Romney misleads voters 27 times in 38 minutes at the first debate

Romney misleads voters 27 times in 38 minutes at the first debate - Think Progress lays them out. Daily Kos is setting out Romney's many misrepresentations too. Steve Benen has it right. We can't decide who won a debate without considering the extent to which the candidates told the truth:

President Obama, meanwhile, was listless and timid. He stumbled on his words. At times he seemed distracted and unfocused. There were key opportunities for the president to go on the offensive, but for whatever reason, he chose not to engage. For pundits checking boxes -- who gave the appearance of being "in control"? -- Romney excelled. But all of this overlooks an element I like to think it sometimes important: substance. The men on the stage last night aren't actors; they're candidates for the nation's highest office. Delivering lines well is a nice quality, but as the dust settles, it's worth pausing to reflect on whether those lines were true and reflect reality in any meaningful way. Indeed, it seems to me Romney thrived in large part because he abandoned the pretense of honesty. And as it turns out, winning a debate is surprisingly easy when a candidate decides he can say anything and expect to get away with it.

Continue ReadingRomney misleads voters 27 times in 38 minutes at the first debate

Matt Taibbi uses the current election to illustrate our completely corrupt political process

Once again, I'm a bit embarrassed that I can't think of ANYTHING to disagree with while reading an article by Matt Taibbi. Here's an excerpt:

If the clichés are true and the presidential race always comes down to which candidate the American people "wants to have a beer with," how many Americans will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall Street multimillionaire who fires your sister, unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss accounts in his wife's name, cheerfully encourages finance-industry bailouts while bashing "entitlements" like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq and generally speaking has never even visited the country that most of the rest of us call the United States, except to make sure that it's paying its bills to him on time? Romney is an almost perfect amalgam of all the great out-of-touch douchebags of our national cinema . . . The fact that Barack Obama needed a Himalayan mountain range of cash and some rather extreme last-minute incompetence on Romney's part to pull safely ahead in this race is what really speaks to the brokenness of this system. Bruni of the Times is right that the process scares away qualified candidates who could have given Obama a better run for all that money. But what he misses is that the brutal campaign process, with its two years of nearly constant media abuse and "gotcha" watch-dogging, serves mainly to select out any candidate who is considered anything like a threat to the corrupt political establishment – and that selection process is the only thing that has kept this race close. Barack Obama is hardly a complete Wall Street stooge. The country's most powerful bankers seem genuinely to hate his guts, mainly because they're delusional and are sincerely offended by anyone who dares to even generally criticize them for being greedy or ethically suspect, as Obama has with his occasional broadsides against "fat cat bankers" and so on. On the other hand, Obama's policy choices in the last four years have made it impossible for him to run aggressively against the corruption and greed and generally self-obsessed, almost cinematic douchiness that Romney represents.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi uses the current election to illustrate our completely corrupt political process

The secretly taped Romney video

At this article in Mother Jones, you can listen to Mitt Romney's presentation to a select ($50,000/plate) private audience. In addition to the well-publicized gaffes, listen to the story about how Mitt's wife's father's family (parents and children) scraped to put one of the children through college. This is at about the 4:40 mark. Mitt marvels at the thought that a child from a financially struggling family worked long hours of self-sacrifice to put his brother through college. It was a touching story of self-sacrifice, but then comes Mitts punch line: "I mean, I would never do that for my brother." [Loud laughing]. No, Mitt. I'm sure you wouldn't. You've made this clear throughout this campaign that everyone is on their own, except for big companies that buy Congress and laughingly feed at the public trough. At the 23 minute mark, Romney asserts that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace. Remarkably simplistic world view.

Continue ReadingThe secretly taped Romney video

Bernie Sanders discusses money in politics with Bill Moyers

On its program of September 7, 2012, Moyers & Co. presented a detailed no-nonsense conversation between Bernie Sanders and Bill Moyers on may critically important issues. Mr. Sanders early attacked dialing for dollars:

BILL MOYERS: Tell me how that money works. I mean, you've been on the inside 20-some-odd years, as I sit. How does it actually work? We hear "money in politics." SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS: Well, this is how it works. And this is what people do not appreciate. And it's true for Republicans and Democrats, as well. You do not know how many hours every single week, how many hours every single day people walk into the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee or the Republican Committee. And you know what they do? They dial for dollars. They dial for dollars, hour after hour after hour. BILL MOYERS: Who are they calling? SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS: They're calling a list of people who have money. That's who they're calling. And what happens when you do that day after day, month after month, your worldview becomes shaped by those people. And most of the money coming into your campaign coffers comes from those people. And you begin representing their perspective. BILL MOYERS: Well, there are more--it's more than that, isn't it? Because you just released a long report on the billionaires. SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS: Absolutely. BILL MOYERS: --who are pouring money into the— SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS: Absolutely. We have right now, and this should frighten every American, as a result of this disastrous Citizens United decision, we're looking now at people like the Koch Brothers, putting in one family, $400 million. Adelson, worth $20 billion, putting in $100 million. We have over 23 billionaire families making large contributions, and I think that's a conservative number. So what you are looking at is a nation with a grotesquely unequal distribution of wealth and income, tremendous economic power on Wall Street, and now added to all of that is you have the big money interests, the billionaires and corporations now buying elections. This scares me very much. And I fear very much that if we don't turn this around, Bill, we're heading toward an oligarchic form of society. [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingBernie Sanders discusses money in politics with Bill Moyers