Month: April 2012

Flip-Flops Could help Romney

Buck Banks

In politics, the flip-flopper label is deemed deadly, the fingering of a candidate with no fixed principles. But I suspect that, with swing voters at least, it helps Romney. If voters believe he was just throwing red meat to voracious primary voters — and that the real Mitt would govern as a sensible man of the center-right — the damage of the last few months could be mitigated.

— Howard Kurtz, writing in the Daily Beast.

Ann Romney Blames the Dog

Jon Ponder

[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

Jon Ponder

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:

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If Republicans Wanted Prices at the Pump to Fall, They Would Go Along with Obama’s Plan

Trish

gaspump

The president is proposing a plan that would actually make a dent in gas prices. And no, it’s not drill baby, drill because, as Obama explained, there’s a big hole in that idea.

…the problem is we use more than 20 percent of the world’s oil and we only have 2 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves. Even if we drilled every square inch of this country right now, we’d still have to rely disproportionately on other countries for their oil. That means we pay more at the pump every time there’s instability in the Middle East, or growing demand in countries like China and India.

Instead, the president wants to attack gas prices both administratively — meaning acting as allowed without Congress needing to do that whole law-passing thing of which they seem incapable — and legislatively. Both strategies start by attacking the real problem — oil speculation. Obama:

We can’t afford a situation where speculators artificially manipulate markets by buying up oil, creating the perception of a shortage, and driving prices higher — only to flip the oil for a quick profit…That’s not the way the market should work. And for anyone who thinks this cannot happen, just think back to how Enron traders manipulated the price of electricity to reap huge profits at everybody else’s expense.

Obama made good a long time ago on a campaign promise to close the “Enron loophole,” which allowed traders to evade American regulations by buying and selling electronically or overseas.

So here’s what he’s asking our representatives in Washington to do.

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