Elections 2012

Byron York has a blog post up which must be one of the most idiotic things I have read in a long time:

Byron York: Voters fret about economy, Dems focus on abortion

"This election, to me, is about which candidate is more likely to return us to full employment," says former President Bill Clinton in a new ad released by the Obama campaign. Most voters would agree, at least if one believes countless polls that show the economy and jobs are the nation's top concern.

So why are Democrats planning to make their convention a celebration of abortion and gay marriage? The Obama campaign has given a new and prominent surrogate role to Sandra Fluke, the former Georgetown law student and full-time lefty activist who achieved notoriety after Rush Limbaugh called her a bad name because of her energetic promotion of taxpayer-financed contraception.

Is this Byron's first round of national elections? It seems so.

Has he not paid attention to the House since Republicans took control in 2010? Apparently not.

A vast, vast majority of legislation by the John Boehner led House has had nothing to do with the economy. Instead they voted 33 times to repeal all or part of the healthcare act, knowing it wouldn't pass Senate or a veto pen. They spent times debating on things like "one nation under God" and other bills that have absolutely nothing to do with the economy.

And every election cycle for the past several decades the GOP has pushed abortion out there. The problem this time is that the GOP's real views have been pushed out front by Todd Akin, and good little foot soldiers like Byron are upset about it. They are made that Democrats now control the debate on abortion and it has gotten so bad that even Mitt Romney is refusing to take questions on it.

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?

Earlier we heard about Mitt Romney blasting the U.K., accusing them of not being ready for the Olympic. It turns out it isn't the first time he has bashed the other side of the pond. In his book, No Apology, this is what Romney had to say about them:

England [sic] is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn't make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadn't been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler's ambitions. Yet only two lifetimes ago, Britain ruled the largest and wealthiest empire in the history of humankind. Britain controlled a quarter of the earth's land and a quarter of the earth's population.

Yeah small roads and houses. That means they should never have any power!

I have never been so scared as to think that this guy could be our President next year. If hat happens then our country is really on a path of self destruction.

Steve Benen picked up on something interesting:

Mitt Romney sat down with CNBC's Larry Kudlow, and made a curious observation. He said voters who want a strong economy should vote for him, but Americans "ought to give, whichever president is going to be elected, at least six months or a year to get those policies in place."

At first blush, that may sound fairly reasonable. A president takes office, he or she needs time to put a team in place, craft an agenda, and get to work. What's more, we generally don't see the results of economic policies immediately; the agenda needs to time to take effect. In Romney's mind, six months to a year seems fair.

This does seem very fair, but why wasn't this the case in 2009?

President Obama was not even a month off the swearing in and Republican politicians and talking heads started asking where the jobs were. It was as though they had been asleep up until January 20, 2009 and didn't notice the economic havoc wreaked on our nation by one George Bush. As matter of fact, it got so bad that when people tried to say the economy was bad when Obama took office, the right started a new defense - "there you go blaming Bush".

So if Romney does win, by February of next year should we start asking why he hasn't turned the economy around? Do the Republicans want their standards applied towards their man, or is that something just reserved for Democratic Presidents. It's a very serious question and one I hope the GOP gets asked.

John Boehner would almost be comical if it wasn't for the extreme delusional state that man lives in. Here's what he told reporters a bit ago:

Boehner said the president's focus on Romney's tenure at Bain Capital shows that Obama, in Boehner's words, "doesn't give a damn about middle class Americans who are out there looking for work." He said voters are more concerned about unemployment than what's in Romney's tax returns.

John Boehner has been Speaker of the House for 19 months. During that time they have done 33 votes to try and repeal the healthcare act. During that same time they have done zero votes to help boost the job or economy - ZERO!

So who is it that doesn't "give a damn"?

And even more signs of delusion are evident in his little statement there. Mitt Romney has been facing increased criticism for shipping U.S. jobs overseas. These are the factory jobs that used to fuel our middle class and Romney got rich off of getting rid of those. That's what these tax returns will show, just how rich he got.

I almost chuckle every time I hear a Republican warn about the rise of the Chinese government. Are the really that stupid to question it while pushing for a man to become President that played an instrumental role in the rise of the Chinese economy? Come on. People can not be that moronic!

Why doesn't Boehner show he "gives a damn" about his own district? He needs to climb down off his high horse and look in his own backyard. Travel the 7 miles over here to Hamilton and look at a town that was a booming manufacturing town and now is crumbling. This is a town that was credited with helping to win World War II because of our manufacturing. Now there are none of those businesses left. This is a town that was a major paper producer and now the final factory is packing up.

On Sunday I posted about a huge lie that was being pushed by Drudge:

The article linked to by Drudge even pushed that this was Obama's doing, but as I also pointed out it was George W. Bush in January of 2004 that announced the retirement of the shuttle program. It was the Republican controlled 108th and 109th Congress that started the massive budget cuts. It was even George W. Bush in 2008 that signed the waiver stating American astronauts would fly on Russian spacecrafts to the ISS.

But don't let these facts stop the Romney campaign from pushing a huge lie that "President Obama outsourced the space program". Here's Romney surrogate and former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu on Monday: