Tag Archives: politics

July 17, 2012 · 8:00 pm

John McCain: I Didn’t Pick Romney Because ‘Sarah Palin Was The Better Candidate’

With friends like this, who needs enemies?

It’s really bad when people in your own Party say an incompetent ignoramus from Alaska is a “better candidate”…

Mittens is really having a rough week….

Good!

From TalkingPointsMemo:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) defended Mitt Romney from Democratic speculation that he passed on him as a 2008 running mate after reviewing his tax returns, saying Sarah Palin was simply the better choice at the time.

McCain called the tax claims “outrageous” and “disgraceful” in an interview with Politico Tuesday. He said he chose Palin “because we thought that Sarah Palin was the better candidate.”

via John McCain: I Didn’t Pick Romney Because ‘Sarah Palin Was The Better Candidate’ | TPM2012.

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July 17, 2012 · 4:08 pm

Chick-fil-A Officially Comes Out as Antigay

I’ve posted on Chick-fil-a and their cultish behavior before, but now they have really come out of the closet.

Let me say this very clearly:  Chick-fil-a is an anti-Gay company.  Openly and clearly stated below.

If you know and care about anyone who is Gay, you should really think hard if you want to buy that greasy chicken sandwich and waffle fries knowing the profit is going to be used against your friends and loved ones….

And for the record, “biblical principles” are open to interpretation.  He’s using this phrase to justify his personal bigotry….

Form TheAdvocate.com:

Dan Cathy, the chief operating officer of Chick-fil-A, said there is no denying that his company opposes marriage equality.

Cathy said that he does not feel right billing Chick-fil-A as a Christian business because, as Christian business mentor Fred Roach once said, “There is no such thing as a Christian business … Christ never died for a corporation.”

However, Cathy told the Baptist Press he aims to operate the restaurant chain “on biblical principles.” When asked whether his company had an established position against marriage equality, Cathy said, “guilty as charged.”

He added, “We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that. … We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles.”

via Chick fil A COO Dan Cathy Officially Comes Out as Antigay | Advocate.com.

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July 15, 2012 · 10:29 am

Romney: America the Beautiful

Even though I live in a Swing State, I don’t watch television, so I may be the last person on earth to see this ad…

This is one of the most quietly devastating political ads I have ever seen…

And it was done by the Democrats for a change!

I’m so proud of President Obama’s campaign!

It looks like they are willing to fight to win….

And ads like this are how they need to do it….

Now, if only the other Democrats would learn this….

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July 13, 2012 · 8:16 pm

The Bain Job Losses Mitt Romney Doesn’t Want You To Know About

All this stuff about Romney and Bain Capital isn’t new.

He’s just upset because it has been used effectively against him before and he hoped to avoid it happening again….

Here is an ad Ted Kennedy rain against Mitt Romney when Romney ran his losing campaign against Kennedy for the Massachusetts U. S, Senate seat in 1994.

And here’s some info from ThinkProgress.org today on what’s behind this current controversy…

No wonder Romney is trying to get people to stop talking about this stuff….

Critics have highlighted a number of businesses that were bought by Bain Capital and then reorganized to maximize profit for the investment firm, with several falling into bankruptcy and vanishing entirely. In several instances however, Mitt Romney defended his candidacy by pointing out that he left Bain Capital in 1999 to run the 2002 Winter Olympics, before those companies began their collapse. With a new timeline that shows Romney was the CEO and principle owner of Bain Capital as late as 2003, that defense now sounds much more questionable. Here are four companies that folded or downsized in the three year period after Romney claimed to have left Bain Capital:

– GS Industries – 750 Jobs Lost: In a series of ads earlier this year, the Obama campaign hit Romney over Bain Capital’s purchase of GS Industries, a steel company that closed its Kansas City plant and eliminated 750 jobs in February 2001. The Romney campaign responded by claiming that Romney had left Bain Capital well before 2001, and was therefore not tied to the collapse of the GS. Bain Capital and its executives, including Mitt Romney, earned at least $12 million on the initial investment.

– KB Toys – Up to 3,500 Jobs Lost: During the primary season, Newt Gingrich’s 30 minute documentary on Romney and Bain Capital spent a significant amount of time focused on KB Toys, a retail chain bought by Bain in 2000. At the time, the Romney campaign, with an assist from fact-checking groups like PolitiFact, pointed to the calendar. As these new filings show, Romney was still very much at Bain Capital when they purchased KB Toys, and profited mightily when the company took out crippling loans to pay Bain Capital an $83 million dividend.

– Dade International – 1,700 Jobs Lost: Months after Romney claims to have left the company, Bain Capital received a $242 million bounty for its stake in the medical supply company. Romney profited substantially from the deal. In 2002, Dade International filed for bankruptcy, costing more than 1,700 people their jobs. At the time, Romney was the 100 percent owner of Bain Capital, the new documents show.

–DDi Corporation – 275 Jobs Lost: In 1996, the circuit board manufacturer was bought by a group of investors, with Bain Capital in the lead, for more than $40 million. By December 1999, DDi closed a Colorado plant and fired 275 workers. Bain Capital, with Romney still listed as Chairman and CEO, then proceeded to take DDi public, raising $170 million during the company’s IPO in 2000. Over the next few months, Bain began selling off its stock, raising almost $100 million, more than doubling its investment. The stock plummeted shortly thereafter.

In all, as many as 6,000 jobs were lost at these four companies during the period between when the Romney campaign alleges he retired, and when the Globe’s report suggests he actually stepped down.

MORE:   The Bain Job Losses Mitt Romney Doesn’t Want You To Know About | ThinkProgress.

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July 13, 2012 · 6:53 pm

Mitt Romney: Bained and Confused

You can argue that elections ought to be about real issues….

That’s how the Democrats lose so many elections they should win.

The Republicans always go for diversions and attack ads, while the Democrats wring their hands, take the high road and lose….

Well, I ‘m glad President Obama’s campaign has apparently seen the light.

The attacks on Romney and Bain Capital are off subject, but brilliant.

And they are working….

If you are going to fight dirty tricks like Karl Rove and the GOP pulls, you have to be willing to join them in the gutter.

And listen to them scream “unfair” when someone does to them what they’ve been doing to others for years….

The next white shoe to drop will be Romney’s tax avoidance…..

Joe Klein at Time gets it….

 

Back in June of 1988, Lee Atwater took me aside and showed me some stuff that Bush the Elder’s campaign had developed against Michael Dukakis, who was then enjoying a 17-point advantage in the polls. The “stuff” seemed laughable. Dukakis hadn’t signed an order requiring schoolchildren in Massachusetts to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He had once said that he was a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.” The most damaging bit was that he’d run a weekend parole program for prisoners, which had been abused by several inmates. (If I remember correctly, Atwater didn’t lay out the sordid details of the Willie Horton case.) In any event, I thought these “issues” were fairly pathetic–and they were. But…

They proved to be devastating. Part of it was the Dukakis campaign’s ineptitude when it came to responding–a consequence that led directly to the establishment of Bill Clinton‘s famed “War Room” in 1992. But more important, this coordinated campaign  ”defined” Dukakis as an out-of-touch, soft-on-crime Massachusetts liberal, a prisoner of the “Harvard boutique” etc etc etc. He spent the entire summer on the defensive. I still think the pledge of allegiance stuff was pretty silly–Dukakis had refused to require children to say the pledge in order to honor the beliefs of Jehovah’s Witnesses–but it was a nail in a brilliantly constructed coffin.

Fast forward to now. Mitt Romney is experiencing a Dukakis-like summer playing defense. The Obama campaign has also constructed a brilliant coffin, custom-made for a turnaround artist. There are many nails in this coffin, some more important than others. The nails are being hammered in a natural progression. There is a logic to this. The current controversy over whether Romney was or was not running Bain capital during the years 1999-2002 is a relatively minor nail–the functional equivalent of the Pledge of Allegiance. Bain was involved in the global economy during those years. This meant outsourcing jobs to places like Mexico and China, which meant the creative destruction of obsolete jobs here at home. Whether Romney was directing them or not, these activities were perfectly legal. That doesn’t matter, though:  there is confusion about why he was still listed as the boss if he wasn’t really the boss, which seems shifty. And there’s the question of why he was making tons of money if he wasn’t the boss, which is what this is really all about.

via Bained | Swampland | TIME.com.

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July 13, 2012 · 4:54 pm

Political Animals

There is a new series called “Political Animals” premiering on USA Network Sunday night….

I heard an interview with Sigourney Weaver on NPR this morning and I’m intrigued…

It also stars Ellen Burstyn….

Hard to tell how it’s going to turn out from what I’ve seen and heard so far, but I’m going to try to watch and find out….

It’s probably either going to be total trash or extremely good….or both!

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July 12, 2012 · 9:49 am

Rielle Hunter, Mistress of John Edwards, Doesn’t Sell

Books, that is….

Her tell-all about her relationship with John Edwards is officially a flop-selling only about 6000 books…

I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to read this trash and I’m glad to see my instincts were correct….

There is some hope that the American Public still has a minimal level of standards remaining….

The only shock here is that you can make the NY Times Best Seller list by only selling 6000 books….

Now if Rielle and John will just shut up and go away….

From the NY Post, Page Six:

Rielle Hunter has gone quiet after less than hoped-for sales of her memoir — she’s scheduled no additional tour dates to promote her tell-all about her relationship with John Edwards, “What Really Happened.” After a serious media blitz, which included interviews with ABC’s Chris Cuomo and appearances on “The View” and “Piers Morgan Tonight,” Hunter, the mother of Edwards’ daughter, Quinn, has sold 6,000 copies of her story, Bookscan told Page Six — enough to crack the New York Times best-seller list but “not big enough to make the major New York houses sorry” for not choosing it, Publishers Weekly said. A rep for Hunter told us: “Rielle’s book tour has not been canceled. She completed her scheduled media appearances, and there are still requests that she’s considering.” But the rep added that no other tour appearances are currently planned. Hunter reportedly got a small advance from boutique publisher BenBella Books because larger publishers feared women would not buy it.

via Rielle Hunter finally silenced as her book flops – NYPOST.com.

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July 11, 2012 · 8:05 pm

5 Ways Republicans Have Sabotaged Job Growth

And these are just to obvious ones…

From ThinkProgress.org:

 

 

1. Filibustering the American Jobs Act. Last October, Senate Republicans killed a jobs bill proposed by President Obama that would have pumped $447 billion into the economy. Multiple economic analysts predicted the bill would add around two million jobs and hailed it as defense against a double-dip recession. The Congressional Budget Office also scored it as a net deficit reducer over ten years, and the American public supported the bill.

2. Stonewalling monetary stimulus. The Federal Reserve can do enormous good for a depressed economy through more aggressive monetary stimulus, and by tolerating a temporarily higher level of inflation. But with everything from Ron Paul’s anti-inflationary crusade to Rick Perry threatening to lynch Chairman Ben Bernanke, Republicans have browbeaten the Fed into not going down this path. Most damagingly, the GOP repeatedly held up President Obama’s nominations to the Federal Reserve Board during the critical months of the recession, leaving the board without the institutional clout it needed to help the economy.

3. Threatening a debt default. Even though the country didn’t actually hit its debt ceiling last summer, the Republican threat to default on the United States’ outstanding obligations was sufficient to spook financial markets and do real damage to the economy.

4. Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.

5. Cutting discretionary spending in the budget deal. While not as cataclysmic as the debt ceiling brinksmanship, Republicans also threatened a shutdown of the government in early 2011 if cuts were not made to that year’s budget. The deal they struck with the White House cut $38 billion from food stamps, health, education, law enforcement, and low-income programs among others, while sparing defense almost entirely.

There have also been a few near-misses, in which the GOP almost prevented help from coming to the economy. The Republicans in the House delayed a transportation bill that saved as many as 1.9 million jobs. House Committees run by the GOP have passed proposals aimed at cutting billions from food stamps, and the party has repeatedly threatened to kill extensions of unemployment insurance and cuts to the payroll tax.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, those policies — the payroll tax cut, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and discretionary spending for low-income Americans — have the highest multipliers, meaning more job boosting potential per dollar.

via 5 Ways Republicans Have Sabotaged Job Growth | ThinkProgress.

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July 11, 2012 · 6:03 pm

Mitt Romney: I Have Secret Black Supporters

You can always tell when Mitt Romney is lying….

It’s anytime he opens his mouth….

Sounds like he’s trying to gloss over all the bad coverage for getting booed at the NAACP speech today…..

From TalkingPoints Memo:

 

After his speech to the NAACP national convention Wednesday, Romney said he connected with black leaders in private and was assured that the loud and sustained booing he got for promising to repeal the health care reform law didn’t represent the feelings of all African American voters, even if they can’t say so in public.

“I spoke with a number of African-American leaders after the event and they said, you know, a lot of folks do not want to say they will not vote for President Obama but they are disappointed in his lack of policies to improve the schools,” Romney told Fox, according to a rush transcript. “The president has not been able to get the job done and people want to see someone would can get the economy going so I expect to get the African American votes, and at the end of my speech having a standing ovation was generous and hospitable and I believe we disagree on some issues like ‘Obamacare’ on a lot of issues people see eye to eye, they want someone getting the economy going.”

Polls show Romney has made no inroads with the African American electorate. He’s pulling single-digit support among black voters in the PollTracker Average. But by Romney’s account, it’s possible black voters are simply afraid to tell pollsters their real feelings.

via Mitt Romney: I Have Secret Black Supporters | TPM2012.

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July 4, 2012 · 10:46 am

Conservative Southern Values and the New Class Warfare

I usually take  Alternet with a grain of salt, but this article really stood out for me….

Alternet is has an admittedly Progressive editorial view.  Their articles can lack focus, run on too long and be very wordy.  They truly need some editorial help to tighten things ups, but they make some very valid points.  If you can find them….

But this one really stood out for its quality and point of view.  It is really worth clicking the link and reading it in its entirety….

And, given the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” that they have employed since Nixon, it has a real resonance.  As the GOP becomes a regional, Southern party, this is something to really keep in mind….

It’s looking more and more like the South may be winning the Second Civil War and we have to think of how to stop this…

This is something I’ve been saying in cocktail conversations for years…

Arguably, the true Conservative position would be to return to the New England view of wealth and the world….

That’s the Traditional way….

For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic of noblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they’ve done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this.

Among the presidents, this strain gave us both Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Poppy Bush — nerdy, wonky intellectuals who, for all their faults, at least took the business of good government seriously. Among financial elites, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet still both partake strongly of this traditional view of wealth as power to be used for good. Even if we don’t like their specific choices, the core impulse to improve the world is a good one — and one that’s been conspicuously absent in other aristocratic cultures.

Which brings us to that other great historical American nobility — the plantation aristocracy of the lowland South, which has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain “order,” and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God.

via Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America | | AlterNet.

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