The Presidential Election In The USA..........

[Prometheus]

Now That Was a Debate: The Other Presidential Candidates Speak Out


By David Swanson
Global Research, October 24, 2012

Here’s a video with highlights of Tuesday’s presidential debate:
http://youtu.be/iiPtJkK58lo

Participating were Jill Stein, Rocky Anderson, Virgil Goode, and Gary Johnson. Moderating was Larry King. Larry was a bit unprepared, but his questions were far superior to those asked at any of the corporate funded debates thus far. They weren’t his questions, though, as they’d been submitted through the internet and selected by http://FreeAndEqual.org Also contributing to the debate was an audience that was permitted to applaud and frequently did so. Johnson was the clear favorite of the crowd before any words were said.

The first question dealt with election reform, and Stein and Anderson made clear they would clean the money out of elections. Goode proposed to ban PACs but to let the money flow through individuals. Johnson made no proposal to limit private election spending, even though it’s the primary reason most Americans have no idea he’s running for president. Instead, Johnson claimed he’d like politicians to wear NASCAR suits advertising their funders. However, he was not wearing one.

Following the first question, it was pointed out to King that he’d skipped opening statements. So those were made. Stein and Anderson described a nation in crisis, suffering from expanding poverty, lack of healthcare, homelessness, and an erosion of civil liberties. Goode tackled the pressing issues of the deficit, immigration, and his desire for term limits (as he would throughout the evening). As a former constituent of Goode, I’ll have you know we had to vote him out before he would leave. Johnson focused his comments on the need to end wars, including drone wars, as well as the war on drugs. He agreed with Stein and Anderson on civil liberties, proposing to repeal the PATRIOT Act and indefinite detention. But he also proposed to virtually eliminate taxes. Johnson tried to address the apparently unfamiliar topic of poverty that Stein and Anderson had raised, referring repeatedly to policies that “disparagingly” impacted the poor (he meant disproportionately).

The second question dealt with the drug war, and all but Goode proposed to end it, and to reduce incarceration. Anderson said that he would pardon all prisoners convicted of only drug crimes. Goode said he’d keep marijuana illegal but cut funding for enforcing that law. Cutting funding in his view is clearly desirable even when he approves of the funding.

The third question was whether military spending should be so incredibly high. All four agreed with the majority of the rest of us that it needs to be cut. Goode didn’t specify how much he would cut, and his record suggests he would cut little or nothing. Johnson proposed cutting 43%. Stein and Anderson failed to specify but have both said elsewhere, including on their websites (which will always remain the best source of most information debates provide), that they would cut 50%. Johnson, Anderson, and Stein, listed off the wars they would end. Stein stressed that climate change is where she would move much of the money.

Tuesday’s debate included a great deal of denouncing the Obama-Romney position on a range of topics, and a great deal of developing slight differences among agreeing candidates. But the fourth question brought out dramatic disagreement. Asked about the cost of college, Goode said he would cut spending on education, apparently because cutting spending is just more important than anything else. Johnson, in a slight variation, said he’d stop funding education because without student loans students would just avoid education and eventually schools would have to lower their costs. With at least one leader of the Chicago Teachers strike in the room, Stein and Anderson said they would make college free. This resulted in Johnson and Goode arguing that there is no such thing as free, that the money must come from somewhere. A flight attendant on the airplane I took out of Chicago shared their view when I asked her if the online internet was free and she rather angrily informed me that “Nothing is free, sir.” But of course the porno-cancer-scans and gropes from the TSA are free. What we choose to fund collectively is often not thought of as a consumer good at all. Stein and Anderson came back with an argument that “we cannot afford NOT to invest in education.” But neither of them pointed out that by cutting the military and/or taxing billionaires we could have far more money than needed. At no time in the course of the debate was the room full of libertarians (who imagine we all have an equal right to spend money) informed that 400 Americans have more money than half the country.

The fifth question dealt with the presidential power to imprison anyone forever without a charge or a trial, a power contained in the 2011 National “Defense” Authorization Act, and a power which Obama’s subordinates are currently struggling in court to uphold. All four candidates, coming from very different places, agreed that this power needs to be removed, along with powers of assassination, warrantless spying, and retribution against whistleblowers. Clearly there is a broad public consensus on these issues that is derailed by lesser-evilism, with half of those who care about such things holding their nose and backing Republicans, and the other half Democrats.

A sixth and final question, before closing statements, asked the four participants for one way in which they would amend the Constitution. Goode and Johnson proposed term limits, a rather silly solution that would not fix elections but just remove one person from them, accelerating the pace of the revolving door between government and lobbyist jobs. Anderson proposed an equal rights amendment barring discrimination based on gender or sexual preference. And Stein, to huge applause, proposed an amendment clarifying that money is not speech and corporations are not people.

Here’s the full video:
http://www.c-span.org/Events/Third-Party-Presidential-Debate/10737435220-1/

[Prometheus]

RT to host final US presidential third-party debate

RT - 26 October, 2012

Libertarian Party candidate Gov. Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein will sound off once more before Election Day, with both presidential hopefuls now slated to debate live from RT’s Washington, DC studio on October 30.

Tens of thousands around the globe watched earlier this week when broadcasting legend Larry King moderated a debate between the top third-party candidates live from Chicago. As those politicians continue to be shunned by the mainstream media and political establishment alike, though, they remain excluded from presenting their platform to the country on the eve of a historic election. RT aims to make a difference, however, and will host Johnson and Stein to speak their minds on the topics Americans really care about in 2012.

Following the success of this week’s Third Party Presidential Debate broadcast on RT live from Chicago, the top candidates as selected by voters on the Free and Equal Elections Foundation website will move on to a second debate from the nation’s capital, this time answering questions dedicated solely to foreign policy.

“The voters have spoken, and we are pleased to announce that Gary Johnson and Jill Stein will advance to the second debate,” Christina Tobin, founder and chair of Free and Equal, tells RT.

When Johnson and Stein took the stage to participate in the first third-party debate this year, the candidates sounded off on questions that, while vital to the voting public, were absent from the discussions held between President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney during the televised debates that selected only Democrat and Republican politicians to participate.

The second and final third-party presidential debate will be held on October 30 from 9:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Eastern Time, (October 31, 1:00 a.m. – 2:30 a.m. GMT)  and will be aired on RT America as well as RT.com and on RT’s YouTube channel.
http://rt.com/usa/news/rt-third-party-debate-stein-249/

[Prometheus]

Prometheus...I removed the artice on the Texas threat to the U.N monitors because an article about this had been previously posted .... God Bless, Rad



/

[Rad]

October 25, 2012

Obama Campaign Endgame: Grunt Work and Cold Math

By JIM RUTENBERG
NYT

CHICAGO — This is what “grinding it out” looks like at President Obama’s election headquarters: scores of young staff members intently clicking away at computer keyboards as they crunch gigabytes of data about which way undecided voters are leaning, where they can be reached, and when; strategists standing at whiteboards busily writing and erasing early voting numbers and turnout possibilities; a lonely Ping-Pong table.

The wave of passion and excitement that coursed through Mr. Obama’s headquarters here in 2008 has been replaced with a methodical and workmanlike approach to manufacturing the winning coalition that came together more organically and enthusiastically for him the last time, a more arduous task with no guarantee of success.

As Washington and the cable news commentariat breathlessly discuss whether Mitt Romney’s post-debate movement in the polls has peaked, Mr. Obama’s campaign technicians — and that’s what many of them are — are putting as much faith in the multimillion-dollar machine they built for just such a close race as in the president himself.

“We are exactly where I thought we would be, in a very close election with 12 days left with two things to do and two things only: persuade the undecided and turn our voters out,” said Jim Messina, 43, the president’s technocratic campaign manager, slightly paler and more hunched than he was when the campaign began. Pointing to the rows of personnel outside his office on Thursday, he added, “Everything in that room has been focused on that.”

Four years ago, Mr. Obama’s political team here was preparing one of its trademark showstoppers: a half-hour prime-time program extolling Mr. Obama’s character and plans across four networks, culminating in a live feed from a boisterous rally in Florida.

There will be no such razzmatazz this time around. Any extra money in this tight final phase of the election is being wired to Nevada and Florida for more Spanish-language ads, to Iowa and Ohio for more on-the-ground staff members, and to Google and Facebook for more microtargeted messaging to complacent, maybe even demoralized, young supporters.

Mr. Obama emphasized the importance of their task during a stop at a phone bank here in Chicago on Thursday, telling volunteers, “If we let up and our voters don’t turn out, we could lose this election.” He added quickly, “The good news is, if our voters do turn out, we will definitely win the election.”

At the White House, it is clear that the action has moved to Chicago, with some staff members, who are legally prohibited from even wearing campaign buttons to work, pining to be on the trail and others whiling away the time preparing for the lame-duck Congressional wrangling on the budget impasse.

For Mr. Obama’s campaign staff in a nondescript office tower here, the task now comes down to creating an electorate more favorable to Democrats than most major pollsters have assumed, with percentages of Obama-friendly black, Latino and young voters that rival those of 2008, at least enough to offset the large drop in support among other segments of the population, like independent men.

An ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll on Thursday had Mr. Romney with a 50-to-47-percent edge among likely voters nationwide, the first time the challenger had reached 50 percent in the poll. But Mr. Obama’s aides here are at least projecting an air of confidence. They say their system, which they began building long before the Republican primaries, is exceeding expectations. Eleven days will tell whether they are bluffing.

After using their huge database to increase registration among favorable voting groups in crucial states, they are now pinpointing people who ordered absentee ballots and need a nudge to send them, or sporadic voters who indicated they would vote for the president but may need to be pushed to show up at their polling place.

“We made a strategic choice very early on that getting our supporters — and the right types of supporters — to the polls before Election Day was a big priority for us,” said Mitch Stewart, the Obama campaign’s battleground state director, who has been helping organize Mr. Obama’s supporters since the 2008 election and started at the campaign some 19 months and, in his words, “20 pounds ago.”

With a box of Tastykakes sitting on his desk in his spartan office, Mr. Stewart added, “The electorate’s going to look much more like 2008 than 2010.”

Some polls in recent weeks have shown Mr. Obama with an advantage among all registered voters, and Mr. Romney with an advantage or tied among likely voters. Mr. Obama’s aides are contending that the pollsters are wrongly assuming that Mr. Obama’s voters are less enthusiastic and that turnout among his key groups will be down, that is, he has fewer likely voters than he had four years ago.

A new Time magazine poll this week showed Mr. Obama ahead by a two-to-one ratio among those who voted early in Ohio.

His aides pointed to statistics showing that a slightly higher percentage of African-Americans had voted early in North Carolina compared with the percentage at this point four years ago, and that their percentages are up along with those of Hispanics in the early mail-in vote in Florida, which they attributed to their turnout operations.

Officials with Mr. Romney’s campaign disagree, and they said that whatever gains Mr. Obama had would be unsustainable through Election Day, contending that he is succeeding only in getting those most likely to support him to show up early, an assessment that Mr. Obama’s aides dispute.

“Every cycle, when someone is losing, they claim they are altering the electorate,” said Rich Beeson, Mr. Romney’s political director.

Of course, at this stage of the race, each campaign is engaged in a bit of bravado, aimed at giving supporters and undecided voters alike a sense that it is the winning team to be on.

There is little dispute that for Mr. Obama to at least come close enough to matching his 2008 coalition to win he will need to induce people to vote in a way he did not have to four years ago, before the full impact of the Great Recession was followed by intensive partisan wrangling.

Mr. Obama’s aides here said they had prepared for the need to rebuild his coalition all along, and that is why they have kept careful tabs on his former supporters, and worked to identify potential new ones, since he took office, all the while perfecting ways to keep track of them, keep in touch with them, and, ultimately, persuade them to vote.

The campaign is refocusing its advertising to scare less motivated supporters to vote. One new ad presents a reminder of Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush in the Florida recount of 2000, which, the ad says, made “the difference between what was, and what could have been.”

But ultimately, if Mr. Obama does win, it could come down to the huge room of technicians and data crunchers in a corporate office here, sitting on exercise balls or squeezing stress toys as they dispatch information to volunteers knocking on doors hundreds of miles away.

In interviews, Mr. Obama’s aides wistfully recalled when the office had just opened, a vast, mostly empty space with a countdown of the days scrawled in Magic Marker — then well into the hundreds. Now it is done with a digital clock, ticking off the very last minutes and seconds.

Peter Baker contributed reporting from Chicago, and Mark Landler and Jackie Calmes from Washington.

[Rad]

October 25, 2012 07:00 PM

Gov. Mitt Romney Blocked Birth Certificates To Gay Parents; Felt They Are Unfit And Kids Would Be Developmentally Impaired

By John Amato

Murray Waas broke an important story and one which goes to the very core of Mitt Romney's beliefs and who he really is.

It's been hard to figure out during this presidential campaign just what Romney wants to do as president. He was vehemently against same-sex marriage and parents after the law was passed in Massachusetts to legalize gay marriage in 2003. But it went deeper than that. He believed gay parents were unfit to be parents and that children born to same-sex couples could be developmentally impaired.

    After presenting their proposal for revised forms to Romney’s chief of staff Beth Myers in May 2004, Department of Public Health officials were told by a Romney staff lawyer via e-mail that “there appear to be many complicated issues that should be discussed with many different communities before the changes are made.’’ The next month, Romney delivered remarks before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington in which he decried the state Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling and its effect on child-rearing. He outlined his misgivings about the request from the Registry of Vital Records.

        “The children of America have the right to have a father and a mother,’’ Romney said in his prepared remarks. “What should be the ideal for raising a child? Not a village, not ‘parent A’ and ‘parent B,’ but a mother and a father.’’Romney also warned about the societal impact of gay parents raising children. “Scientific studies of children raised by same-sex couples are almost nonexistent,’’ he said. “It may affect the development of children and thereby future society as a whole.’’

    Romney expressed similar beliefs during a speech in 2005 to socially conservative voters in South Carolina, as he was beginning to be viewed as a serious candidate for president.

        “Some gays are actually having children born to them,’’ he declared. “It’s not right on paper. It’s not right in fact. Every child has a right to a mother and father.’’

    The birth-certificates episode reflects a constantly evolving approach on gay rights for the former Massachusetts governor. Romney ran for Senate in 1994 promising to be a moderate champion of homosexual rights.

Mitt strongly believes that gay parents would hurt society as a whole. That's insane. I believe his Mormonism has a lot to do with his deep-seated hatred of gays.

    After the Supreme Judicial Court ruling, he actively supported efforts in Massachusetts for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Those efforts never bore fruit.

Romney has to be judged by his actions; period. In the story itself, Waas also reports on how horrible Romney was to all the new gay parents in his state.

    It seemed like a minor adjustment. To comply with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that legalized gay marriage in 2003, the state Registry of Vital Records and Statistics said it needed to revise its birth certificate forms for babies born to same-sex couples. The box for “father” would be relabeled “father or second parent,’’ reflecting the new law.

    But to then-Governor Mitt Romney, who opposed child-rearing by gay couples, the proposal symbolized unacceptable changes in traditional family structures.He rejected the Registry of Vital Records plan and insisted that his top legal staff individually review the circumstances of every birth to same-sex parents. Only after winning approval from Romney’s lawyers could hospital officials and town clerks across the state be permitted to cross out by hand the word “father’’ on individual birth certificates, and then write in “second parent,’’ in ink.

He lied when he ran against Ted Kennedy in 1994 promising to be a moderate champion of homosexual rights and he lied when he ran for Governor in 2002. Remember when he scored a perfect 100 on a Planned Parenthood questionnaire? In '02 Romney Supported Roe v Wade Decision and Spending State Funds For Abortion Services

He also lied when he said he would never try try to force his religious beliefs about abortion on other people -- a position he's again trying to claim. Of course, during the GOP primaries, he was eager to help overturn Roe v. Wade and vowed to sign a constitutional amendment declaring life to begin at conception. But that was then, and this is now.

[Rad]

The Media Won’t tell You About Decades of Perjury Accusations Against Romney

By: Rmuse October 25th, 2012

A compulsive liar is a person who lies out of habit as their normal and reflexive way of responding to questions, and they typically lie about everything, large and small, and their habit makes telling the truth very awkward and uncomfortable while lying feels right.  Willard Romney has proven himself to be a compulsive liar throughout the Republican primary and during the general election campaign, and it appears it has been his practice in business as well. Lying in court is especially egregious, and there is a report that Willard Romney committed perjury in his friend’s divorce proceedings, and it is not the first time he is accused of perjuring himself.

Romney often boasts that one of Bain’s success stories was the office supply chain Staples that his good friend Tom Stemberg founded. In 1988 when Stemberg was going through divorce proceedings, Romney testified on record that Staples stock was “over-valued,” and that he “didn’t place a great deal of credibility in the forecast of the company’s future.” Willard went on to testify that Stemberg spoke about the probability of success as if it was today and that “he minimized the risk and maximized the high probability of success, and the dream went on.” It was to Stemberg’s benefit to place little value on Staples stock to prevent his wife, Maureen Sullivan-Stemberg, from gaining from Staples equity and Romney’s testimony undervalued Stemberg’s primary asset in a fifty/fifty state.

However, if Romney truly believed Staples stock was “over-valued,” why was he, at the same time, making a deal between Stemberg and Goldman Sachs to take the company of no worth public? Because he was protecting his close friend from having to split fairly the assets from the marriage and depriving Stemberg’s ex-wife from her fair share according to the law. Some people may claim Romney made an honest miscalculation in not knowing if Staples stock was worthless or not, but as the first investor, a major shareholder, and board member, as with any corporation, he had a fiduciary responsibility to inform shareholders that the stock’s value was plunging. Either Romney lied about the worth of the stocks, or he was concealing the truth that Staples was a worthless investment and intended to fleece shareholders as he did in several other cases such as KB Toys.

Romney was not a stupid investor or business man, and he claims Staples is his “proudest achievement” on the campaign trail, but to claim a company is worthless at the same time he was in talks to take the company public and make millions informs his willingness to either perjure himself in court or shirk his fiduciary duty as a Staples’ board member.  This was not a flip-flop on Romney’s part, it was either a deliberate lie to benefit his friend and cheat his ex-wife, or conceal important investment information from shareholders, but based on the fact he was dealing with Goldman Sachs to take the company public, it appears Romney was lying to deprive his friends ex-wife from her fair share of the marriage assets. It is also not the first time Romney has been accused of committing perjury.

In bankruptcy cases, a cardinal rule “mandates all disclosures of conflict of interest,” and according to 18 USCS § 152 (3) “A person who knowingly and fraudulently makes a false declaration, certificate, verification, or statement under penalty of perjury as permitted under section 1s746 of title 28, in or in relation to any case under title 11 shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.” In 2001, Romney was “sole shareholder, director, and President of Sankaty Ltd. and thus is the controlling person of Sankaty, Ltd,” and Sankaty applied for payment of administrative expenses from Stage Stores, a company in which Romney was controlling shareholder, and by not disclosing conflict of interest, he committed perjury according to USCS § 152 (3). In a case often cited as precedent, a lawyer, failed to report conflict of interest and he went to prison, paid a fine, and settled for millions-of-dollars for simply not alerting the court he had a conflict of interest.

Willard Romney is a liar and there can be little doubt he failed to disclose conflict of interest in bankruptcy court. He also knew Staples was not a worthless company or he would not have been making a deal with Goldman Sachs to take the company public at the same time he told a judge  Staples stock was “over-valued” and that he “didn’t place a great deal of credibility in the forecast of the company’s future.” In those business deals, Romney was not lying because “telling the truth was very awkward and uncomfortable while lying feels right,” he lied to deprive his friend’s ex-wife from her rightful due and to prevent his friend from losing half his Staples investment.  He lies were purely for profit and not out of a pathological condition or mental disorder.

Romney cannot be trusted on myriad levels, but especially when it comes to money. He conceals hundreds-of-millions of dollars offshore to avoid paying taxes, and he lies about his tax plan that will save him millions. When a person lies in court, whether bankruptcy or divorce court, it is simply perjury, and it is to deceive the court. The statute of limitations expired in the Stemberg divorce case, but in bankruptcy court it is a different story and Romney needs to face the full weight of the law like any other American who deliberately and with malice aforethought commits perjury whether it is to protect his friends investment, deprive a woman of her share of marriage property, or to deceive a bankruptcy judge of conflict of interest.

[Rad]

Ohio’s Election Nightmare – Courtesy of Jon Husted

By: Adalia Woodbury October 25th, 2012

Many are saying that this election hinges on Ohio. Well, if that is true, thanks to Jon Husted’s new program, we may not know the results of the election until late November.

    We could easily see a situation in which the nation has to wait for Ohio because of provisionals,” said Ed Foley, an Ohio State University law professor and nationally respected expert on election law. “We ought to start thinking about those what-if scenarios now rather than the Wednesday morning after the election.

The stated objective of Husted’s decision to send absentee ballot applications to nearly 7 million registered voters was to make things easier. Instead, it is causing a calamity.

Cincinnati.com reports on a truly nightmare scenario.

As of the time of the report, 1.43 million Ohioans requested the absentee ballot. According to Husted’s office, only 618,861 returned their vote. Both numbers are expected to grow by the deadline for most Ohioans to request an absentee ballot on November 3.

Nearly 190,000 people cast their absentee ballots in person at the designated early voting centers.
It’s possible that many of the 800,000 plus voters who have yet to return their completed absentee ballot are planning to return them closer to Election Day.

However, it’s just as possible that many of these voters may opt to vote in person, and that’s where the problems start. This means they would have to cast provisional ballots, so that election officials can cross check to confirm that people didn’t vote absentee then vote again in person.

Provisional votes will not be counted until November 17th.

If the election hinges on the outcome in Ohio, that means we will be waiting for several weeks to know the outcome of the election.

There is nothing about this program that makes voting easier. Rather, it has created confusion to the point that the results of the election might not be known until late November.

Given Husted’s history, it is more likely that his intent was to create even more confusion for voters. This is the same Secretary of State who attempted to restrict early voting in Democratic leaning counties, while maintaining the previsious early voting days and hours in Republican strongholds.

This is the same Jon Husted who thinks it’s “un-American” for Democrats to vote early. His policies suggest that Husted’s idea of America is giving preference to Republican voters. So dedicated is Husted to an America in which Democrats votes are suppressed, that he defended his position in the courts, including the Supreme Court. After losing every legal battle, Husted restricted the available hours that people who vote in the three days leading up to the election.

This absentee ballot program has created more problems than Husted may have intended to resolve.
While it remains possible that some of the people who have yet to return their completed absentee ballot; the more likely scenario is a substantial increase in provisional ballots, which cannot be counted until November 17th.

Not only did Husted make voting in Ohio more complicated, he created additional work for election workers because now they will have to cross check many more provisional ballots than they had to in the past. This means the results in Ohio will be delayed and if the election depends on the outcome in Ohio, the nation will have to wait weeks to know who will be elected President.

Husted deserves a 1 finger salute in appreciate of his efforts to make voting in Ohio “easier” immediately followed by losing his job.

[Rad]

October 26, 2012 07:00 AM

How Do You Know Mitt Romney Is Lying? His Lips Are Moving!

By Susie Madrak

Here's one for your Facebook page. It seems like Mitt Romney isn't the only Republican with Romnesia. Enjoy this collection of his current Republican boosted saying what they really think about the Mittster! Dear God, even Newt Gingrich is telling the truth.

With friends like these, huh, Mitt?

Click here to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ByzxFQSlyDA#!

[Rad]

He literally can not stop himself ....

Mitt Romney Plays Grim Reaper of Jobs in Ohio with Scary Lies about Jeep

By: Sarah JonesOctober 26th, 2012

At an event in Defiance, Ohio Thursday evening, Mitt Romney got his Halloween on early by playing the Grim Reaper of jobs when he told a complete falsehood about Chrysler moving Jeep to China and taking Americans job with them. Chrysler said that a “careful and unbiased” understanding “would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments.” That’s our Mitt.

Romney took “a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats” Thursday when he said, “I saw a story today, that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China. I will fight for every good job in America, I’m going to fight to make sure trade is fair, and if it’s fair, America will win.”

Did you catch that? He saw a “story” alright, and just like Fox, he figured he’d “some people” reality by not bothering with it at all.

The truth is that Chrysler is not moving its Jeep production from America to China. As Chrysler said today, “Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China.”

President Obama has challenged unfair Chinese tariffs on U.S. auto exports to China, including Jeeps. We all know that Romney would have let the American auto industry and a million jobs go under and he’s all for shipping jobs overseas where men like him can get away with paying workers 88 cents a day and no worries about healthcare or being sued for dangerous working conditions.

Here are the facts from the Chrysler Blog Post. They point out, “A careful and unbiased reading of the Bloomberg take would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments.” Ouch.

    Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China. It’s simply reviewing the opportunities to return Jeep output to China for the world’s largest auto market. U.S. Jeep assembly lines will continue to stay in operation….

    There are times when the reading of a newswire report generates storms originated by a biased or predisposed approach. On Oct. 22, 2012, at 11:10 a.m. ET, the Bloomberg News report “Fiat Says Jeep® Output May Return to China as Demand Rises’ stated ‘Chrysler currently builds all Jeep SUV models at plants in Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. Manley (President and CEO of the Jeep brand) referred to adding Jeep production sites rather than shifting output from North America to China.”

    Despite clear and accurate reporting, the take has given birth to a number of stories making readers believe that Chrysler plans to shift all Jeep production to China from North America, and therefore idle assembly lines and U.S. workforce. It is a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats.

Business Week backs up Chrysler, “Chrysler currently builds all Jeep SUV models at plants in Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. Manley referred to adding Jeep production sites rather than shifting output from North America to China.”

In case Mitt is still confused, “Chrysler Group announced that it will invest $500 million at the Toledo Assembly Complex (Ohio) for the production of the next generation Jeep® SUV in 2013. As a result, the Company will add a second shift of production or about 1,100 jobs in the third quarter of 2013.”

It looks like Romney was hoping to deflect and distract from Bainport on the evening when Sensata workers were threatening a walkout after being harassed and threatened by managers at the Bain owned plant. The Bain owned Sensata is shipping American jobs overseas to China after forcing the American workers to train their Chinese replacements in spite of being a profitable plant.

“Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” Mitt Romney must feel he has to go Grim Reaper of Death and Fear when faced with the success of Obama’s auto rescue, “Basking in such sentiments echoing across assembly lines of shiny Wranglers, Obama took a victory bow at the Jeep plant, where he was hailed by many of the 1,763 workers as a job-savior for the 2009 federal bailout that kept Chrysler and General Motors alive.”

[Prometheus]

Who Will Win the Elections? “The Republicrats”


By Julie Lévesque
Global Research, October 24, 2012
 (hyperlinks in the article; http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-will-win-the-elections-the-republicrats/5309524 )

There is no democracy in the United States.

American political life is dominated by one party with two heads, often called the “Republicrats”.

Republicans and Democrats agree on core issues and only argue on technicalities. Obama, who was portrayed as a peaceful saviour in the last presidential elections, has demonstrated during his four years in office that he is not much different from his predecessor.

Nobel “Peace” Prize Laureate Barack Obama’s “war record” is worse than that of George W. Bush;  the civil rights of Americans have shrunk further in the last four years and President Obama has shown that  he is closer to Wall Street than to Main Street.

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are more of the same on key issues as Glen Ford explains:

To any objective observer, the consensus that exists between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on the fundamental issues of war and peace, Wall Street’s dominance of American life, and fiscal austerity, has been made crystal clear in the two “debates.” In the absence of effective popular resistance to the duopoly of money, the economic and social crisis fails to create a corresponding political crisis for the rulers. As a result, there is nothing important for them to debate. (Glen Ford, Obama-Romney: The Duopoly Debates Itself)

But how are Presidential debates regulated? The history of the Commission on Presidential Debates sheds light on how and why other parties are excluded from the political debate and kept away from the public’s eyes and ears:

The Commission on Presidential Debates is a private corporation headed by the former chairmen of the Republican and Democratic parties. The CPD is a duopoly which allows the major party candidates to draft secret agreements about debate arrangements including moderators, debate format and even participants. The result is a travesty riddled with sterile, non-contentious arguments which consistently exclude alternative voices that Americans want to hear. (VIDEO : SpartacusMoriarty, The Truth About the Commission on Presidential Debates)

In 2008, while the Republicrats agreed on bailing out Wall Street, ALL other presidential candidates were against this massive institutionalized fraud. Thanks to the Commission on Presidential Debates, Americans were led to believe that the bank bailout was not only inevitable but in the public interest. Americans were prevented from hearing the dissenting political voices, who were opposed to this odious debt. The same goes for the Republicrats’ Imperial design fueled by “the war on terrorism” and regime change, defended by both Romney and Obama as a legitimate “humanitarian” undertaking.

This excerpt of the last debate shows the extent to which American tyranny around the world is trivialized by the two major parties. The only two presidential candidates allowed to “debate” can casually declare on national television that their country is superior to all others, that they wish to arm foreigners in order to remove a foreign head of state and replace him with a “friendly” leader instead, all of this, oddly enough, for the benefit of the values America advocates with all its might: “human rights [...], freedom of expression, elections [...]”

Romney: Well I — I absolutely believe that America has a — a responsibility, and the privilege of helping defend freedom and promote the principles that — that make the world more peaceful. And those principles include human rights, human dignity, free enterprise, freedom of expression, elections. Because when there are elections, people tend to vote for peace. They don’t vote for war. So we want to promote those principles around the world.

[...]

Obama: America remains the one indispensable nation. And the world needs a strong America, and it is stronger now than when I came into office.

[…]

Romney: As I indicated, our objectives are to replace Assad and to have in place a new government which is friendly to us, a responsible government, if possible. And I want to make sure they get armed and they have the arms necessary to defend themselves, but also to remove — to remove Assad.

As you hear from intelligence sources even today, the — the insurgents are highly disparate. They haven’t come together. They haven’t formed a unity group, a council of some kind. That needs to happen. America can help that happen. And we need to make sure they have the arms they need to carry out the very important role which is getting rid of Assad.

[...]

Obama: What you just heard Governor Romney said is he doesn’t have different ideas. And that’s because we’re doing exactly what we should be doing to try to promote a moderate Syrian leadership and a — an effective transition so that we get Assad out. That’s the kind of leadership we’ve shown. That’s the kind of leadership we’ll continue to show. (FoxNews, Transcript: October 22 Presidential Debate, October 22, 2012)

It is mind-boggling to see how both candidates in chorus “promote democracy”, while calling for the removal of a head of state by arming terrorist gangs to do the job. And whoever is in office in the wake of the November elections, “that’s the kind of leadership [they]’ll continue to show”.

For Bill van Auken the debate was a “filthy political spectacle”:

In what can only be described as a degrading and filthy political spectacle, both the questions posed by the moderator and the answers provided by the candidates of the two major capitalist parties began with the premise that US imperialism has the unassailable right to defend its interests by inflicting death and destruction on anyone or any country that is deemed an obstacle.

No attempt was made to probe the broader interests of American capitalism underlying the wars, occupations and assassination campaigns that have dominated world affairs over the past decade. The impression was promoted that opposing these policies is beyond the pale of American politics, at once forbidden and futile. (Bill Van Auken, Obama and Romney concur on War, Assassination and Reaction)

Even if the two parties are two sides of the same coin, fraudulent behaviour is not ruled out of the Presidential equation. Reminiscent of the 2004 election fraud, a new controversy surrounding voting machines has arisen. Do the Romneys “own your vote”?

Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son and brother are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 7. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the US. (Gerry Bello, Bob Fitrakis, and Harvey Wasserman, United States. Does the Romney Family now Own your E-Vote?)

[T]he Romney family, namely Mitt, Ann, G Scott and Tagg Romney, along with Mitt’s “6th son” and campaign finance chair have a secretive private equity firm called Solamere Capital Partners. This firms ties to Romney’s campaign and bundlers is already well documented, along with its connection to the manufacture and distribution of voting machines. What is not as well documented is a subsidiary of that private equity firm hiring employees of a failed firm tied to a Ponzi scheme that has a long history of money laundering for Latin American drug cartels and to the Iran-Contra scandal. (Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis, Employees of Romney family’s secret bank tied to fraud, money laundering, drug cartels and the CIA)

Global Research brings to its readers a list of articles on this very important topic.

[Rad]

Texas AG Threatens Election Observers while Ignoring Conservative Vigilante Group

By: Adalia Woodbury October 26th, 2012

Things are never dull in the State of Texas. The reaction of State Officials to the idea of international observers being in their state to observe elections is no exception. First, as Hrafnkell Haraldson reported earlier this week, the voter suppression groups blew a gasket and State officials followed their lead.

The OSCE responded to the Attorney General’s threats with a statement which says in part:

    The threat of criminal sanctions against OSCE/ODIHR observers is unacceptable,” Janez Lenarčič said. “The United States, like all countries in the OSCE, has an obligation to invite ODIHR observers to observe its elections.”
    “Our observers are required to remain strictly impartial and not to intervene in the voting process in any way,” Lenarčič said. “They are in the United States to observe these elections, not to interfere in them.”

Indeed, there is a huge difference between observing an election and interfering in it, at least that’s how we saw it when we were the ones doing the observing.

Interfering with the vote sounds more like what Republicans have done with efforts to suppress the vote through voter ID laws, hiring a “strategist” with a history of voter registration fraud; and giving nods and winks to groups like True To Vote that intend to intimidate voters on Election Day.

If we are going to talk about observers who seek to interfere with elections, let’s talk about the Texas based Tea Party group, True to Vote. This group has interfered with the election process seeking to have eligible voters removed from the rolls. While calling their foot soldiers “poll watchers” this group has interfered with the vote in minority neighborhoods, by virtue of intimidating voters and challenging a voter’s right to vote with election officials. They plan to do the same in this election. They caused delays in places where lines are long, with the intent to discourage voters from exercising their constitutional rights and plan to do the same during this election.

What has the Attorney-General of Texas done to stop this group from violating the very laws he seeks to use against the OSCE observers? Moreover, the OSCE is acting in an official capacity, and under the conditions that every OSCE country, which includes the United State, agreed to by virtue of being members of the organization. Conversely, True to Vote is a Koch brother financed vigilante group with no official standing and whose purpose is to influence and interfere with the election process.

A-G Abbot mentions ACORN in his letter, specifically stating: “One of those organizations, Project Vote, is closely affiliated with ACORN, which collapsed in disgrace after its role in a widespread voter-registration fraud scheme was uncovered.”

This is laughable given that the RNC and several state Level Republican officials hired Nathan Sproul given his history of alleged widespread voter-registration fraud. If the Attorney-General is so concerned about voter registration fraud, why isn’t he speaking out to condemn the Republican Party’s payoff to Nathan Sproul for engaging in the very things Abbot accused ACORN of.

Moreover, Republicans are attempting to deny people’s votes in another way. Sources in Texas tell of a Republican effort to manipulate Democrats out of their down ballot votes by circulating misinformation in an email containing the following message.

    ATTENTION! TO EVERYONE THAT’S VOTING IN THE NOVEMBER 2012 ELECTION!!

    IF YOU ARE PLANNING TO VOTE A “STRAIGHT DEMOCRATIC TICKET” THIS NOVEMBER, BE SURE TO
    PUNCH PRESIDENT OBAMA’S NAME “FIRST” ON THE CARD, THEN PROCEED TO PUNCH “STRAIGHT
    DEMOCRATIC TICKET”! IF YOU DON’T PUNCH PRESIDENT OBAMA NAME FIRST ON THE TICKET, YOUR
    VOTE WILL BE VOIDED!!!!

    PLEASE PASS THIS IMPORTANT INFORMATION ON TO ALL YOUR EM-MAIL FRIENDS AND FAMILIES. I’M
    SURE THIS INFORMATION WILL NOT BE TOLD TO YOU AT THE POLLS THIS COMING NOVEMBER!!!!!!

    GOD BLESS!

Well this information won’t be told at the polls because it isn’t true. The reality is voters in Texas who wish to vote a straight Democratic Ticket should punch the President’s name first. If, as he claims, the Attorney-General is concerned about the integrity of the election, he better start by cleaning house in his political party and the organizations support it.

There is also something called The Logan Act which forbids unauthorized individuals from engaging in acts of diplomacy.

Unless the Attorney General sought and obtained authority from the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, his letter to the Ambassador appears to violate the “Logan Act” under Section 953.

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

We are aware that Governor Rick Scott has previously threatened to secede from the United States, but so far as we know, the Governor has yet to act on that threat.

In other words, the Attorney General is still subject to federal laws, including the Logan Act.
I’m willing to bet the Attorney General didn’t bother to get authorization from the Obama Administration before writing his threatening letter to the Ambassador, possibly placing him in a legally precarious position.

All off this is happening because Republicans know that the majority of Americans reject their plutocratic/theocratic “vision” of America. Rather than offering a mainstream conservative platform as Republicans did in the past, today’s Republican party is resorting to voter intimidation, vote suppression and using corporate funded vigilante groups to bully people away from the polls.

Threatening an international organization only emphasizes the need for an outsider to monitor our elections.

The Republican Attorney-General of Texas is doing nothing to stop efforts by his party and organizations friendly to it from doing the very things he wrongly accuses the OSCE of doing. Aside from ignoring violations of his state’s law by True to Vote, the Attorney general appears to have violated at least one Federal law with his threatening letter to a foreign diplomat.

[Rad]

Obama and Dems ‘Absolutely Crushing’ Romney and GOP in Early Voting in Nevada

By: Sarah Jones October 26th, 2012

On MSNBC this morning, Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston said that President Obama and Democrats are “absolutely crushing” Mitt Romney and Republicans in early voting in the state. He’s right. Democrats lead Republicans on every metric: mail ballots returned, in-person early voting, and total ballots cast.

TRANSCRIPT

ROBERTS: We want to dig deeper into the numbers with Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston, host of “Ralston Reports,” our NBC affiliate in Las Vegas, which is KSNV, and also the author of the “Ralston Reports” website and joining us is Allison Sherry, Washington correspondent for The Denver Post. It’s great to have you all here. Jon, I want to start with you. Key in Nevada, our polls showing that President Obama with this lead among the state’s large Hispanic population. NBC News Political Director Chuck Rodd reports even Republicans feel Nevada is so well-organized on the Democratic side of things, it’s really going to be hard to overcome the advantage. So, what are you hearing on the ground?

RALSTON: Well, on the ground, Thomas, the Democrats are absolutely crushing the Republicans in early voting. Where I’m sitting right now, Clark County, the Las Vegas area, more than 200,000 people have already voted, it might be a third of the total vote has already been cast and the Democrats have about a 36,000 vote lead in ballots returned if you’re assuming that most of those are voting for the President, that’s a real problem for Mitt Romney, but those Hispanic numbers you mentioned with the 50-point lead, which is about what exit polls showed, by the way, in 2008 Obama beat John McCain by. That’s a real problem, again, for Mitt Romney. Hispanics will be about 15% of the electorate here…

ROBERTS: Jon, as we look at the Romney Political Director Rich Beeson telling Politico, quote about Nevada “Nevada has been the toughest nut for us to crack.” He also points, though, to some hopeful signs including winning early voting two days in a row in Washoe County, which includes Reno, that’s exactly where Governor Romney was earlier this week. He says that John McCain never won early voting one day there. Beeson also pinning hopes on big margins in the rural counties, what do you think of that?

RALSTON: I think all of that is true, Thomas, but I think comparing 2008, which was a landslide wave election especially here in Nevada where John McCain essentially abandoned the state and did not campaign here is a fool’s errand for the Republicans, but what they’re right about is that Romney will win by a big margin in rural Nevada, but that’s only about 12%, maybe 15% of the vote. Washoe County is a swing county in the state. The registration is about even. The Republicans are doing okay up there but not great, Thomas. The Democrats are keeping it about even. Romney has to win Washoe County by five to seven points at least I would say to have a chance of winning the state. There’s no evidence yet, and, again, we only have six days and 14 days of early voting in the book that that’s happening.

End transcript.

One of the reasons comparing the early vote to the 2008 scenario is not accurate is because Obama is leading Romney by as much as 51% among Latino voters, and more Latinos will vote this year than ever before. The Hill reported, “Obama leads Mitt Romney by 70 to 25 percent in a poll of Latino likely voters conducted for NBC News, Telemundo and the Wall Street Journal. That’s similar to a 71 to 20 percent lead he has with Hispanic registered voters according to a new poll from Latino Decisions.”

Voter registration among Latinos is up by 15% in Nevada from 2008. The Obama ground game is on second to none, and get out the vote is working in Nevada. The Republican Party’s gamble on the small tent of only white men is not paying off in Nevada so far.

[Rad]

From John Sununu to Sarah Palin, Racism is the Lexicon of the Right

By: Tim From LA October 26th, 2012

Here we go again. The former governor, former 2008 Vice President candidate and former Miss Alaska pageant entrant, opening up her mouth and trying to defend herself from racist comments she posted on her Facebook page…for ALL to read.

The controversy started when Sarah Palin posted the following comment:

    Obama’s Shuck and Jive Ends With Benghazi Lies
    by Sarah Palin on Wednesday, October 24, 2012 at 8:39am ·

    As I mentioned on “On the Record”

    last night, there is breaking news that just two hours after the September 11th attacks on our consulate in Benghazi, the White House and State Department knew that an Islamic terrorist group with ties to al Qaeda claimed credit for the attack. We now know that the State Department sent an email to the White House, the Pentagon, the FBI and others in the intelligence community about this Islamist group claiming responsibility. And yet for days afterwards the White House and State Department led everyone to believe that the attack was the result of a spontaneous protest over an obscure YouTube video that had been uploaded months prior. Anywhere from 300 to 400 people from the administration and our intelligence community would have seen that email. Why the lies? Why the cover up? Why the dissembling about the cause of the murder of our ambassador on the anniversary of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil? We deserve answers to this. President Obama’s shuck and jive shtick with these Benghazi lies must end.

    - Sarah Palin

What is Shuck and jive? Well, according to Urban Dictionary

    To shuck and jive” originally referred to the intentionally misleading words and actions that African-Americans would employ in order to deceive racist Euro-Americans in power, both during the period of slavery and afterwards. The expression was documented as being in wide usage in the 1920s, but may have originated much earlier.

    “Shucking and jiving” was a tactic of both survival and resistance. A slave, for instance, could say eagerly, “Oh, yes, Master,” and have no real intention to obey. Or an African-American man could pretend to be working hard at a task he was ordered to do, but might put up this pretense only when under observation. Both would be instances of “doin’ the old shuck ‘n jive.”

So Sarah decided to counter the complaints by posting her response on Facebook…one more time:
    
    For the record, there was nothing remotely racist in my use of the phrase “shuck and jive” – a phrase which many people have used, including Chris Matthews, Andrew Cuomo, and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney to name a few off the top of my head. In fact, Andrew Cuomo also used the phrase in reference to Barack Obama, and the fact that Mr. Cuomo and I used the phrase in relation to President Obama signifies nothing out of the ordinary. I would have used the exact same expression if I had been writing about President Carter, whose foreign policy rivaled Obama’s in its ineptitude, or about the Nixon administration, which was also famously rocked by a cover-up.

    I’ve been known to use the phrase most often when chastising my daughter Piper to stop procrastinating and do her homework. As she is part Yup’ik Eskimo, I’m not sure if this term would be deemed offensive when it’s directed at her or if it would be considered benign as in the case of Chris Matthews’ use of it in reference to Rachel Maddow. Just to be careful, from now on I’ll avoid using it with Piper, and I would appreciate it if the media refrained from using words and phrases like igloo, Eskimo Pie, and “when hell freezes over,” as they might be considered offensive by my extended Alaska Native family.

    The outrageously outraged reaction to this expression from perennial hypocrites like Chris Matthews has only made me laugh. Mr. Matthews, let me share with you my favorite Irish toast: “May we always be happy, and may our enemies always know it.”

    - Sarah Palin

Her logic? “(M)any people have used, including Chris Matthews, Andrew Cuomo, and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney to name a few off the top of my head.”

So if Matthews, Cuomo and Carney say it, then it’s fine? With that logic, there would be no issues from her if I call her a, “big F@@@@ing cry baby” or call her the “C” word because Howard Stern on Sirius Satellite said it? Howard Stern – Sarah Palin's Statement – 01/13/2011 Is that OK? Of course not, and neither is shuck and jive.

With her right-winged logic still clouding her brain, Palin said:

    I’ve been known to use the phrase most often when chastising my daughter Piper to stop procrastinating and do her homework. As she is part Yup’ik Eskimo, I’m not sure if this term would be deemed offensive when it’s directed at her or if it would be considered benign as in the case of Chris Matthews’ use of it in reference to Rachel Maddow. Just to be careful, from now on I’ll avoid using it with Piper, and I would appreciate it if the media refrained from using words and phrases like igloo, Eskimo Pie, and “when hell freezes over,” as they might be considered offensive by my extended Alaska Native family.

Huh? So you tell your daughter to stop shucking and jiving, and you’re offended when people say igloo, Eskimo pie and “when Hell freezes over” because Piper is part Yup’ik. The Yupik are a group of indigenous or aboriginal peoples of western, southwestern, and southcentral Alaska and the Russian Far East, and you call her an Eskimo?

Another thing, Eskimo Pie, in case you did not know, was an ice cream. It was vanilla ice cream covered in hard chocolate: Eskimo Pie It was taken off the shelf because it was offensive to the indigenous people. So which media is bringing up Eskimo Pie? Chris Matthews? Rachel Maddow? Randi Rhodes? Thom Hartmann? Who?

Then Palin said that saying Hell freezing over is offensive to the Native Americans. Is Palin now saying that Alaska is Hell? The “Eskimos” are demons? The true offender here is Sarah Palin, and when she does her best to try and explain herself, she falls flat on her face.

Now it seems that another Republican wants to go one step deeper in racism and that’s John Sununu, a top Romney surrogate, former Governor of New Hampshire and White House Chief of Staff under President George H.W. Bush. He said:

    “Frankly, when you take a look at Colin Powell, you have to wonder whether that’s an endorsement based on issues or whether he’s got a slightly different reason for preferring President Obama,” Sununu said.

    “What reason would that be?” asked host Piers Morgan.

    “I think when you have somebody of your own race that you’re proud of being president of the United States, I applaud Colin for standing with him,”

Sununu: Colin Powell May Have Endorsed Obama Because Of His Race

So when Sununu said:

    “I think when you have somebody of your own race that you’re proud of being president of the United States, I applaud Colin for standing with him,”

His race. President Obama is of Kenyan ancestry. Is Powell also Kenyan? Because, there are 54 fully recognized sovereign states (“countries”), 9 territories and three de facto states with limited recognition and they are: Countries of Africa. It’s like saying Mexicans and Brazilians are the same race. Or Chinese and Koreans are the same race. All four groups are on two different continents, but are totally different races.

Sununu backpedaled and said “Colin Powell is a friend and I respect the endorsement decision he made and I do not doubt that it was based on anything but his support of the President’s policies.”

Because Colin Powell never endorsed: Rev. Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm or Rev Al Sharpton and according to Powell’s record of voting and endorsing white Republicans, what proof does Sununu have to say Powell is basing his endorsement on race? Powell is endorsing Obama’s policies, not his skin color.

Racism is alive in well in the Republican Party, and just because a black Republican endorses a half black Democratic president, it doesn’t mean he’s voting for him because he’s black or because Obama is of Kenyan descent. We don’t know even know what ethnicity Powell is. He may be Kenyan, Zaire, Chad, Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire. So how can it be of race? Or what if he’s from: Saint Kitts and Nevis, Anguilla, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda? A lot of black folks there too?

So yes, whether it’s Sununu or Palin, the hatred for our president will continue, and supporting today’s Republican Party only fans the flames of racism.

************

The Republican Party: The Crazy Ex in Charge of Your Freedom

By: Sarah Jones October 26th, 2012

Yesterday, when Ron Christie sat on the Ed Show with Keli Goff and patronizingly told her that women’s issues were “small ball”, I realized that these Republicans are not just acting like they don’t get that they’re discussing whether or not to let a woman live if she needs a life saving abortion after being raped. They’re not just aiding and abetting criminal violence against women as they refuse to sign the Violence Against Women Act while pushing to give the rapists exactly what they want – control.

No, they aren’t just aiding and abetting. They are the crazy ex, the stalker, the abuser, the “power over” mentality of the drunken frat boy and the greedy CEO, the rapist, the dog abuser…

They talk about legislating not allowing a woman to save her own life and not allowing her loved ones to save her life as if they are legislating what color pencil Americans can use.

It has been explained over and over and over again that contraception is often used for women’s health and sometimes-serious health issues. It’s been explained that ectopic pregnancies are a common occurrence that can and do kill women. It’s been explained that in 31 states, we allow a rapist to have visitation and custody of the child they raped to conceive. But still these men cry about a fetus and tell women that for them to be upset over “small ball” issues is silly.

When they talk about coming between a woman and her doctor, they are talking about not letting a woman save her own life.

Imagine, if you will, if our elected officials were mostly women. And if over the last two years, one party elected women so crazy they reminded men of the crazy ex that threatened to kill herself if you left.

Imagine if those women then legislated that if you made a woman feel like that, your freedom to have medical assistance in the case of a life threatening accident or illness would be taken away. That’s the closest I can come to an analogy since women can’t overpower men and impregnate them when they want to control them. Women can’t impose a medical condition upon men for revenge like men can and do to a woman with rape. But if you aren’t a hater, you get the idea. I suppose it’s a micro example of a woman who gets pregnant to “trap” a man, if women like that were running Congress and decided that the men might not be able to live if they chose to leave because — BABIES.

This is about control. The crazy people are in charge of the asylum now. Women know these men, just like men know the crazy ex girlfriend type once they’ve had one. They’re on TV and in Congress and running for the highest office in the land as they talk about whether or not they are going to make a law saying that women are not free to save their own lives.

The bitterness that seeps through these men’s words is lost on those who haven’t been on the receiving end of a controlling, insecure man. But it is loud and clear to those who have. These are men so insecure that they are dreaming of making laws that would kill women for not being compliant even with a rapist’s desire to control them.

I can’t believe there isn’t an uprising against these men, but they’ve done a great job packaging their control in the wrapper of family values and love for babies. Nothing gets women like the desire to protect babies, and that’s what they’re banking on. Everyone loves a baby, but apparently these men don’t love a woman or else glibly discussing her government-imposed death wouldn’t be “small ball”.

Death panels? Yes, that’s what this is, only it’s not a panel of people who are deciding – it’s the whim of the sickest in our society – the rapist, the stalker, and the batterer. Yes, impregnating a woman is a common thing for an abuser to do to a woman who is trying to leave. So when Republicans talk about giving that rapist/abuser exactly what he wants—access to her and control over her for the next 18 years, they are incentivizing rape.

And if that pregnancy turns out to be life threatening, which is not uncommon, Republicans are giving the abuser/rapist the authority to kill the woman legally.

That’s “small ball” to Republicans. Ron Christie sat there patting Keli Goff’s arm when she tried to make a point, discussing legalizing killing women, and called it small ball.

In reality, these men don’t give care about live babies or children, or else they wouldn’t be cutting back food stamps and government assistance to poverty stricken parents trying to feed their children. They wouldn’t be trying to defund the one sure way we have of reducing abortions – birth control. They wouldn’t be suggesting that crime is a function of single motherhood while they seek to make it impossible for a woman who is raped to have an abortion.

These men are trying to put women at their mercy, with no freedom, while they incentivize violence against women and defund programs meant to help victims of violence.

Why isn’t anyone calling these guys on what they are really saying? They aren’t talking about being pro-life; they are talking about legislating the deaths of women and incentivizing rape and violence against women.

These men are the problem, not the solution. They are spewing hate talk on TV and no one calls them on it. They are saying it’s “small ball” to suggest killing women and everyone glides right over that and discusses the issue as if it’s just another policy instead of the suggestion that half of the population should be left to die at the “religious” whim of these sick control freaks.

I put religious in quotes because to call the desire to kill women religious is giving it way too much cover. These men aren’t religious, and the Nuns on the Bus proved that with their boycott of these men’s Randian budget. These men aren’t lovers of babies – they are haters of women. They don’t hate abortion or else they would not be destroying the one method that reduces abortions or giving would-be rapists an incentive to commit a heinous crime of violence against innocent women. And just for the record, far too often these “pro-lifers” are against abortion for everyone else, but when their mistress gets pregnant, they become bullies for abortion. It’s all about control.

These men (and their female enablers) always talk about “innocent life” as if the women’s lives they are asserting control over are not innocent. They imply that women are evil sinners, trash to be discarded in order to save the “innocent”. I note that not one of them is discussing that it takes two to get pregnant, or implying that men are automatically not as worthy of freedom and life as a fetus.

The Republican Party is being overtaken by the crazy exes, bitter and bursting with desire for revenge against a world that threatens to take away their control and power.

The Romney campaign has been dismissing women’s lives as shiny objects for a while now. That’s what Mitt Romney thinks of women’s lives, but we already knew that Romney’s “only concern is for the fetus.”

Here’s a compilation of the crazy exes spewing their glorification of controlling women by David Packman:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1b9GV-h8BQ&feature=player_embedded

[Rad]

Reaction to Romney’s Economic Speech: ‘All About Obama’, ‘Uniformly Negative’

By: Sarah Jones October 26th, 2012

On the day when economic news should have dampened Romney’s dreams of using actual numbers to bash Obama in order to avoid laying out his own plan, Romney called the numbers showing that “the U.S. economy expanded at a slightly faster 2 percent annual rate” “discouraging.”

Despite promising that he was indeed finally laying out major economic news of a Romney plan, Mitt Romney stumbled his way through a stump speech attack on Obama that included no economic news, no specifics, but tons of negativity aimed at the President.

Speaking at a campaign rally in Ames, Iowa, Romney failed to impress. Here’s a roundup of reaction:

Ali Velshi: “They said this was major economic news. There wasn’t a piece of economic news in it.”

Gloria Borger: “This wasn’t so much about, you know, specific policy prescriptions. Nothing new right now.”

Jim Acosta: “Yes, there’s not really a whole lot that’s new inside these remarks here, if you take a look at these remarks in terms of what he said out here today.”

Brooke Baldwin: “I didn’t hear a lot new in the speech. I’m guessing you didn’t hear much new in the speech either.”

Jim Acosta ‏@jimacostacnn Owner of Iowa company where Mitt Romney delivering speech on economy received stimulus funds: on.cnn.com/QKbZg9

ThinkProgress ‏@thinkprogress Romney makes closing economic argument at firm that benefited substantially from stimulus funds thkpr.gs/ScsELv

Sam Youngman ‏@samyoungman Looking at excerpts from Romney’s “major” econ address. Looks like his stump speech to me.

Ari Shapiro ‏@Ari_Shapiro Romney campaign releases excerpts of today’s “major economic speech.” So far looks a lot like the stump speech he’s been giving this week.

Benjy Sarlin ‏@BenjySarlin So….what’s the news in this major Romney speech so far.

Ali Velshi ‏@AliVelshi I’ll rejoin @SuzanneMalveaux on @CNN after Romney’s econ speech from. This speech isn’t delivering specifics.

Kathie Obradovich ‏@KObradovich Romney about 9 minutes into his speech and it has been uniformly negative in terms of bashing Obama. #romneyia

Molly Ball ‏@mollyesque So far Romney’s big speech on the economy is all about Obama.

Sam Stein ‏@samsteinhp With all the talk of bi-partisanship, has anyone asked Romney campaign if he still looks back at himself as a severely conservative gov?

Justin Wolfers ‏@justinwolfers Turns out that Romney’s “big economic speech” today, was just a placeholder, so that he could go on the attack if the GDP numbers were bad.

Jonathan Cohn ‏@CitizenCohn It’s been a while since I listened to a full Romney speech. Sort of awe-inspiring to hear all of deceptions strung together.

Eric Kleefeld ‏@EricKleefeld Mitt Romney delivers major economic speech, declares substantively that he loves America.

Molly Ball ‏@mollyesque Apparently difference between a Major Romney Address & a regular Romney speech is whether he enters to “Air Force One” or “Born Free.”

Elizabeth Drew ‏@ElizabethDrewOH There Mitt goes again: He will create the 12 million jobs that are going to happen anyway. Who is going to speak up?

Travis Waldron ‏@Travis_Waldron There was nothing major about that speech.

Poor Mitt Romney. Today, the Economist wrote, “Yet in the latest quarter America made its biggest contribution to world GDP growth since 2005 (excluding periods of global recession).”

Lis Smith, Obama campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement, “Romney has started promising ‘big change,’ but the only change Romney’s offering is to take us back to the same failed policies that crashed our economy in the first place. That’s not the change we need, and with every ‘major speech,’ Mitt Romney just reminds voters that’s all he’s got to offer.”

Why was Mitt so negative yet unspecific? Because his specifics spell doom for most Americans. The Economic Policy Institute concluded, “Romney’s policy proposals would reduce GDP growth by 0.5% in 2013, and by 1.1% in 2014. His spending cuts alone would reduce GDP growth by 0.9% in 2013 and by 1.3% in 2014.”

Yeah, that’s change you can believe in — Bushian, backward change. Only Mitt Romney would promise to deliver economic news in an allegedly major economic policy speech and then fail to deliver any news or policy.

After what Mitt Romney did to Massachusetts’ economy, it’s unclear why anyone thinks he could do better if he had a hold of the entire nation. Perhaps this is another reason why he fails to deliver specifics. The economy has a long way to go in order to continue its recovery, but backward isn’t advisable.

Irony alert: Romney gave this speech at a location that received Obama stimulus funds.

[Rad]

October 26, 2012 10:00 PM

Romney Repeats False Claim That Jeep is Outsourcing All Jobs to China

By Heather

Here we go again with Willard telling about his thousandth or so lie out on the campaign trail, but this time we find out that apparently badly sourced right wing blogs are his fact checking department. Explains a lot, doesn't it?

Romney repeats false claim of Jeep outsourcing to China; Chrysler refutes story:

    Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney repeated a false claim Thursday night that Chrysler Group may move all Jeep vehicle production to China, drawing criticism from the Obama campaign, which said the Michigan native had blatantly skewed a news wire story.

    Romney’s comments came the same day that the Free Press reported that 1,100 new Chrysler workers will begin making the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Dodge Durango SUVs at a plant in Detroit next week.

    “I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China,” Romney said during a rally in Defiance, Ohio, before 12,000 cheering supporters, according to several reports. “I will fight for every good job in America, I’m going to fight to make sure trade is fair, and if it’s fair, America will win.

    Romney apparently was referencing conservative bloggers who misrepresented a Bloomberg story from Monday that discussed Chrysler’s decision to consider starting Jeep production in China, the world’s largest new-vehicle market.

    That story, while accurate, sparked a raft of other stories and blogs that incorrectly concluded that Chrysler might close plants or move Jeep production from the U.S. to China.

    Gualberto Ranieri, Chrysler’s vice president of communications, criticized those stories Thursday even before Romney made his comments.

    “Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China,” Ranieri said. “It’s simply reviewing the opportunities to return Jeep output to China, for the world’s largest auto market. U.S. Jeep assembly lines will continue to stay in operation.”

    A spokesperson for the Romney campaign declined to comment.

    In fact, Chrysler is investing $500 million at its Toledo North Assembly Plant and plans to add 1,105 new workers by the third quarter of 2013 to build an all-new SUV that will replace the Jeep Liberty.

    Production of the new SUV will begin next summer and the hiring process for the new workers, who are scheduled to start by the next fall, has begun, said Chrysler spokeswoman Jodi Tinson.

    Romney’s comments were immediately skewered by auto industry observers and Romney’s political opponents because Chrysler added about 7,000 workers in the U.S. and Canada since emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009.

As Rachel also noted earlier in her reporting, Romney was out there deriding the stimulus program at... you guessed it... a company that benefited from stimulus funds. This man just lies every time his mouth is open.

You'd think he'd pick his audience a little more carefully though, since all he did is make himself look like a blathering idiot less than two weeks from the election, when voters are paying attention, and when voters in the states that were saved by the auto bailout know better than to believe him.

Click to watch the pathological liar:

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*****************

October 26, 2012

The Company Romney Keeps

By CHARLES M. BLOW
NYT

The saying goes: A man is known by the company he keeps.

If that is true, what does the company Mitt Romney keeps say about him?

This week Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama again, as he did in 2008. That apparently set John Sununu, a co-chairman of the Romney campaign, on edge. Powell’s endorsement couldn’t possibly be the product of purposeful deliberation over the candidates’ policies. In Sununu’s world of racial reductionism, Powell’s endorsement had a more base explanation: it was a black thing.

On Thursday, Sununu said on CNN:“When you take a look at Colin Powell, you have to wonder whether that’s an endorsement based on issues or whether he’s got a slightly different reason for preferring President Obama.” He continued: “I think when you have somebody of your own race that you’re proud of being president of the United States, I applaud Colin for standing with him.”

Talk about damning with faint praise. In other words, Sununu was basically saying that he was applauding Powell’s inability to see past the color of his own eyelids.

Sununu is the same man who said that the president performed poorly in the first debate because “he’s lazy and disengaged.” He is also the same man who said of the president in July, “I wish this president would learn how to be an American.”

Could Sununu be unaware that many would register such comments as coded racism? Or was that the intent?

To understand Sununu, it is important to understand his political history.

For starters, he is no stranger to racism controversies. When George H.W. Bush selected him as chief of staff in 1988, The New York Times reported:

“Mr. Sununu’s selection was shadowed by concern among some key Jewish leaders. The 49-year-old New Hampshire Governor, whose father is Lebanese and who takes pride in his Arab ancestry, was the only governor to refuse to sign a June 1987 statement denouncing a 1975 United Nations resolution that equated Zionism with racism.”

But that wasn’t his undoing. It was his actions. In 1991, Sununu became enmeshed in a scandal over using government planes for personal trips.

After the embarrassment of the incident, Bush ordered Sununu to clear all future flights in advance. What happened later you must read for yourself, and it is best stated by Time Magazine in a July 1, 1991, article:

“If Sununu hadn’t exactly been grounded, he had certainly been sent to his room. But Bush underestimated the depth of Sununu’s ethical obtuseness and his zeal at finding a way around the rules. Like a rebellious adolescent, Sununu sneaked down the stairs, grabbed the car keys and slipped out of the White House. After all, the old man had only said, ‘Don’t take the plane.’ He didn’t say anything about the car.”

The piece continued:

“Overcome by a sudden urge two weeks ago to buy rare stamps, Sununu ordered the driver of his government-paid limousine to drive him 225 miles to New York City. He spent the day — and nearly $5,000 — at an auction room at Christie’s. Then he dismissed the driver, who motored back to Washington with no passengers. Sununu returned on a private jet owned by Beneficial Corp.”

By the end of 1991, amid sagging poll numbers, Bush began to see Sununu as a drag and unceremoniously relieved him of his post. As The Times reported then, Sununu was made to plead for his job before he was pushed out anyway:

“Mr. Sununu and the White House portrayed the departure as voluntary. But it followed meetings in which Mr. Bush listened to Mr. Sununu’s arguments that he should stay on and then decided to follow the advice of top-level Republicans who urged the removal of his chief of staff.”

R. W. Apple Jr. wrote in The Times after the move that Bush’s “indirectly soliciting and then promptly accepting” Sununu’s resignation had made it abundantly clear what actually happened.

Sununu has apologized, somewhat, for his racial attack on Powell’s motives. But what should we make of all this?

We have a very racially divided electorate. As The Washington Post reported Thursday, “Obama has a deficit of 23 percentage points, trailing Republican Mitt Romney 60 percent to 37 percent among whites, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News national tracking poll.”

The report pointed out that nearly 80 percent of nonwhites support Obama, while 91 percent of Romney’s supporters are white.

I worry that Sununu’s statements intentionally go beyond recognizing racial disparities and seek to exploit them.

What does that say about Romney, and what does it say about his campaign’s tactics?

Remember: A man is known by the company he keeps.

***************

While Romney Runs and Hides, a Confident Obama Takes Media Questions in All Formats

By: Sarah JonesOctober 27th, 2012

While the President makes the rounds and takes questions in situations where “anything can happen”, Romney won’t come on – he’s avoiding the Kids, MTV, Rock Center, Letterman, O’Reilly, and more.

On MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell tackled Romney’s lack of confidence, “The President did at least seven affiliate interviews, a handful of radio interviews and a live interview for the under-30 crowd on MTV.”

TRANSCRIPT via MSNBC with modifications/clarifications:

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: With just 11 days until election, President Obama made the media rounds this week, in between a nonstop campaign scheduled today alone, the president did at least seven affiliate interviews, a handful of radio interviews and a live interview for the under-30 crowd on MTV.

Mitt Romney on the other hand is playing hard to get.

Nickelodeon: Although it was last April when we began requesting that former governor Romney answer your questions, his team has told us he’s been, quote, unable to fit it in, unquote.

NBC NIGHTLY NEWS: We should also know once again, we’ve asked for the chance to spend similar time with the Romney campaign.

MTV: Of course we extended the same offer to governor Romney and we hoped to be able to bring you that interview sometime soon.



MTV’S SWAY CALLOWAY: He (Obama) said he’s anxious to get out there and get the message across in terms of young voters and talk about the issues that matter the most for them. And he believed that light night talk show hosts make better interviewers because it allows him to loosen up.

LOD: he also has to be comfort enough to do this. Because he doesn’t know what Sway is going to come up with. You had questions from some viewers and all that, tweeted questions all that stuff.

SWAY: Facebook and tweets.

LOD: And anything can happen in those situations. And that seems to be what mitt Romney is afraid of, is those anything can happen situations.

LOD: There were two shows, two very big ones, by which I mean tall. Complaining about this last night. Let’s look at David Letterman and Bill O’Rielly.



LETTERMAN: We have our own little problem.

O’REILLY: Romney won’t come on. He’s not coming on at all.

LETTERMAN: He doesn’t have to come on.

O’REILLY: I think you and I because he’s not on “The Factor.” We should go together and just confront him.

END TRANSCRIPT

Mitt Romney has had a long standing policy of avoiding the media at all costs. He broke with this to do a few interviews during his summer gaffe-filled diplomacy gone wrong tour, but he only allowed 6 questions in pressers during his entire tour.

Romney has refused to take questions from children, from MTV, from late night hosts, from mainstream outlets and even from Fox News.

Once again, we find in this one issue an attitude that should disqualify Romney from even running for office. If he is this afraid of the press now, how will he treat the fourth estate should he become president?

We need more transparency, not less.

The interviews done this week with the President, especially the Jon Stewart and MTV interviews, provided a chance to hear him discuss issues the mainstream media doesn’t address, like climate change. At one point in the Stewart interview, we almost got into the finer points of laws like the Patriot Act, which would have been fascinating because we never hear the President’s take on pre-existing laws that he has tweaked but kept in place. Sadly, after warning Stewart that it wasn’t sexy but starting to get into it, they had to break.

Still, we got something specific from these interviews that we don’t from mainstream outlets. We got to hear the President’s thought process in a way that reveals his values. Spontaneous interviews and live interviews provide that context and transparency, and it’s a shame that Mitt Romney refuses to do them.

Romney prefers to control his interviews tightly, which is next to impossible in a live interview situation. Romney rarely sits for even scripted, edited interviews to begin with, but when he does, he has refused to appear until the hosts agree to say the things he wants them to:

    Univision says that during his townhall with them, not only did the Romney campaign pack the hall with non-students because they couldn’t find enough supporters on campus, but when the anchor gave an introduction to Mitt that he didn’t like, he refused to go on until they re-taped it. A Republican present called it a “temper tantrum”.

This allows a candidate to perpetuate a false reality for viewers.

Avoiding the press services Romney’s lies. After Romney’s egregious and outrageous lie about Jeep moving jobs to China — told in an Ohio auto industry county — The Detroit Free Press (a conservative paper that endorsed Romney, by the way) wrote that the Romney campaign refused to answer questions about Romney’s incorrect reading:

    If Mitt Romney knows Chrysler will keep making Jeeps in Detroit and Toledo, neither he nor his staffers acknowledged it Friday.

    A spokesman for the Republican presidential candidate declined to answer questions about the candidate’s incorrect reading of a news report that Chrysler was considering moving all Jeep production to China.

The President sat for questions in a Reddit IAmA chat, while the Romney campaign — afraid of the crowdsourced intellect of Reddit — stuck Paul Ryan on Quora where he dodged questions. Romney was too afraid to appear on The View, saying that there was only one conservative on the show. If he can’t handle Nickelodeon or The View, how would he handle Putin?

Romney’s fear and loathing of the press goes back to his father’s bad experiences during his run for the White House, but there’s no excuse for avoiding the press and certainly no excuse to avoid direct questions from voters. The fourth estate is an essential part of our democracy. While we might not like what the candidates say or agree with them on everything, it is more important that they are at least willing to subject themselves to the people’s scrutiny and questions. To refuse to do so should be a disqualifier.

It should trouble all Americans that Romney has this attitude toward the press, and it begs the question, what is he so afraid of?

***************

Mitt Romney’s 5 Point Plan is the Same Plan as McCain in ’08 and Bush in ’04

By: Jason Easley October 28th, 2012

Mitt Romney’s 5 point plan to create jobs was John McCain’s 5 point plan in 2008, and George W. Bush’s 2004. In reality, voters are voting for Bush’s economic ideas, not Romney’s.

Here is Romney’s 5 point plan:

1). Achieve energy independence on this continent by 2020. America is blessed with extraordinary natural resources, and developing them will create millions of good jobs – not only in the energy industry, but also in industries like manufacturing that will benefit from more energy at lower prices.

2). Trade that works for America.

3). Provide Americans with the skills to succeed through better public schools, better access to higher education, and better retraining programs that help to match unemployed workers with real-world job opportunities.

4). Cut the deficit, reducing the size of government and getting the national debt under control so that America remains a place where businesses want to open up shop and hire.

5). Champion small business. Small businesses are the engine of job creation in this country, but they will struggle to succeed if taxes and regulations are too burdensome or if a government in Washington does its best to stifle them. Mitt will pursue comprehensive tax reform that lowers tax rates for all Americans, and he will cut back on the red tape that drives up costs and discourages hiring.

Here is John McCain’s 5 point plan from his 2008 acceptance speech at the Republican convention:

1). I will open new markets to our goods and services. My opponent will close them.

2). I will cut government spending. He will increase it.

3). Education — education is the civil rights issue of this century. Equal access to public education has been gained, but what is the value of access to a failing school? We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empower parents with choice.

4). We all know that keeping taxes low helps small businesses grow and create new jobs.

5). We’ll attack — we’ll attack the problem on every front. We’ll produce more energy at home. We will drill new wells off-shore, and we’ll
drill them now. We’ll drill them now.

George W. Bush’s 5 point plan for the economy from 2004:

1). To create jobs, my plan will encourage investment and expansion by restraining federal spending, reducing regulation and making the tax relief permanent.

2). To create jobs, we will make our country less dependent on foreign sources of energy.

3). To create jobs, we will expand trade and level the playing field to sell American goods and services across the globe.

4). And we must protect small-business owners and workers from the explosion of frivolous lawsuits that threaten jobs across our country. Another drag on our economy is the current tax code, which is a complicated mess…

5). To be fair, there are some things my opponent is for. He’s proposed more than $2 trillion in new federal spending so far, and that’s a lot, even for a senator from Massachusetts.

Mitt Romney’s 5 point plan to jumpstart the economy is actually John McCain’s 2008 5 point plan to get the economy moving, which was George W. Bush’s 2004 five point plan to grow the economy. The plan for the Republicans is always the same, cut taxes, reduce spending, a talking point about school choice, more domestic oil drilling, and free trade.

The last time this plan was tried by a president the economy collapsed. Voters rejected a rehash of the Bush ideas in 2008, and Mitt Romney is back trying to sell the same plan in a different order in 2012. The reality is that Republicans have no idea how to fix or grow the economy, but they do have an ideology that tells them government is bad, and tax cuts for the wealthy are good.

Mitt Romney isn’t some bold visionary who has the secret to unlocking our national economic power. He is just the latest in a long line of Republican salesmen who are peddling an economic plan that didn’t work then, and won’t work now.

If you are early voting now, or will be stepping into the voting booth on Election Day, remember that you aren’t voting for Mitt Romney’s plan. You’ll be voting for George W. Bush’s, and we all remember where that got us the last time we tried it.


Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

TRANSCRIPT via MSNBC with modifications/clarifications:

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: With just 11 days until election, President Obama made the media rounds this week, in between a nonstop campaign scheduled today alone, the president did at least seven affiliate interviews, a handful of radio interviews and a live interview for the under-30 crowd on MTV.

Mitt Romney on the other hand is playing hard to get.

Nickelodeon: Although it was last April when we began requesting that former governor Romney answer your questions, his team has told us he’s been, quote, unable to fit it in, unquote.

NBC NIGHTLY NEWS: We should also know once again, we’ve asked for the chance to spend similar time with the Romney campaign.

MTV: Of course we extended the same offer to governor Romney and we hoped to be able to bring you that interview sometime soon.

MTV’S SWAY CALLOWAY: He (Obama) said he’s anxious to get out there and get the message across in terms of young voters and talk about the issues that matter the most for them. And he believed that light night talk show hosts make better interviewers because it allows him to loosen up.

LOD: he also has to be comfort enough to do this. Because he doesn’t know what Sway is going to come up with. You had questions from some viewers and all that, tweeted questions all that stuff.

SWAY: Facebook and tweets.

LOD: And anything can happen in those situations. And that seems to be what mitt Romney is afraid of, is those anything can happen situations.

LOD: There were two shows, two very big ones, by which I mean tall. Complaining about this last night. Let’s look at David Letterman and Bill O’Rielly.

ROLL CLIP:

LETTERMAN: We have our own little problem.

O’REILLY: Romney won’t come on. He’s not coming on at all.

LETTERMAN: He doesn’t have to come on.

O’REILLY: I think you and I because he’s not on “The Factor.” We should go together and just confront him.

END TRANSCRIPT

Mitt Romney has had a long standing policy of avoiding the media at all costs. He broke with this to do a few interviews during his summer gaffe-filled diplomacy gone wrong tour, but he only allowed 6 questions in pressers during his entire tour.

Romney has refused to take questions from children, from MTV, from late night hosts, from mainstream outlets and even from Fox News.

Once again, we find in this one issue an attitude that should disqualify Romney from even running for office. If he is this afraid of the press now, how will he treat the fourth estate should he become president?

We need more transparency, not less.

The interviews done this week with the President, especially the Jon Stewart and MTV interviews, provided a chance to hear him discuss issues the mainstream media doesn’t address, like climate change. At one point in the Stewart interview, we almost got into the finer points of laws like the Patriot Act, which would have been fascinating because we never hear the President’s take on pre-existing laws that he has tweaked but kept in place. Sadly, after warning Stewart that it wasn’t sexy but starting to get into it, they had to break.

Still, we got something specific from these interviews that we don’t from mainstream outlets. We got to hear the President’s thought process in a way that reveals his values. Spontaneous interviews and live interviews provide that context and transparency, and it’s a shame that Mitt Romney refuses to do them.

Romney prefers to control his interviews tightly, which is next to impossible in a live interview situation. Romney rarely sits for even scripted, edited interviews to begin with, but when he does, he has refused to appear until the hosts agree to say the things he wants them to:

    Univision says that during his townhall with them, not only did the Romney campaign pack the hall with non-students because they couldn’t find enough supporters on campus, but when the anchor gave an introduction to Mitt that he didn’t like, he refused to go on until they re-taped it. A Republican present called it a “temper tantrum”.

This allows a candidate to perpetuate a false reality for viewers.

Avoiding the press services Romney’s lies. After Romney’s egregious and outrageous lie about Jeep moving jobs to China — told in an Ohio auto industry county — The Detroit Free Press (a conservative paper that endorsed Romney, by the way) wrote that the Romney campaign refused to answer questions about Romney’s incorrect reading:

    If Mitt Romney knows Chrysler will keep making Jeeps in Detroit and Toledo, neither he nor his staffers acknowledged it Friday.

    A spokesman for the Republican presidential candidate declined to answer questions about the candidate’s incorrect reading of a news report that Chrysler was considering moving all Jeep production to China.

The President sat for questions in a Reddit IAmA chat, while the Romney campaign — afraid of the crowdsourced intellect of Reddit — stuck Paul Ryan on Quora where he dodged questions. Romney was too afraid to appear on The View, saying that there was only one conservative on the show. If he can’t handle Nickelodeon or The View, how would he handle Putin?

Romney’s fear and loathing of the press goes back to his father’s bad experiences during his run for the White House, but there’s no excuse for avoiding the press and certainly no excuse to avoid direct questions from voters. The fourth estate is an essential part of our democracy. While we might not like what the candidates say or agree with them on everything, it is more important that they are at least willing to subject themselves to the people’s scrutiny and questions. To refuse to do so should be a disqualifier.

It should trouble all Americans that Romney has this attitude toward the press, and it begs the question, what is he so afraid of?