DOWNLOADS: (94)

PLAYS: (527)

Embed

After Reince Priebus was re-elected as RNC Chair at their annual meeting Friday afternoon in Charlotte, NC, he painted a vision of the future for Republicans. Okay, he really didn't paint a new vision. He just whitewashed their old one and promised that they'd deliver the same crummy policy ideas -- this time, with a smile on their faces and a song in their heart.

After faintly congratulating him for winning the election, Preibus then scolded Obama, claiming that "[Obama] made your party into one of the most outrageous, government-dependent parties that we've ever seen in modern time." Preibus went on to claim that the president has "delivered less and less from our economy, particularly for Hispanics and African Americans, who have struggled disproportionately in the Obama economy."

Gosh, I think he just called Democrats a bunch of moochers. Again. This came right on the heels of his claim that Republicans would stand on principle but smile while they were serving up those policies, in order to win back disaffected Republicans and welcome newcomers.

How is what Priebus said any different than Paul Ryan calling 60 percent of the nation "takers"? Or Romney's claim that 47 percent of us are dependent on government and unwilling to take responsibility for ourselves?

As if to put an exclamation point on things, the next order of business after Priebus' speech was re-electing Sharon Day as co-chair of the RNC. Because Republicans love women, dontcha know? I won't mention that Sharon Day has been co-chair alongside Priebus since 2011 when he was elected, because then you'd know that her presence makes no difference to women whatsoever. It's pure window-dressing.

Gather, ye moochers, and celebrate! Republicans are going to save us by making sure we don't mooch and we don't have anything, either. Privatize everything, and life expectancies won't be a problem anymore, right?

Ed explains Preibus' strategy with regard to the electoral college

If you're just tuning into this, watch Ed explain Republicans' strategy for stealing the 2016 election. My hair is on fire --in advance of my head exploding. Preibus' "in your face" cynicism and thuggery is mind-bending.

I wanted to find a way to change the outcome, so I've been hunting down information on the different states to see how these efforts can be countered. Here's what I have so far.

• Virginia: Virginia has made the first move to change how their electors are allocated. Following their efforts to redistrict state Senate districts, a Senate subcommittee moved on Wednesday to make the change. Go to Credo Action and sign their petition which will remind Governor Ultrasound McDonnell that he shouldn't sign any bill that reaches his desk into law if he has aspirations beyond the end of his gubernatorial term. Virginia is also a state covered by the Voting Rights Act, which should mean a serious investigation of Republican efforts to disenfranchise minority voters in the state, who tend to be clustered in the areas. If this becomes law, minority voters will be deemed irrelevant.

There is some cause to hope, however. Republican State Senator Jill Holtzman Vogel opposes the plan. She abstained from the subcommittee vote and has said she would "likely" oppose it in committee or on the floor. I hope she means it, because that would break the tie in the Senate and cause the measure to fail.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (163)

PLAYS: (3208)

Embed

This display happened three times in the span of about ten minutes at the Republican National Convention today. A fight had been brewing since Sunday over a proposal to change the rules regarding delegate credentials in order to marginalize grassroots delegates (read that as Ron Paul delegates) by centralizing approval over delegate credentials with the candidate and committee.

Morton Blackwell is one of the leading dissenters. Via The Hill:

Blackwell said the rules committee would meet shortly after the convention convened Tuesday afternoon and that he would then know if he has enough support to stop the rules changes.

The changes are being championed by Ben Ginsberg, a high-profile Washington-based election lawyer who is representing Romney’s campaign.

Conservatives believe Ginsberg is supporting the agenda of powerful political consultants and insiders.

“The guy who pushed these obnoxious changes was one of two members from the District of Columbia. His name is Ben Ginsberg. Earlier this year he was employed by the Michele Bachmann campaign and now he represents himself as representing the Romney campaign and he is doing things which are vigorously opposed by conservatives. Ben Ginsberg is a man unencumbered by principal,” Blackwell said.

With Freedomworks leading the charge, delegates stood and chanted "Point of Order!" as other delegates shouted "USA!" over each other, putting a halt to business until Priebus could come up and get them to quiet down.

The remarkable part, however, is how the votes went. All voice votes, and roughly equal in volume, at least, John Boehner and Reince Preibus called the motion for the Ayes.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (142)

PLAYS: (759)

Embed

Oh, boo freakin' hoo. Poor, poor Reince Priebus. He is so choked up at the thought that mean old Barack Obama is deliberately trying to keep rich people from making even more money that he can barely speak at the horror of it all. I'm sure his self-proclaimed "good friends Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio" feel exactly the same way.

That ability to speak the most insanely dishonest things is one of the main reasons why he makes the big bucks as RNC head - the other being his ability to scare very wealthy people into donating even more money to the party:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let's get a response right away to what you just heard from the congresswoman.

PRIEBUS: Do we want to continue down the direction of unemployment above 8 percent for countless months, a president that hasn't lived the mission, hasn't fulfilled the promises. People aren't better off today than they were three or four years ago. Do we want to continue in that direction? Heck no.

And as far as Harry Reid is concerned, listen, I know you might want to go down that road, I'm not going to respond to a dirty liar who hasn't filed a single page of tax returns himself. Complains about people with money but lives in the Ritz Carlton here down the street. So if that's on the agenda, I'm not going to go there. This is just a made-up issue. And the fact that we're going to spend any time talking about it is ridiculous.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You say you are not going to respond, but you just called him a dirty liar. You stand by that, you think Harry Reid is a dirty liar?

PRIEBUS: I just said it.

We have a very famous saying here in Philadelphia that's several decades old, from then-Congressman Ozzie Myers, later convicted of taking bribes in the Abscam investigation. (He was the first congressman since the Civil War to be expelled for corruption.) It's this: "Money talks, bullsh*t walks." Good old Reince can talk all he wants about Harry Reid, but the fact is, most Americans now have their eyes on the ball: Why won't Mittens release his tax returns? Inquiring minds want to know!

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, what do you want from him right now?

PRIEBUS: Listen, this president has a job to do. And Harry Reid has a job to do. We have an opportunity in this country to save the very idea of America. To bring back the days of liberty, freedom, the American dream.

And the fact is, we're just -- we're not doing well right now, as an economy. And this president, is the head of this country. And he has not fulfilled the mission and he hasn't lived up to the promises that he made to the people of this country. And it's hard to believe that the president of 2008, when he campaigned and said he was going to bring America together, that he would trot out Harry Reid and try to divide this country and spread this division and hatred. It's ridiculous, it's wrong, it's untrue. And it's just going to hurt the president.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Setting aside Harry Reid's charges, a lot of Republicans, as you know, a lot of major figures in your party, have come forward and said that Mitt Romney should just release more of his tax returns. Wouldn't that make a lot of these questions go away?

PRIEBUS: George, here's what I think. I think this president has got a problem with the American dream. You know, when I grew up -- and I know that both Republicans and Democrats listening to this right now agree with this -- when I grew up, in a great place called Kenosha, Wisconsin, my dad was a union electrician, my mom was a realtor. We drove around town, and when my parents and we drove past a beautiful house on the corner, my parents didn't point at the house and say, hey, look at this lousy people in this beautiful house. Look at this guy and his new Corvette.

My dad did probably the same thing your dad did and a lot of dads out there. He turned around, and he said, listen, pal, if you work hard and you go to school, mom and dad, we hope you live in that house. We hope it's two times bigger than that house. That's the American dream.

And this idea that we're spending all of our time just killing people because they live the American dream and made something out of nothing and made money -- I mean, this is crazy talk. And I just think we need to get back to the issues.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So the short answer is, you don't believe it's hurting him, you don't think he has to do anything more on the tax returns?

PRIEBUS: I think it's hurting the president -- I think it's hurting the president because people know that the job to do in this country and the job that this president claimed that he was going to do was, what did he say? Jobs one. He hasn't met with his jobs council. The entire philosophy of Bill Clinton -- excuse me, of Barack Obama -- can be summarized in one word, and that's Solyndra. That's Barack Obama's philosophy.

Yes, Barack Obama is Robin Hood. He lives to punish the rich and give your money to the poor. Oh, if only.

Last week, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus compared President Obama to the Italian cruise ship captain who is being held on possible manslaughter charges for the death of 17 people. Priebus then doubled down on his comparison on Faux News.

And Tuesday on Morning Joe, Jack Kingston (W-GA) lamely claimed that Priebus was an "independent contractor" -- and defended his remarks.

BRZEZINSKI: That was disgusting. I'm sorry -- take it back. You all screwed up in a big way. You sat in a room and said, "Oh, this would be so cool to say. Ha, ha, ha." You slapped your knees and then you went out on the air and you spit that you, you vomited that out, and you made a fool of yourself. Does anyone want to add anything?

KINGSTON: I don't know that you can say that was anything but an independent contractor using his own words and his own writing.

Just how exactly is the Chairman of the RNC an "independent contractor"?

Then Kingston defended Priebus.

KINGSTON: There is name-calling there, and I don't appreciate the name-calling anymore than you do. However, there is also a point under it. The president does, in the State of the Union address, kind of revert back to kind of a lot of small ball items and isn't really handling the big issues of the day. Right now on the payroll tax cut, which isn't a huge deal, seems to be his biggest focus...

So, because the GOP didn't like Obama's State of the Union address, he's just like an incompetent, cowardly Italian cruise ship captain who is being held on possible charges for manslaughter? That has to be the lamest defense of a character assassination I've ever seen.

But that's Republicans for you. They don't back down, and they don't apologize -- and the media lets them get away with it. It's difficult to imagine the non-stop wingnut ragegasm that would've erupted if Howard Dean had said something like this about George W. Bush in 2004.

DOWNLOADS: (209)

PLAYS: (1062)

Embed

Is it unreasonable to expect the press, especially respected members of the press like CBS News' Bob Schieffer, to hold guests to account when they make ridiculous, incendiary, defamatory statements about the President of the United States? Evidently it's only unreasonable when Democrats do it about Republicans, but it seems to be perfectly all right for RNC Chair Reince Priebus to liken the President to the captain of the cruise ship that sank in Italy last week. Here's what he said:

SCHIEFFER: But Donald Trump -- he's, kind of, worried about it. You heard what he just said. He said, you know, he thinks they're cannibalizing each other. Do you think that's going to all come out OK?

PRIEBUS: Now, the history shows, Bob, that -- that tough primaries and a little bit of drama are a good thing for the challenging party. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- you know, they killed each other through June, and guess what? He won pretty easily. I think the evidence is there.

I think it's good for America. And in the end, in a few months, this is all going to be ancient history and we're going to talk about our own little Captain Schettino, which is President Obama, who is abandoning the ship here in the United States and is more interested in campaigning than doing his job as president.

SCHIEFFER: What -- what did you just say? What did you call President Obama?

PRIEBUS: I called him Captain Schettino, you know, the captain that fled the ship in Italy. That's our own president, who is fleeing the American people and not doing his job and running around the country and campaigning.

(LAUGHTER)

You made me think of it with all the ships behind you, Bob.

Really? See, if I were to consider a metaphor like captains of ships and the like, I'd think of Captain Chesley Sullenberger (Sully), who managed to save the crew and passengers of his plane by landing it in the Hudson River, saving all 155 people aboard the aircraft, instead of a cavalier, careless idiot like Captain Schettino, who had no business steering a ship so close to shallow water, failed to turn it in time, ran it into a rock and then leapt off the ship while passengers died in their life vests waiting to be evacuated.

Think about those metaphors. Who steered too close to the shore? George W. Bush and his merry band of regulators who sat around watching porn instead of paying attention to banks. Who failed to turn soon enough? Congress, perhaps, where Republicans routinely block each and every initiative to rescue this country from financial ruin? Who jumped into the life boats, leaving others to clean up and try and rescue as many as they could?

And yet, Bob Scheiffer's answer to Priebus?

SCHIEFFER: I -- I see what you're saying.

This is why we can't have nice things.

DOWNLOADS: (214)

PLAYS: (1217)

Embed

This sneering, preening performance by the new Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, yesterday on Fox News really set me off, for some reason. As you can see, it's all about blaming Democrats for the state of the economy, insisting that they are somehow responsible for the ballooning federal deficit and the need to raise the debt ceiling. That's the thrust of the RNC's latest round of Obama-bashing ads.

You certainly can't say they lack for chutzpah.

Look, this meme has been building ever since the Tea Partiers started raging about the deficit and the debt, and now it's the official Republican talking point. It all makes me want to ask:

Where do you guys get the balls to lecture Democrats about deficit spending and the state of the economy?

Seriously.

The previous Democratic president -- a guy named Bill Clinton, who Republicans hounded with a meaningless sex scandal -- handed off to his Republican successor a $46 billion federal surplus after having erased the deficit for three successive years.

That surplus disappeared the first year George W. Bush was in office, even before the 9/11 attacks happened, in no small part because Bush began slashing taxes for the wealthy immediately upon taking office. And then he and his Republican allies running the Congress proceeded to ring up the deficit to unheard-of heights, thanks largely to a needless invasion of another nation under false pretenses.

Where were all these Republicans in the years 2001-2006, when they were setting new records for federal deficits and destroying the economy along the way?

And then blaming Obama and the Democrats for lost jobs really takes the cake. It's undoubtedly true that Obama's policies have not restored jobs in anything near an adequate fashion. But those millions of jobs were destroyed on Republicans' economic watch, as a result of Republican economic policies.

Fixing the economy is indeed a much bigger uphill climb than the Pollyannas on the White House economic team reckoned. But Republicans have done nothing but make it harder, by obstructing every Democratic initiative to stimulate the economy and improve our economic competitiveness (which was what the health-care debate was largely about), not to mention the employment picture generally.

Indeed, it's now becoming crystal clear that they are perfectly willing to wreck the American economy entirely in order to defeat Obama's economic policies, such as they are. And at the same time, they not only plan to blame Obama for the wreckage, they are already doing so.

Remind me again why our president is deluded into believing he can bargain in good faith with these people.

OK, rant over.

DOWNLOADS: 271

PLAYS: 485

Embed

Wisconsin will be holding recall elections for six Republican state senators in July, a fact that has the Wisconsin GOP suffering a major case of heartburn. Governor Scott Walker made no bones about it: The only thing that could stop the radical Republican agenda are these recall elections.

So rather than campaign to save their seats, they're playing a little dirty politics. Via the LaCrosse Tribune:

La Crosse County Republicans discussed running a spoiler candidate against Democrat Jennifer Shilling in an effort to delay the recall election of Sen. Dan Kapanke, according to a secret recording of the party's general membership meeting last week.

On the recording obtained by the Tribune, party vice chairman Julian Bradley says he just spoke with Mark Jefferson, executive director of the state GOP, and "we are actively keeping our ears to the ground and if anybody knows anybody for a candidate that would be interested on the Democratic side in running in the primary against Jennifer Shilling.... So if anybody knows any Democrats who would be interested, please let us know."

Kapanke, a second-term Republican, is expected to face a recall election July 12, unless more than one challenger comes forward. Shilling, a five-term state representative from La Crosse, is the only candidate to declare her intention to run.

Should a primary be necessary, the general election would be pushed back, according to scenarios proposed by the Government Accountability Board.

That, Bradley said on the tape, "would give the state senator an extra month to campaign in. The opposition would obviously have to spend more time and more money."

Mark Jefferson was just named to be the Midwest regional director for the national GOP and is a former aide to Reince Preibus, RNC Chair.

Dirty politics, indeed, but not surprising. What I enjoyed about this tape was hearing just how nervous they are about these recalls. When you're hoping that public employees -- the same public employees who just turned up en masse to protest Scott Walker's radical agenda -- are sleeping through the recall elections, I'd say it's pretty certain you know you're toast.