Counseling for Rick Santorum
April 16, 2012
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Ashley Judd and the brilliant team at Funny or Die have some counseling for Rick Santorum on "aborting his candidacy." (A parody of the worst provisions of anti-abortion laws).
Kelly Camp Releases Meaningless Poll
April 16, 2012
By Michael Bryan The Kelly campaign today leaked a poll by National Research which headlines him "beating" Ron Barber 49% to 45%. The poll also indicates that he is the only GOP candidate who can do that. Imagine that. Barber beats Sitton and Antenori by a few points (43% to 39% and 46% to 40%) … Read more
So you want to be a state legislator? (Daniel Patterson replacement)
April 16, 2012
Posted by AzBlueMeanie: Apparently the Arizona Democratic Party has decided not to challenge Secretary of State Ken Bennett's incorrect interpretation of Arizona law because the Arizona legislature is in the process of correcting his error for the future by legislation, and the replacement of Daniel Patterson will be a one-off event. The Pima County Board of Supervisors today appointed the … Read more
Compare your tax rate to Willard ‘Mittens’ Romney
April 16, 2012
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
From the White House blog The Buffett Rule:
No household making more than $1 million each year should pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than a middle class family pays. This is the Buffett Rule—a simple principle of tax fairness that asks everyone to pay their fair share.
About 55,000 millionaires pay a lower effective tax rate than millions of middle-income Americans.
How many millionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than you? Find your Buffett Number using the calculator (below).
When FAUX News says ‘Mittens’ is full-o’-crap . . .
April 16, 2012
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Mitt Romney's senior adviser is Ed Gillespie, formerly White House Counselor to George W. Bush, who was brought on in 2007 to orchestrate a PR unit dedicated to "selling the Iraq War troop surge to American voters and the media." Gillespie previously served as senior communications advisor to the presidential campaign of George W. Bush, and played an aggressive role as spokesman for the Bush campaign during the vote recount in Florida, for which he was rewarded with the Chairmanship of the RNC in 2003.
Haven't Americans had to endure this insufferable asshole long enough? (Romney has surrounded himself with George W. Bush appointees and advisors — he represents a return to the Bush years.)
Gillespie's latest PR stunt is the Romney campaign's "I'm rubber, you're glue" psychological projection strategy for Romney's "gender gap" problem. The Romney campaign is asserting that the Obama administration is waging a "war on women," not Tea-Publicans in Congress and in state legislatures across the country.
This strategy is effective only with two groups of people: low information voters who are partisan-inclined to believe anything that a Tea-Publican says; and the feckless corporate media villagers who create false equivalencies and manufacture controversy to fill air time and column space, and are genetically incapable of calling the pathological liar Willard "Mittens" Romney a liar.
Maybe there is hope. Chris Wallace of FAUX News whose father, the legendary Mike Wallace died Sunday a week ago, must be feeling the weight of his father's legacy on his shoulders. Chris manned up on Sunday and told Ed Gillespie to his face that "Mittens" is full-o'-crap with his "I'm rubber, you're glue" psychological projection strategy on the "war on women." Romney Adviser Ed Gillespie Struggles To Defend Campaign’s Major Economic Claim:
Mitt Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie struggled to defend his campaign’s central piece of evidence supporting its claim that President Obama is waging a war on women today. The claim — that 92 percent of jobs lost under Obama where lost by women — has been called highly misleading and “mostly false” by Politifact (twice), the Washington Post’s fact checker, an AP fact checker, and even the rabidly conservative Daily Caller.
Even Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace saw the problem with the claim and pressed Gillespie when he mentioned the figure this morning. “It is not true,” Wallace said of the larger Romney argument, calling the 92 percent figure a “little bit of an accounting trick” and noting that “all the independent fact checkers have said it’s misleading.”
The best defense Gillespie could muster was to claim that some of the economists quoted by the Washington Post’s fact checker were liberals. Oooohh! the liberal boogeyman! What, no George Soros?
Gillespie doesn’t even attempt to defend the substance of the claim because there is little substance to it. (Video below the fold).
The 92 percent figure obscures the fact that many more men than women lost jobs in the recession [that's why some dubbed it the "Mancession," The End of The Mancession (Slate, January 2011)], as Wallaces forces Gillespie to admit. The key is timing. Men tend to be concentrated in industries that were hit first, like construction, so they lost their jobs first, while women tend to be contracted in the public sector, which had layoffs later on when [Tea-Publican controlled] state and local governments slashed their budgets.
In fact, it was Republican lawmakers and governors who led this effort [with GOP austerity measures], accounting for over 70 of percent state layoffs, so Romney’s claim is effectively blaming Obama for policies that Romney supports (cutting government workforces).
ALEC made simple
April 16, 2012
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by David Safier I'm just beginning to read the online Atlantic article, Exposing ALEC: How Conservative-Backed State Laws Are All Connected. So far, here's the "ALEC for Dummies," or, if you prefer, "ALEC made Simple" passage: "If it's voter ID, it's ALEC," observed Doug Clopp, deputy director of programs at Common Cause. "If it's anti-immigration … Read more
When teaching to the test in schools isn’t enough
April 16, 2012
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by David Safier Want to get your elementary-aged school children into the best, most selective New York City public schools? Send them to test cram school. For a mere $75 to $150 per hour — I'm sure you can pay more if you're really selective — you can get your child into tutoring courses which … Read more
Arizona moves into potential Obama territory
April 16, 2012
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by David Safier Depending on the breaks, the Obama campaign could be working Arizona big time. President Obama’s re-election campaign is dispatching workers across Arizona’s college campuses and Latino neighborhoods this spring, registering as many new voters as they can in an organized, three-month effort to determine whether they can put this unlikely state into … Read more
