John Boehner tries to school Obama on leadership. Fails. Miserably.

John Boehner has been a notoriously weak and ineffective speaker, struggling to get the Republican votes he needs on major legislation and facing an unprecedented number of his own members voting against him for speaker this year. Under the circumstances, you'd think he and his people would just try to stay away from questions of leadership, but instead, on Wednesday Boehner's blog featured a piece attempting to show how much President Obama sucks by comparing him to the leadership of John Boehner. According to Boehner's blog, Obama was "going to Cleveland to try and start a partisan political brawl."

(In reality: to announce investments in manufacturing and talk about the economy.) READ MORE

Obama Taps Hollywood to Help End Mental Health Stigma

Actress Glenn Close attends the White House Mental
Health Conference in the East Room of the White House
June 3, 2013 in Washington, DC

June 4, 2013 by EURpublisher02 

*President Obama turned to Hollywood for help in raising awareness of mental illness, beginning with a White House summit on Monday with Vice President Joe Biden, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. They were joined by two entertainment industry stalwarts with personal connections to mental health issues: actress Glenn Close and actor Bradley Cooper.

Close, who co-founded the nonprofit awareness group Bring Change 2 Mind, has said she first became aware of mental health problems when she starred in “Fatal Attraction” in 1987. Her sister Jessie grew up with severe bouts of depression and tried to commit suicide several times before being diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. Her nephew Calen has also been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. She’s also the narrator of a PBS documentary that started airing last week in California, “A New State of Mind: Ending the Stigma of Mental Illness.”  READ MORE
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[Why not,  right?  I mean,  were no longer medieval ignorant savages,  so what's the problem?
Brains are organs too,  as we know and organs can suffer damage.  Or are we still thinking the
problem is demons from hell?  Something contagious we might catch?  Or any other tomfoolishness
some shaman wants to peddle.  Then let's get on with the search for a cure.

The Sequester-The Ultimate Betrayal Of The GOP Base

 (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

By all historic accounts, the actual idea for the sequester—the massive front-loaded cuts to the federal budget designed to rip a hole in spending programs near and dear to both Republicans and Democrats—originated in the Obama White House.

By creating a mechanism that would result in huge cuts to a defense budget that has long been sacrosanct to modern day Republicans, along with equally large cuts to the entitlements that Democrats feel duty bound to protect, the Obama Administration believed that it had created a tool that would force a negotiated solution in the effort to get a grip on our debt situation through the balancing of spending cuts with revenue increases.

As a weapon to drive compromise—a concept that has become a four letter word in today’s extreme environment— the sequester wasn’t such a bad idea. Surely, any rational legislator in Congress would understand that reaching a negotiated deal was far preferable to the unacceptably painful results of allowing the sequester to take hold.
Or would they?  READ MORE

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Who Just Made a Billion Dollars?

Our Real-Time Billionaires scoreboard tracks the biggest holdings for 50 of the world’s wealthiest people. See who's up & who's down right now »

 

 

 

Romney 'gifts' comment not a new idea on the right

Mitt Romney likely sees benefits for regular folk as
"gifts," but tax breaks for those like him and wife Ann
aren't, the writer says

By Paul Waldman, Special to CNN

updated 2:38 PM EST, Thu November 15, 2012

 

Editor's note: Paul Waldman is a contributing editor at The American Prospect and the author of "Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success." Follow him on his blog and on Twitter.

(CNN) -- It took until the presidential campaign was over, but Mitt Romney finally figured out the sinister plan Barack Obama executed to win re-election. Here's how it worked: During his first term, Obama craftily carried out policies that helped improve Americans' lives, thereby tricking them into voting to re-elect him. Diabolical!

OK, that wasn't exactly how he put it. But in a conference call with his major donors after the campaign ended, Romney attributed his loss to the fact that Obama gave "gifts" to various groups to win their loyalty. Young people, women, Latinos, African-Americans, all voted for Obama because he showered them with presents, he concluded.

"With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift," Romney said. "Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents' plan, and that was a big gift to young people."

  READ MORE

 

How Mitt Romney Cynically Exploits White Tribalism and Resentment

Romney offers an easy-to-grasp explanation that speaks to white anxiety about the future.

October 16, 2012

SIDNEY, OHIO—At the Shelby county fairgrounds in Sidney, Ohio, on Oct. 10, a jumbotron showed a bus approaching. Image became reality as Mitt Romney’s bulbous white chariot glided into the rally of thousands.

 It was an impressive entrance, for those who are impressed by RVs.
Bounding up to a podium, Romney was ready to proselytize. Thousands of faces turned toward him in the chilly evening air. Word was that Romney’s conquest of Obama in the first debate had infused his robotic demeanor with passion. It was hard to see much evidence of that.

To polite applause, Romney blandly declared, “That’s an Ohio welcome. Thank you guys.” He tried to rouse the audience with a counter to Obama campaign chants of “Four more years,” and the crowd hesitantly recited “Four more weeks,” their tone as flat as the surrounding farmland.

No matter. Romney dove into his stump speech. It was the gospel of lower taxes, freer trade, stronger military, and drill, baby, drill, and the audience was receptive. He hit all the buttons, “jobs,” “small business,” “compete,” and “opportunities.” Some specifics drew hearty cheers: “Get rid of the death tax,” “get that pipeline in from Canada,” and “our military must be second to none.”
The crowd responded favorably because the ideas are presented simply and clearly. People are hurting, and Romney says he’ll create more jobs and put more money in your pocket. His message is he won’t do it through welfare, like Obama, but by encouraging American values like entrepreneurialism, strength, and self-sufficiency.

Author Thomas Frank calls this brand of politics “Pity the Billionaire … a revival crusade preaching the old-time religion of the free market.”    READ MORE

Wall Street Abandons Obama, Democrats

Employees of financial-services companies have
given Democrats $20 million less than they have
given to Republicans during the current election
cycle. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

By Caitlin Dickson, The Daily Beast

19 August 12

In a reversal from 2008, employees of financial-services companies have given most of their $128 million and counting in 2012 political donations to groups and candidates on the right. Sorry, Obama.

n 2008 Wall Street loved Barack Obama. Four years later, even after billions in bailout money went to the banks under Obama's watch, the tide has turned - by about $20 million.

That's the difference between what securities and investment firms and their employees have given to Republican candidates, the GOP, and right-leaning political-action committees during the current election cycle ($56 million) and what they've given to Democrats ($35 million), according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Goldman Sachs and its workers, for instance, made more than $6 million in political contributions in 2008, according to the CRP, which based its research on data provided by the Federal Election Commission. Some 75 percent of that loot went to the Democratic Party or one of its candidates, and 25 percent went to Republicans. In the 2012 cycle, the firm or its employees have so far given nearly $5 million, with the majority (56 percent) going to the GOP.

One reason for the shift, according to the CRP, might be that people in finance tend to donate to the party that controls Congress and therefore the finance committees. In 2008 that was the Democrats. Today it's the Republicans.  READ MORE

Mitt Romney, Un-American

Mitt Romney speaks at a campaign rally in Bowling
Green, Ohio, 07/18/12. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)

By Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast

21 July 12

Republicans have questioned the patriotism of Democrats for nearly a hundred years. But now, at long last, Barack Obama is turning the tables on the GOP.

ohn Sununu opened the "American" door the other day, and now the Romney campaign is barging through it, plotting attacks on Barack Obama's "biography," which will inevitably include veiled accusations about his alleged alien cast, his lack of American-ness. So now that it's open, let's stroll through it ourselves. What's taking place in the room on the other side of that door? Republicans and conservatives are bouncing off the walls because they face a serious risk for the first time in a generation that their definitions of patriotism and Americanism are losing. And not just losing - losing to, of all people, Barack Hussein Obama!

The Republican credo that theirs is the party of patriotism goes back a long, long way, at least to the 1920s. The Democrats then as now represented society's so-called rabble - immigrants, wets, cosmopolites of that gin-soaked decade when the urban population for the first time overtook the rural. Over time, Democrats added blacks, new immigrants, liberated women, gays. The Democrats have been the party of the Other. Impugning their patriotism to the target audience is so easy it can hardly even be called work. In doing so, of course, Republicans tied the concept strongly to their, um, values: the all-conquering free market, mostly; a good war now and then; the occasional (actually, more or less constant, now that I think about it) campaign against subversives real and imagined (the vast majority). Thus have things ever been.

You will find, as you scan our modern electoral history, say since 1968, that the Republican candidate has laid some Americanism-related charge at the Democrat nearly every time, but that the reverse has never occurred. Richard Nixon sent Spiro Agnew out to accuse Hubert Humphrey of being soft on communism and compare him to Neville Chamberlain, even while Nixon was committing treason by submarining the Paris peace talks. Democrats can't, and don't, peddle this merchandise, because it's pointless: they know it won't stick to the party that has owned the issue for decades.

  READ MORE

Actions Speak Louder Than Words: How the Obama Administration Has Worked Behind the Scenes to Advance Marriage Equality

Photo Credit: ShutterStock.com

Ultimately, it's the courts that will ultimately make marriage equality the law of the land in all 50 states.

May 18, 2012

The Obama administration has a pretty good record on LGBT issues, but it has also had a sometimes contentious relationship with gay rights activists.

Even in the wake of Obama's “evolution” on marriage last week, some critics seized on his statement that the states should decide whether to offer gay and lesbian Americans equal treatment under the law.

Yet it is only the courts – not the executive or legislative branches – that can require the states to honor same-sex marriages. And actions speak louder than words.

This week, Chris Geidner, senior political editor for the LGBT magazine Metro Weekly, appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour to highlight where the administration has missed opportunities to advance gay civil rights, and to explain how the administration has been working to advance marriage equality nationwide in the courts – out of the glare of the political press. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the interview (you can listen to the whole show here).   READ MORE

Why the GOP's Really Afraid of a "Cool" Obama

Lately Obama has been raising the ante, asking which candidate would you like to share a song with, and the GOP considers this to be some kind of dirty trick.

May 1, 2012

Republicans used to exult in fielding candidates that voters would like “to have a beer with.” This year, of course, their candidate doesn’t drink beer—in fact, Mitt Romney’s so socially challenged that his advance team is wary about letting him share cookies with voters. But lately Obama has been raising the ante on social comfort, asking which candidate would you like to share a song or nod to a pulsing beat with, and the GOP clearly considers this to be some kind of dirty trick.

And so in the two days since Obama and Jimmy Fallon “slow-jammed the news” on Fallon’s late-night show (specially taped at the University of North Carolina to underline the Democratic campaign to keep student loan interest rates from doubling), the Republicans have put out two web ads. Each tries to turn Obama’s strength into a weakness, insisting that the “Preezy” is too busy being cool to be presidential:

  READ MORE

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That Bin Laden Quote Makes Romney Look Even Worse Than You Think

In a new ad, the Obama campaign is asserting that   Mitt Romney wouldn't have gone after Osama bin Laden:

President Obama's campaign is ... argu[ing that] Mitt Romney would not have launched the raid to capture Osama bin Laden last year....

The campaign suggests Romney would not have ordered the raid by pointing to a 2007 interview with The Associated Press in which Romney said: "It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person."

President Obama's campaign is ... argu[ing that] Mitt Romney would not have launched the raid to capture Osama bin Laden last year....

The campaign suggests Romney would not have ordered the raid by pointing to a 2007 interview with The Associated Press in which Romney said: "It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person."

That quote tells us that Romney was endorsing the George W. Bush approach to bin Laden ("I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you"). And that's the problem: Not only does Romney's statement suggest that bin Laden would be alive if Romney were president, it suggests that Romney will meekly go along with GOP orthodoxy at all times.  READ MORE

The Real Scandals of Obama's Latin America Summit

A US-trained 'jungle commando' disembarks from a
Blackhawk helicopter, while a crop-spraying plane
flies past, during an anti-drug operation in an illegal
coca plantation, in 2000, under the US-backed,
billion-dollar Plan Colombia.
(photo: Reuters/Eliana Aponte

By Amy Goodman, Guardian UK

21 April 12

resident Barack Obama's re-election campaign launched its first Spanish-language ads this week, just after returning from the Summit of the Americas. He spent three days in Colombia, longer than any president in US history. The trip was marred, however, by a prostitution scandal involving the US military and secret service. General Martin Dempsey, chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, said:

"We let the boss down, because nobody's talking about what went on in Colombia other than this incident."

Dempsey is right. It also served as a metaphor for the US government's ongoing treatment of Latin America.

The scandal reportedly involves 11 members of the US secret service and five members of the US Army special forces, who allegedly met prostitutes at one or more bars in Cartagena and took up to 20 of the women back to their hotel, some of whom may have been minors. This all deserves thorough investigation, but so do the policy positions that Obama promoted while in Cartagena.

First, the war on drugs. Obama stated at the summit: READ MORE

Heads of State Considering Alternatives to the Drug War

Obama's heading to Colombia for a summit with Latin American leaders--and for the first time, alternatives to drug prohibition are on the agenda.

April 12, 2012

In just a couple of days, President Obama will fly to Cartagena, Colombia, to attend this weekend's Organization of American States (OAS) Sixth Summit of the Americas. He and the US delegation are going to get an earful of criticism of US drug policies from Latin American leaders, and that makes it an historic occasion. For the first time, alternatives to drug prohibition are going to be on the agenda at a gathering of hemispheric heads of state.

It's been building for some time now. More than a decade ago, Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle became the first Latin American sitting head of state to call for a discussion of drug legalization. Former Mexican President Vicente Fox joined the call, albeit only briefly while still in office through some media quotes, much more frequently after leaving office in 2006. Honduran President Manuel Zelaya issued a similar call in 2008, but didn't move on it before being overthrown in a coup the following year.

Meanwhile, drug prohibition-related violence in Mexico exploded in the years since President Felipe Calderon called out the army after taking office in December 2006. As the savagery of the multi-sided Mexican drug wars intensified and the death toll accelerated, surpassing 50,000 by the end of last year, the call for another path grew ever louder and more insistent.  READ MORE

Fox Spreads Romney's Dubious Talking Point On Women's Job Losses

April 12, 2012 6:07 pm ET 

 

Fox is reinforcing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's attacks on the Obama administration by parroting his misleading claim that since President Obama took office, "92.3 percent of the job losses ... has been women who've lost those jobs." In fact, this indicator is meaningless in understanding how Obama's policies have impacted working women as it ignores several important factors, including when the recession began and the fact that more women are in the workforce today than in January 2008.

Mitt Romney: "The Real War On Women Has Been Waged By The Obama Administration"

Mitt Romney Made Dubious Women Jobs-Loss Claim To Attack Obama Over Economy. CNSNews.com reported:
   READ MORE

Building a 'Mature' Democracy in Afghanistan

Presidents Hamid Karzai and Barack Obama at the
White House. (photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com

09 March 12

ow primitive the Afghans are!  A New York Times account of faltering negotiations over a possible “strategic partnership” agreement to leave U.S. troops on bases in that country for years to come highlights just how far the Afghans have to go to become, like their U.S. mentor, a mature democracy.  Take the dispute over prisons.  Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been insisting that the U.S. turn over its prison facility at Bagram Air Base to his government.  (The recently burned Korans came from that prison's library.)  The Obama administration initially refused and now has suggested a six-month timetable for such a turnover, an option Karzai has, in turn, rejected.  No one, by the way, seems yet to be negotiating about a second $36-million prison at Bagram that, TomDispatch recently reported, the U.S. is now in the process of building.

The Times' Alissa Rubin suggests, however, that a major stumbling block remains to any such turnover.  She writes: “The challenges to a transfer are enormous, presenting serious security risks both for the Afghan government and American troops. Many of the estimated 3,200 people being detained [in Bagram's prison] cannot be tried under Afghan law because the evidence does not meet the legal standards required to be admitted in Afghan courts. Therefore, those people, including some suspected insurgents believed likely to return to the fight if released, would probably have to be released because Afghanistan has no law that allows for indefinite detention for national security reasons.”

Honestly, what kind of a backward country doesn't have a provision for the indefinite detention, on suspicion alone, of prisoners without charges or hope of trial?  As a mature democracy, we now stand proudly for global indefinite detention, not to speak of the democratic right to send robot assassins to take out those suspected of evil deeds anywhere on Earth.  As in any mature democracy, the White House has now taken on many of the traits of a legal system -- filling, that is, the roles of prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner.  READ MORE

Bill Maher | Republican Debate Review

Bill Maher, Reader Supported News

26 February 12

he Republicans sure have the right symbol with the elephant. Republican debates are nothing but elephants in the room.

The biggest of which must be: to someone out there who's hurting, they spend the whole two hours yammering away about earmarks and illegal immigrants and contraception and every other peripheral, wish-I-had-the-time-to-worry-about-it issue they can think of.

Then there is the elephant of how they all - with the sometime exception of Ron Paul - nod along to insane statements just because they don't want to ever look like they're to the left of anybody, on anything, especially the evilness of Barack Obama. So Wednesday night when Newt said the president of the United States had a history of practicing infanticide... yep, yep, yessir, that's what he does all right. Clubs infants like baby seals in his spare time. Ike played golf, Kennedy liked boating...

Ron Paul said foreign aid just helps our enemies. Which, I believe, would make Israel and Egypt our two biggest enemies. Yup, yup, hate foreign aid. A meaningless percentage of the budget, btw.

Newt said where government becomes the central provider of services, it's a move towards tyranny - yeah, except in all the countries where it isn't, like all of Scandanavia and much of Europe. Today a barium enema paid for by medicare, tomorrow Poland.  READ MORE

Obama Birth Certificate Maybe Forged, Sheriff Joe Arpaio Says

By BEN FORER

March 1, 2012

Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., said today that he and his investigators have evidence that President Obama's birth certificate is a forgery. He also raised questions about the authenticity of Obama's selective service registration, though critics quickly accused him of pandering for votes.

"We believe probable cause exists indicating that forgery and fraud may have been committed, not only in President Obama's long-form birth certificate, but more disturbing evidence suggests that another fraud may have been committed regarding his selected service registration card," Arpaio, 79, said at a press conference. "Based on all of the evidence presented and investigated I cannot in good faith report to you that these documents are authentic."

The findings come after a six month investigation by Arpaio's Cold Case Posse, a group of volunteers, many of whom have backgrounds in law enforcement.  READ MORE

Why the GOP Is Trying to Pin High Gas Prices on Obama (and Gullible Americans Are Falling for It)

The Republicans are hoping to blame this rise in the price of gas on Obama's environmentally friendly policies. But here are two major problems with their story.

February 27, 2012

President Obama seems to be enjoying some good luck in that the economy appears to be picking up just in time for his re-election campaign. While the economy is still weak by almost any measure, growth is likely to be in the 2.5-3.0 percent range for 2012. This should lead to the creation of close to two million jobs and a modest drop in the unemployment rate.

That is not much to cheer about in an economy that is still down close to ten million jobs from its trend level, however compared to the recent past, this is good news. And research shows that voters tend to focus primarily on the direction of change. This means that if the unemployment rate is falling and the economy is creating jobs at a respectable pace throughout the year, President Obama stands a very good chance of being re-elected in November.

This explains the decision of the Republican Party to focus on the price of gas. The price of gas has long played a pivotal role in US politics. High gas prices will be forever a symbol of the economic malaise of the Carter presidency in the late '70s. The drop in gas prices under President Reagan was associated with a resurgence of America's political and economic power.

The fact that both the rise in the price of oil in the '70s and the subsequent decline in the '80s had little to do with domestic policy decisions and much more with international politics (e.g. the Iranian revolution in 1979) mattered little. President Carter got the blame for events beyond his control and President Reagan got the credit.

The Republicans are hoping to benefit from this pattern again in the fall election.   READ MORE

Kamala Harris Has Key Role in Mortgage Settlement

California Attorney General Kamala Harris.
(photo: Ali Thanawalla/SFGate)

By Andrew S. Ross, San Francisco Chronicle

12 February 12

here were two people without whom the $26 billion mortgage settlement would not have been done. One is the attorney general of California. The other is the president of Wells Fargo's home mortgage division.

Four months ago, Attorney General Kamala Harris walked away from a proposed settlement that the banks, the Obama administration and other state attorneys general thought was in the bag, for two reasons: The money wasn't enough, and immunizing the banks from further legal liability wasn't acceptable.

Because California, the most populous state in the nation, was also far and away the worst hit by the mortgage meltdown, Harris' signature, on terms closer to what she demanded, was essential for any deal to stand up.

"It was a tough, 13-month-long strategy," said a source in Harris' office. "In the last 10 days, it's been 24/7, round-the-clock negotiations."

California's $18 billion share of a pot that could reach $45 billion, depending on negotiations with other banks, is considerably more than the $4 billion originally on the table, especially given that a central issue of the settlement , the robo-signing of foreclosure affidavits, doesn't apply to California because such documents are not used in foreclosure proceedings here. (The final amount of the settlement will be arrived at by a complicated formula.)

And then there's the law. Under a separate "California commitment" in the settlement, banks failing to enact agreed-upon principal reductions face heavy fines in state court. Other "enforceable guarantees" call on the five banks involved in the settlement - Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Ally Financial - to focus early in the agreement's three-year period on mortgage relief for the state's hardest-hit areas, like Stockton.

That, said Harris in a news conference on Thursday, is to avoid a repetition of Countrywide Financial's $8.7 billion national settlement. While half the money was supposed to go toward principal reductions for California homeowners, many of them never saw a dime. "Countrywide got relief based on a promise. We made sure we won't be in the same situation," she said.   READ MORE

Many Top Israeli Soldiers Wary of Bombing Iran

Israeli soldiers do not want to bomb Iran.
(photo: Landov/EPA)

By Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast

08 February 12

here’s nothing American Jews love more than Israeli soldiers, except perhaps, Israeli spies. Go to American synagogues - especially Orthodox synagogues - and you’ll find boys wearing green-and-yellow skullcaps bearing the Israel Defense Force’s Hebrew acronym. A central element of the Birthright Israel program, which aims to instill a love of Israel and Judaism in young American Jews, is their mifgash, or encounter - often R-rated - with Israeli soldiers. For my Bar Mitzvah, I was given a tome celebrating the exploits of Israel’s external and internal spy agencies, the Mossad and Shin Bet. My 6-year-old son recently came back from the library of his Jewish school carrying a volume entitled Keeping Israel Safe: Serving the Israel Defense Forces.

Since then, a throng of current and former security officials have issued similar warnings. In December, Dagan’s successor at Mossad, Tamir Pardo, suggested that an Iranian nuclear weapon was not an existential threat. This month, another former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, declared that “it is not in the power of Iran to destroy the state of Israel.” Former IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz added that “Iran poses a serious threat but not an existential threat” and that bombing would mean “taking upon ourselves a task that is bigger than us.” It’s remarkable, when you think about it. Almost every week, Israeli security officials say things about Iran’s nuclear program that, if Barack Obama said them, would get him labeled anti-Israel by American Jewish activists and the GOP.

The struggle between Israel’s civilian and military leaders eerily evokes the struggle inside the Bush administration over war with Iraq. Like Dick Cheney, Benjamin Netanyahu has only one mode: apocalyptic. His idols are Winston Churchill and Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, both men famed for having foreseen the Nazi menace when others looked away. And throughout his career, Netanyahu has plugged virtually every adversary Israel faces into the Hitler role. In 1993, when then–Foreign Minister Shimon Peres brokered the Oslo Accords, Netanyahu compared him with Neville Chamberlain.  READ MORE

Jon Stewart rips Republican fear-mongering over Obama: ‘You have lost your d*mn mind’

By Eric W. Dolan
Thursday, February 23, 2012 0:02 EST

On his show Wednesday night, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart lampooned Republican politicians who demonized President Barack Obama in 2008 as a radical socialist who was weak on terrorism.
He noted Obama had failed to live up to many of the campaign promises that his opponents made for him, like “completely socializing” the economy, letting radical Islamists dance in the streets, taking away Americans right to bear arms, and “eliminate freedom of speech” for radio show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

“That was all in 2008, there was a lot of fear-mongering and doom-saying, but by now we have pretty much seen Obama’s first term,” Stewart said. “It looks like conservatives got a little bit kicked in the crystal balls on this one.”    READ MORE

The Daily Show
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Part Two:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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