The GOP's Lost Year In the Fox News Bubble

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America

31 December 12

uffering an election hangover after having been told by Fox News that Mitt Romney's victory was a sure thing (a "landslide" predicted by Dick Morris), some Republicans have promised to break their addiction to the right-wing news channel in the coming year. Vowing to venture beyond the comforts of the Fox News bubble, strategists insist it's crucial that the party address its "choir-preaching problem."

Good luck.

This grand experiment of marrying a political movement around a cable TV channel was a grand failure in 2012. But there's little indication that enough Republicans will have the courage, or even the desire, to break free from Fox's firm grip on branding the party.

For Fox News chief Roger Ailes, the network's slash-and-burn formula worked wonders in terms of catering a hardcore, hard-right audience of several million viewers. (Fox News is poised to post $1 billion in profits this year.) But in terms of supporting a national campaign and hosting a nationwide conversation about the country's future, Fox's work this year was a marked failure.

And that failure helped sink any hopes the GOP had of winning the White House.

From the farcical, underwhelming GOP primary that Fox News sponsored, through the general election campaign, it seemed that at every juncture where Romney suffered a major misstep, Fox misinformation hovered nearby. Again and again, Romney damaged his presidential hopes when he embraced the Fox News rhetoric; when he ran as the Fox News Candidate.    READ MORE

Mitt Romney's Long, Troubled History With the NAACP

"Corporations Are People My Friends"

The GOP presidential candidate spoke to the nation's oldest civil rights organization on Wednesday. Here's what you need to know about their relationship.

—By Adam Serwer

| Wed Jul. 11, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

 

UPDATE: Romney was booed during his speech as he promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

 

Mitt Romney deserves a bit of credit for his decision to address the NAACP on Wednesday, given that he's running against Barack Obama, the most visible symbol of the NAACP's success. Conservatives generally view the group as a excessively partisan. But given Romney's antagonistic relationship with the local NAACP chapter when he was governor of Massachusetts, he may receive a particularly unpleasant reception.
Leonard Alkins, the former head of the Boston NAACP, has few fond memories of Romney's tenure. "There was no relationship between the NAACP in Boston and Gov. Mitt Romney and his administration," Alkins says. "The only time that the NAACP had any interaction with the administration and the governor was to protest when he eliminated the affirmative action office."

In one of his early acts as governor, Romney dumped the state's office of affirmative action and replaced it with the office of diversity and equal opportunity. In doing so, he invalidated a half-dozen executive orders establishing affirmative action policies for women, minorities, veterans, and people with disabilities; diversity training programs; and equal-opportunity standards for state contractors. Romney's executive order replaced all of this with what was essentially a broad—and, Alkins says, "toothless"—commitment to "diversity."  READ MORE
 

Pants on Fire Romney

(CC-BY-SA)

Posted on May 29, 2012

By Eugene Robinson

There are those who tell the truth. There are those who distort the truth. And then there’s Mitt Romney.

Every political campaign exaggerates and dissembles. This practice may not be admirable—it’s surely one reason so many Americans are disenchanted with politics—but it’s something we’ve all come to expect. Candidates claim the right to make any boast or accusation as long as there’s a kernel of veracity in there somewhere.

Even by this lax standard, Romney too often fails. Not to put too fine a point on it, he lies. Quite a bit.

“Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history,” Romney claims on his campaign website. This is utterly false. The truth is that spending has slowed markedly under Obama.

An analysis published last week by MarketWatch, a financial news website owned by Dow Jones & Co., compared the yearly growth of federal spending under presidents going back to Ronald Reagan. Citing figures from the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, MarketWatch concluded that “there has been no huge increase in spending under the current president, despite what you hear.”   READ MORE

 

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

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

Offensive Is Nothing New: Rush Limbaugh's 5 Worst Remarks

Limbaugh is losing advertisers fast after calling law student Sandra Fluke a "slut"--but bad behavior is nothing new for Rush. Here are five of his worst moments.

March 6, 2012

Has Rush Limbaugh finally gone too far?

Despite a notably insincere apology for calling Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” for the crime of using birth control pills, Limbaugh is shedding advertisers like mad. As of Monday evening, nine companies—including AOL, the parent company of the Huffington Post-- have stopped buying time on Limbaugh's radio show, and at least a couple say they have severed ties with the program permanently.

Even Republican presidential candidates have issued tepid condemnations of Limbaugh's rant. Mitt Romney, whose private equity firm Bain Capital is one of the owners of Clear Channel – which owns and broadcasts Premiere Radio Networks, the company that syndicates Limbaugh's show -- told reporters, “I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used,” before quickly changing the subject back to Tuesday's primaries. Democrats quickly pounced on Romney's wimpy repudiation, but none of them bothered to point out the presidential candidate's profit motive in Rush's program.  READ MORE

Rep. Luis Gutierrez Gives Romney a Latinos 101 Lesson on House Floor

 U.S. House of Representative Luis V. Gutierrez of Illinois’ Fourth District in the heart of Chicago spoke on the floor of the House earlier this week about recent comments by GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Rep. Gutierrez said that the nation’s 50 million Latinos, most of whom are citizens and eligible voters, is a lot of people, “especially if you want to offend each and every one of us. But to Mitt Romney’s credit — he’s trying.”

By Jorge Rivas | Colorlines
Posted on Saturday, March 3, 2012 @ 10:08 AM 

 

Trusting the Candidates With Indefinite Detention

January 18, 2012
Posted by Amy Davidson

Can a person trust Mitt Romney, and with what? All sorts of people, from all ideological directions, have asked this, usually with regard to a specific position on an issue like abortion or gun ownership. It was in an attempt to establish his credibility on the latter issue that Romney, in the candidates’ debate in South Carolina on Monday night, tried to remember the animal that he’d recently taken a shot at—not a moose, he decided, but an elk. The question is maddening enough when the parameters are clear—when, for example, he and the other candidates say what the rate in the highest federal income tax bracket should be. (Romney: twenty-five per cent; Ron Paul: “zero per cent. What’s so bad about that?”) Trust, and its opposite, are also behind the calls for Romney to release his tax returns.

More broadly, do we trust Romney or any candidate with power?
  READ MORE
 

Romney: Entrepreneurs Should Just Ask Parents for Money

By David

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney suggested to a group of business people in Michigan on Thursday that entrepreneurs should ask their parents for money instead of using loans from the federal government.

In a speech to the Greater Farmington Area Chamber of Commerce, the former Massachusetts governor blasted the Obama administration for trying to jump start renewable energy with government loans to companies like Solyndra.

"When the president says I'm going to take your money and give it to Tesla and Fisker, two new car companies, which by the way, Fisker now builds their cars in Finland, that's not good," he explained. "When he takes $500 million and puts it into Solyndra, that's not good. That's not good for American enterprise and innovation."  READ MORE

 

US elections: no matter who you vote for, money always wins

Mitt Romney's personal wealth is double that of the
last eight US presidents combined.
Photograph: TJ Kirkpatrick/Corbis

Dollars play a decisive role in US politics. And more so since the supreme court allowed unlimited campaign contributions
 Gary Youngeguardian.co.uk,
Sunday 29 January 2012 15.30 EST


Republican presidential debates are not for the faint-hearted. Last week in Jacksonville, Florida, Rick Santorum warned of the "threat of radical Islam growing" in Central and South America. Newt Gingrich advocated sending up to seven flights a day to the moon, where private industry might set up a colony, and reaffirmed his claim that Palestinians were invented in the late 70s. Mitt Romney argued that if you make things tough enough for undocumented people, they will "self-deport".

Given the general state of the Republican party, such comments now attract precious little attention. Truth and facts are but two options among many. The party's base, overrun by birthers, climate change deniers and creationists, floats its warped theories and every now and then one makes it to the top and bobs out into the airwaves.

So the oft-touted notion that these debates have been responsible for shifting the trajectory of this primary race would be worrying if it were true. It is difficult to think of anywhere else in the western world where these debates would have any credibility outside of a fringe party (even if the fringes in Europe are now spreading). Far from indicating America's exceptionalism, it looks more like an awful parody of the stereotypes most outsiders already believed about American politics at its most bizarre. "Those who follow this race daily may have long since lost perspective on how absurd it is," said the German magazine Der Spiegel last week. "Each candidate loves Israel. They all love Ronald Reagan. Each loves his wife, a born first lady, for a number of reasons."

The good news is, with the exception of Perry's demise, the debates have not been pivotal. The bad news is that the truly decisive element has been something even more insidious: money. Lots of it.
READ MORE

Rhetoric aside, since when do businesses care about job creation?

Romney in September, in a speech
detailing a 59-point job creation proposal.
(AP photo)

COMMENTARY | January 11, 2012

 Henry Banta points out that corporate leaders’ goal is to make a profit, and that ‘any sane businessman wants to employ as few people as he can.’ If jobs get in the way of profits, the jobs go – as Mitt Romney well knows.



By Henry Banta
henrybanta@aol.com

We’ve been hearing a lot from Governor Romney about how his experience as a businessman makes him an expert on job creation. While there has been some challenge to his claim of actually having created jobs, the basic notion that business experience gives a special insight into the creation of jobs deserves a lot more attention from the press than it has gotten. In particular, how do the policies promoted by the business community actually relate to the creation of jobs?

Start with a simple fact: The role of businessmen in our economy is not job creation. Businesses and their leaders are not rewarded for the number of people they employ. They are in business to make a profit. They have no incentive to create jobs per se. Capitalist markets reward profit, not employment. Indeed any sane businessman wants to employ as few people as he can. If jobs get in the way of profits, jobs go. (This is one aspect of the matter that Romney should remember well.)  READ MORE

Henry M. Banta is a partner in the Washington, DC, law firm of Lobel, Novins & Lamont.
E-mail: henrybanta@aol.com

The Grotesque Corporate Monstrosity Unleashed By Citizens United

Citizens United invites the worst corruption our democracy has witnessed since the Gilded Age. Mitt Romney is one of its biggest beneficiaries.

January 5, 2012

If Mitt Romney becomes president I’m to blame. Ten years ago I ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts — which would have given me the opportunity to whip Mitt Romney’s ass in the general election.

I blew it. In the final week of the primary I was neck and neck with the state treasurer, but then my money ran out, which meant my TV ads stopped. Declining the suggestion of my campaign manager to take out a second mortgage on my home, I frantically phoned anyone I could find who hadn’t yet contributed $500, the maximum state law allowed. I didn’t raise beans. In the end, the treasurer won the primary, Romney won the general election and became governor, and I went back to being a professor.

But my fantasy of beating Romney may be nothing more than a fantasy because Romney had — and still has — something I never did, and I’m not referring to his gleaming white teeth, carefully-coiffed hairline, or height. He has money, and he has connections to much more money.

Mitt Romney was and is the candidate of big money.  READ MORE

Mitt Romney: "Corporations Are People, My Friend"

Well, he's toast!