Tag: Campaign 2012
Does Romney’s Teavangelical Base Know He Has Hired an Openly Gay Spokesman?
Romney’s National Security Spokesman Is Openly Gay … A fact that doesn’t make it into the Washington Post. But I’m in no way outing [Richard Grenell]. He has lived with his partner, Matt Lashey, for the past nine years, and is a frequent advocate for Republicans and gays. Which is why this pick is interesting. For Romney to have an openly gay spokesman is a real outreach to gay Republicans, a subtle signal to moderates, and the Santorum faction’s reaction will be worth noting.
Actually, the chance that Santorum’s faction will ever be exposed to the unpleasant fact that Romney has appointed an openly gay man to a high-profile position is less than zilch. Sully, who often writes about epistimic closure, may have been momentarily deluded when he wrote that last bit.
The Republicans base will not learn about it by reading (once openly gay, now closeted) Matt Drudge’s right-wing news aggregator website, and they won’t hear about in the GOP propaganda dumps on Fox News or hate radio — and teavangelicals would never expose their beautiful low-info minds to Sullivan’s posts on the The Daily Beast, even though he is a conservative Catholic, albeit one who is also openly gay.
Ann Romney Blames the Dog
[He] ate the turkey on the counter. I mean, he had the runs.
– Ann Romney in an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer in which she blamed Seamus the Irish setter for befouling himself in his kennel while it was strapped to the top of the Romneys’ car during a 12-hour vacation trip. Sawyer did not ask Ann Romney if it was also Seamus’ fault that he ran away after she and her family arrived at their vacation destination.
MSNBC Host: Romney, Boehner, Cantor and McConnell Are All Criminals – We Need to Chop Their Heads off in November
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
On MSNBC’s “The Last Word” last night, host Lawrence O’Donnell opened a segment of the show by calling on his viewers to decapitate four members of the Republican Party’s leadership:
O’DONNELL: I’ll tell you this right now. If Mitt Romney becomes the president in November, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year. You can’t galvanize and promote — if you can’t galvanize and promote and recruit people to vote for Barack Obama, we’re done. We will be a suburb of Indonesia next year. Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell — they’re all criminals. We are patriots. We are Braveheart. We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November.
Okay, cue the Republican outrage.
Of course, O’Donnell was really just riffing on what Mitt Romney uber-supporter Ted Nugent told his half-witted but fully armed supporters recently:
Romney Advocated Raising Energy Costs in 2010 – Rails Against It in 2012
For the past few weeks, Mitt Romney, his surrogates and primary opponents have been railing against the rise in gas prices and, of course, blaming the surge in crude oil prices in world markets on Pres. Obama. Here is a sampling of their spin from Elizabeth Kolbert writing in the New Yorker:
“Higher energy prices would encourage energy efficiency across the full array of American businesses and citizens.”
– Romney in 2010[Romney] called on President Barack Obama to fire three of his Cabinet members: the Energy Secretary, Steven Chu; the Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar; and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson. According to Romney, the three have spent the past few years carrying out a not-so-secret plan to raise the price of gasoline at the pump. Only by firing the “gas-tax trio,” Romney told Fox News, can the President demonstrate that he did not approve of this plan. “Time for them to go,” Romney said.
Romney’s remarks came just days after Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal, also on Fox, accused the Administration of driving up the cost of gas in the service of its “radical” agenda. “The reality is, gasoline prices have doubled under this President—highest prices for oil and gasoline in a hundred and fifty years,” Jindal said. “People used to think it was because of incompetence from the Obama Administration on energy. I think it’s because of ideology.” (As far as “reality” goes, Jindal’s characterization of gas prices is inaccurate; they were higher in 2008, under President George W. Bush.) Romney and Jindal, meanwhile, were echoing comments made by Newt Gingrich, who accused the President of adhering to a “radical ideology, which wants to artificially raise the cost of energy.” And Gingrich was following Rick Santorum, who, back in February, declared that Obama’s energy policies are based on a “phony theology” that “elevates the earth above man.
But in Romney’s ironically titled book, “No Apology,” published in 2010, he pushed the opposite approach. “Higher energy prices would encourage energy efficiency across the full array of American businesses and citizens,” he wrote back then. “…It would provide industries of all kinds with a predictable outlook for energy costs, allowing them to confidently invest in growth.”
Third Poll in a Row Finds Romney Ahead of Obama
Dan Amira at New York Magazine:
One poll showing Mitt Romney leading President Obama could be a fluke. [1] Two polls? [2] A bit less likely to be a fluke. But three polls in a row, especially when one of them is a Gallup survey of 2,265 registered voters, probably deserves some attention. [3] Yes, even as InTrade shows Obama with a 61 percent chance of winning in November, and even as conservative pundits like George Will talk about a second Obama term as if it’s a foregone conclusion, the reality is that Mitt Romney has beaten Obama in the three national polls taken since Rick Santorum dropped out, and is therefore, at least for the moment, winning the (extremely nascent) general election.
Mitt Said in January That Staying Home with Kids Wasn’t “Work”
It was only January — four short months ago– that former Gov. Mitt Romney applauded the idea of women abandoning their two-year-olds so they could experience “the dignity of work.” That’s work as compared to…what? Possibly, “never working a day in their lives?”
Mitt better warm up his Etch A Sketch for this one. The Mormon maladroit was caught on tape in New Hampshire, with Sen. John McCain looking doubtful, as Mitt upped his own bad bet by boasting that even if it cost the state more money to provide childcare, it was worth it to him to force women receiving assistance while he was governor of Massachusetts to get out of the house and…what was that word again? Oh yeah, WORK. You know, some number of days in their lives.
Obviously Mitt was pandering in this speech, which sets it apart not at all from every other speech he’s made. It’s always popular among the folks looking for support from Republicans and tea partiers to beat up on welfare recipients, dreaming up new and different ways to humiliate them (like drug testing) or run their lives for them, as Mitt was attempting to do here with his tough love paternalism. What they say doesn’t even have to make economic sense. Neither drug testing nor forcing needy mothers to put their children in daycare would save money. The point is to extract a pound of flesh along with that EBT card.
It’s speeches — and attitudes — like this that account for the gender gap in poll numbers that leave Republican candidates in the dust with women.
Mitt Romney Versus the Truth – Again
Romney can’t stop lying.
Caught on Video: Sean Hannity’s Five-Second Flip-Flop on Teleprompter Use
Before his identity was uncovered and Fox News fired him, the “Fox Mole” provided a video to Gawker of an off-air, sotto voce pre-interview conversation between Mitt Romney and Sean Hannity in which they both criticized Pres. Obama’s use of teleprompters and then, literally within seconds, reversed themselves on the subject, with Hannity even agreeing that Romney’s dependence on teleprompters is “smart.”
In the video, Romney, a world-class champion flip-flopper, executes his 180-degree flip on teleprompters in a heart-stopping one-half of a second. It takes Hannity, the slow poke, just five seconds to completely reverse his opinion from being against teleprompters when the president uses them to being for them when Romney, the official presidential candidate of Fox News does — and 22 seconds after dissing the president, Hannity even tells Romney he is “smart” to use teleprompters because “they’re out to just eviscerate anybody who makes a mistake.” (The Gawker video is unembedable, but you can watch it by clicking here or the screenshot at the top.)
Here’s the transcript, which picks up at about 28 seconds into the video:
