Tag: Mitt Romney

Zombie Clown Gingrich Vows to Stay in the GOP Clown Car – Will Deliver Nomination to Romney, No Matter What!

Jon Ponder

art-gingrich-zombie-clown-carAs the Republican primaries grind on, it becomes clearer by the day that Mitt Romney is the weakest GOP frontrunner since former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole ran against Pres. Bill Clinton, and lost, in 1996.

The comparison with Dole presents a historical paradox. One of the biggest factors that hobbled the Senate leader’s campaign in 1996 was his close association with his counterpart in the House, Speaker Newt Gingrich. While Gingrich was not on the ticket that year — Dole’s running mate was a GOP liberal, Jack Kemp — the Clinton campaign deployed a relentless barrage of television ads that tied Dole to Gingrich, who was, and remains, the most unpopular and divisive figure in American politics.

The irony lies in the fact that, in the current cycle, Gingrich is playing a role opposite to the one he played in 1996. His campaign for the nomination, which should have died before it began, is now the key factor propping up the campaign of Mitt Romney’s favor, the putative frontrunner.

In primary after primary, Gingrich has peeled off votes of the GOP’s teavangelical, neo-Confederate base from Rick Santorum, often denying Santorum a win over Romney, as he did in Ohio, or nabbing delegates that would have otherwise gone to Santorum, as he has done just about everywhere else, including in Alabama and Mississippi last night.

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Dumb and Dumber Vs. Obama on Afghanistan

Trish

Mitt Romney, chanelling Sarah Palin when it comes to the difficulty of forming coherent sentences, and vividly demonstrating that he hasn’t been paying attention:

Certainly it’s time on a regular basis to review our mission there, and not to make decisions based upon some actions by a crazed gunman. We don’t determine our foreign policy based on something of that nature, but of course from time to time we have to assess what the process is there. I’m very disappointed that the president has not over the last year or two talked about what’s happening in Afghanistan, what progress is being made, describing a time table, or why his timetable makes sense or not.

Rick Santorum, hysterically demonstrating that he is an idiot (the “enemy,” had nothing to do with the recent killings by the U.S. troop), but he pays more attention than Romney:

The president putting a timeline in place has made a very winnable operation very, very difficult. It continues to unravel because the president has given something to the enemy that we should have been able to deny them, which is hope.

Pres. Barack Obama, calmly demonstrating once again that he is the only adult in the room.

I have put us on a path where we are going to have this war over by the end of 2014. That our troops will be coming out, but will be coming out responsibly. We don’t rush for the exits in a way that could end up leading to more chaos and more disaster not just for Afghanistan and the Afghan people but also for the entire region and for our own security and safety.

Florida Evangelical Leader Calls on Romney to Renounce ‘Racist’ Mormon Religion

Jon Ponder

O'Neal Dozier
O'Neal Dozier
It was not surprising that Rev. O’Neal Dozier, the spiritual leader at the WorldWide Christian Center in Pompano Beach, Fla., endorsed Rick Santorum in the Florida primary campaign earlier this year. Dozier and Santorum are both rabid anti-gay activists who have made offensive statements about gay people that are so nutty that they would be funny if they weren’t so hateful.

Santorum famously compared consensual gay relations with “man on dog sex,” and Dozier once said that homosexuality was “something so nasty and disgusting that it makes God want to vomit.”

Now Dozier, who is Santorum’s honorary Florida chairman, has become the first prominent evangelical leader in this cycle to make an issue out of GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney’s religion. In a press release last week, Dozier — an African-American who sees no irony in the fact that he has built his career by promoting anti-gay bigotry — called on Romney “to openly renounce his racist Mormon Religion,” because of passages in the Book of Mormon that are blatantly racist:

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Republican TV Host Joe Scarborough Outraged over Mitt Romney’s ‘Lie’

Jon Ponder

Mitt Romney, the GOP frontrunner, has never let the fact that he is really bad at lying slow him down one bit. But Romney told such a bald-faced lie at a campaign stop in Ohio on Monday that it sent Joe Scarborough, the stalwart Republican host of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, into paroxysms of apoplexy during Tuesday morning’s show.

The controversy arose after Buzzfeed writer Andrew Kaczynski uncovered an op-ed last week that was written by Romney and published in USA Today in July 2009, during the debate over health-insurance reform. In the article, Romney urged Pres. Obama to adopt the individual mandate — the system developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation that Romney had deployed when he was governor of Massachusetts — as the central cost-saving mechanism in the federal health-insurance reform plan:

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Rush Limbaugh Is Employed by a Subsidiary of Romney’s Bain Capital

Jon Ponder

logo-bain-clear-channelThe chances that Rush Limbaugh will be fired for disparaging women whose insurance covers their contraceptives as “sluts” last week have always fallen safely within the range of slim to none. Limbaugh is, hands down, his employer’s biggest revenue producer, and even if he were caught with the proverbial live boy or dead girl, his bosses at Clear Channel Communications, a multi billion-dollar right-wing radio network based in Texas, would be hard-pressed to send him packing.

But as the controversy over his lies and smears has played out, a key factor related to the politics behind the scandal has generally been overlooked. Clear Channel is a subsidiary of Bain Capital, the firm founded by GOP presidential frontrunner, Mitt Romney in 1984. And although Romney officially resigned from Bain in 1999,he left the company with a deal in place that continues to add millions in income to Romney’s fortune every year. (These millions in revenue were the subject of a campaign controversy earlier this year when Romney was forced to admit he only pays around 15 percent in taxes on his income from Bain.)

In 2008, Bain bought Clear Channel, whose on-air roster includes such heavyweights in right-wing broadcasting as Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and, the heaviest weight of them all, Rush Limbaugh.

Earlier this year, allegations surfaced on the far right that Clear Channel’s influential on-air personalities, including Limbaugh, were in the bag for Romney and so were marginalizing fringe candidates like Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul:

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Two Months into Republicans’ Clown Car Primary, WSJ/NBC Poll Finds Voters Turning against the GOP – Again

Jon Ponder

In the midterm elections just two years ago, voters punished Democrats for the crime of passing universal health care by voting to give Republicans control of the House. Now, a new Wall St. Journal/NBC poll finds that these same voters appear to be changing their minds again:

55 percent of respondents — including 35 percent of Republicans — believe the Democratic Party does a better job than the GOP in appealing to those who aren’t hard-core supporters.

How damaging has the primary season — with all of its debates, attack ads and scrutiny — been for the Republican Party?

Forty percent of all adults say the GOP contest so far has made them feel less favorable about the party, while 12 percent say they now have a more favorable impression. Forty-seven percent say it’s had no impact.

Even among Republicans, 23 percent maintain the primary season has given them a less favorable opinion of the party, versus 16 percent who say it’s been positive.

In addition, 55 percent of respondents — including 35 percent of Republicans — believe the Democratic Party does a better job than the GOP in appealing to those who aren’t hard-core supporters. Just 26 percent say the Republican Party does a better job on this front.

And, as we noted here, the poll found that Mitt Romney’s favorable rating has dropped down into George W. Bush territory. He has a 28 percent favorable rating among all respondents and a 22 percent favorable rating among independents.

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George W. Romney? Romney Now As Unpopular As Bush Was – Approval Rating Drops to 28%

Jon Ponder

28%

Mitt Romney’s favorable rating, according to the new Wall St. Journal/NBC poll. And there is even worse news for the putative GOP nominee. Among independents, the voters who will likely decide the election in November, Romney’s approval is six points lower — just 22 percent. If something about these disastrously low numbers for a national politician have a ring of familiarity, it may be that they call to mind the approval ratings of George Bush in the final years of his presidency, including his all-time low favorable rating of 25 percent, in 2008, according to Gallup. In fact, George W. Bush was the most unpopular president in the history of presidential polling. Now it’s looking like Mitt Romney could become the most unpopular nominee for the presidency in history.