We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers… Mitt Romney ☀
But both are wrong. God is not the celestial chairman of the GOP — and Dolan is not a Romney surrogate.
The Republican delegates, for their part, ought to study the work Dolan does every day on behalf of working people, immigrants and the poor — especially his support for living wages, an issue on which Dolan has closely worked with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who happens to be Catholic, but is also a Democrat who is openly gay.
“The best way out of poverty is to work at a living wage,” he has written.
Given that much of the Republican Party is under the thrall of Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge, it is unlikely Dolan would agree with its solutions for the economy.
Deep inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum, the impenetrable fortress where this year’s Republican National Convention is being held, my colleagues and various GOP delegates assure me that the venue security I experienced is typical for events of this kind — that it’s been this way ever since 9/11. “This must be your first convention,” they say. It is. As a newbie, it feels like an Orwellian police state, albeit one where the men in military fatigues carrying assault weapons are exceptionally polite. Convention veterans are inured to the layers of security checkpoints, the metal detectors, the bomb sniffing dogs, the concrete barricades, the chain link fences, and the virtual absence of protesters. I’ll likely feel that way too after a few more days flashing my official credential, emblazoned with a holographic elephant raising its trunk in triumph. It’s the new normal. For now, however, I still find it striking that a community organizer turned president and a Republican Party constantly talking up limited government have collaborated to police and host a civic event literally held beneath multiple hovering police helicopters. Security at the RNC: George Orwell Meets a ‘Call of Duty’ Cityscape ☀
Meanwhile, Romney had better speak often and with conviction about his own disagreement with some of his party’s platform, or the anti-woman narrative will become so entrenched that the 2012 GOP may go down in history as having sacrificed the nation’s economy to protect the rights of human embryos. He will have to speak loudly, too, if he is to be heard over the iconic women the Democratic Party has assembled for its own convention stage—from the famous Ms. Fluke to the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL. The 2012 election seems to have devolved from a debate between Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes to “The Clash of the Embryos.” Perhaps the math is just too hard for either party. What the *#@% Is Wrong With Republicans?! ☀
REASON 17: I’M VOTING FOR OBAMA BECAUSE I LOVE MONEY, BUT I’M NOT MONEY’S BITCH.
Here’s a quality link for those who wish to know what Obama has done with his time in office. It’s broken down by category and has a very crisp structure to it. So for anyone looking to:
- Learn for yourself what Obama has done.
- Provide data to others regarding what Obama has actually done.
…this is the link of choice.
A Mitt Romney spokesperson offered an unusual counterattack Wednesday to an ad in which a laid-off steelworker blames the presumptive GOP nominee for his family losing health care: If that family had lived in Massachusetts, it would have been covered by the former governor’s universal health care law.
“To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care,” Andrea Saul, Romney’s campaign press secretary, said during an appearance on Fox News. “There are a lot of people losing their jobs and losing their health care in President [Barack] Obama’s economy.”
The ad by Priorities USA Action, a super PAC supporting Obama, features Joe Soptic, a steelworker from Indiana who was laid off from a plant owned by Romney-founded Bain Capital, discussing his wife’s cancer and eventual death. Soptic said his family lost health insurance after he was laid off.
Here’s POLITICO’s running tally of top GOP donors and where they’re putting their cash, compiled using data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the Federal Election Commission.
As should be clear by now, the forces that make Romney a formidable candidate are far stronger than the forces that make him a ridiculous man. Nothing he does to embarrass himself in public is bad enough to overwhelm the power of what a truly remarkable liar he has become. No misstep is bad enough that it cannot be disappeared from our collective mind by a few dozen more commercials. The memory hole in this election is located in Sheldon Adelson’s wallet. His is the most purely cynical campaign in recent memory, selling to a battered economy the very policies that battered it in the first place, and doing so confident in the knowledge that the country has forgotten, or has become completely confused, about what was done to it. And cynicism sells best to the cynical. Charles P. Pierce ☀
Let’s briefly review Noonan’s argument for Rice to appreciate just how wrong it is. Rice is a figure of “obvious and nameable accomplishment”? Which accomplishment would that be? Completely failing to do a competent job as National Security Adviser? Presiding over the worst period of U.S.-Russian relations since the Cold War? Facilitating Hamas’ takeover of Gaza? Advising Bush as he embarked on one of the greatest debacles of post-WWII U.S. foreign policy? Helping to shape one of the most disastrous foreign policy records of modern times? Take your pick. No one can take any of that away from her. Her accomplishment is obvious. Noonan says that Rice wouldn’t be “learning on the job.” Certainly not. She didn’t seem to learn anything while she was in her previous administration positions, so why start now? Choosing her as the VP nominee would have a “certain boldness.” Then again, driving off of a cliff demonstrates a “certain boldness. Noonan’s “Brilliant Choice”: The Absurdity of Condi Rice as the VP Nominee ☀
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