DOWNLOADS: (120)

PLAYS: (1594)

Embed

Regardless of taunts like those from right wingers like Brad Blakeman on Fox this Wednesday morning, Democrats dismissed their claims that the decision to move President Obama's speech indoors was because he could not fill the stadium.

Dems Scoff At GOP Taunts That Obama Couldn’t Fill Stadium:

Senior Democratic officials here scoffed Wednesday morning at Republican criticisms of the decision to move President Obama’s DNC address indoors on Thursday, shutting out tens of thousands of community members to the event.

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, suggested the decision was a move to save face in case the event didn’t pack the house. “After promising to speak at Bank of America stadium rain or shine, Team Obama is moving inside,” he tweeted after the announcement. “Troubles filling the seats?”

“[Republicans] are gonna turn this into a political decision. It was a public safety decision,” a senior campaign official told reporters at a briefing Wednesday morning, following the announcement that President Obama will no longer speak outdoors at Bank of America Stadium because of concerns over “extreme weather.”

More than 65,000 community members had activated community credentials to attend the event, and another 19,000 people were on a waiting list for the event. Democratic officials said they expected the lion’s share of those with credentials to attend, because they had to go through a multi-step process that involved visiting a campaign office, and later activating a code using a computer or mobile device, to show that they were serious about attending. Read on...

DOWNLOADS: (90)

PLAYS: (655)

Embed

I'm not sure what speech the talking heads over at Fox were watching, but leave it to them to try to turn Michelle Obama's wonderful speech tonight at the 2012 Democratic National Convention into some sort of Socialist manifesto which is all about pushing for our reliance on government.

Heaven forbid anyone says something supportive about those teachers, firefighters and those in the military. The horror!

Here's the full speech these clowns were talking about in case anyone did not get a chance to watch it live.

Full transcript of her speech below the fold.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (693)

PLAYS: (15193)

Embed

Leave it to Stephen Colbert to take some of the talking heads on cable news to task in a way that only he can. After pointing out that even Fox's web site featured an article which called Paul Ryan's speech "an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech" and the Romney campaign stating that "We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers," Colbert made a mockery of some of CNN's coverage which we featured here at C&L.

Thank you Stephen for putting into perspective why allowing these lies to go unchecked or to excuse them is so dangerous. It's really pathetic that we continually have to turn to a fake news show on a comedy channel to debunk the propaganda on the "news" channels.

DOWNLOADS: (241)

PLAYS: (1764)

Embed

Bob Schieffer sat down with a panel that could rightfully be called "Meet the Republicans" on this week's Face the Nation and asked his panel of Ken Blackwell, Ed Rollins, Liz Cheney and Ed Gillespie what they thought about Rick Perry's bizarre Cornerstone speech that left so many people wondering if he was drunk or on drugs after watching it.

Ken Blackwell, a Perry supporter, naturally tried to blame the response to the speech on the fact that it was edited down to seven to three minutes on You Tube depending on which version someone happened to watch. I hate to break it to Ken Blackwell, but watching the entire video really doesn't make it any better.

Schieffer asked Ed Rollins if he thought this would harm the Perry campaign in the same manner as the now infamous "Dean scream" harmed the Howard Dean campaign. Rollins didn't think it would but didn't think Perry was going to come out of this unscathed either. And Liz Cheney basically attacked him for even bringing it up at all.

Ed Gillespie tried to paint a happy face on whether this would harm Perry or not as well and said the difference between what happened to Howard Dean and this event with Perry is that people were watching Howard Dean live and unedited. How badly this does end up harming the Perry campaign, time will tell, but the talking heads and pundits as we saw here sure are going to do their best to make sure the media continues to ignore or gloss over the speech and just how truly bizarre his behavior was.

Full transcript below the fold.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (252)

PLAYS: (1487)

Embed

Countdown's Keith Olbermann sat down with Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi to discuss his latest article, Rick Perry: The Best Little Whore in Texas and Perry's recent meltdown at the speech he gave this Friday night in Manchester, New Hampshire which we posted here -- Rick Perry's Bizarre Cornerstone Speech.

As Taibbi noted in his article, Perry's entire political ideology seems to be based on which way he sees the wind blowing to continue getting himself elected to office while passing out handouts and political favors for those who've given him campaign contributions.

Right now I think the only person happier than Mitt Romney when it comes to the Herman Cain campaign meltdown has to be Rick Perry who managed to have the damage done by that speech this Friday largely drowned out in the media by Cain's problems. That said, if he doesn't explain what caused his bizarre behavior and what was wrong with him this past Friday, that speech is definitely going to come back to haunt him. He was already tanking in the polls though, so it may not matter much.

Here's a little bit from the beginning of Taibbi's article at Rolling Stone:

Perry's campaign is still struggling to recover from the kind of spectacular, submarine-at-crush-depth collapse seldom seen before in the history of presidential politics. The governor went from presumptive front-runner to stammering talk-show punch line seemingly in the speed of a single tweet, rightly blasted for being too incompetent even to hold his own in televised debates with a half-bright pizza salesman like Herman Cain and a goggle-eyed megachurch Joan of Arc like Michele Bachmann. But such superficial criticisms of his weirdly erratic campaign demeanor don't even begin to get at the root of why we should all be terrified of Perry and what he represents. After all, you have to go pretty far to stand out as a whore and a sellout when you come from a state that has produced such luminaries in the history of political corruption as LBJ, Karl Rove and George W. Bush. But Rick Perry has managed to set a scary new low in the annals of opportunism, turning Texas into a swamp of political incest and backroom dealing on a scale not often seen this side of the Congo or Sierra Leone.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (342)

PLAYS: (2516)

Embed

After discussing the Republicans reaction to President Obama's speech laying out his proposals for job creation and their scornful reaction to the President mentioning that Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, Lawrence O'Donnell asked Rep. Barney Frank whether there was any chance of his bill passing through the House of Representatives. Rep. Frank stated the obvious reasons why it won't.

As Frank noted, Republicans do not accept the notion that government is capable of doing anything to improve people's lives, they don't believe in government, period, and they don't want the economy to get any better because that would mean President Obama's chances of getting reelected get better. And as Frank pointed out, the Republicans have already said their number one goal was to keep the President from being reelected.

O'Donnell asked Frank what he thought about the idea of President Obama going around to different Republican House districts and show the roads and bridges that need to be rebuilt there, the teachers that could be hired there and what not and whether that strategy might work or not.

FRANK: I believe the president should try and will try, but let me... let's go with the metaphor here. Air Force One is a transport plane, it's not a bomber. The president can't go over districts and bomb them into submission.

Frank also pointed out the other problem with that strategy, which is that the dominating force in Republican politics is their extreme right-wing base, that is pushing them further and further to the right and away from what most of the country wants in order to get Americans back to work, but they're the ones who show up to vote in the primaries, so the Republicans are beholden to them.

DOWNLOADS: (1168)

PLAYS: (2024)

Embed

Well it looks like we've got another Republican who is terribly offended by President Obama's budget speech; former Bush Press Secretary turned Fox shill Dana Perino. Perino accuses President Obama of "saying offensive, crazy things" in his budget speech, but doesn't bother to fill us in on just what those things were, other than to lie and say that President Obama called the Republicans un-American, which he didn't. I'm sure she thinks that expecting anyone to possibly pay more in taxes is just crazy talk as well, but she didn't bring that up here.

Here's a little reminder for Perino of what the President did say:

Now, to their credit, one vision has been presented and championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates. It’s a plan that aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years, and one that addresses the challenge of Medicare and Medicaid in the years after that.

These are both worthy goals. They’re worthy goals for us to achieve. But the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known certainly in my lifetime. In fact, I think it would be fundamentally different than what we’ve known throughout our history.

Full transcript below the fold.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (306)

PLAYS: (1023)

Embed

Well, here's your next Speaker of the House, America: Cryin' John Boehner, who almost turned on the waterworks during his speech after it became clear last night that Republicans are going to win back the House. Boehner -- who, as Keith Olbermann pointed out after his speech, was overpainted himself as just a man of the people rather than on old-time pol -- complained about how "out of touch" Washington has become. Pot, meet kettle.

Get ready for endless investigations, gridlock and craziness that's going to make us long for the days of Bill Clinton in comparison. Ugh.

DOWNLOADS: (5370)

PLAYS: (8989)

Embed

Much to the shagrin of Justice Samuel Alito, President Obama called for Congress to pass a bill to correct some of the problems that will be caused from the awful Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United v. FEC case. Whether they'll listen is another story. I would hope this is one issue where they can get some Republicans to come along and get some legislation passed. When even Jim DeMint looks like a deer caught in the headlights over the issue of foreign companies being able to meddle in our elections I would certainly hope so.

That’s what I came to Washington to do. That’s why – for the first time in history – my Administration posts our White House visitors online. And that’s why we’ve excluded lobbyists from policy-making jobs or seats on federal boards and commissions.

But we can’t stop there. It’s time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my Administration or Congress. And it’s time to put strict limits on the contributions that lobbyists give to candidates for federal office. Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and I urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps correct some of these problems.

(Scarce Edit: This year's Joe Wilson moment? Not as major, to be sure, but just as telling. Alito seems to be saying "No way. Not true.")

DOWNLOADS: (595)

PLAYS: (1185)

Embed

Looks like Dick had to send his daughter out to do his dirty work for him again this week on Fox News Sunday. It's hard to say who was more repugnant among this past week's panel line up--Liz with her denial that the United States tortured prisoners or Bloody Bill Kristol with his war mongering.

WALLACE: Liz, several leading conservatives applauded the president's speech -- Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich. How about Liz Cheney?

CHENEY: There were certainly parts of his speech with which I wholeheartedly agree, and I think it was really good, frankly, to have the president finally enunciate some of these things, talk about, you know, the insufficiency of engagement with respect to dealing with terror or dealing with enemies, talk about the importance of America supporting democracy around the world, and also talk about the role that America has played particularly in post-World War II Europe.

I think the key will be whether the policies now follow that, and I certainly hope that they do. But we still had in this speech -- you know, it's almost like it's become reflexive, this notion that America abandoned our ideals after 9/11, and I think that it is -- you know, as we see this president repeatedly go onto foreign soil and accuse America of having tortured people, talk about Guantanamo Bay as an abandonment of our ideals, you know, I -- that part of the speech to me really is nothing short of shameful.

And it's not just an attack on political opponents. You know, it really is casting aspersions and, I would say, slandering the men and women in the CIA who carried out key programs that kept us safe and the people, frankly, right now at Guantanamo Bay who are guarding some of the world's worst terrorists.

So I think that part of the speech represents something I hope the president will stop soon.

Alan Grayson had it right and his message for the Vice President applies to the daughter as well.