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Even though 3Chics Politico is written and curated by three women: Ametia, Rikyrah, and SouthernGirl2, I must nominate this as one of the most engaging blogs I've found. Devoted to politics and culture, these three shine a light on contemporary life with humor and spirit.
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https://twitter.com/TheDemocrats/status/205097797534490624/photo/1
Ride or Die Joe; thanks for this. I’ve placed it on the VP thread.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Listen All Y’all It’s Self-Sabotage
Posted by Zandar
The Associated Press finally gets around to asking the question if the GOP is tanking the economy on purpose in order to win in November with Orange Julius vowing another debt ceiling fight he plans to “win”, and that the uncertainty that Republicans are not barking mad enough to scuttle the whole deal in a scorched earth campaign is actually starting to hurt job growth. The perennial “Republicans, Stupid, Evil or Both?” argument aside in this case, the real comedy value comes from Power Line’s response that the Democrats are the ones sabotaging the economy. To whit:
In order to either help or hurt the economy, Republicans would have to 1) enact policies that would do one or the other, or 2) block the Democrats from enacting policies that would do one or the other. The Republicans haven’t enacted anything since the Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007, so the theory has to be that the GOP has blocked something that otherwise would have helped. In fact, however, the Democrats have been able to enact the major components of their economic plan, including the stimulus–perhaps the most dismal failure of any legislative initiative in American history–and Obamacare. Democrats have caused discretionary spending to skyrocket and have run up $5 trillion in new debt since President Obama took office. So they have pretty much had their way.
Yes, the inestimable Assrocket figures the not fully implemented Affordable Care Act and the stimulus are proof enough that not only the GOP gets a full a complete pass on obstruction of the President’s jobs bill, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and a bunch of other things, but that the Democrats are really guilty of the following:
It would be much more sensible for the AP to suggest that the Democrats are deliberately injuring the economy by increasing spending and running up more debt (not to mention deliberately driving the cost of energy higher).
Yes, so the Democrats’ secret plan is as follows:
1) Sabotage the economy.
2) ?????
3) Lose in November!
That of course has to be the only possible explanation, self-sabotage in order to put the country in the hands of the GOP. Assrocket’s a deep thinker, indeed. In fact, the entire Republican message this weekend is all about how President Obama is sabotaging himself with failed Republican attacks from 2007 in order to…lose in November…or something, I don’t know. Republicans are like infinite monkeys with typewriters, only they end up typing “POOP” 37 million times no matter what configuration you put them in.
Of course, when they say “Democrats are trying to wreck the country on purpose” they mean “the MSM won’t cover the race war they’re trying to start”, so that makes perfect sense, actually.
Doesn’t it?
http://zandarvts.blogspot.com/
Voters on Romney’s Brilliant Business Career: Meh
by Steve M.
Tue May 22nd, 2012 at 04:48:16 PM EST
Major-media East Coast journalists whose greatest joy in life is rubbing elbows with Wall Street Masters of the Universe are telling us that Kenyan commie Barack Obama made a huge mistake by attacking Bain Capital. They’re doing this for a simple reason: they’re terrified (or at least their fat-cat friends are terrified) that such attacks might actually strike a chord with voters.
Could they? So far that’s not clear, but one thing that seems to be clear is that Mitt Romney’s strategy — saying next to nothing about his record as governor of Massachusetts and putting all his chips on his tenure at Bain — doesn’t seem to be working.
I’m looking at the numbers in the new (pre-Cory Booker) ABC/Washington Post poll, specifically the numbers on one question in particular, and I’m amazed at how little benefit Romney’s getting from his business career (which, after thirty-plus years of corporatist, Reaganite propaganda, would seem to be a terrific selling point for middle-of-the-road voters):
Q: Is Romney’s work buying and restructuring companies before he went into politics a major reason you to (support) that candidate, a major reason you to (oppose) that candidate, or not a major factor in your vote?
Here are the results:
Major reason to support 21%
Major reason to oppose 21%
Not a major factor 54%
No opinion 4%
A wash — an absolute wash. And subgroups you’d think would be impressed by Bain aren’t impressed. Whites? A mere two-point advantage for “Major reason to support,” with the majority indifferent. Southerners? A four-point advantage, with the majority indifferent. White evangelical Protestants? A mere seven-point advantage — you’d think Romney would be killing with this group — and most people indifferent. Really, Romney’s only big advantages are with Republicans, conservatives, and conservative Republicans.
Not being the incumbent in a tough economic period is what’s keeping Romney in the race. His big “I’m a job creator!” selling point isn’t working.
****
And there’s this question:
Q: What do you think is the bigger problem in this country – (unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy), or (over-regulation of the free market that interferes with growth and prosperity)?
Results: 56% think unfairness is a bigger problem; 34% say over-regulation. That’s not good for Romney.
I think one problem Romney has is that he’s being hoist on his own party’s petard. For years, the GOP and the right have tried to distinguish “elitists” from “extremely rich people,” with great success — “elitists” are to be recognized, according to right-wing propaganda, by cultural touchstones (hybrid cars, organic food, stereotypical places of residence, lack of “common touch,” etc., etc.). The GOP’s last three presidents were two nth-generation preppies who faked ordinariness, preceded by a Hollywood millionaire who faked it even better. But Romney can’t fake it. He talks elitist, he dresses elitist, and even his specific path to wealth sounds elitist. Private equity — what could sound more elitist than that? It’s not like drillin’ a damn oil well.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/5/22/161045/847
found this at POU:
Ex-Rep. Artur Davis: “The Obama camp looks..like a cult of personality that tolerates no dissent.”
LOL. Oh Artur, keep on shuffling my man. I need the laugh. I just hope we see the freak out when you realize you’re not welcome to the wingnut welfare they provided to Palin. It’s like Social Security, Artur, you gotta work for master a certain number of years before you get the good gravy that Blackwell is collecting. Or you can be a backstabbing sell-out on tv like Dark Sith; the pays better. You shoulda gone that route; you call yourself a democrat and you’re standing behind a couple of other guys. Plenty for all of you; the pots smaller for actual Black Republican politicians. Look to Allen West; he was down for the RINOs and they redistricted him out of office!
He ran to say that in POLITICO’s “The Arena”; no link for that garbage.
BWA HA HA HA HA
Ed Rendell has jumped on the “I’OIN’T LIKE THE OBAMA NEGATIVE BAIN ADS. FUCK YOU, ED RENDELL.
Mitt Romney’s Very Weird Laugh
By Ben Cohen May 22,2012
Andrew Sullivan analyzes Mitt Romney’s very weird laugh:
One gets the sense that Mormons, perhaps because they remain deeply insecure about their religion, make an extra effort to seem utterly great, happy, nice, genial human beings. Hence what’s been called “The Mormon Mask.” (More discussion of the concept here.)
Romney laughs that way; he also talks as if he’s learned the English language from some tribe of extremely cheerful, mainstream, extremely white Americans from around 1958….
How to overcome the huge gap between what one believes and how the general culture would react if the details of his faith were fully explained? One option: The construction of a personality designed to mimic the least offensive, nicest, all-American persona. So Romney sounds and looks like a focus-group tested model president from 1965. But the focus group doesn’t exist – except in his own mind and manner every year of his life.
http://www.thedailybanter.com/2012/05/mitt-romneys-very-weird-laugh/
****HOLLERING****
Ametia,
can you hit me with the side eye graphic….for Corey Booker?
Yo, Booker; we got your “private equity” right chere:
Michelle Obama’s Workout Playlist
10 Songs that keep the First Lady going during a workout
Not only is she the driving force behind a childhood-obesity-fighting program called “Let’s Move,” she knows that exercise and staying healthy represent an investment in oneself—an investment that every woman has the power to make. Here, some of the move-inspiring music Michelle Obama listens to while walking her talk.
1. Stevie Wonder – “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)”
2. Beyonce – “Move Your Body” (Let’s Move! Theme)
3. Janelle Monae – “Tightrope”
4. Sara Bareilles – “Love Song”
5. Michael Jackson – “Unbreakable
Read more at Women’s Health: http://www.womenshealthmag.com/fitness/michelle-obama-and-fitness#ixzz1vcptzxdq
Cool tunes, FLOUTS.
Posted at 01:06 PM ET, 05/22/2012 TheWashingtonPost The new, strikingly dishonest ad from Crossroads GPS
By Jamelle Bouie
Today’s New York Times had a surprisingly positive piece on the latest ad from Crossroads GPS, the Republican super PAC which will inaugurate the summer campaign season with a $25 million television blitz in ten swing staates. The ad, developed by Willie Horton producer Larry McCarthy, focuses on the hardships of ordinary Americans, in an attempt to put the full weight of the economy on President Obama. The Times says that it is “deeply researched,” “delicately worded,” and “low key”–designed to capture and communicate the frustrations of independent voters, without making explicit attacks on a president that remains well-liked by most people. You can the video for yourself at this link.
The Times is right to highlight the mood of the advertisement; it shies away from the intensely negative rhetoric of actual Republicans, in favor of a downtempo — even mournful — look at a regular family. Its central character is a woman who supported Obama in 2008, but is disappointed with the direction of his administration. The ad builds on Romney’s complete focus on the economy, where everyone — including Democratic groups like women and young people — has been hurt by the economic stagnation. It’s an effective piece of political advertising.
Where the Times goes wrong, however, is in describing this as “deeply researched.” As befitting a Karl Rove outfit, the claims in the ad are either misleading, or outright falsehoods. Citing a Reuters story from 2009 on conservative efforts to sink the bill, Crossroads GPS insinuates that the stimulus was a failure, despite wide consensus that the bill kept United States out of a depression, and significantly improved prospects for recovery.
The ad continues in this vein, blaming high insurance premiums on the Affordable Care Act — when the cited article says otherwise — and blaming Obama for the increase in debt, despite the fact that under his administration, government spending has risen at a slower pace than any time in the last 60 years. Obama is one of the most miserly presidents in recent history, especially compared to George W. Bush, who grew spending at more than 7 percent per year; double the rate of Bill Clinton, and more than five times the rate of Obama. The simple fact is that the accumulation of debt over the last three-and-a-half years has more to do with the Great Recession than it does with any of Obama’s spending priorities. The spending “binge” of Republican rhetoric is a myth.
As with Romney’s rhetoric, the Crossroads attack on Obama is built on a false narrative where Republican policies weren’t responsible for the economic crisis (which happened ex nihilo), and Democrats hold sole responsibility for the recovery.
Of course, I don’t expect a Republican super PAC to do anything different; they’re in it to win it. But I am surprised the Times would run such a positive piece on the ad and its creators, and forgo any attempt to evaluate the claims made by Crossroads GPS. Unfortunately, when it comes to coverage of Mitt Romney’s campaign for the White House, this is par for th course. The Republican nominee is running on a series of unsubstantiated or easily debunked claims: that he is responsible for 100,000 new jobs at Bain, that there has been net job loss under Obama’s policies, that the stimulus failed, that his policies would reduce the debt (the opposite is true), and that the Affordable Care Act was a “government takeover” of health care.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-new-strikingly-dishonest-ad-from-crossroads-gps/2012/05/22/gIQApTKNiU_blog.html
Deeply researched? And the NYT would know this fact, because?
Posted at 09:46 AM ET, 05/22/2012 TheWashingtonPost What the Obama campaign can learn from Newt Gingrich
By Jamelle Bouie
Key to the Obama campaign’s attacks on Bain Capital is the idea that the company was shirking its responsibilities to workers. We’re supposed to see Bain as a ruthless, profit-making enterprise with little concern for the lives of workers or the livelihood of a community. Implicit to the critique is that if Bain (and Mitt Romney) actually cared about creating jobs and improving the economy, it could have found ways to build wealth without closing factories and putting hundreds out of work.
This, however, is an odd conception of private equity. Bain’s job wasn’t to protect workers; it was to create the most wealth for shareholders under the least amount of risk. At times, this was terrible for workers, but it fundamentally wasn’t a concern. The Obama campaign’s exclusive focus on factory closings might play well in manufacturing states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, but it also opens Obama to the charge that he is waging an attack on “free enterprise.” It’s unfair, given the extent to which Obama has run a business-friendly administration (to the frustration of many progressives), but it has the potential for traction, since the Bain attack is centered on the destruction involved in the generation of wealth.
But there’s a way to account for this, and for that, we should look to Newt Gingrich’s campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. With the primaries over, Gingrich might insist that he failed with his attacks on Bain Capital, but that’s clearly not true; together with his debate performances, his attacks earned him a decisive victory in the South Carolina Republican primary.
Gingrich’s approach to Bain differed in the emphasis; rather than focus (exclusively) on the plight of workers, Gingrich challenged the idea that Romney was engaged in traditional, risk-taking capitalism. Instead, Gingrich argued in a news conference in January, Romney was a “vulture capitalist” who did more to extract wealth than create it:
“You have to ask the question, is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money?” …
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/what-the-obama-campaign-can-learn-from-newt-gingrich/2012/05/22/gIQAX2wxhU_blog.html#pagebreak
1:24 PM EDT, Tuesday May 22, 2012
Pennylvania Poll: Obama Up 8, Doubles Romney With Independent Voters
A new poll of Pennsylvania from Democratic-leaning firm Public Policy Polling shows President Obama with an 8-point overall lead, 50 percent to 42 percent, built on large leads with women and independent voters. Obama leads women by 20 points in the poll, while Romney takes men by 5 points. Among independent voters, Obama gets 48 percent, while 24 percent go for Romney and the remaining voters are unsure.
“Our polling for most of last year suggested Pennsylvania could be very competitive in 2012,” said Dean Debnam, president of Public Policy Polling, said in a release. “But Barack Obama’s now looking more like the clear favorite to win the state again by a healthy margin as he did in 2008.”
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/pa-poll-obama-up-8-doubles-romney-with
VP Biden is hitting a GRAND SLAM in NH.
May 22, 2012 12:55 PM
I’m Broke! Please Stop Helping Me!
By Ed Kilgore
If Mitt Romney does get elected president and Republicans do win control of the House and Senate this November, it will be in no small part, I believe, because progressives at least partially lost a meta-argument over what government should do to deal with a deep recession. Until very recently, Republicans and Democrats basically agreed that the public sector should respond with stimulative measures, though the former tended to favor monetary policy and the latter fiscal policy as the best approach.
But now the idea that public-sector austerity (and for that matter, restrictive monetary policy) is an appropriate response has made a big comeback on the Right, and a significant segment of the voting public seems to buy it as well, no matter how much Paul Krugman and other mainstream economists rage at the absurdity of it all.
That’s why appeals like the one offered in the latest Crossroads GPS anti-Obama ad aren’t just laughed off the screen. You can view it and read a brief analysis at the New York Times. I urge you to watch it. It features a middle-classy-looking white woman happily watching her kids play basketball in their driveway. Then they morph into young adulthood, she ages, and she talks about how they’ve moved back in with her because they can’t find jobs, and and she can’t afford to retire. She voted for Obama for “change,” but instead he spent and spent and spent. And the whole narration shifts into the standard right-wing rap about rising debt and Big Government. The only effort made to connect any of that with the economic pain the fictional family is suffering is the mother’s worry that her kids won’t be able to pay off all that debt if they can’t find a job. You’d think they were going to be presented with individual bills for public debt any old day now.
The ad does not, of course, acknowledge that this or any other family might be the beneficiaries of some of that spending; it is presumably being poured down ratholes or perhaps given to those other people. Nor does the ad indicate that the “New Majority Agenda” of tax and spending cuts it promotes might have a negative impact on the family, even though there is the image of a student loan bill in one shot. Viewers are urged to tell Obama to stop the “job-killing debt;” that is the sum and substance of its economic argument.
I recently read David Corn’s account of the inner workings of the Obama White House in 2011, entitled Showdown, which mainly dealt with the runup to the debt limit agreement that year. On the crucial subject of why Obama fished into a public debate on deficit reduction instead of maintaining a focus on jobs, Corn says the White House was looking at private polling and focus groups that indicated a significant majority of Americans, and particularly independents, were buying the “job-killing debt” argument. In their own minds, at least, they weren’t surrendering the Keynesian high ground; it had already been lost.
I don’t know how much of this assessment of public opinion is accurate; polling on macroeconomic theories is not the most exact science, and there were other factors at play, most obviously the refusal of Republicans to support any actions that did not involve deficit reduction more or less on their terms. Corn also makes it clear that all along Obama was trying to get to the point where sharp comparisons of Democratic and Republican policies could be credibly made—the point at which he seems to have arrived this year.
But as the Crossroads GPS ad shows, the public debate we never really had about Keynesianism left the country in a position where Republicans can claim they are the real friends of the unemployed, even as they fight to cut or kill unemployment benefits, and weaken and then abolish other elements of the social safety net. It’s cold comfort to know that the woman with her basketball-playing kids is not going to be very happy when she finally figures out what the “New Majority Agenda” actually means.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_05/im_broke_please_stop_helping_m037490.php
The ‘Women’s Policy Committee’ gets to work
By Steve Benen – Tue May 22, 2012 12:33 PM EDT
.Republicans seem vaguely aware of the fact that the gender gap is growing, and that the GOP’s “war on women” has become of the year’s most important political developments. The party also seems to realize how this problem may cost them dearly in the 2012 elections.
So, what are they prepared to do about it? Apparently, they’ve come up with a solution: form a committee and release a cheesy video with awkward production values.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL8Uv_xiShc&feature=player_embedded
House Republicans have all kinds of caucuses and contingents, but this week, they launched the new Women’s Policy Committee, which is apparently intended to raise the visibility of women in the House GOP caucus.
This appears to be based on an underwhelming strategy: “Maybe if people realize there are some Republican women in Congress, we won’t seem so anti-woman.”
Indeed, the video features two dozen House GOP women, introducing themselves and saying vague things about taxes and “big government.” It concludes that “Republican women … are leading the charge to make America great again.”
I was under the impression that America is already great.
Regardless, I can’t help but think the Women’s Policy Committee is missing the point of the larger controversy — which they won’t be able to address until they understand it.
——————————————————————————–
Reminding voters that Republican lawmakers exist is kind of irrelevant. Critics of the GOP focus less on the gender diversity within the party — though it’s noteworthy that the Republican leadership in both chambers is almost exclusively white men — and more on the party’s policy agenda.
The “war on women” didn’t catch on as a national phenomenon because GOP officials are invariably men; it caught on after Republicans in Virginia decided to mandate medically-unnecessary, trans-vaginal ultrasounds for women who want to undergo a legal medical procedure.
In recent months, Republicans at the state and federal level and have been fighting to restrict contraception; cut off Planned Parenthood; approving sweeping new restrictions on abortion; playing games with the Violence Against Women Act; denying the existence of gender-based pay discrimination and rolling back pay-equity laws.
When it came time for House Republicans to pay for lower student loan interest rates, GOP officials decided to get the funding by cutting access to breast cancer and cervical cancer screenings.
And in nearly all relevant instances, every member of this new Women’s Policy Committee voted with their far-right, male counterparts.
If these lawmakers think a committee and a video will help improve the political circumstances, they don’t yet understand that this is about public policy, not perceptions about gender diversity. If they want to close the gender gap, they need to change the substance, not the style.
.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/22/11812328-the-womens-policy-committee-gets-to-work?lite
I guess Virginia Fox’s vagania is too dried up to fight for WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS, huh?
This video is ridiculous.
NOT ONE, ONE of these women spoke on the WAR ON WOMEN, and why is that? Y’all can take your big government, fighting for all Americans bullshit and shove it. Until you can face yoruselves and be honest about the fility, dirty, laws that you and your white male counterparts have elected to legislate into law, GTFOH!
The “Vetting” Obsession
Paul Waldman
May 21, 2012
Conservatives are still hoping to uncover Barack Obama’s deepest, darkest secret.
When the Washington Post story about Mitt Romney’s high school years (including an incident in which the former Massachusetts governor forcibly cut the hair of a student whose commitment to conformism was insufficiently vigorous) came out, leading Republicans were fairly quiet about it. Whether the incident happened or not, they said, it tells us virtually nothing about the man Romney is today and the issues at stake in this election. That’s a perfectly reasonable argument, but it isn’t the one you would have heard from many of the foot soldiers in the Republican base. Among the troops, there was outrage, not so much about the Romney story, but about what they saw as a double-standard. As one e-mailed me after I wrote a piece on the topic, “I saw your article on CNN. When does the vetting of President Obama begin? Have you delved into his past? The next time I read an article about a young Barrack [sic] Obama will be the first.”
As I replied to this person, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of articles written in 2008 (and since) about Barack Obama’s youth. He even wrote a pretty frank book about it himself, before he ever became a politician. If you think he wasn’t “vetted” you weren’t paying attention. But there are millions of conservatives who believe precisely that, and as we approach Obama’s possible re-election, with an extremely busy and consequential first term almost behind us, the obsession with his allegedly hidden past only grows. So what does it mean that a candidate is “vetted”? Does it mean we know everything there is to know about him? Of course, that’s simply impossible. Perhaps it means we know everything important, everything that might make a difference once he’s in office. Which is what makes the continued conservative interest in vetting Obama so strange. Now that he has been president for three years, can’t we just look at his presidency to see what he’ll do as president?
Yet even at this late date, conservatives are still hoping that within Obama’s past lies a blockbuster secret that will change everything once it is revealed, even if it’s not so secret or not so new. Last week the New York Times reported a proposal made to billionaire conservative Joe Ricketts to air $10 million worth of ads attacking Obama for his association with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. “The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” the proposal said (my emphasis). It further quoted Ricketts himself asserting in reference to a never-aired 2008 McCain ad about Rev. Wright, “If the nation had seen that ad, they’d never have elected Barack Obama.” Just for fun, I searched Google News for stories about Reverend Wright between March 2008, when the story broke, and election day of that year. There were over 10,000 news stories that mentioned him.
So just what are these people thinking? In a way, their perspective shows an almost charmingly naïve faith in the power of information to persuade. Although the Ricketts plan was quickly aborted, I’m sure that if it went ahead, he wouldn’t have thought he was trying to stir up racial resentment, but rather that he was simply putting information voters needed in front of them. It simply can’t be that voters heard about Reverend Wright and decided that whatever they thought about the things he had said, it wasn’t sufficient grounds to reject one of his parishioners as a presidential candidate. Ricketts found the fact of Obama’s association with Wright so appalling that as far as he was concerned, it disqualified Obama from the presidency. If a majority of Americans didn’t agree, it could only have been because they just didn’t know.
So on the right, the desperate search for the appropriate “vetting” material continues. For instance, the late Andrew Breitbart’s constellation of web properties continues in its founder’s spirit, breathlessly promoting one “revelation” about Obama’s pre-political life after another. Obama was friendly with a Harvard Law School professor with strong views on race! In 1991, Obama’s literary agency mistakenly said in a promotional brochure that he was born in Kenya! There is so much to be learned that breitbart.com has created a whole series entitled “The Vetting.”
I’m sure this investigative juggernaut will uncover a tree of mild interest here and there, even if the searchers are utterly blind to the forest. Are there small details of Obama’s pre-presidential life that haven’t been widely discussed? Of course. In the 47 years of his life before his inauguration, he moved through institutions, met and interacted with people, rented apartments, bought and sold cars, held jobs, went to the doctor, ate meals, brushed his teeth, and who knows what else. The mistake that so many conservatives make is in believing that in some (or all) of these details of his life lies the key to Obama’s undoing. If only we can find the radical mentor, the girlfriend holding on to a decades-old secret, or the revealing document, then Obama will be unmasked, his true horrifying self revealed at last for all to see. Then the scales will fall from the voters’ eyes and they’ll boot him from the office he never deserved to occupy in the first place.
We should acknowledge that it isn’t as though the Obama campaign is afraid of engaging in its own “vetting” of Mitt Romney. Right now in Chicago, a thick and growing oppo file on Romney rests on someone’s hard drive, its contents being tested in polls and focus groups to find the most injurious details. The campaign would love nothing better than to find an awful secret, say that while leading Bain Capital Romney personally fired a pregnant woman, tossed her out of her home, kicked her dog and ran over her child’s favorite teddy bear with his limo. But they probably won’t. There is still much to learn about Romney, and some journalists are doing an excellent job of exploring how he came to be who he is today (see, for instance, this interesting piece in yesterday’s New York Times about the role of Mormonism in Romney’s life). But there probably are no secrets, or at least none so horrifying they will change everyone’s view of the man. I doubt Romney has a hidden love child or a terrible crime in his past, just as Obama wasn’t born in Kenya. It isn’t that those things never happen (see Edwards, John), but they are pretty rare.
http://prospect.org/article/vetting-obsession
Meanwhile Liberals are uncovering Americans brave enough to come forward and show us the REAL MITT ROMNEY. Let’s keep at it, folks! BAIN IS IT.
Tweety LAID it out regarding BOOKER. He was OFF MESSAGE, and def NOT acting as a SURROGATE! Fuck BOOKER.
VP Biden in NH
Watch it live here: http://edition.cnn.com/video/flashLive/live.html?stream=4
OOPs!
Bruce Willis: Romney’s ‘an embarrassment’
By PATRICK GAVIN | 5/22/12 8:25 AM EDT
The new issue of Esquire magazine, featuring Bruce Willis on the cover, proclaims that the actor “has a lot to say.”
Especially, it seems, when it comes to Mitt Romney
.I get cranked up, I start talking about Hollywood and what’s wrong with what. Or politics. I might start in on Mitt Romney,” Willis said, out of nowhere, to his inteviewer. “He’s just such a disappointment, an embarrassment. Chin up, hair up. He’s just one of those guys, one of those guys who says he’s going to change everything… And he’ll get in there, and they’ll smile at him and introduce themselves: ‘We’re Congress, we make sure nothing changes.’ He won’t do it. He can’t. Everybody wants to be Barack Obama. And what did he change?”
Asked if Romney could win in November, Willis said, “No. Nah. I don’t really care.” He went on to call Romney “the Dash Riprock of the Republican Party.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76613.html#ixzz1vcVye7Ia
Bring it, Field Negro!
Monday, May 21, 2012
Loose lips sink campaigns.
It’s time for some real talk for my man Cory Booker. I know, I know, some of you have mad love for Cory, and fam seems to be holding it down in Newark. The whole fire rescue thing was straight out of Hollywood.
But I have to keep it real with you, sometimes you Negroes tend to lose it when that little red light comes on. Cory lost it last Sunday on Meet the Press. Not because he strayed off the White House talking points and put a smack down on them for going all Bain Capital on Flipper, but because he admitted that he was a surrogate and did it. What kind of surrogate does that? O, with friends like these….
Please believe that one of Flipper’s surrogates would not have done something like this. They would hold the party line and stick to the talking points no matter what. This is what certain folks do. You Negroes, on the other hand, just can’t seem to stick together. I guess it’s because you want to seem independent, which is fine, but don’t pretend to be in O’s camp and when he sends you out there you ad lib and lose the script.
In Corey’s case, I want to believe that he genuinely has no problem with Bain Capital and other companies like it. But he also has to understand how politics works. Obama is trying to win a damn election, who cares if Flipper’s feelings are hurt or if he is characterized as a bad guy? I know Cory Booker’s black ass shouldn’t. It’s not like Flipper is going to do anything for Cory Booker and Newark, New Jersey if and when he becomes president. Bain Capital is fair game. If Flipper can defend their business practices that’s fine, if not, the voters will decide. The same is true of universal health care and all the other policies Obama put into place
Read the rest here:. http://field-negro.blogspot.com/
As PBO stated yesterda, BAIN CAPITAL is NOT a DISTRACTION. Let’s BE CLEAR HERE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2oLpu4zH6s
This ain’t got shit to do with Corey Booker. Fuck him. Mitt Romney needs to answer to his rule at Bain Capital and his, and his so-called jobs record, his UNRELEASED TAX RETURNS, and his Governorship of MASSACHUSETTS!
STEP #2- SEE ABOVE POSTER IN THIS THREAD! LOL Romney anywhere near the White House, scares the shit out of me, and I’m going to do everything necessary and within my power to keep his pastey ass away from the Oval leather.
The Details
Date:May 24, 2012 – 7:00 pmType:
Campaign Event
In Des Moines, President Obama will continue to outline how far we’ve come and the clear choice that voters face in this election: whether we continue to move our country forward by creating an economy that’s built to last based on a strong, secure middle class, or go back to the same failed policies that led to the financial crisis and left middle-class Americans struggling to make ends meet. READ ON HERE: http://bit.ly/JPYj1b
barackobama.com
Earlier this month we showed how President Obama’s policies benefit women at all stages of life in an infographic we called “The Life of Julia.”
Melissa in Riviera Beach wanted us to know that Julia isn’t just a cartoon character though. Here is her story:
http://www.barackobama.com/news/entry/fl-julia-in-real-life?source=ssn_20120518_FL_FB_JULIA_IN_REAL_LIFE_OTHER&utm_medium=fb&utm_source=ssn_fl&utm_campaign=ssn_20120518_FL_FB_JULIA_IN_REAL_LIFE_OTHER
Let’s continue exploring what Romney Economics means for the American people, we’ve added two new states to our map –Indiana and California: http://www.romneyeconomics.com/states/
Robert Shrum
Bain is just chapter one in the Book of Romney
posted on May 21, 2012, at 12:00 PM
Republicans are desperate to declare Obama’s attacks on Mitt’s business background off-limits. But in the life of Romney, vulture capitalism is an inescapable theme
The real Mitt Romney is finally running for president — but not in his own first television spot, a superficial checklist of issues which provides no insight into who he is or what makes him tick. It’s the Obama commercial on Bain and the destruction of GST Steel that starkly reveals the real Romney as a vulture capitalist. And this is just the beginning of what we will hear about Bain, and of a narrative arc that will position Romney as the candidate of the few, by the few, and for the few.
The Obama ad is so powerful because, like the Ted Kennedy ads in Romney’s losing 1994 Senate race, the story is told not by a smoothly modulated professional narrator, but by working people whose jobs and lives were shredded so Mitt and his men could amass their millions. One of the workers voted for John McCain in 2008 and for George W. Bush before that. Now these authentic blue-collar voices, these Reagan Democrats, are talking directly to swing voters — to folks who could be brothers or sisters, friends or cousins — in the battleground industrial states. It’s a different kind of political media — gritty, unslick, and therefore quite convincing.
http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/228222/bain-is-just-chapter-one-in-the-book-of-romney
The Bain Of This Campaign, Ctd
Noah Millman weighs in on the Bain debate. Obama’s strongest argument:
[I]f Romney’s “private sector experience” can be described as basically destroying healthy businesses to skim money for rich investors, then what does it mean to say he’ll bring that experience to bear in dealing with the economy, and with government? The obvious answer – intended by the Obama campaign – is that Romney will cut everybody’s benefits not to get the economy moving again, but to reduce taxes on the wealthy. That would be precisely analogous to what they are alleging he did at Bain: cut jobs not to save businesses, but to squeeze them for cash and then throw them away.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/
Public Money Finds Back Door to Private Schools
By STEPHANIE SAUL
Published: May 21, 2012
When the Georgia legislature passed a private school scholarship program in 2008, lawmakers promoted it as a way to give poor children the same education choices as the wealthy.
The program would be supported by donations to nonprofit scholarship groups, and Georgians who contributed would receive dollar-for-dollar tax credits, up to $2,500 a couple. The intent was that money otherwise due to the Georgia treasury — about $50 million a year — would be used instead to help needy students escape struggling public schools.
That was the idea, at least. But parents meeting at Gwinnett Christian Academy got a completely different story last year.
“A very small percentage of that money will be set aside for a needs-based scholarship fund,” Wyatt Bozeman, an administrator at the school near Atlanta, said during an informational session. “The rest of the money will be channeled to the family that raised it.”
A handout circulated at the meeting instructed families to donate, qualify for a tax credit and then apply for a scholarship for their own children, many of whom were already attending the school.
“If a student has friends, relatives or even corporations that pay Georgia income tax, all of those people can make a donation to that child’s school,” added an official with a scholarship group working with the school.
The exchange at Gwinnett Christian Academy, a recording of which was obtained by The New York Times, is just one example of how scholarship programs have been twisted to benefit private schools at the expense of the neediest children.
Spreading at a time of deep cutbacks in public schools, the programs are operating in eight states and represent one of the fastest-growing components of the school choice movement. This school year alone, the programs redirected nearly $350 million that would have gone into public budgets to pay for private school scholarships for 129,000 students, according to the Alliance for School Choice, an advocacy organization. Legislators in at least nine other states are considering the programs.
While the scholarship programs have helped many children whose parents would have to scrimp or work several jobs to send them to private schools, the money has also been used to attract star football players, expand the payrolls of the nonprofit scholarship groups and spread the theology of creationism, interviews and documents show. Even some private school parents and administrators have questioned whether the programs are a charade.
Most of the private schools are religious. Nearly a quarter of the participating schools in Georgia require families to make a profession of religious faith, according to their Web sites. Many of those schools adhere to a fundamentalist brand of Christianity. A commonly used sixth-grade science text retells the creation story contained in Genesis, omitting any other explanation. An economics book used in some high schools holds that the Antichrist — a world ruler predicted in the New Testament — will one day control what is bought and sold.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/education/scholarship-funds-meant-for-needy-benefit-private-schools.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&hp
It’s all about PRIVATES for PROFITS.
Look at this crazy Bitc. He even looks POSSESSED!
Emails Show How Hawaii Stiffed Arizona Secretary Of State’s Birther Investigation
Nick R. Martin-May 21, 2012, 5:16 PM76471
One of the more amusing things revealed last week when Arizona’s secretary of state came out as birther curious was that Hawaii officials just simply don’t believe he’s qualified to investigate Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/05/ken_bennett_birther_hawaii_arizona_emails.php?ref=fpa
May 17-20, 2012
Survey of 1,000 registered voters
Conducted Public Policy Polling
It looks like the American people agree – according to a newDaily Kos/SEIU State of the Nation poll, conducted by Public Policy Polling,57 percent of voters, including 64 percent of independents, believe that as the head of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney was more concerned with making a profit than with creating jobs http://bit.ly/LjkL29
May 22, 2012 10:55 AM
The Etch-a-Sketch Moment Has Already Happened
By Ed Kilgore
Some political observers have set up observation sites and calibrated their instruments to detect whether or when Mitt Romney’s campaign will execute its “Etch-a-Sketch Moment:” its long-awaited shift to a “general election message” that is not contaminated by the radical issue positions and toxic themes of the GOP nomination contest.
The argument in my latest TNR column is that it’s already happened. A lot of people have missed it, because it has not involved any modifications of his issue positions, or any “shift to the center,” or any disrespecting of the conservative “base.” It’s no more or less than the Romney campaign’s extraordinary narrowing of focus to the claim that the election is “about” Obama’s economic performance. So Mitt hasn’t abandoned the right-wing policy commitments and social-issues extremism he was forced into during the primary season (and for that matter, the last presidential cycle). He’s just not going to talk about them unless he’s compelled to by restive conservatives or the Obama campaign.
Hard-core conservatives may let him get away with this micro platform so long as it looks like he’s at least an even bet to win. But like John McCain in 2008, if Mitt’s in trouble come September or October, he’ll face more and more open pressure to bring The Crazy out of the closet to “energize the base” and bring the horrifying secular-socialism of Barack Obama to the attention of swing voters. And we can only assume the Obama campaign will be working to ensure that those same voters (not to mention his own party’s “base”) will be regularly informed of all the many indications that a President Romney would oversee one of the most thorough-going right-wing administrations in living memory.
It would be nice, of course, if the MSM would take notice of how Romney is trying to label any discussion of matters that go beyond “the economic referendum” as “distractions,” when he’s actually trying to distract everyone from his own platform. But I wouldn’t count on it.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_05/the_etchasketch_moment_has_alr037487.php
Is it still a ‘day of shame’?
By Steve Benen – Tue May 22, 2012 11:00 AM EDT.
A few weeks ago, with the fate of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng entirely unclear, Mitt Romney decided to condemn the Obama administration’s handling of the situation, calling Chen’s temporary return to Chinese officials “a dark day for freedom and it’s a day of shame for the Obama administration.”
It was an odd move for a high-profile American politician to take. After all, Romney’s condemnation of U.S. officials came during tense diplomatic talks with a major international rival. Even Bill Kristol said it was “foolish” for the Republican to “butt into a fast moving story when the secretary of state is in Beijing with delicate negotiations.”
Three weeks later, I’m curious: does Romney still consider the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts in this situation “shameful”?
Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal advocate who recently sought refuge in the American Embassy in Beijing, arrived in the heart of Greenwich Village on Saturday, holding the kind of open-air news conference that he could have never imagined while under virtual house arrest in China.
After a daylong and hastily arranged flight from Beijing, Mr. Chen stood on crutches — with a lawyer at his side and facing spectators cordoned off by the police — and addressed a throng of reporters. He said he was grateful to the American Embassy and the Chinese government, which allowed him to leave China, and thanked Chinese officials for “dealing with the situation with restraint and calm.”
Too often in political coverage, there isn’t enough accountability. Irresponsible politicians pop off on the subject of the day, but there isn’t much in the way of follow through, as we chase the ball bouncing in new directions.
So, let’s circle back for a moment. Romney wanted to pretend to be a credible analyst of American diplomacy during sensitive diplomatic talks with China. Does Romney still think he was right to condemn the Obama administration? Or has Chen Guangcheng’s arrival in New York caused him to reconsider his rhetoric about a “dark day for freedom” and a “day of shame for the Obama administration”?
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http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/22/11810968-is-it-still-a-day-of-shame?lite
uh huh
uh huh
…………………………..
!Artur Davis Considering Congressional Bid …
Rosie Gray
Artur Davis, the former Democratic congressman from Alabama, is considering running for a House seat in Virginia as a Republican, according to a source close to Davis, who ran a near-miss campaign for governor of Alabama in 2010.
Davis is toying with the idea of challenging Democrat Gerry Connolly’s for his seat in Virginia’s Washington, D.C. suburbs in 2014, the source said; he’s also been encouraged to run for a seat in the Virginia legislature in 2013 or 2015. And if Davis runs, he is likely to do so as a Republican, the source said.
A longtime Democratic strategist in Virginia said that Davis called him and said “he hadn’t quite gotten over the political bug and was thinking about running again.” The source had the impression that Davis had been calling “a number of folks” to discuss the idea. That source, a Virginia Democrat, was under the impression Davis would run as a Democrat.
Davis was one of Barack Obama’s earliest endorsers on Capitol Hill and had been seen as a rising star of the Democratic Party — perhaps, some Democrats speculated, the “second black president.” In recent years, however, Davis — a blue dog who tacked further right for his statewide Alabama run — has become increasingly estranged from the Democrats, espousing conservative views and criticizing the President. Davis told BuzzFeed yesterday that “a right of center point of view has no home in the Democratic Party today” and “I no longer feel a home there.”
“Unless I were to re-enter politics in some way shape or form, there’s no need for me to declare affiliation,” Davis said yesterday.
He is not supporting the Obama campaign, nor the Romney campaign, though he clarified today that “I have not ruled out supporting [Romney].”
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http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/artur-davis-considering-congressional-bid-in-virgi
The party of ‘older white people’
By Steve Benen – Tue May 22, 2012 11:35 AM EDT.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) delivered a rather aggressive speech in South Carolina the other day, and argued, among other things, that the Republican Party is “a more diverse party than the Democratic Party is.” He didn’t appear to be kidding.
Similarly, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus was asked over the weekend if he’s concerned at all about the nation’s increasing diversity, given that his party is “still seen and still is in reality largely white and largely male.”
Priebus was unmoved. “I think we’ve had great successes when it comes to the Hispanic communities across America,” he said.
Priebus didn’t appear to be kidding, either.
To bolster the claim, the RNC chair pointed to the fact that Florida, New Mexico, and Puerto Rico have elected prominent Latino officials. But to say elections of Marco Rubio, Susana Martinez, and Puerto Rican officials in Puerto Rico are proof of a GOP having “great successes when it comes to the Hispanic communities across America” is a real stretch. (Polls show Latino voters moving away from Republicans in droves.)
The GOP’s demographic troubles are getting worse, not better.
The Republican presidential primary campaign so far hasn’t produced a nominee, but it has had one clear outcome — worsening the GOP’s image among the young, the better-educated and the non-white.
That finding, from the Pew Research Center survey released Wednesday, could be a serious handicap for the party in elections this fall and in years to come, said Pew’s director, Andrew Kohut.
“The Republicans really are the party of white people, and especially older white people,” Kohut told reporters as the poll was released.
Ron Brownstein also had a recent report documenting just how extraordinarily white the Republican electorate has become.
GOP officials don’t have to like it, but they should try to avoid arguing that theirs is “a more diverse party than the Democratic Party is.”
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http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/22/11811475-the-party-of-older-white-people?lite
May 22, 2012 9:50 AM
Walking the Planks
By Ed Kilgore
The Iowa Republican Party is getting some attention today for a draft state party platform that proposes requiring candidates for federal office to supply proof of citizenship. The chairman of the committee that drafted this and other provisions went out of his way to let reporters know this was intended as a challenge to President Obama’s legitimacy, in case anyone was wondering.
But if you take a look at the document as a whole, the birth certificate requirement is far from the crankiest of provisions. It calls for the abolition of the federal Departments of Agriculture, Education, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Energy, Interior, Labor, and Commerce. It demands a phase-out of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and immediate provisions to make Social Security voluntary. Though it’s a bit confusing on this point, it seems to call for the abolition of public education, or, as it often refers to them, “government schools.” It calls for U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations and the repeal of all hate crimes and non-discrimination legislation. It endorses a Fetal Personhood Amendment. It demands permanent restriction of total federal spending to 10% of GDP (the draconian right-wing Cut, Cap and Balance Act would limit it to 19.9% of GDP), and reversal of the Supreme Court precedents that made possible the New Deal and civil rights laws.
The Crazy goes on and on and on, far more than in the Iowa Republican Platform that I mocked way back in the day, in 2010, which I thought was pretty nutty then.
It’s true, of course, that these documents don’t mean all that much, and it’s also true the specific Iowa draft platform was prepared under the influence of the recent takeover of much of the state party apparatus by Ron Paul supporters. But you better believe if any group of two or more Democrats wrote up anything remotely this extreme, alarms would go up from coast to coast. I wish at a minimum Republican candidates for major offices in Iowa had to comment on this document one way or another. Walking those planks would do them a world of good in coming to grips with what’s happened to their party.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_05/walking_the_planks037486.php
Romney embarrassed by Bush, but not by Cheney
By Steve Benen – Tue May 22, 2012 9:05 AM EDT.
Last week, former President George W. Bush expressed his support for Mitt Romney’s candidacy, delivering a four-word endorsement — “I’m for Mitt Romney” — as elevator doors were closing. Romney wasn’t eager to publicize the support, and generally prefers not to even say Bush’s name out loud in public.
Bush’s scandal-plagued vice president, however, is fine.
Just months after a heart transplant, former vice president Dick Cheney continues to stay active politically and will host a fundraiser in July for Mitt Romney.
Cheney and wife Lynne will welcome the likely Republican nominee to their home in Jackson Hole, Wyo., on July 12.
“Jackson Hole is a beautiful summer destination and this will be a memorable event,” said an e-mail from the Romney team to invitees, reports The Wall Street Journal. “We hope that you and your friends will be able to join us.”
Remember, no matter how far Romney has been willing to go to distance himself from the last Republican president, the former Massachusetts governor has had no qualms in praising the scandalous former VP. In September, Romney went so far as to call Dick Cheney “the kind of person I’d like to have” as his White House partner.
He wasn’t kidding. After all the corruption, lies, secrets, and torture, Romney looks at Cheney as a model vice president. Bush is merely described as President Obama’s “predecessor,” but Cheney is Romney’s good buddy.
And in the larger context, Romney continues to position himself as offering a third term of Bush/Cheney, hiring Bush/Cheney staffers, backing Bush/Cheney policies, and now benefiting from Bush/Cheney money.
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http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/22/11809323-romney-embarrassed-by-bush-but-not-by-cheney?lite
Bashir is hilarious.
LOL did you see this?
REALLY, Dolan, REALLY?! They want there cake and eat it too. Your’e a 501 (c) (3), if you want to maintain the exemption, KEEP YOUR ASSES OUT OF THE GOVERNMENT!
Dolan: White House is “strangling” Catholic church
CBS News) The spat between Catholic leaders and the Obama administration over its contraception policies is heating up again, with one of the nation’s most prominent Catholic leaders charging that the White House is “strangling” the church over the matter.
Timothy Cardinal Dolan told “CBS This Morning” Tuesday that the compromise reached earlier this year is not sufficient because the exemptions made for churches are too restrictive.
“They tell us if you’re really going be considered a church, if you’re going to be really exempt from these demands of the government, well, you have to propagate your Catholic faith and everything you do, you can serve only Catholics and employ only Catholics,” Dolan said.
“We’re like, wait a minute, when did the government get in the business of defining for us the extent of our ministry,” Dolan said.
More than 40 Catholic organizations sued the Obama administration Monday over a government requirement that most employers provide birth control coverage as part of their employee health plans.
“Dolan also criticized Georgetown University’s decision to invited Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to speak to graduates of its school of public policy last week because of her role in formulating the policy.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505267_162-57438959/dolan-white-house-is-strangling-catholic-church/?tag=nl.e875
Mon May 21, 2012 at 12:37 PM PDT.
Republicans intentionally sabotaging the economy? Why does this keep getting a question mark
Charles Babington asks that question in the first paragraph of his he said/she said piece Saturday on whether Republicans are out to sabotage the economy in hopes of hurting Obama. The question keeps being asked against the clear evidence that this is precisely what’s going on and against polling evidence that half the country, including a lot of Republicans, believe the GOP is doing just that.
It started in earnest four days before Barack Obama took the oath of office in January 2009 when the shadow chief of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, said, “I hope he fails.” Though not stated again so brazenly, GOP efforts to bring about that failure have been going on ever since then on a whole range of issues. But particularly on the economy the Republicans have sought to ensure that Obama does fail.
It started with the stimulus package, the Keynesian boost meant to slow and then reverse the plunge the economy took in the last year of the Bush administration. And it’s happened repeatedly from then on, through several renewals of extended unemployment benefits, through a focus on deficit and austerity practices so incessant that many Democrats and Obama himself felt compelled to announce their own lite versions, through attacks on public sector workforces and their union clout, through weakening proposals for already mild financial sector regulations, through economic hostage taking to maintain reduced taxes (which were creating much of the loss in revenue driving higher deficits) and through pushing the Paul Ryan budget that would make the wreckage of the Great Recession look like happy times by comparison.
And then there was the threatened government shutdown over raising the federal debt ceiling, a raise that had occurred five times without eliciting a smidge of Republican opposition during the Bush administration.
Despite the damage the threat of a shutdown created last time the Republicans did it, including damage to their own reputations, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and other Democrats think that’s where the GOP leadership may now be headed again. That view, Babington wrote, was kindled by House Speaker John Boehner’s saying last week that the next time raising the debt ceiling comes up, he’ll once again be pushing for sharp spending cuts before agreeing on the deal.
That, of course, means chopping things like clean energy initiatives that bolster a growing industry that can provide vast numbers of new jobs in both goods and services as well as cutting programs like food stamps and unemployment benefits that help tide people over in sour economic times. (No cuts in Pentagon spending, however; on the contrary.)
The latest stall is on the Bush tax cuts. Come January, those expire, including the ridiculous cuts on the wealthiest Americans. The Republican argument is that coming to agreement now will give investors and businesses confidence about their future tax load and encourage them to create more jobs. How many times have we heard this siren song only to be dashed upon the shoals of GOP intransigence?
Deciding now on the future of those cuts might well be a good idea, economically speaking. A case can be made for keeping some cuts in place for another year or so for people who aren’t in the top economic tiers. Returning tens of millions of Americans to a greater income tax burden while the economic recovery is still exceedingly fragile could easily stall it out.
But those middle-class cuts are not what really concerns Republicans. It’s the cuts for the wealthiest they want intact—preparatory to slicing off a few more percentage points. They refuse to seriously discuss letting the cuts expire for the most affluent Americans at a time of obscene income inequality and obscene attention to the deficit that will be made worse by keeping those unnecessary, unfair and unproductive top-level cuts in place. Unwillingness to put those cuts on the table sabotages efforts to break the economy out of its sluggish advance.
In the upsidedown world they and their puppet-pundits inhabit, Republicans bellyache that the blockade to dealing with the tax cuts and other aspects of the economy isn’t the GOP’s doing but Obama’s. So, all the while they are dropping their various clogs into the economic machinery, they pretend publicly that it’s the Democrats and the man they think should never have been in the White House who are holding things up. That’s sabotage, pure and simple. With no question marks.
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/21/1093510/-Republicans-intentionally-sabotaging-the-economy-Why-does-this-keep-getting-a-question-mark-
No doubts NO QUESTIONS here. The GOP’s top priority is gettting that NEGRO outta the White House. THE END.
Mon May 21, 2012 at 10:54 AM PDT.
Why Booker Attacked Obama: The REAL Cory [Updated With New Romney Ad/Think Progress]
Many were surprised to watch Meet The Press and see Obama campaign “surrogate” Newark Mayor Cory Booker attack the message of the Obama Campaign, from Politico:
Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a rising Democratic star, criticized on Sunday the Obama campaign’s attack ad against Mitt Romney for his work at Bain Capital.
“It’s nauseating to the American public,” Booker said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Enough is enough. Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright.”
“As far as that stuff, I have to just say from a very personal level I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity,” he added. “To me, it’s just we’re getting to a ridiculous point in America. Especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people invest in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses [and] to grow businesses. And this, to me, I’m very uncomfortable with.”
It is nauseating to talk about a candidate’s business record? A record the candidate himself has have made fundamental to his candidacy? Stop attacking private equity?
Who is this Cory Booker fellow and why is he speaking for the Obama campaign let alone the Democratic Party?
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Well, the people that know Mayor Booker were not surprised he was defending private equity and Big Business generally (admittedly we were surprised he would do it in the context of attacking the campaign he is speaking for). They were not surprised because Cory Booker would actually be much more at home in the Republican Party – an option unavailable to politicians who want public office in Newark, a city which is overwhelmingly Democratic. In fact, registered Democrats are so dominant within the city that the substantial election for power is in reality the Democratic Primary not the general election. If Booker had registered his more appropriate party affiliation he would have had zero chance of becoming a city councilman let alone Mayor.
Cory Booker’s position on private equity is both ideological and practical and not some aberration. But before going into that it should be noted Mayor Booker tried to walk back his comments and was, not surprisingly, very unconvincing
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/21/1093259/-Why-Booker-Attacked-Obama-The-REAL-Cory
The billionaires are going after MN taxpayer’s $$$ to build a vikings stadium.
May 21, 2012 3:17 PM
Roving Bands of Youths Roam Riot-Torn Streets—For Obama!
By Ed Kilgore
Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins usefully summarizes a phenomenon that I’ve barely mentioned here, partly because I’ve had a hard time taking it seriously: the constant buzz in right-wing media that African-Americans are unleashing a large wave of politically motivated violence on white folks.
Coppins’ headline tells most of the tale: “In Conservative Media, A ‘Race War’ Rages.” Interestingly enough, it has ranged from breathless moment-by-moment coverage of the Trayvon Martin case from the point of view of establishing George Zimmerman’s total innocence (assumed from the beginning), to complaints of too much media coverage of the Martin case (at the expense of what they ought to be covering, which is black-on-white or black-on-black violence), to assertions that the Martin case has inspired black people all over the country to beat up on white folks. You will notice the common thread, which is even less subtle than the ancient MSM convention of invoking stereotypes of black menace by referring to “roving bands of youths” or “riot-turn streets.”
Coppins attributes a lot of this crap to conservative anger about liberal allegations of racism. Whatever. He’s absolutely right, though that the Martin case has been conflated with random events like the beating of a white man in Mobile by a group of black folks among whom one supposedly shouted someting about seeking “justice for Trayvon,” and more recently an incident in Norfolk where two white newspaper reporters got stomped after a verbal confrontation with black teenagers. As Coppins observes, it took some massaging to make that a major battle in a “race war:”
Local authorities wrote it off as an all-too-routine assault in a city whose violent crime rate is well above the state average. Even the Norfolk newspaper where the victims worked, the Virginian-Pilot, skipped the story, which the editor deemed un-newsworthy. That was before Bill O’Reilly found out about it.
The Fox News host turned the incident into national news by adding one detail: The attackers were black, and the victims were white.
If you’ve spent much time consuming conservative media lately, you’ve probably learned about a slow-burning “race war” going on in America today. Sewing together disparate data points and compelling anecdotes like the attack in Norfolk, conservative bloggers and opinion-makers are driving the narrative with increasing frequency. Their message: Black-on-white violence is spiking — and the mainstream media is trying to cover it up
………………………..
Ah yes, the Obama Nexus. Not only has Obama sought to impose socialism on America in order to loot virtuous white people and give their hard-earned wealth to shiftless minorities; he’s inspiring redistribution by more direct means than the tax code or “welfare.”
But it would be “racist” to attribute racial motives to O’Reilly or Drudge or Limbaugh any of the other Paul Reveres of the “race war.” They’re the victims. And they’re getting really tired of the distractions the racist Obama-ites are creating to divert attention from the president’s poor stewardship of the economy.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_05/roving_bands_of_youths_roam_ri037472.php
Posted at 05:06 PM ET, 05/21/2012
TheWashingtonPost
Romney’s ever-climbing jobs claim
By Jonathan Bernstein
And just like that, the Mitt Romney campaign is back to claiming he created not thousands of jobs, not tens of thousands of jobs, but “well in excess of 100,000” jobs at Bain. So says the Romney campaign’s Eric Fehrnstrom. This is normally something that Greg would handle, but since he’s not here I’ll just refer you back to his latest on these almost certainly mythical jobs.
Jamelle Bouie had a nice catch here: He notes (on Twitter; Greg did say you should be following him, right?) that The Hill’s story on Fehrnstrom’s claims about Romney’s record in Massachusetts and Obama’s as president are presented without any context at all. Fehrnstrom says that Romney, in the words of The Hill’s headline, “created more jobs as governor than Obama did as president.” Is that true?
In one sense, it depends. In another, voters want to know how Romney’s Massachusetts compared with other states at the time, and how the economy did under Obama, compared to plausible alternatives, and the story doesn’t explain anything about that.
It’s fair to note, for Obama, that the U.S. jobs situation remains lousy over three years after he took office — but it’s also fair to note that it is radically improved from the winter of 2008-2009. Indeed, if Romney’s campaign really wants to stress that, in four years as governor, “he created” 30,000 to 40,000 jobs and compare that to national changes under Obama, it’s also reasonable to note that the United States added many more jobs than that last month, and the month before, and the month before that, and on and on. Look, it’s a silly comparison (one should certainly hope that the United States overall would add more jobs than does one state), but there’s really no excuse for reporters to just transcribe these sorts of claims without pointing out the real context.
In particular, the serious critique about the Obama administration is that right now the United States is adding jobs . . . but at far too slow a pace to bring down the very high levels of unemployment. Granted, that criticism should be accompanied by some sort of specific plan to do better, but it’s a reasonable attack.
What’s not reasonable, not remotely serious, is calling Obama a failure based on the massive job losses that continued from the Bush years through his first few months in office. And when Romney and his campaign repeats those claims, the media should, by now, know enough to knock them down right away.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/romneys-ever-climbing-jobs-claim/2012/05/21/gIQAG0DEgU_blog.html
May 21, 2012 5:08 PM
African-Americans For Private Equity
By Ed Kilgore
I swear I tried to ignore the Cory Booker “story” today, since I can’t really imagine why a toss-off comment defending private equity firms from a guy who may be running as a “centrist” for governor of a state that’s half in the New York media market is surprising or matters a whole lot. But then Harold Ford piled on, unfortunately playing to type, and apparently Team Mitt is talking about nothing else. Hell, the RNC, in a move that may not please Chris Christie, is circulating a “I stand with Corey!” petition.
Oh well. I know I’ve already quoted Dave Weigel once today, but he really does sum up the hypocrisy of the Romney camp on this manufactured story, and how silly the whole thing is:
Last week, as the Joe Ricketts/Jeremiah Wright storm raged around her, WaPo blogger/Romney sympathizer Jennifer Rubin called on the media to stop falling for the lastest campaign crap. “Unfortunately,” she wrote, “the way the media works, in herdlike fashion, as soon as a major outlet holds up the next ‘shiny object,’ other outlets follow suit. Well, the New York Times is covering it! News judgment goes out the window, and any sense of proportion fades not only for the outlet that first held up the ‘shiny object’ but for the whole news corps.”
My question: Does Bookergate qualify? The Romney campaign is spending all day “messaging” Cory Booker’s Meet the Press comments, raising the stakes with a profoundly dramatic video ad that’s intended to further the “Booker SLAMS Obama” story. Did you know that former congressman and frequent Morning Joe guest Harold Ford is a “key Obama supporter,” and not just a has-been now working for Merrill Lynch?
Hilarious. Next we will probably be told that the Booker/Ford one-two is an indication that Obama is alienating his African-American base, which is famously cozy with Bain Capital.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_05/africanamericans_for_private_e037476.php
Political AnimalBlog
May 21, 2012 6:40 PM
Not a Distraction
By Ed Kilgore
The president shot back late today at the Romney campaign’s claims that his criticism of Mitt’s record at Bain Capital is a “distraction” from discussion of his own economic record as president, reports TPM’s Benjy Sarlin:
President Obama defended his campaign’s attacks on layoffs at Bain Capital under Mitt Romney’s ownership, telling reporters at a NATO summit that Romney’s business experience is critical to evaluating his qualifications as president.
Obama declined to criticize Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a supporter who on Sunday called attacks on Bain “nauseating.” Booker is an “outstanding mayor,” Obama said. But the president made clear that he thought Bain was not only fair game, but essential to the process of determining the next president.
“It is important to recognize this issue is not a distraction,” he said. “This is part of the debate we will be adding in this campaign about how do we create an economy where everybody from top to bottom, folks on Wall Street and Main Street, have a shot at success.”
“If your main argument for how to grow in the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors’, then you are missing what this job is about,” he said.
That’s all true, but Obama needs to connect a crucial dot here: Romney is not simply claiming that his ability to “make a lot of money for investors” is a personal credential for his competence or his understanding of how the economy works. It’s his belief that “making a lot of money for investors” is all that’s involved in making the economy work, or in giving the rest of us an opportunity to succeed, that’s the real problem. Making money for your rich peers and paymasters at Bain Capital is one thing. Believing that’s exactly the same job you’d take on at the White House is another altogether, but best as we can tell, that’s how Mitt would perceive his responsibility. And that’s even if you like or trust him!
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_05/not_a_distraction037482.php
May 21, 2012
A ‘Gestalt Gutter’
Michael Tomasky:
The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is not, as many liberals believe, that they play no-rules hardball. Instead, it’s their skill at projection–at accusing Democrats of doing what they are doing themselves, or are planning to do, or have done.
Tomasky’s cited example is Mitt Romney’s coming, attempted assassination of Barack Obama’s character:” [Romney’s] trying to make it so that Bain as a subject becomes off limits, and he’s laying the groundwork for later, when the real character assassination starts.”
I don’t disagree with Tomasky on his character-assassination thesis; I only raise the issue because I quibble with his introductory and singular pronunciamento: that “The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is … their skill at projection.”
In part, Tomasky is incontrovertibly correct, in that Republicans’ projection skills are one secret of their success. To me, though, “the secret of Republican political success” is, first of all, no secret at all, and second, much more of what we might call a “Gestalt Gutter” thing; that is, Republicans, since roughly the late 1970s, simply have been willing to do whatever it takes to succeed.
At root there lay a vigorous (if brutal) ideology–one essentially wrapped in unsentimental atomism; vernacularly, a dog-eat-doggism, blessed by a self-justifying corruption of Christianity. With that end in mind, Republicans proceeded, Machiavellian-like, to the delicate question of means. And with their end being “good,” there could be in their minds no bad means to accomplish it. All was laid on the tactical table as impeccably legitimate.
Projection; character assassination; dirty-money think tanks and propaganda mills; electronic contract killers on radio, television, and soon the Internet; unspeakably massive bundles of cash from the slimmest of demographics; unabashed hypocrisies; mad-dog candidates; twisted and insidious (or most often utterly absent) logic; the reinvention of, or studied ignorance of, American and world history; the expropriated accoutrements of God and flag; and perhaps the crowning jewel of their overall success–their acute and quite useful appreciation of how immensely gullible many voters can be.
Like I said, a kind of political “Gestalt Gutter” thing, in which one cannot profitably isolate any particular toxicity from its thoroughgoing, wholly filthy summation.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/05/a-gestalt-gutter.html
AndCorey Booker as a Democratic politician should KNOW how the GOP play by now. to go on Rachel Maddow and scream “THEZ DONE ME WRONG!” is a big ole boat load of shit.
You got to piss or get off the pot folks, the GOP ARE GUTTER, ALWAYS HAVE BEEN, ALWAYS WILL BE.
May 21, 2012
The need for nausea
Newark Mayor Cory Booker, on why “I get very upset when I see such a level of dialogue that calls us to our lowest common denominators and … the kind of campaigning which I think is becoming too much of the norm in our nation.”
Because “This kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides.”
That may be true, all too true, Mayor, even if every time I listen to you I am reminded of former congressman Harold Ford, Jr., whose similarly overwrought centrism and “even-handed” assaults on both political parties vividly advertise an opportunistic man on the higher-office make.
But back to the other truth of that other nausea. This sort of advertising is indeed “very upsetting,” as you say. Yet even more upsetting is the unavoidable need for being momentarily upset. And by that, I mean this: The swing-voting American electorate is so weak-minded and ill informed and easily led astray by the fancy baubles and shiny beads of any shameless, Romney-like campaign, only a brick-bat counter-offensive can be up to the challenge of cutting it down to proper size.
[Romney’s] whole candidacy is based on the claim that his experience at extracting money from troubled businesses means that he’ll know how to run the economy — yet whenever he talks about economic policy, he comes across as completely clueless.
To Paul Krugman, he does. To you and me, he does. To virtually anyone who is even the least bit familiar with responsible fiscal policy, he does. But somehow, more than a few swing-voting independents–left to their own, independent devices–miss the inescapable reality that Mitt Romney is uttering absolute gibberish.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/05/the-need-for-nausea.html
I see the POLL DANCERS are out in full force calling the race close for PBO and his MITTNESS.
Krugman: Romney’s business experience wouldn’t help him as president
Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman took aim at one of Mitt Romney’s main talking points on Monday, claiming that his experience as a businessman would not help him as president.
“Yes, he made a lot of money. He made a lot of money in ways that were often not good for workers,” he said on The War Room with Jennifer Granholm.
“And it is also totally important to point out, as President Obama just did, what a President needs to do is not what you need to do if you’re trying to make a bunch of money for private equity for investors.”
Krugman, a Keynesian economist, said the United States should be spending more money now rather than trying to slash its budget to make up for lost revenue. The country should reduce the deficit once it had a stable economy.
“Slashing spending at times like these is a terrible thing, it makes the economy much much worse,” he explained.
“I think the way to phrase it is, this is not a stimulus — although it is — but as a ‘we need those school teachers, we need those fire fighters, we need those police officers.’ We are starving essential public services. There are potholes in our roads.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/21/krugman-romneys-business-experience-wouldnt-help-him-as-president/
FOUND THIS AT ANOTHER BLOG:
WARNING: IF you attack @BarackObama, lie on him, distort his views, throw him under the bus, embarrass him, slander his character, offend him or his family, WE WILL BURY YOU ON TWITTER no matter who you are or your Party. Don’t get it twisted. He’s fighting for us, and we stand with him. America is doomed for collapse under a @MittRomney Administration. Booker discovered how strong that support is. #Obama2012 @aeasterwood
smaxxmahaffey
A Tweet by @smaxxmahaffey
ENOUGH SAID!
no. you.didn’t.
not ONE NATION UNDER THE GROOVE.
AWWWEEEE YEAH!!!
THAT’S THE WAY TO START THE DAY!!!
LOL Good Morning, rikryah & Everbody!!! That poster sets it off nicely too, don’t cha think? :-)
Good Morning, Everyone :)