RNC posts 2004 video of Obama calling the deficit under Bush “an enormous problem”
As Republicans this week extend their attacks on President Obama for the increasing federal debt, the RNC’s “rapid response” team has dredged up old video of then-Senate candidate Obama elaborating his views about the federal deficit during a 2004 debate.
In the course of his response to a moderator’s question about the “monstrous federal deficit,” Obama says it’s “an enormous problem” brought about by the Bush White House, which he calls “the most fiscally irresponsible administration in certainly my memory.”
“We have gone from trillion-dollar surpluses to trillion-dollar deficits in the blink of an eye,” Obama said. “Not all of those costs are the fault of the administration — obviously, 9/11 occurred and the decline in the economy. But what is also true is that it was aided and abetted by a set of fiscal policies that I think were on the wrong course.”
Super PAC hits Romney on steel mill record
The super PAC supporting Democratic incumbent Barack Obama announced on Tuesday a multimillion dollar battleground television advertisement and accompanying website attacking Mitt Romney for what it sees as a slash and burn style of capitalism practiced by the former private equity executive while at the helm of Bain Capital.
The roughly one-minute ad, launched the day after the Obama campaign hit Mitt Romney’s record at Bain, is the first in a series of the campaign ads that will run on television and online in the battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, according to a release from the organization, Priorities USA Action, run by former White House aide Bill Burton.
It features Pat Wells, a former steelworker at GS Steel, the target of a Bain leveraged buyout that Reuters highlighted in a special report in January. The super PAC’s video, and the Obama campaign video from yesterday, argue that Romney practiced a brand of corporate raiding that helped wealthy investors at the expense of workers.
“Whether the companies they came in and worked with made money or not was irrelevant. Bain Capital always made money,” Wells said. “He promised us the same things he’s promising the United States. And he’ll give you the same thing he gave us. Nothing.”
Despite the attack, President Barack Obama attended a fundraiser hosted by Tony James, the chief operating officer at Blackstone Group LP, the world’s largest private equity firm, on Monday evening. James’ boss, Stephen Schwarzman, is a fierce critic of Obama’s economic policies, particularly on taxes, and is a strong supporter of Romney.
Photo credit: Screenshot/Priorities USA Action
After gay marriage shift, high profile Romney backer switches to Obama
An openly gay, big-dollar donor to Mitt Romney’s campaign is asking for his money back after Vice President Joe Biden – followed by President Barack Obama – embraced gay marriage, the New York consultant told Reuters on Monday.
“When I heard Biden say he was comfortable with men marrying men I almost fell off my chair,” said Bill White, 42, a registered independent who has supported politicians across the political spectrum, including both President Bushes and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and who maxed out during the Republican primary for Romney, the former Massachusetts Governor.
“These guys are on the right side of history,” said White, who was married to Joseph Bryan Eure in October 2011, a wedding that was officiated by David Boies, a lawyer who defended gay marriage equality in California, and attended by — disclaimer — Thomson Reuters senior executives. Soul singer Aretha Franklin performed at the wedding, the first legal gay marriage ceremony at the Four Seasons hotel, the New York Daily News reported.
White initially backed Romney because the wealthy former private equity executive’s worry over America’s fiscal woes and his plans to rein in spending matched his own, White said.
“I was going to vote for Romney because I think he will be a guy who will have more fiscal control,” said White, who planned to donate more to Romney and had pushed his friends to cut checks to Romney, who has not yet refunded his money. White said he has not yet given to Obama this cycle, either.
The change came after the White House’s shift and Romney took to the stage of evangelical bastion Liberty University and said during a commencement speech that “marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman.” White said seeing Romney make that speech made him worry over a possible constitutional amendment defining marriage.
Public support for same-sex marriage is evolving: half of Americans believe same-sex couples should have the same right to wed as heterosexuals do, slightly down from a year ago but marking the second year that a majority of Americans have supported same-sex marriage. Six states, plus the District of Columbia, have extended marriage rights to gay couples. Twenty-eight states ban such marriages.
To add to andrea00 ‘s comment, the tangled mess needs more than four years to fix, and Obama is on the right path. If he does something about the student debt time bomb, he’s going to beat Romney handily.
A Clinton VP candidacy is a contingency that will be triggered if Obama doesn’t make a clear breakaway by the time the fat cats convention ends in late August in Tampa. Paves the path forhillary to succed Obama in 2016. The GOP has become too jihadi for my liking.
Obama compromised by Wall Street contributions, conservative group alleges
President Obama is too closely tied to Wall Street, claims a new web video that takes the tone of Occupy Wall Street, though it was produced by a conservative group.
The video, released by the American Future Fund, an Iowa-based organization designed to be “a voice for conservative principles” and “free market ideals,” alleges that raising tens of millions of dollars from Wall Street gave Obama reason to let (presumably culpable) Wall Street executives off easy:
“Nearly four years after America’s financial collapse, not a single senior Wall Street executive has been charged with a crime. Not one. Why? Could it be because Obama raised $49 million from Wall Street – more than any candidate in history? He rewarded top Wall Street donors and supporters with senior jobs. His chief of staff made millions from Wall Street — after Wall Street received billions in bailout money.”
The ad names Jon Corzine, the former Democratic senator and New Jersey governor who headed MF Global until it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last fall, as a particular example. Corzine “lost $1.6 billion in customers’ money but hasn’t been charged” the narrator says.
“Under Obama, Wall Street keeps winning, and Obama keeps taking their cash. Tell Obama to stop protecting his Wall Street donors.”
Watch, via the American Future Fund:
pot meet kettle. Seriously, do they think the voters are stupid? Oh, wait.
http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/01/05/223 2/hedge-funds-bet-heavily-republicans-en d-election
“A small network of hedge fund executives pumped at least $10 million into Republican campaign committees and allied groups in last year’s elections, helping bankroll GOP victories that changed the balance of power in Washington, according to a review of campaign records and interviews with industry insiders.
The review by the Center for Public Integrity and NBC found that some of the heaviest contributions from industry leaders came late in the campaign or were funneled through obscure “joint fundraising committees” and other independent GOP allies — some of which were set up to maximize campaign fundraising or to avoid disclosing the names of big donors. The Center and NBC analyzed campaign data compiled by CQ Moneyline and the Internal Revenue Service.
Bitterly opposed to economic and regulatory policies backed by President Barack Obama and Democrats — including proposals to increase taxes on some of their profits — top Wall Street hedge fund moguls were unusually energized during last year’s election. They held multiple fundraisers and coordinated strategy to direct what appear to be unprecedented sums into the coffers of GOP and allied political committees.
The net effect has given hedge funds important new allies at a time when they are fending off some regulations mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and an aggressive Justice Department investigation into insider trading.”
Obama, Romney celebrate tough, compassionate mothers
In two Mother’s Day videos posted to their respective websites, the campaigns working to re-elect President Barack Obama and his likely Republican adversary Mitt Romney packaged the top women in their ranks as strong-willed but compassionate moms who played outsized roles in raising the children of the men vying for the job as leader of the free world come November.
The Romney campaign reprised family videos to highlight the household challenges faced by Ann Romney, who as a tough, doting mother grappled with five rambunctious boys — as well as multiple sclerosis and breast cancer. Ann compassionately disciplined the perceptually quarreling Tagg and Matt, the video notes, and served pancakes to Ben, who needed to be fattened up.
“She is an authentic person,” Tagg says in the video. “You know who she is when you meet her. She doesn’t put on airs. She doesn’t try to be something she’s not. She doesn’t try to measure what she is going to say to gauge how you are going to react. She just says what she thinks.”
Ann Romney, who has taken a more active role helping her husband court women voters on the campaign trail, made her debut on the social networking site Twitter in mid-April by reproaching a Democratic strategist who said Ann had “never worked a day in her life.”
“I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys,” Ann Romney, 62, said in her tweet. “Believe me, it was hard work.”
Mitt is shown only in inter-video montage photos and the nearly four-minute video does not mention the former Massachusetts Governor’s record involving women or mothers, nor does it clarify his position on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the equal pay law Obama signed in 2009 as his first official bill. Romney won’t repeal the law, his campaign said, but it stopped short of saying whether Romney would have signed it if he were in Obama’s shoes.
The Romney campaign’s tribute focuses on the private moments of a large family interacting close to home and regales viewers with private, if innocuous, childhood memories.
The strange vogue in dumping U.S. citizenship
In 2005, a CUNY political science professor named Stanley Renshon compared citizenship without emotional attachment to “the civic equivalent of a one-night stand.”
Michele Bachmann’s fling with Switzerland lasted just 53 days – barely two of them public – before she came running back to Uncle Sam. That was right before Facebook’s co-founder Eduardo Saverin was found to have called it all off with the U.S, possibly for tax reasons.
Bachmann, who came out as Swiss to Politico on Tuesday, made headlines for deciding to split her allegiances – if only on paper – with a gay-friendly, abortion-happy Western European country. Her temporary Swissness made a farce of her fiery patriotic rhetoric, and added a cosmopolitan edge to her down-home image – an image she was counting on for her constituents to vote her back into office this coming term.
Yesterday, Bachmann declared that she had written to the Swiss government and asked them to withdraw her citizenship, which she’d acquired through her husband, Marcus. “I am and always have been 100% committed to our United States Constitution and the United States of America,” she said in a statement. “I took this action because I want to make it perfectly clear: I was born in America and I am a proud American citizen.”
Bachmann’s decision to become Swiss in the first place was a strange one – not because being a dual national is necessarily a bad thing (full disclosure: I have three passports, including one that is Swiss) but because it raised questions about the image Bachmann cultivated for years. She claimed to be naturalizing for her children’s sake, even though Swiss law does not require her to do so in order for them to acquire their own passports. She also put her eligibility for certain types of security clearance at risk, which isn’t a problem for members of Congress, but could pose complications if she ran for higher office.
That Bachmann reneged upon her decision so quickly also speaks to the troubled relationship Americans have with multiple citizenship. As citizenship scholar Peter Spiro has written, dual citizenship has been a contentious issue throughout U.S. history: In 1849, U.S. diplomat George Bancroft likened dual citizenship to polygamy, and Teddy Roosevelt called it “a self-evident absurdity” in 1915. As recently as 2006, Congress held hearings about the constitutionality of dual and birthright citizenship, during which a number of speakers decried it as unpatriotic.
This isn’t an attitude unique to the U.S, though. Europe’s nationalist movements of the 20th century wreaked havoc on the continent, yet in 1930, the League of Nations upheld the view at the Hague Convention that “it is in the interest of the international community to secure that all members should recognize that every person should have a nationality and should have one nationality only.”
Why is most of this article a political hatchet job on Ms. Bachmann when in fact being married to a Swiss Citizen she has a perfectly normal reason to get dual citizenship and apparently not for tax reasons! Whereas the thrust of the article should be Facebook’s co-founder Eduardo Saverin who RENOUNCED (come on Atossa you can say it in the article) his US citizenship not “possibly” for tax reasons but in fact for tax avoidance under the IRS current law since he has assets more than $500k and under current IRS tax law he should be considered a tax cheat having run off the plantation and if the IRS were even handed would be pursued to the ends of the earth.
I cannot fathom the author’s hypocrisy since she holds 3 passports but seems to think others valuing freedom is a strange thing.
I do note the the article would have gotten a lot less interest without Bachmann, whom I guess the press has a symbiotic relationship with. Talk about two weak sisters, the Press and Bachmann while Saverin skates away.
“Mitt Gets Worse” on gay rights, pro-Obama video alleges
Pro-Obama super PAC American Bridge has released a new web video outlining Mitt Romney’s various, and potentially incendiary, comments on a spectrum of gay-rights issues — marriage, child rearing, bullying — at different moments in his political career. “The more we learn about Mitt Romney’s attitude toward LGBT people, the worse it gets,” the ad declares.
The video — titled “Mitt Gets Worse,” presumably a play on the “It Gets Better” video project for LGBT youth — shows the presidential candidate repeatedly disavowing same-sex marriage, first as governor of Massachusetts (“Marriage in one state affects all of the states and therefore we have to have a federal standard that says marriage in this country is a relationship between one man and one woman,” he tells an audience) and, later, as a presidential candidate (“Calling it marriage creates a whole host of problems…three thousand years of human history shouldn’t be discarded so quickly”).
Romney’s concerns about the impact of same-sex marriage on “the development of children” are also highlighted: “The consequences of gay marriage fall far beyond just the relationship between a man and woman — they also relate to our kids,” he’s shown saying in one clip. “The development of a child in the history of civilization has been enhanced by the opportunity to learn from the gender characteristics of a mother and a father,” he says in another, although he doesn’t specify which “gender characteristics” he means.
The video ends with Romney’s reaction when questioned about a Washington Post report that as a high school student he bullied a classmate thought to be gay, holding him down and cutting his hair. “You know I don’t, I don’t remember that incident,” Romney told Fox with a laugh so peculiar that the ad plays it twice.
Watch, courtesy of American Bridge 21st Century:
Photo credit: Screenshot/American Bridge 21st Century
New Obama ads highlight auto bailout, claim moderate recovery
President Obama’s re-election campaign on Thursday released three television ads — two focusing on the auto bailout and a third noting moderate economic improvements since Obama took office — all part of the campaign’s $25 million May marketing blitz.
The ads were a follow-up to what the campaign’s senior adviser David Axelrod called a “foundational” ad called “Go,” airing across nine battleground states and painting a portrait of an America on the economic mend, safer without Osama bin Laden, and relieved that its troops are finally home from Iraq. A nation whose Democratic incumbent simply needs more time.
“Different communities have different interests, or come at some of these issues in different ways, and we want to make sure that we’re getting to them information that is most germane and most relevant,” Axelrod, a former White House aide, said on a recent call with reporters.
A new, 30-second spot that aired in Ohio features an interview with a young autoworker heading back to work after losing his job. “Obama stuck his neck out for us, the auto industry, he wasn’t going to let it just die. And I am driving in this morning because of that, because of him,” the man, Brian Slagle, says.
A second ad airing in Ohio and elsewhere — titled “Succeed” — shows the Democratic incumbent speaking about the “more than one million jobs” the auto bailout saved.
Washington Extra – Surplus shocker!
For anyone who thought the term “budget surplus” had been exorcised from the U.S. government’s lexicon, the Treasury Department offered up some interesting news today.
For the first time since September, 2008, the government’s monthly receipts outpaced its expenditures, resulting in a $59 billion budget surplus in April. The end of the 42-month drought does not mean Washington has solved its budget problems. Indeed, for the first seven months of this fiscal year, $720 billion in cumulative deficits have been racked up.
But you’ve got to start somewhere and April’s result hinted at a slowly improving economy. Other such bits of evidence surfaced in government data released on Thursday: New applications for jobless benefits fell last week and March trade figures showed consumers gobbled up foreign goods at a fast clip while U.S. exports surged to a record high.
House Speaker John Boehner, the highest ranking elected Republican, wasn’t convinced that it was “Morning in America” for the U.S. economy (to steal a phrase from the ever-optimistic Ronald Reagan). “The American people are focused on the economy and they are asking the question, ‘where are the jobs,’” Boehner said at a press conference.
Here are our top stories from Washington…
West Virginia primary ballot included felon, Virginia’s lacked candidates
A convicted felon not only made West Virginia’s Democratic primary ballot, he won 72,544 – or 41 percent - of votes in the contest against Democratic President Barack Obama, and could receive at least one of the state’s delegates to the Democratic National Convention this summer.
The inmate, Keith Judd, is serving a 17-1/2 year sentence at a federal prison in Texas for making threats at the University of New Mexico in 1999.
Judd’s performance was taken as a sign of deep animosity in West Virginia toward Obama, who was handily defeated in the state’s 2008 primary by Hillary Clinton and lost there by 13 percentage points to Republican John McCain in the general election. Joe Manchin, the state’s former governor who is now a Democratic senator, declined to say on Tuesday whether he had voted for Obama.
On Tuesday, Judd beat Obama in nine of West Virginia’s 55 counties. Republican party officials, aides and strategists emailed and tweeted with glee about Judd’s performance, and the Associated Press headlined its story, “Against Obama, even a jailbird gets some votes.”
The inmate’s performance also highlighted the sharp differences across the country in rules for running for office. While Judd, a convicted felon, made his way onto West Virginia’s ballot, leading Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were unable to satisfy the complicated requirements to get onto the ballot to compete in the Republican primary in neighboring Virginia on March 6.
Mitt Romney, now the presumptive Republican nominee, and Texas Congressman Ron Paul were the only two Republican contenders who made it onto the Virginia primary ballot. The others’ failure was taken as a sign of their campaigns’ disorganization.
Intolerance and hate are alive and well in WV. May God help you!
Goes to show Obama knows what he is talking about with regards to economy, in 2004 the economy was humming along with low unemployment, low inflation and decent growth. Those are the times you are supposed to be paying down the debt running surpluses, so you have more flexibility to have deficit spending during bad times, like the 2008-09 recession and subsequent slow recovery.