Jumat, 13 Juli 2012

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Clipping blog

It’s Okay, NAACP. President Obama Probably Still Likes You

Posted: 12 Jul 2012 01:51 PM PDT

Washington (CNN) - President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign insisted a “scheduling conflict” is behind the president’s decision to skip this year’s NAACP convention.

“We declined a few weeks ago and [the] NAACP was pleased [Vice President Joe Biden] was able to attend,” a campaign official told CNN…

Hilary Shelton, the NAACP Washington Bureau director and a senior vice president in the organization, said the White House never confirmed a visit.

"They were trying to work out something,” Shelton said. As to why Obama could not attend, he added, “It was that something could not be moved. Something was crucial. And unfortunately, they couldn't move it in a way they could get him here this week."

 

  • Uncomfortable morning after when you wake up in a front lawn you don’t remember, clad only in a t-shirt that reads “Forward”, with a wicked hangover and some odd soreness, :

I’m sure that briefing was really important. It probably wasn’t something that could have happened through a secure telephone call or a video conference or even put off until the early evening because surely the President had time to fly from DC to Texas and back again in just a few hours. I mean, he’s done it a few times this election season already for some of those big-money fundraisers that have put millions of dollar….

…oh, wait. This wasn’t a fundraiser, wasn’t it? This was just a conference. No cash. Wow, Okay.

Yeah, it’s probably fine, though. The President definitely still considers you a valuable part of his campaign, NAACP. He’s probably not using you to bag an extra percentage point or two among black voters. No shame.

No shame at all.

Obama Campaign: Boy, that Mitt Romney’s Quite the Buck-Passing Felon, Huh?

Posted: 12 Jul 2012 01:21 PM PDT

If you turn on the news today, you’ll probably hear some version of a story about Mitt Romney and whether he really did fire a bajillion people while he was at Bain Capital. See, the Obama campaign really wants you to believe that Romney is some horrible real-life hybrid of the Monopoly Man, and Snidely Whiplash who spent decades tying poor workers to the railroad tracks to be run over by the Outsource Express. The campaign made a couple commercials that somehow managed not to include the lonesome whistle of a distant oncoming locomotive and were so laughably wrong that the normally-biased fact checkers of the MSM had to call shenanigans on them.

Normally, that would have been the end of things. The President tried to slick a couple attack ads past us and got busted. That’s politics and I imagine it happenes at least once in every major campaign. But the Obama team just can’t leave well enough alone. The Boston Globe, in its role as campaign stenographer, ran a major story Tuesday in which it suggested Mitt Romney lied about when he left Bain Capital.

Okay. Let me sum up the story so you can see just what a silly ball of fluff it is. Mitt Romney ran Bain Capital until 1999, when he left to take over the Winter Olympics in Utah. That gig happened fairly quickly, and he didn’t know how long he’d be there, so Mitt left Bain on a more or less temporary basis. He kept ownership and his various titles with the company, but all the operational stuff he had done before 1999 went to other people inside the company because he was spending 112 hours a week on the Olympics. In short, he took a leave of absence. He signed the various legal forms and such the titles required, but he wasn’t doing the work. Four years later (give or take) in 2002, when he was done with the Olympics, he decided to make his leave of absence permanent and resigned the positions he still held on paper.

That’s it. That’s the story. Mitt Romney took a temporary leave of absence that became permanent. While he was gone, he still held the titles of President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Bain Capital but he didn’t make any of the business decisions, which included the instances of evil outsourcing cited by the Obama administration.

Simple enough, right? Not if you’re Stephanie Cutter, deputy campaign manager of the Obama campaign and head of the horribly-misnamed “Truth Team”. This is her response when the Romney campaign explained again exactly what happened.

"Either Mitt Romney, through his own words and his own signature, was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony, or he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investment," Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter asserted.

"If he was lying to the American people," she added. "then that's a real character and trust issue that the American people need to take very seriously."

The Obama campaign’s contention, then, is this: because Mitt Romney kept his titles with Bain, and fulfilled the barest of legal obligations while he did so, he is either a liar or a felon. I’ll give you a minute to pick your jaw up off your desk.

This, by the way, isn’t just the opinion of one wildly out of control campaign operative. It is the position of the Democratic Party, who tweeted this today.


“Everything bad that’s ever happened under [Romney]…he blames on other people, and that just isn’t very Presidential.” http://t.co/U947PgDz
about 1 hour ago via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite
@TheDemocrats
The Democrats

So there you go. Mitt Romney is a big Blamey McBlamerson and a big fat liar who just might have committed a bigger, fatter felony.

Or, you know, not.

 

Congress Costs How Much Again??

Posted: 12 Jul 2012 12:05 PM PDT

This morning, the head of the Democratic National Committee and member of Congress Debbie Wasserman-Schultz tweeted this picture.

I know what she’s trying to get across. The Republicans, who preach fiscal sanity, continue to waste our money on a partisan political crusade against Obamacare and they ought to give it up because it’s here to stay, everyone loves it, and if it goes away an entire magical island full of unicorns and talking puppies will explode and sink beneath the waves never to be seen again.

Okay. Fine. That’s the standard Democratic talking point about Obamacare. I’ll write more about that in a post later. For now, I want to focus on just one thing, the thing that grabbed my attention when I first saw this.

One day of Congress costs over 30 million dollars? Thirty million??

Folks, that number can not be right, can it? The Speaker of the House makes less than $250,000 a year. If every member of Congress made that much and worked the same year-round schedule you or I do, their daily salary would barely break a half million dollars. Operational costs can’t be that high either, even if you assume the Capitol is an old building and requires more daily routine maintenance than a new building. Peg that number at half-million a day, which would include the salaries of the maintenance staff. So that gets you to a million dollars.

Now, toss in a staff for each member of Congress of….what? Twenty? Fifty? Assume a way overblown salary of $100,000 a head for a staff of fifty per member of congress and that cranks you all the way up to, I believe $11 million. So, with salaries and maintenance you’re looking at $12 million, which includes a huge pad for miscellaneous costs. Where is the other $18 million? Are there that many ancillary offices that run every single day Congress is in session?

Before I answer that, let me hit you with the the truly mind-blowing number, extend that to a full session. Take the 2011 session, during which the House met for 175 days. The total freight, at $30 million a day, is five billion two hundred fifty million dollars — $5,250,000,000.

As it happens, that’s more than Congress’ proposed budget, by roughly a billion dollars. That, of course, assumes that Congress passes a budget this year. The Democrats have been a bit hesitant to do that the past few years. I don’t know where Ms. Wasserman-Schultz got her number, but it is clearly too large, and I’m not talking about its accuracy. Congress is out of control, has been out of control, and will continue to be out of control until we get some people in there whose first and strongest instinct is start tearing out huge chunks of the budget and returning them to us, where they belong.

Think about those numbers. Thirty million dollars a day, 5.25 billion dollars a year. That, folks, is insane. Imagine what even an average small business owner could have done with that much money. Imagine how many jobs and how much wealth that entrepreneur could have created. Some of that money might have gone to charity, where it could have fed a child or built a house or saved a woman from brutal abuse. Instead, it went to Washington where it fueled the machine that raises our taxes, restricts our freedom, ignores our wishes, insults our intelligence, and treats us as serfs.

I don’t really have a button to put on this post except to say that number, whether it is the $5.25 billion that Wasserman-Schultz says it is or the smaller $4 billion and change that will likely pass the House this year, is too flipping big. Congress should not cost us billions. We have to fix that.
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