My apologies for the late posting of this podcast which was recorded on November 14, 2012. It’s still worth a listen, Republican stupidity hasn’t gone away, that’s for sure. We listen to and talk about the great rant that Rachel Maddow did on the day after the election plus lots of other good stuff. Give a listen.
Mitt Romney
Romney Pumping Gas Caption Contest!
Enter your best caption for this priceless photo of that guy who is not going to be our President, Willard Mitt Romney. If I get any great ones, I’ll move them up into the post. I haven’t been inspired quite yet. The best I’ve come up with so far is mumbling Mitt saying “If only I’d given out gifts”.
Give it YOUR best shot in the comment section. Ready, set, GO!
UPDATE:
Eurobrat has a good one. “So this is what a hangover feels like.”
More Liberal Gloating On A New Extremely Liberal Podcast!
This was recorded on November 8, 2012, two days after the election. It marks the return of my insightful friend and colleague John to chat it up about the historic day of November 6, 2012. Topics include: The Fox News meltdown, the fun of watching it on the tube, looking forward and many other things. It’s a good one.
My thoughts And Some Links On The Eve Of The Election
I thought I’d put down a few thoughts before tomorrows important election. I’ve been sick for the last week with a terrible cold and it has interfered with my plans to post like hell in the lead up to the election.
This race has been fascinating in so many ways. The Republican party is in shambles, with no adult supervision or guidance. Mitt Romney is a pathological liar with money, a dangerous combination.
Many books will be written about this election and I’ve been thinking hard of writing one myself. I’ve also thought about a documentary or two surrounding what happened in 2012. So many ideas, so little time.
I’m particularly fascinated by the collective failure of the media to do their jobs. In my 50 years on this planet, I’ve never seen anything like it. Sure, there are examples of some great journalists who have done awesome work over the last year, but as a group, the media has failed miserably by all standards.
I thought I’d direct you to some great reads that I’ve come across over the last few days of blowing my nose, coughing and sneezing.
If you haven’t heard about or read the piece by Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei in Political titled “Lessons Learned from 2012”, you should go take a look at it. In my opinion, they are basically outing themselves as racists…but they probably don’t even realize it. In many ways, they are revealing what many other journalists have been more subtle about when they talk “demographics” in polls and particularly that all important “white vote”. Several people have written responses to it, including Steve Benen at the Maddow Blog and Joy-Ann Reid from The Grio.
The idea that Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy was the reason for Romney’s momentum coming to and end is a bunch of crap, if you ask me. I never saw his “momentum” after the first debate as anything more than what it was, a media hyped bounce – one kept afloat by the hot air coming out of most of the media, left and right, and of course the Romney campaign as well. The great Nate Silver had a go at that idea at his NYT’s Fivethirtyeight blog. Go give it a read.
Steve Benen also had an excellent summation of Romney’s meandering campaign.
The entire line of attack seems rather sad — it’s more forced than sincere — but the larger takeaway is that the Romney campaign has spent months chasing after every shiny object that catches their eye.
This campaign is going to be about “the private sector is doing fine”! Wait, scratch that, it’s going to be about “you didn’t build that”! Oh, actually, on second thought, it’s going to be about the “redistribution” quote from 1998! Hold on, now it’s going to be about “you can’t change Washington from the inside”! On second thought, it’s going to be about “not optimal”! No, wait, it’s going to be about characterizing developments in the Middle East as “bumps in the road”!
This is precisely why I’ve compared Team Romney to small children playing soccer, running wildly to wherever they see a bouncing ball, whether it’s strategically wise or not. There’s certainly nothing wrong with a campaign taking advantage of new opportunities, but haphazardly shifting from one out-of-context sound bite to another is evidence of an unfocused candidate in search of an effective message.
If you missed Michael Smerconish’s endorsement of President Obama, go read it. He’s a conservative, in case you weren’t aware.
The excellent, AWARD WINNING BLOGGER, Angry Black Lady posted Chris Rock’s appeal to white voters. Of course, it is funny as hell, it’s Chris Rock.
I’ve been camped out at Nate Silver’s Fivethirtyeight blog for the last couple of weeks. As I’m sure most of you know, he looks at all the polls and sorts through them to come up with damn accurate predictions. As of this moment, 6:29 pm, he has President Obama’s chances of winning at 86.3% and his projected electoral tally at 307.2. Because he doesn’t play the game of bouncing from one poll to the next but rather combines them, weights them and comes up with more accurate estimates, many in the media aren’t big fans. They of course rely on the latest poll to write their stories for them and Nate just takes all the air out of their balloons. Pundits have taken some shots at him recently. He took one back at them as quoted in this piece.
And last but not least, Fox News has been going berserk over trying to create a controversy over the terrorist attack in Libya that killed 4 state department employees. Bob Cesca has a great clip of Geraldo Rivera standing up to Eric Boiling on Fox News, check it out. Truth comes to Fox News for a change.
I hope to be feeling better tomorrow and will hopefully be up to posting some more thoughts.
Here is a link to a message from my granddaughter.
PLEASE VOTE.
Still Undecided, Consider This!
I know a lot of people don’t obsess over politics like I do, so I thought I would try to boil things down to some basic points.
There is a clear choice in this election. If we just look at one thing about each candidate for president, the differences are obvious.
Both President Obama and Governor Romney graduated from Harvard University. What each did after leaving Harvard speaks volumes about their character.
Mitt Romney headed to Wall Street and procured funding for a business venture from some shady folks from Latin America. He built a business that specialized in raiding failing corporations, getting as much money as they can out of them and then liquidating the assets, firing the employees and moving on to the next victim. I found this breakdown of Bain’s business model that I think sums it up pretty good.
Bain Capital, under Romney’s leadership, had one goal: take the money and run. More specifically, their highly successful process goes like this:
- Take over a company
- Borrow millions against the assets
- Procure millions more in taxpayer funded grants and low-interest loans
- Put the millions in grants and loans in their pockets
- File for bankruptcy and hightail it out of town, asap
Kinda sleazy if you ask me…did you ask me?
Barack Obama could have headed to New York, Wall Street or anywhere he wanted to after serving as the president of the Harvard Law Review…kind of a nice resume piece, you know. But instead, he chose to go to Chicago and help people. Two years after leaving Harvard, he took a job with a church based organization called the Developing Communities Project, which was a group of Catholic charities formed to help people suffering through layoffs and plant closings in the Chicago area. The project went on to win many awards and help countless people in Chicago pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Barack Obama then went on to teach constitutional law and entered the state legislature where he began his career in politics, continuing his goal of helping people.
So yeah, there is a clear difference between President Obama and Governor Romney. I go with the guy who helps people, how about you?
Election Breaking For Obama Going Into The Final Weekend Of Campaign!
There is no doubt that in the last week or more, the election has been breaking for President Obama. I don’t normally play the polling game, but as I’ve been saying for over a year, polls are only accurate when you get close to the actual election. Well folks, we’re close.
The awesome Michigander, Nate Silver, has been following all the ups and downs during the election and has developed a model that is comprehensive and relies on getting larger samples, thus more accurate results. He does what any statistician would do, adds them up and averages them. I had to laugh when I saw a quote from a Republican scoffing at the idea that he “averages” the polls.
In Ohio, where the rubber meets the road in this election, President Obama has been steadily climbing in damn near every poll taken in the last week. From Nate Silver…(emphasis mine)
Mr. Obama made gains in the FiveThirtyEight forecast on Tuesday, with his chances of winning the Electoral College increasing to 77.4 percent.
A fair amount of this boils down to Ohio, where three polls released on Tuesday gave Mr. Obama leads by margins ranging from three to five percentage points. Two of the polls, from Grove Research and the Mellman Group, generally show strong results for Democrats, which give them less impact in the forecast after applying our adjustment for pollster “house effects”. Still, the three polls taken collectively were enough to widen Mr. Obama’s projected lead in Ohio to 2.4 percentage points from 2.1 on Monday. Given how central Ohio is to each candidate’s electoral strategy — and how little time remains in the race — this was enough to improve Mr. Obama’s Electoral College chances. (The forecast does not yet account for the poll by Quinnipiac University for The New York Times and CBS News, which had Mr. Obama five points ahead in Ohio but which was released after we had run the model for the night.)
Today, November 1, Nate Silver currently has President Obama…as of 1:47 pm EST…with a 79% chance of winning the presidency and an estimated 300 electoral votes. It has been climbing all week long as poll after poll shows the gap widening between the president and Mitt Romney. Anyone who is honest with themselves can see that the President is widening his lead in the all important swing states. Republicans are having a hard time this week.
I totally understand how the Republicans feel, we Democrats have been through the same denial in 2004 and even some of us in 2010. It sucks having to rationalize and fool yourself into believing that you have a chance when all the signs are pointing the other way. It’s when “denialists” pull out the “momentum” arguments and the “tectonic shift” memes and go searching for the one poll that goes against the grain, clinging to it as if it were their blankie. I’ve been there, it sucks.
It’s been very odd, but not surprising, to watch the media continue to say “the race is tightening”, as Chuck Todd did this morning, even though the polls say otherwise. I tweeted him, of course, to point out his inconsistency and clear bias. I have a feeling ole Chuck isn’t one of my biggest fans.
So I’m excited, but cautious, going into the final weekend before the election on Tuesday. I never get too confident considering the fact that 59 million people voted to re-elect (or elect for the first time) George W. Bush in 2004. There are still a lot of dumb people (misinformed) in this country who have been getting their daily brainwashing from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the rest of the gang. The amount of misinformation in the public sphere as a direct result of that well oiled, Republican propaganda machine is very scary.
Just imagine how far ahead President Obama would be if the Republicans dealt in truth instead of lies or if the mainstream media had done their jobs and actually sorted out the truth for the public. I know, it’s a fantasy.
Romney Excels At Lying In All His Ads, Not Just The Jeep Ad!
In light of the “Jeep lie” that Governor Romney has been using to scare workers in Ohio, I thought I’d take a look at the many other ads Romney has run that were also blatant lies.
Turns out, it’s all of them.
It’s quite a collection that Romney has accumulated over his time in the national spotlight. The 2012 presidential election will provide a lot of material for those of us who study the media and criticize it.
When the ad wars began, it was clear that the truth wasn’t going to play a major role in Mitt Romney’s advertising campaign. In his very first ad, Mitt Romney channeled Andrew Breitbart and just plucked a sentence out of a speech by President Obama and told a massive lie with it. Let the games begin…
Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has displayed a special level of shamelessness in its ads and attacks since its very first one, when it ran a clip of Barack Obama saying “if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose”—a clip from 2008 when Obama was quoting an aide to then GOP nominee Sen. John McCain.
Here is the dishonest ad that became a pillar of the Republican convention in Tampa, the one where they plucked “you didn’t build that” out of a longer statement having to do with infrastructure like roads and bridges, which all American businesses use.
The Romney campaign has released an astonishingly deceptive new ad, containing a blatant, flat-out lie. The new ad actually edits together snippets of words and sentences to make it sound as if President Obama said something he did not say, and then attacks him for saying it.
Here is another example of Romney trying to twist a positive into a negative when the Obama campaign went to court to restore early voting for all of the people of Ohio after the Republican legislature passed laws restricting early voting for all but military personnel. The Republicans didn’t like how the African American churches loaded up their parishioners on buses and headed to the polls on the final Sunday before the election. So what the hell, they passed a law stopping it…because they could.
Mitt Romney wrongly suggests the Obama campaign is trying to “undermine” the voting rights of military members through a lawsuit filed in Ohio. The suit seeks to block state legislation that limited early voting times for nonmilitary members; it doesn’t seek to impose restrictions on service members.
The welfare lie was one of the big whoppers that the Romney campaign told and it received a lot of push back from the media, but that didn’t stop the Romney campaign from continuing to run it. This lie is something that 15 or 20 years ago would have made the media camp out in front of his mansion until he retracted it. But today, eh, just another day, nothing to see here.
Mitt Romney released a new ad today about welfare reform. It’s a stone-cold lie.
The ad’s narrator says: “Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check.”
That’s a wild fabrication. As my colleague Isaiah J. Poole and I have both detailed, Obama’s HHS department merely heeded the concerns from a bipartisan group of governors and established a waiver program so states could experiment with different ways to help welfare recipients transition to work.
Another of the big lies being sold to the American people is the $716 billion lie. Romney and Ryan have told it in many different ways, but basically are trying to scare seniors into thinking that “Obamacare” cut $716 billion in benefits, which is not true at all.
One big chunk of money will be saved by reducing unjustifiably high subsidies to private Medicare Advantage plans that enroll many beneficiaries at a higher average cost than traditional Medicare. Another will come from reducing the annual increases in federal reimbursements to health care providers — like hospitals, nursing homes and home health agencies — to force the notoriously inefficient system to find ways to improve productivity. […]
What the Republicans fail to say is that the budget resolutions crafted by Paul Ryan and approved by the Republican-controlled House retained virtually the same cut in Medicare.
Who can forget about the Solyndra lie where Romney tried to imply that the Obama administration steered contracts to friends and family.
“An independent inspector general looked at this investment and concluded that the Administration had steered money to friends and family and campaign contributors.”
Romney then repeated the claim later in the press conference.
Small problem: No inspector general ever “concluded” such a thing, at least not based on any written reports or public statements.
When you consider the above and the great work that Steve Benen has been doing at “Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity” at the Maddowblog, it all adds up to the most brazenly dishonest campaign that has ever been known. Historians will be busy for quite a while parsing the piles and piles of lies left behind by Romney and his cynical, manipulative, soulless campaign team.
I began this post yesterday and after just visiting the Maddowblog to see what Mr. Benen was writing today, I noticed he has a similar post up where he looks at just the ads Romney has run since the 3rd debate. I’m pasting a bit of it below, but go read the whole thing.
I went through the Romney campaign’s website and YouTube channel, and found that Team Romney has unveiled six English-language television ads since the third and final debate with President Obama last week, an average of nearly one per day.
1. The day after the debate, Romney unveiled this spot, accusing the president of having gone on an “apology tour.” The ad was based on a lie.
2. Romney then unveiled a minute-long spot, boasting about his plan to create “12 million new jobs.” The promise has been exposed as completely fraudulent.
3. The next Romney ad accused Obama of shrinking the military to the point that our Navy is now the smallest since 1917. The claim has been exposed as ridiculous.
4. This week, Romney unveiled an ad suggesting Chrysler is moving Jeep jobs to China. It’s an absurd lie.
5. Romney then launched a Pennsylvania-only ad, boasting about how much he loves coal. Romney is also on record saying he believes coal plants kill people.
6. Romney’s latest spot says Obama “gutted the work requirement for welfare.” That’s a lie.
I’m not cherry picking the offensive ads built around falsehoods; I’m merely listing all of the ads Romney has unveiled since the third debate.
This isn’t normal. It’s also not healthy for our democracy. Mitt Romney — who keeps telling reporters about how great his “momentum” is — has reached some kind of Peak Lying moment in which he spews falsehoods at an almost uncontrollable pace.
This segment below by Rachel Maddow, Steve Benen’s boss, gets to the heart of what has been going on in this election. Watch it, share it and let’s all hope that the 2012 election is an anomaly.
Cross posted at Angry Black Lady Chronicles
Real Liberal Political Talk On The Extremely Liberal Podcast – NEW!
If you are tired of watching pundits playing “both sides” and revealing their conservative biases, check out our little podcast where we say it like it is and delve into topics you won’t hear anywhere else. Listen, enjoy!
Romney’s Job Plan – Hire The Bush People That Caused Our Problems!
The President and Vice President aren’t just talking shit when they say that electing Mitt Romney will be a return to the Bush era. When you look at the people Romney has surrounded himself with, it is clear that the same bunch of boneheads who got us into this mess are the ones making up Mitt’s entourage.
1. Vin Weber. Who is Vin Weber? He’s a former Congressman from Minnesota. A former Health Care lobbyist. A former lobbyist for Freddie Mac. He is also the former regional director for George Bush.
2. N. Gregory Mankiw. A professor of Economics at Harvard University. From 2003-2005, Gregory was Chairman of the Council of Economic Adviser under George W. Bush
3. Kevin A. Hassett. Economic Adviser to George W. Bush. Policy Consultant to George H.H. Bush. Works as an Economist at the right wing American Enterprise Institute. A specialist in investing in the stock market.
4.R. Glenn Hubbard. Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Business. Chairman of Economic Advisers under Bush/Cheney. Areas of expertise are health care and tax policy.
And it isn’t just the domestic policy people that make up Mitt’s “nightmare team”….a play on the “Dream Team” idea, get it? :) From Mugsy, writing for Crooks & Liars…
Back during the 2008 Presidential campaign, I couldn’t help but notice how frequently & easily the Republican candidates (including Mitt Romney) would rewrite the history of how we ended up going to war with Iraq in order to paint Bush as less culpable. One of the most disturbing arguments was that we were FORCED to invade Iraq after “Saddam refused to allow the weapons inspectors back in”, which I KNEW was a load of… eh, rubbish (this is a family site). So I dug through the BBC News archives and pieced together the following video. It’s five years old now, but today on the eve of the third and final Presidential Debate, this time on foreign policy, with a Republican candidate whom has (as Rachel Maddow reminded us Friday) SEVENTEEN of his TWENTY-FOUR Foreign Policy Advisors coming from the Bush Administration, I thought that maybe now was the perfect time to look back for a moment to remember history as it actually happened, and think long & hard about possibly returning these people to the White House just four short years later:
These are the same people that sold us two unfunded, unnecessary wars, trillions in tax cuts mostly to the wealthy with the promise of jobs, jobs, jobs, an expansion of Medicare that wasn’t paid for and deregulation of Wall Street and the housing markets that led to the worst recession/near depression since the Great Depression.
There is no doubt that if Mitt Romney is elected president, he will return us to the same dumbass policies that created the mess we’ve been trying to dig out of for the last four years.
We must not let that happen. Make sure you VOTE and drag every Democrat you know to the polls, make calls, give rides, volunteer….but please, let’s keep the former Bush employees as far away from the White House as possible.
Cross posted at Angry Black Lady Chronicles
Extreme Liberal's Blog 