No it’s not your imagination……my countdown timer has moved up a day. The internet is now reporting we run out of money at midnight tomorrow night, not midnight Thursday night. Things are looking desperate indeed. The Senate appears to have given up and the House…….well the House is still the House……dysfunctional as ever. It is hard to see how this is going to workout.
There is only one song that could express how I am feeling as I prepare this post and here it is…….
Today I bring you Rep. Randy Neugebauer who as you can see above is proud to be Texas’ Most Conservative. A man that feels like it’s Ok to berate a Park Ranger for doing her job by turning people away from National Monuments that are closed because of Randy and his Tea Party compatriots. The best part; however, is that he runs away like a big pussy when confronted by others about the real problem…..(Thanks to Huffington Post for the article below)……
Congressman Castigates Park Ranger
For The Memorial Closure He Voted For
Day two of Government Shutdown 2013 offered America plenty of surreal moments, from the brief and ridiculous re-emergence of the Grand Bargain, to the sight of multiple members of a universally reviled governing body offering to give up their paychecks as if they thought it was a move worthy of a medal. But nowhere did Salvador Dali’s clocks warp and melt under the heat of sustained stupidity as badly as they did down at the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Yesterday, it became pretty obvious that if you wanted to catch the eye of any Beltway reporter to discuss what you were enduring during the shutdown, you had to go on down to this memorial to make your case. Unfortunately, that’s where many members of Congress decided to while away their day as well. As Ryan Reilly reported, heroic members of Congress turned out to boldly grandstand at the memorial, pretending just as hard as they could that its temporary closure was the most dire effect of the shutdown … for which … they voted. Yes, that was by far the most surreal thing about it. Gawker’s Tom Scocca turned the best phrase about the whole mess, describing those lawmakers as committing “an act of civil disobedience against themselves.”
But Mark Segraves, reporting for NBC News’ Washington affiliate, managed to capture the howler highlight of the Great World War II Memorial Bleat-n-Repeat — Rep. Randy Neugebauer’s (R-Tex.) Wednesday confrontation of a poor park ranger on the scene — who was doing nothing more than her job — blaming her for the closure he voted for and telling her that she should be ashamed of herself.
Seriously, this actually happened. Per Segraves:
“How do you look at them and … deny them access?” said Neugebauer. He, with most House Republicans, had voted early Sunday morning to pass a funding measure that would delay the Affordable Care Act, a vote that set up a showdown with the Senate and President Barack Obama. With the parties unable to agree on how to fund the federal government, non-essential government functions shut down Tuesday.”It’s difficult,” responded the Park Service employee.
“Well, it should be difficult,” replied the congressman, who was carrying a small American flag in his breast pocket.
“It is difficult,” responded the Park Service employee. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“The Park Service should be ashamed of themselves,” the congressman said.
“I’m not ashamed,” replied the ranger.
From there, Segraves reports, “a crowd of onlookers got involved,” and began loudly demanding that Neugebauer lay off the park ranger, pointing out again and again that the reason everyone was in the position they were in was due to the fact that Congress very specifically put them there. Neugebauer countered that it was all really Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) fault, but that failed to impress anyone.
What’s really ghastly about this is that the whole “Harry Reid shut down the government” line is a talking point. It’s “messaging” — the mostly disingenuous bilge that politicos spit in order to gain some phantom upper hand in a war of rhetoric that plays itself out in the press. It’s not intended to be sincere, it’s all posturing — throwing sub-standard witticisms at a wall in the hopes that something will stick and convince people.
This is all stuff intended for an audience of reporters — and in that setting, all is fair. But you’re not actually supposed to extend “messaging” out into the world of ordinary human Americans in this fashion, and victimize park rangers with it.
What’s also inane about this is that, as Segraves takes pains to point out, the park rangers deployed to the World War II Memorial, while enforcing the closure of the memorial to the general public, are also there to make sure that the Honor Flight veterans who come to the memorial get access to the site. So, by impeding her from doing her job, all Neugebauer was doing was impeding access for the Honor Flight veterans. And telling the ranger that she should be ashamed? Man, that’s not a good look, and the gathered crowd made sure Neugebauer learned that the hard way.
Got to give credit to the ranger for standing her ground and doing her job with professionalism, in the face of an idiot who really needs to learn his place.
The United States Government is within 9 days of being shutdown by the extremist, Tea Party faction of the Republican controlled House of Representatives. Please visit my politics blog if you are interested in following this story.
Great article from Huffington Post…..no shocker here except that it is starting so soon!
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Romney Campaign, Karl Rove
Framing Hurricane Sandy
For Possible Election Day Defeat
Three days remain until Election Day, but Mitt Romney’s campaign has suggested that Hurricane Sandy would be to blame for a possible defeat.
Citing sources within the campaign, Jan Crawford of CBS News reported Saturday that Team Romney believes the storm, which devastated parts of the East Coast last week, is responsible for putting a halt on their much-touted momentum.
For eight straight days, polls showed him picking up support. The campaign’s internal polling, which is using different turnout models than most public polls, had him on solid ground in Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Iowa. He had a slight lead or was tied in Ohio, New Hampshire and Wisconsin and was in striking distance in Pennsylvania, a state Republicans hadn’t won since Ronald Reagan in 1984.Those leads in Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Iowa still hold in the internal polls, campaign sources say, but Romney’s movement flattened out or, as the campaign likes to say, “paused.” Nevada is now off the table, and those neck-and-neck swing states are even tighter.
The GOP presidential nominee’s momentum rose after the first presidential debate gave him his first bounce this cycle. But there has been little evidence in national and swing state polls conducted since then that the GOP nominee has sustained that momentum, despite the Romney campaign’s claims to the contrary.
Nonetheless, Romney’s allies also began to point prematurely at the timing of Sandy. Republican strategist Karl Rove called the storm the “October Surprise” and argued it had been disadvantageous toward Romney in an interview with The Washington Post on Friday.
“If you hadn’t had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the [Mitt] Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy,” Rove said. “There was a stutter in the campaign. When you have attention drawn away to somewhere else, to something else, it is not to his [Romney’s] advantage.”
“Obama has temporarily been a bipartisan figure this week. He has been the comforter-in-chief and that helps,” he added. “People in Eastern coastal communities are going to be preoccupied by issues of getting food to eat and having a roof over their heads; some of them won’t be thinking as much about the election.”
While Rove acknowledged that people in the Northeast would have little influence on the outcome of the election, his larger point was that the hurricane allowed President Barack Obama to step back into his role as president, while Romney could only watch from the sidelines.
Both presidential candidates temporarily suspended their campaign events in the wake of the storm. But, as the incumbent president, it was Obama who drew the most attention in the final week before the election for his leadership in a time of crisis — prompting effusive praise from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a top surrogate to Romney.
Putting all campaigning aside, Christie repeatedly commended Obama’s outreach and support in a rare show of bipartisanship — the kind the president has been promising to pursue if he wins a second term. Earlier on Saturday, Politico reported that the Romney campaign was frustrated by Christie’s recent show of affection for Obama, another sign that they felt their candidate had been placed in a losing position on account of the storm.
This commandment is the core of the Republican strategy for this year’s campaign. There are too many examples to focus on each one so let’s just focus on the most recent one….Republican lies about the auto industry. Sure, you can see why they are using this approach….Mitt Romney’s “let them go bankrupt” approach to saving the auto industry is not a winning position. So all the Republican’s can do is lie. So tell me, are you willing to vote for a presidential candidate that has zero integrity? I can tell you that I am not!
Let’s start with at the beginning, here is Romney’s position, Romney’s prediction of the consequences of the bailout supported by President Obama, and the reality of what has has occurred based on the bailout.
Here is the Romney ad running in Ohio that is full of lies. The first of the lies is that President took made the companies go bankrupt . Of course it was Romney who wanted to do this and it was President Obama that bailed them out. The second lie is that Chrysler was moving Jeep production to China.
The following article captures Chrysler’s response to the second lie.
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Chrysler CEO Calls Romney Jeep Claim ‘Inaccurate’
For a candidate pledged to help businesses large and small succeed, Mitt Romney sure is getting a cool reception from top executives at Chrysler.
Sergio Marchionne, the company’s CEO, felt compelled to send a company-wide email to reassure workers that assertions made by the Republican presidential candidate both in a campaign appearance and in radio and television advertisements are “inaccurate.””I feel obliged to unambiguously restate our position: Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China,” he wrote, adding that the company was planning on more investment in manufacturing and jobs in the American Midwest, including the crucial presidential swing state of Ohio.
Romney commented while campaigning last week that he had read news reports saying Chrysler would be cutting American jobs in favor of manufacturing Jeeps overseas.
Marchionne said it is true that the company is ramping up overseas manufacturing, but as additional capacity to feed growing demand in Chinese markets, not to replace American jobs.
“Jeep assembly lines will remain in operation in the United States and will constitute the backbone of the brand,” he said. “It is inaccurate to suggest anything different.”
The back-and-forth, held just one week before Election Day, may prove a pivotal moment.
President Barack Obama and Romney are virtually tied in national polling, but Obama has a slight edge in most Ohio surveys, likely buoyed by positive reviews of his oversight of the auto-industry bailout viewed as critical to the region.
The Buckeye State is a near must-win for Romney, as no Republican has been elected to the White House without winning Ohio. Scrutiny of the electoral map reveals even if Romney were to run the table and win other battleground states Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Iowa, he still wouldn’t win the 270 votes necessary without taking Ohio.
Obama campaign officials have called Romney’s willingness to mislead a “desperate” attempt to win.
“It reeks of desperation because that’s what it is,” said Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager in a media call on Monday.
The Ohio press has extensively covered the back-and-forth, with the Cleveland Plain Dealer editorializing that the ad is “a masterpiece of misdirection.”
The Romney campaign also made news Tuesday when it announced that it was buying television advertising time in Pennsylvania, traditionally a swing state but one that has been largely off the table this cycle due to Obama’s consistent lead in polling there. An average of statewide polling has Obama up by 4.7 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics.com. The GOP candidate’s campaign is also going to stump in Minnesota, another state thought to be firmly in the Democrat’s corner throughout the campaign.
“With one week to go, and 96 percent of the vote on the table on Election Day in Pennsylvania, this expansion of the electoral map demonstrates that Gov. Romney’s momentum has jumped containment from the usual target states and has spread to deeper blue states that Chicago never anticipated defending,” wrote Rich Beeson, Romney’s political director, in a memo on the campaign website.
He said the campaign is flush with cash and ready to make a super-sized final push.
“As a campaign we will put more resources into the target states in the final week, than previous GOP campaigns have been able to do in the final 10 weeks,” Beeson said. “The Romney campaign has the resources to expand the map in ways that weren’t possible in past cycles (without reducing any effort in any other target state).”
The Obama campaign, however, argues this expansion into states where Romney hasn’t been spending time or resources previously is an acknowledgement they aren’t gaining the necessary traction in Ohio and in other battlegrounds.
“The Romney campaign has found itself with a tremendously narrow and improbable path to 270 electoral votes,” said Messina, in a statement distributed by the Obama campaign. “Now, like Republicans did in 2008, they are throwing money at states where they never built an organization and have been losing for two years. Let’s be very clear, the Romney campaign and its allies decision to go up with advertising in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Minnesota is a decision made out of weakness, not strength.”
Messina said it’s clear that Obama has a “significant” early vote advantage and that Romney’s momentum gained from his debate performance at the beginning of the month has stalled.
“Gov. Romney has not been able to put away a single battleground state,” he said. “In fact, as polls in the past day have showed the candidates tied in North Carolina, Republicans have raced to increase their television advertising there. Voters who haven’t heard from the Romney campaign in two years will see this desperation for what it is.”
Both campaigns suspended official campaigning by Romney and Obama on Monday and Tuesday due to Hurricane Sandy. Romney did hold what the campaign billed as a “storm relief” event with supporters in Ohio, gathering canned goods and other items and Obama made a stop by the American Red Cross headquarters in Washington. Obama will travel to New Jersey on Wednesday where he will survey storm damage with Republican Gov. Chris Christie, while Romney has a full slate of campaign events scheduled in Florida. Christie, a top Romney surrogate who delivered the keynote address at the Republican National Convention this year, has already offered praise for Obama’s leadership on Sandy relief efforts.
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Did the Romney campaign apologize for the ad……no way. They doubled down on their lies. Here is a news report about their second ad with even more flagrant lies.
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Finally, Rachel Maddow, in her own unique way, sets the record straight and call out Romney and the Republicans for what they are…..serial liars.
By Maggie Fazeli Fard and Ben Pershing, Updated: Friday, October 19, 12:26 PM
A man working for a company under contract to the Republican Party of Virginia has been arrested for allegedly discarding Virginia voter registration forms.
Colin Small, 23, of Phoenixville, Pa., was arrested on Thursday by sheriff’s deputies in Rockingham County, in the state’s Shenandoah Valley, on 13 charges of voter registration fraud.
(Courtesy of Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office) – Colin Small allegedly tossed eight voter registration forms into a dumpster. He was arrested Thursday on charges of voter registration fraud.
The alleged crime happened on Monday, when a business owner in Harrisonburg, Va., reported that someone had tossed eight voter registration forms in a dump bin behind his store.
The forms had been filled out, placed in a folder and stuffed into a bag, store owner Rob Johnson told a Richmond-area NBC affiliate and said in a posting on hisFacebook page.
An investigation led law enforcement to Small, who was described by the sheriff’s office as a “voter registration supervisor.” Officials said Small was employed by a company contracted by the Republican Party of Virginia to register voters.
In a statement, Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Pat Mullins said he was “alarmed by the allegations” and that Small was “fired immediately” when the allegations surfaced.
“The Republican Party of Virginia will not tolerate any action by any person that could threaten the integrity of our electoral process,” Mullins said.
Small was charged with four counts of destruction of voter registration application, eight counts of disclosure of voter registration application and one count of obstruction of justice.
On his LinkedIn profile, Small is listed as a “Grassroots Field Director” for the Republican National Committee.
Brian Moran, chairman of the Democratic Party of Virginia, is calling for authorities to investigate whether the incident “is part of a larger effort to limit Virginians’ access to the ballot.”
“Given their rhetoric about eliminating voter fraud, Republicans should welcome an investigation to prove that these disturbing incidents are isolated and not a central feature of the GOP campaign effort this year,” Moran said in a statement.
According to the sheriff’s office, the incident appears to be isolated and there is no indication that similar activity has occurred in the area.
Still, officials noted that the investigation is ongoing and that additional charges may be filed.
It remains unclear why the voter forms, which do not list party affiliation, were thrown away, officials said.
Voter registration in Virginia closed on Monday, the same day Small allegedly threw the forms away.
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If you are paying attention to this blog the pattern is clear….Republican Voter Suppression and Voter Fraud is being conducted in an organized and systematic fashion to rob non-Republican of their voting rights and to thereby deliver the US Presidency to Mitt Romney! As with most things related to the Republican Party this is repugnant and TOTALLY WRONG.