This is a long but good commentary on the ludicrous idea that video games cause gun violence.

Youtube Video

Jim Joyner and others hosted a webinar discussing hurricane sandy. They blamed the hurricane one…drum roll…gay marriage and laughed about it calling it a “blessing”.

Youtube Video

That’s right folks. Mitt Romney has decided to go nuclear in an attempt to go after Obama. Not only is he using a known dog whistle (welfare queens) but he’s unleashing a blast from the past, Newt Gingrich, to make the attack:

TPM has the full story

Newt Gingrich accused President Obama on Wednesday of a secret ‘radical’ plot to end work requirements in welfare reform, brushing aside denials from both the Republican architect of the 1996 bill and the Democratic president who signed it into law.

‘I think on the hard left, there is an unending desire to create a dependent America,’ Gingrich said.

‘It’s not just that Obama is a radical, it’s that the people he appoints are more radical,’ he said.’ Gingrich also accused Secretary of Health and Human Service Kathleen Sebelius of lying when she pledged to veto state requests to water down work requirements in welfare.

Methinks Mitt is losing, and doesn’t have much left but the muck at the bottom of the barrel.

Found this courtesy of a diary on dailykos.com This one really bugs me given that my Mother In Law is from El Salvador.

Full Article

Romney could also have thanked investors from two other wealthy and powerful Central American clans — the de Sola and Salaverria families, who the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe have reported were founding investors in Bain Capital.

While they were on the lookout for investments in the United States, members of some of these prominent families — including the Salaverria, Poma, de Sola and Dueñas clans — were also at the time financing, either directly or through political parties, death squads in El Salvador. The ruling classes were deploying the death squads to beat back left-wing guerrillas and reformers during El Salvador’s civil war.

The death squads committed atrocities on such a mass scale for so small a country that their killing spree sparked international condemnation. From 1979 to 1992, some 75,000 people were killed in the Salvadoran civil war, according to the United Nations. In 1982, two years before Romney began raising money from the oligarchs, El Salvador’s independent Human Rights Commission reported that, of the 35,000 civilians killed, “most” died at the hands of death squads. A United Nations truth commission concluded in 1993 that 85 percent of the acts of violence were perpetrated by the right, while the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, which was supported by the Cuban government, was responsible for 5 percent.

There’s an interesting article in the dailybeast that I found by way of this diary over on dailykos. In the article, the great grand daughter of Brigham Young gives some insights into Mormonism and more importantly Mitt Romney, some excerpts below, the full article is here.

Emmett has watched Mitt Romney very closely throughout his public life and has strong opinions about what shaped his personality and his character. ‘Mitt is a product not only of his wealth, but of an organization that gives men power when they are 12 years old,’ she says. ‘That is when boys are ordained with the priesthood. It is a big moment in a Mormon male’s childhood.’

As for what pundits say is Romney’s difficulty connecting with people, Emmett blames it largely on what she calls ‘the entitled Mormon male syndrome, where the leadership professes compassion and concern but leaves the manifestations of that to the drones. All male leadership is not this way; there are some wonderful men who do their best to exercise their power compassionately, but many do not.’

Emmett says Romney was a bishop, ‘a position where everyone defers to you. What a bishop says goes. People come to them to receive blessings.’ He then became a stake president, she says, which means he presided over several congregations, and at that point bishops deferred to him.

‘Mitt has had people defer to him and not challenge him his entire life,’ says Emmett. ‘In the Mormon church if you challenge your priesthood leaders it’s a very bad thing to do, especially for women. As the world can now see, Mitt has a very hard time with being questioned and criticized; he’s had so little of this in his life.”

Will he be more beholden to his church than to the American people? Emmett recalls that when Romney was stake president in the church, he was pro-life. But when he was running for governor he changed his position to pro-choice. A woman in the church who was a good friend of Emmett’s went to see Romney and thanked him for changing his position. ‘He told her that he had talked to church leaders in Salt Lake,’ Emmett says, ‘and that they gave him permission to change his position.’

So Romney will lie, cheat, possibly steal and now possibly break the law in order to try and win the presidency:

CNN Has the full story

It also ignores the fact that Mitt Romney shits rainbows and will give us all ponies.

TPM Has the whole story

Mitt Romney’s policy director Lanhee Chen claims that a new study showing 95% of Americans would see a tax hike under Romney’s tax reform plan is ‘biased’ and fails to take into account the explosion of economic growth that will occur under Romney’s administration.

‘This is just another biased study from a former Obama staffer that ignores critical parts of Governor Romney’s tax reform program, which will help the middle class and promote faster economic growth,’ Chen wrote in a statement Monday evening in response to the study by the Tax Policy Center released earlier in the day.

‘The study analyzes only half of Governor Romney’s tax program, ignoring the reforms that would make America’s corporations more competitive by moving from the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world to one that is comparable to our trading partners. And the study ignores the positive benefits to economic growth from both the corporate tax plan and the deficit reduction called for in the Romney plan. These glaring gaps invalidate the report’s conclusions.’

After a week of despair at the current state of just about everything, it’s time for a little brightness (and cuteness)

Youtube Video

If Mitt was looking to burnish his “foreign policy” credentials then he probably shouldn’t insult our closest allies

The US presidential candidate Mitt Romney has questioned the readiness of London 2012, saying there have been “disconcerting signs” in the buildup to the Games – but said the focus would soon switch to celebrating the athletes.
Before meetings with David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband on Thursday, he told US television: “It is hard to know just how well it will turn out.”

Romney told NBC News: “There are a few things that were disconcerting. The stories about the private security firm not having enough people, the supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials – that obviously is not something which is encouraging.”

In the interview he also called into question whether the British people were behind the Games.

Full report here

TPM has the full story, some info below

The firings of Pizzato and Howland resulted in the resignation of all non-Commission members of the station’s fundraising team — including one, Joe Mays, who had served for 20 years — as well as five of the seven members on the Board of Directors. And it was one of the former board members — the source remains unnamed — who claimed that the commission had attempted to ‘force Pizzato to air Christian-themed programming by … Barton.’

(It should be noted that the firings, lawsuit, and resignations come amidst some of the steepest cuts in public television funding yet seen across the state. Between 2008-11, the station lost 50 percent of its state funding, forcing it to shutter its Montgomery bureau and lay off 19 members of its staff.)

The programming in question, which was being considered for inclusion on APT at the time of the firings, was the ‘American Heritage Series,’ a set of documentaries examining the ‘new version of history [that] has assaulted the moral and spiritual fiber of our nation.’ The videos are produced by WallBuilders, an organization founded and directed by Barton.

According to Howland, Pizzato and his staff shared ‘grave concerns’ over airing Barton’s material, but members of the AETC maintain that Pizzato’s views on the matter played no role in his firing.