Salon: Obama Using the Karl Rove 2004 Playbook

Like his predecessors, Obama will do anything and everything to get re-elected. Many of his followers will go along because they've been brainwashed into believing the 'ends-justifies-the-means' because he is the 'lesser-of-two-evils' argument. And as a result we will get more of the failed policies that have been destroying this country for decades:

Barack Obama’s presidency was born from nothing so much as his repudiation of George W. Bush’s administration — its policies and politics, its style and tone. One of Obama’s most effective 2008 stump speech refrains was his promise to end the era of “Scooter Libby justice, ‘Brownie’ incompetence and Karl Rove politics.”

But the political dynamics for winning a second presidential term often differ markedly from winning the first. So don’t be surprised by many eerie parallels between Obama’s 2012 reelection bid and Bush’s 2004 campaign. The president may not rely upon “Karl Rove politics” in the strictest sense, and nobody would confuse David Axelrod with Rove. But Obama’s reelection route and rhetoric may bear more than a few Rovian hallmarks.

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Prisoner gets 41% against Obama in WV Primary

How appropriate. They're all crooks anyway:

President Obama is so unpopular with some West Virginia Democrats that they voted for a prisoner in yesterday's primary.

A prisoner in Texas, no less.

Keith Judd, who is serving time at the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Texas for making threats, actually got 41% of the vote against Obama in the West Virginia Democratic primary.

Warren Buffett says he won't donate to Obama super PACs

Source:

Despite his public backing of President Obama, billionaire investor Warren Buffett won't be donating money to any of the outside groups supporting the president's bid for re-election.

"I don't want to see democracy go in that direction," the Berkshire Hathaway chairman and chief executive officer said over the weekend at his company's annual shareholders meeting, according to Bloomberg News. "You have to take a stand some place."

Transcript: Obama Re-election Campaign Kick-off Speech (5-5-12)

Nothing has changed since 2008:

"We came together in 2008 because our country had strayed from these basic values.  A record surplus was squandered on tax cuts for people who didn’t need them and weren’t even asking for them.  Two wars were being waged on a credit card.  Wall Street speculators reaped huge profits by making bets with other people’s money.  Manufacturing left our shores.  A shrinking number of Americans did fantastically well, while most people struggled with falling incomes, rising costs, the slowest job growth in half a century. 

"It was a house of cards that collapsed in the most destructive crisis since the Great Depression.  In the last six months of 2008, even as we were campaigning, nearly three million of our neighbors lost their jobs.  Over 800,000 more were lost in the month I took office alone.

But he is forced to admit his failure. No sense lying a woeful record:

 OBAMA: "Of course not.  Too many of our friends and family are still out there looking for work.  The housing market is still weak, deficits are still too high, and states are still laying off teachers, first responders.  This crisis took years to develop, and the economy is still facing headwinds.  And it will take sustained, persistent effort -- yours and mine -- for America to fully recover.  That’s the truth.  We all know it.

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Governor Romney's Job Growth Record -- Worse than Obama and Carter's

Source:

Mitt Romney's sole claim to the presidency is that his business experience will enable him to accelerate job growth in America.

The GOP debates revealed that Romney was a failure as governor, with Massachusetts 47th in the nation in job growth, and only one of the four states that did not recover to pre-2001 recession job levels before the Bush/Cheney economic collapse hit.

But, let us talk less about rankings, and more about actual jobs.

What is that story? Again, for Romney it is dismal.

During Romney's four years as Governor of Massachusetts, he added 61,000 new jobs. At the time, Massachusetts had 2.5 percent of the nation's population. Thus, extrapolated to the nation as a whole, Romney would have added 2.4 million jobs. 

CBS News/New York Times Poll: Obama, Romney in Dead Heat among Registered Voters

Despite all the Romney bashing by the mainstream media the American people still think there is no difference between the two candidates and parties. This is why we should vote third party and someone who is part of this failed system. There is still time. Look at what Occupy accomplished in only 3 months:

Mitt Romney has closed the gap with President Obama among registered voters, a CBS News/New York Times poll released Wednesday found, putting the former Massachusetts governor in a dead heat with the president for the White House.

Mr. Obama and Romney each received support from 46 percent of registered voters when asked who they would vote for if the election were held today. In March, a CBS News/New York Times survey found that Mr. Obama held a slight advantage over Romney of 47 percent to 44 percent.

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Transcript, Video: Mitt and Ann Romney's Interview With Diane Sawyer

Full transcript. Excerpt below:

DIANE SAWYER: And John McCain said they gave him 23 years of tax returns when he was considering you for the vice presidency. If John McCain can get 23 should-- for transparency's sake the rest of the American public get 23 years?

MITT ROMNEY: Well, actually the American public has through legislation determined that we need a extraordinary dis-- set of disclosure of financial records of people running for president and I have complied with all that and then in addition put out two more years of tax returns. And exactly as John McCain and-- and-- John Kerry had, and-- I know the Obama people want to get us to do something that will cause a lot of attention to be drawn to the fact that I've been successful. John McCain wasn't worried about diverting from the issues of-- of the-- of the day, but I understand that the Democrats are going to try and do everything in their power to keep this election from being about the failure of President Obama to turn around our economy.

Romney said he would eliminate or limit for high-earners the mortgage interest deduction for 2nd homes

This is a no-brainer. And you mean this is still allowed to go on? Can you top this one Obama? Romney came out for raising the minimum wage. And he's anti-labor. Why hasn't the President proposed raising the minimum wage, as he promised in 2008:

Mitt Romney, speaking at a private fundraising event on Sunday, offered the first details of deductions he would eliminate or limit in order to offset the income tax cut he has proposed for all taxpayers.

Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, said he would eliminate or limit for high-earners the mortgage interest deduction for second homes, and likely would do the same for the state income tax deduction and state property tax deduction.

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White House Opens Door to Big Donors, and Lobbyists Slip In

So really think Obama listens to you? Not unless you have thousands of dollars lying around to give to him. And if you plan to donate $100 to the campaign forget about getting invited to the White House. You ain't a player. Although, there is the occasional lottery-drawing-type invite for the little people:

Although Mr. Obama has made a point of not accepting contributions from registered lobbyists, a review of campaign donations and White House visitor logs shows that special interests have had little trouble making themselves heard. Many of the president’s biggest donors, while not lobbyists, took lobbyists with them to the White House, while others performed essentially the same function on their visits.

More broadly, the review showed that those who donated the most to Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party since he started running for president were far more likely to visit the White House than others. Among donors who gave $30,000 or less, about 20 percent visited the White House, according to a New York Times analysis that matched names in the visitor logs with donor records. But among those who donated $100,000 or more, the figure rises to about 75 percent. Approximately two-thirds of the president’s top fund-raisers in the 2008 campaign visited the White House at least once, some of them numerous times.

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Karl Rove's Secret $10 Million Donor

This scum was a major player in the crimes of the previous administration. Now he is poisoning the well of American politics with the sinister fundraising made possible by the 'Citizens United' decision:

The dark money group founded by Karl Rove and other Republican luminaires, Crossroads GPS, reportedly received a contribution from one anonymous donor for $10 million, according to the Washington Post. WaPo reports, "The tax returns show that Crossroads GPS has collected the vast majority of its donations from the super rich. It reported that nearly 90 percent of its contributions through end of 2011 had come from as few as two dozen donors, each giving $1 million or more. Overall, the nonprofit raised more than $76 million since it was founded in May 2010 through the end of last year. 'That’s certainly not a grassroots movement, is it,' said Bill Allison, editorial director of the Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for transparency in government and politics. 'These donors can have a very disproportionate effect on politics, and the fact that we don’t know who they are and what kind of favors they will ask for is very troubling.'"

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The Hill: Obama puts bully in bully pulpit

The President has no record to stand on, like typical incumbents. Therefore, he will spend most of his time attacking Republicans. That's the strategy:

President Obama in recent days has provided a taste of the sharp tone he will use in the general election against Mitt Romney, the presumptive GOP nominee.

Obama has emerged this year with sharper elbows than the “no-drama" candidate had in 2008. He is injecting drama, cranking up the rhetoric, for example by chiding Romney and congressional Republicans as being "radical" and “members of the flat Earth society.”

Obama, as one former aide put it, "is putting the bully in bully pulpit."

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Video: Hannity tells Perry he sounds like ‘Occupy Wall Street’

Even Republicans are using the language of Occupy Wall Street:

Fact-checking the weekend's GOP debates

Source: CBS

Ron Paul cited a staggering number in the Republican presidential debate Sunday - $15 trillion supposedly spent by the Fed "bailing out their friends." Like Mitt Romney and his claims about creating jobs in the private sector, Paul came up with that shocker by presenting an unbalanced look at balance sheets.

Here is a look at some of the claims in a pair of lively GOP debates on the weekend and how they compare with the facts:

PAUL: "I don't see how we can do well against Obama if we have any candidate that, you know, endorsed, you know, single payer systems and TARP bailouts and don't challenge the Federal Reserve's $15 trillion of injection bailing out their friends."

THE FACTS: First, there are no fans of government-run, single-payer health insurance in the Republican field, despite Paul's suggestion otherwise Sunday. Newt Gingrich once endorsed the idea of requiring everyone to have health insurance, and Romney introduced a mandate for health coverage as Massachusetts governor. But that's a far cry from a Canadian-style health system that makes government the primary payer of people's medical bills.

TARP is the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program that was proposed by President George W. Bush and passed by Congress in 2008 to help rescue imperiled financial institutions. Nearly all of the money has been paid back, with interest.

Paul's slam against the Fed ignores the fact that most of the $15 trillion he is talking about involved loans that were quickly repaid, sometimes the next day. And that's if these Fed transactions can even be considered loans in the conventional sense.

When the Fed lends money to banks, it creates the money out of thin air. When the banks pay it back, the money disappears from the system. If a bank borrows $5 billion from the Fed one day, then pays it back the next, and a week later borrows $5 billion more and quickly pays it back, the total would be listed as $10 billion, even though it's just the same money going back and forth and the treasury is in no sense being emptied.

That's how a federal report counted a running total of about $15 trillion in emergency Fed loans to domestic banks and their foreign subsidiaries between 2007 and 2010. The actual loan total, once paybacks are accounted for, is estimated at $1.1 trillion.

Americans Elect: Obama's Third-Party Tar Pit

We need an alternative to the failed two-party system. Unless have choice this country is headed for ruin. Let's debate who that alternative is. But whatever we do let's not waste our votes our same failed choices:

The real action that may well decide our next president is quietly going on elsewhere, in the state offices that qualify candidates and parties for the November 2012 presidential ballot.  You may not have heard much about a shadowy group called "Americans Elect" (it does not disclose its contributors because of alleged concerns that they might suffer loss of business or social contacts, and because it fancifully but only occasionally declares itself to be a 501[c] [4] tax-exempt organization [though it has qualified as a political party for ballot position in multiple states including Ohio, California, Nevada, and Arizona, which should deprive it of tax-exempt status]).  But if you haven't heard of Americans Elect, you soon will.

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The Handful of White People Who Choose Your Presidential Candidates

It's an insane system. Mitt Romney will probably win Iowa and then New Hampshire. At that point the race will be over. No one whose won both of those States has failed to win the nomination. The remedy is one national primary. Better yet, one national primary involving all political parties and then a general election. This is already done in some States. The Presidential campaign should only last for 6 months, not the current 2 years:

Supporters watch as Republican presidential candidate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry speaks during a campaign stop at the Fainting Goat in Waverly, Iowa, Friday, Dec. 30, 2011. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

On a two-day trip to New Hampshire last week I attended three campaign events with a total of roughly 600 people. I tried to find an African-American in the audience at all three events, but I couldn’t. To be fair, I did spot two Latinos and five or six Asian-Americans. The U.S., according to the 2010 census is 72.4 percent white. The first two states vote in the presidential primaries, Iowa and New Hampshire, are 91.3 percent white and 93.9 percent white, respectively.

The Iowa caucuses, which will be dramatically covered by the news media on Tuesday, are especially pernicious. In a caucus instead of a primary the Iowans who get to participate are even smaller in number and less diverse than the state’s already unrepresentative electorate.

Worse still, the Iowa caucuses aren’t subject to the same spending disclosure deadlines as primaries. An obscure 1979 ruling from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) held that Iowa’s caucus is not an election. The reasons are as muddled as they are unpersuasive. According to the FEC primaries are elections, and caucuses are elections if they have the authority to select a candidate. Since, as a technical matter Iowans caucus for delegates to the state convention who will stand for a candidate, it’s not considered an election. Now, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v FEC, there are organizations called Super PACs that can raise unlimited contributions to take advantage of this loophole. Politico explains, “the decades-old caucus exemption allows candidates with robust super PACs in their corners to enjoy the benefits of unprecedented spending through the early contests without enduring the potentially damaging stories that can accompany the revelation of who’s behind it.” (The information will eventually be released, but not until later.)

Read the full article from The Nation

2012 Presidential Election Prediction: Barack Obama Wins 51/49

One problem with this prediction. It assumes there will be no major third party candidate. This will be the year we could see a candidate other than a Democrat or Republican has a chance to win the White House:

Continuing my tradition of December election predictions (2007), let me note that I am not listening to any news about the 2012 Presidential election. I believe that Barack Obama will win the general election by a slim margin, e.g., 51/49 percent of the popular vote. Here are my reasons:

• people are afraid of change and will favor an incumbent if one is available
• Obama ended the Iraq war
• Americans know in their hearts that Obama is not responsible for the stagnant economy

The last point is the one that may need elaboration. If the economy isn't growing, wouldn't voters be enthusiastic about replacing the President? My belief is that Americans are smart enough to recognize that one hard-working high-achieving person such as Obama cannot compensate for 313 million Americans who, on average, don't work all that hard and haven't achieved very much. Furthermore, as evidenced by the lack of politicians at all levels who are willing to admit that we can't pay for all of the stuff that we want, Americans aren't in the mood to confront reality.

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Romney takes the high road as Christie targets Obama

The main reason Christie is campaigning with Romney is in preparation to make him a running mate for the likely winner of the GOP primaries. Christie thought about running for President. He felt he was unprepared. Being VP for 4 or more years would prepare him for an eventual run for the White House. Christie is also popular with Republicans and is more well known than any other potential running mate. He also makes an interesting contrast with Romney. The only drawback? He is a Northerner. But it wouldn't matter for Romney. The South votes Republican, with a few exceptions. Christie is the logical choice:

Undeterred by the cold or by a steady drizzle, some 600 Iowans came out this morning to hear Mitt Romney, along with his surrogate and enforcer, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, rally the troops before Tuesday's Iowa caucus begins the 2012 primary campaign in earnest.

Romney, as he has done all week in Iowa, set the stakes for 2012 high, telling the crowd the race was not about just changing occupants of the oval office, but also about "saving the soul of America."

No one wages that fight better than Christie, said Romney; the New Jersey governor returned the favor.

"As we always do every four years, America's watching Iowa and Iowa's gonna be, gonna be the folks who are gonna help to start this process to get us going to make sure that the Republican Party nominates the very best person to take on President Obama in November," Christie told the shivering crowd. "Now when you look at that stage in these debates, I think you've gotta come to the conclusion I've come to: there is no person better qualified by his experience and his character to take on Barack Obama and to lead the United States of America than Gov. Mitt Romney"

Christie also jokingly warned the crowd that there would be consequences if they did not support Romney at Tuesday's caucuses. Christie said that he would return to Iowa "Jersey Style," a statement with different, but equally terrifying meaning, to fans of "The Sopranos" and "Jersey Shore" alike.

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