If you have to sabotage the economy to win, your ideas suck Of all the terrible lessons the Republicans have learned since 2009, the worst is: Economic sabotage works. In 2009, the President’s immediate efforts to stimulate the economy and rescue the auto industry took us from losing 800,000 jobs a month to creating thousands. But, before the policies were […]

Ask not who the banks will screw; ask if this is still our country If a law repealing stop signs resulted in streets clogged with totaled cars, you’d think they might bring back the stop signs. And that’s what I thought would happen when in 2008—less than ten years after the repeal of the New Deal era law Glass-Steagall—we saw […]

Seriously? That’s all you have?

On Saturday, Romney campaign spokesman Ryan Williams tweeted this:

View from floor during @BarackObama speech. Not the “overflow” crowd he promised tinyurl.com/7fcozsu #not2008anymore twitter.com/RyanGOP/status…— Ryan Williams (@RyanGOP) May 5, 2012

The photo was clearly taken before President Obama’s first campaign rally got underway. The empty section you see on either side of the tunnel coming out onto the main floor was directly behind the media stand so nobody was seated there intentionally. You can see this in the panoramic image my wife, Anne C. Savage, took while she was there. Go fullscreen with the pano and zoom in on the section in question and

When that’s all you have, you are in BIG trouble.

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How the bane of our political system made Bain Mitt’s Albatross. With the possible exceptions of Grover Norquist, Karl Rove and Roger Ailes, no one man has done more damage to the American political system than Newt Gingrich. But that was back when he was relevant, more than a decade ago. In the last year, Newt’s campaign for President re-imagined […]

Learning is not fundamentalist. What did the GOP learn from eight disastrous years of George W. Bush and the worst financial crisis in a half-century? Nothing good. If we’d followed their advice to shrink government spending dramatically, the US line in the chart below would be flat—much like Europe’s and the UK’s. It might even be nosediving as Italy’s is. […]

Millionaires to be blissfully unaffected. During last week’s debate on the Buffett Rule, the GOP complained again and again that the rule was a political ploy because it would only raise a few billion dollars every year. Also it would hurt the economy and possibly turn Grover Norquist into Grover Norquist HULK who bashes Republican brains with primary challengers made […]

Won’t someone think of the bombers? Nevermind. Someone did. When the deficit cutting committee failed to reach agreement last year, it set in motion a series of automatic budget cuts which included some military cuts. This, of course, is an anathema to the Republicans so they have been scrambling like crazy to find a way to trim the budget to […]

Karma’s a hardass, Pete

Pete Hoekstra, the Republican Party’s leading hopeful to defeat Democrat Debbie Stabenow in November is not looking so hopeful these days. Right out of the chute he ran a clearly racist ad during the Superbowl. That was such a catastrophe that he has since scrubbed all mention of it from every corner of the internet he could.

This past week he joined the GOP’s War on Women by calling the Lilly Ledbetter Act — the law forces employers to pay women the same as men for equal work or face a lawsuit — “a nuisance”. Yes, Pete, it’s such a nuisance to pay the ladies the same as men.

All of this is taking its toll on Hoekstra’s campaign. In February, he was down in the polls against Stabenow 53-42%.

Now we find out his campaign donations are down by nearly a third.

I hate when that happens

Mitt Romney is traveling around the country telling Americans what a complete disaster Obamacare is, the health insurance reform modeled after his own Romneycare back in Massachusetts. He calls it “an unfolding disaster for the American economy, a budget-busting entitlement, and a dramatic new federal intrusion into our lives.”

Meanwhile, back Massachusetts, health insurance rates in the program are actually dropping.

Now we KNOW who will be Michigan’s Senator after November 2012

Pete Hoekstra, he of the catastrophic “Yellow Girl” anti-China campaign ad that all but destroyed any chance he had of competing against Senator Debbie Stabenow in November, has now sealed his fate. How? By pretty much guaranteeing that he won’t get any women to vote for him.

During a campaign stop yesterday, he was asked about the Lilly Ledbetter Act, the law that allows women to sue companies if they pay men more than women for the same job. Hoekstra responded that it shouldn’t be the law.

I’m not kidding…

A tale of an Obama surrogate who isn’t This is the Week of the Woman™ for the Romney campaign and Mitt is going whole hog trying to prove that it is he, not President Obama, who is the pro-woman candidate (maybe I should pause while you stop laughing.) His chief advisor in this effort is, apparently, his wife Ann, pictured […]