I love stuff like THIS:
Mitt Romney isn’t very far into the vice presidential selection process. But according to a dedicated band of conspiracy theorists, the pick is all but a lock: Sen. Marco Rubio.
That’s the current thinking among a worldwide collection of activists who are obsessed with the secretive Bilderberg Group, an alternating roster of global power players who loom as large — if not larger — in the online fever swamps of the fringe as the Trilateral Commission or the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Bilderberg Group, which takes its name from the Dutch hotel where
The great thing about something like THIS is that conservatives can’t easily argue that the poll is a product of the so-called liberal media.
By the way, speaking of Fox and polls, I see HERE that some folks at Fox don’t like it when the company’s own poll produces unwelcome results....
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Given the wide reach of the Associated Press, THIS PIECE has the potential to become a big topic in the national political conversation:
Are Republican lawmakers deliberately stalling the economic recovery to hurt President Barack Obama’s re-election chances? Some top Democrats say yes, pointing to GOP stances on the debt limit and other issues that they claim are causing unnecessary economic anxiety and retarding growth.
The latest Democratic complaint came after House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that when Congress raises the nation’s borrowing cap in early 2013, he will again insist on big spending cuts to offset the increase. Boehner, R-Ohio, ...
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Destroying the icons of religions other than yours is a good way to make yourself look like an extremist.
Take this guy, for example:
Click here to view the embedded video.
...
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It’s time for another edition of our regular Friday feature on Mitt Romney’s aversion to truth.
As usual, OUR SOURCE is progressive blogger Steve Benen. Be sure to check the bottom of his post for links to 17 previous collections of Mitt’s mendacity....
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Remember Reaganomics?
Remember Clintonomics?
Remember Bushonomics? (Well, OK. You probably don’t remember that one. It got only limited circulation.)
Remember Obamanomics? (Stupid question. Of course, you’ve heard of Obamanomics. It’s still in effect. And all the cool kids use that word.)
The point here is that Mitt Romney’s proposed economic policies need a nifty one-word nickname. But Romneyonomics or Romneynomics aren’t going to cut. They’re not much better than simply eliminating the space ”Romney” and “economics.” What we need here is something that leaves something out of those two words to form a new word.
It has to invoke the person’s name (as in ...
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A couple of weeks ago, I praised a presidential campaign ad HERE for its straightforwardness and avoidance of tricky images and manipulative music.
That ad featured Stephanie Cutter of the Obama team — and so does this new offering:
Click here to view the embedded video.
...
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There was one pertinent element missing from yesterday’s Internet firestorm (HERE) over a right-wing scheme to newly smear Barack Obama with the rhetoric of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
The missing element was any effort to link Mitt Romney with the rhetoric of an even more radical pastor — the late Rev. Jerry Falwell.
Follow me on this. The parallels and differences here are as simple as they are striking.
Almost every time Jeremiah Wright’s name is invoked by his right-wing critics, much is made of an occasion on which Wright, in a tirade against this country’s long history of ...
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Joe Ricketts (above), patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs, reportedly is prepared to spend big bucks trying to smear President Obama with the rhetoric of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
There’s THIS PIECE in The New York Times:
The $10 million plan, one of several being studied by Mr. Ricketts, includes preparations for how to respond to the charges of race-baiting it envisions if it highlights Mr. Obama’s former ties to Mr. Wright, who espouses what is known as “black liberation theology.”
The group suggested hiring as a spokesman an “extremely literate conservative African-American” who can ...
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For all his vaunted erudition, political pundit George Will often is simply full of crap.
Consider THIS, for example:
The domain of language already provides plentiful evidence of barefaced nonhumorous lying that in other domains might get you ridiculed or jailed. Language Log has documented some staggering examples. The most striking is probably George Will’s repeated assertion that President Obama’s egotism is revealed in the extraordinarily high frequency of the first-person singular pronoun in his speeches. Mark Liberman has published about 17 Language Log posts on this topic since early June 2009 (this post includes a list up to ...
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Can you say “diversity,” boys and girls?
America is CHANGING:
For the first time, racial and ethnic minorities make up more than half the children born in the U.S., capping decades of heady immigration growth that is now slowing.
New 2011 census estimates highlight sweeping changes in the nation’s racial makeup and the prolonged impact of a weak economy, which is now resulting in fewer Hispanics entering the U.S.
“This is an important landmark,” said Roderick Harrison, a former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau who is now a sociologist at Howard University. “This generation is ...
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On the very same day that Gallup released a poll SHOWING that most Americans — including one in every four Republicans — expect that Barack Obama will be re-elected president in November, the Fox News Web site published a piece aimed at sowing doubts about that.
Some guy named Chris Stirewalt WROTE that Democrats actually are increasingly worried that Obama will go down to defeat.
Oh, yeah! Sure they are! They’re just scared to death!
Ed Kilgore chortles at Stirewalt’s silliness HERE and HERE.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, there’s delicious irony in the latest poll commissioned by Fox News itself. ...
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Six or seven years ago, before I retired from the newspaper racket, I wrote a feature piece on baby-naming trends in America. The more I researched the subject, the more I was fascinated by it.
For example, let’s compare the top ten lists for the decade in which I was born (the 1940s) with the lists for the first decade of this century:
In my time, the most popular boys’ names were, in order: James, Robert, John, William, Richard, David, Charles, Thomas, Michael and Ronald. For girls, they were: Mary, Linda, Barbara, Patricia, Carol, Sandra, Nancy, Sharon, Judith and Susan.
The ...
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This ad tells Catholic voters that their ballots will be “recorded in eternity” — which I suppose means that there will be hell to pay for anyone who votes the wrong way.
...
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The sophisticated digital machinery here at Applesauce World Headquarters has been plagued of late by all kinds of problems — viruses and various inexplicable thingies that make it increasingly difficult to honor our solemn pledge to bring political truth to a troubled nation.
There can be no doubt that this plague is the work of a sinister neo-fascist conspiracy. But it won’t succeed — not in the long run, anyway. Trustworthy techies have been recruited to remedy the situation, and their work likely will be completed within the next five days or so.
In the meantime, posting here will be more intermittent. The output will slow ...
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As recently as the other day, this blog was receiving comments from Ron Paul supporters to the effect that their hero still had a chance of capturing the Republican presidential nomination.
I can only wonder what those die-hards think of THIS:
Ron Paul hinted at it Monday, but today the Texas congressman confirmed something the campaign has never explicitly said before: He cannot win the GOP presidential nomination.
But in a convention strategy memo that followed up on his statement Monday about his campaign plans, Paul clarified the mission and shed more light than ever before on his intentions and expectations for ...
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Even one in every four Republicans expects Barack Obama to win a second term, as we see on the chart above.
The story is HERE:
The poll was conducted at a time when U.S. registered voters are evenly divided in their vote preferences. Gallup’s latest Daily tracking update, based on May 8-14 interviewing, shows 46% of voters preferring Obama and 45% Romney.
It is unclear why Americans are more inclined to predict an Obama than a Romney victory when the two are essentially tied in Gallup’s latest election polling. It may be that Americans recognize the advantages Obama has ...
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For many months now, I’ve been arguing that the Republican Party has moved so far to the right that Ronald Reagan couldn’t win a GOP primary election these days. And seemingly with each passing day, another prominent Republican expresses much the same opinion.
The latest of these is former GOP Sen. Chuck Hegel (above) of Nebraska, who SAYS “extremists” now hold sway in his party:
“Reagan wouldn’t identify with this party. There’s a streak of intolerance in the Republican Party today that scares people. Intolerance is a very dangerous thing in a society because it always leads to a tragic ending,” ...
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The geniuses at the America Future Fund seem to have forgotten that conservatives are supposed to see Barack Obama as anti-business and in favor of regulating Wall Street to death.
This attack ad fails to convey those messages, as Steve Benen notes HERE.
The increase in public acceptance of gay relations over the past 35 years, as measured by Gallup polls, has been nothing less than dramatic.
In Ronald Reagan’s second term as president, as many as 57 percent of Americans said same-sex relations between consenting adults should not be legal. Today, 63 percent say such relations should be legal.
And, as Gallup REPORTED this morning, most Americans have no moral objection to homosexual relations:
The slight majority of American adults, 54%, consider gay or lesbian relations morally acceptable. Public acceptance of gay/lesbian relations as morally acceptable grew slowly but steadily from 38% in 2002 to ...
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