Dwight David Yoakam (born October 23, 1956) is an American singer-songwriter, actor and film director, most famous for his pioneering country music. Popular since the early 1980s, he has recorded more than twenty-one albums and compilations, charted more than thirty singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, and sold more than 25 million records.
Yoakam was born in Pikeville, Kentucky, the son of Ruth Ann, a key-punch operator, and David Yoakam, a gas-station owner.[1] He was raised in Columbus, Ohio. He graduated from Columbus’s Northland High School in 1974. During his high school years, he excelled in both music and drama, regularly securing the lead role in school plays, such as “Charlie” in a stage version of Flowers for Algernon, honing his skills under the guidance of teacher-mentors Jerry McAfee (music) and Charles Lewis (drama).
Love Love me some Dwight! Sexy hillbilly hotness! ***winks at Rikyrah***
mitchellreports: Print reporters in room say audible gasp from audience when Romney cut off POTUS with “you’ll get your chance”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlVyKK5qSDU&feature=player_embedded
Romney’s sons are sociopths just like him.
Obama election night: McCormick Place in Chicago
By Lynn Sweet on October 17, 2012 5:03 PM | No Comments
WASHINGTON–President Barack Obama’s election night event in Chicago will be at McCormick Place, I’ve been told. The rally will be indoors and will not be designed to try to recreate the massive Grant Park gathering that marked Obama’s 2008 election. I reported Oct. 3 Obama will be in Chicago election night. On Wednesday, the location was confirmed.
The event will be indoors, with the Obama team not wanting to take a chance on the November weather–which was gorgeous on the evening of 2008 when Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States. The 2012 Obama election night planners see the 2008 Grant Park event as unique in the history of the city and nation.
In 2008, Obama and wife Michelle voted at their South Side polling place–the Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School. Obama then flew to Indianapolis to work a phone bank, played basketball with pals, stopped home and then headed to the Hyatt on Wacker to watch the returns before hitting Grant Park.
In 2012, Obama will have voted already on election day–he is returning to Chicago on Oct. 25 to cast an early ballot. It’s a good bet he then will do election day get-out-the vote work in a battleground state.
The massive lakefront McCormick Place complex hosted the Chicago NATO summit in May. It is a central location, near public transportation with plenty of parking and close to downtown hotels.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2012/10/obama_election_night_mccormick.html
Walsh: Vote Republican or Lose Your Job
By BJ Lutz
| Wednesday, Oct 17, 2012 | Updated 4:53 PM CDT
Rep. Joe Walsh last weekend told business owners last weekend that if there were ever a year where they needed to “energize” their employees for the election, it’s this year.
And he told them to let their staffs know they could be out of a job if they don’t cast a vote for the Grand Old Party.
“Spread the word,” Walsh boomed. “If you run — if you run, own or manage a company, tell your employees. “What was the CEO this week that said, if Obama is re-elected, I may have to let all of you go next year? If Obama’s reelected, if the Democrats take Congress, I may not be able to cover your health insurance next year.”
Walsh, who is in a intense battle for Illinois’ newly-redrawn 8th Congressional District against Democrat Tammy Duckworth, was referring to David Siegel, the founder and CEO of timeshare company Westgate Resorts. Siegel last week sent a note out to his employees telling them that four more years of an Obama Administration threatens the growth of his company and, therefore, their jobs.
“I can no longer support a system that penalizes the productive and gives to the unproductive. My motivation to work and to provide jobs will be destroyed, and with it, so will your opportunities,” he wrote, in part, in his letter.
Source: http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/rep-joe-walsh-8th-congressional-credo-174651171.html#ixzz29cDAdr8O
Black people live, as Ced the Entertainer says..
by the WISH creed:
Keith Boykin @keithboykin
Message to Tagg Romney: I wish you would…
bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
You ain’t lying! Lawd, I swear to Gawd!
Mitt Romney Brought Every Mitt Romney He Could to the Debate Tonight, and President Obama Destroyed Them All
Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 10:11 PM
We’ve finally returned from Bizarro World. The first presidential debate flipped everything we knew on its head: Obama looked ineffectual and weak, like a Democrat from 2004 or 1988. Romney appeared to first-time viewers to be a moderate who was chipper, friendly, and in control. (After a little bit of research, anyone could discover that just about everything Romney said was a lie, but nobody ever accused the American voting public of doing too much research.) President Obama gave a listless, off-key performance that sent Democrats tailspinning into a spiral of depression and self-loathing. The vice presidential debate, which featured Joe Biden man-handling the alleged brains of the Republican Party in a jovial fashion, wasn’t enough to turn Democrats’ spirits around. Everyone was in a funk, convinced that voters were in the thrall of a new, more competent Mitt Romney and a weak-willed President Obama who was helpless to call Romney out on his litany of lies.
All that ended tonight. This debate’s winners and losers are just as clear as the last debate’s winners and losers, but the results have flipped. President Obama was relaxed, sharp, just aggressive enough, and confident. Mitt Romney was petty, awkward, robotic, and condescending. Romney tried to railroad Candy Crowley the same way he cowed Jim Lehrer during the first debate, but he failed every time, and every time he tried to get his way, he looked a little bit more ineffectual. Twice, Romney came directly to President Obama while stammering questions—once about oil drilling permits, once about pensions—and both times, he seemed to be a third grade bully attacking a high school senior: Small, angry, mindless, weak.
Tonight was the return of the Mitt Romney that we’ve seen since the very beginning of his presidential campaign. When he has months to prepare, as he did for the first presidential debate, Romney can momentarily tuck this awkward, stammering, stiff cardboard cutout of a man away for ninety minutes or so. But when he only has two weeks to prepare, he simply can’t get it done. Worse, Romney can’t remember what he’s supposed to be anymore. What we saw tonight was a Mitt Romney who was backfiring and shape-shifting between all the different Mitt Romneys we’ve seen during his long and ignominious public career. He appeared to take two very different stances on immigration simultaneously. On the liberal side, he reversed his stance on making contraception available to women. On the conservative side, he tried to blame gun violence on single mothers.
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/10/16/mitt-romney-brought-every-mitt-romney-he-could-to-the-debate-tonight-and-president-obama-destroyed-them-all
http://youtu.be/qZ4-xqTD8oU
http://youtu.be/J66bfwiKURg
Romney Did Badly With Women
by BooMan
Wed Oct 17th, 2012 at 03:10:24 PM EST
I don’t think too many women liked what they heard from Mitt Romney last night. Everyone is laughing about his “binders full of women” line, but that was just one piece of a very disturbing performance. It’s nice that he had a woman as chief of staff but being chief of staff to a governor is not the kind of job where you get to leave at 4 o’clock so you can get home to cook your kids’ dinner. That’s just not plausible. That’s not what flex-time is about. There are women all throughout our workforce who are working long hours and flex-time helps them juggle their family obligations with their job requirements. It’s helps men do this, too. But a decent chief of staff works harder and longer hours than the executive that they serve. You don’t send her home early to feed the kids. Either the story is just made up, it’s grossly exaggerated, or Romney was a lousy governor who quit working mid-afternoon. Come to think of it, that may be why he didn’t even try to get reelected.
It wasn’t much better when Romney answered a question about the status of the Assault Weapons Ban by saying that he doesn’t support any new laws but that gun violence would drop if women stopped having babies out of wedlock. “Guns don’t kill people, single mothers kill people.”
Romney wouldn’t say that he supported equal pay for women. He lied about his record on contraception. He lied about asking for the binders of women. He still wants to “get rid of” Planned Parenthood. He still supports overturning Roe v. Wade.
I just don’t think women felt like Romney understands or respects them.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/10/17/151024/22
Romney The Destabilizer
by BooMan
Wed Oct 17th, 2012 at 08:35:17 PM EST
Employers will always be outnumbered by employees. And there will always be certain areas where their interests simply do not overlap. In the American system, where we really are stuck with two parties, it’s not healthy for one party to represent employers and one party to represent employees. And it actually doesn’t quite work that way. For the Republicans, they have to overcome the problem that employers are badly outnumbered. That is why they use religion and patriotism and xenophobia and race-resentment, and some regional resentment, and anti-elite rhetoric and entertainment to lure workers onto their side.
For the Democrats, there are two problems. The first is that employees have a lot less money than employers. They can try to make up the difference with small donations, but it’s a lot more work and it isn’t always enough. Second, and related, the Democrats are not trying to be a worker’s party. They aren’t anti-business. They aren’t anti-capitalism. They aren’t interested in simply taking the unions’ agenda as their own. It’s true that the Republicans make those claims, but they are not true. There are minor parties in this country that unapologetically pursue the workers’ interests, but the Democratic Party can be better understood as the party of the New Deal. And the New Deal was a compromise between workers and employers that served as a middle ground between communism and fascism. It won its political support from an unlikely coalition of immigrant city bosses, progressive-minded intellectuals, and Jim Crow-supporting Southern plantation owners and businessmen.
The system worked pretty well (if you didn’t happen to be black) because it didn’t pit workers and against their bosses. It created a system of arbitration and conflict resolution that served both sides pretty well. And it allowed the country to move at a slow and steady pace toward progressive reforms for blacks and women and gays who had all suffered severe discrimination at the beginning of the process.
Things are breaking down now, though. It’s probably the result of 30 years of Reagan conservatism eating away at the project. When Mitt Romney starts telling employers to intimidate their workers and ask them to vote Republican, we’re back to the days before the New Deal when owners could use the police to break up worker strikes and fire anyone who expressed a political opinion they didn’t like. What is going to happen is that workers will become radicalized, too. That consensus that America is a hybrid country that is neither corporate/fascist nor communist/anti-business will break down and you’ll start to see workers embracing a hard-edged socialist attitude.
You can see the seeds of this in the growing income inequality in the country, and in the Occupy Movement. The problem is that our elites have been failing us, badly, and people are increasingly giving up on the consensus. On the right, they just don’t want to pay to sustain this country anymore. On the left, they can’t take much more erosion of the middle class.
You can say whatever you want about President Obama, but he’s running things how they were designed to be run. He hasn’t failed anyone who understood the hybrid system and wanted to see it propped back up and run by competent people. He’s the best hope for the kind of country we grew up in continuing on with slow improvements. The way Romney behaves with his 47% comments and setting bosses and against their employees, he’d destabilize everything. Maybe you want that. I don’t
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/10/17/203517/58
October 17, 2012
“Offensive”
First Read’s assessment of last night’s personal dynamics is spot on:
They really, really don’t like each other: In fact, almost all of the exchanges drove this point home: These candidates really don’t like each other. The two men constantly interrupted each other; they circled each other like prizefighters in the boxing ring; and they also even got into each other’s faces
But only one candidate took a chunk out of his opponent’s ear. That candidate was, of course, President Obama, and the bite came in his characterization of Mitt Romney’s politicization of the Benghazi affair as “offensive.”
As I mentioned contemporaneously, I was on the edge of my chair, “hoping, praying” that Obama would unleash the “offensive” assault against Romney as the latter droned on in his vintage unscrupulousness. Then, boom, it came–and to me (and I assume a few million others) it marked in an oddly precise kind of universal way the campaign’s most keenly defining moment: It wasn’t just that Romney’s remarks were offensive. It was that Mitt Romney is offensive.
In a word, that’s Mitt. Offensiveness oozes out of the guy–perhaps gushing one minute and merely dripping the next, but it’s always there. Whether he’s exploiting a human tragedy or demagoguing on jobs or dissembling on women’s issues, Mitt Romney is a consistently, immutably, severely offensive man.
Obama simply slapped the word on him. And it’s going to stick.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/10/offensive.html
Romney goes from Etch a Sketch to sketchy
\
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Updated: Wednesday, October 17, 12:58 PM
“Lead from behind” may be a sound bite the Obama administration regrets, but debating from behind is clearly something President Obama is very good at. He got the first debate’s wakeup call while Mitt Romney let the encounter in Denver mislead him into confusing petulance with strength.
For Obama’s supporters, the fact that the president played offense, had a strategy and seemed happy in his work was reason enough for elation. But the most electorally significant performance was Romney’s. Under pressure this time, the former Massachusetts governor displayed his least attractive sides. He engaged in pointless on-stage litigation of the debate rules. He repeatedly demonstrated his disrespect for both the president and Candy Crowley, the moderator. And Romney was just plain querulous when anyone dared question him about the gaping holes in his tax and budget plans
Any high school debate coach would tell a student that declaring, “Believe me because I said so,” is not an argument. Yet Romney confused biography with specificity and boasting with answering a straightforward inquiry. “Well, of course, they add up,” Romney insisted of his budget numbers. “I — I was — I was someone who ran businesses for 25 years, and balanced the budget. I ran the Olympics and balanced the budget.” Romney was saying: Trust me because I’m an important guy who has done important stuff. He gave his listeners no basis on which to verify the trust he demanded.
Romney’s stonewalling was so obvious that it opened the way for one of Obama’s most effective lines of the evening: “If somebody came to you, Governor, with a plan that said, here, I want to spend $7 or $8 trillion, and then we’re going to pay for it, but we can’t tell you until maybe after the election how we’re going to do it, you wouldn’t have taken such a sketchy deal. And neither should you, the American people, because the math doesn’t add up.” Obama sought to make that point in the last debate. This time he had a metaphor and a story to go with the arithmetic.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-romney-goes-from-etch-a-sketch-to-sketchy/2012/10/17/ad4edc2e-187a-11e2-9855-71f2b202721b_story.html?hpid=z2
Women in Swing States Have Gender-Specific Priorities
Female voters name abortion as top issue for women, men prioritize jobs
by Andrew Dugan
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Women in the 12 key swing states have starkly different responses from men when asked in an open-ended format to name the most important issues for their gender in the 2012 election. A plurality of female registered voters offered abortion (39%) as the most important issue for women, followed by jobs, healthcare, the economy, and equal rights. In contrast, men see jobs (38%) and the economy (37%) as the two most important issues facing men.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/158069/women-swing-states-gender-specific-priorities.aspx
RT @jidts07 Whoa!!!! Tagg Romney says he wanted to take a swing at Obama last night: http://billlumaye.blogspot.com… … #p2 #debate2012
WTF? Tagg Romney says he wanted to take a swing at President Obama last night? Punk, I dare you! Worthless entitled arrogant slug! What kind of raising is this when a presidential candidate’s son says publicly he wanted to take a swing at the POTUS? No class! Just entitled rich trash!
WHAT A PUNK ASS BITCH. YOUR FATHER’S A LIAR, TAGG ROMNEY, AND THUS WAS CALLED OUT FOR LYING. GTFOH
Posted at 03:03 PM ET, 10/17/2012
Obama sharpens attack on Romney’s sham jobs plan
By Greg Sargent
Yesterday, the Post’s Glenn Kessler reported that he had asked Mitt Romney’s campaign to back up his claim that his “five point plan for the middle class” will create 12 million jobs. The Romney camp responded with a series of studies that didn’t do anything of the sort — they literally didn’t support Romney’s actual policy proposals in any way — thus revealing that his jobs plan has absolutely no credible foundation.
Romney’s claim that his plan will create 12 million jobs is the single most important promise of his entire candidacy — his leading agenda statement on the most important issue of this campaign, i.e., who will fix the economic crisis. It is the centerpiece of his whole case for the presidency, and of his argument that he represents an alternative to the unacceptable status quo under Obama.
So you’d think it would be newsworthy that his plan has been revealed to have no policy rationale behind it at all. You’d think it would be a big story that it has been revealed as a complete sham. Yet there’s been very little media interest in the story.
Perhaps this will change things. Today, Obama directly targeted the new revelations about Romney’s plan, tying them to Romney’s bogus tax math, and ridiculing the whole package as a “sketchy deal”:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/obama-sharpens-attack-on-romneys-sham-jobs-plan/2012/10/17/9ea0b4f0-1888-11e2-a55c-39408fbe6a4b_blog.html
Posted at 04:54 PM ET, 10/17/2012
Mitt Romney is not George Bush. He’s George Bush Lite
By Jonathan Bernstein
Mitt Romney told more than his fair share of whoppers last night. But my favorite fact check of the second debate concerns Romney’s answer to the questioner asking him how his policies are different from George W. Bush. Here’s the New York Times’s Jackie Calmes:
When Mr. Romney was asked how he and former President George W. Bush were different, he said they were different people and because the times were different, “my five-point plan is so different than what he would have done.”
But Mr. Romney’s five-point plan, which is light on specifics, is an echo of the platform that Mr. Bush ran on in 2000 — energy independence, education, expanded free trade and a get-tough stance toward China, balanced budgets and small business. As Mr. Romney pointed out, Mr. Bush fell short in those areas, for instance by turning balanced budgets of the Clinton era into annual deficits. Still, their campaign platforms are remarkably similar.
It really is amazing just how much Romney’s plan is an exact echo of Bush’s, despite twelve intervening years and a vastly different economic landscape.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/mitt-romney-is-not-george-bush-hes-george-bush-lite/2012/10/17/b7e3ce3a-1887-11e2-a346-f24efc680b8d_blog.html
October 17, 2012, 7:14 am
Chicken Hawk Down
So, do we get to invoke Catch-22, and call him Mitt Binderminder? Especially because his story about seeking out women appears to be false?
Anyway, I’d like to throw in my two cents on Romney’s most easily demonstrated blunder, his claim that Obama waited two weeks before calling the Benghazi attack an act of terror. Maybe you have to remember the Bush administration to realize just how NOT accidental this blunder was; in at least two ways it went to the heart of the modern right-wing identity.
First, there’s the notion that posturing and talking tough is what it’s all about. Bush, you may recall, was hailed as a fighter against terrorism because he, well, gave tough-talking speeches. I mean, he stood on a mound of rubble and pledged to get Osama dead or alive. Somehow, for his devotees, this made him a hero even though he never got Osama either way, and in fact showed remarkably little interest in pursuing the people actually responsible for 9/11.
And conversely, remember that a large part of Romney’s campaign has been based on the false claim that Obama “apologized for America”. This supposed verbal weakness is supposed to trump the reality that Obama, you know, actually did get bin Laden.
So naturally Romney tried to go after Obama not for what he did or didn’t do, but for his supposed failure to talk tough enough.
But then how did Romney get it so wrong? And if you read the transcript, by the way, Obama was clearly enjoying this — it seems as if he knew what was coming:
MS. CROWLEY: Governor, if you want to reply just quickly to this, please.
MR. ROMNEY: Yeah, I — I certainly do. I certainly do. I — I think it’s interesting the president just said something which is that on the day after the attack, he went in the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror. You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack it was an act of terror. It was not a spontaneous demonstration.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Please proceed.
MR. ROMNEY: Is that what you’re saying?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Please proceed, Governor.
MR. ROMNEY: I — I — I want to make sure we get that for the record, because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Get the transcript.
MS. CROWLEY: It — he did in fact, sir.
So let me — let me call it an act of terrorism — (inaudible) —
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Can you say that a little louder, Candy? (Laughter, applause.)
MS. CROWLEY: He did call it an act of terror.
Amazing. But here’s where the second piece of the right-wing mentality comes in. They know, just know, that Democrats are wimps on national security. Hey, they care about the poor, they have some qualms about torture. So inside the right-wing bubble it’s just a known fact that Obama can’t have called terror by its true name.
And so Romney tried to exploit a not-great moment in Obama foreign policy, and ended up making a fool of himself.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/chicken-hawk-down/
A big fool. A big pig-headed jerk!
Birth control is not a ‘hypothetical situation’
By Steve Benen
\Wed Oct 17, 2012 3:47 PM EDT.
The last time Mitt Romney’s campaign ran into real trouble on contraception, it dispatched South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) to argue, “Women don’t care about contraception…. The media wants to talk about contraception.”
Republican policymakers were, at the time, pushing legislation — at the state and federal level — to restrict access to birth control, but for Romney surrogates, the sensible response was to say contraception doesn’t matter.
Today, it happened again.
Kerry Healey, Romney’s lieutenant governor in Massachusetts, fresh off her borderline-comical turn in the post-debate spin room last night, sat down with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell today, and the host asked questions Healey presumably expected, noting Romney’s support for the Blunt Amendment, for example.
Inexplicably, the Romney surrogate described the consequences of the candidate’s own proposals as “some hypothetical situation.” Healey added that even having a discussion about women being able to afford contraception is a “peripheral” issue.
This arrogant attitude is extraordinary. Under Romney’s preferred agenda, employers can end contraception coverage for their women employees, and millions of Americans would no longer be able to afford birth control.
Asked to defend this right-wing nonsense, the Romney campaign’s defense is that the question is irrelevant — as if the issue is so trivial, it’s not even worth their time.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/
President Obama: “I came here today because I want your vote. I am not too proud to beg. I want your vote!” Crowd: “You’ve got our vote!”
Ain’t Too Proud To Beg
Ain’t too proud to plead…baby…. baby.
Leaked Audio Captures Romney Asking Employers To Tell Their Employees How To Vote
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/10/17/1037881/leaked-audio-romney-employers/
uh huh.
uh huh.
Man arrested in alleged plot to attack Federal Reserve in NYC
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/17/14514354-man-arrested-in-alleged-plot-to-attack-federal-reserve-in-nyc?lite
NEW YORK – A suspected terrorist parked a van packed with what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb next to the Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan and tried to detonate it Wednesday morning before he was arrested in a terror sting operation, authorities said.
The suspect, 21-year-old Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, is a Bangladeshi national who came to the U.S. on a student visa in January for the specific purpose of launching a terror attack here, authorities said. He allegedly told an undercover agent last month that he hoped the attack would disrupt the presidential election, saying “You know what, this election might even stop,” according to the criminal complaint against him.
Look at this MOFO
That’s it, POTUS; Keep at Romney’s Azz.
I really like Dwight’s “Blame the Vain” and “1000 Miles From Nowhere”. He has a cameo as a truck driver in a Nick Cage movie by the same name.
Hi Thorsaurus! “1000 Miles From Nowhere” is my favorite. It’s the bestest! Dwight’s voice is so sexy! I totally love him! :) **looks at Rikyrah**
George McGovern Is ‘No Longer Responsive’ In Hospice Care, Says Family
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/george-mcgovern_n_1974944.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — The family of ex-U.S. Sen. George McGovern says the 90-year-old is “no longer responsive” in hospice care.
McGovern’s family issued a statement Wednesday afternoon through Avera McKennan Hospital.
His daughter, Ann McGovern, earlier told The Associated Press that her father is “nearing the end” and appears restful and peaceful. She says it’s a blessing that she and other family members are able to be with him.
McGovern was the Democratic presidential candidate who lost to President Richard Nixon in 1972 in a historic landslide. He was a member of the U.S. House from 1957 to 1961 and a U.S. senator from 1963 to 1981 and led the leader his party’s liberal wing during that time.
In recent years, he turned his focus to world hunger.
17 Oct 2012 12:28 PM
The Character Of Obama
A reader, to my mind, nails it:
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/10/the-character-of-obama.html
Well, I see Sully has gotten down off his high horse. PBO’s got major class, sophistication, intelligence, and swagger. It’s much to much for SOME folks to wrap their brain around. He is the POTUS. And with it carries the responsibility to conduct himself as such. It realy unerves the folks who can’t twist, bend, and shape him in the image they think and want him to be.
Romney would have killed Ledbetter Fair Pay law
By Steve Benen – Wed Oct 17, 2012 11:30 AM EDT.
Way back in April, Mitt Romney and his campaign team were eager to push a very dumb argument: that President Obama has waged a “war on women,” and organized a conference call with reporters to push the story. It didn’t go well.
The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein asked whether Romney supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and aides wouldn’t answer. Romney surrogates defended the candidate, but the surrogates voted against the Fair Pay law. Eventually, the campaign issued a statement saying Romney wouldn’t repeal the Ledbetter law, but refused to state an opinion on its merit.
Last night, after the issue was raised in the debate, the dissembling became almost comical. Kerry Healey, Romney’s former lieutenant governor, was asked about the law, and insisted that Romney shouldn’t even have to answer: “Saying ‘will you sign this, would you support that,’ this is just a campaign tactic.” Apparently, Healey forgot what office Romney is seeking.
It took six months to get an answer, but we now finally have a position:
Had Mitt Romney been president in 2009, he would not have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, a top adviser to the Republican nominee told The Huffington Post Tuesday night.
Now that the law has been passed, Romney has no plans to get rid of it, that adviser, Ed Gillespie, added. But Romney didn’t support it while it made its way through Congress.
“The governor would not repeal the Lilly Ledbetter Act,” said Gillespie, following Tuesday night’s presidential debate. “He was opposed to it at the time. He would not repeal it.”
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/10/17/14510442-romney-would-have-killed-ledbetter-fair-pay-law?lite
Trying (and failing) to defend ‘self-deportation’
By Steve Benen – Wed Oct 17, 2012 10:53 AM EDT
There’s no great mystery as to why Mitt Romney is struggling so badly with Latinos: Romney has gone out of his way to deliberately antagonize the entire community — endorsing “self-deportation,” vowing to veto the DREAM Act, palling around Kris Kobach, using “illegal” as a noun, and describing Arizona’s SB 1070 as a “model” for the nation.
And how many of these data points were raised in last night’s debate? Literally, all of them. This, however, was the moment that amazed me.
http://youtu.be/YMI96I6PhRU
For those who can’t watch clips online, and who missed the debate, President Obama twice slammed Romney for having endorsed “self-deportation” as a credible immigration policy. Romney responded, haltingly:
Oh, I see. Self-deportation, which started as a satirical joke before being adopted by conservative Republicans as a serious policy, is really about choices. Sure, the underlying point seems cruel, making immigrants’ lives so miserable that they’ll leave the country altogether, but for Mitt Romney, it’s really just a celebration of “illegals” — there’s that word again — having the freedom to “make their own choice.”
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/10/17/14509640-trying-and-failing-to-defend-self-deportation?lite
He’s not Bush; he’s worse
By Steve Benen – Wed Oct 17, 2012 9:25 AM EDT.
Much to Democrats’ chagrin, George W. Bush hasn’t played much of a role in larger 2012 political conversation. His name was rarely uttered during the Republican presidential primaries; the failed former president hid during the party’s national convention; and Mitt Romney did his level best to ignore the news when Bush endorsed him.
It came as a pleasant surprise, then, when a voter broached the subject last night. She noted she’s been “disappointed with the lack of progress” over the last four years, but she’s afraid of going back to Bush-era policies and wanted Romney to explain how they’re different.
Romney responded by answering a previous question about contraception. When he got around to responding, Romney stressed oil drilling and trade as examples of why “President Bush had a very different path for a very different time” — despite the fact that Romney and Bush have the same positions on oil drilling and trade.
What struck me as interesting was Obama making a counter-intuitive point — he said Romney and Bush are different, but Romney is worse:
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/10/17/14507969-hes-not-bush-hes-worse?lite
they don’t ever stop. we must be vigilant with these mofos:
……………
Arizona’s largest county listed wrong date for the election on voter ID cards (but just in Spanish)
By Zoë Schlanger – Wed Oct 17, 2012 1:59 PM EDT.
Arizonans who went to their local municipal offices in Maricopa County to pick up their voter ID cards may have been instructed to go to the polls on the wrong date — but only if they were looking for the information in Spanish.
The wrong date was printed on a document that contains the new voter ID card. The document lists the general election date as November 6 in English but reads “8 de Noviembre” in the Spanish translation.
A spokesperson told local station ABC 15 that they estimated fewer than 50 people got documents with the wrong date, based on the number of people who picked up their cards in-person in “previous years,” though they did not say whether those were election years.
.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/10/17/14344718-arizonas-largest-county-listed-wrong-date-for-the-election-on-voter-id-cards-but-just-in-spanish?lite
At Last Night’s Debate: Romney Told 31 Myths In 41 Minutes
By Igor Volsky
During the first presidential debate in Denver, Colorado Romney managed to tell 27 myths in his 38 minutes of speaking time. But at his second encounter with Obama in New York, the GOP presidential candidate — who has run a post-truth campaign from day one — outdid himself and crammed 31 myths in 41 minutes:
HERE ARE THE FIRST FIVE:
1) “I want to make sure we keep our Pell grant program growing. We’re also going to have our loan program, so that people are able to afford school.” Paul Ryan’s budget could cut Pell Grants for nearly 1 million college students and even Romney’s white paper on education, “A Chance for Every Child,” suggests that he “would reverse the growth in Pell Grant funding.” It says: “A Romney Administration will refocus Pell Grant dollars on the students that need them most and place the program on a responsible long-term path that avoids future funding cliffs and last-minute funding patches.”
2) “I put out a five-point plan that gets America 12 million new jobs in four years and rising take-home pay.” The Washington Post’s in-house fact checker tore Romney’s claim that he will create 12 million jobs to shreds. The Post wrote that the “‘new math’” in Romney’s plan “doesn’t add up.” In awarding the claim four Pinocchios — the most untrue possible rating, the Post expressed incredulity at the fact Romney would personally stand behind such a flawed, baseless claim.
3) “And the president’s right in terms of the additional oil production, but none of it came on federal land. As a matter of fact, oil production is down 14 percent this year on federal land, and gas production was down 9 percent.” 14 percent is a one-year number. “Overall, oil production on federal land under Obama is up from 566 million barrels in 2008 to 626 million barrels in 2011, a 10.6 percent increase.” Compared to the last three years of President Bush, there have been 241 million more barrels of oil produced from public lands in the first three years of Obama.
4) “Because the president cut in half the number of licenses and permits for drilling on federal lands, and in federal waters.” There are slightly fewer permits in 2009 and 2010, from between 8,000-9,000 permits to over 5,000, and they have not been cut by half. The oil and gas industry is sitting on 7,000 approved permits to drill, where it hasn’t begun exploring or developing. Two-thirds of “acreage leased by [oil] industry lies idle” on public lands, according to the Department of the Interior.
5) “I believe very much in our renewable capabilities; ethanol, wind, solar will be an important part of our energy mix.” Romney is actually against a one-year renewal of the wind production tax credit. The wind production tax credit has led to $14 billion of investment in 2011 and tens of thousands of American jobs.
http://www.nationofchange.org/print/29721
Sit your AZZ down, Mitt Romney.
Marine One lifts off the WH South Lawn as Pres Obama departs on campaign day trip to IA & OH.
LOVE this comment from TOD:
lisalovesobama
October 17, 2012 at 1:45 am
There were several moments at the beginning of the debate when Willard started to encroach on PBO’s personal space and PBO got right back up in Willard’s face and I actually thought that it would come to physical blows. It was sooooo awesome! Then when Willard realized PBO wouldnt back down, but instead got into Willard’s face, Willard stopped getting up and trying to physically confront PBO. He just sat his ass down like a cowed little muppet.
Binders of Women–it’s not just a meme with its own twitter and facebook page, it’s a lie.
By Soonergrunt October 16th, 2012
Romney claimed that when he became Governor of Massachusetts, that he, not knowing any competent women executives (that’s a story in its own right) that he wanted to add women to his cabinet so he had binders of women prepared and delivered to him.
It’s all a lie.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/10/16/binders-of-women-its-not-just-a-meme-with-its-own-twitter-and-facebook-page-its-a-lie/
@MWJ1231:
RT @ritaag: @MWJ1231 Queen Ann even refused to shake Michelle’s hand. Pathetic // And refused to look at the President
POTUS & FLOTUS stayed behind for at least an hour after the debates and shook hands, gave hugs, and took pics with folks. The Romneys? they made like HORSESHIT and hit the dusty trails!
BWA HA HA HA HA HA AH HA
http://twitter.com/amk4obama/status/258526882235023360/photo/1
Crowd: How dare that negro speak to Mitt Romney like this. who does he think he is?!!!!
A bunch of entitled MOFOs.
@BlackChuckTodd
I got #bindersfullofwomen in different area codes.
*DEAD* @BlackChuckTodd!
Barack Obama: the new Comeback Kid?
By Steve Benen
Wed Oct 17, 2012 8:00 AM EDT.
What a difference 12 days makes.
I never bought into the notion that President Obama needed to crush Mitt Romney in their second debate, effectively forcing the Republican to flee from the stage in tears. What the president needed to do was show some genuine fight — for his supporters, for his agenda, for his record, for reality, and ultimately, for his job.
Obama did all of that and then some last night, delivering the best debate performance of his career in national politics. Take his final response of the night, for example.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/10/17/14506245-barack-obama-the-new-comeback-kid?lite
There’s an old Sci-Fi movie called “Mars Needs Women”. Epic in its failure. I’m no good with graphics but somebody needs to dig up the poster and insert Willard’s bile-filled mug under the edited title “Mitt Needs Women!” Instant classic.
LOL Hi Thorsaurus; we’ll get right on it.
I’m gonna say it now, so that folks understand:
NOBODY PUTS 3CHICS IN A BINDER!!
SG2, may I have that side eye graphic, please?
BWA HA HA HA You got that right, Chica Rikyrah!
What an ugly azz face,ugh!
Hat tip: Deborah Lum
Wake Up! Fight Voter Suppression
http://youtu.be/6Nd1DyAm3Qg
Good morning, Chicas!
Good Morning, SG2 & Everyone! To all you ladies, I hope you don’t let Mitt
Romney stash y’all away in “BINDERS.”
Good Morning, Ametia, SG2 and Everyone :)
Wasn’t last night great,rich bitch got his azz handed to him on a platter,good serve PBO.Never seen such a rude person,talking to the POTUS,like he some big shot,that man is a bloob sucking money grabber,he could care less about the reg hard working people of this country.Lets make sure he’s a no term president.
Mitt’s trying to lie and bully his way into the White House. And he had the audacity try and invade my President’s space. What a rude POS! Nah Nah Nah…what did Bernie Mac say? …I ain’t scared of you mofos!