Friday, June 01, 2012

Mitt Romney - Running the Campaign of a 12 Year-Old

I saw this mentioned on Rachel Maddow last night and had to look it up. Axelrod's Anti-Romney Message Gets Drowned Out.

"In a morning news conference on the steps of the Massachusetts Statehouse, David Axelrod, one of Mr. Obama’s senior strategists, tried mostly in vain on Thursday to level Mr. Obama’s latest broadside on Mr. Romney’s record as governor of the state. Instead, he was booed, heckled and chanted down by supporters of Mr. Romney who refused to let up even for a moment as Mr. Axelrod and Democratic state lawmakers sought to make their case. The group included several staff members in his Boston headquarters, including an aide’s dog wearing a Romney T-shirt."

Romney had an event at the Solyndra building. He told press to get on a bus without telling them where they were going and went to Solyndra. When asked about his staff drowning out Axelrod he Romney replied “At some point you say, you know what, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If they're going to be heckling us, why, we're not going to sit back and play by very different rules." Now Maddow spent all too much time talking about how this is the antiquated version of the quote, but really the important part is is he saying that Obama has done this to him? If so, I can't find a reference. The above article says:

"Although pro-Obama protestors have appeared at some of Mr. Romney’s events, paid Obama staffers have not publicly heckled or booed Mr. Romney or his team, as some of his staff did to Mr. Axelrod today. Citing Mr. Romney’s remarks, Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign, Tweeted that the Republican nominee had invented a “mythic event in which our campaign ‘heckled.’”"

Maddow also called out Romney for lying in his ads and in person about Obama's record. She pointed to this Mike Grunwald piece, Mitt Romney’s Ads: Still Wrong on the Stimulus which investigates this claim, “The Inspector General said contracts were steered to ‘friends and family.’” Grunwald points out:

"Except that Newsweek article was an excerpt from the book “Throw Them All Out,” written by Peter Schweizer, a right-winger who has served as an adviser to Sarah Palin’s PAC, edited one of Andrew Breitbart’s websites, and written a slew of books portraying liberals as pond scum. Not exactly a disinterested source. And it turns out that the inspector general never testified that stimulus contracts were steered to friends and family. He said his office was investigating whether stimulus contracts were steered to friends and family. So far, it hasn’t confirmed that any were."

Meanwhile, remember the GOP is supposed to be all about jobs jobs jobs. So what is the House doing while it's actually in session? House rejects bill penalizing doctors for sex-selective abortions. "The House on Thursday rejected a Republican bill that would impose fines and prison terms on doctors who perform abortions for the sole purpose of controlling the gender of the child, a practice known as sex-selective abortion.

The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), H.R. 3541, was defeated in a 246-168 vote. While that's a clear majority of the House, Republicans called up the bill under a suspension of House rules, which limits debate and requires a two-thirds majority vote to pass."

And sure we can probably agree that abortion merely because of gender is a bad thing, but..."The bill includes a provision that would allow a women's husband or parents, by merely alleging that an abortion is because of gender, to seek injunctive relief to prevent the doctor from performing abortion procedures, sending an incredibly private and personal decision into the courts," Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) added Thursday. I'm not sure how it's supposed to work, but that seems open to abuse.

I really think the GOP likes talking about abortion but doesn't really want to restrict it because then they would lose a big political rallying point. That's why they bring it up in ways they know it will fail. Jobs, jobs jobs.

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