Daily Archives: November 14, 2012

November 14, 2012 · 7:49 PM

ROMNEY GOES 47% AGAIN!

Can we say…sore loser?

The NY Times

A week after losing the election to President Obama, Mitt Romney blamed his overwhelming electoral loss on what he said were big “gifts” that the president had bestowed on loyal Democratic constituencies, including young voters, African-Americans and Hispanics.

In a conference call on Wednesday afternoon with his national finance committee, Mr. Romney said that the president had followed the “old playbook” of wooing specific interest groups — “especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people,” Mr. Romney explained — with targeted gifts and initiatives.

“In each case they were very generous in what they gave to those groups,” Mr. Romney said.

“With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest, was a big gift,” he said. “Free contraceptives were very big with young college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.”

The president’s health care plan, he added, was also a useful tool in mobilizing African-American and Hispanic voters. Though Mr. Romney won the white vote with 59 percent, according to exit polls, minorities coalesced around the president in overwhelming numbers — 93 percent of blacks and 71 percent of Hispanics voted to re-elect Mr. Obama.

“You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity, I mean, this is huge,” he said. “Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group.”

In the 20-minute call —which also featured an appearance by Neil Newhouse, the campaign’s pollster, Spencer Zwick, the national finance chairman, and Mason Fink, the finance director — Mr. Romney was by turns disappointed and pragmatic, expressing his frustration that he’d failed to defeat Mr. Obama on Election Day.

“I’m very sorry that we didn’t win,” he said on the call. “I know that you expected to win, we expected to win, we were disappointed with the result, we hadn’t anticipated it, and it was very close but close doesn’t count in this business.”

He continued: “And so now we’re looking and saying, ‘O.K., what can we do going forward?’ But frankly we’re still so troubled by the past, it’s hard to put together our plans from the future.”

He added half-jokingly that the close-knit group, which excelled in fund-raising but was ultimately unable to propel Mr. Romney into the Oval Office, could even help with “perhaps the selection of a future nominee — which, by the way, will not be me.”

Continue reading here…

 

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· 4:06 PM

Obama Defends Susan Rice Against ‘Outrageous’ McCain, Graham Attack

As Ezra Kline noted on Facebook:

Obama’s defense of Susan Rice strongly reminded me of this scene from “The American President.” “You want a character debate, Bob? You better stick with me, ’cause Sydney Ellen Wade is way out of your league.”

I love this President’s tenacity and resolve.  Basically he’s letting his GOP haters become his motivation for moving forward on his plans regardless of the same old tired intimidation tactics.

I guess they didn’t get the memo: It’s a new day and your ideas are as tired and stale as your party.

TPM LiveWire

President Obama on Wednesday defended Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a possible replacement for Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, against criticism from Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on the Benghazi attacks in Libya.

“If Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham want to go after somebody, they should go after me,” Obama told reporters at the White House. “I’m happy to have that discussion with them. But for them to go after the U.N. ambassador? Who had nothing to do with Benghazi? To besmirch her reputation? It’s outrageous.”

He further added that if the senators are going after Rice “because they think she’s an easy target,” “[t]hen they’ve got a problem with me.”

Graham and McCain objected to any talk of Rice as secretary of state at a press conference on the Hill earlier on Wednesday, with Sen. Graham saying she is “so disconnected from reality that I don’t trust her.” McCain maintained that they would “do whatever is in our power,” alluding to a filibuster, to block Rice should Obama decide to go forth with the nomination.

Moments after Obama spoke, Graham released a statement doubling down on his objection to Rice:

“Mr. President, don’t think for one minute I don’t hold you ultimately responsible for Benghazi.  I think you failed as Commander in Chief before, during, and after the attack.

“We owe it to the American people and the victims of this attack to have full, fair hearings and accountability be assigned where appropriate. Given what I know now, I have no intention of promoting anyone who is up to their eyeballs in the Benghazi debacle.”

Watch the video below:

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· 1:17 PM

CNN host rips Rep. Chaffetz: You don’t represent Grover Norquist

Christine Romans screenshot

Every now and then some of the CNN News hosts cast aside their Fox News wannabe façade, the following is one such instance…

The Raw Story

CNN host Christine Romans chided Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) on Tuesday for refusing to raise tax rates on the rich to reduce the federal deficit, telling him that his job was not to represent anti-tax activist Grover Norquist.

During a discussion about the so-called fiscal cliff, CNN host Soledad O’Brien asked Chaffetz if Congress should raise taxes for people who are making more than $250,000 annually.

“That’s not something I think that we should be doing,” he responded. “I don’t believe we should be increasing the tax rate. I like what Speaker Boehner said and said, look, let’s work on closing these loopholes and deductions. That is common ground. There’s no reason why we can’t come together.”

Chaffetz said Republicans were only opposed to raising tax rates, not cutting tax deductions.

“You signed Grover Norquist’s pledge, I’m going to assume, because pretty much every Republicans congressman did,” O’Brien noted, asking if he was willing to rip up the pledge in order to compromise on a budget deal with Democrats.

“I do not intend to do that. I want to fight for the principles I believe in. I, too, was elected, and I think that’s part of the give and take,” Chaffetz said.

“But Grover Norquist did not elect you. Your constituents elected you,” Romans interjected. “You don’t represent for Grover Norquist. You represent your constituents and the American people.”

But Chaffetz insisted his primarily loyal was to his constituents.

“I didn’t sign it because I was trying to please Grover Norquist,” he remarked. “I signed it because I believe it. I don’t believe that we are one good tax increase away from prosperity in this nation. I really do believe that we have to rein in spending, we’ve got to broaden the base, lower the rate and get this country working again.”

Watch video, courtesy of CNN…

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· 11:23 AM

Fox News Goes Full Metal Tin Foil Hat with Claim Obama Blackmailed Petraeus

Apparently Fox Noise (Fox News) has doubled down with their conspiracy theories about President Obama and their Benghazi fantasies in which they envision an impeached POTUS by dismissing the accusations about their “media bubble” and other such descriptions by  mainstream media types.

These people will not give up until President Obama is out of office. Heck, even when his next four years have been completed, they will continue to try to discredit his record in perpetuum…

Politicususa

Fox News has taken their conspiracy claims for impeachment to new crazy places by claiming that Obama blackmailed Petraeus in order cover up Benghazi.

Here is the video from Media Matters…

Steve Doocy said, ‘Clinton and Petraeus both have got to testify. That’s just all there is. Otherwise the investigation would not be an investigation. It would not be complete.  Also, we told you earlier that Bill Kristol had sources in the testimony that Petraeus gave on September fourteenth, and apparently Mr. Petraeus said, do you want the party line, or do you want the real truth…To some it does look like you know, was he going along? Was he doing the what’s in the best interests of national security, or was he, and some feel this, was he being blackmailed by the White House to toe the company line? Those are the things that can only be found out if you ask him directly.”

This has all the hallmarks of a Fox News conspiracy theory. Message delivered by the morning propaganda team at Fox and Friends? Check. The use of the phrases to some it does look like, and some feel this? Check. The absolute absence of any facts? Check. Anonymous sources from fellow News Corp employees? Check.

In case it wasn’t obvious where this is going, Rush Limbaugh explicitly stated it yesterday on his radio show, “And this Benghazi story, it finally has legs, lots of legs. Have you seen ‘em in Tampa? Broadbeam, Broadwell, whatever her name is. You know, the one good thing, folks, about all of this is that a sex scandal might make some people finally hear about Benghazi, because the media is all over this. It is a sex story that they just can’t ignore. And even the lowest of the low-information voters might finally hear about what happened in Benghazi because of this. That’s why I said, you know, words and policy, we kind of exhausted it. We’re just gonna have to wait for events to overtake the regime.”

The right is hoping that the sex scandal will hook the American people, and then they will be outraged when they learn about Benghazi.

The right is still clinging on their delusion that they can take Obama down if the American people learn the “truth” about Obama. To the absolute surprise of no one, the far right has responded to Obama’s reelection by redoubling their efforts to destroy him. The right wing media is trying to invent a connection between Petraeus and Benghazi because they still believe that Benghazi is their golden ticket to Obama impeachment.

Impeachment is what this is all about. The right wing media is trying to string together enough random facts to give the House Republicans “cause” for impeachment. This Petraeus/Benghazi/Obama conspiracy theory is the deepest manifestation yet of the right’s collective mental illness over the defeat of Mitt Romney.

These people really believed that the polls were skewed, and that they were going to win. They are dreaming of impeachment, because for them the election isn’t over. They are still looking for a way to win.

They have not learned a thing from the 2012 election.

The only that has changed after Obama’s election is that the right is even more obsessed with the destruction of President Obama.

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· 9:38 AM

Audio of Lee Atwater’s infamous 1981 interview on the Southern Strategy unearthed

This might be old news to some of you, but many have no idea just how insidious the GOP has been (for many years) about race and politics.  The following audio was found by the same guy that gave us the Romney 47% tape, James Carter IV.

Democratic Underground

Poppy Bush’s top operative and Karl Rove’s mentor spells out the Republican plan to win the votes of southern racists for a generation.

Keep this one in mind any time Hannity, Coulter or any GOP hack tries to claim the GOP was really the party of civil rights.

More background on this at The Nation:

The back-story goes like this. In 1981, Atwater, after a decade as South Carolina’s most effective Republican operative, was working in Ronald Reagan’s White House when he was interviewed by Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. Lamis published the interview without using Atwater’s name in his 1984 book The Two-Party South. Fifteen years later—and eight years after Atwater passed away from cancer—Lamis republished the interview in another book using Atwater’s name. For seven years no one paid much attention. Then the New York Times’ Bob Herbert, a bit of an Atwater obsessive, quoted it in an October 6, 2005 column—then five more times over the next four years.

Those words soon became legend—quoted in both screeds (The GOP-Haters Handbook, 2007) and scholarship(Corey Robin’s 2011 classic work of political theory, The Reactionary Mind). Google Books records its use in ten books published so far this year alone. Curious about the remarks’ context, Carter, who learned Lamis had died in 2012, asked his widow if she would consider releasing the audio of the interview, especially in light of the use of race-baiting dog-whistles (lies about Obama ending work requirements for welfare; “jokes” about his supposed Kenyan provenance) in the Romney presidential campaign. Renée Lamis, an Obama donor, agreed that very same night. For one thing she was “upset,” Carter told me, that “for some time, conservatives believed husband made up the Atwater interview.” For another, she was eager to illustrate that her husband’s use of the Atwater quote was scholarly, not political.

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· 9:03 AM

Four Great Political Scandal Movies

John Travolta and Adrian Lester in Primary Colors.

Full disclosure…

I’m a political movie fanatic so this article caught my eye and I wanted to share it with any fellow political movie devotees out there.

Granted, this list consists of political scandal movies but that’s ok as long as politics is a part of the main storyline.

Slate

Since word broke on Friday that CIA director David Petraeus was resigning his post because of an affair with biographer Paula Broadwell, the news cycle has whiplashed from one theory to another, trying to figure out what exactly this scandal is about: Is it about classified information? A scheming professional climber? Proof that the FBI is abusing its power to investigate the private lives of public figures? An example of military culture gone awry? As the who, what, where, and whys continue to unravel and we all sweat to keep up, here are four movies that go a long way toward explaining the sexual culture of Washington and the powerful men who live it.

1. The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979): A must-see, if only for the sight of Alan Alda and Meryl Streep in bed together, The Seduction of Joe Tynan shows just how sexy shared interests can be. Alda plays Joe Tynan, a senator who’s been tapped to lead the campaign against a conservative Supreme Court nominee, raising his political career prospects. But he risks everything for an affair with Karen Traynor (Streep), a smart lobbyist, that begins when they’re out on the road together, inspecting wetlands. What’s sticks with you isn’t just Tynan’s stupidity—though there’s that too—but also how much fun he’s having with Traynor. We tend to think of affairs as furtive, desperate things. But despite how sordid they can seem when exposed, The Seduction of Joe Tynan is a reminder of why people, particularly those with lots of power but little in the way of amusement, fall into affairs in the first place.

2. Primary Colors (1998): Based on Joe Klein’s novel of the same name, Primary Colors follows the peccadillo-plagued campaign for president of a southern governor named Jack Stanton (John Travolta, in one of the best performances of his career), otherwise known as Bill Clinton. Rather than trying to understand the appetites of powerful men, the movie is more interested in how people enable those men and those appetites, whether they are aides lying to themselves about their candidate’s transgressions, or actively covering them up in service of some perceived greatness. When Libby Holden, the long-time friend of Jack Stanton played by Kathy Bates, mourns that “No one ever calls you on it. Because you’re so completely fucking special … Me too. Me the worst,” she’s articulating what it’s like to believe in someone so deeply, and to have that faith betrayed.

3. Heartburn (1986): Not strictly a political scandal movie, Heartburn is the movie adaptation of Nora Ephron’s novelization of her marriage to Carl Bernstein—a marriage that was broken up by his perpetual philandering. But if you’ve been watching l’affair Petraeus-Broadwell unfold and marveling at how small the world of the scandal seems—Broadwell’s emails were investigated after she harassed a friend of Petraeus, Tampa hostess Jill Kelley, who was herself exchanging flirty emails with Petraeus’s successor in Afghanistan—this is the movie for you. As Rachel Samstat (Meryl Streep again) navigates life in Washington with her journalist husband Mark Forman (Jack Nicholson), the city starts to feel more and more claustrophobic with every encounter Rachel has at a Georgetown supermarket or at the beauty salon, where she bolts out mid-perm. I can only imagine that the social bubble of the military elite feels equally incestuous, and is equally capable of driving everyone a little crazy.

4. Dick (1999): Particularly if you’re of the view that the FBI, which has its own problems with an agent who sent shirtless photos of himself to Jill Kelley, dramatically overstepped its bounds in investigating Broadwell and Petraeus, watch Dick. It’s both one of the great, underrated Washington movies, and a brilliantly mean portrait of powerful men working themselves into a flop sweat. After two teenaged girls (Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst) accidentally witness the Watergate break-in, the Nixon administration goes to great lengths to placate them, even making them Checkers’ official dog walkers. But when the two turn out to be good for more than worshipping the president and hooking up the Secret Service with magic brownies, the administration turns on them. The lesson? The less time important men spend on teenage girls and middle-aged mistresses, the better for the nation.

 

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· 8:37 AM

What is the “fiscal cliff” everyone keeps talking about?

Thanks   from AMERICAblog for this very informative article.

 

Quick hits again — this is for your reference. There’s so much talk about the “fiscal cliff” that I thought some orientation would be in order.

(1) The actual “cliff” — such as it is — is a supposedly catastrophic set of budget cuts and tax increases. It includes a combo of the expiration of the Bush–Obama Tax Cuts of 2010, the kick-in of the forced “sequester” of budget funds, plus anything else they can cram in, like the extension of the debt ceiling, the deadline for which kicks in somewhere in 2013. They (the NeoLibs and MoveCons working together) will make this as complex as possible, so you can enjoy the “win” — pennies from billionaire heaven — and forget the losses — reduction of the safety net forever.

For more on what’s involved in the sequester, see this Yahoo explanation. Ignore the early-paragraph pimping of the badness and scan down for the detail.

(2) The name — The idea of a cliff is something you don’t want to go over. Keep that in mind; the fiscal cliff is a “very bad thing” according to deficit hawks.

(3) The plan — The fiscal cliff was designed by deficit hawks to force big reductions to the federal budget that they thought were needed.

You read me right. Read those last two paragraphs again, (2) and (3). Note the contradiction? Deficit hawks designed the combo of cliffdeadlines and sequesters, then want you to run screaming from it. Why would a serious deficit hawk run screaming from forced deficit reduction?

Answer: There are no serious deficit hawks in Washington; just serious safety net killers. The “fiscal cliff” wasn’t designed to force budget changes. It was designed to force scary budget changes as a cover for safety net reductions.

Paul Krugman has also noticed the contradiction and has more. Do click and read. Here’s a taste (my emphasis throughout):

The fiscal cliff poses an interesting problem for self-styled deficit hawks. They’ve been going on and on about how the deficit is a terrible thing; now they’re confronted with the possibility of a large reduction in the deficit, and have to find a way to say that this is a bad thing.

Here’s more from James Fallows, furrowing the same ground (h/t digby):

That the looming debt and deficit crisis is fake is something that, by now, even the most dim member of Congress must know. The combination of hysterical rhetoric, small armies of lobbyists and pundits, and the proliferation of billionaire-backed front groups with names like the “Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget” is not a novelty in Washington. It happens whenever Big Money wants something badly enough.

Big Money has been gunning for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for decades – since the beginning of Social Security in 1935. The motives are partly financial: As one scholar once put it to me, the payroll tax is the “Mississippi of cash flows.” Anything that diverts part of it into private funds and insurance premiums is a meal ticket for the elite of the predator state.

The “elite of the predator state” — couldn’t have characterized Our Betters any better myself.

Yours in good information,

GP

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· 12:38 AM

Seen On The Internet (…and I’m still laughing!)

H/t: Teabonics

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