The chairman of the Republican Party said Monday that the GOP needs to "prosecute the president," arguing that Barack Obama's offenses are a long list of promises unfulfilled.
CHRIS WALLACE: So, Tagg, what are family meals like?
TAGG ROMNEY: A little bit of craziness. Dad always goes in line first because he doesn't want to wait for all the grand children because it takes forever. Parents are cutting their meat and he's usually finished by the time the rest of us sit down.
Good news — a three-judge panel in Texas ruled today that Texas' new redistricting plan was designed to intentionally discriminate against minorities, meaning the law is toast.
A redistricting plan signed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) intentionally discriminated against Hispanic voters, a three-judge panel unanimously ruled Tuesday. The judges found that seats belonging to white incumbent members of Congress were protected under the plan while districts belonging to incumbent minorities were targeted for changes.
The court was "persuaded by the totality of the evidence that the plan was enacted with discriminatory intent," according to the ruling. There was "sufficient evidence to conclude that the Congressional Plan was motivated, at least in part, by discriminatory intent," the court found. [...]
The panel of three judges found that "surgery" had been performed on congressional districts belonging to minority members of Congress while no such alterations were made to districts belonging to incumbent white members of Congress.
"Anglo district boundaries were redrawn to include particular country clubs and, in one case, the school belonging to the incumbent's grandchildren," the judges wrote.
The efforts of Texas Republicans to suppress minority representation is clearly aimed at blunting the influence of a rising Hispanic population that could turn the state blue in the not-too-distant future.
This should not be confused with Texas' voter ID law which is still being challenged by the Department of Justice.
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Conservative NYT columnist David Brooks wrote a scathing piece about Mitt Romney that reiterated every criticism ever made of Romney, but in a fresh and particularly bitter light.
Thing is, it was a joke. Brooks was poking fun at liberal criticism of Romney. But he did it so well, that no one got the joke. Instead, we got a cringe-worthy, withering attack on Romney that liberals have been sending around the Internet for a good 24 hours and counting.
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John H. Richardson, at Esquire, points out the scenery at the Tampa convention that you won't see on tv:
The Tea Party is holding its event in Liberty Plaza, which is surrounded now by a twenty-foot fence and black plastic eight feet high so nobody can even see into the lot. First time I came, I didn't have a badge, so they made me walk back to the convention center and apply for admission online, then walk back — except that the massive security fences that surround and divide the entire downtown area force you to walk eight blocks to get across the two blocks to the convention center. In the August humidity and rain. Past many police officers in brown khaki with ominous black devices strapped to their legs. And if you dare to step off the curb while a car is in any portion of the road, the officer barks at you: Sidewalk! On style points, especially an hour after Maine's Ron Paul delegates walk off the RNC floor all in a huff at being stifled by the Romney machine, especially after all the talk about nanny states and the supposedly crippling embrace of the liberal safety-first mentality, they lose the argument on style points alone — this is the most totalitarian celebration of freedom you could imagine. It reminds you, however bad security has been at these things in years past, that Republicans alternate their love of liberty with a love of imprisoning their fellow citizens so passionate it puts our prison system in the company of Iran and Russia…
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Talk about an opportunity squandered. Andrea Mitchell has Rick Santorum on her camera and in her sights. Santorum repeats the lie yet again about the welfare work waivers granted to Republican governors at their request, dismissing those requests as what you'd expect from governors.
This is, of course, not true, as the LA Times managed to report accurately:
"This summer he showed us once again he believes in government handouts and dependency by waiving the work requirement for welfare," Santorum said, referring to Obama.
"I helped write the welfare reform bill; we made the law crystal-clear: No president can waive the work requirement. But as with his refusal to enforce our immigration laws, President Obama rules like he is above the law."
In fact, Obama did not waive the work requirement.
His administration in July issued a letter to state governments saying that the Department of Health and Human Services would consider requests from states to experiment with new ways to fulfill the work requirements. The letter said that in order to receive waivers to carry out the experiments, states would have to show that their plans would move more welfare recipients into jobs than existing policies.
See how easy that was, Andrea? All you had to do was ask Rick Santorum why he was intentionally misstating what the administration did, and point out that he was being inaccurate. But instead, you go to weird places, like asking "what up wit 'dat?" like you're trying to be some kind of hipster.
Is it too much to ask for our political reporters to actually call out the lies? Is this something that's a privilege instead of the norm? I get so tired of reporters like Andrea just allowing these things to pass as though they're fact. It takes three seconds to actually get a fact in there somewhere.
Do it.
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@MittRomney whines like a little bitch. He is practically in tears and pissing himself because that uppity black fella who should just let him have the office he was so obviously born to hold is campaigning during HIS CONVENTION -- totally omitting the fact that he flew to Denver and stumped for McCain in 2008 -- during the Democratic National Convention, which was, as you may recall, held in Denver.
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Now THAT is what I call "damning with faint praise." Huckabee made the case for Mittens in the weakest possible terms at the convention on Tuesday, saying that "If you've just been diagnosed with a brain tumor you honestly don't care if your neurosurgeon is a jerk."
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About time his probation officer put a stop to his gallivanting around the country. James O'Keefe, the republican propagandist and provocateur who is on probation for trying to tamper with the phones in Mary Landrieu's Senate offices in New Orleans won't be joining the festivities in Tampa, his PO said "no" to his travel request.
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If there's still a line, Limbaugh crossed it long ago. He floated the idea of shoring up the levees in New Orleans with bags of money so poor people would go get the money, collapse the levees and drown, thereby getting rid of Democratic voters. Seriously. Pig.
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Everyone knows Republicans hate Hollywood, until they find a Hollywood Actor who doesn't find them to be terrifying pieces of shit. And they have found one such, and she is going to be speaking at them during "We Built It Day," sometime today! It is Janine Turner, and she is amazing, and we are going to re-run a post from April of this year so you too can learn how terrific and cogent and right-thinking and not at all scrambled-egg-brained she is!
Famous 1990s actress Janine Turner ("Northern Exposure," "The Night of the White Pants") has joined the other most famous lady GOPer, Victoria Jackson, in going full wingnut, as you could probably tell by this terrifying picture of her going as Nancy Reagan for Halloween except that that is always how she looks now aiyeeeee!
Anyway, Ol' Janine over there is a "writer" now for Pajamas Media, and this is very exciting, and her first column is a holy shit of a tl;dr wherein she takes apart the word "girlfriends" with each letter forming a different way to convert your idiot liberal Hollywood bitch "girlfriends" to reasonableness by explaining that they are stupid traitors. What fun! Let's take apart some of it (it is literally a list of 63 bullet points) until we are bored! OK, it starts with an introduction where Turner explains that it is hard being a conservative Lady at a table full of blah commie Whoopie Goldbergs, and old feminist battleaxe Baba Wawas, and the talky one, you know, the Jewish one, because conservative women are too sweet and nice to stand up to them. But Turner will show you how!
G: Get Reasonable. Want to teach your children that laws don't matter? Be a Democrat.
Knowledge is power and reason is a civic responsibility.
Our United States Constitution is the law of the land.
Democrat think the Constitution is irrelevant because it restricts them.
 |
| We know what you are, Comrade Jindal, we're simply haggling over the price. |
We noted that it was, well, odd that proud red-stater Jindal, who famously turned down stimulus funds for unemployed Louisianans and for a high-speed rail, is now such a fan of all that tainted socialist "welfare" from Washington.
But now we learn that Jinda is even a bigger hypocrite than we thought.
You see, Comrade Jindal is now demanding more from the federal teet than states normally get during these "disasters."
He wants the federal government to reimburse him for state money spent on preparing for the hurricane. That's not something FEMA normally covers because, you know, this is America, not the Soviet Union, and states like Louisiana, and governors like Jindal, are supposed to prepare for things like bad storms on their own.
Oh but it gets even better: Jindal had no such complaint when George Bush didn't offer to pay state preparations for a hurricane in 2008. So either Jindal is playing politics with his state's impending hurricane, or he blew off the welfare of his own state in 2008 so as not to embarrass a Republican president.
Which one is it, tovarisch?
From Brian Beutler:
Asked today to respond to Jindal's push for further assistance, FEMA administrator Craig Fugate explained, "primary responsibility for evacuations really [falls to] state and local governments and when it's extraordinary the federal government can support that with financial assistance. What the President said yesterday was if you have a request for specific federal assistance, we're ready to provide that life safety issues. We're not going to hold anything up. But we'll look at the impacts and determine, does this really exceed the state's capability that require federal tax dollars to support that response and particularly if they start having damages. So, early on the request was direct federal assistance. If the financial impacts are greater than the state of Louisiana can manage, we assess that and we'll make recommendations again looking at what the governor has requested."
That's the same approach the Bush administration took when Gustav was bearing down on Louisiana in 2008.
According to the Louisiana Times-Picayune, "Though Jindal called on the federal government to shoulder the full cost of the federal, state and local efforts, he did not publicly make the same criticisms when former President George W. Bush issued a similar declaration that included a cost ceiling as Hurricane Gustav approached the state…though as the storm was trailing off, the state and the Bush administration fought over exactly who would pay for what portion of the federal response."
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