May 31, 2012 by BarackObamadotcom
Learn more: http://www.RomneyEconomics.com
Mitt Romney ran for Governor of Massachusetts promising more jobs, decreased debt, and smaller government.
Here’s what Massachusetts got instead:
Jobs: 47th out of 50 states in job creation
Taxes and fees: Increased more than $750 million per year
Long-term debt: Increased more than $2.6 billion
Fact is, Romney economics didn’t work then, and won’t work now.
A front-page New York Times story today exposed a shocking $10 MILLION racist campaign to smear the president that was prepared by GOP operatives and was merely awaiting final sign-off from a politically active right-wing billionaire. The campaign was to focus on the president’s previous ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a racially inflammatory topic that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) declared firmly off-limits during his 2008 presidential campaign.
Here’s the rundown on the latest right-wing effort to attack the president.
What was the smear campaign going to involve?
You can check out the entire 54-page attack plan, entitled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good,” here.
Who was going to pay for it?
Joe Ricketts, a right-wing billionaire who founded TD Ameritrade and whose family owns the Chicago Cubs. Ricketts, who just so happened to sell $10.46 MILLION in TD Ameritrade stock last month, was to bankroll the project through his Ending Spending Super PAC.
On page 3 of the planning document, Rickets is quoted as saying, “If the nation had seen that [unaired McCain ad featuring Rev. Wright], they’d never have elected Barack Obama.
Despite professing strong opposition to government spending, Ricketts and his family (some of whom are Democrats) are seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers funds to update Chicago’s Wrigley Field.
Who was going to execute the campaign?
A team of GOP operatives, led by notorious ad man Fred Davis, who has a history of making race-baiting ads. Davis was to make the film and manage a team of “pirates” who would be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to execute the six-month effort.
Fred Davis was McCain’s ad man during 2008 and famously pushed McCain to use Rev. Wright against Obama, which McCain, to his credit, steadfastly refused to allow. The game plan for the smear campaign begins with “Our plan is to do exactly what John McCain would not let us do.”
Davis’ other clients during the current election cycle include Jon Huntsman, GOP Reps. Ben Quayle (AZ), Steve King (IA), Jeff Flake (AZ), and Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN).
How did Mitt Romney respond?
When asked by a reporter this morning if the Wright issue was off the table for 2012, Romney refused to say that it was and responded weakly that he hadn’t “read the papers yet.” Only later did his campaign manager and then Romney himself repudiate the effort, while also whining that the Obama campaign was engaging in “character assasination” for exposing Romney’s record at Bain Capital. Interestingly, the conservative website to which Romney made his first comments on the smear campaign itself traffics in Rev. Wright attacks, including one recent column on Wright by the very same man who was to be the official spokesman for the effort.
Despite “repudiating” the line of attack, it also emerged today that Romney himself had used the Rev. Wright attack against Obama as recently as February. When quizzed about that apparent contradiction at a hastily called press conference this afternoon, Romney responded, “I stand by what I said, whatever it was.”
Watch Romney stand by his Rev. Wright attack:
What now?
It appears that exposing the shameful, racist campaign has probably killed it. Joe Ricketts issued a statement distancing himself from the plan that bears his name:
Joe Ricketts is a registered independent, a fiscal conservative, and an outspoken critic of the Obama Administration, but he is neither the author nor the funder of the so-called “Ricketts Plan” to defeat Mr. Obama that The New York Times wrote about this morning. Not only was this plan merely a proposal – one of several submitted to the Ending Spending Action Fund by third-party vendors – but it reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take. Mr. Ricketts intends to work hard to help elect a President this fall who shares his commitment to economic responsibility, but his efforts are and will continue to be focused entirely on questions of fiscal policy, not attacks that seek to divide us socially or culturally.
The statement did not explain how Ricketts can both reject dirty racial politics and yet also believe that Americans would not have elected President Obama in 2008 if only they’d heard more about Rev. Wright.
TD Ameritrade, the company Ricketts founded, also found itself in the cross-fire and quickly moved to distance itself from him and his comments.
IN ONE SENTENCE: Once again, when presented with the opportunity to stand up to intolerance in his own party, Mitt Romney once again hesitated and was exposed to have used the attack himself.
Republican Congressman goes birther, says Obama is “just not an American.”
A must-read piece about income equality and how the middle class is the real engine of the economy.
John McCain and his former campaign manager today stood by their decision to keep the Rev. Wright issue off limits in 2008.
Mitt Romney said the JP Morgan fiasco is “just the way America works.”
A growing number of African-Americans are supporting marriage equality in the wake of the president’s evolution.
Senators introduced a bill to ban wealthy people who renounce their U.S. citizenship to avoid taxes from ever entering the country again.
TED refuses to release a talk on income inequality, claiming it was “overly partisan.”
A Bain Capital protegé who also bankrupted companies and shifted pension liabilities onto taxpayers is holding a high-dollar fundraiser for Mitt Romney today.
Poll: 3 in 4 Americans believe the feds should back off marijuana users who comply with state laws.
House GOP Passes Rollback of the Violence Against Women Act In a show of bipartisanship that is basically unprecedented these days in the dysfunctional U.S. Senate, the Senate recently reauthorized and expanded the Violence Against Women Act on an overwhelming 68-31 vote. (Unfortunately, 31 male Republican Senators still voted no.) Today, instead of passing this [...]
JP Morgan Loss Shows Why We Need Tougher Rules On Wall Street You’ve probably heard by now that JP Morgan Chase lost a whopping $2 BILLION on a single bad bet in just a matter of weeks. What you may not have heard is that JP Morgan, and its CEO Jamie Dimon, have been among [...]
Opposing More Than Just Marriage Equality Over the weekend, a top Republican pollster put out a memo urging Republicans to recognize the magnitude of the rapid change in public opinion about LGBT issues and start supporting a least some rights for gay people. And today, Gallup reported that societal acceptance of gays and lesbians is [...]
A Severely Conservative University As we discussed yesterday, Mitt Romney has a radical anti-gay record and agenda. So it’s fitting that tomorrow he will be giving the commencement speech at Liberty University, a radically conservative, anti-gay Virginia university founded by the late televangelist Jerry Falwell. How radical? This is who the university’s founder blamed for [...]
Today’s dismal jobs report — just 69,000 net jobs created last month and the unemployment rate ticking up slightly to 8.2 percent — shows that the GOP’s success at manufacturing crises, blocking new job creation measures, and forcing deep spending cuts is taking a severe toll on our economy and the lives of millions of unemployed Americans.
Why would Republicans want a weaker economy? Republicans have made clear that defeating the president, which would be made much easier by a weak economy, is their number one priority. For example, here’s Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY):
The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.
Here’s the rundown on how the GOP has helped sabotage the economic recovery.
State and Local Government Budget Cuts Led to Massive Layoffs
By refusing to extend sufficient aid to state and local governments, Republicans all but ensured that there would be massive layoffs at the state and local level. And indeed there have been, with over 600,000 public sectors working losing their jobs since the president came into office, including another 13,000 just this month.
As the above chart shows, all of the private sector jobs lost since President Obama came into office have now been replaced. The president has now created 4.3 million private sector jobs — and at a much faster pace than did President Bush. Under President Bush, however, the public sector expanded at a robust rate, while under President Obama it has contracted considerably.
As President Obama said this afternoon in Minnesota, “layoffs at the state and local level have been a chronic problem in our recovery.”
For his part, Mitt Romney has repeatedly said in recent weeks that not enough government workers lost their jobs during the recession.
Manufactured Crises and Austerity Spending Cuts
Last year, Republicans threw the economy into disarray with their manufactured crisis over the debt ceiling. In return for not crashing the entire economy, Republicans insisted on and won deep spending cuts — cuts which will only further reduce demand in an already weak economy. In addition to leading to a first-ever downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, the manufactured crisis also shook consumer confidence and led to weaker job growth.
As the Republicans are signaling their intent to demand yet more draconian spending cuts and manufacture yet another debt ceiling crisis at the end of the year, two leading economists put out a piece this week proclaiming that “debt ceiling deja vu could sink the economy.”
Jobs Bills Blocked
Last year, the president proposed the American Jobs Act, a bill that would’ve staunched the flow of layoffs of teachers, firefighters, cops, and others, while putting hundreds of thousands of Americans back to work rebuilding our roads, bridges, schools, airports, and other critical pieces of infrastructure. Independent economists found that it would’ve created 1.3 million jobs by the end of next year.
Senate Republicans, however, objected and voted the bill down on multiple occasions simply because it was paid for with a small surtax on millionaires. House Republicans refused to even take it up. This just underscores that Republicans will do nearly anything, apparently including harming the economy, if that’s what it takes to protect millionaires and billionaires from paying another dime in taxes.
Republicans have also blocked or delayed several other bills vital to the economy, including an extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits, the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill, the surface transportation bill, and the reauthorization of the Export-Import bank.
IN ONE SENTENCE: It’s time for Republicans to stop sabotaging the recovery and start working with the president to put Americans back to work.
If government jobs were growing at the Reagan-era rate, unemployment would be a full point lower.
Today’s jobs report points again to the need for economic stimulus.
A chronicle of Mitt Romney’s many lies and half-truths.
National Review editor Jonah Goldberg has a brilliant idea: “Beat” the progressivism out of young people.
CNN rescinds job offer to Fox News producer behind Fox and Friends’ anti-Obama ad.
The price of a do-nothing Congress. (Hint: It’s very high.)
Will the GOP stick with austerity despite faling job growth and government borrowing rates at all-time lows? Probably.
A scholar at a prominent conservative D.C. think tank condemned Norwegian murderer Anders Breivik’s anti-Muslim terror attacks…then wrapped one of his justifications into the thesis of her speech.
The Green Lantern is gay.
More Corporations Abandon Right-Wing Group Under Pressure from Progressives There’s big news on the ALEC front today: both retail giant Wal-Mart and Medtronic, a medical device company, have decided to dump the secretive right-wing group. It appears that ALEC’s campaign to promote controversial voter suppression and so-called Stand Your Ground laws played a role in [...]
Down to the Wire in the Badger State Next Tuesday, the voters of Wisconsin will decide the fates of Gov. Scott Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, and four state senators, including Scott Fitzgerald, the co-majority leader of the Wisconsin State Senate and brother of Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald (R). Walker is facing off against [...]
Mitt Romney Stands By Birther King This evening in Las Vegas, birther king Donald Trump will host a $2 MILLION fundraiser for presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney. This comes on top of $600,000 raised at a “birthday party” for Ann Romney that Trump held last month at his New York City home. It was just [...]
Draconian Spending Cuts Are In Fact Bad for the Economy Every so often, Mitt Romney is accidentally honest about something important. One such moment happened earlier this week. Here’s the rundown. It’s Republican orthodoxy that the way to get our economy moving is to massively cut government spending, which they falsely claim is somehow “crowding [...]
Jun 1, 2012 by WeareWisconsinPAC
In last Thursday’s debate, Tom Barrett completely dresses down Scott Walker for using a dead baby in his latest disgusting and desperate ad against Tom Barrett.
Schoolhouse Rock- How a Bill Becomes a Law
Sunday Shows Play Along As Romney Campaign Surrogates Distract From Romney’s Dismal Jobs Record During Mitt Romney’s term as Massachusetts governor, that state ranked as one of the worst in the nation in terms of job creation — squeezing out a net jobs gain of 1 percent compared with the national average of 5.3 percent at the time. But ABC and NBC Sunday shows allowed Romney campaign surrogates to obscure that record using a new talking point that Romney ended his term with Massachusetts ranked in “the middle of the pack.” Read More
Planned Parenthood Action Fund Ad Does Not Violate Tax Laws As Fox Suggested Fox News attacked Planned Parenthood for violating tax laws by putting out an ad that criticized Mitt Romney. In fact, the ad was put out by Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which is organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, the same section Karl Rove‘s American Crossroads GPS uses to attack President Obama. Read More
Media Fail To Fact Check Romney’s Solyndra Speech Mitt Romney’s remarks at Solyndra were full of falsehoods that went unchecked by many major media outlets. The media also largely failed to point out that as governor of Massachusetts, Romney invested in several companies that subsequently went bankrupt or defaulted on state loans. Read More
Though Experts Agree Spending Cuts Hurt The Economy, Media Amplify GOP Attacks On Obama’s Policies Economic experts agree that spending cuts in a weak economy hurt the creation of jobs and economic growth. Though Republicans in Congress spent much of 2011 demanding spending cuts, the media are amplifying their attacks on President Obama’s economic record. Read More
Who Is The Denver Post‘s Resident Birther Mike Rosen? Denver Post columnist and local radio host Mike Rosen drew criticism this week when he questioned the citizenship status of President Obama. Media Matters looks back at his long record of extreme and hateful rhetoric. Read More
Debunking Fox & Friends‘ Dishonest Anti-Obama Attack Ad Fox & Friends aired a video attacking President Obama by resurrecting dishonest and misleading attacks on his economic record. The video, which was produced in the style of a campaign ad against Obama, furthers Fox News’ role as the communications and campaign arm of the GOP. Read More
Fox Helps GOP Gut Vital Antipoverty Programs By Dismissing The Poor Fox is helping the GOP eviscerate vital antipoverty programs by characterizing the poor “as actually living the good life.” In fact, as incomes have stagnated and income disparity between the rich and working class have grown, such drastic cuts would mean “ending assistance for millions of low-income families.” Read More
MarketWatch Column On Obama’s Spending Restraint Stands Up To Attacks In response to a MarketWatch column about federal spending slowing under President Obama, the right-wing media have tried to discredit the column with false or misleading attacks. But none of them contradict the central premise of the column: that there has been no boom in federal spending under Obama. Read More
Fox, Limbaugh Attack Holder For Speaking To Black Leaders About Voter ID Laws Attorney General Eric Holder spoke to attendees at a summit of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Conference of National Black Churches about the importance of voting as well as the significance of new voter ID laws, which disproportionately affect minorities. The summit was designed, in part, to help black leaders learn about the new laws — yet Rush Limbaugh and a Fox News contributor attacked Holder’s appearance as “reprehensible” and “unseemly.” Read More
Oops, someone forgot to purge their files! Rob McKenna got caught… red-handed.
Documents stored at the King County Archives reveal that, while serving as a King County Councilman, Rob was campaigning on the public dime, out of his Council office.
Now McKenna is facing an ethics compliant over his actions, which may have violated ethics law.
Talk about being caught red-handed and red-faced. McKenna’s an attorney. He knows the rules – It is illegal for public resources to be used for campaign purposes.
Can you donate $10 now and help us hold Rob McKenna accountable for his actions?
There may be more to this story.
One of Rob McKenna’s first actions as Attorney General was to hire a Republican campaign operative as his “outreach” director and put him on government payroll. Was this Republican operative reaching out to constituents or working to further McKenna’s political ambitions?
Earlier this week it was revealed that McKenna boosted campaign spending from his Attorney General account in the months before he declared his candidacy for governor – raising concerns with the state campaign watchdog, the Public Disclosure Commission.
After reading these ethics stories, it’s easy to imagine a late-night file-purging party in the Attorney General’s office.
We must continue to hold Rob McKenna accountable for his actions. Will you send us a small donation to support our “Tell the Truth Rob McKenna” team?
http://www.wa-democrats.org/contribute/accountable
Our candidate for governor, Jay Inslee, is dedicated to creating a working Washington. He is the best candidate to rebuild our state’s middle class and get people back to work. Jay would serve the state with integrity and would never violate the public trust the way McKenna has.
Part of our mission at the State Party is to ensure that Jay has a level playing field for this fall’s election. That means we need to hold his ethically challenged Republican opponent accountable for his actions.
Please help with a small donation today. Your support is appreciated by all of our candidates.
Sincerely,
Dwight Pelz
Washington State Democrats Chair
H.R. 2512, Three Kids Mine Remediation and Reclamation Act
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Diane Tran has a lot on her plate for a 17-year-old. After Diane’s parents moved away, Diane stayed behind and started working two jobs to provide for her family — all while taking college-level classes at her high school. But when Diane recently missed school due to exhaustion, she was charged with a crime and sentenced to pay a $100 fine and spend a night in jail. Diane’s classmate, Devin, told reporters that between a full-time job, a part-time job, and making the honor roll, it’s no wonder Diane was tired. “She stays up until 7 in the morning doing her homework,” Devin says. Judge Lanny Moriarty didn’t have to sentence Diane to a night in jail, but he wanted to make an example of her. “If you let one of them run loose, what are you going to do with the rest of them?” Judge Moriarty told reporters. “A little stay in the jail for one night is not a death sentence.” Samuel Oh thinks working hard to provide for your family should not be cause for criminal punishment — so Samuel started a petition on Change.org asking Judge Moriarty to revoke the charges against Diane. Click here to add your name. “Somehow Diane is not just an extraordinary worker and student, she’s an extraordinary human being with a fighting spirit,” Samuel says. “The institutions that are supposed to provide resources to youth and ensure justice are punishing her instead.” There is some good news: when a reporter recently asked Judge Moriarty if anything could be done to get him to revoke Diane’s charges, he replied, “Yeah, it probably could.” Samuel believes that if thousands of people sign his petition, Judge Moriarty will take this opportunity to do the right thing and revoke Diane’s charges. Thanks for being a change-maker, |
