MITT ROMNEY & COMPANY ARE GOING INTO THE RNC ARMED WITH SPIN & LIES. HERE’S WHAT TO WATCH FOR AND HERE ARE THE FACTS. AND A FAKE POPEYE WHO LIES, EVADES, DISTORTS, AND STILL WON’T RELEASE THOSE TAX RETURNS.
GOP LIE =” We Built it.” Obama says you didn’t build that.”
#1 Small business
President Obama has consistently fought to help small businesses grow by cutting taxes and making it easier for them to invest and create jobs. As fact checkers and news organizations have noted, Romney took the President’s words out of context in an attempt to imply that the President was somehow insulting small business owners — rather than advocating for investments that help them succeed. Take a look at what the President actually said ,and learn more about the stark contrast between President Obama’s support for small businesses and Mitt Romney’s plan that would make it harder for small businesses to hire and grow — and share it with family and friends.
GOP LIE = “President Obama stole $716 billion from Medicare.”
#2 Medicare
Under Obamacare, seniors will see their Medicare benefits package improve while the program sees eight additional years of solvency. But Romney, who wants to turn Medicare into a voucher system, is claiming that the President cut billions from benefits. The categorically false attack cannot hide the fact that Romney and Ryan would force new retirees to pay more out of pocket for services. Click here to learn more about this attack, then spread the word.
GOP LIE = “President Obama got rid of the welfare-work program.”
#3 Welfare
President Obama is a strong supporter of welfare-to-work programs and recently gave states flexibility to help move more people from assistance to employment as quickly as possible — a policy that many Republican governors, including Romney himself, have requested. But Romney has decided to falsely claim that the President has somehow weakened welfare-to-work requirements — an allegation a multitude of independent fact checkers declared “discredited,” “mind-boggling,” and “blatantly false.” Learn more about this attack, and make sure folks know.
GOP LIE = Obama took $716 billion from medicare to pay for Obamacare.”
#4 Health care
President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act to make sure insurance companies play by the rules. In his quest to overturn Obamacare on day one if elected, Romney has launched a myriad of false statements and distortions about the health care law. Here are the facts: Obamacare improves the private health care system, strengthens the insurance plan you currently have, reduces the deficit, and offers the largest middle-class tax cut for health care in history. See what is fact and what is fiction when it comes to health care, and ask others to take a look, too.
GOP = BITHERISM
5 Birtherism
Even after President Obama released his long-form birth certificate to reaffirm his birthplace, conspiracy theorists and members of the Republican Party continue to push this false and dangerous attack. Not only have a number of them been invited to speak at the Republican convention, Romney actually enlisted himself in this birther movement last week: “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised,” he said. Get the facts and please, pass it on.
GET OUT THERE AND EDUCATE FOLKS AND HELP GET THEM REGISTERED TO VOTE. THANKS!
August 28, 2012 9:32 AM
Romney’s Big Pivot
By Ed Kilgore
One of these days, perhaps not until after the election, someone will give us an inside glimpse into Mitt Romney’s campaign and document the precise moment when his wizards looked at the numbers and saw something that forced them to change everything. Yesterday afternoon Ezra Klein nicely summarized the pivot Team Mitt has recently executed:
This isn’t where the Romney campaign hoped it would be in August. Recall that Team Romney began with three premises for how to win this election. The first was to make this a referendum, not a choice. The second was to keep it focused on the economy. The third was to bow to Obama’s essential likability by treating him as a decent guy who is simply in over his head.
In recent weeks, the Romney campaign has jettisoned every single one of those premises. In Paul Ryan, Romney found perhaps the only vice presidential candidate whose selection would immediately make the election a choice rather than a referendum. In focusing on Medicare cuts and changes to the welfare program, he’s taken the campaign almost entirely off the economy. And in moving toward ”a more combative footing,” he’s abandoned his effort to try to avoid alienating voters who basically like the president.
Perhaps each and every one of these moves is a genius strategic decision. But the Romney campaign presumably had good reasons for adopting those premises in the first place. That they’re changing strategy so rapidly and noticeably at this late point in the campaign does not suggest they’re particularly confident about where they stand.
What complicates any assessment of this pivot is that it’s exactly where conservative activists have wanted the campaign to go from the very beginning. They always wanted a “choice” election, perhaps even more than Team Obama—some because they’re convinced there’s a “hidden majority” for a hard-core right-wing agenda that can only be conjured up by hard-core right-wing rhetoric, and others because they want an electoral mandate for as radical an agenda as possible. They’ve never really cared that much about the economy, devoted as they are to a program for shrinking government and reversing cultural changes that never changes regardless of economic conditions. And they certainly are not willing to concede Obama’s “likability.”
So the Romney campaign has been pulled in its current direction by a distrustful party “base” as much as it’s been pushed by whatever they’re seeing in the numbers and the focus groups. They’re beginning to run precisely the kind of campaign that the activist base thought John McCain should have run against Obama in 2008, but which McCain personally refused to carry out.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_08/romneys_big_pivot039518.php
I’m going to keep on REPOSTING this video:
That’s right, will McCilvoy, the TALIBAN cannot exist if Dorothy Cooper is allowed to vote.
Last Call For The Race Card – And Bill Clinton’s Opportunity
There are two toxic possibilities for the fall campaign focused on two aspects of each candidate’s life. The first is race; the second is Mormonism. Romney has now firmly grasped the race weapon, while I doubt very much that Obama will touch the LDS church. That shows you who’s still got the edge at the moment: Obama. I try not to jump to conclusions about racial appeals – but the two-pronged campaign assault by Romney, on Medicare and welfare, does not rise to the level, in my view, of plausible deniability.
They key to both is the classic notion that unworthy blacks are taking from worthy whites. And so the Medicare ad uses white old faces expressing shock at the notion that Obama would transfer money from their retirement healthcare for health insurance for those without, i.e. the poor, who tend to be more minority than the rich. It’s basically a lie – Ryan would cut the same from Medicare as Obama would, and there is no direct quid pro quo between the two policies. It’s also dishonest: Ryan and Romney are promising to cut Medicare spending and yet are running against Obama for doing exactly that.
Then there’s the simple bald lie that Obama is allowing welfare recipients to escape work requirements. I don’t remember a campaign in my lifetime which based an entire line of attack on a total fabrication, in fact a reverse of the truth. The welfare waivers are designed exclusively to experiment with how to increase the effectiveness of the work requirement for welfare, and waivers have been granted to Republican governors as well. And yet we get this from the Romney campaign:
“Our most effective ad is our welfare ad,” a top television advertising strategist for Romney, Ashley O’Connor, said at a forum Tuesday hosted by ABCNews and Yahoo! News. “It’s new information.”
It’s not. It’s new disinformation. It’s Orwellian propaganda. Chris Matthews was righteously indignant yesterday about the revival of Atwaterism – but the real scandal is that a major campaign is running a race-baiting ad based on nothing. And it’s their most effective.
The subtext to this is pretty obvious. James Bennet notes the following unguarded aside by Karl Rove to the Washington elite’s stenographer, Mike Allen. Rove was unsurprisingly comfortable enough to say the following about a chat with Mitch Daniels
And I said, ‘Mitch, is there a white Democrat south of Indianapolis who’s supporting Obama who’s not a college professor in Bloomington?’ [Laughter] And he stopped for a minute over his green beans and says, ‘Not that I can think of.’
You know, Indiana’s gone.
The simple assumption of racial politics as the driver of campaigns is what’s striking. Karl Rove became what he is – a persistent whitehead on the face of American politics – because he learned the art of race-baiting politics in the South. Romney – having given up on Latinos and blacks and gays – is now betting the bank on the white resentment that has been fast losing potency since the 1990s. Which is where Bill Clinton comes in. He is used in that ad. His speech at the DNC should take on this lie aggressively, call Romney personally on it, and demand that the lie end. No one has more cred on this than Clinton. He should punch hard.
In many ways, this is the biggest moment in Bill Clinton’s post-presidential life. Killing racial wedge politics would be a fitting finale to his life’s work on that subject.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/08/last-call-for-the-race-card.html
Kudos, Andy Sullivan for advocating that WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON aka BUBBA, call the dirty, rotten, race-baiting Romney-Ryan KLAN out for their RACE-BAING, LYING on BLACK AMERICANS/LATINOS/POOR to sit his pasty ass in the Oval Office leather.
Doctors Storm Tampa To Support Health Care Reform
By Guest Blogger on Aug 28, 2012 at 9:20 am
Our guest blogger is Dr. Laura Davies, a psychiatrist with a private practice dealing with forensic cases.
Doctors for America is taking our message of health care on the road. On Sunday, we kicked off the tour outside the RNC near Tropicana field. Although the RNC delayed their convention by a day, we are out in full force. On our very first stop, we had people crossing the street to ask doctors for medical information. We had passersby stopping and applauding. On of the major papers showed up and spoke with 5 local physicians, getting hometown perspective. This bodes well for our exciting and challenging journey. We will be holding a March for Health Reform on Thursday.
We are on a 12-day, seven-city tour, taking more than 50 doctors and patients from 17 states into the community. On Sunday, we brought the “Patients over Politics” blue bus out into Tropical Storm Isaac and spoke about the facts on reform and stories of patient — right outside Tropicana field where the RNC was kicking off with a party. We discussed our organization of 15,000 doctors committed to health care reform and to providing better care for our patients.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/08/28/755091/doctors-storm-tampa-to-support-health-care-reform/
28 Aug 2012 08:00 AM
A Slaughter In South Africa
emailpermalink
28 Aug 2012 08:00 AM A Slaughter In South Africa
Deadly protests over dismal pay and poor housing at a platinum mine peaked on August 16 when 34 miners were shot and killed by police in a matter of seconds (seen above). Roy Robins steps back:
[T]he country is still reeling. The Marikana massacre, recalling apartheid-era violence and portending potentially devastating conflict, is South Africa’s “Back to the Future” moment. It reminds an already fragile nation that it lacks responsible leadership, basic public services like safety and security, and, too often, rule of law. The country remains one of the most violent in the world, with 43 murders reported every day. Many remember the apartheid-era police, who saw black people as inhuman and therefore eradicable, and see this inhumanity echoed in the actions of today’s police force.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/08/south-africas-mining-massacre.html
can’t post these types of videos enough
Faces to names and voices to shame…. These MOFOs ain’t slick.
August 28, 2012 10:40 AM
Mitt’s Futile Nothing-To-See-Here Moment on Abortion
By Ed Kilgore
It’s not surprising that Mitt Romney would want to tamp down any talk about abortion policy as “his” convention gets underway. It’s supposed to be a dog whistle issue, disposed of in the background by wildly radical language in the party platform, and then rhetorical winks and nods about “respect for life” and “judicial activism” and constitutional originalism.
Todd Akin kinda screwed up that plan, so Mitt’s trying to get the genie back into the bottle, or so it seems from his “nothing-to-see-here-folks” comments on the subject in an interview published yesterday:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_08/mitts_futile_nothingtoseehere039519.php
August 28, 2012
About that 10-year Romney Plan …
Question: Not that the resident sorcerers at the Romney-Ryan coven could answer this (or would answer it honestly), but wouldn’t 65-year-olds in 2013 (let’s dismiss for now all that 55-and-older stuff) be subject to a President Romney’s Medicare voucherization when they turn 75 in 2023?
The presiding fantasy harrumphed by the Romney camp is that nothing changes for current seniors. Everything stays the same, although, as the Center for American Progress points out, it doesn’t. But let’s assume that’s true. Let’s assume that seniors on Medicare continue enjoying Medicare precisely as it’s configured today. What happens in 10 years, though, when Medicare is voucherized? Would not the 75-year-old, who once thought he or she had a remaining lifetime of pristinely preserved Medicare, be subject to the newcomers’ voucherization?
I have read nothing, seen nothing, heard nothing from the Romney-Ryan campaign that suggests that seniors in 2013 would receive a privileged carve-out from Medicare’s ghettoization 10 years later. As a result (although under a Romney administration there would be less odds of this) some seniors reaching the age of 75 in 2023 could be looking at another 10 or 20 years not of traditional Medicare but of voucherized and thus far costlier Medicare.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/08/about-that-10-year-romney-plan-.html
TPMDC
Jindal Cries Wolf On Obama Administration Response To Hurricane Isaac
Brian Beutler- August 28, 2012, 2:03 PM
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is already complaining that the Obama administration is being stingy with federal resources before Hurricane Isaac has even made landfall.
But the usual FEMA pre-disaster protocol has been activated. The Obama administration has approved Jindal’s request for a disaster declaration. The administration’s actions thus far have earned plaudits from the state’s two senators — including Sen. David Vitter (R-LA). And moreover, the steps the administration has taken are broadly similar to the Bush administration’s initial response to Hurricane Gustav in 2008, which Jindal did not publicly criticize.
Jindal’s chief complaint is that the Obama administration has not provided for the federal government to reimburse Louisiana for expenditures the state is making in preparation for the storm.
Asked today to respond to Jindal’s push for further assistance, FEMA administrator Craig Fugate explained, “primary responsibility for evacuations really [falls to] state and local governments and when it’s extraordinary the federal government can support that with financial assistance. What the President said yesterday was if you have a request for specific federal assistance, we’re ready to provide that life safety issues. We’re not going to hold anything up. But we’ll look at the impacts and determine, does this really exceed the state’s capability that require federal tax dollars to support that response and particularly if they start having damages. So, early on the request was direct federal assistance. If the financial impacts are greater than the state of Louisiana can manage, we assess that and we’ll make recommendations again looking at what the governor has requested.”
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/jindal-cries-wolf-on-obama-administration-response-to-hurricane-isaac.php
Bobby is pathetic. Little twit is asking for FREE GUBMENT HANDOUTS, under the guise of “Obama ain’t doing shit for my state.”I loathe these MOFOs.
August 28, 2012
Isaac: Obama mishandled all of it!
The difference between the “liberal media”‘s critical coverage of President Bush’s response to Katrina and the right-wing media’s coming critical coverage of President Obama’s response to Isaac is that the latter is being written pre-storm.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/
Sort o like January 20, 2009, you know when the GOP TALIBAN gathered to plan their OBSTRUCTION of Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency, declaring to make him a one-termer.
August 28, 2012 12:23 PM
GOP Coalition-Building Off the Table
By Ed Kilgore
At TNR John Judis accurately describes Mitt Romney’s 2012 general election strategy as a big departure from the Bush-Rove effort to appeal to potentially disaffected Democratic groups in the electorate, which means even if Mitt wins he’s helping bury his party’s prospects in the immediate future:
George W. Bush and Karl Rove always understood the importance of the Hispanic vote to the Republican future. That accounted for Bush’s support for immigration reform; his repudiation in the summer of 2000 of Republican congressional attempts to eviscerate social spending (you can’t attract the Latino vote by promising to dismantle the welfare state); and by the elevation of half-Latino George P. Bush at the convention and during the campaign. Bush got about 35 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2000 and above 40 percent in 2004, although the exact numbers are in dispute.
The second element of a Republican strategy would consist of cutting into the Democratic advantage among women and professionals. Bush and Rove were also into that. In 2000, Bush ran on a slogan of “compassionate conservatism,” he kept the religious right at bay during the conventions (and in 2000, believe it or not, said he would not impose a litmus test on the appointment of Supreme Court justices) and he tried to convey through the prominence of Colin Powell at the 2000 convention a politics of tolerance and inclusion. Bush did not create a lasting majority—the Iraq war, the Great Recession, and his unwillingness or inability, once in office, to defy the radicals in his own party doomed the Republicans in 2008—but his political efforts in 2000 and 2004 at least showed an understanding of what Republicans had to do to create a majority.
Judis attributes the repudiation of the Bush-Rove strategy to Romney’s clumsy efforts to serially pander to conservative pressure groups in the GOP. I think that’s unfair. If you look at the whole indictment of W.’s administration as having “betrayed conservative principles—an indictment that virtually the entire GOP embraced after 2008 as a way of distancing itself from Bush’s profound unpopularity—the “betrayals” are precisely those Rovian policies designed to reach beyond the GOP base: No Child Left Behind, immigration reform, the Medicare Rx Drug benefit, and (with the exception of the failed Social Security initiative of 2005) a relatively lax attitude towards existing federal social programs.
No candidate was going to be nominated in 2012 who did not repudiate these “betrayals,” even, and perhaps especially, the candidates (notably Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich) who voted for or supported them. It’s already been half-forgotten that Santorum’s narrow defeat by Romney was not attributable to the Pennsylvanian’s “extremism,” but to the incessant attacks on him by Romney and his Super-PAC for being a “Washington insider” who supported Bush’s heresies. So the self-destructive path of closing off avenues for expanding the party base wasn’t a “mistake” by Romney, but in fact the only way he could have possibly won the nomination.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_08/gop_coalitionbuilding_off_the039525.php
Stealing the Election
by BooMan
Tue Aug 28th, 2012 at 09:28:20 AM EST
The Republicans aren’t fooling anyone. The Denver Post reports:
They honestly do not believe that they can win fair and square.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/8/28/92820/2635
August 28, 2012
Killing the Big Lies
Subsequent to observing for the 6,570th time (to save you the math, that’s three times a day, for six years) that Mitt Romney & Co. is a lying, slanderous hunk of the extravagant double-standard and swindling bugaboo, Greg Sargent somewhat more gently notes that
the Romney campaign continues to pose a test to the news media and our political system. What happens when one campaign has decided there is literally no set of boundaries that it needs to follow when it comes to the veracity of its assertions? The Romney campaign is betting that the press simply won’t be able to keep voters informed about the disputes that are central to the campaign, in the face of the sheer scope and volume of dishonesty it uncorks daily.
In this election, that’s my problem with Dudley Do-Right correction squads. They’re magnificently ineffective.
……………………………….
No, in this election the responsible news media would merely but consistently note that there hasn’t been this much right-wing horsehshit thrown around since the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei “campaigned” for Reichstag seats in 1932.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/08/killing-the-big-lies.html
A big step forward on fuel efficiency
By Steve Benen – Tue Aug 28, 2012 1:40 PM EDT.5
The bookends create quite a contrast. Last week, Mitt Romney unveiled an energy policy that ignored, among other things, the climate crisis, oil consumption, and energy efficiency.
On other hand, President Obama is taking a major step in the right direction today.
The Obama administration doesn’t need Congress for this, so there’s no way for congressional Republicans to ruin the policy or undermine the progress.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/28/13528869-a-big-step-forward-on-fuel-efficiency?lite
Posted at 12:38 PM ET, 08/28/2012
TheWashingtonPost
Dems: GOP is Todd Akin’s party now
By Greg Sargent
Republicans thought they could count on an election that would be all about the economy and nothing else, allowing their positions — and divisions — on social issues to recede into the background. But Obama has emerged as the election’s number one culture warrior, endorsing gay marriage, vowing to protect Planned Parenthood, and running ads hammering Republicans over abortion and women’s health.
Democrats obviously got a big assist from Todd Akin’s remarks about “legitimate rape.” Now, with Akin remaining in the Missouri Senate race, Dems are moving to tie Akin to the GOP convention by arguing, in effect, that this is Akin’s party now.
The Obama-allied group American Bridge will unveil a new Web site today called “ItsNotJustAkin.com,” which is designed to demonstrate that many of the speakers at the GOP convention share views on abortion that are quite similar to Akin’s. You can click on the face of any Republican — Paul Ryan, Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker, Jed Bush, Nikki Haley — and scroll through their record of relevant votes or public statements on abortion.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/dems-gop-is-todd-akins-party-now/2012/08/28/664a886a-f128-11e1-892d-bc92fee603a7_blog.html
Loving this. Tie that MOFO to the GOP, because he is the GOP NOW.
Posted at 11:04 AM ET, 08/28/2012
TheWashingtonPost
Fact checking for thee, but not for me
By Greg Sargent
Get this: The Romney campaign’s position is now that the Obama camp should pull its ads when fact checkers call them out as false — but that Romney and his advisers should feel no such constraint.
This is not an exaggeration. This is really the Romney campaign’s position.
As Buzzfeed reports this morning, top Romney advisers say their most effective ads are the ones attacking Obama over welfare, and that they will not allow their widespread denunciation by fact checkers as false slow down their campaign one little bit:
That’s a very interesting admission. But it gets better. Reading this brought to mind Romney’s own remarks about fact-checking and political advertising not long ago. Needless to say, he has a different standard for the Obama campaign:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/fact-checking-for-thee-but-not-for-me/2012/08/28/cccd6036-f11d-11e1-892d-bc92fee603a7_blog.html
Abandoning the pretense of caring about facts
By Steve Benen – Tue Aug 28, 2012 12:49 PM EDT.62
Nearly three weeks ago, Mitt Romney suggested attack ads rejected by “the various fact-checkers” shouldn’t be on the air. Candidates exposed by the fact-checkers should feel “embarrassed” and pull the falsehoods from the air.
Last week, Romney switched gears. Told that “the various fact-checkers” consider his ridiculous welfare smear to be a blatant lie, the Republican said fact-checkers are fine, so long as they agree with him. If not, they must be biased.
Today, Team Romney abandoned the pretense of caring about honesty altogether.
Mitt Romney’s aides explained with unusual political bluntness today why they are spending heavily — and ignoring media criticism — to air an add accusing President Barack Obama of “gutting” the work requirement for welfare, a marginal political issue since the mid-1990s that Romney pushed back to center stage.
“Our most effective ad is our welfare ad,” a top television advertising strategist for Romney, Ashley O’Connor, said at a forum Tuesday hosted by ABCNews and Yahoo! News. “It’s new information.”
The claims are “new,” of course, because the Romney campaign made them up. Sure, it’s “new information,” in the same way it would be “new information” if Obama said Mitt Romney sold heroin to children — when one invents a lie, its “newness” is self-evident.
Romney pollster Neil Newhouse added, “[W]e’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”
Right. So, in early August, Team Romney believed “the various fact-checkers” should be the arbiters of rhetorical propriety, but in late August, Team Romney believes they’re irrelevant.
It’s important to realize there is no modern precedent for a presidential candidate rejecting the premise that facts matter. Mitt Romney is trying something no one has ever seen — he’s deemed the truth to be an inconvenient nuisance, which Romney will ignore, without shame, to advance his ambitions for vast power.
If you don’t find that frightening, you’re not paying close enough attention.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/28/13528235-abandoning-the-pretense-of-caring-about-facts?lite
‘Motown: The Musical’ announces premiere date, stars — EXCLUSIVE VIDEO
by Erin Strecker
In addition to a stellar fall schedule, Broadway will be dancing in the street this spring. As EW previously reported, Motown: The Musical is coming to the Great White Way. Now, it has been announced that Motown: The Musical will open at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on April 14, 2013, with previews beginning March 11, 2013, according to a press release. Tickets go on sale to the general public October 1.
The show will star Tony Award nominee Brandon Victor Dixon (The Color Purple) and Valisia LeKae (The Book of Mormon) as Berry Gordy and Diana Ross, respectively.
Motown: The Musical will be based on the life of legendary Motown founder Berry Gordy and feature hits from Diana Ross and The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, and Michael Jackson and The Jackson Five.
http://popwatch.ew.com/2012/08/27/motown-musical-broadway-premiere-berry-gordy/
A partisan cabinet
By Steve Benen – Tue Aug 28, 2012 9:59 AM EDT.
Romney’s cabinet would be strictly partisan.
Unless Mitt Romney suddenly became the favorite to win the 2012 presidential race, it seems a little premature for Politico to publish a 1,300-word piece on what the Republican’s cabinet “will” look like. There was, however, something interesting about the report that jumped out at me.
Mitt Romney said his Cabinet and White House staff will be stacked with men and women from the business world, but his top advisers sketched out for POLITICO a team composed of many familiar faces in Washington.
Already on the inside track: several veterans of George W. Bush’s administration and a number of women — but not necessarily a single Democrat…. Interestingly, he would not commit to putting a Democrat in his Cabinet, although he noted that he had in Massachusetts.
Presidents are, of course, free to nominate whomever they please for positions in their administrations, and there is no requirement, or even expectation, about bipartisanship.
But there’s a larger trend to keep in mind, which speaks to Romney’s message as a candidate.
Twelve years ago, then-Gov. George W. Bush told voters he’d worked with Democrats in Texas and would have Democrats in his cabinet. In 2008, John McCain was eager to promise voters a “very bipartisan approach” in his administration, assuring the public he would have more than one Democrat in his cabinet.
It matters that Romney is offering no similar assurances. For the Republican, sending bipartisan signals just doesn’t matter.
——————————————————————————–
Keep in mind that President Obama has given more administration positions to Republicans than any modern president has given to members of the other party. For all the talk on the right about Obama being a bitter partisan, the president appointed former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to serve as a co-chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board; he made former Republican Rep. John McHugh the Secretary of the Army; he made former Republican Rep. Ray LaHood the Secretary of Transportation; he put former Republican Rep. Jim Leach in charge of the National Endowment for the Humanities; he named former Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman as U.S. Ambassador to China; and he put former Republican Rep. Anne Northup in charge of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Obama also kept Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, in his post, and for a while, nominated former Republican Sen. Judd Gregg as his Commerce Secretary.
But Romney isn’t even talking about the possibility of bipartisanship in his cabinet. Putting aside whether Bush and McCain were sincere, they at least wanted voters to believe they’d have diversity of thought in their administrations.
Romney, however, doesn’t care. His campaign is of, by, for, and about Republicans. Period.
That is, to be sure, his right. But it sends an unmistakable signal to independents, moderates, and center-right Democrats that Romney isn’t even trying to get their support.
.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/28/13526167-a-partisan-cabinet?lite
Mandel playing fast and loose with the facts
By Steve Benen – Tue Aug 28, 2012 9:21 AM EDT.6
In Ohio last week, Republican Senate hopeful Josh Mandel raised a few eyebrows, going to almost comical lengths to avoid taking a position on President Obama’s rescue of the American auto industry. This week, Mandel changed direction, condemning the rescue that saved hundreds of thousands of Ohio jobs.
Indeed, Mandel called the policy “un-American,” which is absurd and risky given how successful the policy was, especially in the Buckeye State.
But that’s not all Mandel is saying this week. The estimable Zachary Roth had this report yesterday.
……………………………………
The truth isn’t particularly complicated. Four years ago, Ohio allowed voters an early-voting window of three days before Election Day, which in turn boosted turnout and alleviated long lines. This year, Republican officials wanted to close the window — active-duty servicemen and women could vote early, but no one else, not even veterans, could enjoy the same right.
President Obama’s campaign team filed suit, asking for a level the playing field, giving every eligible Ohio voter — active-duty troops, veterans, and civilians — equal access.
Mandel thinks this is evidence of “trying to suppress the military vote.” Even he should understand how painfully ridiculous this is, and the honorable thing to do would be to denounce this garbage.
.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/28/13525417-mandel-playing-fast-and-loose-with-the-facts?lite
Michael Tomasky on How Tricky Mitt Romney Is Aping Richard Nixon
by Michael Tomasky Aug 28, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
With Romney’s likability at record lows, Republicans appear to have given up on getting America to like their candidate. Instead, they’d rather divide and conquer like it’s 1968.
Apparently, there will be no sweeping effort undertaken to humanize Mitt Romney at this week’s convention. He told USA Today that during the daytime sessions, there will be “a series of vignettes, so people who attend the convention will get to know me a little better,” but during primetime, when millions are watching, “we won’t be talking about my life.” It’s the right decision in the sense that there’s almost nothing about his life that’s the least bit emotionally compelling. But it’s also a telling one, because it means the campaign is basically going to be: Vote for me, I’m white, and I’m not a socialist.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/28/michael-tomasky-on-how-tricky-mitt-romney-is-aping-richard-nixon.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_morning&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_morning
Posted at 09:07 AM ET, 08/28/2012
The Morning Plum: What would an Obama second term look like?
By Greg Sargent
I hope the Obama campaign pays very close attention to this finding from the new CBS poll, which has Obama and Romney statistically tied at 46-45:
Fewer than half of voters think either candidate has a clear plan for creating jobs, but more think Romney has a plan (43 percent) than say that about Obama (35 percent).
Barely more than a third say Obama has a clear plan for creating jobs. It’s true that Obama has a very large advantage when it comes to voter perceptions of which candidate understands people’s problems. For Obama those numbers are 54-42. For Romney they are 41-50. But the poll finds that 32 percent are undecided about whether they view Romney favorably. There’s plenty of room for him to fill in a positive picture of himself at the convention and in the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ads that Romney’s team of Mad Men are cooking up. The question still remains whether Romney has enough material left to tell a convincingly positive story about himself. But it does seem likely that he’ll improve his image in the next few weeks.
What’s more, it’s likely Romney will retain a built-in advantage on the economy. Romney doesn’t have an actual plan for the short term crisis, in the sense that he’s not proposing anything he wouldn’t be proposing if the economy were soaring. But public disillusionment with the recovery could lower swing voters’ pickiness about the true nature of the alternative Romney is offering. If Obama is going to fight Romney to a draw on the economy, and win in other areas, it’s not enough to try to discredit Romney’s ideas by exposing the fraudulent claim that his corporate past was about job creation or by driving home that Romney would revive an approach — deregulation and tax cuts for the rich — that didn’t produce shared prosperity last time around
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line
Via James Hohmann over on Playbook, 14 members of the Congressional Black Caucus have signed an open letter to the former Alabama congressman ahead of his speech tonight. The signers, including CBC Chair Emmanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), James Clyburn (D-S.C.) and John Lewis (D-Ga.), don’t exactly mince words.
–From the letter: “We are writing to express our disdain over several recent comments you have made about the important issues facing voters in November, your total distortion of President Barack Obama’s record, and your complete flip-flop on certain core principles you once held dear. Given the magnitude of your recent transformation, we can only conclude that, rather than a true conversion, your actions are the result of a nakedly personal and political calculation or simmering anguish after failing to secure the Democratic nomination for governor of the State of Alabama in 2010.”
http://images.politico.com/global/2012/08/cbc_letter_aug_28.html
Romney, Ryan still struggling with reproductive rights
By Steve Benen
Tue Aug 28, 2012 8:37 AM EDT.
Even before Todd Akin’s odious remarks on abortion and rape victims, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and their advisers had to expect at least some questions about reproductive rights during the campaign. After Akin’s comments, it must have been even clearer to Team Romney that they needed a clear, coherent line in response to inquiries.
Why, then, are they still struggling so badly? Consider, for example, Romney’s interview with CBS News last night.
“My position has been clear throughout this campaign,” Romney said. “I’m in favor of abortion being legal in the case of rape and incest, and the health and life of the mother.”
Except, that’s wrong in more ways than one. After the interview, Romney aides said the candidate misspoke and he doesn’t support a “health” exemption, despite what he’d just told a national television audience. So much for “clarity.”
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/28/13524943-romney-ryan-still-struggling-with-reproductive-rights?lite
Dr. Randal Pinkett: How he landed a billion-dollar government contract by ‘putting in the time and energy’
by theGrio | August 27, 2012 at 6:39 PM
[…]
Dr. Pinkett’s latest new horizon is the broadest of his career. His firm, BCT Partners, was just awarded two contracts from the Department of Health and Human Services worth close to $1 billion to upgrade its healthcare technology infrastructure. The goal is to bring healthcare technology into the 21st century.
“We want to streamline, consolidate, and engender cost savings [in healthcare management] for the Obama administration,” Dr. Pinkett told theGrio. “The average consumer can expect iPhone apps [that] will be able to access records across the board, comprehensive healthcare and the ability to streamline payments to providers. The kind of things that you envision technology being able to do, this contract will allow us to actually do it.”
How did Dr. Pinkett get such a great piece of business? “ We’ve been playing in the federal marketplace since 2004, which is about eight years total. It took us a while to gain a foothold in the market.”
Yet he faced “a classic catch-22: When you first go after business with the federal government, they ask ‘what have you done for the federal government?’ If you haven’t done any work previously, then you can’t do any work for them!”
http://thegrio.com/2012/08/27/dr-randal-pinkett-how-he-landed-a-billion-dollar-government-contract-by-putting-in-the-time-and-energy-it-takes-to-achieve/
This is from David Brooks, of all people.
Others read Brooks, so I don’t have to.
this shyt is hilarious.Willard, when a natural ass kisser like Brooks is writing about you like this….well…..
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/opinion/brooks-the-real-romney.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&seid=auto&smid=tw-nytdavidbrooks&adxnnlx=1346133710-59a/PRvl8/CxgyVvAiZ6QQ
Debt clock serves as a memory test
By Steve Benen
Tue Aug 28, 2012 8:00 AM EDT.
The Republican National Convention’s schedule has been truncated a bit, moving from a four-day affair to a three-day gathering, but there was some action on the convention floor yesterday. As Rachel noted last night, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus officially banged the gavel, kicking off the show. The proceedings lasted seven minutes.
But note what else happened when the gavel came down.
As Republicans gather in Tampa, Fla., for their convention, party leaders want to drive home a message to voters: The federal debt is hurtling toward $16 trillion, and it is President Obama’s fault.
That’s the gist of what the party chairman, Reince Priebus, said as he banged a gavel to open the convention Monday afternoon. The banging activated a “debt clock” in the convention hall that tallies the amount the debt accumulating during the four-day event. A second ticker that started running earlier displays the total national debt.
Mr. Priebus said the clocks served to draw attention to the “unprecedented fiscal recklessness of the Obama administration
Reality is clearly fighting a losing battle, but when it comes to the debt clock, the political world should at least try to avoid collective amnesia.
Towards the end of President Clinton’s second term, debt clocks that had been established in various U.S. locations had to be shut down — the deficit had been eliminated and the clocks had never been set to run backwards.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/28/13524271-debt-clock-serves-as-a-memory-test?lite
Romney’s ‘Live Another Day’ Strategy
by BooMan
Mon Aug 27th, 2012 at 10:38:07 PM EST
There were obviously some lessons that Mitt Romney took out of his failed effort to win the Republican nomination in 2008, and we could probably go back to the beginning of this cycle and find the seeds of some of Romney’s current problems in how he interpreted his 2008 loss. But I think what really happened was that Romney correctly surmised early on that he really could not lose the nomination to any of the clowns opposing him so long as he retained a basic level of support among the base. He had too much money and too much institutional support and such a better claim to able to appeal to people in the middle for him to lose to a Santorum or a Gingrich or a Bachmann or a Cain. So, he basically formed a strategy I’ll call “Live Another Day.”
Everyone in the race (save Huntsman and Paul) had a turn at the top of the polls. The GOP base proved extremely reluctant to settle on Romney. But he didn’t panic. He said whatever he needed to say to keep himself afloat, while each of his opponents rose in turn to the top and then withered in the spotlight. The exercise involved a constant recalibration, as Romney could not let any of the sequential frontrunners get too far to his right. Romney had to move his tax policy as far as Gingrich. He had to move his Islamophobia as far as Bachmann. He had to move his homophobia as far as Santorum. He had to move to the right of Rick Perry on immigration. There was never a point where he could afford to stand up and say, “you guys are intolerant assholes and nut jobs.” When Rick Perry tried to do that on scholarship money for the children of undocumented parents, he never really recovered. So, Romney just kept saying what he felt he had to say to not disqualify himself, and he ultimately contradicted every reasonable position he had ever held.
He took a lot of heat from the right all through the process, but he never crossed them in a way that caused a meaningful backlash. Every time he had a chance to take a stand, he folded. He folded because he knew he couldn’t lose the nomination as long as he never took a stand. It was actually a very safe and cautious, but prudent strategy. Live to fight another day. It was reminiscent of Field Marshall Bernand Montgomery’s strategy against Erwin Rommel during World War Two. Knowing he had an advantage in resources, he was cautious about offering battle and just ground Rommel down.
What Romney’s team couldn’t see is the cost to the candidate’s credibility that this prolonged demonstration of lack of principle would exact. When John Judis points out the long-term costs to the GOP of having failed to consider the ramifications of this rightward drift, he isn’t even considering the costs to Romney himself.
Romney brings a campaign that is hostile to women, gays, blacks, Latinos, Muslims, the poor, and the elderly. And that’s a problem for the GOP going forward. But then there is Romney’s reputation. He has come across as completely inconsistent and unprincipled, incapable of telling the truth, nor of standing for anything.
He won the nomination, but at the cost of becoming King Weasel.
No one likes him, and I mean no one.
He should have risked losing it all. If he had, the nomination might have been worth winning. And the GOP’s future prospects wouldn’t look so bleak.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/8/27/22387/6839
CNN host Soledad O’Brien on Monday questioned Steve Bannon of Breitbart.com over falsehoods in his new movie The Hope and The Change.
The film, a project of the conservative group Citizens United, highlights 40 Democrats and Independents who voted for President Barack Obama in 2008 but no longer support him. One person in the film complains that taxes have gone up, while another complains about the bank bailout. However, tax rates have actually gone down and the bank bailout occurred under President Bush.
“Voters can be low information voters,” Bannon said. “They can be mid-information voters. We went and took a pool of voters, right, who voted for President Obama who are active in the voter pool, registered voters who are likely to vote. Some said they are not going to vote because they may not vote for President Obama. But we got their feelings. And some of them had information that’s not absolutely perfect. I mean, a lot of them don’t know a lot about Obamacare.”
“It sounds like it doesn’t matter to you if the information of the voter is accurate,” O’Brien replied.
“No, it matters but when they’re talking about their own personal beliefs, some of that is in there, absolutely,” Bannon said in defense.
“But taxes going up isn’t a personal belief, it’s a fact, right?” O’Brien shot back.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/27/cnns-soledad-obrien-confronts-director-of-citizens-uniteds-anti-obama-film/#.UDwNcDl18qA.twitter
Why South Carolina Wants To Ban Student IDs At The Polls But Is Just Fine With Military IDs
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Ryan J. Reilly-August 27, 2012, 5:42 PM14796
Updated: August 27, 2012, 6:15 PM
WASHINGTON — Neither a student ID nor a military ID will prove someone is a resident of South Carolina, but the attorney general there said on Monday that one of those forms of identification is still somehow superior under the state’s contested voting law.
Speaking with TPM during a break in the federal trial over whether the law violates the Voting Rights Act, Attorney General Alan Wilson defended its provision that allows voters to use things like military identification and passports to cast a ballot but bans them from using student IDs.
Wilson said the reason was that students were largely “transient” and a school identification card “doesn’t prove you’re a resident.”
He said voters using passports and military IDs, even those with out-of-state addresses, were known to be residents of the state because they were registered to vote in the state.
When TPM pointed out that college students who had out-of-state licenses were in the same situation, another attorney on South Carolina’s team jumped in to contradict Wilson, insisting the state law was about proving identity rather than residency.
After that line of questioning, Wilson said he wouldn’t be speaking with reporters about the case until closing arguments on Friday.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/south_carolina_voter_id_student_military.php
THE CONSCIENCE LIBERAL
August 27, 2012, 3:14 pm1
Voucherizing Medicare
Paul Krugman
So there it is: the draft Republican platform says of Medicare and Medicaid,
The first step is to move the two programs away from their current unsustainable defined-benefit entitlement model to a fiscally sound defined-contribution model.
That means that instead of Medicare as we know it, which pays your medical bills, you’d get a lump sum which you can apply to private insurance — they’ll yell when we call it a voucher, but that’s what it is.
No doubt I and others will have much more to say about this, but let’s just ask the question: why is this “fiscally sound”?
Bear in mind that health expenses will still have to be mainly paid for by some kind of insurance
that’s in the nature of medical care, with its high but unpredictable cost. So what we’re doing here is replacing government insurance with a program that gives people money to buy private insurance — that is, adding an extra layer of middlemen.
Why would this save money? I guess the answer is supposed to be the magic of the marketplace — but we have the experience of Medicare Advantage, plus studies of Medicaid versus private insurance, plus the raw fact that America relies more on private insurance than any other nation and also has by far the highest costs. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the record suggests that this will do anything other than make health care less efficient.
And for those demanding documentation, it’s coming; too busy today.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/voucherizing-medicare/
Why Winners Should Vote for Obama
I will reveal here that I am going to vote for Obama, and I hope he wins, and here is the reason: I LIKE WINNING.
This was not always the case. For someone who came of age as a long-haired public radio nerd in Brookline, MA in Reagan’s eighties and Bush’s early nineties, winning was a foreign country. A country that surrounded our northeastern patch of rent control and repertory movie houses and 100 Years of Solitude, but wanted nothing to do with us.
And while it may surprise you to learn that I was not a sporting person, I did feel some kinship with the Boston Red Sox of this period (a baseball team), because they were perpetual underdogs, which is to say: LOSERS. And I learned from sports the fatalist, self-righteous, weepy thesis of the loser: that winning is stupid. A bully’s art in a rigged game. I learned to wear my irrelevance and exile as a kind of pride: that it is better and more wholesome to absorb a principled loss into your abused heart and keep that faded Dukakis sticker upon your Volvo than to make the comprises required to enjoy some meaningless, passing triumph.
Like many, I first heard of Barack Obama when he spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Though I lived at that time on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I was listening to him on the radio at our summer house in the five college area of Western Massachusetts. I say this to set the scene, and also to re-assert my credentials as an elite, affluent, northeastern liberal, and thus, at that time, a non-American. In case you had forgotten.
Listening to Obama, I realized I agreed with him on most issues, but mostly I was electrified by the premise of the speech, which was essentially that we are all part of the same country, but which I took to mean “people in blue states are actual humans as well.” There weren’t many people saying this in 2004. Not even many Democrats. And while I was instantly thralled by this on a purely selfish level, I also liked that the sentiment flowed in reverse as well. I have disagreements with, but no need to demonize, conservative America, as indeed many of them are my family, even right here in supposedly liberal Massachusetts. We are all one, he said in 2004, and I was so excited. This guy is going to lose so BEAUTIFULLY, I thought.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-hodgman/how-i-learned-to-be-a-winner_b_1834692.html
The GOP Platform that John Boehner does not want the public to see
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
As Republican delegates prepare to approve the party’s 2012 platform on Tuesday, a new national poll shows that Americans are more interested in what’s in that document than they are in Mitt Romney’s and Paul Ryan’s acceptance speeches. Tuned-out nation more interested in GOP platform than Romney speech – LA Times:
[T]he document has not been made public. Earlier Monday, in an indication that party platforms may do more harm than good, Republican House Speaker John Boehner suggested that the GOP issue a one-page platform.
Too late. The Republican National Committee quickly pulled down a draft copy of its 2012 platform Friday afternoon after Politico discovered it hidden on the committee’s web site. The RNC has kept the document tightly held, refusing to share earlier drafts with reporters. An apparent staff error led to its posting. The RNC would not confirm to Politico that what was posted Friday is the final platform language, but it matches amendments approved earlier this week by the platform committee.
Think Progress did an analysis of the GOP platform based upon the platform committee deliberations from last week. GOP Approves ‘Most Conservative Platform In Modern History’:
Republican committee members spent Tuesday articulating and affirming the principles they stand for in a draft of the official party platform. Led by Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) and featuring other Tea Party stars like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the committee approved a draft of the platform McDonnell said “will reflect the heart and soul of the Republican Party”and one committee member called “the most conservative platform in modern history.”
Here are some highlights:
•NO ABORTION IN CASES OF RAPE OR INCEST. The proposal for a “human life amendment” passed without a hitch — and without any exceptions for rape or incest. The committee didn’t stop there; they also adopted language that would ban drugs that end pregnancy after conception, which could potentially include Plan B, the “morning after pill.”
•SALUTE TO MANDATORY ULTRASOUNDS. The GOP officially praises states’ “informed consent” laws that force women to undergo unnecessary procedures, require waiting periods and endure other measures meant to discourage them from getting an abortion. One such law receiving a “salute” was crafted by committee head McDonnell, who passed a notorious mandatory ultrasound requirement after he signed an unsuccessful bill to require an even more invasive transvaginal probe ultrasound during an abortion consultation.
•NO LEGAL RECOGNITION OF SAME-SEX COUPLES. The committee embraced extreme anti-gay language, even rejecting a proposal to endorse civil unions for gay couples after vehement objections from Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Romney adviser Jim Bopp, who called it a “counterfeit marriage.” The rejection of civil unions, along with the refusal to include a line affirming the legal equality of same-sex couples prompted the organization GOProud to declare, “Those who have engaged in this public platform fight have provided distraction from important issues and damaged Mitt Romney’s campaign.”
•REPLICATE ARIZONA-STYLE IMMIGRATION LAWS. Kris Kobach, who wrote the now mostly invalidated immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama, pushed for language calling for a border fence, a national E-Verify system to make it harder for undocumented workers to find employment, the end of in-state tuition for illegal immigrants and an end to sanctuary cities. The committee overwhelmingly approved the proposals, as well as a line chastising the Department of Justice to halt the lawsuits against draconian immigration laws in Arizona, Alabama, South Carolina and Utah: “State efforts to reduce illegal immigration must be encouraged, not attacked.”
•AUDIT THE FED. The pet project of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) to audit the Federal Reserve has now been embraced as an official Republican goal. For the first time, the platform calls for an annual audit of the Federal Reserve.
•NO WOMEN IN COMBAT. The platform condemns “social experimentation” in the military, which covers everything from the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to allowing officers to wear their uniforms in gay pride events to letting women serve on the front lines.
•NO STATEHOOD, MORE GUNS FOR WASHINGTON DC. FRC’s Perkins, who recently blamed President Obama and the Southern Poverty Law Center for the shooting at FRC’s Washington headquarters, requested and received a section specifically urging the DC Council to expand gun rights. The same section also opposes DC statehood, which would allow the District to govern itself and put an end to Congressional attempts to impose abortion bans on DC.
•NO NEW TAXES, EXCEPT FOR WAR. The platform calls for a Constitutional amendment requiring a super-majority to approve any tax increase, “with exceptions for only war and national emergencies.” It would also deliberately hobble future Congresses through a cap limiting all government spending to historical average percentage of GDP — “so that future Congresses cannot balance the budget by raising taxes.”
We will see what gets released to the media and the public on Tuesday. There will be more analysis after the GOP Platform is approved by delegates.
http://www.blogforarizona.com/blog/2012/08/the-gop-platform-that-john-boehner-does-not-want-the-public-to-see.html
Thanks for adding the female anatomy chart. It’s SPOT ON
From Mediaite:
LMBAO
Republicans steal Medicare from the Democrats
By Eugene Robinson, Published: August 27The Washington Post
TAMPA
Who knew? In the hall-of-mirrors parallel universe where the Republican National Convention is taking place, the GOP stands tall and proud as the party of Medicare.
I’m still a little confused about the historical timeline in this alternate reality. Was it President Goldwater who signed into law the nation’s health-care guarantee for seniors? Was it President Dole who made sure the program remained solvent? Did John McCain win in 2008?
It must be that in RNC World, the past simply doesn’t exist. There is no other explanation for all the Great Society rhetoric coming from Republicans who once claimed to favor small government, limited entitlements and a balanced budget.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-republicans-steal-medicare-from-the-democrats/2012/08/27/6c7a06b2-f073-11e1-892d-bc92fee603a7_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions
Good Morning, Everyone :)
Good Morning, rikyrah & Everyone! :-)