Loony Right Wing Group, Americans for Limited Government, say Baghdad Bob came up with new 7.8% Unemployment Number.

This will blow your mind. It appears the right wing will not accept reality, it will create its own.

Americans for Limited Government, another crackpot group with a laughable name, shot this statement to the media disputing the newly released 7.8 percent unemployment numbers.

"It appears that Obama has hired infamous Iraqi information minister Baghdad Bob to calculate the unemployment rate. Anyone who takes this unemployment report serious is either naive or a paid Obama campaign adviser."

This is desperate, but funny stuff...Onion News is no longer necessary:

Business Correspondent Christine Romans explains why accusations new jobless claims numbers were manipulated are wrong.

GOP's 8 Percent Unemployment Talking Point Vanishes...now what?

Has Romney reached the point of self parody yet?

So what do you do when your only big talking point has been obliterated? Well, you don't come up with an excuse that would also work against Republican governors touting their own low unemployment numbers. Those doubled edged swords are nasty...

Newsday: Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney says a drop in the nation's unemployment rate to 7.8 percent "is not what a real recovery looks like." He also argued that the rate is low in part because some people have stopped looking for work.

Big Ed's Political Sports Show Open...

It's takes a radio guy to visualize and put together this surprising Ed Schultz show open. It's a fun but serious commentary. Treating politics like a competitive blood sport, instead of a serious governmental system that effects our quality of life, is the thoughtless road we're heading down.

Obama Won? In Your Dreams Scott Walker.

Who thinks President Obama won? Scott, Democrats are notorious for criticizing themselves. So on performance, not substance, Romney won. Is that good enough?  

Obama needs to remind Mitt of his official positions and public statements. Another words, go into attack mode, a difficult thing to do for a sitting president. 

Obama wins on Substance, Romney Wins on Showmanship.

Predictable response from Mitt Romney tonight, actually. Bluster and nonstop, rapid fire topics allowing for no response. It was my worst fear realized. And Jim Lehrer failed miserably.

For Obama, not one mention of any one of the blunders from the Romney/Ryan campaign. We saw that same mistake from Tammy Baldwin, who never built on Tommy Thompson's campaign killing comments.

I'm not sure what to say about the lack of fight and strategy from our Democratic candidates. It really is painfully pathetic.

That said, the best moments came from MSNBC's Chris Matthews. Rachel Maddow got a kick out of Matthew's colorful reference to getting kicked in the balls:



Here, Matthews said pretty much what most Democratic voters were saying about missing every opportunity to bring up the 47 percent reference, Social Security, women' rights, sticking people in emergency rooms, specifics and others:

Ryan courting the Anti-Moocher Vote!!

Martin Bashir is brutal, and deservedly so, regarding a response Paul Ryan gave to a rally question. The Republican base is stuck on getting poor Americans to pay a "nominal fee" in place of taxes, so they have some skin in the game. I guess the 10 percent bracket and 15 percent payroll tax just isn't enough, or the property taxes they pay, or sales tax, energy tax....

Love the response from Jonathan Alter, "the anti-moocher vote":

Rude Romney Voters Trash Card Board Obama.

What if you put up a life size card board Obama outside a Romney Monday night rally in Denver at the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum, and recorded the comments of the passersby?

Here's the video followed by the story behind it:

In an email to FOX31 Denver Tuesday, ProgressNow Action said, “we did nothing to further provoke the crowd.”

Asked what they want people who watch the tape to see, the group’s executive director, Joanne Schwartz, said this:

“It’s clear that not all, but many within Romney’s base of support dislike the President for irrational and often hateful reasons. Comments like ‘go back to Kenya,’ and asserting Obama is ‘black and used up’ reflect a much uglier prejudice than most Americans would identify with. Others continue to repeat discredited race-baiting falsehoods about the President’s religion and nationality,” Schwartz continued.

“Everyone we videotaped yesterday has a right to free expression, but others have the right to publicly reject intolerance. In a free society, we have an obligation to call this out.”

Americans Concerned about Romney Influence on Supreme Court.

I'm impressed! Americans have figured out how important the presidency is when it comes to who's on the U.S. Supreme Court:

Poll: Americans Fear Romney Would Further Shift Supreme Court Toward Big Business

Survey finds high court is a significant factor for voters … A newly released Hart Research Associates poll found that the Supreme Court is a significant factor for voters in the upcoming election. 

It found that 63 percent of all voters, and more than half of independent voters and presidential “swing” voters, say the issue of who will serve on the Supreme Court is an important consideration in their vote this year … a full 54 percent worry that Romney will nominate justices who will consistently favor corporations over ordinary Americans.

In contrast, voters believe that Obama is more likely to choose justices who “will protect the rights of average people, not just the wealthy and powerful.” And they believe President Obama is much more likely to appoint justices who “would uphold the progress we have made on civil rights and women’s rights.” The voters surveyed were also concerned about Romney’s opposition to Supreme Court decisions favoring women’s rights, including Roe v. Wade … Indeed, 59 percent of all voters, and 62 percent of swing voters, say Romney’s belief that women have no constitutional right to have an abortion gives them less confidence in Romney.

Tommy Thompson has some Explaining to do.

Here's the latest polling on the Baldwin/Thompson race:

jsonline: Marquette University Law School's latest poll shows that Democrat Tammy Baldwin has a 4-point lead over Republican Tommy Thompson in the U.S. Senate race … Baldwin leading by 48% to 44%. That compares to Baldwin's 50% to 41% lead in the last poll released on Sept. 19.

On Aug. 22 showed the opposite: Former governor Thompson was leading Baldwin by a 50% to 41% advantage. The latest poll was taken Thursday through Sunday before Friday's first debate between the Baldwin and Thompson.

But where is Tommy, and why has he decided to hide after his comment about doing away with Medicare and Medicaid? There’s a whole separate story line surrounding his public disappearance:

Yesterday, Washington, D.C. insider Tommy Thompson made a rare public appearance on the campaign trail in Wisconsin but as Milwaukee’s Fox 6 reported, “A Thompson staff member told reporters the former governor would not take questions from the media Tuesday.” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also reported, “He did not take any questions from the media.”

Check out the Politiscoop video: 

Tommy's comments about Medicare and Medicaid were instantly made into an ad by Majority PAC:


Thompson is on the losing side of convincing the public Baldwin is too liberal, and more:

Poll respondents were split - 45% to 45% - on whether they believed Baldwin was too liberal for Wisconsin. 49 percent said they believed Thompson was not working for them anymore; 42% disagreed with that statement. 49% to 35% believed that Baldwin would fight unfair foreign competition, as she says in her ads. But just 40% believed Thompson's claim that he would fight wasteful spending; 52% didn't believe that.

Republican thinks Military not motivated or responsible enough to vote!!

From the sound of this right wing Newmax story, you’d think that without “government assistance,” soldiers are not capable of casting a vote because they’re too…what? Dumb, irresponsible? Lazy?

Requests from military voters for absentee ballots have dropped significantly since 2008 — and by as much as 70 percent in Virginia and Ohio — leading a GOP senator, Jon Cornyn, to conclude that they are yet another example of how the U.S. Defense Department under President Barack Obama has failed the nation’s military. Cornyn, a Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the numbers marked a "serious failure" by the Pentagon. "This is an unacceptable failure by Pentagon leaders to comply with the law.

So conservative military types are not at fault for requesting fewer absentee ballots? It’s the party of “blame someone else.” By the way:

Cmdr. Leslie Hull-Ryde said that a similar number absentee ballots had been downloaded from the central military website the last time an incumbent president sought re-election back in 2004. "We are in complete compliance with the law," Hull-Ryde told Fox in a statement.

PA State Rep. Metcalfe on Voter ID Delay: "Skewed in favor of the lazy..."

Republicans are the biggest freeloaders of them all. They oddly feel entitled to receive all the benefits of society without paying for them.

Having said that, conservatives apparently have issues with those they deem not worthy of being an American citizen with constitutional rights.

Check out this amazingly obtuse reaction to the decision surrounding the Pennsylvania voter ID bill, which has been allowed a soft rollout this election season (photo ID not required). Chris Matthews probes a little deeper for the dog whistle racism.

Huffington Post: Republican Pennsylvania Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, who sponsored the voter ID bill, lashed out at a "judicial activist decision" he called "skewed in favor of the lazy who refuse to exercise the necessary work ethic to meet the commonsense requirements to obtain an acceptable photo ID." Simpson (the judge), he wrote, has chosen "to openly enable and fully embrace the ever-increasing entitlement mentality of those individuals who have no problem living off the fruits of their neighbors' labor."

The Odd Paul Ryan "Ayn Randian" Ad Moment.

It's not really a "vote for us" kind of ad, but a sales pitch for the odd brutal ideology of a fiction writer. It's not really a political movement either because no country has adopted an Ayn Randian economic and anti-social model. In fact, this Paul Ryan ad offers nothing but fiction, like an Ayn Rand novel.

It seems like an odd topic, and a bizarre attack on what has stabilized and managed our economy for centuries, the peoples government. This is nothing more than a self gratifying Paul Ryan ego stroke.



The Huffington Post dug up this gem, closely echoing Mitt Romney's 47 percent takers comment. Reporter Ryan Grim also said he would be posting soon the video of Ryan telling the crowd that he was trying to privatize Medicare. ;

"Seventy percent of Americans want the American dream. They believe in the American idea. Only 30 percent want their welfare state … Before too long, we could become a society where the net majority of Americans are takers, not makers."

Republicans Caught in Massive Election Fraud Scheme. So that's how they want to win Elections.

I came across this sidebar video (TV station unknown) and thought I'd pass it along. It appears GOP registration efforts have become overtly corrupt, after actually registering people to commercial addresses. 

It seems the guys who screamed the loudest about voting integrity were just creating a smoke screen, all the while carrying out their own voter suppression efforts. Thom Hartmann emailed off this editorial today that ties right into the above discovery:

Thom's blog

The Republican National Committee Has Been Caught Red-Handed...

Trying to sabotage the Democratic vote ahead of this year's election. As Brad Friedman at BradBlog.com reported, the Florida Republican Party cut ties with a political firm known as Strategic Allied Consulting after it was discovered that firm changed addresses on numerous voter registration forms to block newly-registered Democrats from voting in November.

The scandal is now spreading, as at least ten counties in Florida have discovered these fraudulent registration forms. And law enforcement authorities are getting involved in the matter. And the National Republican Committee has also cut ties with the firm, which it gave 3.1 million to register voters in wing states like Florida, Nevada, Colorado, North Carolina, and Virginia.

Unclear how much damage this election fraud may have on the elections in those states. This is blatant election fraud committed by the Republican Party, which has been focused on non-existent voter fraud the last two years, also, in an effort to rig the elections.

The Paul Ryan Fox News interview fallout continues-We're getting Tax Cuts No Matter What!

The Washington Post's Greg Sargent has a knack for noticing the "little things" politicians reveal in their zeal to convince, con and win over the low information voter.

Like the unpaid for Bush tax cuts, the Romney/Ryan plan is the same, but this time it'll work, trust them. Tax cuts will greatly reduce revenues by trillions of dollars, which will have to be made up with spending cuts. But "base line" stuff like that takes too much time to explain, time the public doesn't have?

A number of folks are having fun with Paul Ryan’s Sunday interview on Fox News, in which he declined to explain how the Romney/Ryan tax cuts will be paid for: “I don’t have the time, it would take me too long to go through all the math.” Jon Chait sees this as the latest sign that Ryan will “emerge from the race with his legend punctured.” But there’s another line from Ryan that is arguably just as revealing: Ryan explicitly admits that he and Romney would cut taxes even if they can’t make the math show that the tax cuts would be paid for. After Ryan’s remark about not having the time to do the math, Chris Wallace pressed Ryan this way:

WALLACE: OK, but let’s assume it doesn’t. The question is, what’s more important to Romney? Would he scale back on the 20 percent tax cut for the wealthy? Would he scale back and say, OK, you know, we’re going to have to raise taxes for the middle class? I guess the question is what’s most important to him in his tax reform plan?

RYAN: Keeping tax rates down. By lowering tax rates, people keep more of the next dollar that they earn. That matters. That is incentives. That’s pro-growth policy. That creates 7 million jobs. And what should go first...

WALLACE: So that’s more important than...

RYAN: That’s more important than anything. And more importantly, it’s not what deductions are in the tax code but it’s who gets them.

That is as clear a statement of priorities as you could want. Ryan admits that even if the math in their plan can’t work, that even if the tax cuts cannot be paid for by ending loopholes and deductions on the wealthy, he and Ryan would not scale back their planned tax cuts on the rich one penny. And don’t worry, this won’t explode the deficit, because just trust us, the revenues generated by the growth unleashed by the tax cuts will ultimately pay for the plan.

The consensus among many mainstream economists is that this is a “fantasy,” and as Jonathan Bernstein has noted, the same promise by previous GOP presidents has proven it to be magical thinking. The Tax Policy Center found, however, that it’s mathematically impossible. Romney sometimes deals with this by insisting the study is wrong.

But here Ryan allowed that even if the math explicitly indicates that the tax cuts cannot be paid for without raising middle class taxes — the condition Wallace laid down — the Romney administration would precede with the tax cuts, anyway. Good to know. Hopefully the priorities on display here will be exposed during the debates.

Flashback! Thom Hartmann Identified Walker "Divide and Conquer" strategy.

Recorded on February 28, 2011, just weeks into the Madison protests, Thom Hartmann presented the case against Scott Walker's "divide and conquer" strategy to destroy the unions.

This was well before anyone had seen documentary filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein's video clip of Walker telling billionaire Diane Hendricks:“

"Well we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. the first step is, we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use 'divide and conquer.'”

Just under 3 minutes, Thom simply and clearly lays out the right wing strategy:



As fate would have it, Scott Walker ended up using the "divide and conquer" wording. Surprisingly Walker's comments didn't offend or even anger Wisconsin voters. They were played by Walker, and didn't care:

Dumb Ron Johnson Doesn't See a Problem with Outsourcing. He's the only one.

From Sly in the Morning, this amazing response (not so amazing really) from dumb Ron Johnson. Remember, Johnson loves Communist China's business climate.

This bill wasn't allowed to advance, to be debated, to ever see the light of day. Johnson has a problem with discussing anything.

With so many lost manufacturing jobs, it's reckless and uninformed to say outsourcing is not the reason were seeing sluggish job growth. Business regulation, the villain straw man created by Republicans to explain the Great Recession, didn't change during that time, when the worlds economy convulsed. It changed later to control an out of control Wall Street Banks.

RoJo advocates the country side for resources and turning business loose. It's a grand experiment not seen anywhere in the world, and could adversely effect hundreds of millions of people.

Rebuild America, Defeat Obama? What a plan...

Wanna get sick? Check out this cheesy rally, cheesy sloganeering, and cheesy turnout in Hudson. Lucky the Fabulous Freak Brothers aren't around anymore to see this:

More than 50 people turned out for the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama PAC's rally in Lakefront Park at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday. Hudson is one of 72 cities on the PAC's Rebuild America, Defeat Obama Tour.

Ryan Folds under Fox News Pressure, Claims He Might Confuse Us.

Paul Ryan expected a Fox News cakewalk. But that didn't happen. Chris Wallace rightly, didn't let go of the big question about the cost of tax rates. He also ignores the monopoly of conservative talk radio.

Ryan: "It would take me too long to go through all the math."

We're slow?



They don't have a plan because they've already outsourced and offshored all the jobs. You can bet if they won, they'd have a list of excuses why things just aren't working.

Thompson admits he Lifted ALEC Legislation and Deceptively Made it His Own!!!

This is just an amazing admission by U.S. Senate candidate Tommy Thompson, how back in 2002, he disguised ALEC legislation as his own when he served as a state representative. I'm sure it looked good to the voters. It should tell you all you need to know  about our smoke and mirrors Tommy, and how little work is performed by our freeloading anti-government Republicans. Here's the isolated comment as presented on Bill Moyers and Company's feature, "United States of ALEC" :

  

The Moyers video clip is already mentioned on Wikipedia:

ALEC was the subject of the September 29, 2012 edition of Moyers & Company[8] hosted by Bill Moyers.[9] In the report, Moyers reported on Thompson's long ties to the organization.

The American Chemistry Council – that’s the trade group for the chemical industry – has used ALEC to press for changes in health and safety rules on toxic chemicals. Earlier this fall the council poured nearly 650,000 dollars into supporting Wisconsin republican Tommy Thompson’s bid for the U.S. Senate this November. By now it won’t surprise you to learn that Wisconsin’s former governor has been a friend of ALEC going all the way back to his days as a state legislator, when he himself was an ALEC member. Take a listen to a speech Thompson made at an ALEC conference in 2002.

"I always loved going to those meetings because I always found new ideas. Then I’d take them back to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit, and declare that’s mine."—Tommy Thompson[9]

Here's the full clip:

Liberal UW-Madison voted Second Best Small Town College in U.S.

The destructive socialist student commies who attend the U.W. Madison, and protest the Walker Authority in and around the Capitol, are an embarrassment to Wisconsin. How dare they get such national recognition?

To praise these leftist wacko’s with some meaningless award only encourages their outrageous behavior against authority. It's time to cut state funding some more...

Cap Times: Madison is the second-best small city in America for the "college experience," according to an annual index released Monday by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER). The No. 2 ranking is four spots better than Madison's ranking last year.

The AIER index looks at 12 factors, including student concentration (number of students per 1,000 population), cost of living and unemployment rate. Ann Arbor, Mich., home of the University of Michigan, is No. 1, followed by Madison, Boulder, Colo., Gainesville, Fla. and Durham, N.C.

Just as bad, Democratic blue collar Milwaukee ranked 6th for mid-sized cities.