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From this Saturday's The Journal Editorial Report on Fox, host Paul Gigot asks his panel what they expect from President Obama during his second term, and after the initial response from Jason Riley, saying that the president is going to be looking to fund his first term agenda, because "socialized medicine is expensive," fellow panelist Daniel Henninger threw out this stink bomb:

GIGOT: Dan, what about this theory from liberals, which is -- and they're cheering it -- no more mister nice guy. The president is going to take on Republicans. He was way to compromising in the first term -- not that I recognize that president -- but that's the line that they're taking. And so, you know... look, he's going to put them in their place. He's going to demonize them, stigmatize them. Is that what we're going to see? What is that...

HENNINGER: We are going to see it. I mean, the left has been looking for years for an answer to right wing talk radio and they've got one -- the President of the United States. He's like a left wing talk show host.

Uh.... in a word Dan... NO. We've got plenty of "left wing" talk show hosts out there and they're mostly way to the left of President Obama. They went on to complain that President Obama is to blame for making the Republicans look bad and that he's causing them to fight among themselves, as though they needed an ounce of help in that department.

And the Republican health care plan he helped get passed that you all loved until a Democrat proposed it isn't "socialism." These wingnuts just keep pushing that Overton window further and further to the right.

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From this Saturday's Journal Editorial Report, Peggy Noonan, like a lot of other Republicans, are trying to figure out what the GOP should do to keep from suffering the kind of losses they did during this presidential election. Needless to say, like most of them, she doesn't seem to understand that they're going to need to do more than just change their rhetoric.

Peggy Noonan: "Republican Party Has Much To Think About":

"This was a solid win for the president and I think that the Republican party has much to think about here going into the future," Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan said on FOX News' "Journal Editorial Report" this weekend.

Noonan, however, says Republicans don't need to rethink their principles such as limited government, but how to present such ideas.

"The way the party goes forward sometimes, it is a way that unnecessarily, I think, occasionally turns people off," Noonan opined. "I also think, a big lesson for the Republican party in this election is to look at America, look at the Republican base -- the famous Republican base -- and see that this is not expanding anymore; this is where it is, maybe it is beginning to detract." [...]

"One of the things I think the party will have to do now is listen to certain voices, such as up here in New York, Heather Higgins of IWF (Independent Women's Forum). She has been some time to party political professionals the answer is not to drill deep into the base; the answer is to expand the base. And that is through going to people, that is through conversation, that is through talking to them about the issues that they case about. It is not operating from 'up here' with big ads that just press people's buttons; it's operating in a way like the Obama campaign did. It's going down on to the ground and talking to people. It's labor intensive, but it's a way of growing. It's a wake of persuading people, which I think Republicans have gotten kind of bad at," she said.

Here's more on that from Laura Clawson at Daily KOS -- Stunned Republicans try to figure out what went wrong and repackage for the future:

Continue reading »

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From this Saturday's Journal Editorial Report, after the Fox panel members spent some time weighing in on the latest polls and doing their best to get the audience pumped up about Mitt Romney's so-called "momentum" in the national poll and playing a portion of the President talking about Willard's "Romesia," the WSJ's Dorothy Rabinowitz decided to play the "angry black man" card to attack President Obama.

FREEMAN: But the other issue is, look, this is a well known incumbent late in the race. He's probably persuaded most of the people he's going to persuade and I think his campaign speeches now are telling you that, because it is a very fiercely partisan, ideological message that he's delivering as he travels to these swing states. He is not talking to independents.

GIGOT: Let's get a clip of that. We want to give an illustration of what James just pointed out.

(VIDEO)

OBAMA: It turns out it's not a five-point plan Governor Romney has got, it's a one-point plan:  Folks at the very top get to play by their own rules -- pay lower tax rates than you do, outsource more jobs, let Wall Street run wild.  And if this plan sounds familiar, it's because we tried it. […]

Now, Governor Romney knows this.  He knows his plan isn't any different than the policies that led to the Great Recession.  So in the final weeks of his election, he's counting on you forgetting what he stands for.  He's hoping that you, too, will come down with a case of what we like to call Romnesia.

(END VIDEO)

GIGOT: Romnesia. I've got it. You've got it, so what's ahhh... what do you think of that?

RABINOWITZ: Well, what we think of it is, what are we looking at here? We have to acknowledge, the President is a very angry man. That has been there evidently in the past, since that debate, all along...

GIGOT: But you know what Dorothy, here's the thing, he's always been such a cool customer. That's been his great appeal to so many people. It helped him in 2008 with John McCain. […] You're saying this is a different Obama we're seeing?

RABINOWITZ: Yes. When the sun is shining, reality is very different. What happened is that we heard the mantra for a long time now, we always knew this was going to be a close race. Well, maybe his handlers did, but Obama never did. You have to believe inside that you always thought that, but now, came Denver, he began to understand, this is reality. He is in danger of losing and everything that supported him, all of that sense of vast crowds – imagine what happened yesterday in Colorado.

If you took a look at Mitt Romney's immense crowds, that evokes the same, tremendous passion that Obama had, only it was Mitt Romney winning. So you have this enraged President and it comes out he can't stop, just as Biden could not stop, he cannot stop behaving inappropriately.

Ah yes, that "enraged President." Doesn't everyone see just how "unhinged" he is on the campaign trail, waging "class warfare" by daring to point out what Mitt Romney's policies are? The nerve of him. Par for the course, it's another day of upside down land and major projection of Romney's worst traits onto President Obama in Fox GOPTV land.

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The Obama campaign has a new ad out titled "Worried" which points out that Mitt Romney would like to return us to the policies we had under George W. Bush, and naturally the panel members on Fox's the Journal Editorial Report did their best to try to pretend that wasn't true.

While it may be true that Bush is not on the ballot now, and the economy is still in bad shape, that's not due to the policies of the Obama administration as the talking heads on Fox claimed and they completely ignored Republican governors and state legislatures around the country doing their part to lay off as many government workers as possible, or the Republicans in the Congress and the amount of obstruction we've seen from them.

They did do their best to pretend that Romney doesn't want to privatize Social Security, just like George W. Bush did and that there's a dime's worth of difference between the two there. And they criticized Bush for the prescription drug giveaway he passed, as though Republicans really care about government taking care of their allies in big pharma or any of the rest of their campaign donors for that matter. That's their standard excuse to try to pretend Bush wasn't a real Republican and was just like those tax and spend liberals they all hate so much. And even though they acknowledged that Mitt Romney would like to pass Paul Ryan's budget plan, there was no admission that his plan would just be a return to what we had under Bush, only on steroids.

Here's more from Jon Perr from back in June on exactly why Romney would just be a return to the Bush years and why that ad is correct: Mitt Romney is Running for Bush's Third Term:

In Las Vegas last week, Mitt Romney looked to his own biography in proposing a new requirement for anyone seeking the presidency:

"In addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birthplace of the president being set by the Constitution, I'd like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before becoming president of the United States."

Of course, if Mitt Romney had his way, the President should also have an MBA from the prestigious Harvard Business School. He ought to have made millions in the private sector and earned notoriety for running a high-profile sports enterprise. A scion of a proud Republican family, the occupant of the White House should promise massive, Treasury-draining tax cuts which would deliver the lion's share of their benefits to the very richest Americans, himself and his family included. The President should also nevertheless pledge to balance the budget even while boosting defense spending. And in his ideal America, he would like to privatize Social Security and leave Americans to fend for themselves in the private health insurance marketplace.

If that profile sounds like Mitt Romney, that's because it is. Then again, the same description also applies to America's First MBA President*, George W. Bush. And we all know how well that worked out.

(Click a link to jump to the details for each below the fold):

• Big Tax Cuts and Bigger Debt
• Another Windfall for the Wealthy
• Social Security Privatization
• The Bush Health Plan on Steroids
• Defense Spending and National Security
• Of and For the Haves - and the Have Mores

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From this Saturday's The Journal Editorial Report on Fox, the panel from Uncle Rupert's Wall Street Journal really doesn't like the idea of several counties in California using "eminent domain to seize underwater mortgages from investors and restructure them to help borrowers keep the homes." Funny, I don't ever recall anyone on Fox complaining about the use of eminent domain by people like George W. Bush so he could build his stadium in Texas, but if it's to help underwater home owners, well, that's just terrible.

Here's more from the L.A. Times on the story: San Bernardino County weighs eminent domain to fight foreclosures:

A plan by San Bernardino County to seize mortgages and restructure them for underwater homeowners using eminent domain is perhaps the most aggressive example of how local governments are seeking new ways to combat foreclosure.

The cities of Ontario and Fontana are partnering with the county to create a Homeownership Protection Program that would use private funds to acquire underwater mortgages from investors. The county and the two cities have created a joint authority to explore and possibly enact the plan, and the first public meeting of that authority will be held next week.

David Wert, a spokesman for the county, said the program is worth exploring because it could offer a solution to one of the region's most entrenched problems: the vast number of loans that are stuck underwater, with more money owed than the property is worth. If the program were to go countywide, it could benefit 20,000 to 30,000 homeowners, he said.

"The only thing we are doing at this point is conducting a conversation," Wert said. "But the reason the county is interested in talking about this is because this is a proposal that could — if everything checks out — address the problem on a fairly large scale."

Although still in its initial stages, the aggressive proposal has attracted controversy. A number of banking, financial and business groups oppose it, contending that seizing mortgages would raise constitutional issues and could increase lending costs in those cities.

The California Mortgage Bankers Assn., the American Bankers Assn. and the American Securitziation Forum, along with several other financial groups, sent a letter of opposition to the county and the two cities.

"We believe that the contemplated use of eminent domain raises very serious legal and constitutional issues," the letter read. "It would also be immensely destructive to U.S. mortgage markets by undermining the sanctity of the contractual relationship between a borrower and creditor, and similarly undermining existing securitization transactions."

Dustin Hobbs, a spokesman for the California Mortgage Bankers Assn., said the program also could hurt the local housing market.

"It could be devastating," Hobbs said. "If investors are unsure as to the disposition of mortgages in San Bernardino County and in Fontana and Ontario, it could really curtail lending in the area, and if not curtail, certainly increase costs for new loans."

San Bernardino County's plan is the latest of several measures by local governments to fight foreclosures and the problems often associated with resulting neglect: crime and blight. Read on...

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After bringing in former Bush adviser Karl Rove for some free air time on his Super PAC, Crossroads GPS and their latest attack ad on President Obama for not cleaning up his former boss' mess quickly enough, Rove naturally doesn't think it would be a good idea for the Obama administration to remind anyone about just how big the mess really was he inherited.

Rove also said he doesn't think Mitt Romney needs to separate himself from George W. Bush's policies because he's "going to have his own policies," ignoring of course that Mitt Romney's policies are nothing but more of the same or a doubling down of the very policies we saw under George W. Bush that got us into the economic mess we're in now.

Romney wants more tax cuts for the rich, less regulation even after the economic crisis caused by Wall Street. He wants to gut our social safety nets and he's endorsed Paul Ryan's budget. He's also surrounded himself with former Bush advisers. But pay no attention to that, says Karl Rove.

And par for the course, they're blaming the economy not improving enough to suit them on President Obama, ignoring completely the Congress he's been forced to deal with and the fact that even when Democrats had control of the Congress after he was elected, you're not going to get anything passed that didn't suit the whims of the Joe Liebermans and the Ben Nelsons and the Max Baucuses of the world and their ilk and if he did not work with the conservative elements within his own party, nothing was going to get passed.

I always find it amazing that one of the people primarily responsible for putting our economy in a ditch has the gall to appear on television and whine about anyone reminding the public of how terrible his administration's record was and that's putting it mildly. I would say the last thing any Democrat needs to do is take campaign strategy advice from the likes of Karl Rove.

The fact that this man is sitting on television laying out a strategy to defeat President Obama rather than serving jail time for the D.O.J. scandal, the Plame leak, the illegal prosecution of Don Siegelman or the host of other atrocities he's responsible for shows just how broken our political and legal systems are right now. No bad deed when they're large enough goes unrewarded these days and this guy's the poster child as proof of that along with his other cronies that served under Bush.

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From Fox's Journal Editorial Report, Wall Street Journal editorial director Daniel Henninger along with host Paul Gigot and another of their editorial writers, Matthew Kaminski discussing what Gigot called the "biggest foreign policy story of 2011, the Arab Spring. And in typical Fox fashion where what's up is down and black is white, we get this bit of commentary on the cause of the uprisings from Henninger:

HENNINGER: Now, admittedly our options are limited, but why are they limited? The Arab Spring started last January. At least eleven nations erupted against existing dictatorships. The United States' reaction was we don't know what to do because we don't know who these people are, because we aren't engaged with those people.

GIGO: But for precisely that reason, we played or in part because of that reason, in part because of the reluctance of the Obama administration to lead in the world; you know they like to “lead from behind” as one of the advisers famously told The New Yorker. They've played a pretty passive role here. And so is that...

HENNIGER: Well I think they've done that as a matter of policy. They do not want to lead. They want to engage with other multilateral institutions. But I think what you're seeing in the Middle East is a microcosm of what the world looks like when the world's leading power disengages itself. It begins to spin out of control on its own and this is why this will occur in other parts of the world if we don't show global responsibility.

Which by engaging, what they're talking about naturally is threatening to or allowing Israel to go ahead and bomb Iran. They're just aching for a return to the days of George W. Bush and the neocons and more military engagements in the Middle East, facts and how badly that's worked out for us in the past be damned and they'll use any excuse to continue to push for just that as they did here. Heaven forbid we've got all this messy protesting and uprisings going on where people are tired of dictators and oppression. We'd better get more "engaged" to put a stop to it.

I think our meddling in the Middle East and propping up these dictators over the years that the populations are rising up against has done quite enough damage already, thank you. And to claim that we're not "engaged" already when we've still got thousands of troops and contractors over there and are doing drone attacks in the name of this fiasco they call the "war on terror" is utterly ridiculous.

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Naturally since the National Labor Relations Board did something where companies cannot spend a whole lot of time fearmongering and scaring their employees over how terrible unionization might be for them, the panel members on Rupert Murdoch's The Journal Editorial Report on the Fox propaganda channel thought that this was just a terrible idea, because heaven forbid we can't have anyone in the United States standing up against our race to the bottom on wages and benefits going on right now.

These cretins won't be happy until there's nothing left of the middle class in the United States before they're through with us and of course the group here pretended that if heaven forbid workers in the United States are paid a living wage with some benefits negotiated through their labor contracts, that means companies here won't create any more jobs. What of course was not discussed here is why our politicians are happy to be rewarding companies for outsourcing jobs and shipping them overseas and why we're not fixing our tax code and our trade laws to do something about it.

Here's more from Think Progress on what the panel here was trying to convince their lemmings who watch
Fox and actually take it seriously, and what they were trying to portray as some mortal threat to our economy recovering because heaven forbid companies can't scare the hell out of and intimidate their workers before they decide if they want to vote to join a union.

Republicans Call Rule That Would Make Union Elections Fairer An ‘Outrage,’ ‘Misguided,’ And ‘Reckless’:

Today, the National Labor Relations Board announced a new rule aimed at speeding up the process for union elections, in an attempt to prevent employers from using the various tactics they break out to delay and ultimately undermine unionization drives. According to research by John-Paul Ferguson of Stanford Business School, 35 percent of the time that workers file a petition for a union election, the election does not occur due to the many steps that employers take — including bringing in anti-union consultants — to delay elections for weeks, if not years. Currently, the average time between workers filing a petition for an election and the election taking place is 58 days, ample time for employers to engage in coercion and intimidation, or to fire pro-union workers (which happens in 25 percent of union drives). [...]

As the Center for American Progress’ David Madland wrote, the rule would simply “address the roadblocks that commonly are thrown up when the NLRB attempts to set up an election”:

The proposed rule would address the roadblocks that commonly are thrown up when the NLRB attempts to set up an election. There is currently no limit on employers’ or unions’ ability to demand a pre-election hearing on most any issue, including the eligibility of employees to vote, or the scope of the bargaining unit, which can be used to delay an election. Many of these issues could be resolved after voting, and others are manufactured for purposes of delay and don’t need to be resolved at all, ever. As former NLRB General Counsel Fred Feinstein explains, “The problem has been that a party in any election case has the ability to undermine the expression of employee free choice by manipulating Board procedures to create delay.”

And that's about 180 degrees from the takeaway these liars on Fox gave during this segment. In their world, it's the evil unions that have too much power and just want to wreck our economy because those damned American workers want to be paid a fair wage and make sure the company they work for doesn't kill them, or make them work for slave wages with no benefits. The nerve of them asking the CEO's running a company to want to share their wealth and treat their employees fairly and them having some voice in that.

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Ah yes... all that's old is new again. Republicans never get tired of demonizing welfare recipients and the poor, do they? While discussing what the strategy for the House Republicans should be in order for them to gain more power leading up to the 2012 election on Fox’s Journal Editorial Report, The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund has this suggestion for them.

FUND: Here’s another idea. The stimulus bill killed most of the welfare reforms that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996. I think those were very popular. They were also very successful. The Republicans can vote out a restoration of those welfare reform rules and dare the Senate to turn them down because I think that would be a great polarizing issue.

It looks like the Wall Street Journal and some right wing think tanks have been beating this drum for some time now as you can see from these articles:

Stimulus Bill Abolishes Welfare Reform and Adds New Welfare Spending

The Return of Welfare As We Knew It

And there are hundreds more articles out there just like those two from right wing blogs and think tanks. I believe this is the section of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 that they are complaining about. It would be nice to have some analysis on this from some place besides the right wing think tanks and The Wall Street Journal, but I've yet to find any, although I did find one from Truthout on how many of the states were not even taking advantage of the funds --States Ignoring Stimulus Welfare Fund

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The Rupert Murdoch hacks from the Wall Street Journal do their best to paint a happy face on Christine O'Donnell's win in the Delaware Republican primary race for Senate and the extreme right wing in the form of the so called "Tea Party" taking over the Republican Party. I really get tired of them trying to pretend like that astroturf movement funded by big monied interests is somehow not just the Republican base.

Nothing like watching the writers for Rupert Murdoch's right wing Wall Street Journal discuss how that "grass roots" movement they helped the Koch brothers get started is coming along now that they've unleashed the monster on the rest of us.