Neil Munro, the Daily Caller reporter who interrupted Obama’s DREAM Act Lite speech yesterday by yelling, “Why do you favor foreigners over American workers?” is himself a so-called foreigner working a job, here in America. This isn’t breaking news: He identifies as Irish-born on his Twitter bio, and he is currently living in D.C. on a green card. It is, however, somewhat notable and ironic when you consider the agenda behind what he maintains was “a conventional, obvious question.”
Mitt Romney rushes to do interviews with Fox News any time they’ll give him air time, but this Sunday, when he appears on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” it will be the first interview he’s given a legitimate news outlet this year.
Here are five question we wish “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer would ask Romney:
Because they can — and they know they won’t get called on it.
As Jon pointed out yesterday, Mitt Romney’s campaign has turned lying into something of a craft, if not an art form. But Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum offers an explanation why every time a politician tells a lie, he or she is likely to get away with it:
Politicians have increasingly discovered over the past couple of decades that even on a national stage you can lie pretty blatantly and pay no price since the mainstream media, trapped in its culture of objectivity, won’t really call you on it, limiting themselves to fact checking pieces like Kessler’s buried on an inside page. And because virtually nobody except political junkies ever sees this stuff, it doesn’t hurt their campaigns at all.
If Mitt Romney wins the presidency in November it will be because he has adopted the George W. Bush/Karl Rove “reality creation” strategy, wherein the candidate/elected official and his or her surrogates tell so many lies, day in and day out, that the overpaid but beleaguered national political media can’t be bothered to keep up.
Just as there was in the Bush years, a cottage industry is coalescing on the Interwebs around the mission of tracking the Romney team’s “blizzard of lies” strategy with fact checking and lie listings. Media Matters does a good job, of course, and there’s Factcheck.org and right-leaning Politifact, but check out Romney the Liar, at Blogspot, for starters. Here are a few other sources:
4. When confronted directly with past positions that seem to contradict current ones, I may so thoroughly bend the positions back against each other that none shall be able to penetrate my paradoxes…
10. I may lie with impunity to the American people for months and years — and be rewarded with the presidency.
Mitt Romney’s latest gaffe came at the end of last week when he attacked Pres. Obama’s call to hire more first responders and educators. Pres. Obama, he said, “says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”
How bad was the gaffe? So bad that the Republicans’ propaganda network made it disappear, according to Media Matters:
Romney staged a news conference at Solyndra where he falsely accused the president of corruption
On May 31, Mitt Romney went to the site of the Solyndra Plant in California for the express purpose of using the failed green-energy development company as the background to lie about the Obama administration:
ROMNEY: “An independent inspector general looked at this investment (Solyndra) and concluded that the administration had steered money to friends and family—to campaign contributors.”
Accusing the president and his administration of corruption was a vicious lie. It is not true that an inspector general said anything of the sort.
Later, when pressed to cite the source for this lie, the Romney campaign was quoting a Newsweek article by Peter Schweizer, but this citation is fatally flawed. First, the piece in Newsweek was not a article, it was an excerpt from the book “Throw Them All Out,” a Coulteresque right-wing propaganda screed by Schweizer, a former foreign policy adviser for Sarah Palin (!) and speech-writing consultant for the George W. Bush administration, who is currently a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution.
Romney’s lie about the Solyndra investigation has been disproved and disputed by every media source that bothered to look into it. However, at least in part because this fact checking has been censored by right-wing media, the Romney turned the lie into a television ad which it is running in swing states with impunity. Here is the transcript for the false ad:
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
“The man is afraid of the voice of the people and that the people understand and know what he’s doing. He’s trying to stifle the ability of journalists to let the people of America know what’s really going on with their government.”
— “Kamala Harris called President Donald Trump’s ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House ‘absolutely abhorrent,’” The Wrap reports.
“Not one of them is trained in technical skills. Not one research PhD, as opposed to China, where half the cabinet is science and technology PhDs. We’re led by grifters and fools.”
— Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, on X, on President Trump’s 35-person cabinet.
“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far… The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”
— Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), breaking with President Trump in a direct-to-camera video.
“Donald Trump made over a thousand stock sales and purchases worth between $79m and $270m in July,” The Guardian reports. “His two largest sales were of Amazon and Microsoft stock, selling between $5m and $25m each on 20 July. That same day, he also sold up to $5m worth of Oracle and Costco stock, $500,000 to $1m in Nvidia, and bought up to $5m worth of shares in Intuit and Salesforce, among dozens of other transactions.”
“The unprecedented spate of mid-decade redistricting for the U.S. House has changed the congressional districts for one-tenth of Americans and significantly altered the makeup of at least one-fifth of districts, according to a new study,” the Associated Press reports.
A new Fox News Poll finds 71% of voters think the Trump administration lacks a clear strategy for ending the Iran War, including 95% of Democrats, 83% of independents, and 43% of Republicans. Sixty percent say U.S. military action against Iran was the wrong decision, while just 37% say it was right.
“The Trump administration last year spent $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave for federal workers as part of its plan to shrink the government and save taxpayers money, according to a new estimate by a congressional watchdog,” CNN reports.
Reuters has documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets. The list illuminates the sweeping effort by the president and his administration to punish dissent and reshape the government.
