Complaints About the Republican Party IV

[Michael P]

Sen. Rand Paul thought this joke was hi-goddamn-larious.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/n...,7525076.story

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul remarked on President Obama's decision to publicly support same-sex marriage by saying, “Call me cynical, but I wasn’t sure his views on marriage could get any gayer.”

I hate this guy like poison. I had major surgery the Saturday before the 2010 election and had a tube very painfully taken out of my side that Monday, but even though I was sick and in pain I got up out of my bed Tuesday morning, put on real pants for the first time in a week and my mom drive me to the polls so I could vote against him.

What a jagoff.

[dupont2005]

Sen. Rand Paul thought this joke was hi-goddamn-larious.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/n...,7525076.story

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul remarked on President Obama's decision to publicly support same-sex marriage by saying, “Call me cynical, but I wasn’t sure his views on marriage could get any gayer.”

I hate this guy like poison. I had major surgery the Saturday before the 2010 election and had a tube very painfully taken out of my side that Monday, but even though I was sick and in pain I got up out of my bed Tuesday morning, put on real pants for the first time in a week and my mom drive me to the polls so I could vote against him.

6,000 years of tradition?

[Iangould]

Michele Bachmann is beginning to pay the price for all of her hate-speech:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor...easonous_.html

"Bachmann Accused of "Treason" for Swiss Citizenship

Accordng to Birther ideology, her dual citizenship should make her ineligble to run for President.

Ah, the irony.

[worstblogever]

Michele Bachmann is beginning to pay the price for all of her hate-speech:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor...easonous_.html

"Bachmann Accused of "Treason" for Swiss Citizenship

"Michele Bachmann’s short-lived experiment as a Swiss citizen ended awkwardly this week, when her beloved philosophy of American exceptionalism came back to bite her in the tushy. It turns out the far right concluded that her brief bout of dual citizenship made her anti-American. Remember that this is the congresswoman who skyrocketed to fame on an accusation that Barack Obama was anti-American. Oh, the irony!"

Bachmann is a hypocrite and an idiot. And no longer Swiss. I wonder if she will ask her gay husband to renounce his Swiss citizenship as well.

LOL. Couldn't happen to a nicer lady, that she lost control of her own pitchfork wielding mob.

Even the WSJ admits it now: Austerity has harmed the US economy

Something sinister must be happening over at Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (could it have to do with the ongoing criminal investigation in the UK?). Somehow they've allowed the truth of the past year's government spending cuts to be written in one of their official WSJ economic analysis blogs. Without layoffs in local governments (eg, teachers, firemen, police officers, and other vital public services), the unemployment rate would be a full percentage point lower than it is today, at 7.1%.

There's also a handy chart:

Attachment 93284

Looking at the data, they come to the undeniable conclusion that spending cuts hurt employment:

In April the household survey showed that that there were 442,000 fewer people working in government than in March. The household survey has a much smaller sample size than the establishment survey, and so is prone to volatility, but the magnitude of the drop is striking: It marks the largest decline on both an absolute and a percentage basis on record going back to 1948. Moreover, the household survey has consistently showed bigger drops in government employment than the establishment survey has.

The unemployment rate would be far lower if it hadn't been for those cuts: If there were as many people working in government as there were in December 2008, the unemployment rate in April would have been 7.1%, not 8.1%. [my emphasis]

So if the government had stayed exactly the same size as it was on December 1, 2008, we would have significantly lower unemployment than we do now. If we had increased the size of the government more than we did with the stimulus--through, say public works projects, increased funding for schools, and other simple, intuitive measures---unemployment could be even lower still. But instead of taking steps we know to have remedied economic problems in the past, Congress started cutting government spending because of the GOP's irrational fears about temporary increases in our public debt--something we've known since the early part of last century has a negative effect on the economy in a recession.

This should be front-page news, and Paul Ryan and his fellow Rand-devotees (the whole Republican Party nowadays) should have to answer for it this fall. While economists and liberals have comprehended the fact that cutting government spending in a recession causes problems for the economy. But now we have data that directly invalidates their screw-you-I've-got-mine, libertarian ideology, evidence that is now so undeniably clear that even the pro-austerity Wall Street Journal can't deny its truth: Budget cuts increase unemployment.

This needs to be the mantra of every Democrat running for office this fall, and it should be repeated by every liberal on every Sunday morning talk show. Budget cuts during an economic crisis hurt the economy. This is a truth that liberals should not shy away from, and it needs to be something the Dems in Congress refuse to compromise on: Cutting government spending when we need it most just means people get fired from their jobs--that is its primary effect--and that is a terrible thing to needlessly inflict on a country that's still reeling from the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

And yet, on the statewide, and national level, the Republicans have blocked all legislation that would create infrastructure jobs as well. Had they not done that, the unemployment rate would be below 7%, on the American Jobs Act alone.

[7thangel]

the sleaze is still leaving his stains

FACT CHECK: ‘Non-Citizen’ Voter In James O’Keefe’s Voter Fraud Video Is Actually A Citizen

Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe released a new video today supposedly exposing voter fraud in North Carolina by highlighting non-citizens like Zbigniew Gorzkowski who have voted in recent elections.

The problem: Gorzkowski is an American citizen.

In fact, if O’Keefe had done a simple Nexis search for “Zbigniew Gorzkowski”, he would have found a single article from the News & Observer in 2008 noting that Gorzkowski and his wife are naturalized citizens:

Customers flock through the red door of Zbigniew “Ziggy” and wife Halina Gorzkowski’s European grocery and flower shop to buy one of the 12 varieties they sell. The pierogis and 400 eastern European food items and flowers are also punching the naturalized citizen couple’s ticket for their version of the American Dream.

ThinkProgress spoke with Gorzkowski this morning. He verified that this information was indeed correct and he had been an American citizen since the late 1980s. Therefore, his votes in the 2008 and 2010 elections were not only perfectly legal, but encouraged as a civic duty.

In other words, the one instance in the video where O’Keefe purports to show that a non-citizen had actually voted, in fact shows that a citizen voted.

The episode does speak to a larger underlying problem with most accusations of voter fraud. It’s what I call the “Scooby Doo routine”. People like O’Keefe make wild voter fraud accusations like non-citizens voting, only to discover a much simpler explanation for the situation.

In this case, O’Keefe is using “evidence” of foreigners voting in American elections to supposedly demonstrate the need for draconian security measures like voter ID, which could disenfranchise 20 million citizens across the country. However, his evidence actually shows nothing more than an American citizen exercising his civic duty. Earlier this year, South Carolina went through the same Scooby Doo routine after Attorney General Alan Wilson claimed to have unearthed evidence of 953 dead voters, only for his state investigation to ultimately find no dead voters — and zero voter fraud — but rather a handful of clerical errors.

O’Keefe has a responsibility as a journalist to ensure the veracity of his facts before he makes wild charges like these. A simple phone call or Nexis search would have sufficed, yet doing so would have undercut his spurious argument that voter fraud is a widespread problem in the United States.

Update: ThinkProgress spoke with the family of the first “non-citizen” featured in O’Keefe’s video, William Romero, who informed us that Romero is a citizen as well.

The Real Fraud: Second ‘Non-Citizen’ In James O’Keefe Voter Fraud Video Naturalized In 2011

In conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe’s latest video, he features two “non-citizens” who have supposedly committed voter fraud in North Carolina. As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, one of the men, Zbigniew Gorzkowski, has actually been an American citizens for decades.

Now, it turns out that the second “non-citizen,” William Romero, is actually a citizen as well, according to his family.

The video opens with O’Keefe’s cameraman walking up Romero’s driveway and confronting a member of his family about whether he is a citizen. O’Keefe points to court records from 2010 where Romero was excused from jury duty because he was not a citizen at the time. Therefore, as O’Keefe argues, Romero’s voter registration dated December 5, 2011 is fraudulent because Romero “is not a United States citizen.”

Watch it:


In fact, Romero’s family told ThinkProgress he became a naturalized citizen in early 2011.

What’s more, Romero’s family told ThinkProgress that they had began receiving harassing telephone calls two weeks before the incident in the video asking if Romero was a citizen. They confirmed to the caller — it’s unclear whether they were speaking with O’Keefe himself or another individual — that Romero is indeed a citizen. Nevertheless, O’Keefe proceeded to ambush the family at their home and publish this video claiming he’s not a citizen.

One member of his family, who was confronted in O’Keefe’s video as he came home to care for his sick son, was incensed by the charge, calling it “completely absurd.”

O’Keefe appears to have blatantly misled viewers when he declared that Romero “is not a United States citizen” who was therefore committing voter fraud. According to the most recent information, Romero is a citizen who is participating in our most basic democratic right, yet he was attacked and smeared by O’Keefe’s outright falsehoods.

[worstblogever]

the sleaze is still leaving his stains

FACT CHECK: ‘Non-Citizen’ Voter In James O’Keefe’s Voter Fraud Video Is Actually A Citizen

The Real Fraud: Second ‘Non-Citizen’ In James O’Keefe Voter Fraud Video Naturalized In 2011

See, if he had proven it by using his old pal Andrew Breitbart's voter ID to go vote for Obama, he'd have been onto something. But then Breitbart's corpse would rise from his grave to choke him out for casting a vote for a liberal.

[LtMarvel]

the sleaze is still leaving his stains

FACT CHECK: ‘Non-Citizen’ Voter In James O’Keefe’s Voter Fraud Video Is Actually A Citizen

The Real Fraud: Second ‘Non-Citizen’ In James O’Keefe Voter Fraud Video Naturalized In 2011

"Wolf! Wolf! Why doesn't anyone believe me about the wolf?" wondered O'Keefe.

[Shawn Hopkins]

I wonder who he blew and how many pictures he took to keep getting funding for these things?

[Charles RB]

FACT CHECK: ‘Non-Citizen’ Voter In James O’Keefe’s Voter Fraud Video Is Actually A Citizen

The Real Fraud: Second ‘Non-Citizen’ In James O’Keefe Voter Fraud Video Naturalized In 2011

At this point, I wouldn't believe O'Keefe if he reported that Clark Kent was Superman. He has no credibility.

Unless you believe the same shit he does, and then you'll ignore his fucking lying because he says what you want to hear.

[Michael P]

At this point, I wouldn't believe O'Keefe if he reported that Clark Kent was Superman.

Well, of course not. Clark Kent wears glasses.

[chico25]

I wonder who he blew and how many pictures he took to keep getting funding for these things?

It's all part of the conservative mindset right now of just say you have evidence of something that proves your point it doesn't matter if it's true. The way they are looking at things is that the people they are trying to convince will never see the story debunking crap like this because the people they are reaching for only trust conservative media. It's why Mitt Romney just keeps on lying, it doesn't matter if Rachel Maddow calls him on it because the conservative base don't watch her show. They need someone to get it out their so that they can grab people's attention and get them thinking about their way of thinking and he's the perfect guy for this sort of thing for the republicans. He has a fairly large following and is only loosely tied to anyone in authority within the party so if their is ever a real backlash against him they can easily distance themselves.

The other big part of this stategy is the conspiracy theory mindset where once someone is convinced of something no matter how much evidence they are shown disproving what they believe they just convince themselves that your evidence is wrong and theirs is right or worse that the evidence you have is just part of the cover up making their belief even stronger.

[Matt Algren]

Republicans Stalling Obama's Agenda By Speaking, Moving In Slow Motion

[Darrell D.]

It's all part of the conservative mindset right now of just say you have evidence of something that proves your point it doesn't matter if it's true. The way they are looking at things is that the people they are trying to convince will never see the story debunking crap like this because the people they are reaching for only trust conservative media. It's why Mitt Romney just keeps on lying, it doesn't matter if Rachel Maddow calls him on it because the conservative base don't watch her show. They need someone to get it out their so that they can grab people's attention and get them thinking about their way of thinking and he's the perfect guy for this sort of thing for the republicans. He has a fairly large following and is only loosely tied to anyone in authority within the party so if their is ever a real backlash against him they can easily distance themselves.

The other big part of this stategy is the conspiracy theory mindset where once someone is convinced of something no matter how much evidence they are shown disproving what they believe they just convince themselves that your evidence is wrong and theirs is right or worse that the evidence you have is just part of the cover up making their belief even stronger.

That works for the fairly racist factions of conservatism, but it won't help them at ALL with moderate Republican conservatives, and Independents.
O'Keefe got lucky and took down ACORN based on lies, because of a very spineless MSM.
Whenever you hear 'Liberal media', all you have do is point to that, and wait for an answer.
O'keefe and Brietbart were/are basically white supremacists, and Brietbart's site is the new Klan meeting hall.
They can deny it all they want, but that is the new dog whistle for the pieces of shit; 'You are the one that brought race into this, not me!'

[needler420]

where is the thread called compliants about the democrats part l. The mods would probably remove it.

Gald my parents voted for Mccain and not Obama bin laiden.

[worstblogever]

Bet you if i made a topic called compliants about the democrats part l the mod would remove it.

I'll take your bet. How much you offering? I'll bet $5000.