August 2012

This doesn't sound to good for the Mitt Romney campaign:

Mitt Romney is canceling a planned campaign stop Monday in Orlando after a whirlwind weekend in which the presumptive Republican nominee introduced Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as his running mate.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, the campaign said late Sunday that the presidential hopeful was "too exhausted to make the trip" after crisscrossing Virginia, North Carolina and Wisconsin over the weekend.

"We've been planning this bus tour for a while and had to adjust for stuff going on," Jeff Bechdel, Florida communications director for the campaign, told the paper.

Florida is one of the key battleground states this cycle and Romney is blowing off a campaign stop there because of "exhaustion"? Maybe he is truly exhausted, or maybe he is trying to figure out how to face the huge senior populace of Florida that depends upon Medicare, especially now that the man who wants to gut Medicare is his running mate. To see just how bad it is, checkout these headlines from Florida papers over the weekend.

Mitt Romney doesn't think the cornerstone of his Presidential resume should be discussed anymore:

“Our campaign would be — helped immensely if we had an agreement between both campaigns that we were only going to talk about issues and that attacks based upon — business or family or taxes or things of that nature,” Romney said, according to excerpts of an upcoming interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd released Friday.

Romney said he would prefer the campaigns “only talk about issues,” and claimed that “our ads haven’t gone after the president personally. … We haven’t dredged up the old stuff that people talked about last time around. We haven’t gone after the personal things.”

The issues? Mitt Romney only discusses those in private fund raisers hosted by multi-millionaires. Who the hell does he think he is kidding?

But for a campaign to resort to the whole "stop picking on me" thing shows that Romney is losing. If he really wanted to put an end to all of it, he would just release the damn taxes already. Why hasn't he? If there is nothing to hide, then there is nothing to lose in the release of them.

So we can now only conclude that Romney's taxes are a lot worse than anyone is imagining. Maybe it wasn't that he paid zero taxes, but instead got refunds from the government for a few years. We don't know because Romney won't show us and expects us to just "drop it".

Or maybe Romney is scared to death that releasing his taxes, if all perfectly legit, won't end it. I mean look at what his own party has created with the whole "birther" thing. Despite Obama releasing his birth certificate and Hawaii even verifying it, the right continues to push the "he wasn't born here" meme. And that's not just little no-name bloggers, but big Republicans like Donald Trump and Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Think Progress points out an interesting tidbit on Romneycare:

As governor, Romney greatly expanded access publicly-financed contraception through his 2006 health care reform law. The state’s Commonwealth Care, established under Romneycare, offers subsidized, low or no-cost insurance to low-income residents and provides primary and preventive care that includes “family planning services” and prescription contraceptives. In 2005, Romney also “signed a bill that could expand the number of people who get family-planning services, including the morning-after pill” and asked the Department of Health and Human Services to require Catholic hospitals to issue the morning after pill to rape victims.

In fact, the Obamacare rule Romney is now characterizing as an affront to religious liberties is very similar to a 2002 state law he tacitly supported. Like more than two dozen states across the country, Massachusetts required insurers that provide outpatient benefits to cover hormone replacement therapy and all FDA-approved contraceptive methods — well before Obamacare became law. The Massachusetts rule exempts “an employer that is a church or qualified church-controlled organization” from the mandate, but prohibits institutions such as hospitals, universities, and nursing homes from denying their employees birth control coverage.

But in the illogical mind of a Republican, words speak louder than actions. Romney DID this, but he says he wouldn't now, so they believe him. I mean it's not like the guy would profit off aborted fetuses, or would he?

One of the tools terrorists always try to employ is economic terrorism. Find ways to destroy an economy to help push their agenda. Now a U.S. Senator is pushing that very tactic here at home:

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) called on government contractors to put employees on layoff notice before November's election as a way to pressure Congress to address the so-called "fiscal cliff."

Graham, joined by Republican Sens. John McCain (AZ) and Kelly Ayotte (NH), were in Florida for their first stop on a two-day, four-state tour by these three members of the Senate Armed Services Committee designed to bring attention to the $500 billion in automatic cuts scheduled to begin in January if Congress does not find other ways to cut spending.

“Politicians, you know, quite frankly respond to pressure,” Graham said about the cuts set to begin in 2013 under the so-called sequestration budget.

This goes right along with the Republican platform of "tanking the economy to gain political power". Just remember, the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, admitted last year that the GOP benefits from bad economic news and their obstructionism on any bill to help improve the economy is proof of that.

And then there's this little bit of delusional crap:

McCain, Graham, and Ayotte called for a bipartisan solution to the crisis.

Perhaps they can't remember way back in 2009 when the people voted in a huge Democratic majority in the House and Senate, yet Republicans felt the voters were too stupid to pick their own leaders, so they engaged in any trick they could to block the majority from acting.