Conservatives love MSNBC. It’s the crazy network that allows them to make fun of NBC’s broadcast standards. The latest evidence is an edited video of Rick Perry talking about a black cloud over this country. Now, because Obama is black (depending on your level of racial identification) he might have been referring to the black man as a storm cloud. Actually he was referring to “this debt,” as could be seen in the next two words of the video. Ed Shultz apologized for not showing the whole video, but not for the racist implication the night before. Al Sharpton just ignored his charges the next day.
The really dumb part is from left-wing apologists trying to compare this to the Shirley Sherrod video. First of all, that video was single sourced. Fox and others got the video from Andrew Breitbart and that video only showed the bias. NBC had no excuse. The Perry event was covered by multiple networks. Someone at MS/NBC would need to edit the video in such a way that subsequent viewings would create an illusion. I assume it’s the same guy who edited the race from the video of a black man carrying a gun at a Tea Party rally.
If you believe Breitbart, some dubious source gave him a video with the redemption edited out, for some possible nefarious purpose. Still, even if you think Breitbart edited the video down with the hope no one would ever set the record straight, it isn’t a Rick Perry level of character assassination. Sherrod still decided to palm off a white farmer on another employee and called a lot of white Republicans racist just 24 hours later.
I am getting sick of regurgitation journalism. Michele Bachmann gets asked about marital anecdotes from a decade ago. Candidates get grilled on what they said, not what they did or what they even promised. Jackass continues to get off scott free. Here’s an idea. Why not ask these people questions for the purpose of getting an answer instead of a response or a flub or a nervous twitch?
Finding romantic love can be a distracting goal for anyone, but for women thoughts of romantic goals are particularly distracting from science, technology, engineering and math, new research suggests.
These typically masculine disciplines are thought of as particularly non-feminine, and women unconsciously dissociate themselves from STEM activities like college courses and majors when they need to be feminine, the researchers said.
“It says a lot about the influences of the environment that women grow up in. They are socialized and receive messages that being sexy and attractive is very important,” study researcher Lora Park, at the University of Buffalo, told LiveScience. “We find that exposure to these [romantic] cues, even if they are very subtle, can affect their decision to major in these fields.”
Actually, while young nerds may be social pariahs, successful nerds are quite popular.
White House hopeful Rick Perry has at least some supporters in the Democratic stronghold of Chicago — President Barack Obama’s re-election team.
The Texas governor, a social and fiscal conservative, is seen by Obama’s top election campaigners and fundraisers as easier to beat than the more moderate Mitt Romney in the presidential election.
“I was praying Perry would get in the race,” said a former White House aide closely linked to Obama’s campaign.
While Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago will not talk on the record about possible election rivals, fundraisers, senior activists and influential Chicagoans close to the president say Perry’s more polarizing views make him a bigger target for the Democrat in a general election.
Yeah, they’re really gonna tell everyone which Republican they are most afraid of. Riiiight. And Barack Obama is a great public speaker.
Former aides to President Bush have taken to the airwaves to admonish Rick Perry for his comment that Texans would treat Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke “ugly” for printing more money in the next year — but criticism from those sources might be music to Perry’s ears.
Democrats hope to paint Perry as the second coming of George W. Bush, whose approval ratings were abysmal when he left office. At the same time, Perry is already trying to distinguish himself from his predecessor as Texas governor, and the Bush circle’s commentary might help him do just that.
[...]
There’s just one problem: It doesn’t appear as though the GOP establishment has learned much about the Tea Party, an amorphous group of movement conservatives who don’t like being told how to think by the establishment.
Witness this comment on Twitter by Dana Loesch, a high-profile Tea Party activist who often appears on CNN: “I will lose respect for [the] Perry campaign if they walk back the Bernanke remarks one inch.” They didn’t; Perry’s aides said simply that he is passionate about fiscal issues.
What’s more, Tea Partiers have said repeatedly that they were nearly as turned off by President Bush and his administration several years ago as they are by Democrats in charge of Washington today. If “the Bushies” are already attacking Perry, it may help separate the new candidate further from the 43rd president and lend him more credibility with conservatives.
This might come as a shock to some people but George Bush isn’t that popular with some Republicans these days, especially the ones associated with a certain beverage. They don’t care much for Turdblossom either.
The GOP establishment doesn’t have as much control over the nominating process as they have in previous years. But Rick Perry isn’t the candidate they fear the most.
I’ve got a question for Mom. Why don’t you have the guts to ask the question yourself? Too afraid of looking like an idiot in public? Well … too late for that now.
Perry manages to get in a good backhanded slap at Mom, though, when he explains that Texas teaches both evolution and creationism, and says that assumes that students will be smart enough to figure it out for themselves. Too bad Mom doesn’t think the same thing about her son here.
For the record I’m opposed to teaching creationism in school, along with numerology, astrology, phrenology and alchemy. But pushing your kids out in front of the cameras in hopes of embarrassing a politician is bad parenting.
I like the way Perry lowers his voice when he answers, making it hard for the microphones to record what he says. This obviously isn’t his first rodeo.
An Austin Ron Paul supporter has taken out a full-page ad in the local alt weekly newspaper seeking any “stripper … escort … or ‘young hottie’” who has slept with Rick Perry, part of his single-minded jihad against the presidential candidate.
Robert Morrow describes himself as a “self-employed investor and political activist” as well as a three-time delegate to the Texas state GOP convention.
“Have you ever had sex with Rick Perry?” blares the ad, placed by Morrow in this week’s Austin Chronicle. “Are you a stripper, an escort, or just a ‘young hottie’ impressed by an arrogant, entitled governor of Texas? Contact CASH, and we will help you publicize your direct dealings with a Christian-buzzwords-spouting, ‘family values’ hypocrite and fraud.”
[...]
This isn’t the first time Morrow has engaged in this sort of one-man attack campaign. Back in 2008, he paid for (and personally voiced) an anti-Hillary robocall in South Carolina that made the unsubstantiated claim that “Hillary knew about and helped cover up Bill’s rape of Juanita Broaddrick.”
A Ron Paul supporter is behind it but the Obama campaign is praying “Oh please oh please oh please!” Salon is only running the story because it’s newsworthy, of course. (I’m posting it because I like gossip and malicious innuendo)
If you look at the fine print in the ad it says “Offer not valid for enabling wives wearing Hillary Clinton boots.”
In the worst of the Democratic primary campaign in 2008, the angry end of the thing, when I had become a devoted Hillary Clinton supporter and was engaged in bitter arguments with people with whom I often agreed, I used to harbor a secret fear, the twin of my political hope: I worried that Hillary Clinton would win her party’s nomination.
This possibility scared me because I knew, with a furious surety, that if she went on to win the presidency, I and the handful of other Clinton supporters in my privileged, mediacentric, Obama-drunk circle would be forced to spend the next four to eight years hearing the words “We told you so,” spoken at various accusatory pitches. Every time she made a compromise, lost a battle or started a war, those of us who had — often shamefacedly — proclaimed a preference for her would have to answer for it, and more profoundly, have to answer for the dream we dashed. We would have to apologize to the world for robbing it of an imagined Barack Obama presidency.
How can someone be a devoted supporter of a candidate and secretly be afraid that candidate would win?
It NEVER occurred to me that I would ever regret supporting Hillary. I still don’t. Nor did it cross my mind that I would ever find myself apologizing to the world “for robbing it of an imagined Barack Obama presidency.”
That’s just stupid. If we had succeeded the world would owe us thanks. I read Obama right when his campaign played the race card on Bill Clinton – a ruthless empty suit.
But you wanna know what REALLY pisses me off?
People like Traister get paid to spout their opinions.
Most fundamentally, Traister’s petty critique ignores two simple things:
One candidate articulated clear policy objectives that were more progressive than the other, who consistently danced away from clear proposals or analyses, whose main accomplishment was and remains to have voted “present.” It’s far from unreasonable to suppose that the former candidate would have been a stronger leader for progressive values. Could many of the same roadblocks Obama has encountered have defeated her, too? Sure — and so what? That’s not the point of the comparison. The point isn’t that one would obviously have triumphed where the other failed. The point is that there’s every reason to believe that one would have tried, and there is ample evidence that other never did.
Second, the contest between these two was vicious, and the viciousness lay overwhelmingly on Obama’s side. The very hatred that drove Traister — admirably — to switch to Hillary… the very stakes that were raised by the misogyny that Obama’s fratboy team and their media helpers pushed day in and day out… meant that there was a breach to be repaired. And it never was. Obama has spent virtually every waking moment of his presidency caring for the sensibilities of Republicans, but not one moment caring about the disenfranchisement of 18 million Hillary voters or the woman-hatred that helped him to the nomination. He has made zero attempt to heal the Democratic Party, or even to tend to it, to build it as a vital institution. Rather, he has continued to sit inside the increasingly small cult of his own personality (ironic, since he has precious little actual personality). He has done a generation’s worth of damage to the Democratic Party, to its base, to its future. When Hillary warned of the dangers of false hope, she couldn’t have been more right on the money. And we’re not supposed to remember all of that?
The Obama campaign’s point person in New Mexico recently sent an email to supporters defending the president’s position on the debt deal and bashing the Nobel Prize winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and the “Firebagger Lefty blogosphere.”
Hamsher then goes on to explain why this is not a good political strategy for Team Obama based on polling numbers as to who supports Obama (hint, the liberal “Firebaggers”), concluding that “[t]his smacks more of narcissism and personal vendetta than any sound political “strategy.””
So if it were a sound political strategy, if bashing the “Firebaggers” would help Obama win, the Jane Hamshers of the world would be okay with being belittled and demeaned by Team Obama?
And they wonder why they get no respect from Team Obama.
For his part, Chakrabarti, stands by his choice of words, though he sees the controversy swirling around them as more of a distraction from the point he was trying to make.
“I wrote it three weeks ago, and I didn’t expect it to go viral,” he said of the post. “There’s a tendency to focus on conflict rather than focus on merits, which are really why Sandoval probably sent it out.”
The self-described liberal and Obama supporter who lives in Silicon Valley, Calif., calls the debt ceiling deal an “out and out win for the president” even though it didn’t include everything liberals would have wanted.
And, he says, agitation on the left against the compromise makes them increasingly look like the Tea Party.
“When I used the term firebagger, I meant people who are more interested in winning an ideological argument that they are in making policy progress,” Chakrabarti said.
Yeah, it’s all theoretical to us. None of us are actually affected by what they do (or don’t do) in Washington. We’re just latte-sipping liberals.
I hope the left starts looking more like the Tea Party. The Tea Partiers get shit done.
So far, President Obama has taken 61 vacation days after 31 months in office. At this point in their presidencies, George W. Bush had spent 180 days at his ranch where his staff often joined him for meetings. And Ronald Reagan had taken 112 vacation days at his ranch.
Among recent presidents, Bill Clinton took the least time off — 28 days.
I won’t begrudge any president a little R&R – it’s a tough job. And even when they’re “off” they’re still on the job.
But there is such a thing as “optics” and being politically tone deaf. Hot Air:
Presidential vacations are always dicey, even though a President never really goes on an actual vacation; they just change locations. George Bush took plenty of flack for his annual August retreat to Crawford, Texas, where his ranch is located, even though Bush was just as on the job as in DC and Congress was out of session during the same periods. Obama’s taking flack for taking off even though Congress isn’t around to send him any bills, which is unfair — to a point.
The difference between the two is that Bush just went back to his rather rustic and relatively humble home in Crawford, which could never be mistaken for a hoity-toity retreat for the Upper 400. Instead of going home to Chicago, Obama will rub elbows with the wealthy in Martha’s Vineyard who use summer as a verb, and the optics even have Democrats complaining:
With 14 million Americans out of work, a volatile stock market and a historic downgrade of the country’s credit rating, President Obama is set to begin a 10-day retreat Thursday at a 28-acre Martha’s Vineyard compound called Blue Heron Farm, which costs an estimated $50,000 per week to rent. That divide — and the presumed hypocrisy of a president who has pledged not to rest “until every American looking for a job can find one,” going golfing and biking on an island playground for wealthy celebrities — has been too much for political pundits to resist.
Obama has taken heat the past twosummers for renting Blue Heron, but the difference this time is the intensity of his critics and the fact that they are on both sides of the political aisle. Republican strategist Mike Murphy told the Daily Beast that Obama is “acting like the rich guys he wants to raise taxes on,” while liberal columnist Colbert I. King wrote in The Washington Post that this is the wrong time “to dwell in splendid seclusion among the rich and famous.”
Yes, a respite at Martha’s Vineyard is Obama’s idea of “not resting,” which more or less undoes the common-man connection Obama wanted out of his rock-star bus tour. Why not go to the Gulf coast, as the Obamas urged last year, if they didn’t want to come to Chicago in the summer? Why not Camp David, as Colbert King suggested, which is a way for Presidents and their families to take a break outside of the public eye while still giving the impression of being on the job? Camp David wouldn’t have cost the taxpayers millions in additional security:
Obama has paid his family’s share of the property’s rental cost each summer. But as is the case each time the president travels on official duties, taxpayers are on the hook for the millions of dollars it could cost for the Secret Service to secure the island, as well as for the transportation and housing of dozens of White House staff.
It seems that no one at the White House knows how to handle optics. This August will be a festival of failure on that score.
First of all, neither Reagan nor George the Lesser were exactly famous for their “hands-on” management style. Secondly, they went to their private ranches, not to expensive resorts or billionaire hang-outs. Last of all, they were REPUBLICANS, the party of the rich and shameless.
Democrats are supposed to represent the little peeple, the ones with blue and pink collars who toil and sweat for an hourly wage. So when the nation’s top Democrat is partying like a rock star it doesn’t look so good.
Imagine the positive optics if Obama announced he was taking a “stay-cation” this year to work on unemployment. He would work (or not work) just as hard while living in luxury in the White House and he could still sneak off for a few golf games and weekends with the family at Camp David. But if he did that then he couldn’t hob nob with his financial backers. It’s all about the benjamins.
But even worse is Obama’s annoying habit of making a big deal about how hard he is working just before he takes off on another vacation.
