When the GOP says ‘we,’ you know they mean ‘me, me, me’ One of the reasons it’s so easy to forgive the Founders who embraced the prejudice of their time and even wrote it into our founding documents is because of how the first line of the Constitution begins: We the People… In a time when only white males who […]

Mitt Romney: Shameless and shameful

Rolling Stone has a blockbuster piece online that will appear in the September 13 issue. In it, journalist Tim Dickinson reveals that, while at the helm of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney (a) nearly managed the firm into bankruptcy, (b) received a massive government bailout and then, (c) swindled taxpayers out of at least $10 million after basically blackmailing the FDIC.

It’s a piece of journalistic excellence that is likely to break this campaign wide open. The whole scandalous story after the jump.

Welcome aboard, media friends

Yesterday, Greg Sargent at The Plum Line wrote a terrific piece titled “Call out the lies right in your headlines”. He, as well as others, are ratcheting up the call for our main media sources to start calling what Mitt Romney and his campaign are doing: blatantly lying. Making things up and then repeating them over and over again despite being debunked and fact-checked as false Pinocchios with their pants on fire.

It’s starting to work. Proof — lots and lots and lots of proof — after the jump.

We ALL approve this message

A new video out from the group We Approve This Message does an amazing job of showing how there used to be great Republican leaders, even presidents, who looked out for the interests of America and Americans. And how that is no longer true.

The video is one of the most powerful pieces I’ve seen in a long time and features an image by Eclectablog’s very own Anne C. Savage.

Video and more after the jump.

So, Governor, where were YOU on Friday???

This past weekend, former Republican Florida Governor Charlie Crist endorsed President Obama and was announced as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention next week. Here in Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder seems to be keeping out of the limelight with the Romney campaign, as well. At the last two Michigan stops by the Romney campaign, including one last Friday in Commerce, Michigan, our Republican governor was notably absent from the public view. He skipped a rally in June, as well, attending a meeting of business owners only.

Why is that? Heck, even disgraced Republican House Speaker Jase Bolger spoke at the Commerce event.

Is it because the Romney campaign has become too extreme for even our conservative governor?

More after the jump.

Pay no attention to the traitor behind the curtain

By now you know how bad a day Mitt Romney had yesterday. Nearly every headline coming out of his trip to Michigan included the word “birther” in it. It was so bad, in fact, that he quickly sent out a “Look over there! Something shiny!” email to his mailing list, trotting out a thoroughly debunked lie about President Obama removing the work requirement from welfare.

But I would be willing to bet that the Romney campaign is actually relieved that this tempest in a teapot discussion about his slinging red meat to the birthers is dominating the headlines. Why? Because otherwise people would be talking about the massive release of nearly 1,000 pages of internal documents by Gawker from Romney’s days at Bain Capital that show conclusively that he went to dramatic and possibly illegal lengths to avoid paying taxes.

What Mitt Romney is counting on is that Americans are more excited about talking about inflammatory remarks about President Obama’s birth certificate than they are about discussions about high finance, a world most of us will never know, much less understand.

More after the jump.

Todd Akin is a pandering liar

Congressman Todd Akin, candidate for Senate from Missouri says he is sorry. He says he’s sorry because he said “the wrong words” when he said that women who are raped rarely get pregnant because “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

He’s so sorry, he released a video saying how sorry he is.

He is sorry for all of the wrong reasons. And he’s not sorry at all.

More after the jump.

Who’s in charge of this party anyway?

Senate Candidate Todd Akin is now running away from his odious comment about “legitimate rape” and, in the process, proving he doesn’t have a damn clue about why it was so offensive in the first place. He’s now saying that he meant to say “forcible rape”, completely missing the point that nobody but completely out-of-touch conservatives believes that women rarely get pregnant from rape. The statistics show otherwise.

Akin’s not-so-subtle implication is that, if a women gets pregnant from rape, she must have enjoyed it.

This week the Republicans will put the finishing touches on their party platform. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have suddenly Etch-A-Sketched their positions on abortion being legal in the case of rape and now say they now support an exception being made when a woman is raped so that they are not forced to bear the child of their rapist if they choose not to. The question is how they square this with their own Party’s platform that is sure to be absent of that exception.

Let’s ask them.

Much more after the jump.

When you’re in the news this much, something is wrong

It’s not unusual for a state Attorney General to be in the news from time to time. If they are doing their job, that’s part of the job description. But Michigan AG Bill Schuette finds himself at the center of not one, but TWO big news stories. What his involvement in these two stories shows is that Bill Schuette is using his position as the Attorney General of Michigan to pursue a hardcore right wing, anti-labor agenda that benefits his political allies and harms his political foes.

Details after the jump.

You gotta admit, the dude’s got chutzpah

As I wrote about yesterday, disgraced former Republican Congressman Thad McCotter has now been found to have fraudulently falsified nominating petitions not only this year but in 2010, as well. The Detroit Free Press now reveals that the fraud goes back EIGHT YEARS when McCotter filed photocopied and cut-and-paste copied signatures in 2008, too. In fact, if the two-year statute of limitations hadn’t run out, McCotter could be looking at jail time.

Details after the jump.

These guys are out of control

As is becoming increasingly clear to anyone paying attention to the 2012 presidential election, the Ryan/Romney campaign has given up all hope of winning on the issues and on their record and have resorted to unprecedented lying — literally making things up about President Obama and then putting it out as truth in stump speeches, online videos, television ads, appearances by surrogates on news programs and in fundraising emails.

There is a new one this week and it takes the LYING and HYPOCRISY to a new and rather incredible level.

The Ryan/Romney campaign is claiming that President Obama stripped $716 billion out of Medicare benefits “to pay for Obamacare”.

This is a lie.

Also, those same cuts, which I’ll describe in a moment, are in the Ryan budget plan that Mitt Romney has endorsed.

Details and more after the jump.