Daily Archives: June 14, 2011

June 14, 2011 · 5:37 PM

The GOP Debate

7 Republicans Square Off, 7 Months From First Vote

GOP debate play-by-play

Debate Swings Door Open for Perry, Closed For Palin

Fact Checking the Debate: NY Times

Fact Checking the Debate: Washington Post

Fact Checking the Debate: Politifact

Fact Check: Herman Cain’s Muslim comments

Politifact: drilling permits issued under obama; bachmann’s pants on fire

More debunking of GOP talking points

So… who won?

H/t: Randi Rhodes

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· 5:14 PM

Fox’s Bolling Issues Brief, Dishonest Apology For “Hoodlum[s]” In “The Hizzouse” Segment

Eric Bolling’s short apology comes way too late and didn’t cover a similar statement by him when the POTUS was on his trip to Europe. 

Media Matters

Eric Bolling apologized Monday night on Fox Business for his story saying that President Obama is hosting “hoodlum[s]” in “the hizzouse”:

BOLLING: One editorial note. On Friday, we did a story about the president meeting with the president of Gabon. We got a little fast and loose with the language, and we know it’s been interpreted as being disrespectful, and for that, I’m sorry. We did go a bit too far. More Follow the Money coming up in just a minute.

This is a dishonest apology for several reasons.

First, it’s simply not true that the problems on his Friday show consisted of him and his guests getting “a little fast and loose with the language.” Some of the most racially inflammatory language Bolling used on his Friday show was in the two teases for the segment, both of which were apparently scripted and accompanied by equally inflammatory images.

In the tease at the top of the show, he said, “Guess who’s coming to dinner? A dictator. Mr. Obama shares a laugh with one of Africa’s kleptocrats. It’s not the first time he’s had a hoodlum in the hizzouse.”

[...]

The intro to the segment itself, which lasted more than five minutes, also appeared to be scripted. In it, Bolling said this: “So what’s with all the hoods in the hizzy? A month after the White House hosted the rapper Common, who glorifies violence on cops, the president opened his doors to one of Africa’s most evil dictators. Here’s Ali Bongo, the Gabonese president, who’s been accused of human rights violations and plundering billions of his country’s dollars.”

Putting together multiple pieces of script that contain racially inflammatory language, two of which were accompanied by fairly elaborate graphics, is not “fast and loose.” The instance in which he goaded Fox Business reporter Sandra Smith into referring to the “White Hizzy” could perhaps be covered by that explanation, but that, too, seemed fairly considered.

Continue to images…

H/t Gilligan

Related Media Matters Links:

Neal Boortz: “We Got Too Damn Many Urban Thugs, Yo … We Need More Dead Thugs” In Atlanta

On ABC’s The View, Whoopi Goldberg Responds To Bolling’s “Hizzouse” Segment: “Not All Of Us Speak Like That”

 

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· 3:14 PM

Why Facebook lost 6 million U.S. users: 4 theories

This Week

The social networking giant reportedly lost quite a few friends in May. Market saturation, or the beginning of the end?

Facebook may be nearing 700 million users with a $100-billion IPO on the horizon, but all may not be well in Zuckerberg land. According to Inside Facebook, the social networking giant lost nearly 6 million users in the United States in May, along with 1.52 million in Canada and hundreds of thousands in the United Kingdom, Norway, and Russia. The company still managed to add 11.8 million new users worldwide last month, but its growth has been slowing significantly. What’s happening? Here, four theories:

1. Facebook has made as many friends as it can
Mark Zuckerberg and Co. may be “hitting a saturation point in key markets,” especially in the U.S., where roughly 50 percent of the population is already on Facebook, says Kent Bernhard Jr. at Portfolio. If that’s the case, the social network might not be able to reach Zuckerberg’s goal of 1 billion users without conquering China (and its strict online censorship).

2. People are sick of Facebook
“I think users are deleting their accounts because they… are burnt out,” says Lindsay Mannering at The Stir. Even Bill Gates, a Zuckerberg friend and Facebook investor, recently quit the social networking site, saying his friend requests had gotten “out of hand.” I don’t blame him. “Between the feeds and the friends, it’s too much… more of an obligation than a fun way to pass a few minutes.” No wonder people are logging off for good.

3. This is just a temporary dip
“Seasonal changes like college graduations, and other short-term factors, can influence numbers month to month and obscure what’s really happening,” says Eric Eldon at Inside Facebook. These May figures are certainly intriguing, but let’s not overreact. The long-term trends are the ones that really matter.

4. Other social networks are on the rise
It’s “worth noting” that Twitter and LinkedIn are gaining in many of the areas that Facebook saw big losses — namely the U.S. Canada, and the United Kingdom, says Robin Wauters at TechCrunch. But let’s not forget that “on a global level… Facebook is drawing more visitors than ever.”

 

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· 2:48 PM

House Republicans Cut Food Assistance For Low-Income Families While Protecting Azaleas

 

 

Ok, as a die-hard liberal, this sort of stuff really gets to me.  Does anyone in the GOP have a heart or even a conscious?

The Huffington Post

If you’re an azalea at the National Arboretum, you’re in luck — a Republican on the House Appropriations Committee is looking out for you. If you’re a woman, infant or child, however, you’re on your own.

Slipped into the FY 2012 agriculture appropriations bill that the House is expected to take up today is an unusual provision on page 13 requiring the National Arboretum to maintain a very specific portion of its azalea collection.

“The Committee directs the National Arboretum to maintain its National Boxwood Collection and the Glenn Dale Hillside portion of the Azalea Collection,” reads the bill. “The Committee encourages the National Arboretum to work collaboratively with supporters of the National Arboretum to raise additional funds to ensure the long-term viability of these and other important collections.”

While azaleas are being carefully tended to, the bill would cut $832 million from a program that provides food assistance to low-income mothers and children. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the reduction could result in as many as 475,000 people being turned away from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) if food prices continue to rise.

“Everyday people across the country leave their homes in search of work, only to return at the end of the day with more worries and less hope,” said Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.), the agriculture subcommittee’s ranking member. “At a time that people continue to struggle to make ends meet, Republicans want to cut funding to food programs that are helping put food on the tables of those most in need.”

Continue reading here…

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· 8:54 AM

Hackers Attack Senate Website

We live in an advancing technological age.   Sadly, it seems that internet privacy may truly be a thing of the past. 

The irony is that the U.S. Government doesn’t believe in privacy for its citizens (due to the war on terror) but reacts quite defensively when exposed for its hypocrisy through breaches of its security apparatus. 

 Meanwhile…

The Daily Beast

The U.S. Senate website was the latest target in a string of cyberattacks from Lulz Security, the hacker group that had previously compromised PBS and some Sony sites.

The hackers got into the servers’ public side but were not able to penetrate the firewall to reach private information, such as senators’ contact information.

“We don’t like the U.S. government very much,” Lulz Security said in its release of the information it obtained. “This is a small, just-for-kicks release of some internal data from Senate.gov—is this an act of war, gentlemen? Problem?”

 The reference is to a report that the U.S. government may consider cyberattacks acts of war; however, the report referred specifically to attacks from foreign governments, not loose-knit hacking groups like Lulz Security.

Read it at Reuters

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· 8:21 AM

Romney, Bachmann win; Americans lose

Salon – Joan Walsh

Nominal GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney started the day with a direct hit on President Obama, a stark, disturbing ad attacking the president for responding to May’s jump to a 9.1 percent employment rate by saying “There are always going to be bumps on the way to prosperity.”

In the ad, Romney’s team assembled a multiracial group of Americans that looked a lot like the Democratic base: blacks, Latinos, Asians, young people, recent college graduates and a brave-looking single mother, along with working and middle class white men, maybe some of them union members, another pillar of the base. All of them tell us they’re not” bumps on the way to prosperity;” they carry placards with brief descriptions of the story behind their joblessness and tell Obama, “I am an American.”

As Andrew Leonard said this morning, Romney’s description of our nation’s economic problems was spot on, but there was no prescription to show he’d do a better job than Obama has in solving them.

That summed up Romney’s performance at the first major GOP presidential primary debate [last night], sponsored by CNN. Romney took the lead in describing the country’s economic woes, pointing to the 20 million people who are unemployed, underemployed, or who have stopped looking and the millions of Americans still facing foreclosure. But in the debate he had to at least fumble at some prescriptions, and he failed.

He still stood head and shoulders above the other candidates. I’m going to give Tim Pawlenty credit for trying to grope toward some kind of honesty about the plight of the American worker; he flicked at concerns about the fairness of trade deals, concerns that some union leaders share. But when push came to shove, Pawlenty showed he misunderstands the problem, because he made labor unions the scapegoat. (Pawlenty also hurt himself badly when John King urged him to share his Sunday show trashing of Romney – he labeled the health care reform bill “ObamneyCare,” since Obama has, in an act of well-deserved political sadism, lavished praise on Romney for the law, but he wouldn’t repeat his criticism, man to man, with Romney in the room. The “wimp factor” headlines write themselves.)

Continue reading here…

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· 12:05 AM

Herman Cain Says He’s Only Afraid Of ‘Violent’ Muslims

It appears Herman Cain has the GOP talking points down to a science by showing total disregard for the Constitutional amendments that they don’t like, such as  the 14th Amendment which states:

  • State and federal citizenship for all persons regardless of race both born or naturalized in the United States was reaffirmed.
  • No state would be allowed to abridge the “privileges and immunities” of citizens.
  • No person was allowed to be deprived of life, liberty,or property without “due process of law.”
  • No person could be denied “equal protection of the laws.”

TPMDC

Clarifying his earlier claim that Muslims do not belong in government, Herman Cain said in the New Hampshire Republican debate Monday night that he only meant the bad ones.

“You have peaceful Muslims, then you have militant Muslims, those that are trying to kill us,” Cain said. “I was thinking about the ones that were trying to kill us.”

Cain raised eyebrows in March when he said he would not appoint Muslims to his hypothetical White House cabinet out of fears they would “gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government.” He said he still would grill any potential Muslim candidates on whether they were properly pro-American.

“I would ask certain questions …” he said. “It’s not a litmus test. It’s making sure we have people committed to the constitution first in order for them to work effectively in the administration.”

His words drew a pointed rebuttal from Romney, who bluntly said the threat from “Sharia law” that Cain and other GOP candidates have played up is exaggerated. He added that he would freely appoint Americans of any religion.

“First of all, of course, we’re not going to have Sharia law,” Romney said. “That’s not going to happen. We have a constitution and we follow the law. No, I think we recognize that the people of all faiths are welcome in this country, our nation was founded on a principal of religious tolerance. That’s in fact why some of the early patriots came to this country and we treat people with respect…with their religious persuasion.”

Watch:

 

 

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