Romney’s position on measures to deal with current undocumented immigrants, not in the military, who would be protected under the DREAM Act Republicans blocked in the senate and he said he would veto, is still unclear:
Paul admitted he does, stating, “[It’s] just as I use the post office, I use government highways, I use the banks, I use the federal reserve system. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t work to remove this in the same way on Social Security.”
But then Ron Paul names all the awesome federally funded, built and administrated things he uses but would like to under fund or just “turn over to the states”.
Swing state economies are improving, the Republican Governors want to publicize it but Romney doesn’t really want them to talk about it:
The development is perhaps one of the clearest examples of the messaging predicament the Romney campaign finds itself in. For the Republican presidential nominee, the election is largely a referendum on President Obama’s handling of jobs and the economy. And with last month’s weak jobs report, he appeared to have a winning message. Yet when you ask Republican governors how things are going, especially in swing states, the economic picture starts to brighten considerably
These Governors are not just trumping the rationale behind a line of attack (like the Democratic Bain defenders tried to do) they’re usurping the rationale behind the core message of the Romney Campaign.
The victims in these cases are dealing with so much and exhibited bravery testifying against Jerry Sandusky and Msgr. Lynn.. Victim number 1 in the Sandusky trial recounts cutting off contact with Sandusky:
“I kind of thought he sees me as family and this is just what his family does,” he testified.
“I didn’t know what to say,” testified the man. “I was embarrassed and confused and didn’t know what to do. My mom felt I was doing stuff she couldn’t do with me, she enjoyed the fact that I had a role model. I couldn’t just say no.”
He testified that after he broke off contact with Sandusky, the former coach came to his home and yelled at him for not spending more time with him. He told the court that the argument got heated and that eventually hid behind a bush to avoid Sandusky.
“I got extremely, extremely scared,” testified the man. “With all the connections he had if he really thought I would say what happened that he could hurt me or someone close to me.”
And the victims who testified about the priests Msgr. Lynn helped to shuffle through the archdiocese to help them escape discovery:
During the 10-week trial, more than a dozen adults testified about wrenching abuse they said they suffered at the hands of revered priests.
A former seminarian said he was raped by a priest throughout high school at the priest’s mountain house.
A nun testified that she and two female relatives were sexually abused by a priest described by a church official as “one of the sickest people I ever knew.”
Being on a jury is hard, being on a jury for criminal trials can be especially hard. That being said: I’m proud of the the two separate Pennsyvlania juries and Prosecutors who were on the two high profile cases involving cover-ups of child molestation by revered institution.
William Lynn, a catholic official in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia convicted of child endangerment in Philadelphia
The 12-member jury acquitted Monsignor Lynn, of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, of conspiracy and a second count of endangerment after a trial that prosecutors and victims rights groups called a turning point in the abuse scandals that have shaken the Catholic Church.
The single guilty verdict was widely seen as a victory for the district attorney’s office, which has been investigating the archdiocese aggressively since 2002, and it was hailed by victim advocates who have argued for years that senior church officials should be held accountable for concealing evidence and transferring predatory priests to unwary parishes.
Later Friday, Jerry Sandusky, former Penn State Defensive Coordinator was convicted.
After a three-week trial featuring emotional and often graphic testimony from eight of the former Penn State assistant football coach’s victims, a 12-person jury late Friday night convicted him on 45 of 48 counts. There were convictions related to all 10 victims alleged by prosecutors, with the three not-guilty verdicts applying to three individuals.
[…]
He should be sentenced in about 90 days, according to Cleland. If he gets more than two years, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections will determine the prison where Sandusky will serve his time.
Hats off to Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly for getting Sandusky “thrown under the jail”. They economically built their case, and helped the victims become a part of the justice served through testimony. In addition, two more victims may be able to have their grievances against Sandusky heard.
Here’s Attorney General Kelly’s interview with ESPN on the Verdict:
Jurors reported for Jury Duty, have volunteered time and are party to accounts of awful details of these crimes and they dutifully came to a verdict.
The debate was to be sponsored by the Edward M. Kennedy Institute and Vicki Kennedy is the president of the Institute. So there’s some notional logic to the demand. But c’mon. In the real world it’s irrelevant to anything to do with the debate. Media organizations would control the questions and the questioners. Brown’s really trying to insist that Kennedy’s widow stay uncommitted for the whole cycle?
You know, Martha Coakley was endorsed by Vicki Kennedy and Scott Brown didn’t give a damn. I think Scott Brown is shook because Warren is actually a much better opponent, but he shouldn’t be so shook that he wants to bind Vicki Kennedy’s free speech to his agreement to debate. It’s a f*cking stupid bargain. Nothing irks me more than this new type of debating where candidates pre-screen questions and cherry pick moderators, but there is still value in debates. It’s where some real differentiating can happen. Scott Brown is really happy to seem more moderate than he is and wants to not remind people that he works for a party powered by a swelling base of aging, increasingly mon0-cultural, political zealots.
And that’s what it is: Scott Brown won’t debate Elizabeth Warren. it isn’t “they can’t come to terms” or “both sides were unreasonable”, Scott Brown wants to keep the widow of the Senator he succeeded to keep her mouth shut. To literally trade free speech for him to feel it necessary to debate his opponent. Warren should hammer him on this. And not in a mean, snide way, but demand that they be allowed to discuss the issues in front of voters.
I played Rugby in FDR park (a part of Philadelphia’s great Fairmount park system) for 5 years. I think most of us grow up with a park or field as a near and dear part of our childhoods, so this is dismaying as it is really an act of intimidation towards children and families.
Mayor Nutter vowed to fix this playground and fast. He called the Philadelphia Eagles organization this morning and owners Jeffrey and Christina Lurie pledged immediately to give whatever is needed to rebuild.
“The Eagles are absolutely going to step up and get this fixed,” said Christina Lurie. “Our employees have built 16 playgrounds throughout the city. I know we’re going to get so many volunteers to work on this one.”
Prisoners Phone conversations are all recorded, So it’s good not to prove you committed perjury and be a callous jerk who’s bereft of remorse when you are a defender in a manslaughter case after murdering a teenager:
They also discussed Zimmerman getting out on bail, and how to keep him from the press. The Sentinel reports that his choice of words was not ideal:
… “Well, I have my hoodie,” he says, a possible joke, referring to the hooded sweatshirt Trayvon Martin wore the night Zimmerman shot him in Sanford, Feb. 26.
More Democrats than the President needed to defend this (and he did defend it) but right during it’s passage, even stalwarts like Bernie Frank and Howard Dean said to scrap it.
It was Remote Area Medical’s 667th clinic. But this one came at an unusual moment: as the Supreme Court deliberates whether to uphold the health care law that will have a disproportionate impact on the sort of people served by the organization.
Layman was hardly the only patient unaware that the law aims to help people like her, by expanding health insurance beginning in 2014. And this gets to the heart of the political dilemma for Democrats: Despite spending tremendous political capital to pass the law, the party is unlikely to win many votes from the law’s future beneficiaries, most of whom live in Republican-dominated states in the South and West. In fact, many at the clinic said they don’t vote at all.
The real truth, Mitt Romney lied about how hard it was to file a change of Address form vs. Order a sandwich. MSNBC totally did a hatchet job on Romney’s anecdote:
Discussing how the public sector suffers from a lack of competition, Romney told the audience about an optometrist who wanted to change his address and subsequently received 33 pages of paperwork from the federal government, which begat a months-long bureaucratic nightmare during which the optometrist in question wasn’t receiving his checks. “That’s how government works,” Romney said.
Then, to illustrate the advantages of competition in the private sector, Romney shared an anecdote from his visit to the local WaWa chain store. “I was at WaWas, I went in to order a sandwich. You press a little touchtone keypad — you touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier — there’s your sandwich. It’s amazing. People in the private sector have learned how to compete. It’s time to bring some competition to the federal government.”
He’s just a person who’s in some kind of shield of affluence and a lack of empathy. Not “you need a hug” sympathy, but empathy. Some other times of empathy deficits:
In April, Mr. King published a memoir detailing his struggles, saying in several interviews that he was hopeful, but that he had not been able to find steady work and was essentially broke.
“I was speaking with one of these business owners … And he said, ‘You know, I’d like to change the Constitution,’?” Romney said, citing the earlier conversation. “?‘I’d like to have a provision in the Constitution that in addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birthplace of the president … I’d like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before he could become president of the United States.’?”
Romney did not explicitly endorse the suggestion, but added that if business experience were a requirement, the president “would understand that the policies they’re putting in place have to encourage small business, make it easier for business to grow.”’
Let’s see if this rationale holds up:
In a scholarly ranking of great presidents, a 2009 survey conducted by C-Span,6 of the 10 best leaders lacked sufficient business experience to be president by Romney’s rumination. This list includes Ronald Reagan, the actor, union activist and corporate spokesman, and John F. Kennedy, the naval officer, writer and politician. There is one failed businessman on the list of great presidents, the haberdasher Harry S. Truman.
By contrast, two 20th century businessmen — George W. Bush, whose sweetheart deal with the Texas Rangers made him a multimillionaire, and Herbert Hoover, who came by his mining fortune honestly — were ranked among the worst presidents ever by the same historians. Bush left the country in a sea of debt and an economic crisis rivaled only by the one that engulfed Hoover.
I don’t know that for a fact. I don’t if that’s true, but I guess it is: I would guess some Dem strategist is upset with Obama right now.
And yet, today after the Obama anounces the new DHS policy on Dream Act eligible youth, it doesn’t matter. Does it?
When Obama seems to be doing alright like he has since the speech in Cleveland and the presser today where he basically made immigration an issue Romney will have to address in depth again while securing some solace for those who would be best served by the DREAM Act. If anonymous Dem chatter sanctioned in a blue-doggish counter-intuitive way by Harold Ford, doesn’t matter then, it shouldn’t matter when he stumbles over some gaffe. Only someone willing to put facts forward with their name should be given a fair hearing. Take the Bain attacks, when facts did come forward polling by Carville’s outfit supported them, not defeated them.
Anyone wringing their hands about this policy should know something: Reagan did Amnesty. Not just the tip, balls deep in amnesty.
Nothing Obama has done that Republicans oppose is controversial. nothing.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration will stop deporting and begin granting work permits to younger illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and have since led law-abiding lives. The election-year initiative addresses a top priority of an influential Latino electorate that has been vocal in its opposition to administration deportation policies.
And no, to stave off the inevitable snark, she’s not a bratty entitled kid. Here’s how we know: By her 19th post, she decided she’d gotten enough attention that she wanted to redirect it somewhere useful, and she asked her followers to donate to a charity called Mary’s Meals that funds school food in Africa. She started off the donations by sending £50 that she got from a magazine that reprinted some of her photos. By today, according to her father’s note, she had raised £2,000.
I only write my blog not newspapers and I am sad I am no longer allowed to take photos. I will miss sharing and rating my school dinners and I’ll miss seeing the dinners you send me too. I don’t think I will be able to finish raising enough money for a kitchen for Mary’s Meals either.
The Romney campaign bus appeared to be circling and honking at the location of a campaign speech to be given by President Obama during a visit to Cleveland, Ohio today, according to a tweet by CBS White House correspondent Mark Knoller.
The old adversary culture of the intellectuals has turned into a mass adversarial cynicism. The common assumption is that elites are always hiding something. Public servants are in it for themselves. Those people at the top are nowhere near as smart or as wonderful as pure and all-knowing Me.
[…]
In his memoir, “At Ease,” Eisenhower delivered the following advice: “Always try to associate yourself with and learn as much as you can from those who know more than you do, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.” Ike slowly mastered the art of leadership by becoming a superb apprentice.
[…]
To have good leaders you have to have good followers — able to recognize just authority, admire it, be grateful for it and emulate it. Those skills are required for good monument building, too.
Here’s what the central banks are doing:
BIS slammed the easy credit policy of the Fed and other central banks, the failure to regulate the shadow banking system, “the use of gimmicks and palliatives”, and said that anything other than (1) letting asset prices fall to their true market value, (2) increasing savings rates, and (3) forcing companies to write off bad debts “will only make things worse”.
Remember, America wasn’t the only country with a housing bubble. The world’s central bankers let aglobal housing bubble development.
These truths are as applicable in Europe as in America. The central bankers have done the wrong things. They haven’t fixed anything, but simply transferred the cancerous toxic derivatives and other financial bombs from the giant banks to the nations themselves.
And Europe – like the U.S. – has made the cardinal sin of covering up fraud, so that the wound can never be cleaned, but will just infect the patient. Indeed, the sepsis is killing the patient.
James Carville and Stan Greenberg’s Democracy Corps has been conducting focus groups of swing voters in swing states; a new report from the firm says that voters in the focus groups don’t really see signs of an economic recovery, which means they’re struggling to decide whether to vote for Obama again.
[…]
We gave respondents a fact sheet about Mitt Romney and asked them to indicate which items were most significant for them, both positive and negative. The top six responses were all negative and all focused on Mitt Romney’s personal wealth, Wall Street connections, and cavalier attitude toward those less fortunate. The single most important issue for these voters was that Romney holds millions in an offshore account.
Cory Booker et al are not the boss of us nor are they in step with us. The Romney out of touch because of Bain/Swiss Accounts/Elevator House/Corporations are people attacks work and resonate because they are true, not because they are unfair. Who cares if these Democratic big guns are concerned about Bain investor feelings. If they are, be a surrogate at fundraisers and local campaign events. Bain executives can put some money on it. What they really fear is a slight increase in taxes, not what we think about them.
Note: i feel like the previous Bain attack was a test run and that it will be tuned and rolled out throughout the campaign. It works, it stops Romney’s b.s. lies on the stump by forcing him to actually explain what he thinks we should do if he were President: corporations are people, the Ryan Budget, repealing his health care plan spread nationwide, calling rich people who outsource and fire folks “job creators” and the like. I just wanted to point out, the media uses validators to stand in for reality. Just because these Democratic politicians who are centrist on the Wall Street issue say: talking about Bain is bad, doesn’t mean it’s true.
The NBC report, citing unnamed sources, said investigators have 2001 emails among Spanier, school official Gary Schultz and athletic director Tim Curley that allegedly show they opted not to contact authorities about abuse allegations related to Sandusky. The emails reportedly say officials thought that would be the “humane” way to handle the situation.
These prosecutors better try to throw each and every one of these f*ckers under the jail for the lies they have discovered:
Those documents filed by the Attorney General’s office late Monday indicate Schultz told so many lies in his Grand Jury testimony that it was impossible to respond to each and every one of them.
Penn State says the e-mails were discovered and immediately turned over.
As a family sociologist, demographer, and marriage and family therapist, he was the founding editor of the Journal of Family Issues.
[…]
Spanier earned an annual salary of $545,016 while President of Penn State. His compensation was ranked third among his peers at surveyed public universities nationwide and was the fifth-highest university pay in America, a total annual package in excess of $800,000.
