Anti-Obama group raising money off events related to Colorado shooting

The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama released a fundraising letter late Friday afternoon requesting donations over an early report on ABC News that suggested a member of a Colorado tea party group may have been the shooter. The on-air report, delivered by ABC News chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross on "Good Morning America," was inaccurate, and Ross issued an apology and a correction later that day.

The fundraising letter, which was written on behalf of Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz, asked for money to "fight back" against the media.

"We can't let the media get away with their attempts to smear the tea party," the unsigned letter read,
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Wisconsin Lawmaker to Spousal Abuse Victims: If You Are Being Beaten, Just Remember the Things You Love About Your Husband

Don Pridemore (R) Wisconsin

If you need any further proof that we are in the midst of a full-on patriarchal biblical-religious war on women, a Wisconsin lawmaker is happy to provide it.

According to Yahoo News, Wisconsin Rep. Don Pridemore helpfully suggests that, rather than divorcing an abusive spouse, you should try to remember the things you love about the guy while he is beating you up.

In Wisconsin -- yes, the same state where lawmakers have introduced a bill penalizing single mothers for being unmarried -- a Republican state representative has come out against divorce for any reason -- even domestic abuse. 

Instead of leaving an abusive situation, women should try to remember the things they love about their husbands, Representative Don Pridemore said. "If they can re-find those reasons and get back to why they got married in the first place it might help," he told a local news station.   READ MORE

The Wisconsin Story: Scott Walker's Unprecedented Assault on Unions and Democracy And the June 5th Recall Vote

Wisconsin's populist rebellion came after state GOP leaders attacked workers' rights and dignity.

March 23, 2012

“The folks that were angry about this started a recall....Not hundreds, not thousands, but tens of thousands of ordinary people did an extraordinary thing. They stood up and took their government back.” -- Gov. Scott Walker, discussing the 2002 recalls that led to his election as Milwaukee County Executive. 

Those words, uttered by Wisconsin Republican Gov. Walker in an ad during his 2010 gubernatorial campaign, are strikingly relevant today. 

In a 60-day period during a cold Wisconsin winter, state residents collected nearly one million signatures for Walker’s recall, with an election date now scheduled for June 5. That election, which will likely be very close and will almost certainly break new records for spending in the state, will end this stage of a year-and-a-half-long battle over Walker’s divisive reforms, including his controversial attack on public employee unions.    READ MORE

How the GOP Might Try to Steal the 2012 Election

TEN YEARS LATER

Democrats had better hope that the coming elections are not too close because the GOP is honing its vote stealing skills in its own primaries:

GOP state party snafus all have benefited Romney:

As we wrote yesterday, the Michigan Republican Party voted Wednesday night to award its two at-large delegates to the statewide winner instead of dividing up proportionally, as we (and even the Michigan GOP chairman at one time) had assumed. That move gave Romney a 16-14 delegate edge in the state instead of a 15-15 tie, and it has produced a firestorm of controversy. What’s more, it’s the latest GOP state party snafu this primary season that’s benefited Romney.

Consider: The Iowa Republican Party originally declared Romney the winner there (and even once the vote count had changed, it was hesitant to declare Santorum the new winner). In addition, the Maine GOP badly mishandled its caucuses (one county wasn’t counted due to snow, other results got lost in a spam folder), and Romney narrowly won that contest. And now you have the delegate drama in Michigan, which now allows Romney to claim a win there in both the popular vote and delegate count.

It's important to remember that they have two main methods of stealing elections. The first is vote suppression, in which they make it difficult for their opponents to cast votes. This is nothing new historically and it's not been confined to one party. But the modern Republicans have put their very special stamp on the practice by using reverse psychology and whining about non-existent voter fraud to claim they have been the victims of the terrible ACORN conspiracy to cancel out their decent Real American vote. (This was one of the bogus arguments used inBush vs Gore, which serves as a sort of template for their various legal arguments.)

But there's always been a second piece to the puzzle and that is the local and state GOP institutions responsible for counting votes and interpreting the voting laws being trained to use that power for partisan purpose.   READ MORE

Fox News Shamelessly Smears Group That Exposed Network's Sordid History

Media Matters' new book has been met by shameless propaganda by Fox news.

February 23, 2012

A new book from Media Matters is being released this week that chronicles the history of Fox News, explaining how a small group of wealthy, politically connected partisans conspired to build a pseudo-news network with the intent of advancing the right-wing agenda of the Republican Party.

The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine, was written by David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt (and others) of Media Matters. It begins by looking back at the early career of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes and his role as a media consultant for Republican politicians, including former president Richard Nixon. From the start, Ailes was a brash, creative proponent of the power of television to influence a mass audience. He guided the media-challenged Nixon through a treacherous new era of news and political PR, and his experiences formed the basis for what would become his life’s grand achievement: a “news” network devoted to a political party, its candidates, and its platform.

When Ailes partnered with international newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch to launch a new 24-hour cable news channel, he was given an unprecedented measure of control to shape the network’s business and ideology. The Fox Effect examines the underpinnings of the philosophy that Ailes brought to the venture. His earliest observations exhibit an appreciation for the tabloid-style sensationalism that would become a hallmark of Fox’s reporting. Ailes summed it up in an interview in 1988 as something he called his “orchestra pit theory” of politics:

“If you have two guys on stage and one guy says ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls into the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”

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The Republican Brain: Why Even Educated Conservatives Deny Science -- and Reality

Case in point Santorum

New research shows that conservatives who consider themselves well-informed and educated are also deeper in denial about issues like global warming.

February 22, 2012

This essay is adapted from Chris Mooney’s forthcoming book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality, due out in April from Wiley.

I can still remember when I first realized how naïve I was in thinking—hoping—that laying out the “facts” would suffice to change politicized minds, and especially Republican ones. It was a typically wonkish, liberal revelation: One based on statistics and data. Only this time, the data were showing, rather awkwardly, that people ignore data and evidence—and often, knowledge and education only make the problem worse.

Someone had sent me a 2008 Pew report documenting the intense partisan divide in the U.S. over the reality of global warming.^. It’s a divide that, maddeningly for scientists, has shown a paradoxical tendency to widen even as the basic facts about global warming have become more firmly established.

Those facts are these: Humans, since the industrial revolution, have been burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to as the “radiative” properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation that would otherwise escape to space), to have a warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming is taking place, but have also grown confident that it has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural fluctuations, although they exist, can’t explain what we’re seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and their smokestacks.

Colbert Announces His 'Serious, Classy Republican Debate' This January

By Tina Dupuy All I want for Christmas...

Wealthy Republican Congressman Apparently Pays Workers Less than $11,400 Per Year

Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) owns a number of small businesses—according to the clip, Subway and UPS outlets, so franchises of national corporations—and he's objecting to President Obama's proposal to tax the wealthy a little more for deficit reduction, because it might hit non-rich people like him and then they'd create fewer jobs.

As Think Progress describes the scene:

Fleming is himself a businesses owner, so Jansing asked, “If you have to pay more in taxes, you would get rid of some of those employees?” Fleming responded by saying that while his businesses made $6.3 million last year, after you “pay 500 employees, you pay rent, you pay equipment, and food,” his profits “a mere fraction of that” — “by the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over.” READ MORE

Before you go to a Government Gone Wild seminar, know speaker's history

By Dan DeWitt, Times Columnist
In Print: Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Maybe, you Pasco County residents have seen the ads in your subdivision newsletter. Maybe on the Internet.

And maybe, if you don't trust national politicians and you're easily swayed by exclamation marks and capital letters, they might sound like something you need to see, these seminars, these bold, new exposes of waste and dishonesty that go by the name of Government Gone Wild — excuse me, GOVERNMENT GONE WILD! — and that promise to tell you "what the federal government does not want you to know!!''

Because "ADMISSION IS FREE'' and they are scheduled in Pasco for "ONLY 3 NIGHTS!!'' you better "RESERVE NOW!!''

None of this is new to Hernando County, home of GOVERNMENT GONE WILD! star Blaise Ingoglia, who is identified on the governmentgonewild.org website as a motivational speaker, which is one of several titles by which he goes. Professional poker player is another. So is chairman of the Hernando County Republican Executive Committee, which casts doubt on the claim that these seminars, the first of them scheduled for Thursday night at the Word of Life Auditorium in Hudson, really are "NON-PARTISAN.''
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"Still, this is my advice to our neighbors to the south who might be thinking of going to one of Ingoglia's productions: STEER CLEAR!!!''"