DOWNLOADS: (501)

PLAYS: (6105)

Embed

Jon Stewart took a shot at Fox News, Republicans and their allies for not even trying to hide why they're passing these voter ID laws across the country, even though they're well aware that there is no problem with voter fraud.

As Stewart pointed out, they could care less about problems with absentee voting, which is one area where there are actually problems and John Fund just admitted why they're pushing these laws but don't care about problems with absentee voting: John Fund: Sure, Republicans Focus On Voter ID For Political Reasons:

John Fund, the former Wall Street Journal columnist who has been promoting voter ID laws for years, admitted Tuesday that some Republicans focus on voter ID laws which restrict in-person voting over laws which could limit absentee voting because the GOP has a perceived electoral advantage when it comes to voting by mail.

“Absentee vote ballot fraud is the tool of choice amongst fraudsters,” Fund told a group of bloggers munching on Chick-Fil-A at the conservative Heritage Foundation on Tuesday. “Everytime you see a truly massive, coordinated effort at voter fraud, it usually relies in part on absentee voter fraud.”

Fund said that many voter ID laws “take some provisions to curb absentee ballot fraud,” with a few exceptions. But he confessed that Democrats had a point when they say that Republicans focus on voter ID because of a potential electoral advantage.

“I think it is a fair argument of some liberals that there are some people who emphasize the voter ID part more than the absentee ballot part because supposedly Republicans like absentee ballots more and they don’t want to restrict that,” Fund said. “But the bottom line is, on good government grounds, we have to have both voter ID laws and absentee ballot laws.”

And as we posted here, Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Turzai openly admitted their new law will help Mitt Romney win their state in the upcoming presidential election: Shameless Republican Brags About Voter ID 'Winning the State of PA'. Stewart wondered if Turzai realized anyone had the camera running during that event, because Turzai was "going to look like an a**hole." I don't think they care too much as long as it means they win elections by hook or crook and stay in power.

Stewart then turned to his "Senior Voting Correspondent" Jessica Williams for further discussion on how these new regulations are going after minorities, the poor, students and the elderly and some potential new tests for eligibility to vote, like whether you understand Jeff Foxworthy jokes or not.

DOWNLOADS: (251)

PLAYS: (1053)

Embed

Stephen Colbert went after Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai with this bit of satire on his show Wednesday evening for him bragging about voter suppression winning his state earlier this week.

DOWNLOADS: (451)

PLAYS: (276)

Embed

More fearmongering on the Super Committee failing to reach a deal to avoid the automatic triggered cuts that will come if the committee can't reach agreement soon. If you knew nothing about what the Republicans latest offer was and were just watching the segment above, you'd think both sides were being terribly unreasonable and wondering why, oh why that silly John Kerry won't give in and let the Republicans have what they want and that the Democrats had been offered some sort of "balanced" deal.

From Dave Dayden over at FDL News Desk, here's what the Republicans were offering today -- Republican’s Latest Super Committee Offer is a 181:1 Ratio of Spending Cuts to Tax Increases.

Whoo boy that's some real balance there. Why won't those silly Democrats agree to that very "serious" plan? I can't imagine. Here's more from DDay.

Republicans apparently just submitted a last-ditch effort to get agreement on the Super Committee. It was a $545 billion proposal, less than half of the minimum requirement to avoid all of the automatic trigger cuts. And it included $3 billion in tax increases.

For those of you scoring at home, that’s a ratio of about 181:1.

Democrats rejected it.

It’s almost getting fun to watch the catfood commission fail so thoroughly. If we’re already submitting proposals of less than half the minimum requirement, then there’s nothing left to fear from this thing. It’s also good news that the unbalanced proposal was rejected, because that probably included a lot of cuts already offered in past proposals by Democrats.

It will be fun to watch Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles and David Walker and Maya MacGuineas and all the rest whine and cry next week when this thing gets a real Viking funeral. What they know, but won’t tell you, is that simply doing nothing would lead to $7.1 trillion in deficit reduction. In other words, just offsetting any changes to current law will accomplish about twice as much as their alleged goal for cutting deficits. They won’t tell you this because it comes primarily from letting tax cuts expire. [...]

The point is not to let all of this happen; the point is not even to pay for all the fixes to this, necessarily. The point is to show that the medium term budget is ALREADY in primary balance, and that just relatively following that guide path – even while allowing for targeted measures to improve the economy – is completely sufficient, rather than cutting everyone’s Social Security and Medicare benefits.

181:1, and host Erin Burnett and her panel of Jim Bianco, John Avlon and David Gergen were allowing the viewers of CNN to think the Democrats were being offered anything they should have taken seriously. We need to just let these Bush tax cuts expire and put an end to this saber rattling over austerity measures, but the Villagers in the corporate media are desperate to continue to push the narrative that there are no solutions for this other than inflicting pain on the majority of the electorate rather than ask the richest among us to pay any more taxes.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (303)

PLAYS: (6763)

Embed

Just before the start if GOP presidential debate in Nevada, Erin Burnett and her panel had a little bit of trouble broadcasting from their outdoor studio as they were drowned out by the Occupy Wall Street protesters and chants of "Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!"

After TeaNN's relentless promotion of the AstroTurf "tea party" and Burnett's derisive treatment of the protesters during her opening show, I can't think of a more fitting bunch to have to put up with this, other than anyone from Fox "News."

DOWNLOADS: (378)

PLAYS: (1391)

Embed

Hey John Boehner... where are the jobs? Oh, I guess they don't matter if it's government employees potentially getting hammered from the GOP's proposed spending cuts.

Boehner: If Jobs Are Lost As A Result Of GOP Spending Cuts 'So Be It':

If House Republicans succeed in cutting tens of billions of dollars in discretionary spending over the next six months, some of the most immediate victims will be federal employees, many of whose jobs will be slashed as their agencies pare back.

At a press conference in the lobby of RNC headquarters Tuesday morning, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) shrugged this off as collateral damage.

"In the last two years, under President Obama, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs," Boehner said. "If some of those jobs are lost so be it. We're broke."

Some of those employees will no doubt collect unemployment insurance, so the government's obligation to them won't disappear with their jobs.

As TPM and John King pointed out, his numbers are wrong too.

And you've got to love CNN's favorite phony baloney "centrist" hack John Avlon defending Boehner here. Talking like some tough guy when you're doing real damage to real people's lives isn't going to win him any points in the minds of most of the electorate. It would be nice if his constituency at home finally had a belly full of him.

UPDATE: And here's more from Steve Benen. Apparently Villager Mark Halperin is trying to trivialize this as some sort of minor gaffe by Boehner. As Steve explains, it's not.

And Rachel Maddow opened her show by asking if John Boehner is just not very good at his job considering the way the last month has gone for him, with this remark just being the latest in a series of missteps.

DOWNLOADS: (476)

PLAYS: (3779)

Embed

DOWNLOADS: (234)

PLAYS: (291)

Embed

You've got to love it when CNN puts the "BREAKING NEWS!" banner on a story that's not yet been confirmed yet. The Villagers on the panel segment of John King's show are apparently all aflutter over the prospect of William Daley joining the Obama administration because heaven forbid this administration hasn't been friendly enough to big business and Wall Street already.

We can't continue to have our Wall Street masters of the universe continuing to go around with their feelings hurt, now can we?

KING: Let's begin there with that breaking news. I'm told tonight by several top Democratic sources including two current senior Obama administration officials that banking executive William Daley is being considered as a possible chief of staff candidate. Daley is the brother of the Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and was commerce secretary back in the Clinton administration. He also was a top official in the Gore presidential campaign back in 2000.

My sources tell me Daley's name figures prominently as the president and his close advisers debate how to respond to the new environment of divided government here in Washington, and how to put the White House on the best possible footing heading into the president's re-election campaign in 2012. One of these sources said that as of last week, Daley had not, not been offered the job.

Another said whether to make that offer was part of the president's work on his Hawaii vacation. And a third source confirming a Bloomberg news report this afternoon that Daley's name was part of a broader discussion about White House changes for the new year and the new political environment. So why consider Bill Daley and what does it signal about the president's thinking after the midterm election shellacking?

Gloria Borger is here. She's been working her sources this evening too. Also with us, CNN contributors Roland Martin, a veteran himself of Chicago politics, John Avlon and Erick Erickson. Gloria, let me start with you.

Sometimes in what we're told we have to try to crack the reporting code and one of the things that strikes me is officially White House officials are saying no comment. Not go away. No comment.

BORGER: No comment. Can't confirm or deny. And you know this is something our White House correspondent Ed Henry was hearing back in early September. He was getting a whiff of this. He was waved away from it. I was waved away from it. It is very clear that this White House has been doing an internal review led by the current chief of staff, Pete Rouse, about what they need to do heading in to a new Congress with a new political reality and the political reality, as you pointed out, is a divided Congress and Bill Daley is somebody who really knows how to reach out to Republicans.

We saw that when he passed NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement when Bill Clinton was there. And I bet they're going to -- you know that's one reason that he's attractive to them.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (309)

PLAYS: (931)

Embed

You've just got to love the framing they used for this segment from CNN's Parker/Spitzer earlier this week -- Can a centrist movement in the U.S. succeed or is it too 'mushy' to hold up?

This just smells of more Republican re-branding with some of the so-called Republican "moderates" wanting to distance themselves from the teabirchers that have taken over their party. They may have done well during the mid-term elections just catering to their base, but that's not going to work so well in 2012.

Former Rudy Giuliani staffer John Avlon's been pushing this nonsense for some time now, but as Karoli pointed out last week, there's a new group jumping on his bandwagon as well. Kathleen Parker never mentioned the "No Labels" group during the segment, but it may as well have been an infomercial for them by Parker and Avlon.

It's really a shame that Thomas Frank wasn't allowed to speak more to counter Avlon's talking points. Kathleen Parker and John Avlon can put all of the "mushy middle", "we're a center-right country", bipartisan spin on this they want. It's not going to change the fact that they're both a couple of right wingers. There's not a lick of difference between their economic policy positions and those of Dick Armey and the Koch brothers.

CNN's off air interview with Frank looked a lot more interesting than listening to Avlon's claptrap about how voters just really want all the bickering to stop and for our politicians to all just get along, which is doublespeak demanding Democratic capitulation.

Q: If we could arrange a private conversation between you and Rep. John Boehner, what would you say to him?

FRANK: I was struck by his line about Democrats “snuffing out the America that I grew up in.” It’s a charge that I frequently apply to conservatives, who have so resolutely smashed the middle-class society where I grew up in favor of a nation that is heaven on earth for the very rich—and an endless, losing struggle for working people. It’s also something I often say about market forces generally, which are the most radical and disruptive cultural influences I know of. Conservatives always claim to love the market and to deplore what’s happening in “the culture,” but they never explain how they can hold these two views at the same time. Wouldn’t it be great to have John Boehner himself sort out these things out for us?

I’m also always been impressed by his luminous neckties, and I would of course tell him so.

Q: What credit do you give the Tea Party for changing American politics at this moment?

FRANK: They demonstrated two important things:

- That the supposed power of centrism is in fact just a comforting beltway fairytale. That the “median voter” doesn’t really determine things. That politics really is a battle of small, committed groups—and also of money.

- That there’s a place in politics for class-based discontent. That conservatives can speak to that emotion just as readily as liberals can. And that if liberals don’t understand this—if they just blow it off on the grounds that working-class people will always vote for Democrats because duh—that they will keep losing, and they will deserve to lose. [...]

Q:As you get older, do you find yourself becoming more or less liberal?

FRANK: Not speaking strictly for myself here, but what I find people outgrow isn’t liberalism per se, it’s the tendency to treat politics like a branch of aesthetics, where what matters are gestures and what you’re after—the object of politics—is a demonstration of your originality and your surpassing cleverness. When you get older you realize how impotent that approach is, and you also understand the disastrous consequences things like, say, banking deregulation have for people.

Full transcript of the clip above below the fold.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (558)

PLAYS: (1258)

Embed

It looks like Digby is as tired of Mr. Wingnuts John Avlon’s hackery on CNN as I am. As she noted Avlon and the other Villagers on the panel of John King’s show are just desperate for our political class to just get along, or in other words for the Democrats to capitulate to the demands of Republicans.

BTW, the "centrist" ex-Giuliani speechwriter John Avlon was on CNN just now, wringing his hands and arguing ad nauseam that all the American people want is for everyone to just stop the fighting. John King was very sympathetic and agreed.

Is that what all those Republicans who voted for far right Tea Party candidates want? What I heard was that want their politicians to fight as hard as possible for their agenda. Liberals want the same thing. The only constituency that seems to be upset by the fighting is the Village constituency which is obviously quite agitated to be wasting time dealing wit such silliness as unemployment insurance and social security cuts and tax breaks for millionaires. Who cares about that trivia?

There are issues worth getting passionate about, like the horror of unauthorized presidential fellatio or the horror of unauthorized leaking of documents to the press, but arguing over things that affect Real Americans is the last thing Real Americans want. Just ask the Villagers, our self-designated celebrity millionaire stand-ins. They know us better than we know ourselves.

I’m also as sick as she is about seeing unemployment extensions for the most vulnerable among us being held hostage by the Republicans in exchange for tax cuts for the rich. They’ve already let them expire. I would guess nothing less than an extension of the Bush tax cuts for two years just in time to muck up the 2012 elections will be demanded to extend those unemployment benefits. Sadly there are probably enough rotten Blue Dogs that will vote with Republicans to make sure the rich still gets theirs and that the ransom being demanded from the working class and the poor is paid.

And then we get to look forward to having this fight again just in time for the presidential elections if they give them a two year extension as a “compromise”. Good job Democrats! I’m wondering where I can get a job to give you such politically savvy advice and if it includes a pension?

Full transcript below the fold.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (398)

PLAYS: (980)

Embed

CNN contributor and former Giuliani speechwriter and Deputy Communications Director John Avlon is back at his usual game of making false equivalencies and pretending all sides are equally extreme when it comes to this race-baiting and extreme anti-Muslim rhetoric that's been hyped by the media for the last month or so and that everyone just needs to tone it down and play nice with each other that are out there protesting. John, why don't you start by asking your former boss to lead the way and knock it off?

He also throws this nugget in there when asked about the wingnut pastor who wanted to burn the Quran on 9-11.

AVLON: It's a good example and a cautionary tale of the way that extremists are able to gain the system and hijack the media with deeply disproportionate, you know, unrepresentative statements. And that kind of ugliness too often occupies our attention. We need to push back on that.

Try starting with your own network John. All of the cable news networks have been nearly as bad as Fox when it comes to over-hyping these stories. Then they bring this guy on for some naval-gazing and to play the all-sides-have-crazies game.

LEMON: Yesterday, the nation remembered those lost on September 11, 2001. But some people say the anniversary this year was unlike the last eight. They feel the controversy surrounding a proposed Islamic center two blocks from Ground Zero turned a patriotic day of mourning into political football.

John Avlon, a regular contributor to CNN, says the anti-Islamic center rally he attended yesterday was a desecration to the meaning of September 11. He told me there's been a 9/11 amnesia in today's politics.

AVLON: You know, one of the things that came out of that awful day wasn't just the beginning of a wider war that we are still engaged in, but an awareness that what unites us is fundamentally more important than those things that divide us as Americans.

And what we're seeing with the rise of partisan politics and an ugliness at some of these rallies marks the fact that I think we're forgetting that again. The divisions that are deeply divisive to Americans, whether Democrat or Republican, completely unimportant under the wider lens of the war we're in. That was an awareness that really sunk into people after the attacks...

(CROSSTALK)

LEMON: What did you specifically see, John, at the rally -- at these rallies that made you use such harsh words?

AVLON: Just on both sides, a lot of politicization, harshly political rhetoric, and a lot of -- not just anger, but hate. Keep in mind, one of the organizers of the big rally in the afternoon is somebody who has referred to President Obama as the Muslim in the White House over 250 times on her blog.

There's an inherently partisan political nature of this. It's not about Democrat or Republican, but really a divisiveness. And that's what we need to push against. That's what we need to remember. In fact, on the day when McCain and Obama went to the Ground Zero ceremony in 2008 together, that is the spirit of this day. That's the spirit we need to keep in our minds and hearts. We're losing it.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (203)

PLAYS: (230)

Embed

Rep. Alan Grayson and former Rudy Giuliani staffer and king of the false equivalencies Wingnut author John Avlon had a little dust up over polls on John King's show. Grayson took Avlon to task over a recent Gallup poll which shows President Obama's approval rating down to 38% with independent voters. What I wish he'd have called him out for is his claim that voters are more worried about the debt than jobs and the economy. Since he used the words "independent voters" and didn't say which poll he was citing it's impossible to say if he was cherry picking some statistics.

The larger problem with what Avlon did here is one that Digby pointed out a few weeks ago.

Conflation Fail:

FAIR does an overview of the polls which show that the beltway obsession with the deficit is not, in fact, shared by the country.

But I did want to highlight this one piece of evidence supporting my contention that to the extent people do care about --- they just don't understand it. [...]

This is one of the reasons why I have been so frantic that the administration was feeding into the deficit hysteria. They don't seem to get that people don't actually care about "the deficit," they care about "the economy" and they fail to make a distinction between the two, especially since we have right wing wrecking crew that makes a point of conflating the two.

It's a problem.

Yes it is and people like Avlon here hyping fears over the deficit is just another example.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

Continue reading »