Political Ruminations

Morning Quote: Ralph Gilles to Donald Trump

Chrysler Group Vice President of Product Design Ralph Gilles’ response to Donald Trump’s tweet yesterday:

“@realDonaldTrump you are full of shit!”

Be sure to read the New York Times piece on Romney versus the auto industry!

Via Ashby

NYT Op-ed: Romney Versus the Automakers

A New York Times op-ed on the ridiculous spectacle of the Mitt Romney campaign, particularly Romney’s lies on top of more lies about the auto industry:

When General Motors tells a presidential campaign that it is engaging in “cynical campaign politics at its worst,” that’s a pretty good signal that the campaign has crossed a red line and ought to pull back. Not Mitt Romney’s campaign. Having broadcast an outrageously deceitful ad attacking the auto bailout, the campaign ignored the howls from carmakers and came back with more.

Mr. Romney apparently plans to end his race as he began it: playing lowest-common-denominator politics, saying anything necessary to achieve power and blithely deceiving voters desperate for clarity and truth.

This started months ago when he realized that his very public 2008 stance against the successful and wildly popular government bailout of G.M. and Chrysler was hurting him in the valuable states of Ohio and Michigan.

Continue reading….

Andrew Sullivan: Paul Ryan is a Lying Liar

Conservative Independent Andrew Sullivan was brief and to the point about the lies spewed by Lying Liar Paul Ryan during his convention speech Wednesday night, formatting and emphasis mine:

“Claim: We will protect Medicare! Truth: Ryan banks more savings from Medicare than Obama does and throws out all the cost control experiments that might - just might - bend the cost curve downward.

Claim: We will balance the budget! Truth: by slashing taxes and revenues and by boosting defense, they won't, by their own accounting, for another two decades. If we really cannot wait, how do two decades of more debt accumulation help?

Claim: we protected the auto industry. Truth: they wanted Detroit to go bankrupt.

Claim: the only thing the stimulus did was add debt. Truth: yes it added debt, but it did so in large part by tax cuts that Ryan approves of.

And so you have an alternative empirical universe in which a deeply radical platform that would transform Medicare for the young, while retaining it in full for the biggest generation, and increase the debt for two more decades, is portrayed as a multicultural rescue of Medicare and the economy.”

Obama Embraces Populist Themes in Ohio

By Michael Collins

When you take the right side, style trumps substance every time in politics. President Obama was on fire Saturday in Columbus, Ohio, hammering home populist themes that will define his campaign. This was his campaign kick-off. He couldn't have done a better job of stating his case as the candidate of the people, while painting Romney as the darling of The Money Party (Wall Street, big banks).

PRESIDENT OBAMA: The problem with our economy isn’t that the American people aren’t productive enough -- you’ve been working harder than ever. The challenge we face right now -- the challenge we faced for over a decade is that harder work hasn’t led to higher incomes. It’s that bigger profits haven’t led to better jobs. President Obama (Full text of Obama's remarks, Columbus, Ohio, May 5, 2012)

It's not your fault the president tells us, which happens to be absolutely correct. Then he nailed Romney:

Morning Quote: Bill Clinton

“Every time I hear Mr. Romney talk about this, I think his daddy must be turning over in his grave.”

- Former President Bill Clinton on Romney’s opposition to the auto industry bailout.

Full Video: President Obama Talks to the UAW About the American Auto Industry Rescue & Comeback

Looking for the text transcript? You can read it here.

Watch:

Full Text Transcript of Speech by President Obama on the Rescue and Comeback of the American Auto Industry

President Barack Obama delivers remarks at the United Auto Workers Conference at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, D.C., White House Photo, Pete Souza, 2/28/12

---

TEXT TRANSCRIPT of President Obama’s remarks to the United Auto Workers in Washington, D.C. on February 28, 2012. Looking for the video? You can watch it here.

THE PRESIDENT:  How's it going, UAW?  (Applause.)  It is good to be with some autoworkers today!  (Applause.)  All right. Everybody have a seat, get comfortable.  Go ahead and get comfortable.  I'm going to talk for a little bit.  (Applause.)

First of all, I want to say thank you to one of the finest leaders that we have in labor -- Bob King.  Give it up for Bob.  (Applause.)  I want to thank the International Executive Board and all of you for having me here today.  It is a great honor.  I brought along somebody who is proving to be one of the finest Secretaries of Transportation in our history -- Ray LaHood is in the house.  Give Ray a big round of applause.  (Applause.) 

New Obama Campaign Ad: Made in America

Watch:

Bring it on, Mr. Romney.

Via Ashby

Video: Clint Eastwood’s Super Bowl Commercial (I hated it)

This is, beyond doubt, a great commercial.

But for whom?

To the best of my knowledge, Clint Eastwood is a Libertarian (a Republican). As such, he has, in my opinion, no right to make that ad.

After all, the ad implies that we’ve overcome such things as the Detroit auto crisis together (lest we forget, Republicans wanted to let Detroit “fail”.) Together, Republicans and Democrats.

The truth is something else entirely.

The Republicans have done everything in their power to cause this country to literally fail, in the service of their stated mission to make President Obama a one term president.

To that end, the obstruction, the willful, wanton obstruction and destruction of everything which could help us to overcome the economic crisis we faced in 2008, has been mounted by one party. The Republican Party.

This commercial would be a great ad, but only if it were an Obama 2012 ad. No Republican has a right to pretend that they contributed anything to any success this country has had since 2008.

Not a damn one of them.

Via Bob Cesca

Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

“Let Detroit go bankrupt.”

-Declared presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in a 2008 op-ed published by The New York Times.

Morning Quote: Andrew Sullivan on President Obama’s Job Performance

“On the economy, the facts are these. When Obama took office, the United States was losing around 750,000 jobs a month. The last quarter of 2008 saw an annualized drop in growth approaching 9 percent. This was the most serious downturn since the 1930s, there was a real chance of a systemic collapse of the entire global financial system, and unemployment and debt—lagging indicators—were about to soar even further. No fair person can blame Obama for the wreckage of the next 12 months, as the financial crisis cut a swath through employment. Economies take time to shift course.

But Obama did several things at once: he continued the bank bailout begun by George W. Bush, he initiated a bailout of the auto industry, and he worked to pass a huge stimulus package of $787 billion.

 

All these decisions deserve scrutiny. And in retrospect, they were far more successful than anyone has yet fully given Obama the credit for. The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.

 

The right claims the stimulus failed because it didn’t bring unemployment down to 8 percent in its first year, as predicted by Obama’s transition economic team. Instead, it peaked at 10.2 percent. But the 8 percent prediction was made before Obama took office and was wrong solely because it relied on statistics that guessed the economy was only shrinking by around 4 percent, not 9. Remove that statistical miscalculation (made by government and private-sector economists alike) and the stimulus did exactly what it was supposed to do. It put a bottom under the free fall. It is not an exaggeration to say it prevented a spiral downward that could have led to the Second Great Depression.

You’d think, listening to the Republican debates, that Obama has raised taxes. Again, this is not true. Not only did he agree not to sunset the Bush tax cuts for his entire first term, he has aggressively lowered taxes on most Americans. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts, affecting 95 percent of taxpayers; he has cut the payroll tax, and recently had to fight to keep it cut against Republican opposition. His spending record is also far better than his predecessor’s. Under Bush, new policies on taxes and spending cost the taxpayer a total of $5.07 trillion. Under Obama’s budgets both past and projected, he will have added $1.4 trillion in two terms. Under Bush and the GOP, nondefense discretionary spending grew by twice as much as under Obama. Again: imagine Bush had been a Democrat and Obama a Republican. You could easily make the case that Obama has been far more fiscally conservative than his predecessor—except, of course, that Obama has had to govern under the worst recession since the 1930s, and Bush, after the 2001 downturn, governed in a period of moderate growth. It takes work to increase the debt in times of growth, as Bush did. It takes much more work to constrain the debt in the deep recession Bush bequeathed Obama.”

- Conservative-Independent, Andrew Sullivan, excerpted from a Newsweek cover story. The quoted portion of the article focuses on President Obama’s job performance in regards to the economy.

Morning Quote: Spokesman for Obama Reelection Campaign

“If Mitt Romney was president, there would not be an American auto industry. Industry experts have been clear: Our auto companies would have faced liquidation if Mitt Romney had his way and more than 1 million Americans would have lost their jobs. Mitt Romney must explain to Michigan voters this week why he would have let Detroit go bankrupt.”

- Ben LaBolt, spokesman for the Obama reelection campaign, re Mitt Romney’s now famous stance [“let Detroit go bankrupt”] on the successful auto industry bailout.

Quote of the Day: George Clooney on the Disillusioned Left

“I'm disillusioned by the people who are disillusioned by Obama, quite honestly, I am. Democrats eat their own. Democrats find singular issues and go, 'Well, I didn't get everything I wanted.’ I'm a firm believer in sticking by and sticking up'for the people whom you've elected.

If he was a Republican running, because Republicans are better at this, they'd be selling him as the guy who stopped 400,000 jobs a month from leaving the country. They'd be selling him as the guy who saved the auto-industry. If they had the beliefs, they'd be selling him as the guy who got rid of  ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell’,  who got Osama bin Laden. You could be selling this as a very successful three years.”

- Actor and Activist George Clooney to ABC News on the “disillusioned left”, i.e., the Professional Left and their sheep/followers.