Down To The Wire It Is All Lies All the Time For Romney

Down To The Wire It Is All Lies All the Time For Immoral Mitt Romney

How desperate is Mitt Romney to win Ohio? Before you answer, pay attention to what he and his campaign have been saying about the auto industry in the last few days.

As you may have heard, Romney on Thursday scared the bejeezus out of Ohio autoworkers when, during a rally, he cited a story claiming that Chrysler was moving Jeep production to China. Thousands of people work at a sprawling Jeep complex in Toledo and a nearby machining plant. Many thousands more work for suppliers or have jobs otherwise dependent on the Jeep factories. It’s fair to say that they owe their jobs to President Obama, who in 2009 rescued Chrysler and General Motors from likely liquidation. If Chrysler moved the plants overseas, most of those people would be out of work.

The story turns out to be wrong. As Chrysler made clear the very next day, in a tartly worded blog post on the company website, officials have discussed opening plants in China in order to meet rising demand for vehicles there. They have no plans to downsize or shutter plants in the U.S. On the contrary, Fiat, the Italian company that acquired Chrysler during the rescue, just spent $1.7 billion to expand Jeep production in the U.S. That includes $500 million to renovate and expand the Toledo facilities, with 1,000 new factory jobs likely to follow. On Monday, about the same number of people will report for their first day of work in Detroit, when Chrysler adds a third shift to a Jeep plant it operates there.

Did Romney intend to mislead Ohio voters? I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Presidential campaigns are chaotic, particularly in their final weeks. Maybe somebody on Romney's staff read the story, which bubbled up in the right-wing press and included a genuinely confusing statement from Fiat, and gave it to the candidate without checking its veracity. But, even after Chrysler clarified its intentions, the Romney campaign refused to answer questions from reporters about the erroneous claim. Now I think I know why: A new Romney ad references the same story.

The campaign does not appear to have announced the ad. The Obama campaign captured video of it, during a broadcast in the Toledo area. Here's how it ends:

    Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy, and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.

Although the statements about Chrysler are true individually, together they imply that the Obama Administration's action led to the outsourcing of American jobs. That is obviously false, both in the specific sense of what Chrysler is doing and in the more general sense of what the entire auto industry is doing. Just look at the numbers (or the graph below). According to the Bureau of Labor of Statistics, the number of autoworkers fell almost in half between 2002 and 2009, from around 1.1 million to around 600,000, as the industry was in something like a death spiral. Then, as Chrysler and GM were on the brink of true collapse, the Obama Administration stepped in with federal loans and a managed bankruptcy. Almost immediately, the automobile manufacturing sector started growing again. Since July, 2009, the workforce has risen by about 150,000 jobs and that's purely in manufacturing. If you include parts manufacturing and other related jobs, it's 250,000.

And that's the net increase. By providing Chrysler and GM with the financing they needed to avoid liquidation, the Obama Administration prevented those companies from putting more people out of work Overall, according to estimates by the Center for Automotive Research, the rescue probably saved at least a million jobs.

Of course, this kind of deception is emblematic of the campaign Romney and his supporters have waged in the last few days. They insist that Romney never thought government should let Chrysler and GM collapse. But Romney's vague and inconsistent rhetoric included statements that he would have opted for a “private sector bailout”—something that was not possible in 2009, because private investors were in no position to make the necessary loans.* As Detroit Free Press columnist Tom Walsh wrote on Friday,

    Throughout the primary campaign, [Romney] joined other Republican candidates in a chorus of bailout-bashing and union-bashing when the auto bailouts came up, painting the Obama administration's crisis-management effort as a reckless campaign to run up the national debt and do favors for labor unions.

Romney’s advisers have also tried to downplay the importance of the issue altogether. A Romney strategist recently told Politico’s Mike Allen that Obama’s constant invocation of the rescue makes the president a “one-trick pony,” even though one of eight jobs in Ohio is tied to the auto industry.

Mitt can use all the lipstick in the world, he'll still be a pathological lying pig. When a pol has to lie this much to sell their agenda, its past time for buyer beware, and time for caring Americans to say enough of this garbage passing for public policy answers.

Myth Busters: President Obama and Appeasement

Myth Busters: President Obama and Appeasement

The Bizarre Meme That 'Appeasement' Caused the Libya Attack

There is no better example of the obliviousness to reality that characterizes current conservative attacks on Obama's foreign policy.

Professor Paul Rahe is a nice man who teaches history at Hillsdale College. Here's what he wrote about the attack on our embassy in Libya and the murder of four people, including the American ambassador:

    The American people cannot be allowed to discover that Barack Obama's policy of appeasement has persuaded our enemies that we are weak and feckless and has elicited aggression on their part. Nor can they be allowed to learn that Hillary Clinton and our minions have been grossly negligent with regard to the security of our embassies, consulates, and other installations in the larger Muslim world. Instead, we must ignore the spirit of the First Amendment and vent our wrath on an inept Coptic Christian immigrant from Egypt.

So let me get this straight. President Bush cuts a deal with Moammar Gadhafi, in which the dictator forswears weapons of mass destruction, and is thereafter treated as a friend of the United States. President Obama takes office. The Libyan dictator threatens to massacre his own people. In response, Obama orders the U.S. military to play the lead roll in bombing Libya, helping rebel forces to oust and kill Gadhafi. Every last person in Libya knows that this happened.

And you assert, as if it's self-evident, that the Libyans attacked our embassy because of Obama's "policy of appeasement." What possible sense does that make? In Libya, none, and it doesn't make sense elsewhere either. Obama surged troops into Afghanistan before beginning the present withdrawal with bipartisan support in Congress and from American voters.

Obama escalated a drone campaign that has spread to half a dozen countries, ordered a raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, and helped to engage in a cyber-attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. He ordered a special forces raid on pirates that rescued hostages. All told, the various drone strikes that Obama has ordered have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people.

Perhaps you have critiques of this record.

I certainly do!

To call it appeasement is to traffic in fantasies. But Rahe is hardly alone in doing it. It's a widespread meme on the right. And for a slightly different species of unreality, here's Victor Davis Hanson:

    At the very least, the Obama administration needs to drop the politically-correct euphemisms, stop the Cairo-speech banalities, and remind its diplomatic team that radical Islam's hatred of the West is not placated by loud American outreach, soaring mytho-history about Islam, or the particular politics, race, pedigree, or charisma of the occupant of the White House, but that Islamic expressions of that hatred most surely are predicated on the degree to which America appears diffident, apologetic, and unsure--or confident, occasionally dangerous, and unpredictable.

I don't know how the people of Libya judge America's confidence. But again, given our recent intervention in their civil war, after previously cutting a deal with their dictator, it's a fair bet that Libyans of all people regard as as "occasionally dangerous" and "unpredictable." When it comes to foreign policy, the conservative movement is running against a president of their own creation.

Victor Davis Hanson a hack on the payroll of wing-nut welfare at several "think tanks" has a record of supporting every failed policy of the neocons. Having no humility, lacking the intellect and maturity required for insight, Hanson keeps rolling the same stinking boulder up the same stinking hill no matter how many times it crushed him on the roll back down. As an historian ( that is a kind of joke, no one thinks Hanson is a real historian excpet some brain damaged conservative geeks) Hanson shows a remarkable ability to learn abosutely nothing from history. There are certainly hate filled radical Muslims. Out of the world's 1.1 billion those radicals represent perhaps 1%. Since most serial killers are white males by Hanson's logic we should declare war on white males as well as all Muslims.

Romney And Bain Boosted Agriculture Giant Monsanto In Spite Of Toxic Past

K.T. McFarland, Fox News Security Analyst, Repeats Myth That Obama Went On "An Apology Tour". This meme has been around since the first month Obama was in office. You'll note that at no time has any of these conservative Republican freaks ever produced a transcript - a full one - not an edited one - in which Obama apologizes for America. It never happened. If Republicans have values how come they never show them. Do they keep their values in a secret place, maybe the safe where Rush Limbaugh keeps his drugs and divorce papers.

2012 Republican National Convention Is Proving What Patriotic Americans Already Know, Republicans Have The Values of Pond Scum

2012 Republican National Convention Is Proving What Patriotic American Already Know, Republicans Have The Values of Pond Scum

1. The "You didn't build that" deception. By now, Obama's rhetorical trip-up on the campaign trail is the stuff of legend, because in the construction of a series of sentences, Obama left an opening for Romney and his allies to suggest that the president meant something entirely different from what he said. At a campaign stop in Roanoke, Va., Obama said that a business owner's success requires government investment in infrastructure such as roads and bridges. "If you've got a business, you didn't build that," he said -- meaning, quite clearly, the roads and bridges. Republicans, however, pulled the quote from its context and ran with it. And Romney is determined to carry that ball to the finish line.

Never mind that even mainstream media have repeatedly refuted the meaning falsely imparted to the president by Romney and company. As of Tuesday night, the Obama quote was altered even further in the "Hands" videos to make it seem that he was shaking his brown finger in the face of lighter-skinned business owners: the audio track takes the words, "Let me tell you" from earlier in the speech, and sets them just ahead of the out-of-context quote to make it sound like this:

    "Let me tell you, if you've got a business, you didn't build that."

Here's the actual quote in its entirety, with the Romney edit in bold:

    "There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me, because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.  Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

    If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

2. The welfare lie. The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced that it would consider providing waivers to states from the implementation of welfare-to-work requirement in the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program if the states could demonstrate that they had a more effective means of helping welfare recipients find work. Romney has seized upon this announcement to claim that Obama is "gutting welfare reform" and eliminating the TANF work requirement -- a blatant lie that has been reported as such by many news outlets.

If facts actually mattered to the Republican Party, and truth-telling actually mattered to Romney, that would have put an end to the promulgation of the lie. But when a lie feeds a false but effective narrative about a black president and welfare, Romney and his allies apparently can't bear to give it up.

Several convention speakers took up the theme, most notably Rick Santorum, who said:

    "And this summer [Obama] showed us once again he believes in government handouts and dependency by waiving the work requirement for welfare."

Artur Davis, the former Alabama Democrat turned Virginia Republican, put it this way:

    Bill Clinton took on his base and made welfare a thing you had to work for; this current crowd guts the welfare work requirement in the dead of night.

Davis' part in promoting the lie is especially sweet for the G.O.P. Because he's African American, he provides a certain amount of insulation from charges of racism, despite the obvious racial dog-whistle to those voters who see welfare as a black thing.

3. The "dependency" lie. The Republicans have found a useful corollary to the welfare lie in their invention of a Democratic dependency doctrine, which sells the false idea that Democrats deliberately seek to make people dependent on government benefits as a means of winning votes. It flows from the Republicans' emerging producerist narrative, which was a staple of the racist rants of President Andrew Jackson -- the idea that the world is inhabited by "makers" and "takers," with the "takers" characterized as anybody outside of one's own constituency.

The most juvenile articulation of this steaming pile of prevarication was delivered by radio host and former actress Janine Turner, who followed up a Ben Franklin quote with this:

    Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death." Today Obama enables an entitlement society that says, "Give me liberty and gimme, gimme!"

    Why? Because Democrats depend on dependence.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whose entire political career is a creation of the Koch brothers' Americans For Prosperity enterprise, chimed in with this description of the outcome of progressives' attempts to recall [7] him from the governor's mansion after he gutted labor protections for public employees and slashed the education budget:

    On June 5th, voters in my swing state were asked to decide if they wanted elected officials who measure success by how many people are dependent on the government, if they wanted leaders who believe success is measured by how many people are not dependent on the government, because they control their own destiny in the private sector. ( there are three more examples at the link)

Republicans are real worked up over someone down on their luck getting $4 a day in food assistance until they get back on their feet. In contrast they think its great that America's largest corporations and billionaires get billions in subsides from the capital created by American workers. It is not just the 2012 RNC convention, the entire conservative movement is based on a foundation of lies, just like every radical authoritarian movement in the last 120 years..

Why do Republicans hate science based facts- Todd Akin (R-MO) Claims Breast milk Cures Homosexuality

Paul Ryan stands on a foundation of lies. If there was a way, a humane way, to make Ryan tell the truth or be rendered mute, he would not be able to talk.

What Does Mitt Romney Believe In? Obviously Not American Values, But Whatever Lie Will Make Him President

What Does Mitt Romney Believe In? Obviously Not American Values, But Whatever Lie Will Make Him President

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. Polls show voters are starting to believe them, especially in swing states where they’re being repeated constantly in media spots financed by Romney’s super PAC or ancillary PACs and so-called “social welfare” organizations (political fronts disguised as charities, such as Karl Rove and the Koch brothers have set up).

Romney’s lying machine is extraordinarily well financed. By August, according to Jane Mayer in her recent New Yorker article, at least 33 billionaires had each donated a quarter of a million dollars or more to groups aiming to defeat Obama – with most of it flooding into attack ads in swing states.

In early August, “Americans for Prosperity,” one of the nonprofit front groups masquerading as a charity, and founded in part by billionaire right-wingers Charles and David Koch, bought some $27 million in ad time on spots now airing in eleven swing states.

So Romney’s lying machine is working.

But what does all this tell us about the man who is running this lying machine? (Or if Romney’s not running it, what does it tell us about a man who would select the people who are?)

We knew he was a cypher — that he’ll say and do whatever is expedient, change positions like a chameleon, eschew any core principles.

Yet resorting to outright lies — and organizing a presidential campaign around a series of lies — reveals a whole new level of cynicism, a profound disdain for what remains of civility in public life, and a disrespect of the democratic process.

The question is whether someone who is willing to resort to such calculated lies, and build a campaign machine around them, can be worthy of the public’s trust with the most powerful office in the world.

For decades conservative have claimed they are the party of values. America - some of us were - should have asked what kind of values. Romney and Paul Ryan seem to have nothing but contempt for anything resembling an honest campaign. No matter how many times the lies in Romney ads are shown to be mendacious lies, he and his billionaire buddies running pro Romney PACS, just repeat the lies over and over. So a Romney presidency would be based on a foundation of moral corruption from day one.

Who Built That? Fox Hypes Romney Op-Ed That Touts Businesses Receiving Government Money

Conservatives are trying to sell Americans the bizarre notion that we're moving towards socialism. Anyone who has studied poiltical science and economics can tell you that this is not what socialism looks like,

Corporate Profits Rebound But Household Income Falls In Wake Of Great Recession

Why Does Scott Brown (R) Hate American Values and Common Decency

Why Does Scott Brown (R-MA) Hate American Values and Common Decency

WASHINGTON — Continuing his quest to hide his record from Bay Staters, Sen. Scott Brown used a recent Watertown appearance to lie to constituents about supporting tax loopholes for oil companies and powerful corporations.

At a September 28 event at the Watertown Chamber of Commerce, Sen. Scott Brown responded to a question from a concerned constituent by making a series of false statements and misleading claims to perpetuate the myth that he is fighting for working Massachusetts families.

“Despite his campaign promise to be a ‘Scott Brown Republican’ and put Massachusetts ahead of party politics, Scott Brown has time and time again shown he’s more interested in toeing the Republican Party line,” said Rodell Mollineau, president of American Bridge 21st Century.

“By jumping at the chance to defend oil companies at the expense of middle class families and willfully deceiving constituents, Scott Brown has once again revealed that a ‘Scott Brown Republican’ is just like every other Republican — except they lie about it afterwards,” Mollineau added.

BACKGROUND:
At Chamber of Commerce Event, Sen. Scott Brown Misled Constituent On Support For Tax Loopholes

QUESTIONER: “I want to know how you can support cutting Medicare and Social Security and you keep voting to protect tax breaks for billionaire and oil companies, there’s so many subsidies out there, they don’t provide anything to us- they do profit and they profit and they don’t help our local communities like our community banks do.”

SEN. SCOTT BROWN: “With regards to closing loopholes, listen the only loophole that’s been put up before us is the ethanol subsidy and I voted to close that because it’s used its useful life. Are there others that are out there yes, we’ve talked about it but none of them have been proposed at this point . . . it’s difficult to get into hypotheticals about some of the things you’re talking about because they haven’t been brought forward yet. So we’ll chip away at it and we’ll do our very best.”
But Brown Has Routinely Opposed Eliminating Tax Loopholes For Oil Companies & Wall Street

Brown Opposed Closing Tax Loopholes for Oil Companies. In response to a question from MoveOn.org organizer Nina Allen, who pressed Brown to support closing tax loopholes, “Brown said he had voted to close some loopholes, such as a tax subsidy for ethanol. But he said he was not inclined to support any more taxes.” “We’re in a 2 ½- to 3-year recession right now, and raising taxes is an absolute job killer,” Brown said. [Boston Globe, 8/8/11]

Brown Voted to Kill Bill to End Tax Breaks For Large Oil Companies. Brown voted against invoking cloture on a motion to proceed to legislation that would repeal tax breaks for the largest oil companies. The legislation would eliminate five different tax breaks, saving $21 billion over 10 years. The New York Times reported, “The Senate on Tuesday blocked a Democratic proposal to strip the five leading oil companies of tax breaks that backers of the measure said were unfairly padding industry profits while consumers were struggling with high gas prices.” [Vote #72,5/17/11; New York Times, 5/17/11]

Brown Wrote to Senate Finance Committee to Preserve Venture Capital Fund Managers’ Tax Break. In May 2010, Brown wrote to the leaders of the Senate Finance Committee “asking to have the tax break preserved for venture capital fund managers who ‘contribute to the viability of our start-up community.’” The tax break Brown referred to allowed venture capitalists and other financial managers to pay the lower 15 percent capital gains tax rate on the money they earn from successful investments, as opposed to the up to 35 percent tax rate wage earners pay. Eliminating the tax break would have yielded “$24 billion in taxes over the next 10 years” according to the administration. [Boston Globe, 12/29/10]

Brown Voted Against Amendment to Eliminate Oil and Gas Company Tax Loopholes. Brown voted against a Sanders Amendment to the tax extenders bill. Tulsa World reported, “The Senate rejected an amendment, sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act (H.R. 4213) that would have eliminated tax credits for oil and natural gas production and would have used the proceeds to reduce the deficit and fund programs to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy. The vote Tuesday was 35 yeas to 61 nays.” [Vote #187, 6/15/10; Tulsa World, 6/20/10]

Brown Voted Against Closing Corporate Tax Loopholes. Brown voted against the Senate conference committee report on legislation that would close several corporate tax loopholes. The Boston Globe wrote, “The corporate tax bill… would close several so-called loopholes that companies have used to lower their payments to the state. The biggest money-raiser is a provision known as combined reporting, which is designed to prevent companies from shifting profits to other states with lower tax rates. The measure would require companies to combine income from all their operations, then apportion a profit for tax purposes based on the amount of business activity they have in Massachusetts.” [H4904, Vote 261,7/1/08; Boston Globe, 7/1/08]

pay no attention to brown's record of voting like a little puppet for special interests who pull Brown's strings. pay attention to all the noise about Elizabeth Warren and whether she is part Native America ( which no one has proved she is not). Let's all vote to return the corrupt, lying, sleazy Scott Brown to the Senate because that is what conservatives want. The more lying two faced morons like Brown we have in the Senate the easier it is for conservatives to make America into Pottersville. Brown and conservative are counting on voters to act like small minded morons and focus on things that do not matter.

Where Does Mitt Romney Stand on Veterans Issues? He'll Get Back To You When He Gets Around To Considering Them

Where Does Mitt Romney Stand on Veterans Issues? He'll Get Back To You When He Gets Around To Considering Them

President Obama announced today at Ft. Stewart in Georgia that he will sign an executive order to protect veterans, members of the military and their families from deceptive and predatory marketing practices by some for-profit higher educational institutions.

Mitt Romney’s campaign tried to get out front of the news today by issuing press releases suggesting that the president hasn’t done enough for the nation’s veterans. Campaign spokesperson Andrea Saul said:

    “Under President Obama, all Americans have suffered from one of the worst job markets in recorded history — and our nation’s veterans have been among the hardest hit. With more than twelve percent of our most recent veterans struggling to find work and nearly a million veterans unemployed, it’s clear that we need to do more to grow our economy and ensure that those who fight for America can find a job when they return home.”

Saul didn’t expand on the “do more” part of her critique. The other press release titled “Mitt Romney Will Give Veterans A Chance to Find Good Jobs” links to a page on the campaign website that makes no mention of any plan for veterans.

And it appears that no plan exists on Romney’s campaign website to address various issues affecting the U.S. military — for example, veterans’ health care and unemployment or, as Obama addressed today, servicemembers’ education. The “Issues” page lists 23 separate issues Mitt Romney has apparently chosen to focus on during his presidential campaign and none is “Veterans” or “Military.”

It seems like the only outline of any plan Romney has for veterans is to, as he said in a speech to the VFW last August, use “billions of dollars in waste and inefficiency and bureaucracy from the defense budget” and “spend it to ensure that veterans have the care they deserve.” He mentioned no specifics.

Romney announced a Veterans Policy Advisory group back in October to “help to formulate policies that will ensure America keeps its commitments” to veterans but it is unclear what those policies are.

Romney has even praised President Obama’s veterans initiative to encourage companies to hire veterans, saying last November that “it’s a good idea.”

On Veterans Day last year, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee did float a plan to privatize the veterans health care system but he was forced to back away from the proposal after swift condemnation from veterans groups.

Romney has also said he supports Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget proposal. That budget “would cut $11 billion from veterans spending.”

ThinkProgress asked the Romney campaign if the former Massachusetts governor has a detailed plan to address veterans issues but it did not respond before this post was published.

In a primary season that has lasted a year and included over 30 debates and Romney thinks veterans are so important that he will come up with a veterans policy some day.

Digby takes a look at how the no nothing/do nothing little bug named John McCain has exploited war anytime he thinks such exploitation will get him votes - The maverick has a fainting spell

Back in 2010, Rep. Darrell Issa called Obama one of the most corrupt presidents in history, and pledged to investigate his administration. After a year’s worth of hearings and investigations, Issa has come out empty-handed. Of course, when has lack of proof stopped anyone from making ridiculous accusations in politics?

Conservative Puppet of the Week Sen Scott Brown(R-MA) - Has Strings Pulled by Anti-American Publisher Rupert Murdoch

Conservative Puppet of the Week Sen Scott Brown(R-MA) - Has Strings Pulled by Anti-American Publisher Rupert Murdoch

News Corp. subsidiary Fox News -- which actively aided the Massachusetts Republican during his 2010 campaign -- is playing host to Brown as he promotes his new book, published by News Corp. subsidiary HarperCollins.

Brown appeared on Fox's Hannity last night and Fox & Friends this morning to discuss the book, which Fox's Brian Kilmeade said "is going to be rockin' up the charts."

The Associated Press noted that "highlights" of Brown's book tour include "the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., and The Villages retirement community in Florida, where Sarah Palin promoted 'Going Rogue.'" Palin's Going Rogue was also published by News Corp. subsidiary HarperCollins.

According to the FEC, Brown's campaign committee proposed to "use the book to influence Senator Brown's election, such as by distributing books as 'thank you' gifts to campaign contributors and political supporters."

On February 17, the FEC issued an advisory opinion that concluded Brown's campaign committee's proposal to "use campaign funds to purchase copies of the book from the book's publisher at the fair market price, and to have the publisher donate to charity Senator Brown's royalties from sales of the book to the Committee, is permissible." However, the FEC "could not approve a response on whether Senator Brown may host fundraising events in cities where the publisher pays his travel costs to promote the book."

As Media Matters documented in 2010, Fox News repeatedly hosted Brown in the days leading up to his 2010 special election, and Fox News political analyst Dick Morris urged viewers to "go to DickMorris.com ... to help elect Brown," because if "we win this fight, then there will never be another victory for Obama."

Fox also repeatedly misrepresented remarks made by Brown's Democratic opponent -- Martha Coakley -- to portray her as incompetent.

Shortly after Brown won the 2010 special election, Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich acknowledged that Fox News helped make Brown's "insurgency possible."

Ever hear Sen brown offer up any real solutions for real problems. No, and that is because Brown basically recycles all the worthless sound bites of conservative great thinkers like George Bush. Brown thinks America has a debt problem when we have the lowest revenue in decades. We're over regulated, brown repeats like a little puppet, just like every conservative robot. Except we have much the same regulation we had during the Clinton boom years. Brown wants smaller government? That sound bite is meaningless code speak from conservatives. What they mean is they want government to let corporate crooks and polluters to get away with anything they want. That worked out real well on Wall Street, right?


20 Experts Who Say Drilling Won't Lower Gas Prices

Wingnut Conspiracy Theory of the Day: Trayvon Photo Was Lightened to Make Him Look ‘Innocent’

Hold The Broccoli: What Limbaugh And Fox Get Wrong About The Constitution And The Affordable Care Act

Anti-American Conservative Group Crossroads GPS  Launches $650,000 False Ad Campaign On Gas Prices

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Epitomizes The Conservative Movement's Desire to Have the Elite Rule and Kick The Middle-Class to The Curb

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Epitomizes The Conservative Movement's Desire to Have the Elite Rule and Kick The Middle-Class to The Curb

While volunteer after volunteer from each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties marched into the state’s election board to deposit over one million signatures for the recall of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Walker was no where to be found.

At the hour petitions were being deposited on January 17, Mother Jones revealed that Walker was scheduled to attend a high-dollar fundraiser in the heart of the New York’s financial district at 339 Park Avenue -- the towering headquarters for global financial giant CitiGroup. The $5,000 per couple fundraiser was hosted by none other than Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, former CEO of AIG.
Walker’s choice to be on Wall Street the day of the recall filing is so astounding, for many it goes far beyond the notion of a tin ear. "Walker could not have sent a clearer signal to Wall Street, that he is on the side of the 1 percent ready to do their bidding and take the heat," said Scot Ross of the Wisconsin group, One Wisconsin Now. Ross points to the data his group compiled to support his claim that Walker is constructing an economy that only the 1 percent could love.

Citigroup and AIG

No two institutions are more responsible for the economic collapse of America than CitiGroup and AIG.

Citi is the original too-big-to-fail bank. Citi’s merger with Travelers Group in 1998 blew apart the Glass-Steagall protections that had kept the U.S. financial system safe from major financial crises for 60 years.

Citi was a primary driver of the subprime mess. A top Citi official testified before Congress that the firm was betting that the housing market would go sour as early as 2006, yet it remained the nation’s top lender of subprime mortgages and continued to underwrite billions in subprime mortgage-backed securities. It hedged risk by taking out insurance in the form of credit default swaps with firms like AIG.

Like Goldman, Citi has been caught betting against its own customers. Citi’s $285 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) -- for fraudulently selling packages of mortgage-backed securities that they knew would fail -- was just tossed out by a federal judge who called it “is neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest.”

Today, Citi is considered by many to be a zombie bank, with billions in toxic assets and growing legal liability. Yet, Citi CEO Vikram Pandit hauled in $23 million in bonus money in 2011, giving  him plenty of pocket change to support pet politicians.

It was a surprise to see Hank Greenberg's name on the Walker invite (below). Greenberg was last seen fleeing down Wall Street with Elliot Spitzer hot on his heels, pursuing him for securities fraud and bid-rigging in 2005. AIG later settled federal and state charges for $1.6 billion, one of the largest fines in history. Greenberg, now the CEO of global finance firm CV Starr, and Co., settled the charges against him for $15 million.

All this took place, before that critical week in September of 2008 when the Lehman Brother’s and AIG collapse triggered a global economic meltdown. AIG had issued some $500 billion worth of credit default swaps it could not pay for when mortgage-backed securities went sour. In 2008, AIG was taken over by the U.S. government and bailed out by taxpayers to the tune of $68 billion. Most of that  money is still outstanding.

Right now, Walker can raise unlimited sums due to a quirk in Wisconsin’s recall law. How much he raised from Wall Street on January 17 is still unknown, although in his latest report, Walker raised 60 percent of his campaign war chest from out of state according to One Wisconsin Now. This included four eye-popping $250,000 contributions.

Citigroup's "Plutonomy" Memos

In his 2009 movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore unveiled two explosive memos written by Citi analyst in 2005 and 2006. The memos coin the term “plutonomy” and describe in glowing terms Citi's view of a U.S. economy entirely driven by the wealth and purchasing power of the 1 percent. The memos can be accessed here and offer a stunning glimpse into the cognition of Wall Street elite.

Plutocrats Drive the Economy: “The world is dividing into two blocs -- the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest. Plutonomies have occurred before in sixteenth century Spain, in seventeenth century Holland, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties in the U.S.”

The Future: “We project that the plutonomies will likely see even more income inequality, disproportionately feeding off a further rise in the profit share in their economies, capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity, and globalization.” "Society and governments need to be amendable to disproportionately allow/encourage the few to retain the fatter profit share."

Forget about Main Street, Invest in the Plutocracy: “Since we think the plutonomy is here, is going to get stronger…” “It is a good time to switch out of stocks that sell to the masses and back to the plutonomy basket.”

While Henry Ford believed that the economy thrived when the people who made the cars could afford to buy them, the Citi plutocrats believe that growth is powered only by the super rich and that catering to their taste for imported baubles and bags should be the goal of every investor and policymaker.

Some believe Scott Walker got the memo.

In Wisconsin, a Budget Only a Plutocrat Could Love

If you believe that “the earth is being held up by the muscular arms of its entrepreneur plutocrats,” then the first thing you should do as governor is send them some money.

Massive tax breaks for the wealthy: With a series of bills, Walker delivered $2.3 billion dollars worth of tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, according to a Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo. He also gave them Health Savings Accounts and other perks for the wealthy that few Wisconsinites will be able to utilize.

Race to the bottom in wages: At the same time,  Wisconsin protesters believe that Walker decided to balance the state's budget on the back of the middle class. Walker’s first “budget repair bill” forced concessions from Wisconsin’s 380,000 public workers, who already made on average 8.2 percent less than private sector workers. Walker's collective bargaining bill amounts to an 11 percent cut in pay for workers making $25,000 a year, and 8.5 percent cut in pay for workers making $50,000 a year, according to a Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo.

Pounding the middle class: Walker’s budget bill made steep cuts in the state’s largest programs that aid the middle class: $749 million in direct cuts to schools; $848 million in cuts to Medicaid; $170 million in cuts in state aid to cities and counties. The  cuts in state aid contribute to the fact that Wisconsin now leads the country in public-sector job loss. The working poor were hammered as well, with $56 million in cuts to the Earned Income Tax Credit program and cuts to BadgerCare, where Walker is threatening to deny 65,000 residents health care.

Rejection of federal funds: At the same time, Walker has turned down billions in federal assistance: $810 million for light rail (funds quickly snapped up by other governors); $23 million in broadband money (the first state in the nation to turn down broadband); $38 million for health care exchanges, and $11 million for health care for the poor.

The result of all these changes? Employment in Wisconsin dropped off a cliff the in the month of July, the month that the Walker budget kicked in. At the same time, employment nationally was on the uptick, as can be seen from these compelling graphs by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

One realtor put it this way: “Walker doesn’t get it. People don't want to move to 'Wississippi.' They want to move to a modern, pro-growth state where there will be jobs, modern infrastructure and opportunity. His policies are scaring off my customers.” A local economic think tank dubbed the issue "the price of extremism."

Plutoparticipants?

The Citigroup memos pose the question, how long will the electorate continue to endorse plutonomy?

“The rising wealth gap between the rich and poor will probably at some point lead to a political backlash,” opines the Citi analysts. “Whilst the rich are getting a greater share of the wealth, and the poor a lesser share, political enfranchisement remains as it was – one person one vote (in the plutonomies). At some point it is likely that labor will fight back against the rising profit share of the rich and there will be political backlash…”

Some might say that the residents of the state of Wisconsin have also gotten the memo. They did not just take out their anger and frustration with sustained street protests, frequently topping 100,000 last winter. They put their discontent into democratic action, petitioning for the redress of grievances in the unique way provided for by the Wisconsin Constitution.

They are refusing to be Citigroup's "plutoparticipants."

All the of Republican presidential candidates have a Scott Walker plan for the U.S. economy - the rich will get richer while everyone else loses ground. According to conservatives, if your common sense tells you that some how the systems is being abused to give most of the national pie to those at the top - who work the least - then you're a socialist. Maybe the Americans with common sense know a scam when they see one, and that's all conservatism is.

Mitt Romney, Bain and Right-Wing Death Squads

Romney tapped El Salvador's wealthy families, including one linked to right-wing death squads 

A significant portion of the seed money that created Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, was provided by wealthy oligarchs from El Salvador, including members of a family with a relative who allegedly financed rightist groups that used death squads during the country’s bloody civil war in the 1980s

Bain, the source of Romney’s fabulous personal wealth, has been the subject of recent attacks in the Republican primary over allegations that Romney and the firm behaved like, in Rick Perry’s words, “vulture capitalists.”One TV spot denounced Romney for relying on “foreign seed money from Latin America” but did not say where the money came from. In fact, Romney recruited as investors wealthy Central Americans who were seeking a safe haven for their capital during a tumultuous and violent period in the region.

Like so much about Bain, which is known for secrecy and has been dubbed a “black box,” all the names of the investors who put up the money for the initial fund in 1984 are not known. Much of what we do know was first reported by the Boston Globe in 1994 when Romney ran for U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy.

In 1984, Romney had been tapped by his boss at Bain & Co, a consulting firm, to create a spin-off venture capital fund, Bain Capital.

A Costa Rica-born Bain official named Harry Strachan invited friends and former clients in Central America to a presentation about the fund with Romney in Miami. The group was impressed and “signed up for 20% of the fund,” according to Strachan’s memoir. That was about $6.5 million, according to the Globe. Bain partners themselves were putting up half the money, according to Strachan. Thus the Central American investors had contributed 40 percent of the outside capital.

Back in 1984, wealthy Salvadoran families were looking for safe investments as violence and upheaval engulfed the country. The war, which pitted leftist guerrillas against a right-wing government backed by the Reagan administration, ultimately left over 70,000 people dead in the tiny nation before a peace deal was brokered by the United Nations in 1992. The vast majority of violence, a UN truth commission later found, was committed by rightist death squads and the military, which received U.S. training and $6 billion in military and economic aid. The Reagan administration feared that El Salvador could become a foothold for Communists in Central America.

The notorious death squads were financed by members of the Salvadoran oligarchy and had close links to the country’s military. The death squads kidnapped, tortured, and killed suspected leftists in urban areas fueling an insurgency that retreated to rural areas and waged war on the government from the countryside. The war, which lasted 12 years, triggered an exodus that brought more than 1 million Salvadorans to the United States.

There is no evidence that any of Bain Capital’s original investors were involved in these sorts of activities. But the identities of some of the investors remain secret, and there are family names that raise questions.

Four members of the de Sola family were among the original Bain investors, or “limited partners” in the company, the Globe reported. Their relative and “one-time business partner,” Orlando de Sola, was an important figure in El Salvador. A well-known right-wing coffee grower with an (in his words) “authoritarian” vision for the country, de Sola spent time living in Miami but was also a founding member of the right-wing Arena party, lead by a U.S.-trained former intelligence officer named Roberto D’Aubuisson.

Craig Pyes, an investigative reporter then with the Albuquerque Journal, wrote a series on the rightist death squads based on extensive on-the-ground reporting in El Salvador in the early 1980s with Laurie Becklund of the Los Angeles Times, while the death squads were still active.

Pyes, who has since won two Pulitzer Prizes and is now a private investigator in California, says that no one has produced any proof that de Sola directly funded death squads.

“However,” Pyes says, “he was in the inner circle of the group around D’Aubuisson at the time that D’Aubuisson was well known to be involved in the death squads. De Sola’s name appears in a December 1983 FBI cable as one of 29 people suspected by State Department officials of furnishing funds and weapons to Salvadoran death squads.”

De Sola’s name also turned up in a notebook, seized from an aide to D’Aubuisson named Saravia, that detailed the finances of D’Aubuisson’s terrorist network, according to Pyes.

The Saravia notebook, reviewed by U.S. officials, listed weapons purchases, payments, and what appear to be descriptions of violent plots by rightists, including the assassination of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in 1980. Asked about the notebook by the New York Times in the late 1980s, de Sola denied that he had ever helped finance political violence. De Sola could not be reached for comment for this story.

Romney, for his part, who was much more accessible to the press in 1994, told the Globe that year that “we investigated the individuals’ integrity and looked for any obvious signs of illegal activity and problems in their background, and found none. We did not investigate in-laws and relatives.” He also said that Bain had checked the names of the Bain investors with the U.S. government. Given the policy of the Reagan administration at the time, though, it’s not clear going to the government would have been the most effective vetting mechanism.

It’s impossible to fully explore the backgrounds of the original Bain investors because we don’t know all their identities, including the names of the four members of the de Sola family mentioned by the Globe. Neither the Romney camp, Bain Capital, nor Strachan — the Bain executive who recruited the Central Americans — responded to requests for comment.

During his first presidential bid in 2007, Romney more than once touted the Central American investors in Bain while trying to woo Hispanic voters. 

Romney has learned from the Bush family, never leave your bloody fingerprints on anything. Romney and his apologists can always claim he was once or twice removed from actual murderous thugs so everything is just peachy.

Conservative Welfare Queen Mitt Romney no stranger to tax breaks, subsidies

Conservative Welfare Queen Mitt Romney no stranger to tax breaks, subsidies

As Mitt Romney defends his record running a private equity firm, he frequently points to a fast-growing Indiana steel company, financed in part by Bain Capital, that now employs 6,000 workers.

What Romney doesn't mention is that Steel Dynamics also received generous tax breaks and other subsidies provided by the state of Indiana and the residents of DeKalb County, where the company's first mill was built.

The story of Bain and Steel Dynamics illustrates how Romney, during his business career, made avid use of public-private partnerships, something that many conservatives consider to be "corporate welfare." It is a commitment that carried over into his term as governor of Massachusetts, when he offered similar incentives to lure businesses to his state.

Yet as he seeks the GOP presidential nomination, he emphasizes government's adverse effects on economic growth.

"Fundamentally, what happens in America that creates jobs is not government. It has its role. But by and large, it gets in the way of creating jobs," he said during a debate Saturday sponsored by ABC News and Yahoo.

Bain Capital began looking at investing in the steel start-up in late 1993. At the time, Steel Dynamics was weighing where to locate its first plant, based in part on which region offered the best tax incentives. In June 1994, Bain put $18.2 million into Steel Dynamics, making it the largest domestic equity holder. It sold its stake five years later for $104 million, a return of more than $85 million.
As Bain made its investment, the state and county pledged $37 million in subsidies and grants for the $385-million plant project. The county also levied a new income tax to finance infrastructure improvements to benefit the steel mill over the heated objections of some county residents.

"I'm very pro-business, but I'm not pro-business-welfare," said DeKalb County resident Suzanne Beaman, 58, who fought the incentives. Steel Dynamics "would have done fine without our tax dollars, I have no doubt."

Another steel company in which Bain invested, GS Industries, went bankrupt in 2001, causing more than 700 workers to lose their jobs, health insurance and a part of their pensions. Before going under, the company paid large dividends to Bain partners and expanded its Kansas City plant with the help of tax subsidies. It also sought a $50-million federal loan guarantee.

"This is corporate welfare," said Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst with the Washington-based Cato Institute, which encourages free-market economic policies. DeHaven, who is familiar with corporate tax subsidies in Indiana and other states, called the incentives Steel Dynamics received "an example of the government stepping into the marketplace, picking winners and losers, providing profits to business owners and leaving taxpayers stuck with the bill."

On Thursday, Romney acknowledged that government can help spur private enterprise.

"When I was governor of our state, we competed aggressively to get companies to move to our state and provide benefits to them if they were to decide to bring manufacturing jobs, for instance," he said during a campaign stop in Greer, S.C. "That's the nature of competition between states. I'm happy with competition and do believe in free enterprise."

The outline of the tax subsidies to Steel Dynamics was initially provided to the Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau by American Bridge 21st Century, a pro-Democratic "super PAC." The details emerged during a week in which Romney has repeatedly cited Steel Dynamics as an example of his successful job creation while he was head of Bain Capital.

Launched as a start-up at a time when many American steel mills were foundering, Steel Dynamics is the fifth-largest producer of carbon steel products in the country, generating $6.3 billion in revenue in 2010.

Government support was a key ingredient to getting it off the ground.

When local officials in DeKalb County learned that three veteran steel mill executives were starting the company in 1993 and looking for a home for their new mini-mill, they pulled out all the stops. "These people don't just drive by and choose accidentally to be your neighbor," said Jack Bercaw, a Butler businessman who was co-chairman of the recruitment drive.

The county promised $23.4 million in property tax abatements and tax increment finance bonds, as well as a new income tax to generate economic development funds. The latter was required by the state, which shelled out another $13.6 million in tax credits, energy grants, workforce training and funds for roads.

A new quarter-percent tax on DeKalb County residents financed infrastructure improvements such as roads and railroad exchanges that benefited Steel Dynamics, Bercaw said. The county also created a new redevelopment commission and redevelopment authority to oversee the activity.

Steel Dynamics executives did not respond to requests for comment. But in a 1994 interview with a trade journal, then-Chief Executive Keith Busse said the $4.4 million the company initially received in state tax credits, in particular, helped persuade Steel Dynamics to locate in Indiana. Busse told a business panel that same year, however, that he was opposed to the new income tax levied by DeKalb County, according to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.

David Stickler, an investor and advisor specializing in the steel industry who engineered the original financing package that launched Steel Dynamics, said the $37 million in grants and subsidies was not only a financial boost, but also helped persuade larger lenders to sign on.
"What I've found is that the senior lending banks, especially lenders from overseas, take great comfort in the fact that the local and state government entities are showing a willingness to partner on the project," Stickler said.

Boston-based Bain became involved with Steel Dynamics about two months after the company formed in 1993. At that point, the management team had already sought incentive packages from the state and county. Stickler said Bain executives were well-briefed on the proposed deal and noted that they were particularly thorough in examining the intricacies of the deals' structure.

"They lifted up every rock, they stress-tested every financial scenario," Stickler said. "Before they put their money into a transaction, they wanted to know that as many of the risks have been mitigated as possible."

A spokesman for Bain said Thursday that the private equity firm "has had a 28-year track record of growing great companies, including partnering with the management team to help to launch and grow Steel Dynamics. We are extremely proud of the work our employees have done throughout our history to build our businesses and improve their operations."

In DeKalb County, the tax incentives rankled some local residents, who protested the deal at county government meetings.

Tim Heffley, then a Democratic county commissioner, was opposed to the new tax but was outvoted. "I was just against any company getting handouts from the government, corporate welfare," said Heffley, who nevertheless praised Steel Dynamics as a good company that has brought jobs to the region.

Nearly two decades later, some are still smarting about the subsidies.

America is being sold the BIG Lie by conservatives. In election years or when a Democrat holds an office conservative think they have some kind of moral right to have, conservative preach the gospel of super pure capitalism. yet time and again conservatives lie. The capitalism they practice is never pure. They get help from influential friends, state and federal government. America should demand that conservatives stop the Big Lies. While we all get to read the eventual truth and feel some vindication that at least these raging hypocrites were exposed, millions of Americans have lost their jobs because of conservative economic policies.

Meet America Hating Spend and Borrow Conservative Rick Santorum

Meet America Hating Spend and Borrow Conservative Rick Santorum

Conventional wisdom holds that former Senator Rick Santorum, co-winner of the Iowa caucus, is indisputably conservative enough for the Republican base. “Santorum fits the mold of a tried-and-true conservative who has rarely compromised,” writes Aaron Blake of the Washington Post.

In fact, Santorum is a throwback to the Bush era: a big-spending, big-government conservative. He has had the good fortune to have lost re-election in 2006 and not been around to vote in favor of TARP, but time and again he voted for costly schemes that expanded the national debt. Many of the attacks that damaged Newt Gingrich could have been made against Santorum if he had been polling well enough to invite them.

Santorum voted for Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind and the Iraq War. This is no way to shrink the government or balance the budget, especially when you simultaneously propose to cut taxes and increase defense spending.

Santorum’s own nephew put it best in his endorsement of Ron Paul. “If you want another big-government politician who supports the status quo to run our country, you should vote for my uncle, Rick Santorum.... My uncle’s interventionist policies, both domestic and foreign, stem from his irrational fear of freedom not working,” wrote John Garver, a college student. “When Republicans were spending so much money under President Bush, my uncle was right there along with them as a senator. The reason we have so much debt is not only because of Democrats, but also because of big-spending Republicans like my Uncle Rick.”

So if conservatives and Republicans were really moved to protest big government during the Bush years, then Santorum might have a problem. Luckily for Santorum, most conservatives only oppose deficit spending when it’s done by Democrats. As David Weigel reports for Slate from Iowa, “Tea Partiers did not demand much economic libertarianism from their GOP. Sixty-four percent of caucus-goers called themselves ‘Tea Party supporters,’ and 30 percent of them backed Rick Santorum—a social conservative who proudly defended his earmarks.”

Indeed, when Santorum started to rise in the polls last week Rick Perry hit him with an ad attacking his penchant for pork-barrel spending. It didn’t pierce Santorum’s bubble. Nor did Rand Paul’s dubbing Santorum a big government conservative on the campaign trail in Iowa.

Actual Tea Party activists and conservative opinion writers are aware of these contradictions. Jane Aitken, the founder of the New Hampshire Tea Party, endorsed Ron Paul on Tuesday. Aitken tells The Nation that Santorum’s big spending tendencies and his belligerent foreign policy concern her. “I don't like Santorum's record that much.... He's way too hawkish. We need to be vigilant over countries like Iran, but we must not appear to be the aggressors ever.”

James Poulos of the conservative Daily Caller writes, “The Bush years proved beyond question how difficult it is to cabin off ‘good’ interventions in the minute details of our moral lives from ‘bad’ interventions in our finances, our health care, our education, and other similarly sweeping areas.” David Boaz of the libertarian Cato Institute complains that in 2006 Santorum campaigned on earmarks he delivered for Pennsylvania and articulated a big government ideology. “[Santorum] declared himself against individualism, against libertarianism, against ‘this whole idea of personal autonomy…this idea that people should be left alone.’?”

But will critiques of Santorum from the well-informed activists and opinion-makers infiltrate the mass of Republican voters? Their reassessment of Jon Huntsman never caught on with rank-and-file conservatives. When it comes to average voters, the GOP may still be the unprincipled party of George W. Bush.

It must be one of te most mentally taxing occupations in the world being a rabid conservative. They have to juggle all those contradictions, lies, and not lehast of all the fact that allowed to run rampant conservatism would end the United States of America and our democratic republican form of government.

Conservatives, Especially Those Who Don't like Romney, Can Rejoice in Becoming Victims of Their Own Propaganda

Conservatives, Especially Those Who Don't like Romney, Can Rejoice in Becoming Victims of Their Own Propaganda

"This is politics," Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney declared Dec. 21, dismissing calls for him to condemn ads attacking former House Speaker Newt Gingrich that were run by an independent group supporting Romney's candidacy.

The ads were part of an unprecedented $3.3 million negative campaign of television spots and direct mail by Restore Our Future, an independent expenditure-only committee or super PAC, which blunted Gingrich's rise and may very well be the main ingredient in an Iowa victory for Romney next Tuesday.

Never before have the Iowa caucuses seen such a campaign by any group other than a candidate committee. And with days to go before Iowans cast their votes, the new political landscape is coming into sharper focus.

Fully aware of the bazooka he had in his back pocket, Romney on Friday jetted off to New Hampshire to campaign for the primary election there, casually planning a return to the Hawkeye State on Saturday afternoon. Calm and assured that his campaign would keep on going past Iowa, he put an op-ed in the State newspaper in South Carolina and spent the morning taking shots at President Barack Obama in a variety of interviews. Opponents were left grappling for third place in Tuesday night's vote.

Gingrich, the target of the pro-Romney super PAC's ammo, was left in a more fetal state. "I can't do modern politics," the former speaker said at one campaign stop. At another, he broke down in tears, as he described memories of his mother.

The 2012 Iowa caucus is, increasingly, not about the individuals running. Campaign finance observers have warned repeatedly that independent groups, enabled by the Supreme Court's January 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to raise and spend unlimited sums, would alter the balance of campaigns, once run primarily by candidate committees and party organizations. So far, those warnings are looking prescient.

As evidenced in Iowa, campaigns now operate as political parties of one. Candidates with enough financing can lay their own groundwork for voter mobilization efforts and remain positive, while a supportive super PAC runs negative ads beating off opponents. Voter mobilization and opponent attacks were roles traditionally reserved for the party organizations in the general election, but thanks to Citizens United and the birth of super PACs, each individual candidate can now operate in this fashion.

Conservatives who support Santorum, Gingrich, Huntsman or Paul don't really stand a chance because Romney and his "friends" can out spend everyone. I can't say that i have too much sympathy since the right-wing judicial activists on the Supreme Court made this all possible with the Citizens Untied decision. Conservatives are reaping what they sow.

Republicans Come Out of the Closet, They Just Don't Like Anyone Having Sex, Unless its With Them

Republicans Come Out of the Closet, They Just Don't Like Anyone Having Sex, Unless its With Them

The Republicans ban women from having sex (except with them)

In 2011 America's right wing, and especially the Christian right wing, at last let slip what their problem is with contraception and abortion: it's not squeamishness, morality or a fondness for hanging outside Planned Parenthood clinics toting misspelt placards – they just don't like women having sex. At all. As Amanda Marcotte wrote this week, in 2011 the anti-choice movement "stopped trying so hard to manage mainstream perceptions of themselves as somehow just great lovers of fetal life, and are coming out with their anti-sex agenda". This was borne out in their frankly unhinged attacks on Planned Parenthood, the HPV vaccine, insurance coverage of contraception and, as I discussed last week, the puritanical mood they created that encouraged President Obama to restrict access to Plan B, or the morning-after pill, none of which have much to do with abortion and everything to do with women's temerity to have sex.

Thus, in 2012 the Republicans propose the female anti-sex bill, in which women are expressly forbidden from having sex with anyone other than the occasional lecherous politician who happens to hurl himself, bodily, sweatily, in her lucky, lucky path.

Newt Gingrich becomes the face of the family values party

And here's one Republican politician who definitely doesn't mind women having sex, as long as it's with him. And there does seem to be a surprising number of candidates for the job, considering he looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, and his name is Newt.

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure – of meeting him, I mean, of course, of meeting him – here is a crash course in the Republican party's current presidential front runner. This champion of family values cheated on his second wife with a woman 22 years younger than him at precisely the same time he was attempting to impeach Clinton for – and maybe you saw this part coming – cheating on his wife with a woman 22 years younger than him.

Gingrich claimed that his actions stemmed from "how passionately I felt about this country" and, truly, nothing says "patriotism" more clearly than taking your pants off and banging a congressional aide – as long as you're Newt Gingrich, of course. He declined to attend the wedding of his lesbian half-sister, Candace Gingrich-Jones, having referred to gay marriage as "a temporary aberration" and, really, there is no one better placed to sound off on the sanctity of the institution of marriage than Newt Gingrich. Sadly, space prevents me from getting too deeply into other subtleties of Newt's character – that he condemned Freddie Mac for its part in the housing collapse while omitting to mention that he had received $1.6m from them as a consultant, say – but let's just say that he is the perfect summation of all the ticklish and self-serving contradictions one now expects of a party that argues for tax breaks for the rich while pretending to be a friend of the working man. Newt for 2012!

Conservatives constantly betray their small government platform. Name one segment of private or personal life in which conservatives have not tried to get government to regulate, spy on or dictate about. OK, conservatives are sure the individual right for any America to dump their toxic waste on other Americans is in the Constitution. Conservatives are also sure that just about everyone - women, people of color, non-right-wing Christians, people with disabilities and everyone who exercises has fewer rights than they do.

Commander Flip-flop Mitt Romney Has a Principled Position on Iraq, Choose The One You Like

Commander Flip-flop Mitt Romney Has a Principled Position on Iraq, Choose The One You Like

Mitt Romney, speaking on Wednesday to NBC News' Chuck Todd, seemed to shift positions on the Iraq War.

As highlighted by New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait, Romney explained to Todd, "If we knew at the time of our entry into Iraq that there were no weapons of mass destruction, if somehow we had been given that information, obviously we would not have gone in."

The former Massachusetts governor then gave a more detailed response:

    Todd: "You don't think we would have gone in?"

    Romney: "Well of course not. The president went in based upon intelligence that they had weapons of mass destruction. Had he known that that was not the case, the U.N. would not have put forward resolutions authorizing this type of action. The president would not have been pursuing that course. But we did not know that. Based upon what we knew at the time, we were very much under the impression as a nation, our president was under the impression, that they had weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam Hussein was intent on potentially using those weapons, and so he took action based upon what he knew. But to go back and say, well knowing what we know now would we have gone in. Well, knowing what we know now, they did not have weapons of mass destruction, there would have been no effort on the part of our president or others to take military action."

Chait points out that Romney previously took a much different position on the conflict. Per The New York Times, moderator Tim Russert asked Romney during a 2008 presidential debate if the Iraq War was "a good idea worth the cost in blood and treasure we have spent." Romney answered, "It was the right decision to go into Iraq. I supported it at the time; I support it now." As Chait explains, Romney's debate answer came at a time when it was already clear that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction.

Romney's latest comments come only a few days after the U.S. marked the end of the nearly nine year conflict. The Republican contender has not been shy in his criticism of President Obama's handling of the troop withdrawal. This past Sunday, BBC News reported that Romney said, "I think we're going to find that this president, by not putting in place a status-of-forces agreement with the Iraqi leadership, has pulled our troops out in a precipitous way and we should have left 10-, 20-, 30,000 personnel there to help transition to the Iraqis' own military capabilities."

Politicians should be able to change their mind when they have new information. That would be what America expects from wise leadership. Mitt did not change his mind based on new news, he just decided that being an anti-war conservative would play well now that most Americans agree that conservatives dragged the country into a tragic and unnecessary debacle.

His Royal Highness Mitt Romney Wants His Billionaire Wall Street Donors To Be Able To Give Him Unlimited Sums Of Money.