DOWNLOADS: (90)

PLAYS: (327)

Embed

Here we go again. Another day, another story about a Republican feeding into the birtherism that still runs rampant among their electorate.

From Think Progress -- Rep. Stearns On Obama Birth’s Certificate: ‘The Question Is, Is It Legitimate?’:

New video of a February town hall shows Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) pandering to birthers and raising questions about the legitimacy of President Obama’s birth certificate.

When Stearns met with constituents on February 25 in Belleview, one of the first questions came from an elderly gentleman who insisted that Obama was not born in the United States and ought to be impeached. Rather than correcting the man and informing him that the president is indeed a natural-born American citizen, Stearns coddled the conspiracy theory by implying that Obama’s birth certificate may be a forgery — “is it legitimate?” Stearns wondered aloud.

The Florida congressman noted that there is a “general consensus” that Obama “produced a birth certificate,” but gave no indication that he agreed with this sentiment. He also advanced an phony conservative meme, debunked by Dave Weigel and others, that Hawaii’s governor was incapable of locating the birth certificate. Read on...

Video via Youtube user FlaPolActCoop.

Think Progress has the transcript posted for those having trouble hearing them and as they noted, the very next questioner was a man asking "if there was a grand jury looking into the veracity of Obama’s birth certificate."

Steve Benen at Rachel Maddow's place has more on some recent poll numbers with just how pervasive this is in the South -- Zombie lies linger in the Deep South.

DOWNLOADS: (10772)

PLAYS: (1440)

Embed

Rick Santorum was asked by CNN's John King about an incident at a Florida town hall where a woman in the audience questioned President Obama's citizenship and claimed that he is a Muslim and unlike John McCain who ran into some similar situations in 2008, Santorum didn't feel the need to correct the audience member.

KING: Senator, at your event there earlier today a woman stood up and she delivered a pretty “out there” attack on the President and I want you to listen.

WOMAN: I never refer to Obama as President because legally he is not the president. He constantly says that our Constitution is passe and he totally ignores it as you know he does what he darn well pleases. He is an avowed Muslim.

KING: This is how you responded.

SANTORUM: I'm doing my best to try to get him out of the government, right? I am. And you're right about how he uniformly ignores the Constitution.

KING: You're not responsible for what somebody in the audience says Senator. I want to make that perfectly clear, but do you feel any sense or responsibility to say whoa? Senator McCain repeatedly in 2008 stopped people who went down that line and said look, let's fight them on policy. Let's not go there.

SANTORUM: I have repeatedly done that. I don’t feel it’s my obligation every time someone says something I don’t agree with to contradict them and the President's a big boy and he can defend himself and his record and I'm going to go out and talk about the issues that the President and I disagree on and try to defeat him because I think that's the best thing we can do for the future of our country.

KING: I understand on every point, but something like that, standing up saying he's an avowed Muslim, you don’t feel an obligation to say, “Ma’am, let’s fight him on taxes, let’s fight him on spending, let’s fight him on the size of government but let’s not do that”?

SANTORUM: I think I repeated that many, many times throughout the course of this campaign. I don't really feel an obligation to go out and repeat it over and over again as people bring that up. My position's clear, the President's position's clear. I don't think the President's a Muslim, but I don't think it's my obligation to go out and repeat that every time someone who feels that way says something.

While it may be true that Santorum isn't responsible for questions he's asked during his campaign stops, it might help matters or make his excuse more believable here if he were not just bragging about an endorsement from World Net Daily's wingnut birther, Joseph Farah -- Santorum Touts Birther Endorsement.

DOWNLOADS: (222)

PLAYS: (1513)

Embed

At President Obama's town hall in Mountain View today, Doug Edwards, former Consumer Marketing Head for Google, stood and asked the President to raise his taxes to preserve Pell Grants, education funding and disaster relief, among other things.

This was, of course, a riff on Warren Buffett's column a couple of weeks ago where he called on Congress to make his tax rate equitable with that of his secretary, who actually pays more in taxes than Buffett does.

The near-instantaneous reaction on Twitter and elsewhere has been fascinating. Mark Knoller tweeted this:

The US Govt accepts contributions. Online at pay.gov or by mail: Bureau of Public Debt, Dept G, P.O Box 2188, Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188.

The right-wingers are nearly apoplectic, with Michelle Malkin ready to vomit while they furiously spread speculation that the guy was a plant. Because surely an ex-Googler who made a fortune via stock options and the like couldn't possibly be sincere about wanting to pay more in taxes to make sure kids get decent educations and things?

So the counter from the right is either, "Sure, go ahead and pay whatever you want, here's the address to send it to!" or "You lie!"

Continue reading »

Well, at least he wasn't complaining about struggling to get by on his $174,000 a year salary this time, but Wisconsin Republican Rep. Sean Duffy didn't fare much better at a town hall this week.

Town Hall Citizens Confront Rep. Sean Duffy For Voting To Privatize Medicare And Defend Tax Breaks For Rich:

All across America, a Main Street Movement has broken out to defend the middle class against right-wing attacks on labor rights and basic public services. In recent days, this movement has turned on GOP House members who voted to effectively end Medicare and turn seniors over to private insurance companies when they approved Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) radical budget bill.

On Tuesday, Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) was the latest congressman to face the ire of Main Street America during a town hall event with constituents who stopped being polite and started getting real.

First, constituents explained they were upset that Ryan’s plan would cut off people under the age of 55 from Medicare. Then, others directly challenged Duffy about defending tax breaks for the wealthy for voting to effectively replace Medicare with a voucher system.

Think Progress has the transcript posted so go read the rest. It's nice to see these reps who voted for Paul Ryan's budget getting an earful from real voters instead of Koch brothers bused in astroturers.

Aliens! Zombies! Make some popcorn and turn down the lights for Area 51: The Truth is Outsourced followed by Attack of the Town Hall Zombies

From The Uptake--Ed Schultz "I'd Kick Their Ass" If I Ran For US Senate:

Talk show host Ed Schultz says he's not running for US Senate in North Dakota but if he were he'd "kick their ass" referring to Republicans. Schultz also says " We need to get the people who have infiltrated the Democratic-Progressive movement and get them the hell out" and "We need to get rid of Michele Bachmann" (wild applause)

Schultz spoke at AM950's Blue State Bash in Minneapolis. Distributed by Tubemogul.

And Think Progress--Ed Schultz Tells Robert Gibbs He’s ‘Full Of Sh*t’ And ‘You’re Losing Your Base’:

Last night, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz spoke at Minnesota progressive talk radio AM950’s Blue State Bash at the Minneapolis Convention Center. During his remarks, Schultz revealed that he recently had a testy confrontation with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs (Gibbs appeared on Schultz’s show this past Thursday). “Mr. Gibbs and I had quite a conversation off the air the other night,” he revealed:

SCHULTZ: I told him he was full of sh*t is what I told him. … And then he gave me the Dick Cheney f-bomb. … I told Robert Gibbs, I said “And I’m sorry you’re swearing at me, but I’m just trying to help you out. I’m telling you you’re losing your base. Do you understand you’re losing your base?”

Continue reading...

Give 'em hell big Eddie. Somebody needs to tell them what they don't want to hear. This isn't all that surprising after watching them the other night. The interview was already pretty heated before they got off the air.

DOWNLOADS: (1506)

PLAYS: (3105)

Embed

Peggy Noonan with a double dose of her typical snobbery on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Noonan first calls the President "boorish" for doing his "Full Ginsburg" on the Sunday shows and for all the town hall meetings he's had. Then she goes on to excuse the racism at the tea bag parties and town hall protests.

Stephanopoulos: Peggy one of the arguments the White House makes is they're dealing with a very different media environment than any other President in the past has ever had to deal with. There's such a fracture in media environment that even someone like Ronald Reagan, who you worked for would have to do more of what you're seeing the President do in this environment.

Noonan: Oh I don't know. I think the President is doing what he's doing now, being all over today and the past few weeks--he's doing it because... he can, because people do what they know how to do.

Stephanopoulos: Because no one is going to turn him down.

Noonan: This is his way. Because everybody will say yes. I don't think it's about the media environment but I do think the media environment allows a modern leader to be something subtly damaging and that is boorish. They get their face in your face every day all the time. It's boorish and it makes people not lean towards you, but lean away from you, no matter what the merits of the issue and the merits of this issue are not such great merits.

[.....]

You know what I think. When I look at this I step back a little bit and I think there is a lot of anger now. Mrs. Pelosi had a point. Things get high. It's always good to cool things down, but essentially what we have here is a very new president. He's only been here for ten months. He is a young man. He didn't have deep, long, profound experience. He is attempting right now to change, what it is, seventeen, eighteen percent of the GNP of the United States of America, changing how it works, health care.

This is problematic on the face of it. People will argue about that, but on top of that people are thinking about, in America the economy, unemployment, war and peace, two wars that are going. This president who is new and young comes along and says "Oh, that's not the issue. The issue is health care". It seems not like a program but a non sequitur and it angers people.

Inland at DailyKOS reminds of us what the definition of a boor is and tries to figure out what Noonan may have been implying by using the term.

boor definition boor (bo̵or)

noun

1. Archaic a peasant or farm worker

2. a rude, awkward, or ill-mannered person

Inland also points to this post at Firedoglake by Blue Texan with more of Noonan's hackery on the town hall protesters. Peggy Noonan: Health Care Protests Haven’t “Gotten Out of Hand”, Just “Plenty of Booing”:

Nooners surveys the mob scenes, the hangings in effigy, the assaults, the unhinged rhetoric -- and blames it all on Obama.

All of this is unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative. They [the White House and Democrats] are mocking and menacing concerned citizens. This only makes a hot situation hotter. Is this what the president wants? It couldn’t be. But then in an odd way he sometimes seems not to have fully absorbed the awesome stature of his office. You really, if you’re president, can’t call an individual American stupid, if for no other reason than that you’re too big. You cannot allow your allies to call people protesting a health-care plan “extremists” and “right wing,” or bought, or Nazi-like, either. They’re citizens. They’re concerned. They deserve respect.

Shorter Noonan: if the Democrats would stop dressing like slutty socialists, they wouldn't get raped.

h/t to Bob Cesca who also noted..

Adding... Peggy Noonan was at the top of her passive aggressive condescending game. Bravo. Referring to the president as "boorish" in her trademark insufferable hushed tone doesn't make her "graceful" or "civil" -- it just makes her look ridiculous, since she clearly doesn't know what "boorish" means.

DOWNLOADS: (1982)

PLAYS: (4906)

Embed

Compassionate conservative Rep. Paul Broun makes Ed Schultz's Psycho Talk segment for this number- Rep. Broun walks away from man asking for plan to lower health care costs: ‘If you have a suggestion, send it.’:

Yesterday, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) held a town hall in Watkinsville, GA, where he fielded questions about health care legislation before Congress. At the conclusion of the town hall, Ryan Lewis, an Athens, GA, resident, approached the congressman and politely explained to him about how his health insurance company refuses to pay for his treatment. In response, Broun told Lewis, “We need to make insurance affordable.” Lewis then asked, “How do we do that?” Rather than offering a GOP solution to skyrocketing health care costs, Broun simply told him, “If you have a suggestion, send it to me” and quickly walked away.

DOWNLOADS: (301)

PLAYS: (436)

Embed

September 07, 2009 News Corp

BAIER: Now for another example of a legislator having some troubles at a health care town hall meeting, a video making the rounds on YouTube shows Indiana Democratic Congressman Baron Hill firing back after a woman who said she was a journalism student complained that Hill's staff would not allow her to videotape the event.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

VOICE OF TOWNHALL PARTICIPANT: I'm not disrupting. I'm keeping to myself, but now that I'm not getting to do this for a project, I was going to ask a question. Why can't I film this? Isn't this my right?

VOICE OF BARON HILL (D), INDIANA REPRESENTATIVE: Well, this is -- this is my town hall meeting, and I set the rules and I've had these rules.

Let me repeat that one more time. This is my town hall meeting for you. And you're not going to tell me how to run my congressional office.

DOWNLOADS: (1459)

PLAYS: (6156)

Embed

September 03, 2009 News Corp

(Nicole) KTLA:

A 65-year-old man's finger was bitten off at a health care rally Wednesday night in Thousand Oaks, California. KTLA reports that the man was part of an anti-reform crowd:

About 100 protesters sponsored by MoveOn.org were having a rally supporting health care reform. A group of anti-health care reform protesters formed across the street.

A witness from the scene says a man was walking through the anti-reform group to get to the pro-reform side when he got into an altercation with the 65-year-old, who opposes health care reform.

The injured anti-reform man walked to Los Robles hospital to have the finger reattached.

He had Medicare. A blogger who witnessed the fight from the pro-reform side says that the finger-biter was provoked

The finger-biter fled the scene and is still at large. I don't know if I buy the whole "he punched me, so it's okay that I bit the guy's finger off" alibi, but isn't it nice to know that the guy protesting government's role in health care has Medicare to take care of his hospital bills?