Day: November 17, 2011

Abramoff Calls Out Gingrich for ‘Corruption’

Buck Banks

People who come to Washington who have public service, and they cash in on it. And they use their public service and their access to make money, and unfortunately Newt Gingrich is one of them who’s done it. I don’t know if he’ll survive this, to be honest with you … Because he is doing and engaging in the exact kind of corruption that America disdains. The very things that anger the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement and everybody who is not in a movement and watches Washington.

— Former jailbird Jack Abramoff, commenting on Newt Gingrich’s work for Freddie Mac to NBC’s David Gregory on his “PRESS Pass” program.

Lazy Lying Republicans – Obama Calls U.S. Corporatists ‘Lazy,’ GOP Falsely Claims He Was Referring to All Americans

Jon Ponder

In the art of political warfare, if you’re on defense, you are losing. After being pilloried by the press and even among their own party’s establishment for a series of stoopid gaffes, outright lies and displays of monumental ignorance over the past month or so, Republican presidential candidates and the party’s propagandists are now desperately trying to get off defense by breitbarting Pres. Obama over a comment he made at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting over the weekend.

“[There] are a lot of things that make foreign investors see the U.S. as a great opportunity — our stability, our openness, our innovative free market culture. But we’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades. We’ve kind of taken for granted — well, people will want to come here and we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new business into America.”
– Pres. Obama

In a Q&A with Boeing CEO James McNerney at the APEC CEO Business Summit, Pres. Obama said that corporate leaders have “been a little bit lazy” in their efforts to recruit new foreign investments in manufacturing in the United States. He went on to cite his administration’s efforts to address the corporate sector’s laziness in attracting new business through its SelectUSA program which “organizes all the government agencies to work with state and local governments where they’re seeking assistance from us, to go out there and make it easier for foreign investors to build a plant in the United States and put outstanding U.S. workers back to work.” (Emphasis added.)

Deploying a deceptive tactic out of the playbook of racist provocateur Andrew Breitbart, Republicans, including candidates Rick Perry and Mitt Romney and propagandists like the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, have taken the president’s comment out of context, implying that he was criticizing the American people as being lazy.

Here’s the transcript of the president’s comment, in context:

[…]

Lobbyists Ensure Pizza Remains a Vegetable

Buck Banks

$5.6 million

Amount spent by food industry lobbyists to ensure that the U.S. Department of Agriculture did not change the designation of pizza from “vegetable.” Wrote the USDA: “While it’s unfortunate that some members of Congress continue to put special interests ahead of the health of America’s children, USDA remains committed to practical, science-based standards for school meals.”