Blue Water Bubbles wallpaper. Also looks look upside down, for those who would prefer the dark blue at the bottom of their screen.
Jennifer Rubin belongs in the conservative hack pundits hall of fame. So I use this excerpt with that caution in mind. EXCLUSIVE: Richard Grenell hounded from Romney campaign by anti-gay conservatives By Jennifer Rubin
In a statement obtained by Right Turn, Grenell says:
I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman. While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.
No one should be fired from their job because they are gay, Latino, a Caucasian male or have a butterfly tattoo on their thigh. or any other silly reason that has nothing to do with their qualifications for the job. That said i refuse to shed any tears of outrage over the gay male version of Ann Coulter. That hyperbole about President Obama serves as a good example. Other than being gay Richard Grenell is like every other conservative, a hateful ideologue, a cult member of the voodoo economics club, a war monger, a serial liar, someone who holds ideals about integrity in utter contempt, a cheap shot artist incapable of even comprehending the complexities and ramifications of public policy, a dullard who wants desperately to be thought of as cool, a smiley faced right-wing loon and a purveyor of misogyny ( his infamous Tweets deleted to avoid embarrassing conservatives who claim they have not declared war on women). Unlike the average person fired from a job, Grenell will continue to live a lush lifestyle on the conservative welfare circuit churning out sleazy media ads for the next generation of Dick Cheneys. Plenty of things going on in the world that deserve genuine outrage, little Richie’s latest soap opera is not one of them.
Tea Partiers Who Opposed Bank Bailout Take Campaign Donations From Bailed-Out Banks
The 10 freshmen Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee who have Tea Party backing have taken more than $100,000 from the political action committees affiliated with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs…
The big banks are giving to Romney at three times the rate they are giving to President Obama. The tea baggers never stood for change o accountability. They are the ones that succeeded in watering down financial reform. Thus to day we have much of the same too big to fail threats to the economy as we did five years ago.
Barack Obama Killed Osama Bin Laden. Period. It was a bold, even risky decision, but he made it.
The Republicans have glommed on to a neat rhetorical trick: When Barack Obama does something indisputably admirable or effective, simply pretend that he had nothing to do with it.
This ploy was first trotted out in the aftermath of Moamar Qaddafi’s downfall in Libya, when Obama’s former presidential rival, Sen. John McCain, gave all the credit to the French.
Now Mitt Romney, this year’s presumptive GOP nominee, is waving off Obama’s role in the killing of Osama Bin Laden—the president’s signal national-security achievement—by chortling that “any thinking American would have ordered the exact same thing,” even Jimmy Carter.
Two new investigative reports—a book by Peter Bergen, Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad, and an article by Graham Allison in the May 7 issue of Time—thoroughly rebut that notion.
Far from the no-brainer that Romney depicts, the secret, high-level discussions leading up to the raid were fraught with intense debate and uncertainty—and Obama’s final decisions, on both whether and how to attack, went against some of his top advisers’ recommendations.
According to Fred Kaplan and his sources even Bush’s former Secretary of Defense and Obama’s current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates were worried that sending in a special-ops team might turn into another failed operation like the attempted rescue of hostages in Iran in the 1970s. Romney has literally suggested that he might go to war – start dropping bombs on Iran, North Korea and Russia ( Russia is back sliding into a corrupt authoritarian state, but Romney is under the impression that our relations with them are still at Cold War levels). So those that want to talk – as Mr. Grenell above has – about who is a wise, mature and steady hand on foreign policy, one cannot point to Mittens and say he is talking sane, much less presidential on foreign policy. Just as Romney has plans to double down on Bush/conservative supply-side economic policy, Romney has surrounded himself with neocons from the Bush administration for his foreign policy team.
If I was not so familiar with the shallowness of their honor, the non-existence of their genuineness and the long history of contradictory political philosophy, I would be shocked at conservatives. I would be shocked that they are apologizing to Pakistan and the rest of the world for all the trouble America, President Obama and SEAL Team Six caused for killing on of the worse terrorists in history. I would be shocked that they are showing the world’s terrorists a weak knee America afraid to kill terrorists because it creates a public perception problem for Conservatives. What we are seeing is the back-handed acknowledgement of conservatives that they just cannot cut it on national security and they’re deeply embarrassed. Embarrassment frequently reveals itself as impotent rage: Republicans Wouldn’t, Couldn’t, Shouldn’t Get Bin Laden
On Friday, the still bitter McCain declared, “Shame on Barack Obama for diminishing the memory of September 11th and the killing of Osama bin Laden by turning it into a cheap political attack ad.” For his part, the 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney scoffed that “even Jimmy Carter would have given that order.” Unfortunately for the Republican propaganda machine, we know that neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney would have supported the Special Forces strike deep in Pakistan. We know this, because they told us so.
McCain Said He Wouldn’t Go After Bin Laden in Pakistan.
Romney Said We Shouldn’t Go After Bin Laden in Pakistan.
Bush Couldn’t Get Bin Laden, Period.
The record of conservative failure in every aspect of governing from the economy, to education, to job creation, to the environment, to national security, to health care for working Americans might be one of the reasons they have intensified their efforts to have government control of every uterus in the U.S. They cannot seem to be able to succeed at anything except redistributing the wealth of the middle-class and blue-collar workers to millionaires. So maybe they see the uterus as a chance to succeed at something, to finally have command over one thing.
Top Romney Donor Pens Book Arguing We Need More Income Inequality
That income inequality is crushing the middle class and its political power. But don’t tell that to Edward Conard, a top donor to presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney who gained notoriety during the campaign as a million-dollar mystery donor who set up a shell company to shield his identity. Conard, a former director at the Romney-founded Bain Capital, is working on a new book in which he argues that income inequality is a good thing, and what the U.S. really needs is more of it, the New York Times’ Adam Davidson reports:
Unlike his former colleagues, Conard wants to have an open conversation about wealth. He has spent the last four years writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the superrich’s role in our society. “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong,” to be published in hardcover next month by Portfolio, aggressively argues that the enormous and growing income inequality in the United States is not a sign that the system is rigged. On the contrary, Conard writes, it is a sign that our economy is working. And if we had a little more of it, then everyone, particularly the 99 percent, would be better off. This could be the most hated book of the year.
Conard instead argues that income inequality helps everyone because investors grow wealthy by creating products that benefit the 99 percent. Though that is certainly true to an extent, Conard’s line of thinking leads to the supply-side policies that are proven failures at “growing the pie” for everyone.
Like every Democrat I know I like money. I think Wall Street is capable of creating good. Conard and many of the greedy crony capitalistic on Wall Street takes things a bridge too far. Conard will not acknowledge that when they started selling derivatives – a form of insurance for investments – that Wall St did so without having the capital to pay off those derivatives if something crazy happened – like the housing market hit a slump. He, Romney and the tea smokers want a Wall St that runs like an unregulated casino. I want one that respects the hard work and savings of all the workers that create the capital that makes every penny of wealth on Wall St possible. Conard and Romney think just alike. They should be treated like bank robbers out on parole, not allowed within 100 yards of a bank, much less the nation’s economy. One of the best responses to Conard and his crony corporatism is from Forbes of all places, Three Reasons Bain Capitalnomics Fails
It’s understandable why the Romney campaign is now distancing itself from Conard’s ideas. Here are three of the biggest intellectual low-lights produced by this Harvard Business School graduate.
1. Income inequality makes the economy work. Conrad contends that income inequality is better for everyone. If this is so, it would help to learn his explanation of why income inequality peaked in the U.S. at two points in its history that preceded the worst economic collapses in the last hundred years — 1928 and 2007.
[ ]…2. Google (GOOG) and Wall Street have the same social benefit. Conard quite seriously conflates the truly beneficial technologies discovered and marketed by Silicon Valley with what Wall Street does. He believes that they both make their executives rich and make consumers better off in the bargain.
This argument is wrong on at least two levels. First, while Google has made people far more productive, Wall Street is a cancer on society — it enriches its executives when times are good, siphons off fees from consumers in exchange for holding on to their money, and when it borrows too much money — which it does every decade or so — government bails it out. ( the very wealthy – Conard belongs to the upper 0.1% are as motivated by ego and power as they say they are by profits. Not creating benefits for mankind – that’s according to studies)
[ ]….3. Statistics are the best way to bag a mate. To find his wife, Conard used a statistical system. This involved several steps: market sizing: calculate the number of potential mates in your geographic area using demographic data; calibration: “dating as many people as you can so that you have a sense of what the marriage marketplace is like;” and selection: picking a permanent mate.
Too bad Marie Antoinette is dead, they would have been a great match – statistically speaking of course – in terms of promulgating the genes of the clueless.
The Long Goodbye 