First Chris Matthews smacked down the Republican Party national chairman over Romney’s false, racist Welfare ad, now Ron Fournier at National Journal calls out a Romney operative. Josh Marshall at TPM wonders if the media elite is growing a spine:
Deep in the Conejo Valley, Steven Showers has put up a very tall neon sign in his front yard that flashes “Romney’s Racist Heart Dotcom. Save the GOP.” Showers tells the Ventura County Star that he is Republican and Christian and that, upon Mitt Romney’s apparent nomination for the presidency, he “was stunned to find out that the Mormon religion is a white supremacist, anti-black, racist ideology.” He launched the Romneys Racist Heart website (which warns that “You Are About to Read About the Most Gigantic Fraud Ever Perpetrated Upon the GOP in U.S. Political History”) and spent most of August designing and building the 120-pound billboard, which required a crane to mount.
The sign itself is ten feet tall and sits on a four-foot concrete foundation. The lights went on on Thursday and the first complaint came into Ventura County on Friday (Showers says he didn’t check to see whether the sign might be violating any codes). According to the LA Times, “On Friday, a Ventura County code inspector dropped by and left a notice that the monument was a violation of zoning laws.”
Meanwhile, you can buy your own smaller version for just $800. And a rep for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints points out to the Star that the religion let black people join the priesthood starting in 1978.
Shower’s site is here.
When the GOP nominates Paul Ryan as its vice-presidential candidate on Wednesday night, they will be putting a man who proposed steep reductions to disaster relief funds in his most recent budget—restrictions so radical that GOP appropriators in the House disobey them. Ryan proposed that Congress adhere to the debt-ceiling limitations, and not spend over them when appropriating disaster relief, but instead make cuts elsewhere to pay for them. This is the same “morally reprehensible” approach to disaster relief funding taken by House Republican leaders last summer: even as Hurricane Irene bored down on the eastern seaboard, Congressional Republicans threatened to withhold disaster relief funds if offsetting cuts were not made elsewhere in the federal budget. Holding federal disaster relief hostage to political food-fights was a truly unprecedented move.
Five more major national and global corporate members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have told leading online civil rights group ColorOfChange that they have cut ties to the right-wing policy group, bringing the total of companies to drop ALEC to 38. They include: General Electric, The Western Union Company, Sprint Nextel Corporation, Symantec Corporation, and Reckitt Benckiser Group plc. The announcement of these major departures comes days before the Republican National Convention is scheduled to open in Tampa, FL.
In the diplomatic ranks, trained professionals toil,
To keep the peace and tamp down foreign turmoil.
But for Greek ambassador,
Trump picked an artful dodger —
The grifting, drunken blackmailer Kimberly Guilfoyle.
