Sleaze Bag of the Week - Scott Brown (R-MA) is Getting Desperate and Dirty with Sexist Attack On Warren

Sleaze Bag of the Week - Scott Brown (R-MA) is Getting Desperate
and Dirty with Sexist Attack On Warren

In my latest column, “Dems' war FOR women,” I suggested that a power-hungry politics and rightist extremism has led Republicans into attacks on programs vital for women and against pay equity for women. These attacks at times veer into personal campaigns against the women themselves. Witness the many efforts against Hillary Clinton over the years and now, in Massachusetts, witness the slander against Elizabeth Warren by Scott Brown.

In a recent column suggesting that Warren is the great voice of workers, consumers and men and women who are the backbone of the nation I did suggest that Scott Brown was decent. It did not take long for Brown to prove me wrong about that. His dishonest and scandalous attacks against Elizabeth Warren put to shame Brown's argument that he is some sort of "bipartisan" "reasonable man.”

In the end, Scott Brown is just another politician, a handsome and charming guy who will ultimately do anything to win when he fears he could lose.

First Brown implied that Warren was a Harvard elitist. Presumably Brown would attack John F. Kennedy for the same reason. Now Brown suggests that Elizabeth Warren is not really qualified to teach at Harvard. Huh? Brown's using the old Karl Rove-style "dog whistle" attack, suggesting Warren just maybe got the Harvard job because of affirmative action.

What sexist garbage it is that Scott Brown is trying to sell?

Elizabeth Warren got the Harvard job because she was supremely qualified, as are most women who are attacked in this way.

Elizabeth Warren is outstanding by any and all measures at Harvard, admired by her peers and respected by her students.

What is special about Elizabeth is that given her enormous talents she could have sold out like so many others, and made her fortune with any law firm or investment bank, but did not. Instead:

She has fought for women and men who are workers and consumers, fought for economic fairness and financial integrity, fought for lower credit card rates and against banks that charge Mafia-like rates, fought for homeowners against banks that would foreclose upon them (which is why many of those banks hate Warren and support Brown).

If you like the banks, vote for Brown. If you like the consumers, vote for Warren.

Warren has fought in support of active-duty military troops, in support of America's military families, and against those who cheat and abuse our military families and vets (who desperately favor Brown).

Warren has fought for the middle class, for the poor, for the workers and military families and consumers of Massachusetts.

No, Sen. Brown, Elizabeth Warren is not some woman who got a job through affirmative action. She is partially Native American but she has achieved much in life not because of her gender or heritage as you, Sen. Brown, and your great ally, Karl Rove, would suggest, but because of her talent, ability, integrity and hard work.

Elizabeth Warren could have made tens of millions of dollars selling out to greed, as so many of Scott Brown's campaign donors have, but instead, she is one of the most courageous fighters on behalf of workers and consumers and veterans who has ever served in public life in Washington or anywhere else.

Shame on you, Scott Brown.

Thank goodness there are still good people like Elizabeth Warren who are still willing to serve in public life in a system too often dominated by charmers who use dirty politics to support those who cheat the workers and consumers and vets Elizabeth Warren has used her God-given talents fighting for throughout her career.

Many Americans were wondering just who Scott Brown is, he has so many faces it is hard to keep up. Now desperate that he might lose the election to someone who is genuinely concerned with working families, brown has shown his real face. he is a petty pathetic little wing-nut conservative in the pocket of special interests and he cannot compete with a woman of substance and the kind of integrity America needs in Washington. What is Elizabeth Warren's big unforgivable crime? her parents told her she was part Native-American.Conservatives, you know those people who lied us into a 3 trillion dolar war and bankrupted the country wants an election decided on what might be slight exaggerations from someone's parents. Conservatives are once again taking Americans for fools. Let us hope for the future of this great country that this time conservative smears do not work.

11 Ways Mitt Romney Shows He is a Clueless Rich-Guy

The Austerity Agenda is just an excuse to give working class Americans the shaft.

Patriotism 101: Why Are Conservative Republicans Lying To America About Food Stamps and Unemployment

Patriotism 101: Why Are Conservative Republicans Lying To America About Food Stamps and Unemployment

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Robert Barro dismisses Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s claim that every dollar spent on food stamps generates $1.84 of economic activity.  Barro claims Secretary Vilsack’s “Keynesian” estimate conflicts with “regular” economics, which he says predicts that increasing transfer payments like food stamps and unemployment insurance (UI) would lead to a decline in economic activity and a fall in employment because they would “motivate less work effort by reducing the reward from working.”

Contrary to Barro’s assertion, however, the Secretary is in good company appealing to Keynesian multiplier analysis under current economic conditions, and Barro’s assessment is implausible.  For example, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that transfer payments to individuals like the increase in food stamp benefits and additional UI compensation of the 2009 Recovery Act generate between 80 cents and $2.10 for each dollar spent when the Federal Reserve holds short-term interest rates as low as possible (see Table 2 here).  Barro says “there is zero evidence” that deficit-financed transfers increase economic activity and boost employment;” CBO explains why, taken as a whole, the evidence says they do.

Circumstances matter.  When the economy is humming along on all cylinders and unemployment is very low – think the late 1990s – deficit-financed increases in food stamps and UI would not increase economic activity or boost employment.  The multiplier would be essentially zero because the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates in response.  Any rise in demand stimulated by the increase in transfers would be offset by the fall in demand due to higher interest rates.  Barro’s concern about work disincentives could come into play if transfers were exceedingly generous.

That’s not where we are now.  Higher interest rates due to Fed tightening will not likely be a concern anytime soon.  Instead, we face a long period of high unemployment and excess productive capacity.  These are just the circumstances in which transfers will most likely be effective in stimulating demand and creating jobs.

Food stamp and UI recipients spend most of any increase in income they get, and they spend it quickly.  That means more spending at local businesses and more orders for those businesses’ suppliers.  The additional spending generates income for local businesses and their suppliers, and the boost to demand multiplies through the economy.  With nine unemployed workers for every two job openings and businesses generally operating well below full capacity, constraints on expanding production and employment to meet the increased demand should be minimal.  Treasury borrowing costs will continue to be low and we will increase the odds that a real economic recovery will take hold.

I wish we were at a point where further deficit-financed spending would be counterproductive because growth is strong and full employment is in sight.  But, we’re clearly not there yet and it’s bad economic policy – regular or irregular – to pretend otherwise.

 We do live in a free market society - at least for those in the middle-class and below ( in other words not in the same economic class as George W. Bush and Mitt Romney). When people spend their very small government benefits those dollars do not disappear down a black hole. And when people do get back on their feet - and most Americans do eventually - they pay back into the system and start putting more money in the pockets of American business. At no time in this cycle is there much incentive not to seek work. Having a safety net to provide some protection against ending up living under a bridge is hardly incentive to live off gov'mint benefits. Those benefits are measly at best.

Anti-American Propaganda Channel Fox News Spreads Romney's Dubious Talking Point On Women's Job Losses

The National Review’s fake plagiarism scoop - Updated: After falsely accusing Elizabeth Warren of plagiarism, the conservative magazine apologizes. The Biggest wuss in Massachusetts Scott brown (R) is still using false and distorted claims in his mail campaign about Warren to rise money.

Women for Obama

Conservative Republicans Are The Shame of The Nation: House 'Violence Against Women Act' Bill Ratchets Up Attacks on Domestic Violence Survivors

Conservative Republicans Are The Shame of The Nation: House 'Violence Against Women Act' Bill Ratchets Up Attacks on Domestic Violence Survivors

Women have been under economic assault in Washington for months. Deficit hawks have taken aim at social programs and civil rights protections that help keep women safe, healthy and able to participate in work and community life. To some lawmakers, none of that is more important than “saving” taxpayer dollars—which is often shorthand for robbing working women of both their earnings and their safety net.

The hostility toward women crested this week as conservative lawmakers pushed legislation that would gut the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). House Bill 4970 isn't just oppressive to survivors; it attacks the civil and social rights of all women. By raising barriers to economic assistance and legal recourse, the legislation sends the message to countless women living in violent households that their place is still in the home.

Even with protective laws on the books, a woman struggling to support a family and avoid foreclosure faces a devastating choice when the alternative to an abusive home is homelessness. The decision to break away is even harder when local service programs and battered women’s shelters are themselves struggling for survival amid budget cuts.

Adding insult to injury, many states have failed to protect survivors’ access to unemployment insurance, which aggravates the economic instability that often keeps vulnerable women tied to abusive partners.

"The brutalization of women doesn’t go on just behind closed doors. On the House floor, the nation’s shame is now on full display."

The House version of VAWA would deal a blow to immigrants trapped in abusive relationships, making it harder to petition for legal status as abuse victims, and easier for abusers to terrorize partners who fear immigration authorities. Lisalyn Jacobs of the advocacy group Legal Momentum told In These Times that “immigrant women are particularly economically vulnerable and may either be relying on their abusive partner's income, or in a marginal position themselves that prevents them from being economically stable enough to leave their violent partners.” The bill also erodes mandates for public housing authorities to develop policies to help abused residents relocate to safer places.

The legislation also excludes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people from key protections—an exclusion compounded by poverty, homelessness and employment discrimination afflicting many LGBTQ populations. Similarly, the bill would undermine anti-domestic violence protections in Native American communities, where both poverty and gender-related violence are rampant.

The House bill comes at a time when the country’s economic crisis has taken an especially cruel toll on abuse victims. Although economic troubles don’t directly cause domestic violence, combined with anger and self-blame, can unemployment, poverty and other social stressors can definitely excerbate family conflicts and make escape prohibitively expensive.

The economics of intimate partner violence shape the impacts of abuse as well. According to a 2007 analysis by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence:

        The cost of intimate partner violence exceeds $5.8 billion each year, $4.1 billion of which is for direct medical and mental health services.
        Victims of intimate partner violence lost almost 8 million days of paid work because of the violence perpetrated against them by current or former husbands, boyfriends and dates. This loss is the equivalent of more than 32,000 full-time jobs and almost 5.6 million days of household productivity as a result of violence.
        There are 16,800 homicides and $2.2 million (medically treated) injuries due to intimate partner violence annually, which costs $37 billion.

A 2009 study published by the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence noted that compared with other women, "women who report [domestic violence] victimization also report more days arriving late to work, more absenteeism from work, more psychological and physical health problems that may reduce their productivity, and greater difficulty maintaining employment over time.” In the perverse cycle of economic oppression and violence, some abusers capitalize on women's financial dependency by harassing their partners to interfere with their jobs, or simply stealing money from them.

Efforts to claw back protections for survivors are the tip of a widening spectrum of policies promoting gender inequality, including welfare regulations that punish single mothers, budgetary attacks on reproductive health care for the working poor, and now, abandonment of the state’s basic responsibility to protect women from physical and economic abuse.

Advocates have supported the Senate version of the VAWA bill, which contains the progressive provisions absent in the House legislation. But overall, funding for related programs and services has been precarious year to year. Jacobs said, “neither bill contains the strong response to the economic needs of survivors of violence that would be appropriate given the fragile state of the economy.”

The brutalization of women doesn’t go on just behind closed doors. On the House floor, the nation’s shame is now on full display.

How can this be, conservatives claim they have not declared war on women. Would the party of "values" be once again lying to the public. Could the party of values once again be acting like some authoritarian thugs who do not have the capacity for empathy that normal human being and good Americans should have.

Scott Brown(R-MA) Scared Of Elizabeth Warren 

Why Have Conservative Republicans Declared War on Women - America’s Women Can’t Be Trusted

Mitt Romney Debt Speech Ignores Key Facts - His plan, the conservative Republican plan would increase the deficit by $5 trillion over ten years.

Conservatives Define Good Old Fashioned American Problem Fixing as Socialism. No Wonder Conservatism Has Become Nihilism

Conservatives Define Good Old Fashioned American Problem Fixing as Socialism. No Wonder Conservatism has Become Nihilism

What if the president proposed something big -- something that really focused on a broader question, such as the fundamental inequality in America? Well, surely, if he did so, he would be labelled a socialist! Not socialist as defined in the academic sense, or as the rest of the world uses it in its political life, but in the crude way that Republicans have always used it -- as a brickbat to throw at their political opposition.

This has all happened before. In the 1936 election, when FDR proposed the "radical" safety net of Social Security, his Republican opponent Gov. Alf Landon painted a portrait, familiar to FDR's detractors, of the president as a communist and socialist:

    Imagine the field opened for federal snooping. Are these 26 million going to be fingerprinted? Are their photographs going to be kept on file in a Washington office? Or are they going to have identification tags put around their necks?

Fortunately, Americans ignored him and gave FDR an overwhelming victory.

Democrats are again in an excellent position to take a risk like FDR took with the New Deal. They might give themselves some identity other than that of modest centrists, constantly worried about offending one constituency or another.

Professional party Democrats in Washington have been dismissive of the New Deal for the past twenty years, considering it a coalition of voting groups that are now "passé." While that is true, they could learn from the example of a White House administration tending to the needs -- and the pain -- of Americans. FDR's administration was not afraid to institute programs that the Republicans condemned as "socialist"; it was ready to take the flak from a right wing that was always prominent in the Republican party -- and that now seems to control it.

Commenting on Republican congressman Allen West's assertion that there are currently "78 to 81" Communists in the Democratic party, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed, entitled "Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem":

    The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country's challenges.

They're going to call us socialists or communists no matter what we do, so now seems like as good a time as any -- when their party is in disarray -- to solve inequality. It's not "class warfare." When I was young, America, indeed, had a real class system (in the same way that much of the world still does). Now, social distinction is largely based on income bracket, not birth. Inequality is the problem.

Discrimination because of class difference was bad enough, but our present inequalities have a new, quite sinister origin. Money means power. Super money means super power. It's not just that the top 1 percent -- and the top 0.1 percent -- skims their money off the top. What is more important is that power is concentrated in a very few hands, which is a disaster for our democracy. (See Paul Krugman's article "Plutocracy, Paralysis, Perplexity.")

As a result, we see two things happening. The first is abuse of the capitalist system -- demonstrated by free enterprise run amok as experienced in 2008, and from which we still suffer. The second is the tremendous control wielded by those who provide money for campaign financing. They are the people FDR once summed up quite neatly as "organized money."

Let us draw a line between business institutions that are expected to perform essential services for us and those that are allowed to carry on in the ways to which they are accustomed. (Although, hopefully, with less "buccaneering." The Dodd-Frank legislation designed to introduce regulation has been badly watered down or not even carried out.)

We should simply recognize those business institutions that provide basic services and require close monitoring to ensure that these services are performed well. No, not nationalization, but careful regulation of businesses that agree to provide specific services with agreed-upon "just profits."

Credit cards and a bank account are essential to daily life. The New York Times reported on April 30 that "The banking industry as a whole earned nearly $30 billion last year from overdraft fees on debit cards and checking accounts." An attorney from the National Consumer Law Center summed it up: "Profits are the reasons for fees, not risk or costs."

And what about loans for buying a house? Or for education? And health insurance, perhaps even life insurance? What about heating our home? Many communities contract with a provider for water and electricity. Is not the profit factor agreed upon? And monitored? (Is that not how we handle military contracts, even if we don't monitor those very well?)

There is a long history of business working closely with private enterprise, going back to the New Deal and on through World War II. At the local level today we have many examples. The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority in New York comes to mind. There are other experiments with "hybrid companies," as Stephanie Strom informed us in the New York Times: "A new type of company intended to put social goals ahead of making profits is taking root around the country, as more states adopt laws to bridge the divide between nonprofits and businesses."

But, one knows that most institutions, particularly the big ones, will not respond voluntarily, or simply won't cooperate. Hence, there is little realistic choice other than government intervention and supervision. Government action was behind every program of the New Deal. And we seemed not only to have survived but also prospered. No question about it: on a nationwide scale, our government needs to provide the framework and monitoring of these "service institutions."

This regulation would be but one step in a major political effort to set right the inequality in our economic and social system. Introducing this in no way diminishes the other measures needed, such as a radical shakeup of the taxing formulas.

Shifting the thrust of economic policy to emphasize -- and actively promote -- the quality of our life is essential, and it's hardly radical or socialist. Are we Americans willing to grasp this?

While I might not agree with every word I get the spirit. What happened to the old fashioned attitude that America has a problem let's fix it? Conservatism has replied that problems are not to be fixed, they are a permanent part of life, suck it up and live with it. They have become weird cranks who take sadistic glee in people not being able to find work or having a toxic waste site in their backyard or not being able to pay their medical bills.

Hannity Adopts Limbaugh's Defense Of His Attacks On Sandra Fluke: "He Uses Absurdity To Illustrate The Absurd". Conservatives probably respect women in some ways, they just like to keep it a secret. You know something that Hannity and Limbaugh discuss in the shed when they're polishing their jack boots.

There is No Racism in the History of the Conservative Movement ?

The Racism-Conservatism Link: 'National Review' Firestorm Over Racism Calls Up William F. Buckley's Troubling Legacy

The National Review's dropping of two writers -- one for publishing a racist article in another publication, the other for giving a racist talk -- has renewed discussion of that magazine's early positions regarding race and the legacy of its founder and guiding spirit William F. Buckley, Jr. Since Buckley's magazine was critical to the success of the postwar right, mainstream conservatism's supposed renunciation of racism has depended in part on a prevailing, little-examined notion that having defended white supremacy in the South in the 1950s, Buckley later apologized for that position.

His fans, both conservative and liberal, cite the apology. It's become part and parcel of a contention that racism and conservatism are not ineluctably connected.

But the aged Buckley was renouncing a position entirely different from the one he'd actually advanced in the 1950s.

Writing in 1957 in defense of jury nullification of federal voting laws, Buckley insisted that whites in the South were "entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, where they do not prevail numerically," because the white race was "for the time being, the advanced race." In 2004, asked whether he'd ever taken a position he now regretted, he said: "Yes. I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary."

Nicely done. Where in '57 he'd asserted a right even of a minority of whites to impose racial segregation by literally any means necessary, including breaking federal law, in '04 Buckley expressed regret for supposedly having believed only that segregation would wither away without federal intervention.

Stupid the man was not. He gets credited today with honesty about his past and with having, in his own way, "evolved up." Modern conservatives, more importantly, get to ignore the realities of their movement's origins.

Buckley did evolve, just not in the way his fans like to imagine. His effort to construct working-class white Southern racists as an advanced race was brief. (Given Buckley's ideas of what advanced races like to do -- sail, listen to Bach, defend high culture against barbarity -- it's not surprising if they disappointed him.) By 1965, at a famous Oxford Union debate with James Baldwin, Buckley was fighting what had already become a rearguard action on civil-rights legislation, and he was taking a new position. Claiming now that everybody already agreed that race prejudice is evil, he accused the civil-rights movement of no longer seeking equality but the actual regression of the white race. He announced that if it ever came to race war, he was prepared to fight it on the beaches, in the hills, in the mountains.

And he joked that what he really objected to was any uneducated Southerner, black or white, being allowed to vote. That's less a turnabout on equal rights for blacks than a retreat to a more logically consistent snobbism, and the joke was serious: that same year, James J. Kilpatrick put forth in the National Review an argument mixing states-rights populism with ruling-class prerogative, warning that federalism would be destroyed unless states were free to impose voting qualifications, and that such qualifications must discriminate equally, not racially.

Race nevertheless long remained a defining conservative issue for the National Review. In a 1969 column, Buckley hymned the research of Arthur Jensen on race and IQ, which showed blacks testing lower than whites on abstract reasoning skills, a finding from which Buckley deduced a racial imperviousness to improvement by education. In the 1970s the magazine persistently defended apartheid South Africa on the same basis that it had once defended Jim Crow.

The problem isn't that old Bill Buckley gets a pass. If conservatives today really mean to mark out an American conservative ethos with no remaining ties to racism, wouldn't they need to reckon, far more seriously and realistically than they seem prepared to do, with the painful legacy of the postwar right when it comes to what was then called racial integration? With the Cold War, integration was the hot issue of the day -- and that was the day when the right wing was taking over the Republican Party. Nelson Rockefeller was a fire-and-brimstone Cold Warrior but hyperliberal on race; he was just the type the Buckleyites were knocking out. Ties between conservatism and straight-up, hardcore, undisguised disgust at the presence of African Americans in any position other than servile were once so tight that for some of us with long enough memories it's somewhat bizarre even to have to review them.

And the deeper one digs into the history of race and the right wing, the trickier things get. There's another remark of Buckley's that gets him routinely credited with acknowledging, in old age, postwar conservatives' error on race and personally recanting it: a comment he made during an interview with Judy Woodruff in 2006 regarding his opposition to the 1962 Civil Rights Act. "The effect of that bill should have been welcomed by us," Buckley told Woodruff. He framed his old objection to the act in terms of William Rehnquist's supposedly having persuaded him and Barry Goldwater, when developing positions for the Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, to view opposition to the act as an inescapable conclusion of the supposed strict constitutionalism on which Goldwater was running, a position that Buckley told Woodruff he'd since come to regret for its "constitutional formalism."

Buckley's 2006 frame is a false one. Advancing states-rights and anti-judicial-review arguments against civil-rights laws was nothing new to Buckley in '63-'64, and his arguments certainly didn't depend on any "formalist" urging from Rehnquist. By the time of the Goldwater campaign, nearly 10 years of unrelenting objection to every form of civil-rights legislation had appeared in the National Review, weirdly blending the (supposedly race-neutral) "strict-constitutional" argument with Buckleyite claims for the right of cultures deemed superior by Buckleyites to violate the Constitution.

Most conservatives today are not racists, but that a large minority are remains a problem. First, conservatives refuse to acknowledge they have a problem with racists - who are drawn to the conservative movement ( why are racists sympathetic to conservatism. What is it about conservatism that appeals to racists). The other is that many conservatives in leadership positions may not be racists they are happy to use the conservative dog whistle to signal to racists that they should vote for conservatives.

Conservatives have a similar problem with women and are often even less subtle in their appeals to sexism and misogyny. First conservatives have to admit they have a problem before they can start to do something about it. The war on women continues - Top Republican Strategist Denies Women Are Paid Less Than Men To Do The Same Work.

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Mitt Romney Spokesman Proto-fascist Richard Grenell Scrubs OnLine Attacks on women

Eight of the Top Ten 2012 Super PAC Donors Are Anti-Democracy Conservatives Hell Bent on Bringing Back Bush Policies

Mitt Romney Spokesman Proto-fascist Richard Grenell Scrubs OnLine Attacks on women

Mitt Romney Spokesman Proto-fascist Richard Grenell Scrubs OnLine Attacks on women

In the Twitter-fueled 2012 election, it's not surprising that reporters quickly began digging through Grenell's Twitter feed, even before he got a chance to scrub out a number of impolitic and sexist comments.

ThinkProgress noted Grenell's tendency to make cutting remarks about the appearances of prominent women in media and politics, including his tweet advising MSNBC host Rachel Maddow "to take a breath and put on a necklace," and another suggesting she resembled Justin Bieber.

In another tweet, Grenell wrote that "Hillary is starting to look liek Madeline [sic] Albright." He discussed First Lady Michelle Obama working out and "sweating on the East Room carpet." He also asked whether Callista Gingrich's "hair snaps on," and on another occasion, commented how Gingrich's third wife "stands there like she is wife #1." Politico flagged more examples and noted Grenell's "old pastime" of "ridiculing the Gingriches."

When contacted about Romney's hiring of Grenell and his removal of online writing, a campaign spokesperson referred The Huffington Post to a response Grenell gave to Politico. "My tweets were written to be tongue-in-cheek and humorous but I can now see how they can also be hurtful," Grenell said. "I didn’t mean them that way and will remove them from twitter. I apologize for any hurt they caused."

Maddow certainly didn't think Grenell's tweets were so "tongue-in-cheek" or "humorous," pointing out the ones written about her during Friday night's show, while asking if the Romney campaign sees "any sign that they understand that a long, string of really nasty, sexist tweets about Callista Gingrich's appearance might be alienating to people who might otherwise consider voting for Mr. Romney."

But Maddow's not the only member of NBC/MSNBC who Grenell has knocked in recent months. Grenell described NBC's "Meet the Press" on Twitter as "a commercial for the Democratic Party & its radical feminist agenda," while taking a few shots at chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell and political director and White House correspondent Chuck Todd.

"[A]re any reporters asking HillaryClinton tough questions?" Grenell asked on April 3. "NBC has expert foreign policy reporter Andrea @mitchellreports asking non-questions." On March 27, Grenell tweeted that MSNBC "has ushered @chucktodd so far left he's lost his ability to see a Russian video moment as anything more than a 2nd term reality." That same day, Grenell said what he "love[s] about twitter and facebook is that it has outed reporters from their phony facade of pretend non-partisan commentary."
Richard Grenell Twitter


He has also taken a few jabs at BuzzFeed, writing that the Ben Smith-led site "looks like it's either working for [liberal watchdog Media Matters for America] or the Obama re-election." (Smith wrote Saturday how the hiring of Grenell, who's openly gay, quickly prompted an attack from Bryan Fischer, the anti-gay chief spokesman of the American Family Association).

Grenell also recently tweeted that New York Times reporter Matt Bai "isn't fit to cover Obama," and once tweeted that this reporter is a "liberal" who "ignores george @stephanopoulos' secret coordination w/ WhiteHouse on contraception," both posts that appear to have been removed. On another occasion, Grenell disputed whether this reporter's article included a "clarification" or, in his view, a "correction." In a subsequent tweet, he alleged that bias was the motivation for clarifying the article.

On his now-removed personal site, according to a few posts archived online, the spokesman takes similar swipes at the "Fourth Estate."

In May 2010, Grenell criticized New York Times columnist Charles Blow in a post headlined "Charles certainly does Blow."

"Blow's writing is choppy and vapid," Grenell wrote in a post that has since been removed. "His filing today is a 474 word piece of partisan whining for his favorite political party labeled 'Liberals in Limbo". While conservatives won't be shocked that Blow is on staff and writing for the Grey Lady, intellectuals everyway [sic] should demand she do better than Blow."

Grenell has blogged for The Huffington Post as recently as last month.

Given Grenell's repeated swipes at the media, reporters may be concerned that they won't get a fair shake and that legitimate questions could be dismissed as being motivated by liberal bias.

Mitt Romney has high standards, yes sir. His idea of running a campaign of substance is to hire a  lunatic who specializes in jokes so bad that no one likes them except Rush Limbaugh fans and cockroaches.

Not Just Labor Rights; America hating Conservative Republican Scott Walker(R-WI) Is Also Dismantling Women's Rights


The Right Wing's Insurrectionist Mindset. Conservatism is fanatical anti-American movement that tries to disguise its radical democracy hating agenda in patriotism.

Who Killed Womens Jobs? The Conservative Republican Pretend Patriots

Who Killed Womens Jobs? The Conservative Republican Pretend Patriots

Yesterday on Meet the Press David (the GOP Talking Point Spigot) Gregory peppered Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on the issue of jobs losses faced by women under President Obama.  Most news items covering his response have only pointed out the first said...

    "It's a ridiculous and misleading way of looking at the economy"

You can find that quote as the headline at the L.A. Times,, ABC News, Business Insider, Politico, and CBS News among others.

But what I found more interesting is what he said next.  He pointed out that many of the job losses that have occurred while Obama has been President have been in the Public Sector and that's has disproportionately affected police, firemen, nurses and Teachers who are overwhelmingly female.

    I asked Geithner about the technical accuracy of the Romney claim and he explained “this crisis was a very damaging crisis, hurt everybody.  And it began in, as you know, in early 2008.  And a lot of the early job losses in 2008 affected men, because they affected construction and manufacturing. And as the crisis spread and state and local governments were forced to cut back on services and fire a lot of teachers, that caused a lot of damage to women, too.”

Politifact Rated the Romney claim as Mostly False and correctly noted that it come from the BLS:

    Romney’s campaign pointed to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment figures from January 2009, when Obama took office, and March 2012, for all employees and for female employees.

    Here they are:

    * Total Nonfarm Payroll Jobs:

    January 2009: 133,561,000

    March 2012: 132,821,000

    Net loss: 740,000 jobs.

    * Total Female Nonfarm Payroll Jobs

    January 2009: 66,122,000

    March 2012: 65,439,000

    Net loss: 683,000 jobs.

    They then divided the net loss among women by the total net loss and came up with 92.3 percent.

Although the number is technically true, it doesn't tell the complete story as noted by former Reagan Official Bruce Bartlett:

    "To the extent there have been excessive job losses among women, a lot of it has to do with the fact that there has been an enormous reduction in state and local government employment," Bartlett said. "The decline ... has been especially pronounced in this recession as opposed to other recessions."

This is what the loss of public sector jobs looks like compared to private sector gains under President Obama.

It's not like the GOP has necessarily been a fan of job growth among the public sector.

    "Over the last two years since President Obama has taken office, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs," Boehner said. "And if some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it. We're broke. It's time for us to get serious about how we're spending the nation's money."

And the Center for Budget and Policy points out, State Budgets have been hit hard by this Recession.

    The Great Recession that started in 2007 caused the largest collapse in state revenues on record. Since bottoming out in 2010, revenues have begun to grow again, but states are still far from fully recovered. As of the third quarter of 2011, state revenues remained 7 percent below pre-recession levels, and are not growing fast enough to recover fully soon.

    Meanwhile, states' education and health care obligations continue to grow. Next year, states expect to educate 350,000 more K-12 students and 1.7 million more public college and university students in the upcoming school year than in 2007-08.[2] And some 5.6 million more people are projected to be eligible for subsidized health insurance through Medicaid in 2012 than were enrolled in 2008, as employers have cancelled their coverage and people have lost jobs and wages.[3]

    Consequently, even though the revenue outlook is trending upward, states are still addressing large budget shortfalls by historical standards as they consider budgets for the upcoming year. In some states with two-year budget cycles, projected shortfalls for fiscal year 2013 have already been closed through spending cuts and other measures scheduled to take effect in the next fiscal year, but in the majority of states they must be closed through legislative action in the coming months in order to meet balanced-budget requirements. Extremely large shortfalls addressed in recent years have led to deep cuts in critical public services like education, health care, and human services; the new shortfalls likely will prompt legislators to make further cuts in those areas on top of those already enacted.

And in which states have those public sector cuts been the worst?  You guessed it - in Republican Controlled States.

    The 11 states that the Republicans took over in 2010 laid off, on average, 2.5 percent of their government workforces in a single year. This is compared to the overall average of 0.5 percent for the rest of the states. [...] [T]hese 11 states as a whole account for a total of 87,000 jobs lost, reflecting around 40.5 percent of the total.

    ...

    Texas and the 11 newly-Republican states accounted for a total of 71.5 percent of the year’s public sector job losses, even though they account for less than one-third of the nation’s public sector workers.

    ...

    Many government job losses were due, indeed, to the recession’s impact on state budgets. But in many of the newly-Republican states, the GOP made the problems worse. In Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Maine, Republican-controlled legislators not only cut public sector jobs, they led assaults on public sector unions, targeting government workers under the guise of balancing their budgets. In those and others, Republicans exacerbated their states’ deficits with tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, thus leading to even more public sector layoffs that didn’t take place in states that didn’t pursue similar policies.

In several states the attack on public sector jobs has exempted police and firefighters, which leaves teachers and nurses unions to take the majority of the brunt simply so that GOP could give their corporate and Wall Street buddies Bigger Tax Breaks.

The bottom line is that President Obama attempted to stop these types of job losses by extending his emergency stimulus funding to the states.  Guess who stood in the way of that?  I'll let Jeff Hayes of the Institute for Women's Policy Research say it via Politifact:

    "If you break out the 683,000 jobs women lost between January 2009 and March 2012, 64 percent were in government and only 36 percent in the private sector."

    That leads us to a point made by Eileen Appelbaum with the left-leaning Center on Economic and Policy Research. She noted that after the first wave of money in the president’s stimulus bill had run out, Obama asked for another $23 billion in "emergency aid" for state and local governments. The money was sought to avert the layoffs of as many as 300,000 public school teachers, but House Republican leaders stripped it.

    "You could hardly blame Obama for that," Appelbaum said.

There you have it, we now see who killed all those jobs for women.  It wasn't President Obama.  It wasn't Col. Mustard in the Kitchen with a candlestick.

It was the G.O.P., in the Legislature, with a Tax Cut.

Lots of charts at the link. Conservatives cannot have it both ways - cutting jobs that disproportionately affect women and older workers, then turn around and claim someone else is to blame. When a political movement is constantly contradicting itself, telling the public long convoluted stories that bury the truth in bullsh*t, that political movement never has the best interests of the people at heart.

Ann Romney's and the Conservative Republican war on women has an actual body count.