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New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R):
“I don't worry about reelection. I feel like I'm playing with house money anyway. Nobody expected me to win this race. The more I start thinking about reelection and trying to calculate either my actions or my decisions based upon that, I'm probably moving closer and closer to not getting reelected. Be myself, be who I am, let the chips fall where they may.”
Via Taegan Goddard
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“My brain is like a chicken pot pie. His is like a refrigerator that is all very organized — pickles here, salad there. ”
Gov. Perry = George W. Bush? No. Perry is dumber (however impossible that may seem), and he is far more conservative.
Were he to win the presidency, he would be nothing short of an unmitigated disaster for the people of this country.
Via Andrew Sullivan
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“When it comes to presidential politics, why does America seem to be allergic to brains?”
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“ The odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect. ”
Terrifying indeed.
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“With all due respect to anybody that's out there either directly or indirectly criticizing me because I speak plainly, I call it like I see it.
Look, I am not an establishment figure -- never have been and frankly I don't want to be. I dislike Washington. I think it's a seedy place.”
Perry does speak the language of the far right extremists very plainly.
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The abstinence thing is nothing more than an attempt to control the biological drives of humans, a policy forever doomed to failure, since human beings were programmed to procreate. Thus, the silliness of abstinence education cannot be underestimated. How much more successful could Texas be in reducing teen pregnancy rates if instead of teaching abstinence, they used those funds to teach teens how to stay safe and avoid pregnancy?
And this is the guy who is now the frontrunner in the field of 2012 GOP presidential candidates.
Adding.......I’ve heard a number of pundits posit that “Perry is George W. Bush II”. There is a comparison to be made between the two men, but in my opinion, the much more far right Rick Perry makes George W. Bush look like a Liberal.
H/T Bob Cesca
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“Huntsman is a liberal's idea of what a Republican ought to be.”
Well, okay. Is there something “liberal” about wanting any candidate for high office to have some common sense and a belief in science?
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“It is a sign of enormous, thin skin that if we speculate about her, she gets upset, and I suspect if we didn't speculate about her, she'd be upset and trying to find a way to get us to speculate about it... it's weird, very odd.”
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“You can't just be against the president.”
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The health care reform law will survive even if the Supreme Court declares the individual mandate unconstitutional, former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Wednesday in Sioux Falls.
“It's going to survive. It's not going to be repealed.”
Via Taegan Goddard
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“There are a lot of things lacking in American politics; maturity is high on the list.”
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Eli Lake, a national security correspondent for the unabashedly conservative Washington Times and not exactly a fan of President Obama, raised a point on Twitter that the right probably didn’t care for. (via Zack Beauchamp)
“Worth noting. President Birth Certificate has done what Reagan and W could not: end Gadhafi's reign and kill bin Laden. #realkeeping”
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“Which presidents failed to oust Qaddafi?
Ronald Reagan — Strong on national security!
George H.W. Bush — Strong on national security!
Bill Clinton
George W. Bush — Roid Rage on national security!But even though he ordered the death of Bin Laden, and will likely preside over the ousting of Qaddafi, the Republicans will still claim he’s an effete wimpy wimp.
Oh, and how many U.S. military casualties in the process?
ZERO.”
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Jubilant Libyans celebrate in Benghazi. The sign in the middle of the square reads “The Fantastic 4 (left to right - Pres. Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice) God Bless You All. Thanks For All.”
Image credit: AP/Alexandre Meneghini
The GOP is already spinning.
Via Think Progress
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“This is a tough game. You can't be intimidated. You can't be frightened. And as far as I'm concerned -- the Tea Party can go straight to hell. ”
Via Taegan Goddard
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“Republicans in Congress are expressing outrage over the president's ten-day vacation. Of course, it was rather hard to reach most of these members of Congress, since they ae all enjoying their own five-week long vacation. By the time they return to Washington in September, Congress will have taken more vacation time this year alone than Obama has for his entire term. Making their 'outrage' over Obama's vacation schedule more than just a little hypocritical.”
Indeed.
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If you haven’t yet watched Part I [an overview] of Robert Greenwald’s documentary film series, “The Koch Brothers Exposed”, you should do that prior to watching Part II, which concerns our public education system.
Part II is about the Wake County school system (one of the largest school districts in the country) in North Carolina, where the Koch founded and funded ‘Americans for Prosperity’ funded a resegregation effort on the part of a group of parents in Wake County. Resegregation. In 2011 America.
Since the Koch brothers are very bullish on privatizing our schools, both I and apparently the films producer, Robert Greenwald, believe that this resegregation effort is just a stepping stone to privatization.
From kochbrothersexposed.com:
The Facts
- 1. After the November 2009 elections, the Wake County school board dismantled socio-economic diverse schools and began to implement a neighborhood schools plan that would resegregate schools.
- 2. Resegregation in schools would be a disaster. It would turn back the clock fifty years with the creation of high poverty, racially isolated schools. The integration plan destroyed by Koch-supported board of education members was used as a model for high achieving, diverse schools throughout the country.
- 3. This October 2011, Wake Country elections will decide if schools become resegregated. Koch-supported candidates are still pushing for neighborhood schools and to end diversity.
- 4. The Koch brothers free market, libertarian ideology rests on privatization in society, especially the privatization of education.
- 5. The Kochs founded Americans for Prosperity in 2004, and AFP indirectly poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Wake County school board elections and helped jeopardize the diversity policy.
RELATED POSTS:
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“The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party -- the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012.”
Right.
The Republican Party crossed that line, and is the anti-science party. That fact has already become universally known.
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“To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”
How far out of line are most of the Republican candidates when simply speaking common sense on matters of science can cause a massive explosion on a social network? Something to think about.
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Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is on a roll of politically incorrect/offensive this week. Think Progress reports on three instances.Fresh off his outlandish suggestion that Medicare and Medicaid violate the Constitution, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) offered an equally outlandish theory about how President Obama’s race influences his priorities:
Responding to a man in Langley who asked if Obama “wants to destroy America,” Coburn said the president is “very bright” and loves his country but has a political philosophy that is “goofy and wrong.”
Obama’s “intent is not to destroy, his intent is to create dependency because it worked so well for him,” he said.
“As an African-American male,” Coburn said, Obama received “tremendous advantage from a lot of these programs.”
In the past, Coburn has touted a strong personal friendship with Obama.
At a town hall in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) appeared to embrace Perry’s claim that providing for America’s seniors is unconstitutional:
QUESTION: With more and more cuts in Medicare and Medicaid on the horizon, I’m really worried about protecting our frail elderly in the Medicare and Medicaid facilities. So I would like to know how Congress proposes to balance the budget and still make sure our frail elderly in these facilities are protected and have trained care staff.
COBURN: “That’s a great question. The first question I have for you is if you look in the Constitution, where is it the federal government’s role to do that? That’s number one. Number two is the way I was brought up that’s a family responsibility, not a government responsibility.”
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) intimated that he’d like to threaten physical violence against his Senate colleagues, saying, “It’s just a good thing I can’t pack a gun on the Senate floor.” During a tour of Northeast Oklahoma, Coburn also called his fellow senators “career elitists” and “cowards.” After the Tucson shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) that claimed the lives of six people, there were renewed calls for elected officials to tamp down allusions to violence and be more cautious and respectful when talking about their colleagues, but Sen. Coburn apparently has no such concern. His cavalier remarks come only days after Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) used menacing language about the Federal Reserve Chairman.
H/T Bob Cesca
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“This is what John Boehner is like as speaker of the House. The president announces job creation ideas that the speaker rejects. The president announces he`ll release a whole new big job creation plan, the speaker says plan? Where is this plan? Dude, that`s the point. That`s the announcement. When somebody says here comes this plan, expect it on this date -- you don’t respond with where is the plan? Who even does that?”
Watch (the segment that contains the quote is at approx. 7:11):
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I had no idea that there was bad blood between the Bush family, and Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), and I’m thrilled to hear it, because Perry as a general election candidate worries me.
“They know what they're doing, and they are ruthless, and they [Bush political team] are going to take Perry out.”
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“The American people are looking for someone who lives in reality and is a truth teller because that’s the only way that the significant problems this country faces can be solved. It appears that the only science that Mitt Romney believes in is the science of polling, and that science clearly was not a mandatory course for Governor Perry.”
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“The day that the president became president gasoline was $1.79 a gallon. Look at what it is today. Under President Bachmann, you will see gasoline come down below $2 a gallon again. That will happen.”
Is she right? Not in the sense of her implication that Obama is at fault.
Think Progress addressed this issue in June when Exxon claimed it had found abundant oil supplies in the Gulf. That “abundant supply” would provide only enough oil for 9 days worth of global oil consumption.
Setting aside that big ‘if’, while 700 million barrels is enough to ruin the Gulf if we get another blowout, it represents only 9 days of global oil consumption — and roughly one month’s worth of U.S. consumption.
The discovery doesn’t prove we have ‘abundant’ oil reserves, as Hastings claims. It proves the exact opposite, that ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ can’t solve our problems. Steve Greenlee, president of Exxon Mobil’s exploration business, unintentionally admitted that when he said, “This is one of the largest discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico in the last decade.”
There just isn’t enough oil in the Gulf to make a dent in our addiction. A 2009 report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Impact of Limitations on Access to Oil and Natural Gas Resources in the Federal Outer Continental Shelf” analyzed the difference between full offshore drilling and restriction to offshore drilling.
The EIA found that there is no impact on U.S. gasoline prices whatsoever in 2020. Gasoline prices would be a mere three cents a gallon lower in 2030. So much for Drill, Baby, Drill.
The fact is that that oil prices have been soaring in spite of the fact that U.S. domestic oil production has also been soaring, “to its highest level in almost a decade,” as EIA’s own data shows:
In January 2005 when Bush was inaugurated for a second time, gas cost $1.83 per gallon. That bargain didn't last long.
Gas prices shot up rapidly as the U.S. economy heated up and oil topped $100 per barrel. Gas soared to a national average of $4.11 in July 2008. That's a rise of about 125 percent.
Then the bubble burst.
Is that so difficult to understand?
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“I have no problem with folks saying ‘Obama Cares.’ I do care. If the other side wants to be the folks who don’t care, that’s fine with me.”
I've long thought that we should turn it around on the right wing, and use the term as a badge of honor.
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“Actually, what Perry said is even worse than most writing on it has suggested. Yes, he’s showing ignorance of the basics of monetary policy; yes, he appears to have implicitly threatened violence against my former department head. (Incidentally, threats of that kind are a long-standing feature of modern GOP rhetoric; as early as 1993, Republican Senators would joke about what might happen to Bill Clinton if he visited their states, and the Broders of the world pretended not to notice).
But somehow everyone I’ve read seems to miss the bit about Bernanke playing politics — implying that anything he does would be in the interests of helping Obama get reelected.
That’s a hell of an accusation to make — especially when you bear in mind that Bernanke was a Bush appointee. But this is apparently how people like Perry think.
After this, I suspect that Perry is a shoo-in for the nomination.”
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“If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion.”
What Perry is now shown to have said has a plain meaning. He'd support lynching the Fed Chairman. And he believes that Bernanke's attempts to prevent a Second Great Depression are partisan politics, and an attempt to rig the election. He seems to think, in other words, that the man who was the head of George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers and was appointed to Fed Chairman by George W. Bush is somehow a Democratic party operative trying to win the election for Obama. It's a staggering assault on the integrity of a civil servant grappling with some of the most serious economic problems this country has faced in our lifetime.
Yes, as Talk Progress notes, treason is a capital offense. And there is no doubt what a bully means when he says someone should be treated "pretty ugly" in Texas. There you have the mindset of a man who could issue a death warrant for an innocent man and who would bring back the most brutal torture techniques he could get away with.
Gov. Perry's comments about Chmn. Bernanke are inappropriate and unpresidential.
With any luck, Rick Perry may be out when he is just barely in.
Via Sullivan
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“OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.
These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.”
While I admire Mr. Buffett for taking this stand, let’s be honest here……..Congress doesn’t do this out of any sense of benevolence. They do it because they’re paid to do it by the very super-rich citizens (a vast majority of which are registered Republicans) Buffett speaks of. Paid, whether it be via campaign cash, endorsements, or cash under the damn table. Paid.
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“One of the reasons that I'm running for president is I want to make sure that every young man and woman who puts on the uniform of the United States respects highly the president of the United States.”
The line is a reversal of the usual pledges of respect for the military from politicians, and Perry seemed to suggest that Obama lacks the qualities of a commander-in-chief in being able to command the troops.
The line could be taken either as a slur on the military -- they're pretty much obligated to respect the president, or at least the presidency; or as a sort of validation of military doubts about civilian leadership, which isn't exactly standard issue politics in the developed world.
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“But the big news today came from the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, where, in an attempt to appeal to more voters, Ron Paul had himself batter-dipped and deep-fat fried.”
I’m sure Sarah Palin would enjoy a deep-fat fried Ron Paul on a stick along with her other healthy choices.
Via Bob Cesca
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“I cannot wait to go get my fried butter on a stick, and fried cheesecake on a stick and...Twinkies, especially in honor of those who would rather just be forced to eat our peas. ”
Um, gah……my stomach is churning.
Adding.......yes, I know that Palin's remark was aimed at the First Lady. Palin is a weakass moron to resort to such utterly pathetic insults.
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“President Obama, quit lying. Have you no shame, sir? In three short years, you’ve bankrupted this country.”
“I won’t place one more dollar of debt upon the backs of my kids and grandkids unless we structurally reform the way this town spends money.”
“Have you no decency?”
Seriously. You can not make this stuff up.
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“There are some in Congress right now who would rather see their opponents lose than America win. And that's got to stop. We're supposed to all be on the same team. Especially during tough times.”
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“There is nothing wrong with our country. There is something wrong with our politics.”
“The last thing we need is Congress spending more time arguing in D.C.. What I figure is they need to spend more time out here listening to you and hearing how fed up you are. That's why I'm here.”
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“Over the last two weeks… we came within a whisker of defaulting on our debt for the first time in our history because of the Republican Party`s flirtation with that sort of catastrophic default. We had our credit rating downgraded for the first time ever… We haven`t had just a wake-up call. We`ve had a wake-up call followed by an alarm clock, followed by somebody throwing a bucket of water on us, followed by a burglar entering the bedroom and grabbing us by the neck. We are awake.”
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“The Republicans, inclusive of the tea party, have been orchestrating another economic decline knowing that it will damage the president’s re-election chances as well as the perceived efficacy of Democratic economic policies. Put another way, the Republicans are threatening your personal well-being in order to defeat the president, and they’ve just completed the latest successful attack in their economically bellicose strategy.”
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“Corporations are people, my friend.”
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Rick Perry tells TIME magazine that he actually made the decision to run for the presidency 45 days ago:
“I'm very calm in my heart that this is what I'm supposed to be doing.”
Oh goody.
Via Taegan Goddard
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I used to have some respect for Jon Huntsman (R-UT), seeing as how he seemed to be the least stupid of the current crop of Republican morons, but once he announced his campaign, and began promoting the lies so typical of modern Republicans, that respect quickly vanished.
“It's criminal that you've got some corporations not paying taxes. Like GE, for instance. That's got to come to an end.”
It’s truly pathetic that one little bit of sanity from a Republican is so unusual that it grabs headlines, but there it is.
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“The president of the United States addressed the country yesterday afternoon, and we saw in his remarks - both in content and tone - that his call to the nation that he used in 2008 of hope and change became hope and blame. And he began to act like a manure spreader in a wind storm, throwing things in every direction without any real focus.”
Oh, I think not, you miserable hack. President Obama threw the blame exactly where it belonged; although, in my opinion, he should have thrown it much more forcefully.
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