Eastwooding...

No Bump From Rmoney's Convention Speech

How bad was Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech? According to Intrade, the odds of Obama being reelected have increased from 55.7% before the speech to 56.8% after.

Bloomberg reported that, “The odds that President Barack Obama will be re-elected on Nov. 6 rose to 56.8 percent after the Republicans concluded their nominating convention, according to online prediction market Intrade. Obama’s odds, at 10:21 a.m. New York time, compared with a 43.3 percent chance for a victory by Republican nominee Mitt Romney, according to bets made at the Dublin-based bookmaker. Obama’s chances increased from 55.7 percent yesterday, while Romney’s dropped slightly from 43.4 percent.”

Anyone looking for a big bounce in support for Mitt Romney after that speech probably shouldn’t be holding their breath. The speech was an underwhelming disjointed mess with no theme, no vision, and at times seemingly no idea where it was going.

Mitt Romney’s speech was essentially a longer more drawn out version of his stump speech. If you have heard Romney speak in the last five years, then you’ve heard this speech before.

Mitt Rmoney Calls America A 'Company'

More proof we don't need a CEO/businessman running this COUNTRY. Mitt was speaking at an event in Florida this morning, saying his administration will reach out to people who “want to make sure this company deals with its challenges”, and also said this.....

"Paul Ryan and I understand how the economy works, we understand how Washington works, we will reach across the aisle and find good people who like us, want to make sure this company deals with its challenges. We’ll get America on track again." 

So now we're a COMPANY? Sorry Mitt, you seem to be confused about something. See, the goal of a company is to make money, whereas the goal of a government is to provide services that are not achievable in the private sector.

His belief that the government is similar to a company explains his dedication to cutting programs that he perceives are “inefficient” because they cost money, even if they effectively help American citizens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5H3Ic4elo9I&feature=player_embedded

"After all, 'you people' gotta pay for my increased tax cuts!"

This seat's already taken!

Rmoney going for one last Rebub Presidency

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/2012-or-never-for-gops-white-base.html

Rmoney's Lying Machine

I've been struck by the baldness of Romney's repetitive lies about Obama -- that Obama ended the work requirement under welfare, for example, or that Obama's Affordable Care Act cuts $716 billion from Medicare benefits.

The mainstream media along with a half-dozen independent fact-checking organizations and sites have called Romney on these whoppers, but to no avail. He keeps making these assertions.

Every campaign is guilty of exaggerations, embellishments, distortions, and half-truths. But this is another thing altogether. I've been directly involved in seven presidential campaigns, and I don't recall a presidential candidate lying with such audacity, over and over again. Why does he do it, and how can he get away with it?

The obvious answer is such lies are effective.

More HERE.

Teaching People to Hate Their Own Govt. Is at the Core of the Project to Destroy the Middle Class

Read it HERE.

Charlie Crist Endorses Obama

Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist endorsed President Obama for reelection on Sunday, writing in a Tampa Bay Times op-ed that the president is "the right leader for our state and the nation."

"I applaud and share his vision of a future built by a strong and confident middle class in an economy that gives us the opportunity to reap prosperity through hard work and personal responsibility," Crist writes. "It is a vision of the future proven right by our history."

Crist, a former Republican who served as governor from 2007 to 2011, switched his party affiliation to Independent during a failed U.S. Senate bid. Crist lost the 2010 race to Sen. Marco Rubio.

More HERE.

Dissecting The Deficit

My colleagues Kathy Ruffing and Jim Horney have shown that the economic downturn, President Bush’s tax cuts, and the legacy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan explain virtually the entire federal budget deficit projected for the rest of this decade (that is, through 2019).  That is, there would be practically no deficits over that period if the tax cuts, the wars, and the downturn had not occurred and other policies remained the same.  This widely circulated CBPP chart makes their point vividly.

Last week columnist Robert Samuelson looked at a related — but different — question, one that looks backward in time rather than forward:  why did the federal government amass large deficits between 2002 and 2011, rather than the large surpluses that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected in early 2001?

Over the 2002-2011 period, the negative budgetary impact of so-called “economic and technical” changes — most notably, the 2001 and 2007-2009 downturns — dwarfed that of any single legislative change that policymakers enacted.  Samuelson cites an analysis of CBO data that accordingly ascribes about a quarter of the deterioration in the budget over that period to President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The 2002-2011 period is now history.  For the years ahead, CBPP found that the tax cuts (if policymakers extend them in full) and the wars, plus the lingering effects of the recent downturn, essentially account for the entire deficit between now and 2019.  Indeed, the tax cuts and the wars alone account for nearly half of the public debt by 2019.

More HERE.

Conspiracy Aszwhole

During a recent show in Singapore during Megadeth's "Th1rt3en World Tour," Mustaine took to the mic from the stage to discuss his beliefs about some of the recent gun violence in America.

"Back in my country, my president," Mustaine begins and then pretends to gag himself with his finger, "is trying to pass a gun ban so he's staging all of these murders. The 'Fast and Furious' thing down at the border. And Aurora, Colorado, all the people that were killed there. And now, the beautiful people at the Sikh temple."

Mustaine went on to say, "I don't know where I'm going to live if America keeps going the way it's going because it looks like it's turning into Nazi America."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/15/dave-mustaine-megadeth-si_n_1784525.html

The Admiral Sez....

Rebub Paul Ryan Wins!!!!

Veep Candidate Paul Ryan wins today's "The Evil Gummit Stimulus Doesn't Create Jobs Except When It Does™ Award"!

Seen on facebook...

On the Keith Olbermann Fan Page:

I am starting to think that the Romney camp was not going to pick Paul Ryan but did so impulsively at the last minute. Their choice of him as V.P. shows a lack of thought as to how they could possibly reconcile the Ryan budget with the conservative population who receive Medicare or who have worked long hard years contributing to the pot only to be told that America is breaking their contract wit

h them for the greater good(?) of the U.S. economy. I think they were going to play it safe with someone else but saw their campaign floundering and went for broke....... a la Paul Ryan. They thought he would give them that Palin boost but alas even the Tea Party sees right through him. He's going to take their hard-earned money away and give it to the (ahem) job creators. They hate to admit it but they really don't believe that rich people are job creators. It would be like believing in fairies. And we know how the conservatives feel about fairies.

Odd story on so many levels...

"A shocking report from Russian Northern Fleet scientists aboard the Gepard Akula II, which just completed its maiden voyage off the United States coastline in the Gulf of Mexico, warns the aftereffects from the 20 April 2010 BP Oil Spill Disaster are “beyond catastrophic” and borders on the “truly apocalyptic.”

The Gepard Akula II nuclear-powered submarine [photo 2nd right] is the most advanced stealth underwater vessel ever built and began its sea trials last month in the Gulf of Mexico where it went undetected by US Naval Forces for weeks until it had left the region and resurfaced in the Atlantic Ocean much to the embarrassment of the Americans."  

http://www.eutimes.net/2012/08/russia-issues-apocalyptic-warning-for-us-gulf-coast/

Rebubs hate Rachel Maddow...

... because she tells the truth.

11 facts about the tax debate

If Congress doesn't act, taxes are going to go up for 114 million middle-class families on January 1.

The good news is that nearly everyone in Washington agrees we need to do something about it. The bad news is that Republicans in the House of Representatives are refusing to act unless they can also extend cuts for the wealthiest two percent of people in this country.

But right now, most Americans don't really understand just how stark a difference there is between President Obama's plan and the one put forth by GOP lawmakers. So we've put together 11 facts you need to know about the tax debate. Read it, SHARE IT!

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/08/15/11-facts-about-tax-debate

What to do with political lies

‎"Fact-checking was a great development in accountability journalism -- but perhaps it's time for a new approach. It's no longer enough to outsource the fact-checking to the fact-checkers in a news environment where every story lives an independent life on the social Web and there's no guarantee the reader of any given report will ever see a bundled version of the news or the relevant fact-checking column, which could have been published months earlier. One-off fact-checking is no match for the repeated lie."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/what-to-do-with-political-lies/261189/

Rebub health insurance/medicare scam

For years, the insurance industry has contributed generously to candidates who want to hand over the Medicare program to private insurance companies. That’s exactly what Ryan’s so-called “Path to Prosperity” would do. It would end the Medicare program as it has existed for almost half a century—a program that guarantees access to affordable care for senior citizens—and replace it with a scheme in which beneficiaries would be given “premium support” to help them buy coverage on the private market. Yes, the traditional Medicare program would continue to be a choice under the 2012 version of Ryan’s plan, but it would have to compete with private insurance companies. And because, under Ryan's plan, insurers would be able to cherry-pick the healthiest seniors, the traditional Medicare program would likely be unable to survive over the long haul. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Ryan's wife is a former lobbyist for the health insurance industry.

http://leanforward.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/14/13277101-wendell-potter-ryan-is-a-dream-come-true-for-health-insurance-industry

We literally cannot afford to lose this 'un!

A Fight We Must Engage: http://youtu.be/KYPvaC831xY

Medicare is under attack by people who call themselves deficit hawks but really aren't. The assault on working families is being waged by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and others who, in fact, squandered a big budget surplus that President George W. Bush inherited from President Bill Clinton. They voted for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without coming up with revenue to pay for them. They dug the deficit hole deeper when they gave tax breaks to the rich. They caused more red ink to flow the Wall Street deregulation they rammed through resulted in a horrible recession. "Our Republican friends, who are working day and night for the wealthiest people in this country, want to balance the budget on the backs of people, who are already hurting as a result of this terrible, Wall Street-caused recession. They want to protect the wealthiest people and the largest corporations, who today are doing extremely well. This is a fight that we've got to engage in. It is a moral issue. It is an economic issue," Sen. Sanders said.

Paul Ryan’s Fairy-Tale Budget Plan

Reagan's Budget Director recently admitted that "trickle-down voodoo economics" was a disaster for this nation... and now, David Stockman, is sounding the alarm to fellow Republicans (real Republicans - like Obama) that Paul Ryan's budget is as much a waste of paper as the Ayn Rand novels that Ryan looks toward to shape his destructive policies.

"The Ryan Plan boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate for “job creators” — i.e. the superwealthy — to 25 percent and paying for it with an as-yet-undisclosed plan to broaden the tax base. Of the $1 trillion in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates on capital gains and dividends. The crony capitalists of K Street already own more than enough Republican votes to stop that train before it leaves the station." ~ RepublicanDirtyTricks.com

PAUL D. RYAN is the most articulate and intellectually imposing Republican of the moment, but that doesn’t alter the fact that this earnest congressman from Wisconsin is preaching the same empty conservative sermon.

Thirty years of Republican apostasy — a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state — have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt. Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/opinion/paul-ryans-fairy-tale-budget-plan.html?_r=1

From The Blog: 90 DAYS, 90 REASONS

The difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is not solely a matter of policy or priorities. The difference is about something far more fundamental and significant to the lives of every American. It is a difference of world views.

If you want to know how Mitt Romney views the world, you need not focus on the train wreck that was his recent junket to England, Israel, and Poland. True, the former governor’s first foray into foreign affairs gave Americans a glimpse of what a Romney presidency would look like to the rest of the world. The results were not encouraging. In England, Romney managed to alienate nearly the entire British people by questioning their preparedness for the Olympics. In Israel, he delivered a shockingly ignorant speech in which he blamed the massive disparity in GDP between Israel and Palestine not on forty years of Israeli military occupation but on “cultural differences.” In Poland, Romney was denounced and boycotted by the party of his host, Lech Walesa, because of his assaults on American labor unions. These foibles and many others led the political editor of London’s Daily Mail, James Chapman, to tweet: “Do we have a new Dubya on our hands?” Chapman may not realize how right he may be. Indeed, the true revelation of Romney’s world view did not come during his disastrous trip oversees. It came before he left US soil.

On the eve of his departure, Romney gave a much-anticipated speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFA), laying out for the first time his foreign policy philosophy. In that speech, Romney described his vision for America on the global stage by using a term that has become so toxic, so outmoded, so universally proven to be a dangerous, self-destructive, and intellectually bankrupt expression of the global order, that until Romney revived it in his remarks at the VFA, most Americans assumed they would never hear it again. Romney called for a new “American century.”

This phrase should sound familiar to anyone who was not living under a rock for the last decade. It is the manifesto of the thankfully defunct neoconservative think tank The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose promotion of a unipolar world dominated by America’s untrammeled military might was wholeheartedly adopted by the George W. Bush administration. The result? A catastrophic war in Iraq. An ill-conceived war on terror. The erosion of American civil liberties. The loss of American influence across the world. Hundreds of thousands of lives lost overseas, and trillions upon trillions of dollars of debt at home. That is the legacy of the new American century. And it is the legacy that Mitt Romney seems all too eager to revive, which may explain why fifteen of the twenty-two people on Romney’s foreign policy team worked for George W. Bush. Six of whom were members of PNAC.

http://90days90reasons.com/08.php

Why Tee Partay Seniors Love Paul Ryan

Gee, seems they're just a bunch of selfish turds.

70 percent of the Tea Party supporters, along with even higher percentages of other Americans, oppose cuts in Medicare spending.

The explanation for this inconsistency is that most Tea Party members are AARP-eligible. Surveys have shown 70 to 75percent of Tea Party supporters to be 45 or older (compared to about half the overall population). Tea Partiers aren’t against government benefits. They’re against government benefits for other people. They just dress it up in antigovernment rhetoric and convince themselves that Medicare and Social Security benefits are different because they’ve already paid for them through payroll taxes (when in fact beneficiaries take out far more than they put in; that’s why both programs need periodic adjustments). Hence the nonsensical slogan, “Keep government out of Medicare.” The fact that Medicare and Social Security account for most of the welfare-state spending that Tea Partiers profess to despise (andabout one-third of all federal spending) is something that Tea Partiers either don’t grasp or choose to ignore. 

Ryan’s Medicare plan has been through many iterations, but in all of them the single-payer system in which Medicare exists today would be replaced with a voucher system that would gradually shift medical costs onto senior citizens. A “public option” incorporated into one version of Ryancare would likely outperform private-sector rivals on cost control (government-provided health care always does), but there’s a real question whether Congress would allow a mechanism by which that public option could pass those savings on to consumers. (When a public option was up for debate in Obamacare, Congress worked mightily to cripple its inherent market advantage.) There’s also a real question whether Medicare’s elderly constituency is up to the task of rational consumer choice. As Yale’s Ted Marmor notes in afact sheet for the Scholars Strategy Network (an excellent resource that posts online serious social science findings on various topical matters), close to 30 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries are cognitively impaired. “How are frail older people supposed to deal with complex, often confusing ‘choices’ among private insurance plans?” Marmor writes. “They can easily get lost or misled in a lot of evasive fine print.” Is this paternalistic? You bet. I’m certainly counting on society to treat me paternalistically when I enter my dotage.

Ryan’s continuing popularity among the Tea Party crowd, in spite of his planned assault on Medicare, can only partially be explained by Marmor’s 30-percent factor. Another explanation may be that Ryan’s plan would “grandfather” today’s elderly population out of his reform; they could continue to participate in Medicare as is. The choice of age 55 as a cutoff is, Skocpol explained to me in an interview, politically salient. “That age was probably a little too far to achieve the savings he needed,” she observed. “But it’s perfect [to demarcate] the line between Tea Partiers and everyone else.” The 55 year-old cutoff exempts from Ryancare close to half of all existing Tea Partiers (46 percent, according to a 2010 Winston Group poll). They can have their cake and eat it, too.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/106198/why-does-the-tea-party-adore-ryan

A country of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich...

The Real Vote Fraud...

Ohio Early Voting Cutbacks Disenfranchise Minority Voters

http://www.thenation.com/blog/169284/ohio-early-voting-cutbacks-disenfranchise-minority-voters#

One More Reason I Think Rmoney Is A Turd

Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads

South American death squads killed 35,000 people. How anyone could vote for someone who has profited from this atrocity is beyond me.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/08/mitt-romney-death-squads-bain_n_1710133.html

I'ma Worried

We're fast becoming a nation full of voters who vote against their own best interest. I fully expect increasing numbers of voters to continue to do so and vote for Republicans. Here's what your Republican vote has gotten you so far:

*For the past two years the Republicans have obstructed proposals that would have helped most Americans. They fought the middle-clas

s tax cut because it would only apply to the first quarter-million of income. They killed a jobs bill that was supported by two-thirds of the public. They rejected a bill to disclose information about big campaign donors. They disrupted the routine process of increasing the debt ceiling, thus triggering the first-ever downgrading of the U.S. credit rating. Most recently they've obstructed efforts to provide mortgage debt relief to American homeowners.

*Along the way they found time to obstruct other bills that conflicted with their 'austerity' mentality: a Pay Equity Bill that would have provided greater pay equality for women; a bill to limit student loan rates; a transportation bill that Senator Dick Durbin called one of the "easiest bills to do on Capitol Hill"; a demand for a $16 million cut in the FAA budget that led to a $25 million PER DAY shutdown. ~ via Alternet

But hay, if you truly believe that O'Bama is a Muslim commie Nazi socialist, go ahead and keep voting in Republicans and Mitt Rmoney. Just don't come crying to me when our economy accelerates the race to the bottom that started due to Republican policies during the Bush adminny. I'm sure we'll figure out a way to survive without jobs, houses, retirement, savings, and health care. Maybe the ever-enriched wealthy class will take pity on us... Nah, hasn't happened yet.

More Faux Noise

Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano is insisting that it was “not domestic terrorism” for a white supremacist to shoot seven people dead at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, but a Muslim U.S. Army major killing 13 coworkers at Ft. Hood was.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/07/fox-news-analyst-sikh-temple-massacre-not-domestic-terrorism/

Silly investigators. White people can't be terrorists.... Oh. My. Golly.

Fact

Right Wing Wall o' Shame

Rmoney connects with 'you people'.

Where's the tax returns, Mitt?

In 1994, Mitt Romney demanded Ted Kennedy "disclose his taxes, to prove he has nothing to hide...and to show the people how much he pays in taxes."

George Romney, Mitt's father, speaking before he released 12 years of tax returns, “Release of the document, while it might serve a political purpose, would not prove very much, he argued. One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show, and what mattered in personal finance was how a man conducted himself over the long haul.”

What shenanigans are you hiding, Mitt?

Tea Party Group Jokes About Beating Obama To Death

A local tea party group in Pennsylvania called Northeast Pennsylvania Spirit of 1776 is sending out an email alert in which it imagines the Founding Fathers beating up President Obama in Heaven for being a “radical, socialist leader”:

http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/08/06/647201/tea-party-group-jokes-about-beating-obama-to-death/?mobile=nc

Where's the tax returns, Mitt?

Hmm?

Voter Fraud ‘Study’ Authored By Republican Who Pleaded Guilty In Abramoff Scandal

A new paper claiming that voter ID laws actually protect rather than disenfranchise minority voters is getting play in conservative circles. What isn’t being mentioned so much is the background of the paper’s author.

Horace Cooper, the author of the paper, told the Daily Caller this week that voter fraud “criminals — more often than not — are Democrats violating the rights of people who tend to be black or senior.”

Cooper may not have any expertise on voter fraud, but he does know a thing or two about falsifying documents. Cooper was indicted in 2009 on five public corruption charges, charged with exchanging political favors for gifts from Jack Abramoff. Cooper allegedly accepted bribes as a staffer to former Majority Leader Dick Armey, as chief of staff for Voice of America and when he worked for the Department of Labor. Cooper later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of falsifying a disclosure report and was sentenced to 36 months of probation.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/voter_fraud_study_horace_cooper_jack_abramoff.php

Rick Perry Factors Into State Budget Obamacare Funds He Had Pledged To Reject

Eight days after the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and ruled that the federal government cannot penalize states that refuse to expand Medicaid, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) announced that he would not open the program to more applicants. But while he was making a public show of turning down federal funds, Perry was using the additional dollars in state budget projections.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/08/06/647211/perry-medicaid-expansion-pp/

Won't be a long wait...

Waiting for the nutcases to say THIS shooting is also an O'Bama plot to institute gun control in America.

Army Vet Identified As Sikh Temple Shooter:

New charge that Romney’s Bain Capital avoided Italian taxes emerges

There may be a reason Mitt Romney went to Poland and not Italy on his foreign trip. Many Italians, in their view, consider him to be persona non grata for "cheating" the Italian government out of taxes. It raises new questions about U.S. taxes.

According to an article in Bloomberg NewsSunday, Italians say Bain Capital made about $1 billion profit in a deal and avoided paying taxes in Italy by funneling money through tax haven Luxembourg. Romney personally made $50 or $60 million on the deal.

Bloomberg reported that when Romney was CEO, Bain Capital made about $1 billion profit in a controversial leveraged buyout of a telephone-directory company from the Italian government. Bain sold it about two years later, at the peak of the technology bubble, for about 25 times what it paid.

http://www.examiner.com/article/new-charge-that-romney-s-bain-capital-avoided-italian-taxes-emerges

Seen On My Facebook Page...

Ann Romney: "I'm disappointed Rafalca lost. I was sure paying for a German horse and a German rider would win Olympics gold for America." (Actual Quote)

But remember, the Romneys "Believe" in America... They just won't hire us.

~~~~

In 1994, Mitt Romney demanded Ted Kennedy "disclose his taxes, to prove he has nothing to hide...and to show the people how much he pays in taxes."

George Romney, Mitt's father, speaking before he released 12 years of tax returns, “Release of the document, while it might serve a political purpose, would not prove very much, he argued. One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show, and what mattered in personal finance was how a man conducted himself over the long haul.”

What shenanigans are you hiding, Mitt?

More Fux Noise Spam

Where's The Tax Returns, Mr. Rmoney?

Is it true you didn't pay any taxes for 10 years? Is it true that you received amnesty for some illegal financial dealings? Hmmmmm?

Friday 'Toons