Mitt Romney was spotted pumping gas in La Jolla, California, near one of his many homes.
There Is NO Excuse For Anyone To Watch Fox News
I channel surfed over to Fox to see if the whipping their credability had taken on the last election had corrected their constant stream of bull and propganda. It Had Not. Rasmussen was still their pollster and his results were just as silly as his prediction of a Romney Land Slide and the talking Fox Heads were talking the same trash as before the results of the election were known to all.
Fox News is a fantasy land for old white republican men and other fools looking for a return to a 1950's lifestyle. Billionaires have taken over the GOP and these small time republican sheep don't even know it. The humor publication "The Onion" delivers more truth in a single issue than Fox News does in a full year. If Fox is your source for news your knowledge of current events is laughably small.
They came. They spent! Then, they limped home, tails between their legs. (OK, they didn't limp; they were flown home on their private Gulf-stream jets. But still, their tails were tucked down in the defeat mode.)
"They" are the far-right corporate billionaire extremists who tried to become America's presidential kingmakers this year. Unleashed by the Supreme Court's Citizens United edict allowing unlimited sums of cash in our elections, they spewed an ocean of money into efforts to enthrone Mitt Romney in the White House and turn the Senate into a GOP rubber stamp for totally corporatizing government.
On election night, they gathered at exclusive Romney victory parties, but the celebratory mood quickly soured, for key states were choosing Democrats. The people were speaking, and (damn them) they seemed to be deliberately voting against the barons.
Take casino baron Sheldon Adelson, for example. He became the 2012 caricature of an obscene billionaire trying to buy democracy. Adelson rolled the political dice on eight candidates, betting more than $60 million — and crapped out on all of them. Also, the uber-arrogant Koch boys, Charles and David, amassed some $200 million from their corporate vault and from other billionaires to knock out President Obama.
But at evening's end, there the president stood, re-elected by a majority of voters and winning with more than 56 percent of the electoral votes. And Bob Perry, another self-serving, ultra-rightist billionaire dumped $21 million into GOP Super PACs trying to win senate races in Florida and Virginia, as well as the presidency. All for naught. Democrats not only gained two seats in the Senate, but new senators such as Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin and Mazie Hirono are expected to make the Senate more populist and much feistier. Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Donnelly, Chris Murphy and Martin Heinrich are expected to make the Senate more progressive than it has been (admittedly a low standard) and less likely to support the kleptocracy the barons so dearly hoped to establish.
Of course, the billionaires aren't through. They reckon that the roughly one billion bucks they put up this year just wasn't enough firepower. So look for even more obscene spending in 2014 and 2016. Meanwhile, let's check in on the premier political bag man for moneyed corporations: Karl Rove. You know it's been a good election night when he has a hissy fit on national television. It came at just past 11 p.m., after he heard a TV network declare Obama the winner in Ohio. This was not just any network; it was Fox, the Republican Party's official propaganda machine! Rove, who is a rabidly partisan GOP politico and fundraiser, also doubles as an expert "analyst" for Fox. (Proof again that this network has amputated the word "conflict" from the ethical concept of "conflict of interest." But I digress.)
Rove was sitting just off-camera on the Fox set when the on-air anchor team made the call on Ohio. In fact, he was on his cellphone at the time with a top Romney staffer who was wailing that Fox was wrong, that Romney was winning Ohio. With his right knee jerking furiously, Rove demanded to be put on the air to rebut the network's own professional vote counters. He got what he wanted, publicly chiding his Fox colleagues for being "premature."
This prompted an unusual moment of dead air, after which anchor Megan Kelly said, "Well, that's awkward." Since every news outlet and even Republican Party officials were by then conceding Ohio (and the presidency) to Obama, Kelly asked whether Rove was using his own math just to "make himself feel better."
Bingo! Karl the Kingmaker was having a really bad night. In the past year, he had talked assorted corporations and fat cats into putting some $256 million into his attack ads against Democrats, assuring the donors that their money and his political genius would put the White House and the Senate in GOP hands. He came up a bit short.
For example, American Crossroads, one of Rove's two political funds, spent $103 million to defeat Democratic Senate candidates, but the return on that investment was a pathetic 1 percent. Billionaires expect quite a bit better, so Rove had some explaining to do and some crow to eat. By the way, in response to this brouhaha, Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" said, "'Math You Do As a Republican To Make Yourself Feel Better' is a much better slogan than the one Fox has now." But again, I digress.
To be fair to Rove, his 1 percent return on the money he handled is not atypical of the secretive Republican political funds in this election. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce laid out $31 million in dark money and got a 5 percent return on their funders' investment.
Worse, the National Rifle Association surreptitiously invested $11 million in several Republicans — and got zero return. As a researcher for the Sunlight Foundation, an independent watchdog group, put it: "It may mean people really don't like big money in politics."
What the rich buy with all the money the spend on elections is fear... Nobody bet the farm on this election... The rich spent chump change to change the minds of chumps.. and the rich will be back next election and next election until Congress passes regulations to end this obscene practice the Supreme Court hung on America.
Those on the Supreme Court who saddled the country with the Citizens United decision should rot in hell for their lack of judgement.
Karl Rove Fleeces $300 Million Dollars from the Gullible Rich
In 2000, Karl Rove predicted George W. Bush would win 320 electoral votes. Bush won 271–if you count Florida.
In 2006, he said he had “THE math” that showed the GOP would keep the House of Representatives. They lost 30 seats and the
House.
In 2008, when he wasn’t closely involved in the McCain campaign, he came out with a map just before the election that pretty much predicted the president’s landslide.
In 2012, Karl Rove has been a de facto campaign manager for the Romney campaign. He’s raised $300 million to elect Romney
and Republicans and is so closely tied to their fate that he joked might be involved in Todd Akin death after the Missouri
congressman blew an easy Senate pickup for the GOP with his “legitimate rape” comment.
On Tuesday, Rove predicted Romney would win at least 279 electoral votes and 51 percent of the national vote.
Then as the week went on and Mitt Romney’s lies about Jeep exporting jobs blew up all over Ohio and the president was
called “outstanding” by the keynote speaker of the Republican National Convention, state polls kept showing what they’d
been showing for months–the president is ahead in Ohio. And he’s coming back in Virginia and Florida, states that would give him an electoral landslide.
There’s also the fact that cell-phone only voters who support Obama are being seriously under counted in the polls.
So what’s Karl Rove to do now that his butt is on the line to $300 million worth of donors? Start making excuses.
He spoke the the Washington Post–despite the fact that he has a Wall Street Journal column and can go on Fox News seemingly
at will. The man called “Bush’s Brain” told the paper that Hurricane Sandy changed the election.
“It’s the October surprise. For once, the October surprise was a real surprise,” he said.
This was after GOP insiders told Politico’s Mike Allen that Romney’s impending loss would be blamed on Hurricane Sandy, and to some degree Chris Christie.
Friday the CEO of Fox News’ parent company Rupert Murdoch tweeted this: Thanks Bloomberg right decision.@now Christie, while thanking O, must re- declare for Romney, or take blame for next four dire years.
— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) November 3, 2012
In Rove’s Post interview, he didn’t explicitly say that Romney would lose. But you get his drift: “…There’s a subtle
disadvantage for Romney [in the wake of the hurricane]. For a five-day period, the country stopped talking about the presidential campaign really and people were talking only of the mega-storm.”
Basically, we did everything right! And we would have gotten away with it if were not for that pesky super storm!
How would you be acting if you knew you were about to blow $300 million that you scammed from some of the richest people in America?
Republicans Tell Unemployeed Vets to Drop Dead
As if to underscore Mitt Romney's indifference to the 47 percent, his Republican Party colleagues in the US Senate used a procedural vote to block a $1 billion bipartisan bill that would have given tens of thousands of jobless military vets the opportunity to work. No Political Party ever deserved defeat more that the Republican Party. Republicans have not spent one single moment representing the country, they were in full time persuit of power and their actions are sickening.
Inspired by President Obama's State of the Union Address challenge to get veterans working, the Veterans Job Corps bill would have created a program to fast-track 20,000 former service members into federal jobs as law enforcement officers, first responders, and parks workers. The legislation "was one of the few pieces of legislation [to] make it through Congress, which has been mired in partisan gridlock for the last two years," reports Stars & Stripes' Leo Shane.
A few enthusiastic Republicans even added several provisions to the bill, including measures to increase internet access for job
-seeking vets and to aid them in their transitions from military life. "Once it incorporated ideas from both sides of the aisle, I thought it would be an easy sell," Tom Tarantino, a war vets' lobbyist, told the Washington Post Wednesday.
But despite support from 58 senators, the bill couldn't achieve the supermajority needed to get an up-or-down vote, dashing any chance that it could pass before Election Day in November. Forty Republicans succeeded in blocking the bill Wednesday afternoon, including self-styled budget hawks Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.). But chief among the bill's attackers was Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee. "Americans don't trust us," he said. "And why should Americans trust us when we keep using gimmicks and budget sleight of hand to hide more spending and drive the country further into debt?"
Coburn seemed to argue that government spending is more of a "real problem" than the plight of US vets.
Conservatives say the bill was a budget-buster, with Sessions alleging that it "violate[d] the Budget Control Act by adding
to the deficit." Coburn complained that the jobs bill made him want to quit his own vocation. "I don't want to come [to work] anymore," he said, "and the reason I don't want to come anymore is because we're not doing anything to address the real problems that are in front of our country."
In saying that, Coburn seemed to argue that government spending is more of a "real problem" than the plight of US vets.
Young ex-service-members—many of whom were in the now-famous 47 percent of non-income-tax-paying Americans while they were deployed or held junior ranks—face unemployment levels up to 31 percent higher than their civilian counterparts. It's a plight that Romney and other Republicans pay lip service to in their attacks on the White House. "President Obama's policies threaten to break faith with our veterans and our military," Romney's campaign literature (PDF) states. "We must do better."
Yet conservatives' plan to block a pro-veteran bill that had the support of the GOP-led Congress, all the Senate Democrats,
and five Republicans in the upper body. "These men and women have worn our uniform, shouldered the burden and faced
unthinkable dangers in forward areas during a very dangerous time," Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), one of the GOP
supporters of the bill, told the New York Times. For his part, Sessions says he'd vote for a budget-neutral GOP-drafted version of the bill—a version that saves money by doing away with the Veterans Job Corps, which was ostensibly the whole point of the proposal in the first place. Sometimes you have to destroy a jobs bill in order to save it.
Republicans Squabble over Direction Party Needs to Go.
died, at least in the shape that has existed for decades.
The post-mortem into Tuesday's disastrous election results was already under way Wednesday. There was near consensus that
the party needs a drastic overhaul. Does it move further to the right or to centre? Does it reach out to women, the young
and minorities, eating into the Democratic coalition?
Some conservatives, especially those from the Tea Party, argued for a shift further to the right, saying that first John McCain in 2008 and then Romney this year were too moderate, both Rinos ("Republican in name only").
In an early taste of the blood-letting to come, former House speaker Newt Gingrich said he and figures such as Karl Rove – George W Bush's former strategist and co-founder of the Super Pac Crossroads – had been wrong in focusing on the economy.
The party needed a rethink, to reach out to Latinos and other ethnic groups. "Unless we do that we're going to be a minority party," Gingrich said. The party has been and remains overwhelmingly male, old affluent and white.
It has survived as an election fighting machine for so long only because of what Republicans describe as the southern strategy. That strategy is dependent on a guaranteed bloc of support among whites in southern states (bigots) the party has enjoyed since the 1960s civil rights era. Throw in Christian evangelicals and others from the mid-west and the mountain states, and there was an election-winning combination.
But, as Election night showed, that no longer works. Not only did the Republicans fail to take the White House, they also failed for the second time in two years to take the Senate. The latter is almost as bitter a disappointment as the failure to win the presidential race. The tea party appeal is mostly to older, less educated and those bothered by immigrants and blacks.
The chances are the shape of a new-look Republican party will not be decided by Gingrich or Rove or others of that older generation but the younger one, figures such as Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who gave the stand-out speech at the Republican convention in Tampa this year. He is already a front-runner for the 2016 presidential nomination.
In a statement, Rubio identified two targets. The first was that the Republicans had to expand its reach, to be seen as the party of not just the affluent but as the party that helps people become upwardly mobile.
Like Gingrich, he called for outreach to ethnic minorities. "The conservative movement should have particular appeal to people in minority and immigrant communities who are trying to make it, and Republicans need to work harder than ever to communicate our beliefs to them," Rubio said.
He is well-placed to make the argument as a Latino himself, the son of Cuban immigrants.
The party has to not just appeal to Latinos but to begin to take at least some of the African American vote too from the Democrats. As well as addressing its failure among ethnic groups, the other priority is to address the alienation of gay and female voters. The only solid support the Republican Party has comes from the bigots in the South and old white men and there just aren't enough votes there to maintain a National Party. Voter supression has already been tried and it didn't work so its either change and grow or become a minority parity.
Tea Party blames Romney for being a 'moderate candidate'. Following the Tea Party Path is a sure fire trip to third party
status.
But the shift to a new-look party will not be easy. Relations between establishment Republicans and the newer Tea Party
activists threaten to become messy. Within minutes of the result being announced, Jenny Beth Martin, head of the Tea Party Patriots, blamed the loss not on the changing demographics or social issues but on the candidate.
"What we got was a weak, moderate candidate, hand-picked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment wing of the
Republican party," Martin said. "The presidential loss is unequivocally on them."
The Tea Party had a bad election again, with its more outlandish candidates having failed at the ballot box, but it is not finished yet, and it will have a say in what the new Republican party looks like.
The prime issues for the Tea Party are not so much as social as small government, a policy that has a big appeal throughout
the country, especially in the mid-west and the mountain states, as well as cutting the deficit and lowering taxes. Above all, like Martin, it is anti-establishment.
A Tea Party activist, Evelyn Zur, from Parker, Colorado, is fully behind the idea of reaching out to Latinos and African Americans; he sported a T-shirt at a recent rally saying "Black and Conservative Are Not Mutually Exclusive". Zur resented the way the Tea Party is demonised as racist. She argued there is a space for conservative views among blacks in urban areas who have fared badly under the Democrats. She also sees the move as pragmatic. "Blacks and browns are going to be majority so Republicans have got to get them aboard," she said and this good looking tee-shirt is the way to get it done.
One of the younger generation of Republicans who will have a say in the reshaping of the party, Henry Barbour, nephew of the former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, shares the view that the party has to reach out to Latinos, blacks, women and the young. Some of the candidates the party put up came across as "hostile", he said, adding that he did not have to name them.
Unlike the Tea Party activists, Barbour is mainstream, an influential figure in his native Mississippi and in the Republican party beyond its borders. The party was and will remain a conservative one, Barbour said, and policies such as opposition to abortion would remain a given. But the party could also learn from the Democrats about better organisation in identifying and getting out voters. It would also help if the people we are trying to recruit didn't know that the party hates them but I'm unsure of how to handle this as of yet Barbour said.
He thinks the party should listen to figures such as his uncle Haley Barbour and former Florida governor Jeb Bush but that the people who will lead the party should be Rubio or Romney's running-mate Paul Ryan or someone else from that generation.
A younger person with the same old views might just get over. Some women and blacks to pose in the photos will also be good. We can try to get by on image until the old whites die off and real change becomes possible.
The main message of the election was the need to be more inclusive. "What we have to do is do is take our message to people who do not historically support us - blacks, Women, Latinos, Asians, Gays, the young, hippie types, people who might agree with us but we do not sit down with and break bread with," Barbour said. "We either do it or we continue to blow them
off."
When asked why not develop positions that support the concerns of these people? Barbour said Gee, I never thought of that, If we were to represent their interest we'd be the Democratic Party.
John McCain Has Lost His Mind
Senator John McCain’s repeated attacks on President Obama over the years shows the senator for what he is, a bitter frustrated old man whose legacy as a self proclaimed “maverick” is a thin veneer over a partisan right wing fanatic.
If McCain had his way we would still be fighting the Vietnam War irrespective of how many young Americans were killed. The loss of one or two million Americans means nothing to a man who would not blink an eye at dropping napalm from a jet fighter burning the skin off innocent Vietnamese children.
Today he wants to wage an eternal war in Afghanistan against 300 Taliban fighting over barren soil and rock impervious to plant growth without care to the cost to America’s fighting heroes or our national treasure.
Now McCain seeks to lynch his rival, President Obama, for actions in Libya another place where this mad white man would fight endless war as he would fight endless wars elsewhere around the world for no other reason than to satisfy his own personal rage.
McCain and his little lap dog Lindsay Graham have gone beyond reality in their attacks on President Obama. A recent check
on McCains brain function was his picking of Sarah Palin as a running mate. No matter what McCain says or does he was
soundly beaten by President Obama and he should get medical help to adjust and live with it. Lindsay should step out of the closet and enjoy the sunshine.
TOP 10 RICHEST MEMBERS OF CONGRESS?
For the first time this year, the richest member of the US Congress had a a net worth of more than $300 million. The 2012 list includes Senate and House Democrats and Republicans hailing from all over the United States. In 2012, about half of the 50 wealthiest members of Congress reported a lower minimum net worth than last year, which Roll Call attributes to new mortgage disclosures.
Here is CNBC and Roll Call's countdown of the 10 wealthiest members of the 112th Congress. Can you guess which political
party had the most members on the list – and who grabbed the top spot?
- CNBC.com and Roll Call
10. Rep. Jim Renacci (R) – Ohio
Minimum net worth: $36.67 million
Renacci's minimum net worth remains relatively unchanged from the year before, rising just slightly to $36.67 million.
9. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) – Calif.
Minimum net worth: $41.78 million
Feinstein's minimum net worth dropped about $3.6 million to $41.78 million in 2011.
8. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D) – N.J.
Minimum net worth: $56.8 million
Lautenberg's minimum net worth rose about $2 million in 2011, to $56.8 million.
7. Rep. Jared Polis (D) – Colo.
Minimum net worth: $72.09 million
Polis added at least $6 million to his fortune last year to arrive at a minimum net worth of $72.09 million.
6. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D) – Conn.
Minimum net worth: $79.11 million
Like many on Roll Call's list, much of Blumenthal's minimum net worth of $79.11 million comes from the family of his spouse. His wife, Cynthia Blumenthal, is the daughter of New York real estate magnate Peter Malkin.
5. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D) – W.Va.
Minimum net worth: $83.08 million
Even multimillionaires have mortgages.
Rockefeller took out a loan of at least $1 million on a New York condominium in 2011 and disclosed it on the liabilities section of his annual disclosure form. Though in prior years such a purchase would have likely gone unnoticed, lawmakers were required to report mortgages on personal residences for the first time this year under new disclosure provisions in the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act.
4. Sen. Mark Warner (D) – Va.
Minimum net worth: $85.81 million
Virginia's junior senator increased his wealth by nearly $10 million from the year before, reporting a minimum net worth of at least $85.81 million in 2011.
3. Rep. Darrell Issa (R) – Calif.
Minimum net worth: $140.55 million
Issa's minimum net worth dropped by about $80 million from 2010 to 2011, dropping him one spot on the list, to third place.
2. Sen. John Kerry (D) – Mass.
Minimum net worth: $198.65 million
Kerry has been a mainstay on Roll Call's list of the wealthiest in Congress for more than 15 years, due in large part to the assets of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, the widow of Sen. H. John Heinz III (R) of Pennsylvania of the Heinz ketchup fortune.
1. Rep. Michael McCaul (R) – Texas
Minimum net worth: $305.46 million
McCaul tops the list for the second year in a row with a reported minimum net worth that broke the $300 million mark.
Amherst County Virginia Democratic News
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