Romney and Perry have spent a combined $10 million in Iowa alone. Romney’s campaign has spent about $1.11 million and a PAC called Restore Our Future ( friends of Romney) have spent about $2.85 million. The latter of which I have seen a few are attacks ads against newt Gingrich. Newt has said is has been running a positive campaign. Now that the Newt wave is over, at least partly due to Romney’s attack ads, Newt is pissed, Gingrich: Mitt Romney is a liar
On CBS’ “The Early Show” this morning, CBS News chief White House correspondent Norah O’Donnell asked Gingrich about comments he had previously made about his chief rival and the Super PAC whose negative campaign ads have hurt his campaign: “You scolded Mitt Romney, his friends who are running this Super PAC that has funded that, and you said of Mitt Romney, ‘Someone who will lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when they are president. I have to ask you, are you calling Mitt Romney a liar?”
“Yes,” Gingrich replied.
“You’re calling Mitt Romney a liar?”
“Well, you seem shocked by it!” said Gingrich. “This is a man whose staff created the PAC, his millionaire friends fund the PAC, he pretends he has nothing to do with the PAC – it’s baloney. He’s not telling the American people the truth.
“It’s just like this pretense that he’s a conservative. Here’s a Massachusetts moderate who has tax-paid abortions in ‘Romneycare,’ puts Planned Parenthood in ‘Romneycare,’ raises hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes on businesses, appoints liberal judges to appease Democrats, and wants the rest of us to believe somehow he’s magically a conservative.
“I just think he ought to be honest with the American people and try to win as the real Mitt Romney, not try to invent a poll-driven, consultant-guided version that goes around with talking points, and I think he ought to be candid. I don’t think he’s being candid and that will be a major issue. From here on out from the rest of this campaign, the country has to decide: Do you really want a Massachusetts moderate who won’t level with you to run against Barack Obama who, frankly, will just tear him apart? He will not survive against the Obama machine.”
This is not irony, it is irony on steroids. It’s a Hollywood special effects mega-movie of the irony monster that ate conservatism from the inside out. The attack ads are made possible by the unlimited spending secret Super PACS unleashed to new heights by Citizens United. A decision made by conservatives on a court packed with ethically challenged conservative judicial activists. Newt and those conservatives who prefer anyone but Romney are reaping what they sowed. Newt Gingrich is correct about Romney breaking bad on the attack ads and short sheeting the truth. Liberals have pointed out that Romney has become a serial and unrepentant liar. Moderate to liberal citizens may wonder, gee, don’t conservatives fact check their candidates. No. Supporters hear the lies, believe them and are so certain of this new “truth” they do not generally bother to do any fact checking – that tendency goes through the roof if a liberal progressive is the one exposing the lie. This tendency to be lousy citizens and uniformed voters can be confirmed by visiting some of the popular conservative blogs such as Michelle Malkin, Gateway Pundit or conservative sites like the National Review.
So Newt Gingrich, yes that Newt, is complaining about lies and attacks during a political campaign. This from the party of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. The political movement of the politics of destruction, the politics of the shock doctrine, the politics of fear and hysteria. The politics which sends kids and parents off to die for a lie and never apologize or make amends. The same conservative Republican party that helped Wall Street steal trillions of the nations’ wealth and blame it all on Fannie May. Let’s say the CIA wrote up a dossier of Newt’s flip-flops, lies and reality challenged “ideas”. With a FOIA request you would get back a booklet of largely redacted tripe. He as been a virtual pin ball machine of policy prescriptions and corruption. Should someone ever put a Newt character in a game of virtual politics, who’ll be able to find out which of your friends is masking a monstrous personality disorder when they choose him as their character.
With a few exceptions conservatives are not outraged by the behavior, lies or half-truths of any of the conservative candidates. Want to see a conservative get upset? Let them tell you about the time they saw someone buy a bag of gummy bears with food stamps. Or tell them you’re going to buy some energy-saving light bulbs. Or Obama’s birth certificate is real. They may have a breakdown if you tell them that the average effective tax rate was lower under Clinton and Obama than Saint Ronnie. One of the hit-men for the far Right, Eric Cantor (R-VA) was so shocked by this revelation on 60 Minutes he suddenly became speechless. This tax information has been floating around for a while. What is a full-time conservative reality denier to do. Change the argument i.e. well by the time he left office taxes were lower than when he went in. He raised taxes or he didn’t is the question put to Cantor and the challenge to Ronnie the Perfect Conservative. He slashed taxes and saw that he was going to run some extreme deficit numbers – conservatives care about the deficit when its convenient – so he raised taxes again and again.
Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, 57.3
Highway Revenue Act of 1982, 4.9
Social Security Amendments of 1983, 24.6
Railroad Retirement Revenue Act of 1983, 1.2
Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, 25.4
Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985, 2.9
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986, 2.4
Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986, 0.6
Continuing Resolution for 1987, 2.8
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987, 8.6
Continuing Resolution for 1988, 2.0
Total cumulative tax increase, 132.7
Added $2 Trillion to national debt.
The illusion of Reagan as conservative tax saint even went back to his days as robber-in-chief governor of California. It is the conservative argument that federal tax increases on income and capital gains simply back to those of the Clinton administration were the vast majority of Americans had a very low effective tax rate, is the road to serfdom, socialism, hell or whatever over the top babble. In short being sane and reasonable are bad things.
Ron Paul(R-TX) May Be a Useful Tool, But He is a Crackpot
This obsessive idea has, at various times in his career, led him to: denounce the Civil Rights Act because it infringed the free-market right of a monolithic white establishment to immiserate blacks; dabble in gold buggery and advocate the elimination of the Federal Reserve, apparently because the global economy worked so well back in the era before central banks; suggest that the border fence is being built to keep Americans from leaving the country; claim that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional and should be dismantled; mount repeated warnings that hyperinflation is right around the corner; insist that global warming is a gigantic hoax; hint that maybe the CIA helped to coordinate the 9/11 attacks; oppose government-sponsored flu shots; and allege that the UN wants to confiscate our guns.
[ ]…Now, balanced against that you have the fact that Paul opposes the War on Drugs and supports a non-interventionist foreign policy. But guess what? Even there, he’s a crank. Even if you’re a hard-core non-interventionist yourself, you probably think World War II was a war worth fighting. But not Ron Paul. He thinks we should have just minded our own damn business. And even if you’re a hardcore opponent of our current drug policy — if you think not just that marijuana should be legalized, not just that hard drugs should be decriminalized, but that all illicit drugs should be fully legalized — I’ll bet you still think that maybe we should retain some regulations on a few of the worst drugs. They’re pretty dangerous, after all, and no matter how much you hate the War on Drugs you might have a few qualms about a global marketing behemoth like RJ Reynolds having free rein to advertise and sell anything it wants, anywhere it wants, in any way it wants. But not Ron Paul. As near as I can tell, he just wants everything legalized, full stop.
Paul still makes a useful tool for progressives to mess with conservatives and to send a message to Washington about excessive military intervention, drug policy and SOPA.
In trying to be fair and pick on almost everyone, Six Reasons Why Rupert Murdoch Is Tweeting for Santorum
As you may have heard, Rupert Murdoch is now on Twitter. In a series of tweets under his own name over the New Year, the eighty-year-old mogul announced his arrival in the Twittosphere by reviewing his holiday reading (Matt Ridley’s “The Rational Optimist”—“Great Book”. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs—“interesting but unfair”); complaining about how crowded it was in St. Barts; and registering his support for Rick Santorum.
“Good to see santorum surging in Iowa,” Murdoch wrote on January 1st. “Regardless of policies, all debates showed principles, consistency and humility like no other.” The following day, he followed up with another message: “Can’t resist this tweet, but all Iowans think about Rick Santorum. Only candidate with genuine big vision for country.”
Taking lectures or tweets from Murdoch on “principles” is like ask a Satan worshiper how to live your life. Murdoch has declared war on blue-collar and middle-class Americans. He is a foreigner who meddles in American politics and has tried with some success to be a king-maker. Now Murdoch is endorses a guy who is possessed by a morbid sense of morality that only a corrupt 15th century priest could appreciate. Ricky and Rupert thinks the government should get up in every woman’s uterus as well – Santorum: States Should Have The Right To Outlaw Birth Control- Anyway,
5) It’s a welcome diversion. Over the past few months, hardly a sentence has appeared in the media about Murdoch and News Corp. without the words “News of the World” and “phone hacking” attached to them. This provides reporters with something else to write about.
As I pasted that quote I remember that Murdoch’s media empire was the ones who hacked the phones of the families of 9-11 victims to get juicy stories for the tabloids. So Rupert does share Santorum’s morbid imagination.
L.A. arson suspect is 24-year-old Hollywood man. He is white and male, does not have a Muslim or Latino sounding name so the Right has no use for this story unless they find he has some political affiliations they don’t like.
The Long Goodbye 