with an animal to produce your husband.
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You know what’s hard, Miss Ann? Having a gathering of your husband’s friends and supporters described as a HIP HOP BARBEQUE.
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You know what’s hard, Miss Ann? Having school systems across the USA cancel your husband’s BACK TO SCHOOL speech b/c it’s “indoctrination.”
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You know what’s hard Miss Ann? After 3 years of disrespectful/racist comments about you, getting more racist comments for pointing that out.
***
You know what’s hard Miss Ann? Getting booed by a bunch of NASCAR rednecks because your black ass is trying to honor the TROOPS.
http://twitter.com/utaustinliberal/status/249636044427898880/photo/1
Rachel Maddow discusses the response to her story about the Senate GOP filibustering the veterans jobs bill this week.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#49127430
Senate GOP furious newspaper got better briefing on Libya
By Alexander Bolton – 09/22/12 06:00 AM ET
Senate Republicans are furious the Obama administration rebuffed their attempts to learn details of the Benghazi attack, only to give the coveted information to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Senators say they were rebuffed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when they pressed for more information about the attack that killed U.S. envoy Christopher Stephens in Libya.
“That is the most useless, worthless briefing I have attended in a long time,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told reporters after the closed-door session.
GOP lawmakers were incensed to find many of the details they tried to learn Thursday were in a front-page article in The Times the following morning.
“I was very disappointed in the briefing yesterday, too. The bottom line is, we asked questions like, ‘How many people were at the Benghazi consulate?’ You pick up The New York Times and you get a blow-by-blow description of what supposedly went on,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The Times published a timeline of the attacks chronicling militants gaining access to the U.S. compound after 9:35 pm on Sept. 11, American security forces attempting to retake it at 10:45 pm and American and Libyan forces regaining control of the main compound around 11:20 pm, before evacuating.
According to the timeline, Libyans found Stevens in the compound after midnight and took him to a hospital, and 20 embassy staff members were hit by mortar rounds around 2 am, an attack that killed two former Navy SEALs.
The official Senate briefing was less informative.
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/251109-senate-republicans-upset-obama-administration-passed-them-over-for-the-new-york-times
http://youtu.be/GKhcrxIOP0g
Where’s the Motivation?
by BooMan
Sat Sep 22nd, 2012 at 01:44:46 PM EST
Mitt Romney has raised less money from small donors than John McCain did in 2008. And, overall, he has roughly $40 million less under his direct control than the president. His big donors have already maxed out, but Obama can keep going back to a massive pool of small donors. The RNC has a big money advantage over the DNC, but they don’t know what to do with it. Their ground game is pathetic. And how is Romney supposed to motivate people to work for him when he spends almost every day shooting himself in the foot and then putting his bloody foot in his mouth?
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/9/22/134446/984
Romney’s Fundraising Comes Down to Earth
The GOP nominee lags Obama in small donors and dollars under his direct control. They’re related and could be crucial.
After a summer in which he routinely posted larger fundraising hauls than President Obama, Mitt Romney was supposed to march into the home-stretch of the campaign accompanied by a war chest so massive it would induce insomnia at Obama headquarters in Chicago. But the GOP presidential nominee’s deflating fundraising numbers this week suggest that Team Obama might get some sleep this fall after all.
Romney’s campaign, in a report filed to the Federal Election Commission this week, showed $50.4 million cash on hand — nearly $40 million less than Obama’s reported $88 million. Romney’s joint fundraising operation with the Republican National Committee and other party committees still has a bigger bank account overall. But that advantage –$180 million on hand compared to President Obama’s $120 million, according to The New York Times – is hardly as large as Republicans hoped it would be when the former governor reported hundreds of millions raised this summer.
So what happened? Campaign finance experts say Romney, and Obama for that matter, have masked their true financial figures by reporting money raised by allied groups like the RNC in addition to the principal campaign account. They have presented all of the money as being part of one big pot, but that conflation belies the fact that how a campaign raises cash determines how it can spend it.
More broadly, experts say, the confusion underscores the uncertainty of the first presidential campaign conducted in a dramatically reshaped campaign finance landscape brought forth by Citizens United and related court and FEC decisions. Rules that remained consistent for decades are now gone, and political observers and participants of all stripes are still racing to catch up.
……………………………………………………………….
The candidate’s own campaign has maximum flexibility – capable of funding candidate travel, a ground game and TV ads that say exactly what the campaign wants to say, exactly when it wants to say it. So the fact that Obama’s account has roughly $40 million more than Romney’s, even if his allies have less on hand, is significant.
Obama has been able to raise more money through his campaign account because a greater portion of his contributions come from small donors. Major donors are important, but federal law means only $5,000 of their money can fund the official campaign account while the rest goes to party and joint-fundraising committees. In other words, $50,000 collected from many small donations is more valuable to a candidate than a $50,000 infusion from one donor.
According to numbers compiled by the Campaign Finance Institute and shared by Malbin, through Aug. 31 Obama had raised $147 million from donors whose aggregate contributions totaled less than $200 (more than the $121 million he had raised from small donors at the same time four years ago). Romney had raised $39.5 million from donors giving less than $200 by the end of last month, according to the institute (about $3 million less than McCain’s total in 2008).
The larger donors also present another problem for Romney: Contributors offering $5,000 checks might have boosted his summer fundraising totals, but because they’ve reached their maximum contribution, he can’t return to them for more money. Obama, meanwhile, can continually ask his small-donor pool for more cash.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/romney-s-fundraising-comes-down-to-earth-20120922
Ohio Tea Partier attempts to intimidate student voters at OSU
By Joseph On September 22, 2012
On September 13th, Hilliard Tea Party member Carol D. Bicking submitted a voter challenge to hundreds of OSU students. Bicking appears to be following the strategy promoted by True the Vote which aims to intimidate Democratic voters, like students or African Americans, into staying away from the polls this November.
If the Board of Elections accepts the challenge, students would be sent a subpoena to appear at a hearing to question their voting status. Students would then have a minimum of three days to prepare for the hearing, and possibly hire legal counsel, all because some nasty Tea Partier didn’t like the way their address appeared on the voting registration form.
According to documents obtained by Plunderbund, the bulk of the challenges (246) are for students who registered to vote at their dorm buildings at OSU but failed to provide a specific room number on the application. We confirmed with OSU’s Housing Department that “as long as everything else is accurate including their name” the students will, most likely, still receive their mail even without the room number.
http://www.plunderbund.com/2012/09/22/ohio-tea-partier-attempts-to-intimidate-student-voters-at-osu/
Romney campaign trails in crucial ground game
By NICHOLAS RICCARDI
Associated Press / September 22, 2012
Richard and Jessi Constantine were alone recently as they wheeled their 1-year-old son in a stroller around a Las Vegas subdivision, knocking on doors to promote Mitt Romney’s candidacy. Yet legions of volunteers working to re-elect President Barack Obama are a pervasive presence in the state.
In one office park on the eastern end of the metropolis, dozens of union members fanned out to canvass for Obama and Democratic campaigns. To the north, members of the 60,000-strong Culinary Workers Union emerged from their union hall for their daily door-knocks on the incumbent’s behalf.
In Obama campaign offices to the northwest and north, throngs of workers and volunteers heard rousing speeches from San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro to fire them up before they hit the streets to register new voters and argue the president’s case to undecided ones.
The Obama campaign’s dominance of the ground game — the volunteer-driven nuts and bolts of electioneering that ranges from registration drives to door-to-door canvassing — contributed mightily to his 2008 victory. His campaign is banking on its advantage on the ground, assisted by a new array of digital innovations, to deliver victory once again.
‘‘Our massive grassroots organization will make the difference on Nov. 6,’’ Obama campaign spokesman Adam Fetcher said.
Republicans are scrambling to narrow the gap and say they will improve greatly over what they acknowledge was a dismal performance in 2008. They contend that the Obama campaign’s dominance on the ground is largely a public relations construct.
‘‘We are just rocking it on the ground game out there,’’ said Rick Wiley, the Republican National Committee’s political director.
There are no independently verified numbers documenting how the campaigns are doing on the ground, but a discrepancy can be found in the internal data each side promotes.
The RNC released a memo last week boasting it has made 20 million voter contacts — phone calls and face-to-face conversations. At the Democratic National Convention this month, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina told the crowd the re-election campaign had, to date, made 44 million phone calls alone.
The Democratic campaign boasts nearly three times as many offices in eight swing states.
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2012/president/candidates/romney/2012/09/22/romney-campaign-trails-crucial-ground-game/p5kwywI7pmffTrRG85ZOUP/singlepage.html
How Romney Packed The Univision Forum
Tense moments as the campaign demands to bus in supporters and to retape an introduction. “A little bit of disrespect,” complains Univision’s Salinas.
Posted Sep 22, 2012 10:47am EDT
MIAMI, Fla. — Mitt Romney’s campaign took a hard line with the Spanish-language network Univision, making last-minute demands in the run-up to last week’s town hall that helped insure his success in the forum, sources familiar with the broadcast told BuzzFeed.
When the Republican took his place Wednesday night in the first of two back-to-back candidate forums televised on the mega-network, he was greeted by an adoring, raucous crowd that cheered his every word, and booed many of the moderators’ questions. The next night, President Obama was treated to stone cold silence from the audience as he was aggressively grilled on his lackluster immigration record.
The contrast was widely noted by observers who watched both forums — and it was glaring enough to evoke some boasting from the Romney campaign in the immediate aftermath.
“These forums are going to be watched by more Hispanics than watched the conventions,” said Alberto Martinez, a Florida-based Romney adviser. “I think [Romney] did an amazing job, and I think it was pretty clear there wasn’t the same excitement for President Obama.”
But the enthusiasm gap may have been an optical illusion formed by a series of last-minute demands by the Romney campaign, according to Maria Elena Salinas, one of the Univision anchors who moderated the forums.
Salinas told BuzzFeed that tickets for each forum were divided between the network, the respective campaigns, and the University of Miami (which hosted the events) — and she said both campaigns initially agreed to keep the audience comprised mostly of students, in keeping with the events’ education theme.
But after exhausting the few conservative groups on campus, the Romney camp realized there weren’t enough sympathetic students to fill the stands on their night — so they told the network and university that if they weren’t given an exemption to the students-only rule, they might have to “reschedule.”
The organizers relented. One Democrat with ties to the Obama campaign noted that Rudy Fernandez, the university official charged with coordinating the forums, is a member of Romney’s Hispanic steering committee. Fernandez did not respond to BuzzFeed’s questions about whether he gave preferential treatment to Romney’s campaign.
In any case, Romney’s team was allowed to bus in rowdy activists from around southern Florida in order to fill the extra seats at their town hall.
Obama’s campaign, meanwhile, stuck to the original parameters and allowed a large chunk of the tickets to be distributed to interested students on campus. The result was a quiet, well-behaved crowd — and a lot of no-shows. Minutes before Obama’s forum was to begin, producers began frantically directing university staff and volunteers to sit in the empty seats.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/how-romney-packed-the-univision-forum
Obama Nominee Would Be First Black Woman To Join Washington DC Trial Court In 30 Years |
Over half of Washington, DC’s residents are black, yet an African-American woman has not served on the federal trial court that presides over the District of Columbia since 2003, when former Chief Judge Norma Holloway Johnson stepped down from the federal bench. Yesterday, President Obama took the first step towards rectifying this by nominating Sentencing Commission member Ketanji Brown Jackson to a seat on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. If confirmed, Jackson will be the first black woman to join this court in over thirty years, when Judge Johnson took the bench. President Clinton also nominated a black woman, Rhonda Fields, to the same court, but she was not confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/09/21/890011/obama-nominee-would-be-first-black-woman-to-join-washington-dc-trial-court-in-30-years/
http://youtu.be/xr65xu46xh8
http://youtu.be/k0yS4kOt04o
http://youtu.be/IxWaIkZjxis
Ari Bermnan is on MHP He has done a Yoeman’s job of investigative reporting on VOTER SUPPRESSION.
that is the best graphic..
thanks for finding it, SG2!!
Rep. Nancy Pelosi Promises To Overturn ‘Citizens United’ If We Give Her Back The House
In the off chance that Democrats take back the House in November, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has dreamed up quite a busy first day for her return to the Speaker’s podium.
After laying out the Democrats’ path back to the House Thursday, Pelosi ticked off a bold list of the achievements she most wants to see on day one – including perhaps, a constitutional amendment.
First and foremost was a jobs bill, based largely on President Obama’s, she said. Second on the list was passing the DISCLOSE Act, a bill introduced in 2010 that would effectively overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.
If the bill isn’t enough to get the job done, she won’t stop there.
We would “amend the constitution to overturn Citizens United, reform the whole money in politics to take it to public financing of campaigns, and elect — and I don’t care if they’re Democrats or Republicans — elect reformers to save our democracy. Keeping it the government of the many not the government of the money.”
read: http://influencealley.nationaljournal.com/2012/09/nancy-pelosi-if-we-win-the-hou.php
Willie Nelson is supporting PBO. Skyping on MHP Show.
These were excellent segments
Hollering
GREAT WEB SITE – PLEASE SHARE!
Welcome to governmentisgood.com
Why a website defending government? Because, like many Americans, I am tired of the government bashing that is constantly coming from the political right. For decades conservatives have been demonizing government and not enough has been done to defend it. Ever since Ronald Reagan declared in 1981 that “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem,” Republicans have been waging a political war against this institution. They have been joined in this anti-government crusade by libertarian thinkers, Tea Party activists, right-wing media pundits, and wealthy corporate lobbies. This powerful political coalition blithely ignores anything good about government and conducts a relentless smear campaign against this institution. They constantly play upon the fears and insecurities of average Americans and encourage them to blame all their problems on big bad government.
Make no mistake: the goal of this anti-government movement is not merely to eliminate waste or make the government more efficient. The ultimate aim is to undo many of the basic government programs that have been in place since the New Deal and the Great Society. They want to slash spending on vital safety net programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. They would like to roll back key regulations protecting consumers, workers, and the environment. And they want to reduce taxes so drastically that funding any new government programs would become extremely difficult.
http://www.governmentisgood.com/
Potus got that swag!
THERE YOU GO!
3 page article. SHORT: Mitt releases BS tax info to take some shade off before the first DEBATE.
Mitt Romney’s tax release puzzles strategists
By MAGGIE HABERMAN and ALEXANDER BURNS | 9/21/12 7:04 PM EDT
Mitt Romney’s decision to release tax information he’d said was off the table revives an issue seven weeks before Election Day that had finally faded from view, and it could give Democrats new fodder for their caricature of Romney as a secretive businessman.
Republicans are hopeful a piece of the information released Friday that he’d always promised — Romney’s full 2011 tax return — adds little to change the story. Voters already know that Romney is rich — now they know his effective tax rate was 14.1 percent last year.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81546.html#ixzz27CzmqhpK
OMG! Janiya Penny is way too precious! She is the cutest!
Washington Post editorial:
Going with the best-defense-is-a-good-offense approach, the Romney campaign is accusing President Obama of being a — gasp! — redistributionist. In a rather pale replay of 2008’s Joe the Plumber spread-the-wealth debate, the GOP dredged up a 14-year-old video.
…. The campaign apparently thinks that voters will find “redistribution” a scary word. But does Mr. Romney really disagree with the belief that part of government’s role is, in Mr. Obama’s words, to help “make sure that everybody’s got a shot”? To tax is to redistribute. To govern is to redistribute….
…. It’s indisputable that Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama have diverging views about the danger posed by increasing income inequality and the degree of redistribution in which government should engage. But the Romney campaign’s desperate, clownish portrayal of Mr. Obama does this important debate a serious disservice
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mr-romney-has-his-own-redistribution-plans/2012/09/21/95c45b24-0402-11e2-91e7-2962c74e7738_story.html?hpid=z3
Tee hee hee. See the latest video just posted in the thread.
Michael Tomasky: The release of the Romney tax returns is so amateurish that it almost offends me…..
Romney had pledged, in that ABC interview in Israel, that he’d never paid less than 13 percent to the feds. But to make that true for tax year 2011, the campaign admits that he artificially refused to take some deductions so that the rate would stay above the magic number.
But wait a second. Isn’t this the same Mitt Romney who said back in January: “I don’t think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes.”
In fact, it is. So he just released returns that, when stacked against his earlier statement, disqualify him for the presidency by his own lights. Amazing…..
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/21/you-know-you-ve-had-a-bad-week-when.html
NYT Editorial:
This is how voter intimidation worked in 1966: White teenagers in Americus, Ga., harassed black citizens in line to vote, and the police refused to intervene. Black plantation workers in Mississippi had to vote in plantation stores, overseen by their bosses. Black voters in Choctaw County, Ala., had to hand their ballots directly to white election officials for inspection.
This is how it works today: In an ostensible hunt for voter fraud, a Tea Party group, True the Vote, descends on a largely minority precinct and combs the registration records for the slightest misspelling or address error. It uses this information to challenge voters at the polls, and though almost every challenge is baseless, the arguments and delays frustrate those in line and reduce turnout.
The thing that’s different from the days of overt discrimination is the phony pretext of combating voter fraud. Voter identity fraud is all but nonexistent, but the assertion that it might exist is used as an excuse to reduce the political rights of minorities, the poor, students, older Americans and other groups that tend to vote Democratic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/opinion/voter-harassment-circa-2012.html?_r=1&hp
Good Morning, Ametia, SG2
Join me
mmmm…So delicious. Thank you! I’d be delighted.
Good Morning, Everyone! :-)
The photo of Janiya is priceless. The mere thought of these kids meeting President Obama is so a GAME CHANGER. it’s beyond words, REALLY.
Pete Souza captures those priceless moments once again. The pic of Janiya made me tear up.