Oh Mittens, that true mensch, a real man of the people, displaying his common touch during his speech to an empty stadium:
"I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pick-up truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually. And I used to have a Dodge truck. So I used to have all three covered.”Ah yes, who doesn't have multiple cars to play with? Who doesn't use a 20-sided die every morning to decide which car to pull from the stable? Is it an SUV day, or a convertible day, or a two-seater roadster day, or a muscle car day? You know what I'm talking about, right? Right?
Wait, you mean Americans don't typically have multiple Cadillacs in their garage? Uh oh. Time for some quick damage control!
The Romney campaign later said Ann Romney drives two Cadillac SRX’s (model years 2007 and 2010), one in California and one in Massachusetts.Ah yes, that explains it. They need multiple Cadillacs to stock their various mansions! That'll help Romney seem less detached from the 99 percent!
But wait, mansions in California and Massachusetts? Seems kind of communist. Surely, he has to have a mansion in the heartland, or at least in Michigan, where Romney has a tree fetish:
This feels good, being back in Michigan. You know, the trees are the right height. The streets are just right.
Nope. He's got a $10 million summer vacation mansion in New Hampshire, were the trees are too tall and too small and too bushy.
Banker & tradesman reported that Ann D. Romney, wife of former Bay State Governor and presidential contender Mitt Romney, purchased a new townhouse in a luxury Belmont development for $895,000. The Romneys sold their 6,400-square-foot home on Belmont’s Main Street last April as part of their efforts to downsize and simplify.There's the $12 million La Jolla, California property, which is totally inadequate at 3,009 square feet. So much so, that the Romneys are razing it and building a 11,000-square-foot mansion in its place.
Deer Valley, Utah ...
But don't worry! He has a bunch of cars made in America in all those garages! Well, four of them, to be exact. But of course we know he has more cars. I wonder why he doesn't want to list them all?
A campaign spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for a full inventory of the Romneys’ vehicles.
- Today's comic by Matt Bors is Uterus police:
- What's coming up on Sunday Kos ...
- Relentless anti-choice forces can only be defeated by relentless foes, by Meteor Blades
- 2008 v. 2012--Is the presidential landscape changing, by Steve Singiser
- Trouble in the Heartland, by DarkSyde
- The encroachment of religion on our secular government, by Armando
- Will 2012 be the year the Democrats say 'I do,' by Scott Wooledge
- The lie about when slavery ended, by Denise Oliver Velez
- President Obama outflanks lost Republicans on corporate taxes, by Dante Atkins
- Defeating Mitt Romney is about more than 2012, by Laurence Lewis
- The Romer Memo and Obama's first term, by brooklynbadboy
- Marriage equality activists in Maine have turned in nearly 30,000 more valid signatures than they needed to get a measure on the state ballot that, if passed, would allow gay and lesbian couples to marry. A previous referendum failed in 2009, but backers of the referendum believe enough Mainers have changed their minds to reverse that decision:
- Matt Taibbi writes that what we saw in Mesa in the Republican debates was the arrival of justice:
Given the continued troubles and the continued failure to return to good old American values, who else could possibly be to blame? Where else could they possibly point the finger?
There was only one possible answer, and we're seeing it playing out in this race: At themselves! And I don’t mean they pointed the finger "at themselves" in the psychologically healthy, self-examining, self-doubting sort of way. Instead, I mean they pointed "at themselves" in the sense of, "There are traitors in our ranks. They must be ferreted out and destroyed!"This is the last stage in any paranoid illness. - The state of Alaska has released the last of Sarah Palin's whiny emails:
In an April 2009 email, she commiserated over a story indicating another ethics complaint was to be filed: "Unflippinbelievable ... I'm sending this because you can relate to the bullcrap continuation of the hell these people put the family through," she wrote to Ivy Frye, an aide during the first part of her term, and to Frank Bailey, another aide.
Later that day, in an email to her husband and two top aides, she wrote, referring to the same issue: "I can't take it any more." - A court has awarded Rielle Hunter custody of the sex tape of her and former lover, one-time presidential candidate John Edwards. The tape, along with any copies that Hunter discovers, must be destroyed in 30 days so it will presumably not make a debut on YouTube. The tape had been held by former Edwards campaign aide Andrew Young.
- Lego, the Danish toymaker that manufactures 19 billion colorful, plastic, snap-together bricks each year, is buying a one-third share of a 277-megawatt off-shore wind farm that will supply all the company's electricity through 2020.
- Rep. John Sullivan (R-Okla) says he's sorry "to anyone he offended" by his remarks about getting Senators to vote for the draconian Paul Ryan budget. In a speech in Bixby, he said: "You know but other than me going over there with a gun and holding it to their head and maybe killing a couple of them, I don’t think they’re going to listen unless they get beat." The First District Congressman was careful in his apology not to offend those who were not offended by his original comment.
- iran isn't building a nuclear bomb in the view of the authors of a still-classified 2010 National Intelligence Estimate circulated early last year. Some critics say that both the most recent NIE and its 2007 predecessor are mistaken, although they cite no direct evidence to support that view:
For now, U.S. military and intelligence officials say they don’t believe Iran’s leadership has made the decision to build a bomb.
“I think they are keeping themselves in a position to make that decision,” James R. Clapper Jr., director of National Intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 16. “But there are certain things they have not yet done and have not done for some time.” - Jeb Bush awakes from his public slumber to find Republican campaign rhetoric "troubling."
FRI FEB 24, 2012 AT 11:31 AM PST
Gas price rise has Republicans gleefully rubbing their palms in hopes of scamming voters
Percentage increases in year-over-year gasoline prices for the past 20 years
President Obama nailed it Thursday in his speech at the University of Miami:
“You can bet that since it’s an election year, [Republicans are] already dusting off their 3-point plan for $2 gas — and I’ll save you the suspense: Step one is to drill and step two is to drill. And then step three is to keep drilling,” he said. “We heard the same line in 2007 when I was running for President. We hear the same thing every year. We’ve heard the same thing for 30 years. Well, the American people aren’t stupid. They know that’s not a plan, especially since we’re already drilling. That’s a bumper sticker. It’s not a strategy to solve our energy challenge. That’s a strategy to get politicians through an election.”Indeed, many besides Republicans are taking note of the recent price rise and what that might mean come November. Somewhere, the speculation goes, there is a point at which the president, and the party which he heads, will take unacceptably large hits from voters convinced that the Democrats are at fault. What that price point might be is variously put at $4 a gallon (a price already to be found throughout California), $5 or somewhere north of there.
Newt Gingrich, one of the Republicans who the president says is "licking their chops" over the prospect of higher gasoline prices by election day, is promising $2-a-gallon gasoline when he enters the Oval Office. His plan is to do what has become one word: drillbabydrill. To step up domestic production more than the 8 percent it has already risen over the past few years. Run the price down by boosting supply that's supposedly hampered by "radical environmentalists" and their Democratic lackeys.
This just goes to show that the guy who thinks he's the smartest fellow in the GOP contest, if not the universe, doesn't understand the global economics of oil or the constraints on how much U.S. production can be had. Even if every square inch of public land from the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the warming tundra of northern Alaskan is pumped dry, the flow from U.S. wells will never again be enough to appreciably budge world prices much.
(Continue reading below the fold)
FRI FEB 24, 2012 AT 11:00 AM PST
Obama campaign and Super PAC, MoveOn, Michigan Dem Party all meddle in Michigan GOP contest
bykos
MoveOn hits Mitt Romney in Michigan this week:
Obama campaign hits Romney in Michigan this week:
Obama Super PAC hits Romney in Michigan this week:
Now, of course, none of those ads specifically urge people to vote for Rick Santorum. They don't need to. If you are casting a vote in Michigan, and it's not for Romney, it's going to be for Santorum (Paul and Gingrich won't rate).
Democrats know that if Romney loses Michigan, this thing will continue to drag out, causing more damage to the candidates and the broader GOP brand, bleeding their cash and giving them less time to recover in time for the general election. That's why they're spending big bucks to soften up Romney.
And while we've focused on getting Democrats to turn out (along with the Michigan Democratic Party), those ads have a different (but complimentary) purpose: to depress independent pro-Romney turnout. The numbers are stark:
"Among GOP voters [...] Santorum leads Romney by 41%. Among Independent voters, Romney leads Santorum by 30%.”If Democrats can use these negative ads to depress turnout among that insanely pro-Romney cohort, it makes it much harder for Romney to win the contest. It's a classic campaign tactic.The winner will be determined by which candidate does the best job getting their supporters to the polls.
The progressive effort to deliver a Santorum victory in Michigan is two-pronged—suppress pro-Romney voters and increase turnout among Democrats willing to further cast anti-Romney votes. The two approaches are complimentary because, ultimately, the goal is the same: a Romney loss in Michigan, and a GOP nomination contest that gets dragged out that much longer.
FRI FEB 24, 2012 AT 10:30 AM PST
Rick Santorum: Mitt Romney is a liberal, anti-NRA, pro-abortion socialist ally of Democrats
Nearly 48 hours later, Rick Santorum defends his wingnut credentials (Joshua Lott/Reuters)
"Mitt Romney has criticized me for taking one for the Republican team and we all know why, because Mitt Romney’s teammates are all Democrats," Santorum said in an emailed statement. "It's pretty clear what team Mitt Romney is on when he passed socialized medicine that included $50 dollar abortions -- bragged about not lining up with the NRA -- appointed liberal activist judges to the Massachusetts bench, and was hanging out at Planned Parenthood events celebrating the pro–choice agenda."Well, maybe if he'd remembered to say all that on Wednesday things would be different now. But you know what Rick Santorum's real problem was on Wednesday night? He didn't dress up like this guy:"No wonder working with a Republican President's team is foreign to Mitt Romney," Santorum said.
FRI FEB 24, 2012 AT 10:00 AM PST
Mitt Romney speech to nearly empty Ford Field roundly mocked on Twitter
"It's quite the venue for Romney's speech" @MaeveReston
those wide shots at the Romney Ford Field event aren't doing him any favors.— @rickklein via TweetDeck
So apparently football stadiums only carry sound when there are 60K people watching a game. Can barely here the crowd clap here in Detroit.— @EmilyABC via Seesmic
Romney thanks Ford Field for hosting: "I guess we had a hard time finding a large enough place to meet... and this certainly is."— @GarrettNBCNews via TweetDeck
"This is not exciting and barn-burning," Romney says in wind-up to his Detroit policy speech— @michaelpfalcone via web
After this Ford Field debacle, I want to Photoshop Mitt Romney speaking in other thinly populated areas.— @MattOrtega via TweetDeck
CNN breaks away. MSNBC talking over, Fox and Bloomberg TV not airing Romney speech.— @jeffzeleny via TweetDeck
Tomorrow, Mitt Romney will address the Arizona Economic Club in the Grand Canyon.— @adamsorensen via Tweetie for Mac
1,200 seats filled for Romney event at Ford Field. Spokesman for Detroit Economic Club said original hotel venue could only accommodate 700— @michaelpfalcone via web
Mitt Romney is expected to mimic Obama's 2008 trip to Berlin by delivering a foreign policy address in the sand dunes of Egypt.— @MattOrtega via TweetDeck
10:03 AM PT: Sorry, I couldn't resist one more hilarious photo of the scene in Detroit:
By the way, if you listened to the speech, it was as empty as the stadium—he didn't mention anything new, just the same old tired crap. Pure vapidity.
10:12 AM PT: Oh, and here was President Obama in Detroit on Labor Day 2011.
10:24 AM PT: Another great angle of #romneyfail, this time from Greg Sargent:
Here's a shot that shows the Romney speech didn't even fill up the folding chairs in front of the stage:http://t.co/...— @ThePlumLineGS via TweetDeck
FRI FEB 24, 2012 AT 09:30 AM PST
Rick Santorum is back on the ballot for the Indiana Republican primary
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum can count on being on Indiana's May 8 primary election ballot, thanks to a recount of his petition signatures in Marion County.Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul all successfully qualified in the Hoosier State, so the clown car will be full by the time Indiana's primary rolls around. Well, at least in theory: The election is not until May 8... and will we really still be in the thick of the GOP nominating contest at that late date? Old me (that is to say, one-month-ago me) would have said "no way." Now, I can only say, "who the hell knows!"The original tally showed he fell eight signatures short in the 7th Congressional District, which is entirely in Marion County. Candidates must collect the signatures of 500 registered voters in each of the nine congressional districts to be on the ballot.Santorum's campaign said it thought he had turned in hundreds more than necessary, including in the 7th District.On Thursday—one day before the Indiana Election Commission was to weigh challenges to ballot access by Santorum and other candidates—the Marion County Board of Voter Registration said Santorum had more than enough signatures for inclusion on the ballot.
FRI FEB 24, 2012 AT 09:00 AM PST
Newt Gingrich gives Rick Santorum some helpful debate advice
Gingrich's aides say they hope Santorum wins Michigan, but aren't offering any help (Scott Audette/Reuters)
“It was amazing to me in the debate last night, that he was attacking Rick Santorum for some indirect vote that funded Planned Parenthood when in fact Romneycare put by law Planned Parenthood on a board in the Romneycare system,” Gingrich said. “The Romney administration funded an abortion clinic for Planned Parenthood while he was governor. Little surprised Rick didn’t point that out.”Gee, if only Newt had known somebody sitting on the stage who could have said that, then maybe everything could have been different...
FRI FEB 24, 2012 AT 08:30 AM PST
The choice between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown on birth control couldn't be more clear
Elizabeth Warren on the campaign trail in New Bedford, MA (Elizabeth Warren/Facebook)
Washington is so out of touch with what’s happening to families across this country that the Senate is about to vote on an amendment that would allow any insurance company or any employer to claim a vague “moral conviction’’ as an excuse to deny you health care coverage. Here’s the really astonishing news: Senator Scott Brown is not only voting for this amendment, he is fighting to get it passed. [...]Warren points out that President Obama's measure includes a significant exemption for religious institutions, and that the head of the Catholic Health Association is fully satisfied with the accommodation—so under no reasonable standard is this about religious freedom.It is shocking that in 2012, Brown and his Republican colleagues would try to pass a law to threaten women’s access to birth control and other health care. Women all across this Commonwealth should have the right to use birth control if they want to. Giving corporate CEOs and insurance companies the power to dictate what health care women can and cannot get is just wrong. Those decisions should be up to women and their doctors.
Scott Brown, of course, tries to keep us in the dark about what the Blunt amendment actually does, because that's the only way to sell it. So if you listen to Brown, this is about "religious hospitals and charities." But the Blunt amendment isn't about religious hospitals and charities. It's about all employers. Brown calls that fact "a red herring."
But perhaps even more appalling than referring to an accurate characterization of what the bill he supports would do as "a red herring" is that Brown tries to wrap himself in the mantle of Ted Kennedy:
The legislation borrows language directly from Senator Kennedy, who in 1995 sponsored a bill that that provided an exemption to health care workers and facilities so they would not be required to provide “an item or service under a certified health plan’’ they found objectionable based on “religious belief or moral conviction.’’It's true! The words in quotation marks are included in both bills. But Kennedy's bill (PDF) said "A health professional or a health facility may not be required to provide an item or service under a certified health plan if the professional or facility objects to doing so on the basis of a religious belief or moral conviction." The Blunt amendment (PDF) exempts health plans from required "coverage of specific items or services" because:
‘‘providing coverage (or, in the case of a sponsor of a group health plan, paying for coverage) of such specific items or services is contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of the sponsor, issuer, or other entity offering the plan; or‘‘(ii) such coverage (in the case of individual coverage) is contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of the purchaser or beneficiary of the coverage.
Scott Brown is saying that this is in the spirit of Ted Kennedy because it takes language he applied to a narrowly delineated set of people and applies it to anyone with any involvement whatsoever in providing a health care plan, allowing anyone along the way to remove specific items or services from what is provided to the person ultimately covered by the plan, regardless of what that person wants or needs. I'm not going to follow his dubious lead by claiming to channel Kennedy, but as a person who can read, and has read the relevant sections of both bills, I can say that they do two very, very different things—and that you could equally say that a bill to completely repeal the Affordable Care Act "borrows language directly" from the Affordable Care Act because it, too, uses the words "a," "and," and "the."
FRI FEB 24, 2012 AT 08:00 AM PST
Mitt Romney's economic vision is as empty as Ford Field will be
Well here's a perfect symbol of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign: he's giving a speech on tax cuts for the wealthy today at the state-of-the-art 65,000 seat Ford Field ... but there's going to be 63,800 empty seats. After ditching three earlier plans to try to make the field look crowded, this (via Mark Halperin) is what they've come up with:
FRI FEB 24, 2012 AT 07:30 AM PST
Mitt Romney campaign adviser brags about destroying Rick Santorum
On Thursday, Mitt Romney celebrated his "gotcha" moments during Wednesday's debate
The thing that surprised me was that Romneyland didn't push back on Politico's characterization of Mitt Romney as an attack dog whose biggest strength is his ability to trip up his opponents. In fact, talking about how Romney handled Rick Santorum during Wednesday's debate, they bragged about it:
“To do last night effectively, you had to have done very careful research and then the candidate has to master the information and think through how and when to use it,” a campaign adviser said Thursday. “And the campaign has to remain disciplined around a message and a strategy.”That sort of boasting reminds me of The New York Times article published the weekend before Florida's primary in which Romney aides gleefully described how their campaign and their candidate had systematically destroyed Newt Gingrich. The thing that they'd forgotten, however, is that while they were effective in tearing down Gingrich, they had failed to build up their own candidate. The result? One week later, Rick Santorum trounced Mitt Romney in Minnesota, Colorado, and Missouri.
If Romney ends up winning in Michigan and Arizona on Tuesday, his campaign will certainly try to avoid the post-Florida narrative that he only won by destroying his opponents; that's why they scheduled today's speech on the economy at Ford Field, and that's why his campaign and Super PAC have made a big show about releasing positive ads. But as the campaign adviser acknowledged to Politico—and as anyone who watched Wednesday's debate could see with their plain eyes—Romney's entire game plan has been to destroy Rick Santorum. If Romney succeeds, the question will be whether Newt Gingrich has anything left in the tank. If Romney doesn't, he'll be running on fumes.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario