Hey, Mitt — Politics Ain’t Beanbag

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Mittens thinks his business record as well as his taxes should be off limits in the campaign.

Mitt Romney, battered by Democratic attacks over his Bain Capital record and taxes, is calling on President Obama to agree to a truce over his business career.

“Our campaign would be — helped immensely if we had an agreement between both campaigns that we were only going to talk about issues and that attacks based upon — business or family or taxes or things of that nature,” Romney said, according to excerpts of an upcoming interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd released Friday.

Romney said he would prefer the campaigns “only talk about issues,” and claimed that “our ads haven’t gone after the president personally. … We haven’t dredged up the old stuff that people talked about last time around. We haven’t gone after the personal things.”

Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul offered up a broader take on whether Romney was really suggesting that his career at Bain Capital — the crux of his argument that he is better equipped to handle the economy — should be considered off-limits.

First, since Mittens has been running on his business career, it’s not off limits. And if he’s not going to release his taxes, he needs to man up and take his lumps for it, and stop whining.

Second, Mitt’s anti-Obama ads are among the most dishonest campaign ads ever produced. For example,

Mitt’s anti-Obama welfare reform ad is a lie.

Mitt claimed the Obama campaign was trying to take voting rights away from servicemen and women — a lie.

The “you didn’t build that” ad — a deceitful fabrication.

I could go on. Basically, under Mitt’s Rules, he gets to lie with impunity, but the Obama campaign is not allowed to tell the truth about Mitt. I guess he thinks that’s the only way he can win.

RNC Convention Speakers: Lettin’ the Freak Flag Fly

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Here is the current list of people scheduled to speak at the RNC convention, in no particular order:

  • Rick Santorum
  • Sen. Rand Paul (KY)
  • Gov. Mary Fallin (OK)
  • Jeb Bush
  • Gov. Nikki Haley (SC)
  • Gov. John Kasich (OH)
  • Gov. Rick Scott (FL)
  • Condi Rice
  • Mike Huckabee
  • Sen. John McCain (AZ)
  • Gov. Susana Martinez (NM)
  • Gov. Scott Walker (WI)
  • Ted Cruz, Tea Party whackjob who just won a Texas primary to run for Senate
  • Gov. Luis Fortuno, Puerto Rico
  • Sam Olens, Attorney General of Georgia
  • Pam Bondi, Attorney General of Florida

I’m assuming the worst whackjobs will not be speaking in prime time. However, at least half of these people belong in the character disorder hall of fame.

Conspicuously absent: Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Eric Cantor. I’m predicting that’s the short list for both keynote speaker and veep.

Apology Due From Naomi Wolf

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Fox News is outraged —

The Obama administration told law enforcement authorities to go easy on Occupy Wall Street protesters, even though they were violating local laws, according to documents obtained by watchdog group Judicial Watch.

Emails from the General Services Administration show that the federal agency, acting on orders from the White House, told federal law enforcement authorities in Portland, Ore., not to enforce curfews on protesters camped out on federal property. JudicialWatch.org obtained the emails through Freedom of Information Act request lodged last year.

In one email exchange between the GSA and the Department of Homeland Security, it was clearly said that the White House preferred that Occupiers be left alone and allowed to camp overnight as long as there was no threat to public safety. What arrests had been made at that point had been carried out by local police in defiance of a request from the feds.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the emails show the White House was protecting Occupy protesters.

“We now have a new GSA scandal — one that involves the Obama White House,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These documents clearly show that federal agencies colluded with the Obama White House to allow the Occupy Wall Street protesters to violate the law with impunity. These documents tell us that the GSA and DHS can’t be relied upon to protect federal workers or property.”

Although it’s touching to know that someone on the Right actually cares about federal workers, I must note that this new scandal is the flip side of the old one, in which the DHS, under orders from the White House, coordinated a violent crackdown of Occupiers. This story was pushed last November in a widely read Guardian post by Naomi Wolf. Even after thorough debunking, some posters at Firedoglake continued to flog this long-deceased horse for several more months because, your know, Obama is evil and we should have elected Hillary.

And I’m not holding my breath waiting for the Fox News story to pop up at Firedoglake.

Coming Attractions: The GOP Convention

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The upcoming Republican National Convention could be a train wreck. Instead of the usual perfectly choreographed variety show, we’re likely to see an epic battle between take-no-prisoners baggers and what’s left of the GOP establishment. And then there are Ron Paul groupies, many of which are still fighting to take over state delegations.

For example, this is from yesterday’s New Orleans Times Picayune:

Ron Paul forces in Louisiana were willing to employ “dishonest and disruptive tactics” to manipulate voting at the party’s presidential caucuses and try to “hijack” the state convention to “overrule the will of nearly 200,000 presidential primary voters,” according to a brief filed by the Louisiana Republican Party with the national GOP’s Committee on Contests. The state party is defending the 46-member delegation it is sending to the National Republican Convention at the end of the month in Tampa from a challenge by Ron Paul supporters in the state

The challenge on behalf of the Paul supporters portrayed state party Chairman Roger Villere and the party apparatus as operating in a manner “more characteristic of a North Korean politburo than a democratic American political party that honors procedures and majority votes,” in order to keep the Ron Paul majority at the state party convention in Shreveport in June from working its will.

Similar disputes are ongoing in other states as well. The convention begins August 27.

And then there are the baggers. Nobody seems to know what percentage of the delegates are from the Tea Party, but those that are will very likely insist that the platform and agenda reflect their ideology and only their ideology, or else they are going to get very loud and nasty about it.

Mittens wants the convention to be a five-day ode to his magnificence. Will the baggers behave? Will they refrain from booing and walkouts and otherwise doing whatever they can do to draw attention to themselves? Not likely.

Mitt’s vice presidential pick will either alienate the baggers, causing them to act up; or it will please the baggers, causing general election voters to stamped to President Obama. I don’t see a lot of wiggle room for Mitt there.

In short, this convention could be epic. The GOP will be lucky if it doesn’t turn into a gunfight.

NBC? OMG!

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I think I’ve finally figured out why NBC’s Olympics coverage is so … frustrating. It’s designed for people who hate sports and don’t want to watch them. Otherwise this makes no sense.

Last night, a 19-year-old runner from Grenada named Kirani James won the 400-meter race by a substantial number of feet…. This was all wonderful but, for some reason, the entire NBC broadcast crew decided that James’s talent and personality weren’t enough to carry the story. Or, perhaps, the story just wasn’t American enough. So they larded up their coverage with paeans to the moment in 1983 when Ronald Reagan arranged to liberate Grenada from the clutches of Cuban construction workers.

And in the amount of time they were going on about Ronald Reagan, they could have covered several pole vault attempts and maybe some wrestling.

Romney-hood

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First, here’s a powerful ad:

Second — today’s word, boys and girls, is Romney-hood. This may become the center of President Obama’s stump speeches:

On the campaign trail Monday, President Obama debuted a new attack on Mitt Romney’s tax plan, continuing with his campaign’s leveraging of the recent Tax Policy Center study. From a pool reporter following Obama to a fundraiser in Connecticut:

“The entire centerpiece” of Romney’s economic plan is a $5 trillion tax cut, he said.
The president spoke of the Tax Policy Center’s analysis of Romney’s plan again.
“It’s like Robin Hood in reverse — it’s Romney-hood.” The crowd laughed and roared and whistled its approval.

The Romney campaign, predictably, said President Obama is trying to distract people from “the issues.” If Mitt’s damnfool tax plan isn’t an “issue,” I don’t know what is.

Who’s Lying Now?

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The entire Republican Party currently is flopping about in apoplexy over Harry Reid’s claim that someone told him Mitt Romney hadn’t paid federal income taxes for ten years. Why, they have even taken to calling Harry Reid a liar! Imagine!

According to Charles Mahtesian at Politico, it is extraordinary for one party to accuse the other of lying. I mean, really using the “L” word.

The Sunday news shows featured a rare spectacle that at once revealed the decline of civility in Washington and the depth of GOP outrage over Harry Reid’s unproven claim that Mitt Romney didn’t pay income taxes for an entire decade: two of the nation’s top GOP officials flat out called the Senate majority leader a liar.

That’s no ordinary criticism in official Washington.

There are plenty of other ways that pols use to call out their partisan rivals on their statements. Reid’s GOP counterpart, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for one, has already said Reid’s charge is “beneath the dignity” of his office.

But the actual term ‘liar’ crosses a line that’s seldom breached, signaling a widespread GOP belief that, even by the diminished standards of contemporary political debate, Reid has violated a code.

Hmm. Well, seems to me I have heard this before. For example, I remember Al Gore repeatedly referred to as a “serial liar” during the 2008, and that was for saying stuff that he never actually said, or if he did say it was actually true, if you looked it up. But let’s go on.

Reid is not backing down.

Reid wasn’t fazed. His spokesman Adam Jentleson responded in the afternoon by vouching for the credibility of the source and inviting Romney to disprove the claim by releasing a series of tax returns. Calling him the “most secretive candidate since Richard Nixon,” Jentleson told TPM: “It’s clear Mitt Romney is hiding something, and the only way for him to clear this up is to be straight with the American people and release his tax returns.”

The allegation irritated the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board, which called it “a smear from the fever swamps that say more about Mr. Reid’s ethics than they do about Mr. Romney’s taxes.” But Reid isn’t on the ballot this year; Romney is. And as the Journal argued, “Mr. Romney’s problem is that he can only disprove the charge by releasing his tax returns.”

Reid isn’t up for re-election until 2016, and who knows if he’s going to run again, anyway? So what can the GOP do to him? And there’s a chance someone did tell him that Romney didn’t pay federal taxes for ten years.

Unlike Reid’s unsupported and unverifiable claim, Mittens tells verifiable lies as fast as he can move his lips. So can I hear some Democratic spokespeople use the “L” word, now? Anybody? How about the recent howler that the Obama campaign is trying to restrict the military vote in Ohio?