Tag: Campaign 2012

Santorum Froths It Up with Tea Partyist Who Claims Obama Is an ‘Avowed Muslim’ Who Has ‘No Legal Right to Be President’

Jon Ponder

In this cycle, the Republican Party’s ever-dwindling tea bagger base demands a candidate for president who is an angry, practiced liar who will go to any rhetorical extreme to smear Pres. Obama.

Rick Santorum is doing his best to prove that he is their guy. Case in point is this episode, played out in the two videos above, from a Santorum campaign stop in Lady Lake, Fla., yesterday.

His performance in these two videos shows, once and for all, that he lacks the intelligence, decorum and stature to be president, and that, were he to become the Republican Party’s nominee, he could never get the votes of moderates and independents that are required to win the presidency.

Transcript for video on the left:

[…]

If Callista Becomes First Lady, What Will You Tell Your Kids?

Jon Ponder

photo-callista

During the impeachment-driven midterm elections in 1998, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich commissioned a series of ads designed to try to reverse growing public support for his nemesis, Pres. Bill Clinton, whom Gingrich and congressional Republicans were trying to hound out of office because he had been caught lying during a lawsuit deposition about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

One of the ads, titled “What Did you Tell Your Kids,” specifically targeted suburban women who might be wavering in their support for the GOP by referencing the ickier parts of the scandal — the “not sex” sex, stained blue dress, etc. — without mentioning them outright. The ads don’t appear to be available online today — 1998 was well before the YouTube era — but writing for Slate.com in October 1998, William Saletan, supplied this review:

It features one young suburban mother talking to another. “What did you tell your kids?” asks the first woman. “I didn’t know what to say,” answers the second. The first woman replies: “It’s wrong. For seven months he lied to us.” Like the finger-wagging scene in One Person, this ad reminds viewers not of what Clinton did to [Paula] Jones or [Ken] Starr but of what he did to us. It doesn’t say his lies were criminal; it merely says they were wrong. This isn’t an abstract matter of law, the ad suggests. It’s about your kids.

This ad, and the theme of explaining a politician’s sexual misdeeds to children, has renewed salience now, in light of Gingrich’s surprise victory in the South Carolina primary over the weekend. As a caller into C-SPAN’s phone-in show, “Washington Journal”, put it in a rhetorical question to women Republican voters last week: Have you considered the fact that if you elect Newt Gingrich president, his first lady will be this homewrecker who broke up his marriage?

What will you tell your kids, indeed.

[…]

Carville: ‘Republicans Are in the Midst of a World Class Disaster’

Trish

James Carville, or as I think of him, Mr. Mary Matalin, penned an open letter to Republicans and it’s a doozy. Carville looks back at the lowest high points of the race so far and concludes it’s a “world-class disaster.” Since right now that particular description brings to mind captain-less ships unable to float, it’s not a bad analogy.

But Carville is just getting warmed up.

Carville on Newt: ‘You guys have to deal with a $1.6 million Freddie Mac consultant who has been married three times’

…most people thought it was kind of a watermark when your Tea Party gang booed the golden rule. You know, I’ve spent some time in Philly and they have always thought they were pretty radical because they actually booed Santa Claus and Willie Mays. Philly, I’ve got news for you — you ain’t got nothing on South Carolina Republicans. They just aren’t buying any of that do-unto-others garbage.

It’s hard to tell from the clip if the audience was booing Jesus or Ron Paul or peace. No matter, they were clearly not interested in anything but kicking Iranian butt.

But Paul, as we know, is not a front-runner. For the two of them, Carville saves his best shots, starting with Mitt Romney.

[…]

Andrew Sullivan Debates Obama’s Record with Bay Buchanan

Jon Ponder

The venue for this debate is Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN. Meanwhile, Fox is signaling that it is terrified of this story. The network’s spokesmodel hosts have been trashing Sullivan’s article while refusing to invite him on to debate it. (They even blurred his name on a graphic of the Newsweek cover.)

The biggest surprise is that Andrew Sullivan is surprised that the GOP’s propaganda network won’t allow its viewers to hear a dissenting view:

I knew from afar that they were a propaganda channel. Now, in this close-up personal interaction, you realize just how deep the rot goes. This is a channel dedicated to money, power and entertainment, in that order.

Romney Has Millions Stashed in Offshore Accounts

Jon Ponder

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player

ABC News:

Although it is not apparent on his financial disclosure form, Mitt Romney has millions of dollars of his personal wealth in investment funds set up in the Cayman Islands, a notorious Caribbean tax haven.

A spokesperson for the Romney campaign says Romney follows all tax laws and he would pay the same in taxes regardless of where the funds are based…

Official documents reviewed by ABC News show that Bain Capital, the private equity partnership Romney once ran, has set up some 138 secretive offshore funds in the Caymans.

Romney campaign officials and those at Bain Capital tell ABC News that the purpose of setting up those accounts in the Cayman Islands is to help attract money from foreign investors, and that the accounts provide no tax advantage to American investors like Romney. Romney, the campaign said, has paid all U.S. taxes on income derived from those investments.

Read more…

In New Interview Set to Air before S.C. Primary, Newt Gingrich’s Second Wife Says Newt Wanted an ‘Open Relationship’

Jon Ponder

screenshot-marianne-gingrich-nightline

Daily Mail:

Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife revealed for the first time today that the GOP presidential hopeful had asked for an open marriage so that he could have a wife and a mistress.

Marianne Gingrich, his second wife, said she wanted American voters to know his true moral character. There have been fears that her explosive television interview could end her former partner’s campaign for the White House.

Regarding the claims, Marianne told ABC: “And I just stared at him and he said, ‘Callista doesn’t care what I do.’ He wanted an open marriage and I refused.”

As of early Thursday morning, ABC News had not announced when it will air the interview, but it will presumably be Thursday or Friday night, on the eve of the South Carolina primary on Saturday.

Marianne Gingrich’s last interview was with Esquire, for an article published in August 2010. What was apparent then was that she has neither forgiven nor forgotten. She has obviously timed this interview so that it will air just before a potentially make or break primary in a state that is hotbed of Republican “values voters.”

In the 2010 interview, Marianne Gingrich confirmed one of the more paradoxical rumors about Newt’s marital history.

[…]

Romney Defines $374K As ‘Not Very Much’ Money

Jon Ponder

374,00

Apparent Republican Party presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Tuesday: “What’s the effective rate I’ve been paying? It’s probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything. My last 10 years, I’ve — my income comes overwhelmingly from investments made in the past rather than ordinary income or rather than earned annual income. I got a little bit of income from my book, but I gave that all away. And then I get speaker’s fees from time to time, but not very much.” Romney collected $360,000 $374,000 in speaking fees over the 12-month period reporting period covered in his most recent financial disclosure report.

In Newsweek, Andrew Sullivan Takes on Obama’s Critics on the Right and Left

Jon Ponder

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Note: The complete transcript of the interview is published below.

Writing in the cover story of the current issue of Newsweek, titled, “Why Are Obama’s Critics So Dumb?” Andrew Sullivan goes after the right wing for its ongoing, deliberate mischaracterizations of the president as a “a radical leftist attempting a ‘fundamental transformation’ of the American way of life.” He writes:

chart-job-growth-bikini-dec-2011You’d think, listening to the Republican debates, that Obama has raised taxes. Again, this is not true. Not only did he agree not to sunset the Bush tax cuts for his entire first term, he has aggressively lowered taxes on most Americans. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts, affecting 95 percent of taxpayers; he has cut the payroll tax, and recently had to fight to keep it cut against Republican opposition. His spending record is also far better than his predecessor’s. Under Bush, new policies on taxes and spending cost the taxpayer a total of $5.07 trillion. Under Obama’s budgets both past and projected, he will have added $1.4 trillion in two terms. Under Bush and the GOP, nondefense discretionary spending grew by twice as much as under Obama. Again: imagine Bush had been a Democrat and Obama a Republican. You could easily make the case that Obama has been far more fiscally conservative than his predecessor—except, of course, that Obama has had to govern under the worst recession since the 1930s, and Bush, after the 2001 downturn, governed in a period of moderate growth. It takes work to increase the debt in times of growth, as Bush did. It takes much more work to constrain the debt in the deep recession Bush bequeathed Obama.

The great conservative bugaboo, Obamacare, is also far more moderate than its critics have claimed. The Congressional Budget Office has projected it will reduce the deficit, not increase it dramatically, as Bush’s unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug benefit did. It is based on the individual mandate, an idea pioneered by the archconservative Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and, of course, Mitt Romney, in the past. It does not have a public option; it gives a huge new client base to the drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also pioneered by the right.

But Sullivan, who is a conservative-leaning independent today but was, in the 1990s, as a British citizen living and writing about politics in the United States, a Republican Party sympathizer, also takes on Obama’s critics on the left:

[…]

Gingrich Goes Negative on Mitt – And Reveals His Own Shortcomings

Trish

Yes, this video put together by the Newt Gingrich team does show a greatest hits list of Romney bloopers (although there are more that didn’t make this cut, such as when he pretended to be goosed by waitresses in a diner, or when he claimed in front of unemployed people to understand their plight because he is unemployed too, or more, more, more). But the most revealing line in it, to me, is the premise underlying it: that Romney will never win in a debate with the presumably much smarter and better spoken Obama — and that this is what matters most.

I think Gingrich honestly believes that governing is all about what words you choose and the mental abstractions you amuse yourself and those listening in awe with. There is no sound more lovely to Gingrich than that of his own voice, but a president needs traits other than pontification and bloviation. He, or one day, she, needs judgment and sanity and a willingness to be, as we so often think of Obama when the subject of Congress comes up, the adult in the room. Million dollar credit lines at Tiffany and trophy wives and egos that don’t fit through the door equip someone to be president no better than does constantly saying stupid things in public.

So yeah, Mitt’s an idiot. But Gingrich doesn’t even get why he’s no upgrade.