Tag Archives: Prop 8

Morning Bunker Report: Saturday 4.7.2012

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————————————-WHAT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY STANDS FOR TODAY

Cantor To Release Ad Touting ‘Small Business’ Tax Cut For Millionaires Like Oprah – House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), fresh off a legislative victory with his fraud-inducing JOBS Act, is pushing another bill aimed at helping small businesses. The legislation is supposed to give small businesses a tax cut but instead, it cuts taxes for millionaires, professional sports franchises, and businesses like Oprah Winfrey’s production company. While giving millionaire’s a $45,000 tax cut, many small businesses actually wouldn’t qualify for the tax cut Cantor proposed. Those facts, however, aren’t stopping him from running advertisements in his Richmond-area district touting the bill… [...] Once again, Republicans are betting that its single trick of cutting taxes for every millionaire (“small businesses” and “job creators,” to borrow from their parlance) will stimulate job growth. The problem is, there’s no evidence that it will.

National Review Writer Tops Racism With More Racism – Popular conservative columnist and National Review writer John Derbyshire topped all of his previous racist screeds (and sexist rants) today by posting a long breakdown of all of the important lessons he has taught his children about race — and he’s outdone his own racism with this one. [...] After spending a few minutes bemoaning imagethat he can’t say a racist slur (“What you must call ‘the ‘N’ word’ is used freely among blacks but is taboo to nonblacks”) and opining on the hostility he believes all black people feel toward white people like himself (though he says he isn’t white before calling himself white several times), he cuts to the heart of his lessons for his children: (10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally. (10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods. (10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot)…

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker Overturns Law To Help Prevent Pay Discrimination Against Women – The Equal Pay Enforcement Act, passed in 2009, gave employers more power to press charges against employers to challenge unfair pay practices, allowing people to plead their case in state courts, instead of the more costly federal court system. The state legislature passed the Republican-backed repeal bill on party-line votes last week, and Walker waited until almost the last possible minute before signing it. As the Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel explains, the Equal Pay Enforcement Act could have helped women in the badger state: “Women earn 77 cents for every dollar that men make. In Wisconsin, it’s 75 cents, according to the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health (WAWH), which also estimates that families in the state “lose more than $4,000 per year due to unequal pay.” …

imageMaryland Mormons want to repeal marriage equality — Members of the Mormon church are leading efforts to place a marriage equality referendum on the ballot in Maryland, according to an e-mail obtained by the Washington Blade. The e-mail states that several Maryland churches are working to gather signatures, and that 200,000 need to be collected by May, even though just over 55,000 signatures are needed for the referendum to reach the ballot. Two members of the Mormon community in Maryland are listed as organizers in the e-mail, which calls for more people to gather signatures “within the LDS community,” referring to the church’s formal name, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. An LDS spokesman said that the church is not involved in the effort. The Mormon Church was one of the primary backers of California’s Proposition 8 amendment, which prohibited same-sex marriage in the state.

NOM calls for federal investigation of LGBT group, IRS – According to the documents, Romney donated $10,000 to the controversial anti-gay organization in 2008, which has recently come under fire over racially divisive tactics revealed in court documents by the State of Maine. HRC says that NOM is notoriously cagey about revealing its donors. The revelation of Governor Romney and other donors’ names has the group calling for a federal probe of both HRC and the Internal Revenue Service. In a statement on its website, NOM’s President Brian Brown alleges that HRC could have only obtained the information by criminal means. “Either the HRC got NOM’s tax return from someone with the Internal Revenue Service, or they got it from a hacker who stole it. Either way, it appears that a federal crime may have been committed,” wrote Brown. The information was originally published on March 30 at Huffington Post. [image: DonkeyHotey]

What Could Go Wrong? – According to a report from the Miami New Times, corroborated by the leader of the group, a Neo-Nazi white nationalist group is now patrolling the streets of Sanford, Florida in the event that a race riot breaks out. Neo-Nazis are currently conducting heavily armed patrols in and around Sanford, Florida and are “prepared” for violence in the case of a race riot. The patrols are to protect “white citizens in the area who are concerned for their safety” in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting last month, says Commander Jeff Schoep of the National Socialist Movement. “We are not advocating any type of violence or attacks on anybody, but we are prepared for it,” he says. “We are not the type of white people who are going to be walked all over.” [...] Only in America does a white man shoot a black man [kid], and then somehow it’s white people who end up concerned about their safety.

—————————————————————————————–THE ALTERNATIVE

“I think the meanness of the GOP was a big part of it. The outing people on the internet, the religious fanatics, the attempts to get people fired, the absolute unwillingness to ever admit error, the smearing of the Schiavo’s husband, the gay-bashing, etc. Even if I bought into wingnut bullshit, I never thought of myself as a hater. [...] And while Republicans may very well have been crazy for decades, the outright ugliness, I think, has escalated beyond measure. The hideous treatment of Graeme Frost was the final straw, I guess. It was just the last, final, “WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?” moment. You see the same thing from the same folks as they viciously attack Trayvon Martin for his horrible sin of being gunned down in cold blood. I will never know why it took so long. It’s not easy looking at everything you thought you knew and saying “Wow, was I ever full of shit.” But eventually, if you have two remaining brain cells bouncing around your thick noggin, the amount of evidence becomes unavoidable and undeniable. Even for someone who voted for Bush twice,” – John Cole, Republican apostate  

04/06/2012: President Obama Speaks at the White House Forum on Women and the Economy: WATCH

…
Some of President Obama’s remarks: Right now, women are a growing number of breadwinners in the household.  But they’re still earning just 77 cents for every dollar a man does — even less if you’re an African American or Latina woman.  Overall, a woman with a college degree doing the same work as a man will earn hundreds of thousands of dollars less over the course of her career. So closing this pay gap — ending pay discrimination — is about far more than simple fairness.  [...] Because of the health reform law that we passed, women finally have more power to make their choices about their health care. Last year, more than 20 million women received expanded access to preventive services like mammograms and cervical cancer screenings at no additional cost.  Nearly 2 million women enrolled in Medicare received a 50-percent discount on the medicine that they need.  Over 1 million more young women are insured because they can now stay on their parent’s plan.  And later this year, women will receive new access to recommended preventive care like domestic violence screening and contraception at no additional cost. And soon, insurance companies will no longer be able to deny coverage based on preexisting conditions like breast cancer, or charge women more just because they’re women… [image: Rachel Maddow]

Al Franken may be a Senator now but he’s still very funny: People In Stock Photos For Al Franken – “And whether you’re a Tattooed Guitar Player, a Guy Wearing Hard Hat, or an Elderly Couple Sitting At Kitchen Table, there’s no better way to show your support than by making a contribution today.”

LINK: Related: “Al Franken, Email Master”

 

Mitt Romney: poised to be the GOP’s top shithead

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Mitt Romney poised for Tuesday sweep – If Mitt Romney is able to win with these kinds of margins—big double-digits in Romney-friendly states, high single-digits to low double-digits in states where Rick Santorum originally had a chance—there’s no question that he’ll win enough delegates to hit the magic number while primaries are still ongoing. So I guess Republicans have the shortest memory in the world. After spending three years yelling about President Obama, health care reform, and high taxes … they are about to nominate the guy who invented Obamacare and who raised taxes while governor of Massachusetts. Of course, he denies all that, and apparently Republicans are willing to believe him. But things are going to get interesting when Romney tries to move into Etch-A-Sketch mode, trying to erase the things he said during the Republican primary in order to appeal to swing voters. And assuming tomorrow goes as PPP’s polling suggest it will, that day is coming soon.

 Wisconsin, Where the Romney Pushback Begins – So, suddenly, with women running away from the Republican party and its putative nominee as though he’s gone radioactive, we get a story that tells us that the White House “fears” the power of “rock star” Ann Romney, the woman with several Cadillacs? As near as I can tell from that Politico story, the main sources of Ann Romney’s “power” are that she’s Mitt’s only first wife, and that he’s a little bit less of an animatronic foof when she’s around. She’s his “link” to “the base” simply because they’ve stayed married to each other. [...] The work of humanizing the Romneybot — recreating him as a “moderate,” so that we can actually have the horse-race that people want so badly come the fall — is going to continue and accelerate. His campaign has been stunningly adequate throughout, just about up to the task of spending a quintillion quatloos to crush a field of lightweights and rodeo clowns. He’s outspending Santorum 55-to-one in Wisconsin and has built up a virtual monopoly on television advertising, and his lead is still only in single digits. And he’s being stunningly adequate in a state that is in a merry chaos of superheated politics. For the first time since Fighting Bob LaFollette was in there swinging, Wisconsin is the red-hot core of American politics.

Animatronic foof!! That’s exactly why I read Charles P. Pierce, who in my mind is a national treasure. #WIN

Here are some things the Romneybot has done / said recently, all of which TeamRomney will now attempt to either “soften” for moderate voters (the majority of folks who aren’t likely to think Jesus would have voted for more tax cuts for the wealthy), or will just straight up amend, change, or lie about in the future. We need to keep score:

Mitt Romney’s top 5 assaults to women’s health

1. He’s going to ‘get rid of’ Planned Parenthood.

2. Romney supports the Blunt Ammendment which would allow employers to deny health insurance coverage on the basis of moral objections.

3. Romney is fighting a covert battle against contraception, even if he is doing his best not to call it that.

4. Romney failed to condemn Rush Limbaugh’s characterization of Sandra Fluke as a “slut.”

5. Romney supports restricting access to abortions. He has called Roe v. Wade “one of the darkest moments in Supreme Court history.”

More details at Think Progress

Side note:


via: lycanpedia

One of NOM’s Top Secret Donors Revealed: Mitt Romney – We often talk about how hard NOM works to hide their donors – even if it means circumventing the law – but now, we’ve learned the identity of one of their high-profile financial supporters: Mitt Romney. Financial documents obtained by HRC reveal that Mitt Romney donated $10,000 to the National Organization for Marriage in 2008 – essentially funding NOM’s strategy of using racial division and unfounded scare tactics to attack LGBT equality, at the same time that NOM was fighting for Prop 8 in California. via: sarahlee310

Tax Cuts in GOP Budget Would Give Millionaires $265,000 on Top of Bush Tax Cuts; Would Cut Top Rate to Lowest Level Since Hoover Administration – “I’m very supportive of the Ryan budget plan. It’s a bold and exciting effort on [Ryan’s] part and on the part of the Republicans.”— Mitt Romney [source]

Ad War Update – Romney’s online ad strategy is to tell people what they want to hear, literally: In the past campaign speeches often tried to include one line or two to satisfy each type of voter. But increasingly campaigns are figuring out exactly what people like you would need to hear to vote for them, and then giving exactly that message to people exactly like you. Another group of people will hear another message directed explicitly at their concerns.

Mitt Romney Keeps Lying – Mitt Romney is not only lying more often as the primary draws to close, he’s also telling bigger lies. “We know that under Barack Obama, 800,000 jobs have been lost. We know that under Barack Obama, 2.3 million homes have been foreclosed upon. We know that under this president, chronic unemployment is the worst it’s been in American history.” No, it is not the worst it’s been in American history. I expect the general election will be filled with one lie after another, because there is no credible way for Romney and the Republicans to attack the president without lying…

Romney (and the rest of the GOP) can’t ever make a point without acting like they’re in a junior high lunch room:  “Our president doesn’t have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do,” Romney told a conservative crowd. Obama rebuffs Romney on ‘exceptional’ America – “It’s still primary season for the Republican Party,” [Obama] said, but then took aim at Romney’s central argument. “It’s worth noting that I first arrived on the national stage with a speech at the Democratic Convention that was entirely about American exceptionalism and that my entire career has been a testimony to American exceptionalism. But, you know, I will cut folks some slack for now because they’re still trying to get their nomination.”