Tag Archives: David Corn

April 25, 2013 · 6:47 PM

Mother Jones: Frank Luntz Calls Right-Wing Talk Radio ‘Problematic’ For GOP

I would agree that right-wing talk radio is an Achilles heel for the GOP but they have bigger problems than that.  

They have an immigration problem, a gun problem, a people of color problem and a “stupid party” problem.  Not to mention their anti-abortion legislation problems.  Also the fact that the Tea Party won’t allow the GOP any amount of compromise not only stifles our government, it stifles the party as well.

Yep, what the GOP has…is a bad image problem.

TPM Livewire

GOP strategist Frank Luntz went off the record before a group of college Republicans earlier this month at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss the negative impact he believes right-walk talk radio has had on the GOP, Mother Jones reported Thursday.

“And they get great ratings, and they drive the message, and it’s really problematic,” Luntz said of right-wing talk-radio programs, according to a recording of the event. Luntz added that talk radio has been especially damaging to Sen. Marco Rubio’s immigration reform efforts.

“He’s getting destroyed,” Luntz said, “by Mark Levin, by Rush Limbaugh, and a few others. He’s trying to find a legitimate, long-term effective solution to immigration that isn’t the traditional Republican approach, and talk radio is killing him. That’s what’s causing this thing underneath. And too many politicians in Washington are playing coy.”

According to Mother Jones’ piece, written by David Corn, Luntz asked the audience to allow him to speak off the record, prompting one college newspaper reporter to switch off his device. But another student, Aakash Abbi, captured the sound bite on his iPhone.

Corn has built a reputation reporting on surreptitious recordings, starting with Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments and continuing with a secretly recorded Mitch McConnell campaign strategy meeting.

Listen to the audio and read Corn’s full piece here.

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February 19, 2013 · 6:13 AM

MOTHER JONES REPORTER WINS POLK FOR ROMNEY STORY

Mitt Romney

David Corn is also an MSNBC contributor and the co-author of the book Hubris…

Mother Jones

How is MoJo Washington Bureau Chief David Corn like Edward R. Murrow, Carl Bernstein, David Halberstam, Gay Talese, Fred Friendly, I.F. Stone, and Walter Cronkite? So many ways really, but the most notable today is that they have all won a George Polk Award, one of the most prestigious honors in journalism. Corn is the winner in the political reporting category for the 47 percent story—his revelation of a video documenting Mitt Romney’s remarks at a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser that 47 percent of Americans were “dependent upon the government” and would never “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.“

The Polk award, established in 1949 to honor a CBS correspondent murdered while covering the Greek Civil War, is given each year by Long Island University; this year’s announcement commends Corn for the “years of high-impact journalism that helped lead him to the source of the recording,” and for the “persistent digging and careful negotiation” that made the story possible. Other winners include the staff of Bloomberg News and the New York Times‘ David Barboza for uncovering corruption among China’s elite; a team of McClatchy correspondents (including former MoJo contributor David Enders) covering the war in Syria; Sarah Stillman for her New Yorker piece on teen informants; Ryan Gabrielson of California Watch for a story on abuses in state clinics for the disabled; and the Frontline team behind the documentary “Money, Power, and Wall Street.” For David and all of us at Mother Jones, it’s a capstone for an amazing year and thrilling recognition for a project that has been widely credited with changing the course of the campaign.

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December 20, 2012 · 12:29 AM

Man Behind “47 Percent” Video Opens His Own Research Firm

BuzzFeed

Jimmy Carter’s grandson turns his big scoop into a career. He’s already taken down another Republican with a hidden-camera video.

The freelance researcher who became a minor campaign celebrity after unearthing the now-infamous video of Mitt Romney railing against 47 percent of Americans at a private fundraiser has used his political fame to start his own opposition research firm.

When the researcher, James Carter IV, first saw the secretly recorded footage of Romney in August, he immediately identified it as a bombshell, and sent it to David Corn, a Mother Jones reporter with whom he had worked in the past. When the magazine published the scoop — headline: SECRET VIDEO: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters” — Corn received a solo byline, with Carter getting a modest mention at the foot of the post: “Research assistance: James Carter.”

Corn would later turn what his magazine called “the scoop of the decade” into a HarperCollins e-book, which he titled, 47 Percent: Uncovering the Romney Video That Rocked the 2012 Election. Carter is thanked in the acknowledgements for “his diligent pursuit of the source for the Romney fundraising video and for introducing the two of us,” writes Corn. “It was a consequential hook-up.”

It was, in fact, Carter who found the video, researched Romney fundraisers, identified the likely location and date of the one featured in the video, and convinced the source of the footage through a series of Twitter direct messages to hand it over to Corn.

“[Corn] got a lot of the credit for it, and that’s fine — that’s the way it had always worked,” Carter told BuzzFeed, adding, “I was perfectly fine with it. I’m the research guy, and he was the reporter and publicist.”

Continue reading…

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September 18, 2012 · 1:04 AM

“Today, Mitt Romney Lost the Election…”

The title of this post is from Bloomberg View, the editorial arm of Bloomberg.com…

Bloomberg View - By Josh Barro

You can mark my prediction now:  A secret recording from a closed-door Mitt Romney  fundraiser, released today by David Corn at Mother Jones, has killed Mitt Romney’s campaign for president.

On the tape, Romney explains that his electoral strategy involves writing off nearly half the country as unmovable Obama voters. As Romney explains, 47 percent of Americans “believe that they are victims.” He laments: “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

So what’s the upshot? “My job is not to worry about those people,” he says. He also notes, describing President Obama’s base, “These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax.”

This is an utter disaster for Romney.

Romney already has trouble relating to the public and convincing people he cares about them. Now, he’s been caught on video saying that nearly half the country consists of hopeless losers.

Romney has been vigorously denying President Obama’s claims that his tax plan would raise taxes on the middle class. Now, he’s been caught on video suggesting that low- and middle-income Americans are undertaxed.

(That one is especially problematic given the speculation about what’s on Mitt’s unreleased pre-2010 tax returns.)

Corn tells us there are more embarrassing moments on segments of the video he hasn’t released yet. Romney jokes that he’d be more likely to win the election if he were Hispanic. He makes some awkward comments about whether he was born with a “silver spoon” in his mouth.

But those are survivable. The really disastrous thing is the clip about “victims,” and the combination of contempt and pity that Romney shows for anyone who isn’t going to vote for him.

Romney is the most opaque presidential nominee since Nixon, and people have been reduced to guessing what his true feelings are. This video provides an answer: He feels that you’re a loser. It’s not an answer that wins elections.

(Josh Barro is lead writer for the Ticker. E-mail him and follow him on Twitter.)

Read more breaking commentary from Bloomberg View at the Ticker.

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July 11, 2012 · 5:42 PM

No, Romney Didn’t Leave Bain in 1999

No, Romney Didn’t Leave Bain in 1999

Talking Points Memo Editor’s Blog

A central element of the 2012 campaign cycle has become just when Mitt Romney left Bain Capital. The Romney campaign says he left in early 1999 — in time to get him off the hook for some controversial investments. Factcheck.org backs up Mitt while David Corn and the Obama campaign have brought forward numerous pieces of documentary evidence indicating he didn’t leave until a couple years later.

Now here’s even more evidence that he didn’t leave in 1999 as he now claims.

The gist of the disagreement comes down to this: There’s no question that numerous public filings and some contemporaneous press references say Romney was still running things at Bain after 1999. But his campaign insists that whatever securities filings may have said, in practice, he was so busy running the 2002 Winter Olympics that he actually had no role at Bain after early 1999. That’s possible in theory. But there’s no evidence for it besides self-interested claims by Romney. And there’s plenty of documentary evidence to the contrary. After all, what you tell the SEC is really supposed to be true.

But here’s the thing. I’ve found yet more instances where Romney made declarations to the SEC that he was still involved in running Bain after February 1999. To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet noted these.

The documents go into different aspects of Romney’s ownership of various Bain and Bain related assets. But in both Romney had to say what he currently did for a living.

Here are two SEC filings from July 2000 and February 2001 in which Romney lists his “principal occupation” as “Managing Director of Bain Capital, Inc.”

image content

Romney’s argument is that it doesn’t matter what he said on these SEC filings. Whatever they say, he really wasn’t at Bain anymore. But absent of any evidence, how is it that anyone can be expected to disregard what Mitt actually told the SEC at the time?

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July 27, 2011 · 10:13 AM

The Debt Showdown: The GOP’s “Blank Check” Lie

Mother Jones‘ David Corn seems to “get it”.   The GOP is full of crap…

Mother Jones

What happens when a political party taints a critical national debate with a falsehood? Not much.

What does the news media do when a critical national debate is tainted by a lie? Not a whole lot.

During the debt ceiling showdown, the Republicans have clearly calculated that an effective charge to hurl at President Barack Obama and the Democrats is that the president, by asking Congress to raise the debt ceiling (which used to be a routine maneuver for Capitol Hill), is requesting a “blank check” for government spending.

In his response to Obama’s speech on Monday evening, House Speaker John Boehner claimed that Obama “wants a blank check” for a spending binge that is “sapping the drive of our people.” Earlier in the day, Boehner slammed Sen. Harry Reid’s last-ditch debt plan, which the White House supports, as a “blank check.” On Monday morning, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor issued a statement: “We have worked for months to back the President and Congressional Democrats away from their demand for a blank check to keep spending.” On Tuesday morning, the Republican National Committee sent out a fundraising email with the subject head, “Stop Obama’s Blank Check.” If you’d like to join the Republicans in “taking away Obama’s blank check,” you could send “$25, $50, $100, or more” to the RNC. On Tuesday afternoon, the National Republican Congressional Committee tweeted, “The President of No: Obama Continues to Insist on a Blank Check for More Spending.” And Boehner, in desperate search of conservative support for his debt-ceiling/deficit-reduction plan, called Rush Limbaugh and vowed he wouldn’t give Obama a blank check.

Continue reading here…

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December 28, 2010 · 6:55 AM

Chris Matthews: Why Doesn’t Obama Demand A Copy Of His Birth Certificate? (VIDEO)

He prefaces his diatribe by holding up a long form birth certificate and simultaneously stating that he is not a birther.  Yet…

Huffington Post

Chris Matthews waded into the birther controversy on his Monday show, wondering why President Obama has not demanded a copy of his full birth certificate to put the conspiracy theories about his birth to rest.

Speaking to reporters Clarence Page and David Corn, Matthews addressed the recent efforts by Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie to be able to release more information about Obama’s birth.

“I am not a birther, I am an enemy of the birthers,” Matthews assured Page and Corn, before comparing a so-called “long form” birth certificate to the more abridged copy that Obama has released. “Why has the president himself not demanded that they put out the initial documents?” he asked.

Page said there was no point in Obama engaging birthers, because they were not interested in evidence showing that he is a natural-born citizen. Matthews responded that, no matter what, it will be interesting to see if Abercrombie’s quest for the full document is successful.

“Don’t we want to know if he can find it?” he said. “I don’t know why the Governor doesn’t say, ‘snap it up, whoever is there in the Department of Records, send me a copy right now. And why doesn’t the president just say, ‘send me a copy right now’?”

See video here…

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November 17, 2010 · 7:24 AM

Bush “Photoshops” Rove Out of Plame Scandal

Mother Jones - By David Corn

In an act of historical airbrushing, the ex-president leaves a key player out of his account of the CIA leak case.

In his new book, George W. Bush repeatedly challenges the charge that he misled the country into the Iraq war. He writes, “I didn’t like hearing people claim I had lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” But while defending his integrity, he presents assertions that are outright false: for instance, that Iraq had a WMD infrastructure and was pursuing such weapons at the time of the invasion (it did not and was not), and that Saddam Hussein had refused to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors (he was not fully cooperating with inspectors, but the inspectors had reported Iraq’s cooperation was increasing). His account is often selective—such as when he recounts a 2003 meeting with Tony Blair and fails to mention that at this session he (Bush) raised the possibility of kick-starting the Iraq war with a phony provocation. But Bush’s selectivity is glaringly apparent when he recounts one of the dark moments of his presidency: the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.

Bush describes this episode for one purpose: to discuss the “most emotional personnel decision” of his presidency—whether or not to pardon White House aide Scooter Libby, who had been convicted of lying to FBI agents and a grand jury during the investigation of the Plame leak. He notes that this affair began when former ambassador Joe Wilson, Plame’s husband, wrote a post-invasion op-ed challenging Bush’s pre-invasion claim that Iraq had sought to buy uranium (presumably for use in a nuclear weapons program) from Niger. Bush doesn’t fully cover the back story: Nearly a year prior to Bush publicly making the uranium-from-Niger charge, the CIA—after Vice President Dick Cheney had requested the agency provide him more information on this matter—asked Wilson to trek to Niger to check out the allegation. Wilson did so and reported back to the agency that this sort of uranium deal would have been nearly impossible to pull off.

Continue reading…

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Valerie Plame: How to Dismantle 23,000 Atom Bombs  -The ex-CIA agent on why we’re running out of time to get rid of the world’s nukes.

Corn on “Hardball”: Cheney Forgets Plamegate 

22 Things Cheney Can’t Recall About the Plame Case - In the CIA leak investigation, the former Vice President tried the Alberto Gonzales defense.

Novak, Corn, and Plamegate

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