At least that was the headline in the UK Newspaper “The Sun” and other UK papers this morning….
Seems his diplomacy trip has made quite the impression…
Just not the one he intended…
He makes George W Bush look like a skilled diplomat….
Here is a great summary of his Greatest Diplomatic Blunders- so far:
Filed under Politics, Uncategorized
What is he, a twelve-year-old or does he just have the vocabulary and mind of one?
Or did they mix up some quotes from a Justin Bieber interview?
I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that this man was president for 8 long years….
But we all know it’s true and we are still paying for the mistakes of those who put him in office….
From RawStory.com:
In a recent interview, George W. Bush fondly recalled his eight-year presidency as “awesome,” but said he wasn’t eager to get back into public life.
“I really don’t want to be in the public eye anymore,” the former president told the Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson in an interview posted to YouTube on Tuesday.
“Look, eight years was awesome,” Bush explained. “You know, I was famous and I was powerful, but I have no desire for fame and power anymore.”
“I don’t want to undermine our president — whoever is president,” he added. “And a former president can do that. And I think it’s bad for the presidency itself.”
“I have found that life after the presidency is awesome.”
Bush left office in 2009 with a 22 percent approval rate, making him one of history’s least-liked presidents, according to CBS News. In all, 73 percent said they did not approve of the way he ran the country for eight years.
via Bush recalls ‘awesome’ presidency: ‘I was famous and powerful’ | The Raw Story.
Filed under Politics
Romney has to be the biggest trickster since Nixon…
And at least Nixon was good to his dog….
This is an amazing-and amazingly inept- attempt at Media manipulation….
This man is dumber than W and more dishonest than Nixon….
It’s a good thing he’s not too bright or he would really be dangerous with all that money….
An official with the NAACP suggested that Republican challenger Mitt Romney brought his own black supporters to the NAACP speech yesterday to give the appearance that NAACP members were applauding him. And when Romney later told Fox News that black people at the event gave him a standing ovation and said in a private meeting they would vote for him because of dissatisfaction with Obama, they were actually his own people, the official suggested.
The revelation was made on MSNBC’s “Ed Show” by Hilary Shelton, Senior Vice President for Advocacy and Policy and the Director of the Washington Bureau of the NAACP, who said Romney flew in black conservatives to stand up at the end of his speech, allowing Romney to claim he got a standing ovation.
“I spoke with a number of African-American leaders after the event and they said, you know a lot of folks don’t want to say they’re not going to be voting for Barack Obama, but they’re disappointed in his lack of policies to improve our schools,” Romney said in an appearance on Fox, where he said he expected to get booed by the crowd and he also claimed he got a standing ovation. “Disappointed in urban policies, disappointed in the economy. 14.4% rate of unemployment among African-Americans today. The president has not been able to get the job done. People want to see someone who can get the economy going, so I expect to get African-American votes.”
Hilary Shelton told MSNBC host Ed Schultz that the only African Americans Romney met with after his speech were those that he brought with him. He never met with any NAACP members. So while he wasn’t explicitly lying about meeting with black leaders at the convention, either he or somebody on his campaign knew that he was intentionally misleading Fox viewers.
Many analysts have also questioned Romney’s motives behind going to the NAACP convention and purposely inciting the crowd by referring to the healthcare plan as “Obamacare,” a term originated among conservatives and intended to be derogatory name-calling, and saying he would try to repeal it. In a piece on The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky suggested that Romney sought the boos to excite his base of conservative white voters.
via NAACP Official: Romney ‘Flew In’ His Own Blacks to Cheer NAACP Speech.
Filed under Politics, Uncategorized
Uh, does anyone really want this man in charge of U.S. Diplomacy?
If he can piss off our oldest and closest ally in a matter of hours, just think what he would do to our enemies…
There is reason the “Talking Ken Doll” was never a hit for Mattel…..
From The Guardian (UK):
Mitt Romney handed Barack Obama a priceless gift for the US presidential election campaign when the presumptive Republican nominee blundered on his first diplomatic outing by questioning whether London was capable of staging a successful Olympic Games.
In a move that astonished Downing Street, hours before it laid on a special reception for Romney at No 10 he told NBC there were “disconcerting” signs about the preparations for the Games.
One senior Whitehall source said: “What a total shocker. We are speechless.”
David Cameron wasted no time in rebuking Romney hours after his remarks were broadcast. On a visit to the Olympic Park, the prime minister said: “We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.”
Cameron’s remarks were intended to be a light-hearted jibe at Romney, who used his famous management skills honed at Bain Capital to rescue the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Romney rowed back later after a 45-minute meeting in Downing Street where the prime minister expressed his unease about his remarks. “I am very delighted with the prospects of a highly successful Olympic Games. What I have seen shows imagination and forethought and a lot of organisation and [I] expect the Games to be highly successful,” he said.
via Mitt Romney’s Olympics blunder stuns No 10 and hands gift to Obama | World news | guardian.co.uk.
Filed under Politics
Sadly, the Stripper look-alike is probably more qualified for public office than the original….
And let’s hear it, again, for these Republicans and their dedication to Family Values….
Hypocrites….
From The Raw Story:
Sarah Palin fans who are disappointed that the former vice presidential candidate won’t be speaking at the GOP convention in Tampa next month won’t be left hanging because her stripper look-alike will be entertaining hard-working Republicans at a local “gentleman’s club.”
WFLA learned last week that a “dead ringer” for Palin will stripping at Tampa’s Thee Doll House, only 5 miles from the the Tampa Bay Times Forum convention site.
Owners of Thee Doll House and 2001 Odyssey strip club both told the WFLA that they expect business to quadruple during the convention.
And that’s not a surprise because conservatives have a reputation for being great for the adult entertainment business.
“Hands down, the Republicans have always been our best customers,” Association of Club Executives Executive Director Angelina Spencer recently told WFAE. “We get clients from all walks of life, but for whatever reason… I have heard club owners say, ‘Boy, those Republicans really are great customers.’”
via ‘Sarah Palin’ stripper coming to Tampa for Republican convention | The Raw Story.
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….
Filed under Politics
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.
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.
Filed under Politics, The Economy, Uncategorized
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.
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.
Filed under Elections, Politics, The South, Uncategorized
Lost in the 21st Century 