Day: June 11, 2012
Fox News Propagandists ‘Disappear’ Romney’s Claim That U.S. Does Not Need More First Responders and Teachers
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:
Bad News for Obama: Racism Could Cost Him Re-election
Creative research published by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz shows Obama will be in trouble in his bid for re-election in part because of his race.
Stephens-Davidowitz decided to see if there was a correlation between Google searches for the word, “nigger” and voting behavior. Yes, he looked at searches for that word.
The conditions under which people use Google — online, most likely alone, not participating in an official survey — are ideal for capturing what they are really thinking and feeling. You may have typed things into Google that you would hesitate to admit in polite company.
He examined searches conducted nationally in the years 2004 to 2007, before Obama was officially running, and long before he was the front-runner on the Democratic side. From that study, he identified the most, and least, racially charged areas of the country.
Most racially charged areas of America:
- West Virginia
- Western Pennsylvania
- Eastern Ohio
- Upstate New York
- Southern Mississippi
The state with the highest racially charged search rate in the country was West Virginia. Other areas with high percentages included western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, upstate New York and southern Mississippi.*
Next, Stephens-Davidowitz came up with a baseline for how a generic Democratic candidate would have performed based on the vote for John Kerry in 2004 which presumably reflected the ballots of people who were likely to go Democratic, even if a not very exciting, privileged, rich Massachusetts liberal who said stupid things like, “I voted for it before I was against it” was the candidate. He also looked at how Democratic Congressional candidates did in the 2008 election.
The results were striking: The higher the racially charged search rate in an area, the worse Mr. Obama did.
Rand Paul Would Accept Veep Spot
A year, year-and-a-half ago, I was a physician in a small town. And it would be a great honor to be considered as a vice president for the Republican Party. I think that would be something that anybody who said otherwise would not be being truthful.
— Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), telling CNN it would be an honor to be Mitt Romney’s running mate, a day after he endorsed Romney.
Gov. Rick Scott Compared to George Wallace
This June, the governor of another Southern state is challenging the federal government’s authority. Nearly 50 years after Wallace’s showdown, you are standing between Floridians and their right to vote as U.S. citizens. We agree that only citizens should vote, but your approach to cleaning up the voter rolls is fatally flawed. The U.S. Justice Department and county supervisors of election have reached the same conclusion and told you to stop, yet you persist.
—The Tampa Bay Times, comparing Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) to Alabama Gov. George Wallace for trying to purge state voter rolls.
Jeb: Reagan ‘Would Have a Hard Time’ Being Nominated by Republicans Today
Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground, as would my dad, they would have a hard time [winning the GOP primaries] if you define the Republican party, and I don’t, as having an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement, doesn’t allow for finding some common ground.
– Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, decrying the takeover of the party by the tea party, the ultra-right wing of his party which, until January 2009, was known as his brother George W. Bush’s “base.”
Romney Falsely Accuses Obama of Corruption – Fact Checkers Say It’s a Lie, So Mitt Doubles Down by Using the Lie in an Ad
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:
Romney Suggests First Responders and Teachers Are Not ‘American People’
ROMNEY: President Obama “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.”
