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| Unspeakable Evil |
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| Corrie Bond |
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| Wacko and Dangerous |
CBS News - (CBS News) WASHINGTON - Former GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and four other conservative members of Congress are charging that people with ties to Muslim extremists have infiltrated the federal government.
Sen. John McCain denounced the allegations Wednesday, calling them "sinister" and saying they "need to stop."
Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has been singled out.
The State Department has responded to the allegations with very harsh language, calling Bachmann's charges "vicious and disgusting lies."
Even Bachmann's own former presidential campaign chief, Ed Rollins, said she was being extreme and dishonest.
It's rare for a senator to publicly rebuke members of his own party. But that's just what Arizona's McCain did, saying on the Senate floor, "These attacks have no logic, no basis and no merit, and they need to stop," after the five House Republicans questioned whether Abedin has ties to terrorism.
"When anyone, not least a member of Congress, launches specious and degrading attacks against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they are and ignorance of what they stand for, it defames the spirit of our nation, and we all grow poorer because of it," McCain continued.
Bachmann, from Minnesota, and the four other representatives sent letters to top intelligence and security officials last week warning that the Muslim Brotherhood, a global religious Islamic movement whose members have been linked to terrorist groups in the past, may have infiltrated the top levels of U.S. government.
They pointed the finger first at Abedin, who is deputy chief of staff to Secretary Clinton and has been one of her closest aides for nearly two decades. Abedin, who was born in the U.S. and is of Pakistani descent, has been described by both Hillary and former President Bill Clinton as a daughter.
But Bachmann and the others wrote, "Huma Abedin has three family members -- her late father, her mother and her brother -- connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations."
Minnesota's Keith Ellison, the nation's first Muslim congressman, says, "Our country has gone through a McCarthy period. We cannot allow America to go back to another one." {Read More}
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| Ann Romney - trains with show horses as part of her therapy for multiple sclerosis |
ABC News - It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now the Democratic National Committee is offering an apology of sorts to Ann Romney.
At issue is a DNC video featuring footage of Ann Romney’s dancing show horse. The DNC used the horse in mocking way to attack Mitt Romney for not releasing his tax returns (and dancing around the issue).
The DNC introduced the video as the first in a series of videos featuring the horse, which is owned jointly by Ann and Mitt Romney.
Ann Romney, who trains with show horses as part of her therapy for multiple sclerosis, took offense in an interview with Robin Roberts on “Good Morning America,” and now the DNC is saying it will put out no more horse videos, and is expressing regret for offending Ann Romney.
“Our use of the Romneys’ dressage horse was not meant to offend Mrs. Romney in any way, and we regret it if it did,” DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse told ABC News. “We were simply making a point about Governor Romney’s failure to give straight answers on a variety of issues in this race. We have no plans to invoke the horse any further to avoid misinterpretation.” {Read More}
President Obama's reelection campaign accuses Mitt Romney of distorting the president's words, by showing a side by side comparison of the Obama's words and Romney's quotation of those words:
"Mitt Romney is launching a false attack," the ad's text states. But the weird thing is: The Obama campaign is purposefully trying to make it sound like Romney is misquoting the president, when the official White House transcript backs up Romney's quotation.
In the ad, Romney says that Obama revealed his thoughts on business when he said this, "If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen."
And, in fact, according to official White House transcript that's precisely what Obama said on July 13, 2012 in Roanoke, Virginia.
Nevertheless, the Obama campaign, in the ad, says it's not true. "The only problem?," the ad text reads. "That's not what he said." It then turns to Obama, from the same Roanoke campaign speech, who said, "If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life."
Which is true. Obama did say that. But he also said the line that Romney says he said-- "If you’ve got a business --you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen."
President Obama sure stirred up the hornet's nest last week when he told a small business group in Roanoke, Virginia:
'If you've got a business, you didn't build that!'
What would you think he was talking about if you had nothing other than those 9 words to read?
The statement came across to many as further evidence that the President is hostile to the private sector, profits and the whole free enterprise system.
That one single statement, coupled with his stated incessant desire over the past 3.6 years to 'raise taxes on the wealthy'; 'make them pay their 'fair share' (whatever that is...someone please give us an exact number or percentage of income that can truly be considered 'fair') and his propensity to regulate everything under the sun in America sure seems like 'proof' to any reasonable observer, doesn't it?
To be fair about it, here is the exact transcript of what he said in its entirety:
"There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me (one person exactly, Warren Buffett, our insert)-- because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.
You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. "If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.
If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. (We thought Al Gore invented the Internet- our insert again) Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires. "So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the G.I. Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam.
That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President -- because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together."
We can see where he 'said': 'If you have got a business, you didn't build that'. It is right there in the transcript for all the world to see.
Either President Obama's teleprompter went out-of-whack and he went off on a bad tangent ad-libbing or he has a very bad and probably now-fired speechwriter.
But to be entirely charitable, even though the fun thing to do would be to pile on in this political season, we will at least acknowledge that the President might have been referring to the fact that each individual business person did not build all the roads and bridges and the Internet on their own.
Which is sorta true. But not entirely. {Read More}
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| As We Have Come To Expect |
The Washington Examiner - President Obama has accused Mitt Romney of raking in profits from investing in companies that ship American jobs overseas, but according to his most recent financial disclosure, he and First Lady Michelle Obama have hundreds of thousands of dollars in a mutual fund that has large holdings in corporations that outsource jobs.
“(Romney) invested in companies that have been called ‘pioneers’ of outsourcing,” Obama said at a Saturday campaign event in Glen Allen, Va. “I don’t want a pioneer in outsourcing. I want some insourcing.”
But Obama’s own portfolio shows a willingness to invest in American corporations that have shifted employment overseas.
In his most recent financial disclosure from 2011, Obama and his wife reported having between $200,000 and $450,000 in the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, which invests in the largest U.S. corporations. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as of Sept. 30, 2011, the fund’s biggest holding was 8,272,039 shares of Apple Inc., then valued at $3.2 billion.
The New York Times reported in January:
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas….
“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.
“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.” {Read More}
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| Deja Vu |
POLITICO - Mitt Romney's tax returns had nothing to do with Sen. John McCain's decision to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, according to the Arizona Republican, saying he chose the former Alaska governor because she was a "better candidate."
McCain received more than two decades worth of Romney's tax returns as the former Massachusetts governor was undergoing the vetting process four years ago, far more than Romney has released publicly in the 2012 campaign. Democrats have questioned whether McCain saw something untoward in those tax returns and decided to choose Palin instead.
But on Tuesday, McCain flatly rejected that assertion and grew angry at questions over his decision to choose Palin over Romney.
"Of course not," McCain told POLITICO when asked if the contents of Romney's tax returns disqualified him from the selection process. "I don’t know what depths these people won’t reach. Obviously, it’s just outrageous. That’s just outrageous. It shows the – it’s so disgraceful for them to allege something that they have absolutely no knowledge of."
Asked why he chose not to go with Romney, McCain said: "Oh come on, because we thought that Sarah Palin was the better candidate. Why did we not take [Tim] Pawlenty, why did we not take any of the other 10 other people. Why didn’t I? Because we had a better candidate, the same way with all the others. ... Come on, why? That’s a stupid question."
Steve Schmidt, McCain's top campaign adviser in 2008, told the Huffington Post that the contents of the tax returns were not viewed as a problem for their campaign. But Romney's vast wealth was seen as a political liability that McCain could ill afford, he said.
"Sen. McCain got caught flat-footed answering a question about how many houses he owned," Schmidt told the news website. "In fact, they were Cindy McCain's properties but that distinction was lost in the political optics and we knew it would be a big liability that the presidential and the vice presidential candidates together owned more than a dozen homes. It was like something out of a 'Saturday Night Live' skit. I mean, come on."
... The president is now running an ad showing Mitt Romney tunelessly singing “America the Beautiful,” while the text on screen blasts him for shipping jobs to China, India and Mexico.
The accuracy of the ad has been questioned by the various fact-checking outfits. That need not detain us. It’s safest to assume that all the ads you see this year will be at least somewhat inaccurate because the ad-makers now take dishonesty as a mark of their professional toughness.
What matters is the ideology behind the ad: the assumption that Bain Capital, the private-equity firm founded by Romney, should not have invested in companies that hired workers abroad; the assumption that hiring Mexican or Indian workers is unpatriotic; the assumption that no worthy person would do what most global business leaders have been doing for the past half-century.
This ad — and the rhetoric the campaign is using around it — challenges the entire logic of capitalism (emphasis mine) as it has existed over several decades. It’s part of a comprehensive attack on the economic system Romney personifies.
This shift of focus has been audacious. Over the years of his presidency, Obama has not been a critic of globalization. There’s no real evidence that, when he’s off the campaign trail, he has any problem with outsourcing and offshoring. He has lavishly praised people like Steve Jobs who were prominent practitioners. He has hired people like Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, whose company embodies the upsides of globalization. His economic advisers have generally touted the benefits of globalization even as they worked to help those who are hurt by its downsides.
But, politically, this aggressive tactic has worked. It has shifted the focus of the race from being about big government, which Obama represents, (emphasis mine) to being about capitalism, which Romney represents (emphasis mine).
Just as Republicans spent years promising voters that they could have tax cuts forever, now the Democrats are promising voters that they can have all the benefits of capitalism without the downsides, like plant closures, rich C.E.O.’s and outsourcing. Just as Republicans used to force Democrats into the eat-your-spinach posture (you need to have high taxes if you want your programs), now Democrats are casting Republicans into the eat-your-spinach posture (you need to accept outsourcing and the pains of creative destruction if you want your prosperity).
The Romney campaign doesn’t seem to know how to respond. For centuries, business leaders have been inept when writers, intellectuals and politicians attacked capitalism, and, so far, the Romney campaign is continuing that streak. {Read More}
