apsies: Michelle Obama stands with Hitomi Noda, wife of Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, and Valerie Trierweiler, partner of French President Francois Hollande, during the White House tour for the spouses of the G8 members attending talks at Camp David.

via: exit-does–not-exist

Record average national temperatures from May 2011 to April 2012: NOAA/NCDC

The last 12 months were the hottest 12 months in US history since record-keeping began in 1895. This according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center‘s latest State of the Climate report.

United States Drought Monitor as of 1 May 2012.: climate.gov

The gnarly partner to all this heat is drought. The US Drought Monitor (USDM) map above shows the state of drought in the lower 48 as of 1 May 2012. That’s a lot of dry territory.

So what’s a good Plan B? Good old fashioned racism — early and often. If there’s anything the Fox News audience seems to be more against than the gays, it’s the “not white” races. The base won’t need the full programming to remember things they already know.

Charles P. Pierce says,

This is likely going to be the most obviously racist presidential campaign the country has seen since people went out a’whispering about Warren Harding’s black ancestry. Even if Willard Romney has the stones to unequivocally denounce the entire network dedicated to boosting this stuff into the mainstream, which he doesn’t now and never will, he can’t stop it. It’s a feature of conservative politics, not a bug.

Don’t believe it? It’s just beginning:

• Chris Wallace: ‘McCain was crazy’ not to attack Obama with Rev. Wright – Fox News host Chris Wallace on Friday suggested that it would be “legitimate” for presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to attack President Barack Obama for his association with Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. “As far as Rev. Wright is concerned, I think it had a lot of relevance and I think when you look back on it, [former Republican presidential nominee John] McCain was crazy not to bring it up,” Wallace told Fox News host Gretchen Carlson. “Not in a matter of exploiting it, it’s a legitimate issue.” — Raw Story

• During the May 17 edition of Fox News’ Hannity, host Sean Hannity disagreed with the Romney campaign’s decision, stating: … I believe that the president’s relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a man that influenced him for over 20 years, inspired him, is a very important campaign issue. After all, it is a matter of character. – MMFA

• In a May 18 post, on his blog, RedState, CNN’s Erick Erickson praised Breitbart.com for its May 17 “vetting” of  Obama, using the post to call Obama a “Composite Kenyan.” – MMFA

• Obama Derangement Syndrome, cont. – Arizona edition: Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett (R) told KFYI he’s not entirely convinced President Obama was really born in the United States and suggested he could be knocked off the state’s presidential ballot. Said Bennett: “I’m not a birther. I believe the president was born in Hawaii — or at least I hope he was. But my responsibility as secretary of state is to make sure the ballots in Arizona are correct and that those people whose names are on the ballot have met the qualifications for the office they are seeking.” – Political Wire

Wouldn’t it be great if these birthers (or, really, the panderers to birthers) like Bennett and Arpaio and whoever else is but isn’t a birther this week would compare for us not only ROMNEY’S and Obama’s birth certificates — but their own, and let us all in on the big difference. Just so we all know… so that we all can be on the same page.

Same cafe, later in the summer, photographer unknown. (I have searched and searched for this photographer. If you know, comment and I’ll update.)

But look at THIS and THIS.

A Romney Presidency: Day One – this is from the Romney campaign itself, describing how “President Romney” would approve the Keystone pipeline, introduce pro-growth tax reforms, and repeal Obamacare. So, yeah, no surprise—Day One: tax cuts for the wealthy, because ‘job creators!’  And all you people without health insurance, with pre-existing conditions, with kids in their early 20s? Suck it, plebs! Hurry up and die but in the meantime, thank your lucky stars for the minimum wage jobs that will (someday?) be ‘created’ by CEOs making hundreds of millions of dollars, who just got more tax cuts from “President Romney.”

…

• The only “acceptable” outcome for Romney is one in which tens of millions of Americans lose their health care coverage, seniors pay higher prescription drug costs, small businesses lose their tax breaks, and the deficit goes up by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. But there’s another point that’s gone largely forgotten: we’ve gone from a policy landscape in which Republicans agreed with 80% of Obamacare to one in which Republicans agree with 0% of Obamacare. – Steve Benen

Senate Republicans quickly united behind House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on Tuesday after he telegraphed his intention to use the debt limit as leverage to avoid a scheduled tax increase. Democrats balked at his demand that raising the debt ceiling — which is set to max out this December — be paired dollar-for-dollar with spending “cuts and reforms.” The widening rift foreshadows another self-inflicted battle, the likes of which nearly collapsed the U.S. economy last fall. […] And the Democrats’ response to the prospect of another deficit-reduction package devoid of new tax revenues? Dream on. — TPM

• House GOP Throws Out Entire Summer Of Debt Ceiling Negotiations In Less Than 10 Minutes – Last August, debt ceiling negotiations between House Republicans and Senate Democrats came to an end when President Obama signed into law the Budget Control Act, a not-so-grand bargain that created a legislative super committee tasked with finding spending cuts to offset the debt ceiling increase. If the super committee failed, automatic cuts from the defense budget and discretionary spending levels would offset the cost.In less than 10 minutes, the House officially unwound a budget deal that took an entire summer to craft… — Think Progress

What’s that called when the people who know you the best dislike you the most? “If Mitt Romney is to win the presidency, he’ll likely have to clear a high historical hurdle: Getting elected while losing both his state of residence (Massachusetts) and his native state (Michigan)… The last person to get elected president while losing his home state and his state of birth was James Polk, in 1844.” — Greg Sargent

The ‘competence’ theme of the Romney campaign: Mitt Romney’s campaign, eager to attack the Recovery Act that pulled the economy back from the brink of collapse, thought it had come up with a brilliant idea. The former governor would go to New Hampshire and mock the 19th century Sawyer Bridge, which was restored with public funds, but which is closed to traffic. […] The project was championed by 28 New Hampshire Republicans who now support Romney’s presidential campaign.  […] Last month, Romney blamed President Obama for a closed drywall plant in Ohio, but the facility was shut down during the Bush era. This week, the Romney campaign released a video showing a closed Electrolux plant in Iowa, but the company has added more American jobs than it had lost. Then it released a video of a steel plant that benefited in part from an investment by Bain Capital, but which thrived thanks to government assistance Romney opposes. Now it’s new evidence of wasteful spending that isn’t an example of wasteful spending. — Maddow Blog

PRESIDENT OBAMA / DEMOCRATS————————————————————

“Unless you run a financial institution whose business model is built on cheating consumers, or making risky bets that could damage the whole economy, you have nothing to fear from Wall Street reform.” – President Obama, in his weekly address, calling for stricter reform after J.P. Morgan’s multi-billion dollar loss. – Political Wire

…

It’s a busy weekend for international diplomacy, with a G8 meeting at Camp David, followed by a NATO gathering in Chicago on Monday.

President Obama’s re-election campaign is getting increasingly engaged on voting laws, unveiling GottaVote.org today, along with a new video highlighting voting restrictions approved by state Republican policymakers. – Steve Benen

Volcker takes on Dimon: “You’ve got great advantages if you’re a government regulated bank,” Volcker explained. “Take the two big remaining investment banks — used to call them investment banks — Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Both during the crisis got a banking license. Why’d they get a banking license? They wanted the protection of the government in the middle of the crisis. Now the crisis is over, if they want to do proprietary trading, they want to do a lot of other things, it’s very simple: give up their banking license.” This was back in April, but takes on greater significance now. JPM’s losses appear small enough that they won’t need the government to step in and cover them. But the idea behind the Volcker Rule is that federally insured banks shouldn’t be making these kinds of bets at all — because when the bets go spectacularly bad, it falls to taxpayers to cover them. — TPM

• What’s this tell you? “Donors from big banks are betting on Mitt Romney to defeat President Obama and repeal new restraints on risky, large-scale investments,” the Boston Globe reports.
• Think Progress: the top six donors to Romney come from the biggest banks — Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and Citigroup. And the finance/insurance/real estate industry is far and away the largest donor to Romney’s campaign, giving him $18 million. Of course, banks also throw money at the Democrats, but in this cycle, they’ve clearly favored the GOP.
• 

via: savagemike

Armed with fresh survey data and a counterintuitive thesis, a new Brookings Institution study released Wednesday makes the compelling case that Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith, long pegged by pundits as a political albatross for the candidate, won’t actually hurt him at the polls in November — and it could even help.

[...] According to the study, a full 82 percent of respondents said they knew “little” or “nothing” about Mormonism, and researchers found that feeding them even a couple sentences of basic information about the church’s beliefs had the ability to swing wide swaths of the electorate in terms of their support for Romney.

In the case of this particular survey, the headline-ready finding is that — among conservatives at least — such information actually increased support for the candidate.

Americans Don’t Know Anything About Romney’s Religion — Yet

Two things:

1. Let’s be honest: the rightwing fundies would support ANYONE running against what they see as the “black, socialist, Kenyan” who currently resides in the White House; and
2. It’s funny that the “couple sentences of basic information” given to these people are about Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon — both pretty neutral, noncontroversial facts about Mormonism. I’d like to know when they’ll get the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say, the lesser known beliefs, such as:

• God lives on a planet near the star Kolob.
• God (“Heavenly Father”) has at least one wife, our “Mother in Heaven,” but she is so holy that we are not to discuss her nor pray to her.
• Jesus was married.
• We can become like God and rule over our own universe.
• There are many gods, ruling over their own worlds.
• Jesus and Satan (“Lucifer”) are brothers, and they are our brothers – we are all spirit children of Heavenly Father
• Jesus Christ was conceived by God the Father by having sex with Mary, who was temporarily his wife.
• We should not pray to Jesus, nor try to feel a personal relationship with him.
• ETC…

The thing is, even if fundagelicals are given more information about this religion, I’ll bet they’ll ignore it, decide it’s too unbelievable. That’s how crazy some of it would sound to them  (between you and me, it’s no crazier than every other religion).  In the meantime, Romney panders hard to the Wingnut-Christian political agenda of making everyone else’s business a test of their personal ‘religious freedom’ — feeding their obvious plan of one day transforming America into a Christian theocracy.

Update ~~~

liberalsarecool: Using ‘self defense’ as you attack with a gun: the death of Trayvon was avoidable if Zimmerman asked “do you live around here?’ That’s how humans communicate.

graph: factcheck.org

Veterans of the Clinton administration warn that Romney’s love letters to the former president — who has appeared at fundraisers and in TV ads for Obama — could backfire with voters. “Maybe it’s a good one-liner for today, though I’m not sure that the public doesn’t see through it,” said John Podesta, who was a White House chief of staff under Clinton and co-chaired Obama’s transition team. “All it does is, in the long term, all it will do is elevate President Clinton’s views of the economy.” Clinton, Podesta noted, raised taxes in office, which administration veterans credit for boosting the ‘90s economy for which Romney claims to be nostalgic. “If he’d be for what Clinton was for, maybe that would help him,” Podesta said. “If [voters] think back to those days, and if they look at what Romney is proposing, it’s exactly the opposite of what Clinton did in office.” – POLITICO

Obama wants to let the Bush-era rates for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans expire at the end of 2012. With a few notable (and, within their party, increasingly marginalized) exceptions, Republicans have vehemently attacked this suggestion. According to the GOP’s line, to raise taxes on anyone now, even (or especially) the wealthy, would kill the recovery and cost jobs, depriving the Treasury of revenue and only making the deficit problem worse. “We don’t have deficits because Americans are taxed too little, we have deficits because Washington spends too much,” is House Speaker John Boehner’s standard line on the issue — a refrain that is echoed by virtually every other Republican on the national stage. If this anti-tax adamance — and the dire warnings of what life in a post-tax hike America would look like — sounds familiar, it’s for good reason. Republicans issued the exact same warnings the last time a president proposed addressing exploding deficits (in part) through tax increases on the wealthy. […] Ultimately, Clinton and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill united behind a plan that would raise taxes on the top 1.2 percent of income earners and create a new 39 percent bracket for the wealthiest Americans. —Salon.com 

My opinion: let’s remember what worked during the success of the Clinton years and repeat it — which obviously includes spending cuts paired with taking in more revenue for the government in the form of higher taxes for the wealthiest. I think we all already know how the economics of the Bush years worked out for us.

Mittens and Paul Ryan want to extend Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest, because “job creators.” They’ll pay for it (well, not really!) by cutting services and programs for the rest of us (the taxpayers, the poorest, the elderly). Anyone with half a brain knows the true job creators are the 99%, the rest of us. We either have enough disposable income to buy products and services or we don’t. End of story.

via: destroythegop

barackobama: Mitt Romney being Mitt Romney.

It’s real, y’all!

…

My contribution:

Reasons why Congress is a complete failure – At a fundraiser, Mike Coffman (R-CO) said “I don’t know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. I don’t know that,” Coffman said. “But I do know this, that in his heart, he’s not an American. He’s just not an American.” After a short pause, which Elbert County Republican Chairman Scott Wills recalled as “deafening silence,” Coffman was met with applause, tentative at first. Later, Coffman told KUSA “I misspoke and I apologize” in a written statement. — TPM  (SORRY, HE DIDN’T “MISSPEAK”)| Note: Coffman’s on Twitter: @RepMikeCoffman

Mitt Romney has turned into Bill Clinton’s biggest booster. Seeking to attract Democrats and independents who supported the last Democratic president, Romney has taken to lavishing praise at every turn on Clinton’s boom-era ’90s policies while contrasting them unfavorably with President Barack Obama’s old-school, Big Government ways. […] Romney’s hope that Democrats and independents who supported Clinton will gravitate to his candidacy ignores the fact that Clinton is appearing at fundraisers for Obama and making a star turn in his TV advertisements, said Phil Singer… “It’s a particularly ineffective tactic when the Bill Clinton-Barack Obama fundraising roadshow is taking place in real time.” — POLITICO | image: politicaldirtylaundry

What credibility? Newt Gingrich said there are plans for [Romney and him] to appear together in Las Vegas at the end of the month. In June Gingrich said he will be raising money in Atlanta for Romney and U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, with a Gingrich-Romney tandem appearance set for June 11. The embrace of Romney puts Gingrich in an awkward spot, said University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock. If he were to start gushing about his former primary foe, it would look insincere. “I expect Gingrich is also concerned about his own credibility,” Bullock said. “There’s only so much you can recant.”  – ajc.com

PRESIDENT OBAMA / DEMOCRATS————————————————————

Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday joked that he would “take a lot of credit for a man having landed on the moon” to point out the absurdity of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney taking responsibility for saving the U.S. auto industry. “So I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back,” he told Cleveland’s WEWS-TV earlier this month even though he had penned a 2008 op-ed titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” warning that if a bailout was provided to the auto industry then “its demise will be virtually guaranteed.” “Whoa!” Biden exclaimed to crowd at car dealership in Martins Ferry, Ohio on Thursday. “And by the way, I’ll take a lot credit of for a man having landed on the moon. Because although I was in school, I rooted for it.” — Raw Story

The decade the GOP hopes you’ve forgotten — If there’s one aspect of the deficit reduction plan that President Obama outlined last week that congressional Republicans most object to, it’s probably his call for higher income tax rates on the wealthiest Americans. Specifically, Obama wants to let the Bush-era rates for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans expire at the end of 2012. With a few notable (and, within their party, increasingly marginalized) exceptions, Republicans have vehemently attacked this suggestion. According to the GOP’s line, to raise taxes on anyone now, even (or especially) the wealthy, would kill the recovery and cost jobs, depriving the Treasury of revenue and only making the deficit problem worse. “We don’t have deficits because Americans are taxed too little, we have deficits because Washington spends too much,” is House Speaker John Boehner’s standard line on the issue — a refrain that is echoed by virtually every other Republican on the national stage. If this anti-tax adamance — and the dire warnings of what life in a post-tax hike America would look like — sounds familiar, it’s for good reason. Republicans issued the exact same warnings the last time a president proposed addressing exploding deficits (in part) through tax increases on the wealthy. […] Ultimately, Clinton and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill united behind a plan that would raise taxes on the top 1.2 percent of income earners and create a new 39 percent bracket for the wealthiest Americans. — Salon.com 

Geithner: ‘I Don’t Understand’ Why Debt Ceiling Debate Is Back — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown during a factory tour Thursday that he couldn’t understand why the debate over the federal debt limit is back again. “Because look at how much damage it caused the country last August. I mean, it was terribly damaging for the country. And the idea you can govern effectively at this time in American history — you know, we’re fighting wars. We’ve got a major financial crisis in Europe. We have all of these challenges for the rest of the country with political politicians threatening to default if we don’t adopt a partisan political agenda. It’s deeply irresponsible. There’s no basis for it.” — PBS NewsHour

Rahm Emanuel ‘livid,’ not returning calls from Ricketts family  – “The Mayor was livid when he read that the Ricketts were going to launch a $10 million campaign against President Obama – with the type of racially motivated ads that are insulting to the president and the presidential campaign,” said the aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the situation. “He is also livid with their blatant hypocrisy.” The aide also said Emanuel, who is Obama’s former chief of staff, has cut off communication with the family. “The Ricketts have tried to contact the mayor, but he’s said that he does not want to talk with them today, tomorrow or anytime soon,” the aide said. The Ricketts family is seeking taxpayer funding for the renovations. – The Washington Post

• NOTE THIS HYPOCRISY: Ricketts’ SuperPAC is called “Ending Spending Political Action Fund.” But he’s seeking TAXPAYER FUNDING for renovations to Wrigley Field, home of his Chicago Cubs!

A Fox News poll released yesterday finds that voters would rather have President Obama pick the next Supreme Court justice than Republican candidate Mitt Romney by a 46 to 38 percent margin. Last November, Romney promised that, if elected, he would model his Supreme Court nominees after Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito, all of whom voted give wealthy corporations a nearly unlimited power to try to buy elections in Citizens United. By contrast, Justice Sotomayor, who was the only Obama appointee on the Court when Citizens United was decided, dissented from that decision.– Think Progress

via: brandyleexd