Every president inherits challenges, few have faced so many. Four years later our enemies have been brought to justice. Our heroes are coming home. Assembly lines are humming again — there are still challenges to meet, children to educate, a middle class to rebuild but the last thing we should do is turn back now.
Lyin' Ryan and Romney campaign spokesliar, Andrea Saul
In three separate instances during the vice presidential candidates’ debate last night, Paul Ryan falsely accused the Obama administration of referring to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad as a “reformer”:
From left: Rep. Mack, Rep. Bono Mack and Dr. Ruiz, Bono Mack"s Democratic challenger The new NBC/Marist poll in Florida finds that incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson leads his Republican challenger, Rep. Connie Mack by double digits, 52 percent to 39 percent.
But that may not be the only political trouble facing Rep. Mack’s household. His wife, GOP Rep. Mary Bono Mack, the widow of entertainer Sonny Bono, is also facing the toughest reelection challenge since she assumed the seat representing Palm Springs that her late husband held until he was killed in a freak skiing accident in January 1998. Because Rep. Mack opted to give up his seat in Florida to run against Nelson, there’s a chance now that both Mack and Bono Mack will not be returning to Washington next year.
Rep. Bono Mack, who is considered to be one of the five most vulnerable Republican representatives in the House, appears to have really stepped in it when an “October surprise” lodged against her Democratic opponent, emergency-room physician Raul Ruiz, backfired, big time:
During the Vietnam War, Mitt Romney protested the protesters one year and then headed to France the next. While students who involuntary enlistment he actively supported died in the mud in Vietnam, he lived in a chateau in Paris and tooled around France on a bike trying to convince the French to give up coffee and wine.
Now he cites the courage of a former Navy SEAL who died in a terror attack claiming that “They didn’t hunker down where they were in safety. They
rushed there to go help.This is the American way. This is the American way. We go where there’s trouble. We go where we’re needed.”
But you didn’t go there, Mitt. You hunkered down in France.
I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there’s just no way. And so what you do is you say you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that it’s going to remain an unsolved problem … All right, we have a potentially volatile situation, but we sort of live with it. And we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve.
Romney in October 2012
I will recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the Jewish state of Israel. On this vital issue, the President has failed, and what should be a negotiation process has devolved into a series of heated disputes at the United Nations. In this old conflict, as in every challenge we face in the Middle East, only a new President will bring the chance to begin anew.
Mitt Romney’s blizzard of lies strategy in his first debate with Pres. Obama was highly effective, if the post-debate polls are accurate.
But now that the smoke has cleared, fact checkers are going through the mountain of BS Romney left on the stage trying to sort fact from fiction. Alternet published this list of Romney’s most shameless lies from the debate:
1. An ‘Unelected Board’ Controlling Your Health Care
I will champion free trade and restore it as a critical element of our strategy, both in the Middle East and across the world. The President has not signed one new free trade agreement in the past four years. I will reverse that failure.
– Mitt Romney, telling a bold-face lie in his foreign policy speech yesterday. Pres. Obama signed three free-trade bills — with Colombia, Panama and South Korea — last October. Some fact-checkers give Romney a pass because these bills were not technically “new.” Initial negotiations had started under the previous administration. But if we’re going to quibble, the president has not been in office for “four years,” so it’s dishonest to criticize him for trade bills that did not get signed in the last three and a half months of the Bush administration.
The producers pulled the YouTube video of the debate. There is apparently a way you can view it for a fee, but in a quick scour of the Internet, I could not find it, so I’m posting Jon Stewart’s recap of the debate from his show — although now this video seems faulty. We apologize for their problems.
It’s hard for those of us who have absolutely no trouble whatsoever figuring out how to vote to understand what’s going on in the heads of “the undecideds.” It’s also easy to believe that they’re like the folks in this video, clueless morons distracted by irrelevant issues — and not all that bright.
When the dust settled, the choice given was Romney, a candidate McCain himself considered a poorer choice than Palin in 2008
But an essay* from a retired cop in Jacksonville named Jim Crosby, who’s changed parties several times, shows that not all independents are self-absorbed halfwits. In fact, some of them do a more thorough job of thinking through the issues and making a decision than those of us whose leanings in one direction or the other allow us to get there faster. For proof, read on.
I defected…I changed my voter’s registration from Republican to Democrat.
I don’t think BLS cooked numbers. I think a bunch of Dems lied about getting jobs. That would have same effect.
— One of many nutty tweets expressing rightwing suspicion over new unemployment numbers that show the biggest month to month drop in nine years at the end of September, 2012. Some, like Jack Welch, CEO of GE and Obama critic, claim the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the lower figures to throw the election.
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
“If you are committing fraud against the American people, all of us in public leadership should be trying to stop it and throw you in prison for enriching yourself off the American taxpayer.”
“We are done, Americans are done with endless conflict in the Middle East, spending trillions of dollars, American lives… this is insane and we have to call it for what it is.”
“The U.S. State Department announced on Monday that it has revoked more than 175,000 visas during President Donald Trump’s administration so far,” Fox News reports.
President Donald Trump is asking for $1,500,000 million for the military for next year. That’s close to $600 billion (adjusted for inflation) more than we were spending on the military in fiscal year 2025, before Trump took office, Alternet reports. This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around 8% of the total budget.
A new Emerson College survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%. President Trump holds a 39% job approval rating, consistent with the past two months, whereas his disapproval increased another point, to 57%.
A new American Research Group poll finds just 30% of Americans say they approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president and 67% say they disapprove.
Wall Street Journal: “Around 40% of voters in the 2024 election said the economy was their top issue, far outstripping any other matter. And those voters favored Donald Trump by 60% to 38%. Many say they were moved by his pledges to tame inflation, rebuild U.S. infrastructure, cut red tape and trim government waste. … About a year and a half later, more voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy than approve, 61% to 35%, an average of polls by the Cook Political Report found this month.”