February 2012
“I was basically pro-choice all my life, until I ran for Congress.”
– Rick Santorum, in a 1995 interview.
“Santorum is a product of the polarization of our politics. He has taken advantage of it. He understands it. And he will take a position to benefit himself to get a small group of people to love him adamantly. His personality hasn’t evolved, his...
3 tags
Republican Radioactive Rhetoric
“It’s not just that the most irresponsible candidates can play to the base and get a boost in the polls, while more sober-minded candidates like Jon Huntsman fail to get attention.
The real damage is to the process of running for president itself. Because when low blows get rewarded, the incentive to try to emulate Lincoln — holding yourself to a higher standard —...
Stock Market Does Much Better Under Democrats
“While Republicans promote themselves as the friendliest party for Wall Street, stock investors do better when Democrats occupy the White House,” Bloomberg reports. In fact, since John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, $1,000 invested in a hypothetical fund that tracks the S&P 500 “only when Democrats are in the White House would have been worth $10,920 at the close of...
Santorum: Takes One To Know One
Dana Milbank calls out that horrid little man for equating President Obama with Adolf Hitler:
“This is where Santorum exists, in a place of binary extremes of good and evil, where his political foe isn’t just wrong but adheres to a ‘phony theology’ not found in the Bible. His frequent tendency to go from zero to Nazi over ordinary political disagreements … shows why...
“It’s not a new candidate the Right needs. It’s a new electorate.”
– Michael Tomasky in the Daily Beast.
The party’s biggest problem is the ideological bloodlust of its base. No savior candidate for the GOP in 2012. The Republicans have gone completely off the deep end.
“It’s a party made up of on the one hand unprincipled cowards, and on the other of...
Romney Admits Spending Cuts Slow Economic Growth
Mitt Romney:
“If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting spending, as you cut spending you’ll slow down the economy. So you have to, at the same time, create pro-growth tax policies.”
Mitt broke the First Rule of Republican Fight Club: Never talk about reality.
Why The GOP Regression On Science, Truth, And...
“Why is today’s religious right and their political enablers and supporters like Santorum and Gingrich even more benighted, more backward than ignorant, uneducated pissants who lived nearly a thousand years ago? Why do today’s religiously (un)informed right-wingers scream bloody murder at the very mention of climate change, stem cell research, natural selection, and a myriad...
The Santorum Code: Combining Church And State On...
“[Rick] Santorum … admitted to [Bob] Schieffer [of CBS News] that he believes humans are biblically commanded to take dominion over the earth, and that environmentalism is in conflict with that mandate…. In Michigan today, Santorum is rehashing this speech claiming that ‘climate science’ is actually ‘political science.’ Translation: there is no...
“The issue, for Republicans, is not just that Santorum would lose in November....”
– Eugene Robinson, Rick Santorum Could Take Republicans Down With Him
3 tags
Independent Voters Side With Democrats On Tax...
Jonathan Bernstein:
“The dilemma for Republican politicians here is clear: their primary voters are pushing them into a position on taxes which embraces a version of fairness that few outside the GOP base share. So something such as Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan can be wildly popular among Republican voters, but electoral poison in November. Repeat across enough issues, and you wind...
“Conservatives in power have never been — and can never be — as...”
– E.J. Dionne
“This Republican presidential campaign is demonstrating conclusively that there is an unbridgeable divide between the philosophical commitments conservative candidates make before they are elected and what they will have to do when faced with the day-to-day demands of practical...
Newt The Historian Not So Good At History
“Defeating Barack Obama becomes, in fact, a duty of national security. Because the fact is, he is incapable of defending the United States.” — Newt Gingrich, quoted by NBC News, adding the country is at risk “someday in your lifetime of losing an American city” from a terrorist attack.
I wonder what bin Laden, al-Awalki, the underwear bomber and Muammar Qaddafi...
The GOP Race: Small Turnout, Mostly Old, White,...
“So far, three million voters have participated in the Republican races, less than the population of Connecticut. This means that 89 percent of all registered voters in those states [that have held caucuses or primaries] have not participated in what is, from a horse-race perspective, a very tight contest. Yes, we know Republicans don’t like their choices; it’s a meh primary. But...
More Election Doom For Republicans
Walter Shapiro:
“The Mitt Romney crisis transcends the seven straight national polls showing Rick Santorum in the lead. It goes beyond the embarrassing reality that the son of an auto executive and two-term governor has been behind in every Michigan poll conducted since Groundhog’s Day. Even more devastating for Romney is that elite Republicans have begun to conclude that he...
Radical Rick Ups His Rhetoric: Not His Job To Use...
Jake Tapper of ABC News:
“Obama campaign strategist and former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum this morning, saying he was ‘well over the line’ for questioning President Obama’s Christian faith. ‘It’s wrong, it’s destructive and it makes it virtually impossible to solve the problems we face together as ...
2 tags
Duly Enacted Law? GOP Says Not Good Enough
Andrew Sullivan on Republicans moving the goal posts on marriage equality:
I am not afraid of referendums in New Jersey or Maryland. Let’s do all we can to win them. The polls are now increasingly on our side. But the way in which a tiny 2-3 percent minority seeking basic civil equality has been forced now to be subject to state referendums, even after winning legislative victories,...
myspotforthought asked: your blog makes me pretty much cry with joy. and terror. also a lot of terror.
1 tag
Two Supreme Court Justices Suggest Reconsidering...
Two Supreme Court justices suggested Friday that the court reconsider its controversial 2010 decision that allowed unlimited corporate and union spending in elections.
The suggestion came as the court blocked a Montana Supreme Court decision upholding a century-old ban on corporate campaign spending in the state.
The Montana ruling seems squarely at odds with the court’s 5 to 4 decision in ...
Santorum's Preacher Complex: Would Eliminate...
“If Santorum’s comments [on banning online gambling] aren’t nanny state-ism in its purest form, then what is? If President Obama made the same remarks, the story would be getting the Drudge siren. Conservatives would be up in arms. Twitter would be flooded with speculations over what ‘vices’ the president would try to clamp down on next. If you’re a conservative and you...
GOP Chances If Mitt Loses MI: "We'd Get Killed"
Steve Benen:
How important has Michigan’s Republican presidential primary become? Talk like this is becoming increasingly common.
A prominent Republican senator just told [ABC News’ Jonathan Karl] that if Romney can’t win in Michigan, the Republican Party needs to go back to the drawing board and convince somebody new to get into the race.
“If Romney cannot win...
'Glad' To Have Him Back?
“We’re glad to have [Chris Brown] back. I think people deserve a second chance, you know. If you’ll note, he has not been on the Grammys for the past few years and it may have taken us a while to kind of get over the fact that we were the victim of what happened,” - Ken Ehrlich, executive producer of the Grammys.
You punch your girlfriend in face and send her to the hospital....
“I as a Catholic have absolutely no right in my thinking to foist through...”
– Boston’s late Richard Cardinal Cushing, 1965, the man who married John F. Kennedy.
The spirit of the church is not to control the lives of others, but to respect their consciences in a pluralistic society, and to uphold certain values as examples to follow, not as rules to be enforced.
The Commercial You Will Never See
It is very easy to promote the idea of having children.
The commercials you will never see are the real lives of millions of people who used contraception, who never had children when they were young or not ready, no single parents with kids out of wedlock, who were able to go to school, get that degree, get a job, live on their own, travel the world, have a full life with great experiences and...
Why Are We Mum On Controlling Our Reproductive...
“In the extreme and ill-tempered debate over the availability of contraceptives for women, we have heard from the president, the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, the Republican presidential candidates, members if Congress and various talking heads on TV.
All of them, so far as I can tell, are men. Where are the women?
Men discussing the reproductive rights of women…....
March 1st GOP CNN Debate Cancelled
CNN canceled its March 1 debate in Georgia after Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum signaled Thursday they would not attend, meaning the GOP field will meet just once more before the critical Super Tuesday vote on March 6.
No Republican candidate wants the public to see how bad they are. Who would avoid publicity?
“The Party Of Negativity” has a image problem, big time.
“A number of Catholic commentators and leaders applauded the Obama compromise....”
– The unholy alliance between Catholic bishops and the GOP, by Robert Shrum for The Week. (via turnabout)
Romney's Detroit Policy Was A Lemon
The Economist:
Free-marketeers that we are, The Economist agreed with Mr. Romney at the time. But we later apologised for that position. ”Had the government not stepped in, GM might have restructured under normal bankruptcy procedures, without putting public money at risk”, we said. But “given the panic that gripped private purse-strings…it is more likely that GM...
Santorum: Right Wing POTUS: Preacher of the United...
“Obama’s greatest skill is in getting his opponents to overreach and self-destruct. And this issue could not be more tailor-made to benefit the candidate with real potential pull with far-right-wing Catholics and evangelicals: Santorum.
If the GOP really makes this issue central in the next month or so, Santorum (whose campaign claims to have raised $2.2 million in the two days following...
“If this race does come down to who can run the most negative ads… and beat...”
– John Brabender, media strategist for Rick Santorum, quoted by The Hill.
The Party Of No: The GOP Candidates Of Negativity