Why Is Anti-American Values Candidate Mitt Romney Lying About Democrats and Equal Opportunity

Why Is Anti-American Values Candidate Mitt Romney Lying About Democrats and Equal Opportunity

So Mitt Romney, writes Thomas Edsall in The New York Times, wants to make the election about entitlements vs. opportunity.  He warns darkly against a government that “provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk.” This is the sort of thing that used to scare the bejesus out of Democrats and still does frighten some of them, but it needn’t. Romney’s error in this framing is one Republicans often make—assuming that they are the “real Americans,” and Democrats are in some way fake Americans, and therefore all of middle America must agree with them.

Romney’s approach is clever up to a point. It does successfully blend more traditional Republicanism with Tea Party resentment (reflecting, perhaps, the way in which this supposedly “new” Tea Party is really just the same old anger at poor people and nonwhite people, outfitted anew in sans culottes). He uses the lie Republicans have used for many, many elections, that liberals and Democrats insist not on equality of opportunity but equality of result. And he invokes “government dependency”—a well-turned locution I must confess, those being two pretty unappealing words to most people. If he becomes the nominee, and if he can get most Americans to see the election as a choice between the candidate who wants Big Daddy government to look after every aspect of your life and the candidate who insists on your freedom to pursue wealth and liberate yourself from any obligation to those below you, then he’ll be in pretty good shape.

But there exist mountains of evidence that most Americans don’t think the way Republicans want them to. As Edsall notes: “The American public is highly conflicted on the subject of providing aid to people in need. While strongly opposed to ‘welfare,’ decisive majorities support more spending in key public policy areas. Polls conducted since 1972 by the General Social Survey show that by margins of two to one, voters consistently say too little is spent on the poor, on education, on health care, on drug treatment—the list is long.”

And that’s just spending on the poor. Spending on the middle class enjoys far greater support. “Welfare” as we once knew it being largely off the table as a divisive political issue, the Republicans really don’t have much material to work with here. In one sense, the entire GOP approach on these issues since Ronald Reagan’s time has been to hide the actual agenda because Republicans know most people don’t agree with them. A famous memo from Paul O’Neill’s Treasury Department in early 2001 to the Bush White House told the new president and others to be careful about juxtaposing tax cuts with spending because “the public prefers spending on things like health and education over cutting taxes.”

Conservatives will not and cannot argue with the reality of Democrats on public policy and the concept of equal opportunity. Democrats want everyone to have a CHANCE to prove themselves and to achieve. Because most Americans believe the same thing - it is a challenge that most Americans are personally familiar with through their own life experience - so the integrity challenged conservatives twist that to mean wanting everyone to have equal outcomes by force of law. That is yet another conservative BIG LIE. Not to mention how cowardly it is that they will not have an honest debate about the subject.

Republicans Say Americans Are Lazy. Something Obama Never Said

Republicans Say Americans Are Lazy. Something Obama Never Said

GOP State Rep: Obama ‘Enables’ ‘Lazy’ Americans By Extending Unemployment Benefits | Conservatives have pounced on President Obama for the completely false story that he called Americans “lazy.” But one Iowa Republican is publicly agreeing with the disparaging characterization Obama never made. State Rep. Josh Byrnes doesn’t think all Americans are lazy — just the 14 million who are unemployed. And he blames Obama for the problem, writing:

    I might have to partially agree with President Obama on this one. I don’t think Americans as a whole are lazy, but we have some pockets of Americans that appear lazy. Ironically, the president has helped enable some of these pockets by doing things like extending unemployment benefits.

Byrnes also says people who are out of work could find jobs if they wanted to, but are simply too proud: “There are jobs out there and I think the problem is that some people think some of these jobs are beneath them.”

In other words this freak thinks Americans would rather loose their homes, have no money, hope they can get a few dollars a day in food with food stamps all to avoid work. There are lazy Americans out there. Some of them are like Byrnes collect a pay check but never do any actual work for the American people. Republicans have tried to mangle Obama's speech to make it look like he said something he never did - Lazy Lying Republicans – Obama Calls U.S. Corporatists ‘Lazy,’ GOP Falsely Claims He Was Referring to All Americans and here Perry Ad Distorts Obama ‘Lazy’ Comment

“Can you believe that? That’s what our president thinks is wrong with America? That Americans are lazy? That’s pathetic,” Perry says in the spot that’s airing in Iowa and New Hampshire. 

The only problem: the full context of Obama’s remarks made Saturday during a meeting of CEOs in Honolulu indicates he wasn’t suggesting that at all.

Boeing CEO James McNerney asked Obama about his thinking on the perception by some countries of “impediments to investment” in the U.S.

Obama replied that “we’ve been a little bit lazy” about actively trying to attract private foreign investors to U.S. soil — referring broadly to American government and business sectors, not the American people themselves.

Perry and other right-wing conservatives are lying once again. That should tell America a lot about the real integrity of the "values" party.

What Liberal Media - Herman Cain Could Be a Sexual Predator and The Press Avoids the Issue

Sexual Harassment Versus Sexual Assault: How the Mainstream Media Keep Screwing Up the Herman Cain Story

Yesterday’s New York Times once again reports on “sexual harassment accusations” against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain. But nonconsensual and forced groping is not harassment--it’s sexual assault. Plain and simple. We don’t know what happened between Cain and these women, but the content of the allegations is clear: they allege harassment and, more seriously, assault.

Sexual assault, according to the National Center for Victims of Crime, includes “when someone touches any part of another person's body in a sexual way, even through clothes, without that person's consent.”

Sexual harassment, according to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, is a broader category, that includes “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature” that “affects an individual's employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual's work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment.”

On Monday, the Times reported that accuser Sharon Bialek put “a face and a name for the first time to accusations of sexual harassment” after alleging that Cain “ran his hand up her skirt, ‘reached for my genitals’ and pulled her head toward his crotch.”
Each clause of that accusation alleges sexual assault. And the Times is far from alone in missing this. The Washington Post noted that Bialek “accused Cain of groping her and trying to force her into a sexual act” and then went on to describe her as the “first woman to publicly accuse Herman Cain of sexual harassment.” Again: no mention of assault.

The media wall of obfuscation does have some cracks: The Wall Street Journal referred to the “stream of accusations of sexual assault;” and the Times did quote Robert D. Lipman, a lawyer who represents victims of sexual harassment and assault, in an online article as describing Bialek’s accusations as “more of a sexual assault.”

The story nonetheless continues to be one overwhelmingly framed as being about sexual harassment. Yet in a separate article on a series of incidents in Brooklyn, the Times describes unwanted groping as “assaults.” Refusing to call sexual assault by its name is a means of denying its existence or limiting it to cases of out-and-out rape.

But if conservatives ignore sexual assault, they boldly deny the very existence of sexual harassment, as Dahlia Lithwick points out; dusting off the Clarence Thomas playbook, set to assassinate the character of all accusers, and something more. (Cain, unsurprisingly, has already channeled Thomas’ charge of a “high-tech lynching.”) We have entered the “era of gender harassment denialism. The harassment skeptics claim that harassment, like racism, used to exist but is now over. Twenty years ago, when charges were leveled at Clarence Thomas, supporters of the accused refused to take the accuser seriously. Now supporters of the accused refuse to take the accusation itself seriously. We have gone from not knowing what sexual harassment is to not believing it still happens.”

This is a two-step process to rob victims of justice: first, the very notion of sexual harassment is belittled as the self-serving and greedy complaints of humorless women. Then, when sexual assault allegations arise, they are downgraded to this “harassment” category that conservatives have declared to be meaningless.

As Emily Hauser writes at Feministe, “Every woman I know can tell a story of harassment or assault...Sexual threat or violence, or fear of same, is a constant in the lives of all women and girls. Full stop.” Ignoring sexual assault and downplaying sexual harassment is an attack on women. This is about more than the (allegedly predatory) clown named Herman Cain, and the mainstream media’s language should take that into account.

We've seen this time and time again. A conservative is exposed as a pervert, a predator, certainly someone lacking common decency and values and Republicans turn on the victims instead of the perpetrator. What kind of values do conservatives stand for. Apparently some of humanity's darkest values.

Destroying Medicare to Balance the Budget is a False Narrative. We Have a Revenue Problem.The United States Is a Low-Tax Country

Destroying Medicare to Balance the Budget is a False Narrative. We Have a Revenue Problem.The United States Is a Low-Tax Country

Ten Charts that Prove the United States Is a Low-Tax Country ( see above).
Our Citizens and Corporations Pay Much Less Than They Once Did and Much Less Than in Most Other Countries.

The United States is a low-tax country. That’s true for individuals and for corporations, and it’s true whether you compare us to other countries or the America of the past. No matter how you slice it the conclusion is the same.

Conservatives like to claim that our budget deficits are purely a “spending problem.” Said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “We don’t have this problem because we tax too little. We have it because we spent too much.”

It’s a popular talking point, but it simply isn’t true. Deficits do not stem from spending levels alone. They are the product of a mismatch between spending and revenue. And when revenue is as low as ours is, you end up with big deficits.

Recently, President Obama met with a group of House Republicans to discuss the federal budget and the national debt. During the course of that meeting, the president noted, correctly, that taxes today are even lower than they were under President Ronald Reagan. This fact was met with “a lot of ‘eye-rolling’” from the Republicans. They didn’t believe him.

This anecdote suggests that perhaps the reason conservatives think we don’t have a revenue problem is because they don’t know the facts. Taxes today are lower than they were under President Reagan. They’re lower today than they’ve been in 60 years. And they’re lower than they are in most developed countries.

We do have a debt problem coming down the road. That debt problem is the result of an aging population, rising health care costs, and, yes, revenue levels that are too low.

Michael Linden is the Director for Tax and Budget Policy at American Progress, Seth Hanlon is Director of Fiscal Reform for CAP's Doing What Works project, and Jordan Eizenga is a Policy Analyst with the Economic Policy team at American Progress.

Amazing what trash becomes a national narrative, pushed along by the so-called liberal media. As of today in order to be a'serious adult" one has to beleive that our national finances are in such diaarry we must destroy or severely cripple programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security because the deficit is high. One of the reasons for that is simple: The Bush tax cuts and a low tax on capital gains. In other words we have a revenue problem. Republicans, the people who lost 17 trillion dollars of America's wealth in the Great Recession which begin in 2007, claim taxes are too high. How often do conservatives have to burn America before people get tired of being burned. Time to say enough with the kind of BS spoon feed the American public by serial lying snake oil salesman like Mitch McConnell(R-KY) and the Anti-America stooges at Fox News.