"Boston Spirit magazine reported last month that when gay activists met with him in his office in 2004, as Romney was backing a failed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in the state, Romney remarked, 'I didn't know you had families.'
Julie Goodridge, lead plaintiff in the landmark case that won marriage rights for gays and lesbians before the Supreme Judicial Court, asked what she should tell her 8-year-old daughter about why the governor would block the marriage of her parents.
According to Goodridge, Romney responded, 'I don't really care what you tell your adopted daughter. Why don't you just tell her the same thing you've been telling her the last eight years.'
Romney's retort enraged a speechless Goodridge; he didn't care, and by referring to her biological daughter as 'adopted,' it was clear he hadn't even been listening.
By the time she was back in the hallway, she was reduced to tears. 'I really kind of lost it,' says Goodridge. 'I've never stood before someone who had no capacity for empathy.'" - Michelangelo Signorile Editor-at-large, HuffPost Gay Voices
Republicans fear that the government has too much control over corporations. Democrats fear that corporations have too much control over our government.
Democrats believe it benefits all of us to help the weakest and the poorest among us. Republicans believe it benefits all of us to help the wealthiest and most powerful among us.
Democrats believe everyone is entitled to health care regardless of their ability to pay. Republicans believe everyone is entitled to jack squat if they can’t pay for health care.
Democrats believe our health care system exists solely for the purpose of making people healthy. Republicans believe our health care system exists solely for the purpose of making a healthy profit.
Democrats believe anything that helps the American people during a recession or a time of crisis is the true essence of patriotism. Republicans believe anything that helps the American people during a recession or a time of crisis is the true essence of communism.
Democrats believe the President and Congress need to work together to create jobs during a weak economy. Republicans believe that Congress should do nothing to create jobs and then blame the President.
Democrats believe that too much money in politics produces corruption and destroys the American way of life. Republicans believe that money and corruption in politics are the American way of life.
Anyone who tells you the vice presidential debate was a tie, or that Mr. Ryan prevailed, is trying to sell you a diamond mine that ain't worth a dime. The ultimate impact and import of what went down during Thursday's debate won't be immediately known, but the simple fact is beyond dispute: Joe Biden owned the night, and owned his opponent, in a way rarely seen in modern debate history.
If one is to believe the latest polls, Washington will become the first state to re-legalize the adult use of cannabis by plebiscite. According to a just-released Survey USA poll , nearly six out of 10 voters now express support for Washington’s Initiative 502. According to the survey, 57 percent of respondents stated they intend to vote yes on I-502; 34 percent said they intend to vote no, and nine percent were undecided. Men and women are equally supportive of the initiative.
Both Mitt and I have summer places up in New Hampshire on Lake Winnipesaukee. And a few summers ago I was taking my grandchildren and children to town in the boat for ice cream.
And we got into the docks and they were all full and I looked around, there was no place to park, so we stopped at the end of a dock. They all jumped off and ran up the dock. And I realized there was nobody in the boat to help me dock the boat, handle the ropes, do anything -- they just left me out there at sea.
So I finally found a place to park after about 20 minutes, and I pulled in,
I said, 'Who's going to grab the rope?,' and I looked up and there was Mitt Romney.
So he pulled me in, he tied up the boat for me. He rescued me just as he's going to rescue this great country.
The PNAC GalleryJuly 1, 2004
Project for a New American Century
Awhile back the Little Woman figured out how to get my mind offa some things (her) and on ta other things. She bought me a computer and got the local dial-up guy ta show me how ta git on the Internet. Once I got the hang of it, among other things, I discovered Google and Google News (what a dang goofy-soundin name), and started enjoyin myself. Danged if I wasn't becomin an informed electorate!
"So," she told me with that look she gits, "you wanted to know what a neocon is? Well honey, paste this URL (www.newamericancentury.org) and click "go."
So I did. I clicked, I saw The Project For the New American Century (PNAC), and I read. I even kept readin after I realized I'd spend my time in a better way by fishin or chasin after the Little Woman...
Dang! I think PNAC must be one of them there Ivory Towers I've heard about from time to time. Only this tower don't even sound like ivory to me, more like some kinda fragile rose-colored glass.
I read their declarations about what they think they know and what they think they stand for. And I read their letters to Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush goin back to 1997. I read all their big plans involvin how we need to police up the trouble spots around the world cause we're the toughest thing next to the Almighty on this planet.
These PNAC Galleryites seem to think that the world is like recess at grade school and the U.S. of A are the biggest toughest Sixth Graders than run the schoolyard. All them fifth graders and younger better do what we say. We only let them other kids play what we want em to play, where we want em to play and when we want em to play.
PNAC'ers look like the kinds of intellectchals I could beat at Combat Scrabble. They'd be spendin too much time trying to put together eleven-letter words and I'd be cleanin up with my little threes or fours.
And what they've been writin! I suspect that in order to get accepted into the club ya have to have credenchals - ya know - the kinda things that mean you're smart or know what yer talkin about. I'll bet you that you aren't even CONSIDERED to be worthy of joinin that club until you've played and won at least 10 games of Monopoly and 10 games of Risk.
And the way some of em write, to win 10 games of Risk they had to play at least 100 times. That would explain all that high-falutin writing about economics and "America's Global Responsibilities."
Whatever happened to our honorable thinkin that we don't start wars, we end em?
About a year ago one them eleven-letter-word guys named Schmitt wrote about Shock'n and Awe'n and compared America to Marshall Will Kane in the movie "High Noon," as some sort of warrior who can't get the other townfolks ta help im.
Made me remember a better movie to illustrate what America has stood for: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In that one, John Wayne got rid of the bad guy - Lee Marvin - and then minded his own business while James Stewart, the lawyer politician, cleaned up the mess and made the community a better place.
I'm downright curious as to how many of them folks in that glass tower has actually wore a military uniform and got it dirty. They talk fast and loose about American military power wandrin about all over the world cleanin clocks and tellin tyrants how the cow ate the cabbage.
Mr. Chaney says he had other priorities when he had the same chance during his prime manhood age to join up like a real patriot. I hear today that this real patriotic draft avoidin vice president is slanderin Mr. Kerry while Mr. Bush has been pretendin that he looked like Mel Gibson in Braveheart when he was young enough to become a real warrior. Makes me laugh even tho it ain't no laughin matter. Danged campaign commercials have gotten tedious and embarrasin.
When PNAC'ers talk about it you get the idea that troops don't mean nothin more to them than the little red, white and blue wood blocks in the Risk Game or the little green plastic houses and red hotels in Monoply. Seems like to these guys livin breathin troops don't exist - only wooden blocks.
Seems like to these guys people who lose jobs or try ta live without medical benefits are nothin more than little metal top hats, race cars and horses.
These ain't the guys you'd want on a camp out, that's fer sure. Take them along and you'd have to chop all the wood, build the fire, help em put up their tents, and sing cowboy songs to em when it gets dark, quiet and scary in the woods. Probably have to bait their hooks, untangle their lines and hold their hands while they reel in a fish.
Dang certain I'd have to gut the fish for em since there'd be guts involved.
Their statements and their letters to Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush were all signed (well, their names were at the bottom). In the 1990's those names included Chaney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle - all names I recognize from the news as PNAC members doin the thinking for Mr. Bush.
I'm tellin ya, these drug-store warriors ain't the ones we oughta be trustin.
Well, I'm curious now. Think I'll go get Google to show me all the smart things Flush Limbaugh, Squawk Hannity, Factor O'Reilly and Anxious Coulter have said lately. It don't seem that any of them have yet qualified by winnin their ten games of Monopoly and Risk.
Well, it is widely thought that Romney’s political advisers aren’t the brightest bulbs—his entire campaign has been a litany of errors. What has been less remarked upon is the makeup of Romney’s foreign-policy team. For a former businessman who claims to willing to hire the best and smartest regardless of background, it is a remarkably unimpressive and ideologically driven group, consisting largely of washed up neocons and Cold Warriors, many of whom served in the Administration of George W. Bush.
On a day-to-day basis, Romney’s foreign-policy point man is Dan Senor, a former spokesman for the American government in Iraq, who wrote a book about Israel’s economy that Romney often cites. Senor, a longtime neocon, often travels with Romney. On Tuesday, according to a report from ABC News, he was travelling with Paul Ryan in order to brief him along with Reuel Marc Gerecht, another well-known neocon, and Jamie Fly, who worked at the National Security Council under George W. Bush. John Bolton is another important player in the Romney team. Often dismissed even on the right as a hirsute blowhard, Bolton appears to have persuaded Romney to take him seriously. A third influential adviser is Eliot Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins, who once worked for Paul Wolfowitz. Then there’s Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, who is also said to have Romney’s ear.
Kristol, Bolton, Gerecht, Cohen, and several other of the people who are listed as informal advisers on Romney’s Web site are former members of the Project for the New American Century, the neocon think tank that will forever be linked to the invasion of Iraq. Conspicuously absent from Romney’s foreign-policy advisory team are representatives of the less bellicose school of thinking that dominated Republican foreign policy before the neocons showed up. A few months back, in a piece entitled “Is There A Romney Doctrine?,” David Sanger, the Times’ veteran Washington correspondent, wrote this:
Curiously for a Republican candidate with virtually no foreign policy record, Mr. Romney has made little effort to court the old-timers of Republican internationalism, from the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft to the former secretaries of state James A. Baker III, George P. Shultz and even the grandmaster of realism, Henry A. Kissinger. And in seeking to define himself in opposition to President Obama, Mr. Romney has openly rejected positions that George W. Bush came around to in his humbler second term.
Not only is your religious liberty not at stake, but there is a strong chance that you are oppressing the religious liberties of others. This is the point where I would invite you to refer back to the tenets of your faith, especially the ones about your neighbors.
“The demographics race we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” - Senator Lindsey Graham, (R) SC"Senator Lindsey Graham's Republican confession.
But the head of the Republican Governors Association told Washington’s delegates to the Republican National Convention that McKenna would be a leader similar to Walker.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, chairman of the RGA, spoke at a breakfast for the Washington and Montana delegations, touting Republican gubernatorial candidate McKenna, along with Montana contender Rick Hill, as top-tier contenders in 2012.Wow!
McDonnell lavishly praised Walker as a model of leadership.
WALKER: You've got a few of the radical ones -- unfortunately, one of them's the minority leader -- but most of the rest of them are just looking for a way to get out of this. They're scared out of their minds. They don't know what it means. There's a bunch of recalls up against them. They'd really like to just get back up here and get it over with.
So the paycheck thing, some of the other things threatening them, I think collectively there's enough going on, and as long as they don't think I'm going to cave, which again we have no interest in.
An interesting idea that was brought up to me by my chief of staff, we won't do it until tomorrow, is putting out an appeal to the Democratic leader. I would be willing to sit down and talk to him, the assembly Democrat leader, plus the other two Republican leaders—talk, not negotiate and listen to what they have to say if they will in turn—but I’ll only do it if all 14 of them will come back and sit down in the state assembly.
They can recess it... the reason for that, we're verifying it this afternoon, legally, we believe, once they’ve gone into session, they don’t physically have to be there. If they’re actually in session for that day, and they take a recess, the 19 Senate Republicans could then go into action and they’d have quorum because it's turned out that way. So we’re double checking that. If you heard I was going to talk to them that’s the only reason why. We’d only do it if they came back to the capitol with all 14 of them. My sense is, hell. I'll talk. If they want to yell at me for an hour, I'm used to that. I can deal with that. But I'm not negotiating.
"KOCH": Bring a baseball bat. That’s what I’d do.
WALKER: I have one in my office; you’d be happy with that. I have a slugger with my name on it.
"KOCH": Beautiful.Am I implying the as governor, McKenna would employ this sort of approach to managing problems with opponents? I don't know.
Abstinence-only education is based on the specious theory that teenagers shouldn’t be taught anything about sex because they shouldn’t be having sex. But promoting abstinence hasn’t worked in religious communities — a full 80 percent of evangelicals report having sex at least once before marriage — and won’t work in schools, either. The approach fails to take into account the fact that 70 percent of teenagers are sexually active by the time they turn 19, and sitting in a health class that pushes junk science won’t dissuade them otherwise. To achieve the goals the Republican Party puts forth, schools across the country need to implementcomprehensive sex education that will have honest conversations with young adults about sexuality. - Tara Culp Ressler, Think Progress
An attendee at the Republican National Convention in Tampa on Tuesday allegedly threw nuts at a black camerawoman working for CNN and said “This is how we feed animals” before being removed from the convention, a network official confirmed to TPM.
For a Republican candidate to not disappoint you, he would have to be Jesus of Nazareth. And even Jesus would be toast after a few news cycles. Because “feed the hungry”? Sounds suspiciously like welfare. And “heal the sick”… for free?? (wild audience applause) That is definitely Obamacare! And “turn the other cheek”? Maybe you didn’t hear, Jesus, but this is the party that cheers executions.
So here now is the short campaign timeline of Jesus Christ, Republican candidate.
Day 3
Three days after Jesus announces he’s in, a Gingrich spokesman reports that he read Jesus’s book… and finds some aspects of it troubling. Mitt Romney says Jesus’s previous statements make him appear anti-business. And Rick Perry asks if America is ready for a Jewish President.
Day 7
At the Republican debate, the other candidates pile on the new frontrunner. Michele Bachmann calls the meek inheriting the earth a colossal expansion of the estate tax. And Newt Gingrich scores the big zinger when he says, “Mr. Christ, America can’t afford another cheek!”
Day 9
Teabaggers start getting e-mails from their idiot brother-in-law about how Jesus is not even from this country. (wild audience applause) ... And was born alongside a bunch of animals in a manger. And not to harp on it, but where’s the birth certificate? And if he’s a carpenter, is he too pro-union?
Day 10
Jesus is now polling fourth behind Perry, Romney, and the pizza guy. And in a desperate attempt to gain credibility, he goes to New York and has coffee with Trump… who pronounces him, “a decent guy, but a little effeminate”.
It is well known -- authoritarians, totalitarians throughout history have known -- controlling the health care of a society is -- that's like the IV. You go in the hospital, they put an IV in your arm, it's there in case they need to get in, in an emergency to do something else, they've already got the pathway in. Health care is the IV to total state control over a population. Hitler knew it, the Nazis. It's one of the first things that they tried. That will be the Media Tweak of the Day. Although it's nothing new. We've said it before. [Premiere Radio Networks]Squawk Hannity:
When government has to instill austerity measures, i.e. Greece, i.e. other places in Europe, what happens? The people rebel, they get angry. They feel like they have had the, you know, the floor pulled out from under them. "Where's my retirement?" They don't have the money, they overspent. "Where's my health care?" You have to wait six months for that X-ray. "Where's my - I'm sorry you're too old to get that hip replacement." All these things are happening in Europe. Why would they not happen here? "You're talking about death panels again, Hannity." Death panels are inevitable. [Premiere Radio Networks, The Sean Hannity Show, 1/11/12,]
This Is The End Of Prosperity In America Forever ... The End Of America As You Know It." Telling his radio audience, "You must not allow this to pass," Glenn Beck stated in November 2009 that "they're going to get past that 60-vote barrier. And they'll get there by people like [Sen.] Joe Lieberman, who's a reasonable guy and has good intent. You'll get past it by people like that, who say, you know what? Look, we got to be reasonable; we have to have a debate. And then Harry Reid will go for the 51 count and he'll pass this thing. And it will be a nail in the coffin of America." Beck added: "You must -- must get on the phone in your districts. You must wake everybody up you know. This is the end of prosperity in America forever if this bill passes. This is the end of America as you know it." [Premiere Radio Networks, The Glenn Beck Program, 11/19/09,]
"Cheap labor". That's their whole philosophy in a nutshell – which gives you a short and pithy "catch phrase" that describes them perfectly. You've heard of "big-government liberals". Well they're "cheap-labor conservatives".
"Cheap-labor conservative" is a moniker they will never shake, and never live down. Because it's exactly what they are. You see, cheap-labor conservatives are defenders of corporate America – whose fortunes depend on labor. The larger the labor supply, the cheaper it is. The more desperately you need a job, the cheaper you'll work, and the more power those "corporate lords" have over you. If you are a wealthy elite – or a "wannabe" like most dittoheads – your wealth, power and privilege is enhanced by a labor pool, forced to work cheap.
Don't believe me. Well, let's apply this principle, and see how many right-wing positions become instantly understandable.
- Cheap-labor conservatives don't like social spending or our "safety net". Why. Because when you're unemployed and desperate, corporations can pay you whatever they feel like – which is inevitably next to nothing. You see, they want you "over a barrel" and in a position to "work cheap or starve".
- Cheap-labor conservatives don't like the minimum wage, or other improvements in wages and working conditions. Why. These reforms undo all of their efforts to keep you "over a barrel".
- Cheap-labor conservatives like "free trade", NAFTA, GATT, etc. Why. Because there is a huge supply of desperately poor people in the third world, who are "over a barrel", and will work cheap.
- Cheap-labor conservatives oppose a woman's right to choose. Why. Unwanted children are an economic burden that put poor women "over a barrel", forcing them to work cheap.
- Cheap-labor conservatives don't like unions. Why. Because when labor "sticks together", wages go up. That's why workers unionize. Seems workers don't like being "over a barrel".
- Cheap-labor conservatives constantly bray about "morality", "virtue", "respect for authority", "hard work" and other "values". Why. So they can blame your being "over a barrel" on your own "immorality", lack of "values" and "poor choices".
- Cheap-labor conservatives encourage racism, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of bigotry. Why? Bigotry among wage earners distracts them, and keeps them from recognizing their common interests as wage earners.
Washington Mormons for Marriage is a resource for LDS members who support marriage equality in Washington
the Republican Establishment all but ceded control of the party, or at least the public face of the party, to Fox News (and Rush Limbaugh) in January, 2009.
Still, it's becoming increasingly clear that Fox's programming and the radical, fear-based agenda it's setting for Republicans is now doing lasting damage to the Grand Old Party.
That's because Fox News isn't simply offering a rightward take on the day's events, or innocently providing Republican-friendly commentary, of course. It's leading an exhausting, day-in, day-out attack campaign against Obama, Democrats and all their liberal allies. (Real or imagined.)
Its relentless, paranoid crusade falls well outside the mainstream of American politics, which is why the Republican primary season, so proudly sponsored by Fox News, is shaping up to be such an embarrassment.
With Fox News at the irresponsible helm, the conservative movement in America, including the emerging Tea Party, became first and foremost a media movement, and one that gleefully cut ties with common sense and decency. (See: Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh.)
As blogger Andrew Sullivan noted this week:
The Republican Establishment is Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, and their mainfold products, from Hannity to Levin. They rule on the talk radio airwaves and on the GOP's own "news" channel, Fox.
With media outlets setting the conservative agenda, as well as raising campaign funds and boosting GOP candidates, it was Fox News that quickly transformed itself into the Opposition Party.
