Daily Archives: November 28, 2012

It Gets Worse for Mitt Romney as He is Named the Least Influential Person of 2012

Oh well, if one acts despicable their entire adult life, this is what might happen…

PoliticusUSA

Apparently, Mitt Romney hasn’t hit rock bottom yet. Romney has gone from being one of only two men vying to be president to being named the least influential person of 2012 by GQ.

Mitt Romney beat out such luminaries as Amanda Bynes, Jerry Sandusky’s lawyer, Lance Armstrong, Madonna, and George Zimmerman to win the title of GQ’s Least Influential Person of 2012.

Here is how GQ described Romney, “Was anyone inspired by Mitt Romney? Did anyone vote enthusiastically for Mitt Romney? Of course not. Voting for Romney is like hooking up with the last single person at the bar at 4 a.m. The only successful thing he did this year was embody every black stand-up comedian’s impression of a white person. Thank God the election’s over. No more endless photos of Mitt staring winsomely off-camera with that attempted smile on his face. No more glaring campaign mishaps week after week after week. No more labored media efforts to make him look like anything other than Sheldon Adelson’s pampered money Dumpster.”

At first, I wasn’t sure if I agreed with this reasoning. I mean Romney did manage to become one of the two finalists to be the next President of the United States of America. That has to make him more influential than Amanda Bynes, right?

Not really. Mitt Romney spent six years of his life running for president. In those six years can you name one original idea or policy proposal that he came up with? Just one. You can’t, because Mitt Romney spent nearly a decade planning and running for president without adding a single new idea to our national discourse. Some people called Romney an empty suit, but his problem was an empty mind.

Then, there were the gaffes. Mitt Romney’s self inflicted wounds were so severe that he made Sarah Palin look like Stephen Hawking.

Romney spent the entire 2012 campaign being the least popular nominee in modern American political history. Not only was Romney completely devoid of ideas, but people felt historic levels of dislike for him. One of the great oddities of Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign was that the more voters saw of Romney, the less they liked him. (At this point Republicans will point to the October public opinion polls as proof that Romney was liked, but as we found out on Election Day, the national polls were overestimating the Republican makeup of the electorate.) The writing was on the wall in state polls of places like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Romney remained more disliked than liked.

Mitt Romney was such a turn off to voters that his political convention actually gave his opponent a bounce in the polls.

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Teacher reprimanded for writing “You can’t be a Democrat & go to heaven”

Slate

A complaint was filed against a Kentucky teacher for writing the message on her class whiteboard

The mother of a student  in Kentucky filed a complaint with the Education Professional Standards Board after her teacher wrote ”You can’t be a Democrat & go to heaven” on the classroom whiteboard.

Kendra Baker, a teacher at South Laurel County High School, wrote the message, reportedly a comment by another student, shortly after the election.

From the Lexington Herald-Leader, Mary Gilbert, who filed the complaint, had a daughter in Baker’s psychology class:

“I feel like she was bullied by a teacher,” Gilbert said of her daughter.

Gilbert said she filed a complaint against Baker with the state Education Professional Standards Board, which issues credentials to teachers.

“She wrote it on her own, and she wanted to write it on the board.  She realized it was inappropriate,” Superintendent Doug Bennett said in a statement on Monday, the Herald-Leader reports.

 

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Supreme Court Inaction Boosts Right To Record Police Officers

Score another one for democracy…

The Huffington Post

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court  declined to review a decision by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocking the enforcement of an Illinois eavesdropping law. The broadly written law — the most stringent in the country — makes it a felony to make an audio recording of someone without their permission, punishable by four to 15 years in prison.

Many states have similar “all-party consent” law, which mean one must get the permission of all parties to a conversation before recording it. But in all of those states — except for Massachusetts and Illinois — the laws include a provision that the parties being recorded must have a reasonable expectation of privacy for it to be a crime to record them.

The Illinois law once included such a provision, but it was removed by the state legislature in response to an Illinois Supreme Court ruling that threw out the conviction of a man accused of recording police from the back of a squad car. That ruling found that police on the job have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

The Illinois and Massachusetts laws have been used to arrest people who attempt to record on-duty police officers and other public officials. In one of the more notorious cases, Chicago resident Tiawanda Moore was arrested in 2010 when she attempted to use her cell phone to record officers in a Chicago police station.

Moore had come to the station to report an alleged sexual assault by a Chicago cop, and says she became frustrated when internal affairs officers allegedly bullied her and attempted to talk her out of filing the report. Moore was eventually acquitted.

The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is planning a police accountability project in Chicago that will involve recording police while they’re on duty. The organization wanted to be sure its employees and volunteers wouldn’t be charged with felonies.

The 7th Circuit Court found a specific First Amendment right to record police officers. It’s the second federal appeals court to strike down a conviction for recording police. In August 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that a man wrongly arrested for recording cops could sue the arresting officers for violating his First Amendment rights.

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