DOWNLOADS: (961)

PLAYS: (14775)

Embed

From this Friday evening's The Daily Show, Jon Stewart had some fun with Clint Eastwood's appearance at the Republican National Convention, which he described as the "most joy" he's "gotten from an old man since Dick Cheney non-fatally shot one in the face."

After showing a bit more of Eastwood's performance at the RNC, Stewart proceeded to rip apart Mitt Romney's speech and the reason that Clint Eastwood's speech was so damaging to Republicans.

STEWART: Here's why it hurts. It hurts these Republicans bad because this convention, like all conventions is a scripted and focus group fantasy and the display of Eastwood's Gran Torino id was the very thing Republicans had constructed the entire week to suppress.

This convention was the vision of a perfect America that used to exist, until Barack Obama ruined it and so what if that America had never actually existed.

ROMNEY: To be an American was to assume that all things were possible. That unique brand of optimism, humility... it's that good feeling when you have more time to volunteer to coach your kid's soccer team or help out on school trips. It's when we see that new business opening up downtown, so when we go to work in the morning and see everybody else on the block doing the same thing. My friends cared more about what sports teams we followed than what church we went to.

STEWART: Gee whiz pops, that sounds awesome. That was the uncomplicated America that you remember. I think in the early '60's there are some churches in Alabama that would have disagreed with your sports team versus place of worship anecdote.

But the point is this, when this convention attempted to do is say that we could all live again in this nostalgic paradise, if it weren't for this one f**king guy.

After pointing out that Republicans have invented a complete fiction of a world that never existed and playing a bunch of clips of these Republicans at the convention attacking President Obama, Stewart laid waste to Romney's ridiculous talking point during his speech that he really wanted Obama to succeed.

STEWART: Bull f**king s**t! You... wanted... Obama to succeed? We may not remember that America was never Mayberry, but we sure at s**t can remember back to 2009.

Cue the clips of Fox "News" and rMoney himself hoping for failure from President Obama almost immediately after he got elected and Clint Eastwood giving us more proof that Republicans live in upside down land and a world of projecting their faults onto their opponents, regardless of reality.

DOWNLOADS: (390)

PLAYS: (6558)

Embed

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) has become the latest Republican to go up against CNN host Soledad O'Brien on the issue of Medicare and lose.

During an interview on Friday, O'Brien called out Chaffetz after he tried to claim that that Medicare plans offered by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), would not turn the program into a voucher system.

"Let's keep to the facts that President [Barack] Obama did take $700 billion out of Medicare," Chaffetz told O'Brien.

"We've now had this conversation 15 times at least," O'Brien noted, shaking her head. "As you know, it's not taking money out of Medicare, right? It's a decrease in spending over time and it's a decrease that you yourself, I assume, voted for, right? In Paul Ryan's budget in 2011 and 2012, he had that same number in his budget. Didn't you vote for that?"

"It's not exactly the same number," Chaffetz replied. "I did vote in favor of the two budgets."

"But now you're criticizing something that you voted for twice, right?," O'Brien observed.

"It's a totally different approach," the Utah Republican maintained. "For instance, the Independent Payment Advisory Board -- IPAB -- is not something that I support, but is something that takes that $700 billion that Obama took and puts it into the control of these bureaucrats in Washington, D.C."

"At the end of the day, that same number crunching was voted on by virtually every single Republican in 2011 and then again in 2012. That is fair to say," O'Brien pointed out, adding that both Romney and Ryan had promised to "save" Medicare by turning it into a "voucher program."

"No, it's not!" Chaffetz objected.

"It's not a voucher program?" O'Brien wondered.

"It is not a voucher program," Chaffetz insisted. "It is a premium support, and that is totally different than a voucher program. And every time somebody says, 'Oh, it's a voucher program,' it's false, it's misleading, it's derogatory and it's inaccurate. That is not what it does."

"You will give people money to go and buy their own insurance, right?" O'Brien pressed. "But we're arguing over symantics. At the end of the day, isn't it -- you would give someone money to buy their own insurance."

"No, a premium support program is different than a voucher program," Chaffetz repeated.

"Walk me through how it's different," O'Brien dared the congressman.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (781)

PLAYS: (102029)

Embed

Romney surrogates going up against CNN host Soledad O'Brien clearly haven't learned their lesson.

A day after former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu angrily told O'Brien to "put an Obama bumper sticker on your forehead," former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney's national campaign co-chair, suggested that the CNN host didn't understand English.

During an interview on Wednesday, O'Brien told Pawlenty that one of the presumptive Republican presidential candidate's ads falsely claimed that President Barack Obama had cut $716 billion from Medicare -- but the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had determined that it was actually reduction in spending, not benefits.

"Isn't that just patently untrue in that ad?" she asked the former Minnesota governor.

"No, that's not correct, Soledad," Pawlenty replied. "It is absolutely beyond factual dispute that [Obama] has cut $716 billion out of the money that was projected to be spent on Medicare over the next 10 years."

"But, sir, it's not a cut in Medicare, right?" O'Brien observed. "Let me just read from the CBO. It's a 'permanent reduction in the annual updates to Medicaid's payment rates.' It's a cut in the spending -- future spending. And it's cut that actually goes to insurers, right? I mean, it's not cuts to individuals."

"No matter how you say this, it's a cut to Medicare," Pawlenty insisted. "You can't even with a straight face, look your viewers in the eye and tell [them] that it's not a cut to Medicare."

"Well, I can't look viewers in the eye from where I am," O'Brien pointed out. "I'm saying the way the CBO puts it. ... That is a savings."

"Do you know what that is in English?" Pawlenty quipped.

"I speak English incredibly well, sir, as you know," O'Brien shot back. "So, tell me what it is in English."

"In plain speaking is this -- and I just mean in compared to the mumbo jumbo in the bureaucracy in the CBO -- what they're saying is that Medicare was going to go up by X and now it's going to go up by X minus $716 billion. There is no question that is a cut in where current law was before Obamacare was passed. There is no way you can present that in any other way."

"Or you can call it a savings, is actually the other way to present that," O'Brien explained.

Although O'Brien is of Latino (and Irish and African American) descent, she actually only speaks English fluently.

On Monday, Sununu, who serves as the chairman of Romney’s national steering committee, had lashed out at O'Brien after she tried to fact check his claims about vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's plan to cut Medicare.

“Soledad, stop this!” Sununu shouted. “All you’re doing is mimicking the stuff that comes out of the White House and gets repeated on the Democratic blog boards out there.”

“I’m telling you what Factcheck.com tells you, I’m telling you what the CBO tells you, I’m telling you what CNN’s independent analysis says,” the CNN host explained.

“Put an Obama bumper sticker on your forehead when you do this!” the frustrated surrogate shot back.

“You know, let me tell you something,” O’Brien said. “There is independent analysis that details what this is about. … And name calling to me and somehow by you repeating a number of $716 billion, that you can make that stick when [you say] that figure is being ‘stolen’ from Medicare, that’s not true. You can’t just repeat it and make it true, sir.”

DOWNLOADS: (442)

PLAYS: (6686)

Embed

Poor Stephen Colbert. He was temporarily very excited over the prospect of Paul Ryan as our next President of the United States, only to have his hopes dashed by Mittens. After realizing he was going to have to live with Ryan only having the second spot on the ticket, Colbert went on to talk about how jazzed everyone's going to be with their plans to lower Romney's tax rate to 0.82 percent, gutting all non-defense spending, turning Medicare into a voucher program and ending Social Security.

Colbert also took a shot at Romney for having his son break the news to Portman and Pawlenty that they weren't going to be his running mate. Which as he noted was better than how he treated Chris Christie, who (according to Colbert) got the news from Rafalca the Romney's dressage horse, or Bobby Jindal, who Stephen claimed got the news from watching this very show.

DOWNLOADS: (156)

PLAYS: (401)

Embed

Please... let it be Paul Ryan - Romney to announce running mate Saturday in Va.:

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) -- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will announce his running mate Saturday morning in Norfolk, Va., his campaign said Friday night.

The short list of candidates - if there is one - is believed to include Ohio Rep. Rob Portman, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan. In a statement issued Friday night, the Romney campaign said the running mate would be revealed at 9 a.m. EDT at the Nauticus Museum. Romney is kicking off a four-day bus tour through swing states.

Speculation has focused in recent days on Ryan, the seven-term congressman. Conservative pundits have been urging Romney to choose Ryan in large part because of his authorship of a House-backed budget plan that seeks to curb overall entitlement spending and changes Medicaid into a voucher-like system to save costs.

Pawlenty was maintaining his Saturday schedule campaigning for Romney in New Hampshire, an official close to Pawlenty's political team said. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak ahead of the formal announcement.

The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial on Thursday, praised Ryan as a strong choice for Romney: "The case for Mr. Ryan is that he best exemplifies the nature and stakes of this election. More than any other politician, the House budget chairman has defined those stakes well as a generational choice about the role of government and whether America will once again become a growth economy or sink into interest-group dominated decline."

Romney's choice comes as he tries to repair an image damaged by negative Democratic advertising and shift the trajectory of a campaign that's seen him lose ground to President Barack Obama. Read on...

UPDATE: It appears my wish may have come true and that Romney is going to pick Ryan. I guess we'll see once the announcement is made in the morning. In the mean time, here's the crew over at MSNBC pretending that Ryan's budget policies don't matter all that much because as David Gregory let us know, some in the Republican party consider him a "visionary." If anyone wants a preview of what Meet the Press is likely to look like this Sunday, I'd say you've got one with this late night coverage of Romney's potential announcement of Ryan as his VP from MSNBC. Video below the fold.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (172)

PLAYS: (559)

Embed

From this Monday's Your World with Neil Cavuto, Bloody Bill Kristol had some predictions for guest host Stuart Varney on Mitt Romney's timing and picks for veep. According to Kristol, Romney is going to pick next week, his guess on Thursday. And he believes the choices are down to Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Paul Ryan, who he says his magazine, The National Review is advocating for, and Gov. Chris Christie who Kristol claims is still in the running.

So I guess it's safe to assume Mittens will be waiting until the convention to announce his pick and it'll be Pawlenty or Portman, since Kristol's usually wrong about everything.

DOWNLOADS: (135)

PLAYS: (751)

Embed

The co-chair for Mitt Romney's national campaign on Tuesday said that campaign surrogate John Sununu had "issued a clarification" after saying that President Barack Obama should "learn how to be an American."

"Gov. Sununu made those comments earlier today," former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. "He then clarified and walked back those statements by saying he meant that President Obama really doesn't have a familiarity with what it means to be in the American entrepreneurial and private enterprise system, early-stage capital formation deployment, and comments to that effect."

"So, I think he clarified it," Pawlenty added. "And obviously, Gov. Sununu has a knack for colorful language and can be very informative and entertaining. This one, he, you know, admitted perhaps he wasn't as clear as he should have been, and he issued a clarification. And I think that was appropriate under the circumstances."

In a conference call earlier in the day, Sununu blasted the Obama campaign as a "bunch of liars" for suggesting that Romney could have committed a felony if he lied to the Security and Exchange Commission about when he retired from Bain Capital.

"The president clearly demonstrated that he has absolutely no idea how the American economy functions," the former New Hampshire governor said. "The men and women all over America who have worked hard to build these businesses, their businesses from the ground up is how our economy became the envy of the world -- it is the American way."

"I wish this president would learn how to be an American," he added.

Obama campaign spokesperson Lis Smith later told reporters that Sununu's rhetoric was proof that Romney's campaign had grown desperate.

"The Romney campaign has officially gone off the deep end," Smith said. "The question is what else they’ll pull to avoid answering serious questions about Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital and investments in foreign tax havens and offshore accounts. This meltdown and over-the-top rhetoric won’t make things better -- it only calls attention to how desperate they are to change the conversation."

DOWNLOADS: (328)

PLAYS: (7146)

Embed

Protester Al Neal of Fight For a Fair Economy in Ohio got some unusual silencing treatment today during a speech by former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty at Kentown Plaza in Parma, Ohio.

via Brandon Blackwell of Cleveland.com.

At one point, one of the protesters, Al Neal of Canton, 25, who said he was a union worker and a member of Fight for Fair Economy Ohio, was confronted by Richard Brysac, 77, of Parma.

Brysac attempted to quiet the protester by emptying a bottle of water in Neal's mouth.

"He seemed thirsty, so I tried to shove the bottle in his mouth," Brysac said. "I thought it was wrong to interfere with [Pawlenty's] freedom of speech.

"I acted out of character and I apologize if I offended anyone."

When the bottle didn't work, Brysac pulled out his handkerchief and gagged Neal.

Neal removed the handkerchief and continued chanting with the other protesters until the group was escorted from the rally.

The old chestnut "I apologize if I offended anyone" is now being used to literally gag protesters.

DOWNLOADS: (490)

PLAYS: (5512)

Embed

This Friday during his New Rules segment, Real Time host Bill Maher went through the list of potential running mates for Mitt Romney and finally ended up suggesting... the Real Time host himself, Bill Maher. As Maher noted, they disagree on almost every issue, but so what? Romney's already disagreed with himself on every issue as well with his flip flopping.

DOWNLOADS: (569)

PLAYS: (6711)

Embed

Jon Stewart started out this segment from Tuesday night's show going after the Republican hand wringers such as John McCain, his BFF Lindsey Graham and Tim Pawlenty, for claiming that President Obama's change in immigration policy, where he is no longer going to deport those who would have otherwise been protected if the DREAM Act had been passed by Congress, is somehow unprecedented.

As Stewart pointed out, that's not true if you count George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, but hey, why should a few facts get in the way of Republicans coming on the air and clutching their pearls and feigning outrage? It's never stopped them before.

Stewart also knocked them for having selective amnesia and pretending that the President did not try to get these reforms passed, only to blocked by Republicans and played some footage of the news coverage back in December of 2010 when the Senate filibustered the legislation.

Stewart wrapped things up by taking a shot at Fox News and Sean Hannity for deceptively editing President Obama's statement on whether he had the authority to act unilaterally after the Congress has continually failed to act and pass the DREAM Act. I don't expect we'll be getting an acknowledgement or apology out of Hannity any time soon.

If by some miracle Hannity does say he's going to apologize, let's just hope Stewart doesn't put himself through another hour of the torture of having to sit through Hannity's show waiting for it like he did a few years ago. That had to be one of the funniest Daily Show clips I've seen in a long time because it rang so true. Watching too much Fox News or Hannity will make most sane people physically ill after a while.