Truth will out

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Newt Gingrich: ‘CNN is less biased than Fox’
By Dylan Stableford, April 12, 2012

In what some might consider an act of GOP political suicide, Newt Gingrich slammed Fox News earlier this week, saying that the cable news channel has favored Mitt Romney throughout the 2012 Republican race--and that CNN has been the more "fair-and-balanced" network this cycle.

"I think Fox has been for Romney all the way through," Gingrich said during a meeting with Tea Party leaders in Delaware on Wednesday, according RealClearPolitics.com, which said it was granted access to the private event. "In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than Fox this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of Fox, and we're more likely to get distortion out of Fox. That's just a fact."

The former House Speaker blasted the Roger Ailes-led network, blaming Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of Fox News owner News Corp., for the bias.

"I assume it's because Murdoch at some point said, 'I want Romney,' and so 'fair and balanced' became 'Romney,'" Gingrich said. "And there's no question that Fox had a lot to do with stopping my campaign because such a high percentage of our base watches Fox."

"This is nothing other than Newt auditioning for a windfall of a gig at CNN--that's the kind of man he is," a spokeswoman for Fox News responded in a statement to Yahoo News. "Not to mention, he's still bitter about the fact that we terminated his contributor contract." (Gingrich was dropped by Fox last year shortly before he announced his presidential bid.)

Gingrich added that he will attend the White House Correspondents' Association dinner later this month--as a guest of CNN.

"The only press events I go to are interesting dinners when the wife insists on it, so we're going to go to the White House Correspondents' dinner because she wants to. And we're actually going to go to CNN's table, not Fox."

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Newt, Newt, Newt, "when the wife insists on it"???  What an obvious Republican attitude-- even more reason for women to leave him in the dust.
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G.W. Bush: not good to undermine the President!

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Where has Dubya been?!
[snipped]
“I have decided to stay out of the limelight,” Bush said at a conference hosted by theGeorge W. Bush Institute. “I have had plenty of the limelight. I don’t think it is good, frankly, for our country to undermine our president and I don’t intend to do so ..."
[snipped]
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Hey, homophobes who post on the Olympian-- we know what you are!

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Santorum has to think about exiting the race

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UPDATE: Santorum suspends campaign -- AP
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Rick Santorum's Closing Window for Graceful Exit
By Rick Klein, April 8, 2012

Leave it to Newt Gingrich, back in his role as strategist rather than candidate, to state the obvious reality of Mitt Romney's commanding position in the Republican presidential race.

"You have to be realistic," Gingrich said today on "Fox News Sunday. "He is far and away the most likely Republican nominee."

That matters almost not at all for Gingrich, whose campaign has morphed into an irregular traveling road show with a newly stated goal  of guarding against any Romney lurches toward the center, at the Republican National Convention and beyond.

But it should matter a great deal to Rick Santorum, who has more at stake in these next few weeks than any other Republican, up to and including Romney himself.

The hospitalization of Santorum's 3-year-old daughter, Bella, who suffers from a rare genetic disorder that's usually fatal in young children, has pulled the candidate off the campaign trail at least through Monday.

When he's able to return to campaigning, Santorum will have to decide whether he wants to. The primary in his home state of Pennsylvania looms just two weeks away, and Santorum will be risking much of what he's achieved in this campaign if he suffers an embarrassment there.

As for what he's risking, recall that few Republicans and fewer pundits thought much of it when Santorum announced his presidential candidacy. He then consistently registered approximately nowhere in the polls.

Santorum has shocked the political world by emerging as Romney's chief alternative. His slightly belated victory in Iowa was followed by a series of impressive showings, including wins in the Deep South and the Mountain West, and a blowout victory in Louisiana as late as March 24.

But even if he continues to surprise, he has fallen too far back in the delegate race to have a serious shot at capturing the nomination. He's secured only 281 delegates to Romney's 658, according to ABC News' delegate count; 1,144 are needed for the nomination, but only Romney has a legitimate mathematical shot of getting there, given proportional allocation rules in most states.

Santorum has labeled his home state a must-win. But even a win there would probably see him slipping further behind in the delegate race that day, because Romney-favored New York, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island also vote April 24.

Nudging Santorum's decision-making along is Romney, whose campaign is pledging an ad buy of nearly $2 million, for starters, in Pennsylvania starting Monday. Polls have already begun to show Santorum's once-commanding lead there beginning to evaporate, and the Romney campaign has seen enough rivals get off the mat to let a chance to close out the race get away yet again.

Santorum has now gone from ex-senator who lost his last race in a landslide, to the silver medalist in a chaotic, once-crowded GOP primary. At 53, he's young enough to have a long future in the party, maybe even as a candidate again some day.

Romney's timely exit in his race against Sen. John McCain in 2008 has been widely cited as the first step toward what's on track to be a successful bid for the nomination in 2012.

For Santorum to follow a similar path, getting out on his own terms is a must. And losing on his own turf would hurt that prospect, perhaps beyond repair.

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"Hollow" Romney

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Dems running against the Tea Party!

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Can Dems Run, and Win, Against the Tea Party?
By Paul Glastris, April 7, 2012

A couple weeks ago, I met up in DC with a former Clinton administration colleague, a great guy named James Cargas. A Houston area energy lawyer who got his start in politics interning for Tip O’Neill, Cargas is running in the Democratic primary for Texas’s 7th congressional seat. If he wins, he’ll face GOP incumbent John Culberson, who’s such a staunch Tea Party conservative that he’s fought against federal funding of light rail for his own city. The district leans Republican, but not so much that a moderate Democrat like Cargas can’t win. But what I found especially interesting is the central message of Cargas’ campaign: he’s running to help drive the Tea Party out of Congress.

That got me wondering: if Cargas thinks he can win by running against the Tea Party, are other Democratic candidates thinking the same thing?

Apparently so. The Washington Post today reports polling data showing that “opposition to the tea party is more strident than the tea party itself,” and that fewer Republicans are latching on to the label. It goes on to say this:

In contrast, Democrats are actually starting to wield the tea party label as a tool in their campaigns.

“I’m Bill Pascrell, and this is why I’m running: to stop the tea party,” the Democratic congressman from New Jersey says in a new ad.

The tea party is also being used against Reps. Joe Walsh (Ill.) and Ann Marie Buerkle (N.Y.), two top tea partiers in tough districts for the GOP, and was used in ads run by Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), who won a special election earlier this year.

Democrats say the issue works for them as they continue to define a Republican Party whose brand is already struggling.

“It’s no longer viewed as a populist, grass-roots organization, but a dangerous group with extremist views that don’t reflect the mainstream values of America’s middle class,” Democratic media strategist John Lapp said.

This will be an interesting trend to watch.

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Why do the Cons hate the Chevy Volt?

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Obama and the Volt
By Matthew Zeitlin, April 7, 2012

Joe Nocera’s column yesterday took on the campaign against the Chevy Volt, GM’s innovative (and expensive) plug-in hybrid that has seemingly had more articles written about it in the conservative press than in car publications. Nocera writes that, contra Neil Cavuto et al, the Volt has much more to do with GM’s effort to leapfrog other car companies in producing technologically advanced hybrids than the Obama administration’s attempts at environmental industrial policy:

For months, the conservative propaganda machine — including Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Neil Cavuto, the Fox News business editor — had been mocking the Volt, and linking it to President Obama, who has long touted the promise of electric cars. Cavuto, who has called the Volt “roller skates with a plug,” was rumored to be going on the air that very night with yet another Volt hatchet job.

What is the connection between President Obama and the Volt? There is none. The car was the brainchild of Bob Lutz, a legendary auto executive who is about as liberal as the Koch brothers. The tax credit — which is part of the reason conservatives hate the car — became law during the Bush administration.

Nocera is on to something when he says that the conservative focus on the Volt has much, much more to do with politics, especially the politics of Obama’s stimulus and energy policies, than it has to do with the merits of the car. But I think Nocera, in his effort to combat the doggedly anti-Obama conservative media, may actually be giving the Obama administration too little credit when it comes to the Volt as well as underplaying how much Obama personally is tied to the vehicle.

After all, the stimulus package included all sorts of supports and inducements for electric cars and plug-in hybirds. In ProPublica, Michael Grabell described the administration’s substantial efforts to expand the supply of and market for electric and hyrbid vehicles. For example, the stimulus included more than $1 billion in supporting and expanding the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries (the batteries found in electric cars and hybrids, including the Chevy Volt). Total government support for electric cars came out to $2 billion. Then there’s the federal support for GM’s successful reorganization which allowed them to ever pursue forward-looking projects like the Volt in the first place. On the regulatory side as well, there has been a concerted effort to make the country a friendlier place for electric and hybrid vehicles; the new mileage standards proposed by the EPA, which have gotten the support of automakers could dramatically expand the market for higher-mileage vehicles as car companies have to comply with yearly gas-mileage improvement targets through 2025.

Obama, too, has proudly and publicly associated himself with these efforts, and has specifically praised and the Volt. In February, Obama said that, “five years from now,” when he could buy and drive his own car again, he would get a Volt. In 2010, the administration was touting its support for electric and hybrid vehicles, specifically a factory in Holland, Michigan, which manufactures the battery for the Volt.

Of course, the Volt is a Chevy product, through and through, envisioned by legendary auto designer (and staunch conservative) Bob Lutz. But the environment necessary for the Volt to thrive will be one largely created by the Obama administration. That doesn’t make the conservative attacks on the Volt any more fair or true, but it does mean that Volt fans maybe ought to be defending the administration’s efforts, or at the very least acknowledging them.

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What counts for smarts in today’s GOP

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Nailed it!!
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GOP: Check Your Intelligence At The Door
By Cliff Schecter, April 5, 2012

There was a time when there were statesmen among the GOP’s elected and appointed officials. Men of academic and intellectual accomplishment, such as Dwight Eisenhower, Earl Warren, Nelson Rockefeller and yes, George H.W. Bush. Men and women who didn’t brag about not having a passport (the estimable Dick Armey), misunderstand how birth control works or think French kissing was invented in Gaul.

Those were the days.

For the past generation, Republican leaders, talk-show hosts and elected officials have made it their mission to mock anyone of serious intellectual import (liberal elitist!), attack the professional class and wonder aloud about proven science on about as constant a loop as “Sex In The City” reruns on E!. They have fed at the trough of what the late historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed “Anti-intellectualism In American Life.”

These decisions have had their consequences. One of the most loyal groups to emerge among what Ruy Teixeira has called The Emerging Democratic Majority are professionals located among “Ideopolis” clusters around the country, usually major cities or college towns and their suburbs. Those who make their living with creativity that requires advanced education, such as software developers, architects and nurses, have abandoned the Grand Old Party in droves. For some reason, seeing gravity as part of suspiciously Semitic War on Christmas, or the principle of inertia as a left-wing plot to grow welfare rolls, just doesn’t hold the same chant-”USA”-three-times-and don-an-American-flag-bikini cache for those post-GED.

So it should be no surprise that if conservatives and you chew your own food, or are willing to try three syllables on for size, you might just become what Paul Krugman refers to as “a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.”

As in judicial activist Antonin Scalia, Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan–today’s right-wing, intellectual dream team we often hear talked about as if they invented cold fusion. Scalia, a Supreme Court Justice appointed by Ronald Reagan, thinks he sounds awful smart when he bullies counsel for the liberal side of any case before the Court and uses Tea-Party talking points to do it. Most recently, he compared the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act to making people buy broccoli. Keep in mind that in 200 years of jurisprudence, Scalia is the only Supreme Court Justice to commit “flatulence” to written opinion—and I don’t even think he was talking about Clarence Thomas.

Then there is presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, “the ideas guy.” I’m not quite sure what most of them are, or if they involve large ethics fines, but a guy who’s calling for destroying government’s ability to do anything while simultaneously proposing a lunar colony–well, let’s just say Pauly Shore was also big in the 90s and probably had some ideas too.

Finally we have Rep. Paul Ryan, who recently released a budget document so utterly obtuse, that the House GOP Caucus had to go and vote for it right away. To get to the heart of Ryan, let me again harness the wit and wisdom of Nobel-Prize winner Paul Krugman:

“Mr. Ryan talks loudly about the evils of debt and deficits, but his plan would actually make the deficit bigger…is his budget really the most fraudulent in American history? Yes, it is.”

Somehow slashing taxes on multinational corporations and the Mitt Romneys of the world while increasing defense-contractor spending and not mentioning where most of the spending cuts come from–that, my friends, has led Ryan to be hailed as the next Cincinnatus with a side of Enrico Fermi. And with those numbers he might just balance the budget – sometime after we make contact with the planet Vulcan.

George Carlin once pointed how many of the daft and dull one meets in an average day. He reminded us to “think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of ‘em are stupider than that.” If the above is what counts for smarts in today’s GOP political apparatus, we can probably postulate which half they walk among.
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Do you suppose Santorum will ever figure it out?

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9 Signs Your Campaign Dreams Are Over
By Gregory J. Krieg

Momentum is the darling of every political campaign. Advisers and operatives are paid millions each election season to help their bosses seize it. But the effects cut both ways. After a few brief surges, Rick Santorum's candidacy has finally, and perhaps fatally, caught the bad strain - the one that looks like an unbreakable, interminable death spiral.

If only he knew it.

Here now, for the former senator and so many other politicians who couldn't see it was time to kindly leave the stage, is a simple guide to knowing when your campaign has run its course:

Your opponent has stopped mentioning you in speeches.

[snipped]

Your bowling score on a given day gets more publicity than anything else you said or did.

[snipped]

You are repeatedly likening your campaign to Ronald Reagan's … from 1976. 

[snipped]

You are banking on a state that voted you out of office by an 18-point margin six years ago to save your campaign.

[snipped]

The Duggar family clogs the room at some of your events.

[snipped]

Even the people who used to like you, and maybe still do, are voting for the other guy.

[snipped]

The party's national committee is raising money for and with your opponent - the same opponent who outspent you four-to-one in the last primary state.

[snipped]

Endorsements! They rarely swing a race, but they can seal it.

[snipped]

You are caught cussing at - or in response to - reporters on a rope line.

[snipped]

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GOP plan? = good; same plan from Dems? = socialism!

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Socialism: A GOP Plan Signed by Obama
By Tina Dupuy, April 4, 2012

Calling ObamaCare “socialized medicine” truly lowers the standards on what could be considered socialized medicine. It’s like calling paved roads “government overreach”; a stop light a “government takeover of your commute”; or a neighborhood with speed bumps “a road to communism.” The law is really some regulations to help consumers buy private insurance coupled with a small fee if consumers decide not to buy said insurance.

Is it perfect? No. Could it be improved? Absolutely. However, ObamaCare is the opposite of socialism — it’s a market solution.

The right-wing got a “free” market solution to health care. That was their cause — personal responsibility their mantra — now it’s law. They got an entire reform bill incentivizing citizens to buy into private for-profit insurance plans. This is the Republican vision for America: Less government more profits for giant corporations. This core of the Affordable Care Act was an idea floated by President Nixon in 1974, touted by the Heritage Foundation in 1989, introduced by Newt Gingrich in 1993 and implemented by Mitt Romney in 2005. And now? Now it’s a big festering albatross around Obama’s neck.

As former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said in front of the Supreme Court last week, “We have not waved the white flag of surrender on socialized medicine!”

So the decades-old Republican big idea finally gets Democratic presidential ink and now, if you ask a Republican, it’s an unconstitutional government takeover of health care Stalin would have loved. Mitt Romney wants to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with RomneyCare. Essentially repealing the Affordable Care Act with the Affordable Care Act. Leave it to a Republican frontrunner to vow their first act as president will be to waste time with redundancies while lamenting how ineffective government can be.

Now that health care reform has reached the Supreme Court, we will have a ruling on the law in late June. Will it be overturned fully or partially or upheld? It’s anyone’s guess.

Regardless of the outcome, personal responsibility in health care is a Republican pet idea they’ve strapped to the roof of the car.

It makes the case that their ideas should never be law because if partisanship beckons, they’ll rally against them and call any Democrats who signed the bill, Hitler.

Imagine if Obama signed the most recent Paul Ryan Budget plan — a blueprint to cut taxes further for the wealthy and further increase the debt by not taking in enough revenues. If Obama embraced it, Republicans would storm the Capitol calling it a tax hike and a Maoist plot with Wall Street. People in tri-corner hats with signs reading, “Don’t raise my taxes!” and “Stop government takeover of business!” would swarm The Mall. The erosion of Medicare would make Republicans faint on the House floor. “It’s a tenet of Marxism to kill grandma!” They’d gasp.

Just remember, when George W. Bush took office the budget was set to be balanced in a few short years. Social security was actually its namesake — secure. And then he went uber-GOP-with-a-mandate — didn’t pay for any of the wars he started — just showered seniors with unpaid-for Medicare Part D and sent everyone in the country a rebate check. And when this “free market capitalism” failed? He bailed out the banks and the auto industry with taxpayer money, famously saying he “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.”

Now? Now the Republicans blame the deficit, the debt, the recession, the bailouts and (wait for it) the wars on the Democrat in the Oval Office.

It’s a take on the Pottery Barn rule, “You break it, you buy it.” The Republican version: “We break it, we blame you … and call you a Nazi.”
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Someone's undies are in a bunch

Traffic Sources: http://americanswhohateobama.com/news_-_gossip.html We had 172 page views today from this location.  At least they admit they hate him and not just his policies.

Letter to the tiny white men living in women's underpants

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A satiric commentary on the Republican attitudes on women's health and sexuality:
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AN OPEN LETTER TO THE TINY WHITE MAN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS SENT TO LIVE IN MY UNDERPANTS.
By Kari Anne Roy
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No more racism? HA!

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Republicans Don’t Seem Ready For A Post-Racial America
By Jason Stanford, April 2, 2012

Y’all can go home. Put away your hoodies and cancel the vigils. Pick up the race cards, the game’s over. There is no more racism in America. The Texas Attorney General said so.

All this is a result of what’s called by the political cognoscenti as “Voter ID,” a concept pushed by Republicans to force voters to show identification before being allowed to vote. So far eight states have passed some form of this law: Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, Mississippi and Rhode Island. In an age in which Americans need to show ID to board a plane, the idea seems to make sense—except when you have to explain it.

Greg Abbott has been on a decade-long crusade to weed out voter fraud, a time-honored crime in Texas where a bunch of dead people once provided the winning margin in Lyndon Johnson’s first U.S. Senate race. But after spending $1.4 million investigating voter fraud, Abbott’s crack squad turned up exactly zero cases of impersonating an eligible voter at a polling place, which is what supporters say Voter ID laws would prevent.

As someone who long ago stepped in Democratic politics and has never been able to scrape it off his shoe, I can promise you that the Vast Leftwing Conspiracy is not even organized enough to get eligible voters to the polls. And in Texas, where our Hispanic turnout is lower than in neighboring New Mexico, it’s almost insulting. We can only get 15 percent of Tejanos to vote, and Abbott thinks we’re cheating?

What Voter ID would actually accomplish is making it harder for 5 million Americans to vote, according to the Brennan Justice Center. In March, Attorney General Eric Holder objected to Texas’ Voter ID law, claiming it could prevent as many as 304,000 Hispanic Texans from being able to vote. Holder has made the same argument with South Carolina’s attempt to preserve the sanctity of its ballot boxes.

If you like Joseph Heller or Franz Kafka, you’ll adore what Abbott did next, bless his heart. He sued the Obama administration to overturn Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. That’s just a $100,000 way of saying that the Texas Attorney General is suing for the right to stop asking permission before passing laws that make it harder for minorities to vote on the grounds that we don’t make it harder for minorities to vote anymore. They just set a court date, and now the whole thing will get hashed out in D.C. in July.

Republicans might be holding a premature funeral for racism, and you can start with the attempts to smear Trayvon Martin to justify his shooting. Conservative blogs publicized his three school suspensions and showed a photograph of him wearing baggy jeans. Fox News pundit Geraldo Rivera said Martin’s hoodie “is as much responsible” for the shooting as the shooter. They can’t help themselves from using their racism to justify a race-related shooting while doing their literal damndest to deny that race had anything to do with it.

Over in Georgia, there’s a lady who owns a paint ball field near Savannah who is selling bumper stickers that say “Don’t Re-Nig in 2012.” She professed amazement that people thought her admittedly anti-Obama stickers were racist after people got upset. “And besides,” she said, “Obama is not even black. He’s got a mixture of race. It’s his choice of what his nationality is.” So it’s OK to use the N-word to describe the president because he’s only a “Halfrican American.”

Republicans could use Barack Obama’s election as the first black president as evidence of racism’s demise, except that they can’t acknowledge that he’s an American. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who enjoyed a moment in the sun as the Republican frontrunner, even calls Obama the “food-stamp president” and recently accused the Commander in Chief of exhibiting “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.”

If white America spent as much time embracing minorities as our brothers instead of defining them as The Others, we might get past this. But Americans have been arguing about white meat versus dark meat since Pilgrims massacred 700 Pequot Indians because they saw them as sub-human impediments to progress.

Long after gays can marry—heck, after we have a gay president—Americans will still be arguing about racism. It’s our original sin.
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GOP says "Here's your hat, what's your hurry?"

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Why I Switched From Republican to Democrat
By Angelica Martinez, 04/ 3/2012

Ever since I became aware of the debate in this country about the proper size, structure and role of government, I have been a believer in limited federal power, fiscal restraint and keeping as much power as possible in the hands of states, communities and individuals. For me, the Republican Party was a natural fit. I am sad to say that over the past few years, this has become no longer the case.

This decision did not come about suddenly; I did not go to bed a Republican last night and wake up a Democrat this morning. In fact, I still hold center-right positions on a number of issues, especially on taxes and the role of the federal government in regulating business.
I came to believe that this was the right choice for me after being told by other Republicans that I am not a "real" Republican because I hold a number of beliefs that are well within the mainstream of American public opinion, but do not conform to the standards of the far right wing of the party, which has recently come to dominate the Republican agenda and the fight for the presidential nomination.

In 1968, George H.W. Bush spoke in the House of Representatives in favor of widespread access to comprehensive sex education and birth control, a policy I fully support. I was told that not only am I not "really" a Republican for supporting sex education and access to birth control on a voluntary basis through organizations like Planned Parenthood. Why does this position makes me a "radical liberal" who wants to "destroy families," 44 years after a man who went on to be a Republican president said the exact same thing on the floor of the House? I personally find abortion to be in direct contradiction to the teachings of my Catholic faith, I believe that for women who feel differently, or who are in difficult situations and feel they have no choice, that abortion services should be available, held to reasonable safety standards, and not be made by legislators into a more painful, invasive or humiliating experience than it already is. For this, I was told that I was a radical.

On fiscal issues, I expressed support for the Bowles-Simpson plan as a good overall template for compromise. It balances the budget, simplifies the tax code, lowers rates and reforms entitlements.

These are goals that Republicans have been trying to achieve for generations! But because it contains a net revenue increase, it was deemed to be in violation of a politically popular but deeply irresponsible pledge, signed by nearly the entire congressional Republican caucus, to never agree to a net revenue increase under any circumstances. I know the man who wrote this pledge claims to be doing what he feels Ronald Reagan would want, but I cannot imagine Ronald Reagan supporting this hyper-simplistic, blatantly pandering document, that willfully ignores the reality that this is a big and complicated country that sometimes requires its leaders to make hard and unpopular choices. Some may consider this a reiteration of Democratic talking points and the GOP represents "real Americans." If this is so, I would appreciate an explanation of how President Obama is leading all of the potential GOP nominees in swing states with persistent 8% unemployment and an economy struggling to sustain a recovery.

After over a year of actively trying to help the Republican Party, and being constantly told to leave, I'm finally taking that advice. My opinions on the issues have not changed; I'm still to the right of most Democrats on a number of issues. But in most Democrats I've encountered, I've at least found a group of people who are willing to listen to my ideas, debate them respectfully, and try to find common ground. To me, that's what a political party should be about, not litmus tests, nostalgia for 30-year-old victories and revenge for 40-year-old defeats. I have recognized in President Obama a leader, while I might not see eye to eye with him on every issue, who is willing to compromise and have a conversation with leaders of both parties, which is something that the GOP does not support anymore.

A political party is supposed to work with people who want to advance its general principles, and find a way to build a big tent that fits as many voters as possible. It is not supposed to be an exclusive club that people may earn the privilege of joining by pledging strict allegiance on everything under the sun; unfortunately, that's what the GOP has become. When Reagan was asked why he left the Democratic Party to become a Republican, he famously responded that he didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him. I, and many in my generation, feel not that the Republican Party left us, but that it never really wanted us to begin with. We'll simply do as we've been asked; we'll leave.
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Shop and Compare

Rick Santorum recently went off on a tangent about euthanasia in the Netherlands.  As usual, he didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.  So Factcheck shared this:

http://factcheck.org/2012/02/santorums-bogus-euthanasia-claims/

Not to be outdone, Daily Caller aka Tucker Bowtie Carlson and crew contributed:

http://dailycaller.com/2012/02/21/santorum-more-right-than-wrong-about-dutch-euthanasia/

National Review piles on with:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/293857/santorum-and-dutch-euthanasia-fact-checking-fact-checkers-john-keown

I'll let everyone read for themselves, but it's amazing that when someone like Santorum pulls bullshit from his ass, there are the lackeys ready, willing and able to back him up, regardless of how stupid it is.

Backward-looking GOP

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Bill Kristol’s Blues: The Republican Party Is Still Looking Backward
By Joe Klein, April 2, 2012

Bill Kristol proves, once again, that he’s a far better political tactician than a political thinker, with this assessment of the presidential campaign to come. He continues to be something less than full-blooded in his support of Mitt Romney–he’s been twenty shades of tepid throughout–and for all the right structural reasons: traditionally, it takes a national meltdown (1976 and 1980) or an extraordinary politician (1992) to defeat an incumbent president. With the economy drifting toward prosperity and no major foreign crises on the horizon, Kristol sees Obama as a clear favorite. Nothing special about that. But Kristol does have a few nice suggestions about the sort of campaign that Romney should run.

It shouldn’t be a backward-looking campaign as John Kerry tried in 2004, a combination of biography and vitriol against a marginally popular President. Romney needs to offer an alternative. He needs to explain what that alternative would be–and then Kristol describes the things that he thinks Romney has to explain:

Can he explain how an Obama second term would be even more dangerous and damaging than the Obama first term has been? Can he explain that we’re heading off a cliff of debt and deficit if Obama’s fiscal policies are allowed to continue? Can his campaign make vivid the harm Obama’s tax hikes and regulations will do to the economy, and Obama-care to our health care system and our country? Can he explain what a second term of Obama judicial appointments will do to our courts? Can he explain the damage an Obama second term will do to self-government, and limited government, and constitutional government in America? Can he conduct a campaign that describes how much more dangerous the world might look in 2016 if we continue Obama’s foreign and defense policies? Can the Republican campaign present a choice of paths for the future, à la Paul Ryan’s budget and his explanation of it, rather than simply complain about the recent past and the difficult present?

You may have noticed that, with the exception of Paul Ryan’s deficit-busting, Medicare-privatizing* budget, all of the things that need to be explained are attacks on Obama’s first term. So much for forward-looking. And that is one of the essential problems with today’s Republican party: it has no intellectually honest vision of the future, no answers except “no” and “less” (or “more” when it comes to the military). Such answers can be semi-plausible when dealing with budget matters, but there are real problems the country is facing that it might be nice for Republicans to address.

We need to figure out how to rationalize the health care system, whether Obamacare survives the Supreme Court or not. I doubt that even Bill Kristol believes that “market forces” are the one and only solution to a public-private system that encourages doctors to conduct as many tests and procedures as possible.

We need to figure out how to rationalize the regulation of the financial sector, especially the more exotic derivatives. The Dodd-Frank bill was lousy to begin with, and has now become a regulatory mess. I haven’t heard Romney, or any other active Republican, propose a plan that would help prevent the 2008 disaster from happening again. (We also need to systematically weed through the rest of the regulatory thicket that has grown up, and become impenetrable, over the past 100 years.)

We need to figure out a long-term energy strategy that encourages non-fossil fuels because, as Romney himself has said, the earth is warming, even if he isn’t–at least, wasn’t, during the Republican primaries–entirely sure that the warming is man-made. The Republican silliness about science in this and other areas, like evolution, is a witting, disgraceful fraud.

There was a time–the turn of the 1990s, to be precise–when the Republican Party offered solutions to all of these problems (and welfare and education reform as well). In many cases, their solutions were superior to the Democratic brand–the individual mandate was, and is, superior to the then-Democratic solution of an employer mandate; cap-and-trade was a good way to handle pollutants (though not so good as a straight-up, but refundable, carbon tax); choice and market-incentives were, and are, good ways to deal with our desultory educational system. Republicans and moderate Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, came to a humane solution to an immoral welfare system (and should finish the work now, by carefully reforming Social Security disability payments).

If I remember correctly, Kristol was part of that conversation. His turning point came when he advised Republicans to oppose the Clinton health care plan on purely tactical grounds–he didn’t want Clinton to win the political victory that reform would represent. And yet, he refused to propose an alternative. He didn’t even support the Republican alternative. He has led the GOP nihilist caucus ever since–except when it comes to warmongering, where he is an uninflected and unmitigated hawk.

And so it is entirely predictable, and sad, that Kristol’s idea of a forward-looking campaign is a combination of aggression overseas and nihilism at home. I still believe a Romney win is entirely possible, if less likely, this November, but he will have a difficult time winning, and an impossible time governing, with Kristol’s cocktail of aggression overseas and nihilism at home.

*Actually, Ryan’s Medicare privatization is, hilariously, a more liberal version of Obamacare (that is, Obamacare with a public option). As I’ve written elsewhere, I think that some version of this could work with younger retirees–say, up to the age of 80. But older retirees can’t be expected to make complicated market decisions when it comes to medical care. But either way, we need to get rid of the expensive fee-for-service system and severely limit medical malpractice suits if we want to control costs.

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Women just don't like Romney

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Romney's 'Women Problem'

By WILLIAM MCGURN, April 2, 2012

A USA Today poll shows Romney trails among swing-state female voters. Is this because he opposes mandatory coverage of birth control in health insurance?

It's over.

Mitt Romney has lost the 2012 election, and he's lost it because women are deserting the GOP over its opposition to ObamaCare's contraceptive coverage mandate. That's been the press drumbeat for the last few weeks. Now the argument appears to be backed up by a new USA Today/Gallup poll of swing-state voters. It shows Barack Obama out front for the first time since the poll started last November—largely because of the 2-1 advantage he enjoys over Mr. Romney among women under age 50.

Leave it to the liberal Salon website to sum up the conventional wisdom: "This is very likely a result of the prominence that contraception and women's issues have assumed in the public debate since February, when Republicans revolted against the Obama administration's efforts to make birth control a mandatory component of health insurance coverage."

One problem with this explanation: The same USA Today poll reports that 63% of those surveyed say they don't even know what Mitt Romney's position on government and birth control is. For that matter, 46% say they don't know President Obama's position either.

We don't know how these numbers break down among subgroups such as unmarried women, because USA Today has not released the cross tabs. What we do know, however, suggests it is premature to conclude the Republican Party's handling of the contraception mandate has cost Mr. Romney the women's vote. Especially when women in this same poll rank government policies on birth control last on their list of electoral priorities—behind health care, gas prices, unemployment, the national debt, etc.

We also know that many of the broadest conclusions about Mr. Romney's appeal among women from this new USA Today poll have been ripped out of any context. David Paul Kuhn is chief political correspondent for RealClearPolitics and author of "The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma." In an interview on Monday he told me the argument that Mr. Romney has lost women's support over the course of the contraception debate is contradicted by the timing.

"If the heated contraceptive debate was shifting the female vote, I would expect it to have burned Republicans with women back in February, when the debate was at its climax," Mr. Kuhn says. If you look at polls pre- and post-debate, Mr. Romney's support among women is steady in a half dozen major surveys, he adds.

Then there's the assumption that all women think the same. Steve Wagner of public opinion research firm QEV Analytics has taken a private poll, also of swing-state voters, specifically on the mandate, for the Catholic Association, a nonprofit. When he broke down the numbers for women under 50, he told me that he found two striking results.

The first is that nearly half of women under 50 attend religious services weekly. The second is that a majority oppose in principle what the administration is doing.

When asked, for example, whether the federal government has the right to force morally objectionable coverage on religious institutions, 52% of these women say "No." An even larger percentage, 59%, say that insurance companies should handle contraceptives the way they do other drugs (instead of having to provide them free). All of which suggests that Republicans who advance a religious liberty argument when asked about the contraception mandate will find a receptive audience.

That's not to say that President Obama is wrong to look to women for new votes—especially single women. Notwithstanding the jokes about the "I Got a Crush on Obama" video that went viral during the last campaign, the Obama Girl apparently spoke for many. In 2008, Mr. Obama won women handily—and captured 70% of the single female vote.

That makes unmarried women one of the most solidly Democratic voting blocs. Given that an estimated 20 million unmarried women did not vote in the last presidential election, it also makes them a natural target for Democratic mobilization.

The question is whether free birth control will do it, especially when the USA Today poll shows it to be such a low priority. We forget today, but in the 2010 national elections women showed they cared plenty about issues such as ObamaCare and the stimulus when they went for Republicans 49% to 48%. With the economy now showing signs of getting better, that may be a harder sell in 2012, but it's a sale Mr. Romney has to make.

The good news for Mr. Romney is that his failure to elicit enthusiasm among women likely has little to do with the way he or his party have handled contraception.

The bad news for Mr. Romney is that his inability to generate much excitement among women appears related to a general inability to generate much excitement among anyone.

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