Huffington Post: ESPN decided to pull its Monday Night Football introduction after singer Hank Williams, Jr. made comments comparing President Obama to Hitler.
The country singing star and voice of the Monday Night Football theme song, Williams appeared on “Fox and Friends” this morning to talk politics via satellite hookup. He got right into it, telling the hosts that he didn’t like any of the candidates in the GOP primary for President, and that John Boehner’s golf game with Barack Obama was a major mistake.
Racist Tea-Bagger, Country Singer Hank Williams JR.
“That would be like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu. Not hardly. In the shape this country is in?”
When Brian Kilmeade said that he didn’t understand the analogy, Williams was non-plussed. “I’m glad you don’t brother, because a lot of people do. They’re the enemy… Obama! And Biden! Are you kidding? The Three Stooges.”
And while it was suggested that the President and Vice President were only two people, falling short of the trio he described, Williams just moved on to talking about the current race.
“The one that makes the most sense is Herman Cain,” he said, finally revealed which candidate he supported. Back in 2008, Williams ignited a controversy when, campaigning for John McCain, he said to an audience in Colorado, “Join me now in our national–you know, that song that, uh, Mr. Obama’s not real crazy about, we’re singing it right now.” [ READ MORE ]
Sean Hannity Farms Out Content To Andrew Breitbart: Sean Hannity is turning to Andrew Breitbart for race-baiting smears. Hannity on Monday promised to “show a tape” of Obama “hanging out during the campaign” with a member of the extremist New Black Panther Party (NBPP. [ READ MORE ]
Limbaugh: At Public Schools, “Children Of Illegals” Are “Brainwashed And Programmed To Become Democrats“
Fox’s Karl Rove: Obama Doesn’t Have “The Right” To “Insult Our Country” By Proposing To Improve It
Art Laffer Forecasts “Much More Than A Doubling Of The Stock Market” Under A New Administration
Bob Beckel Calls Out Fox News For Not Covering Koch Brothers Scandals
By: Michael Tomasky It was a rare confessional moment for Barack Obama. At a Miami fundraiser in mid-June, the president acknowledged that it’s “not as cool” as it was in 2008 to support him. It isn’t just a matter of fewer hip posters and viral videos. It’s a matter of votes. Rekindling the enthusiasm of African-Americans, educated white liberals, Latinos, young people, and union members–the Democratic Party’s most loyal and progressive members–will be a huge challenge. After all, you can only elect the first African-American president once, and the past two and a half years have deeply disappointed many liberals. “I know a lot of the kids who worked hard in 2008,” says Hodding Carter III, adviser to the last one-term Democratic president (Jimmy Carter) and now a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “They walk around like cattle who’ve been hit with stun guns between their eyes. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”
Obama and his people have heard this sort of thing so often that they no longer bother to take umbrage. When I asked chief Obama reelection guru David Axelrod about this sense of disillusionment, he patiently ticked off a list of accomplishments: health-care reform, repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” financial regulatory reform, the drawdown from Iraq, student-loan reform. “Did we keep faith with the things that the president said he would do when he ran?” asks Axelrod. “There is a long list of things he said he’d do that we in fact did.”
It’s a solid inventory. But it’s countered by the undeniable reality that the country hasn’t noticeably moved in a more liberal direction (quite the opposite), and by the widely held perception among progressives that Obama will never wage fierce battle on behalf of liberal ideals. When I interviewed Justin Ruben, the executive director of MoveOn.org, whose 5 million members (many in swing states) must be revved up and mobilized if the president is to be reelected, he gave me four or five variants of the line “People need to feel like the president and the Democrats are really going to fight for their side.”
President Obama arrives in Miami on June 13.
Unfortunately, making tough, partisan economic arguments has never been the president’s strong suit. “Since the beginning of his candidacy in 2007, Barack has struggled to put together a sustained, winning economic argument,” said Simon Rosenberg of NDN, a Washington-based think tank.
“With ‘Morning in America’ not really a viable option for 2012, he is going to have to draw brighter lines with the GOP, and particularly do much more to discredit their failed and reckless economic approach.”
The base vote can still emerge in large numbers, but the dominant factor this time won’t be hope and change. Instead, the factors will be fear of the other side, state and local political conditions (think of how motivated Democrats are to regain control of their politics in Wisconsin), and demographic changes that are still redounding to the Democrats’ benefit. And because we elect presidents by states, the place to assess Obama’s prospects is on the ground.
Wake County, N.C.; Arapahoe County, Colo.; Franklin County, Ohio–these are representative base Democratic counties. They are in swing states, which means the president will need a big vote in these places to offset a presumed high conservative turnout in other parts of these states. And they are counties that have only recently become solidly Democratic, because of demographic changes. “Obama’s majorities in these counties are not secure,” says Ruy Teixeira, coauthor of the 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, which predicted the bluing of states like then-red Colorado. “He needs a full-bore mobilization effort in these counties to get his supporters out and develop the margins he needs to carry swing states like Ohio, Colorado, and North Carolina.”
Wake County is home to Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina. Bush won it by 7 points in 2000 and then, in a sign that demographics were changing, by just 2 points in 2004 against the Yankee John Kerry. But in 2008 Obama blew it open–a 15-point win, 57-42, and a turnout 80,000 votes higher than in ’04. Since then? Very different story. In 2009 voters installed an aggressive conservative majority on the school board, and in 2010 Republicans took a congressional seat and swept most state and county offices (the GOP won back both statehouses last year).
I don’t know a single expert who thinks Obama has a great shot at winning the Tarheel State again. But he wants it badly enough to hold the Democratic convention in Charlotte (Mecklenburg will be another county to watch). Mack Paul, the attorney who chairs the Wake County Democratic Party, believes that population growth has brought in more Democrats since 2008, and he insists, “I hear more anger directed at Democrats who don’t support the president.” His GOP counterpart, Sue Bryant, ventures that her party’s candidate might just carry Wake, but “even if we come within 5 points here, that’s the election in North Carolina.”
In Arapahoe County, outside Denver, Democrats only recently came to outnumber Republicans in voter enrollment. But the trend lines are clear: whereas Bush beat Kerry 51-47 in 2004, Obama romped McCain by 56-43 in 2008, when turnout was about 15 percent higher than four years earlier.
In the last decade, the Latino population of Arapahoe County has more than doubled, to 105,249. If the Democratic Party can register and mobilize this key Obama constituency–Latinos gave him 67 percent of their votes nationally last time–the president would likely carry Arapahoe by a far larger margin than he did in ’08. But Olivia Mendoza, executive director of the nonpartisan Colorado Latino Forum, says the community’s temperature about Obama is awfully lukewarm. “This is very anecdotal,” Mendoza ventures, “but overall, in my experience? General dissatisfaction.”
Todd Mata, the county Democratic chairman, acknowledges that “a lot of people are a little disillusioned, rightly or wrongly,” with Obama, but he says that on the ground, the party structure is working much more closely than last time with Organizing for America (OFA), the Obama get-out-the-vote vehicle. Obama might benefit here from a local GOP that “doesn’t have it together,” according to Scott Adler, political-science professor at the University of Colorado. When I spoke with Joy Hoffman, the county Republican chairwoman, she did acknowledge she’s herding cats, between the more traditional Republicans and no fewer than “15 or 16 distinct Tea Party groupings in the county.” But, she insisted, the state GOP is picking up the pieces from its 2010 debacle, when its gubernatorial candidate got just 11 percent of the vote.
And then there’s Ohio. Big numbers in Franklin County–home to the state capital of Columbus, Ohio’s largest city–are crucial to Democratic hopes. Again, the trend is evident: Al Gore won the county 49-48 in 2000, when 414,000 votes were cast. Kerry won it 53-45, with 517,000 total votes. Obama: a 59-40 blowout on the strength of 575,000 total votes.
It’s pretty difficult to imagine another nearly 20-point win. But Greg Schultz, the county’s Democratic chairman and the state director for OFA, says an on-the-ground network exists today in a way it didn’t even in 2008. “There’s a structure that remains in place today that is self-organizing,” he boasts, even in Republican-leaning parts of the county like Westerville.
Another factor that might motivate Democrats in Franklin, and across Ohio: the unpopular Republican governor, John Kasich. He won a narrow victory over Democratic incumbent Ted Strickland in 2010, when base Republican voters turned out and their Democratic counterparts did not. Now Kasich and his public-employee-union-bashing bill (S.B. 5) are targets of rage. “If the Democrats are smart,” says Herb Asher of the Ohio State University, “here and in Wisconsin they’ll have a very simple theme: Elections have consequences. Look at what happened in your states.”
That’ll be about the strongest argument Obama can make to base voters: it could, and will, be a lot worse if you don’t vote for me. That’s true, and fear is usually a pretty good motivator in politics. But it still isn’t what people were hoping for, and it seems inevitable that some percentage of the most loyal Democrats will stay home. In these three counties and others like them, that percentage will be the difference between reelection and retirement.
Playlist: Road To 2012 U.S. Presidential Elections [ 194 Clips ]
Less than a month after Sarah Palin embarked on her surreal bus tour of nationwide historical sites, the former beauty queen has returned to Alaska.
Piper Palin might be wondering why her vacation was cut short, but the rest of us aren’t surprised. Let’s not forget that the reality star resigned as Governor of Alaska halfway through her term.
If a capricious God allowed Palin to become the next President of the United States, would she quit halfway through her term?
I feel sorry for Palin’s husband, you know the First Dude, Palin probably quits halfway through their love sessions. Todd must be the most frustrated husband in the state of Alaska.
Is there anyone who still thinks of Palin as presidential material?
By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez John McCain said there was ‘substantial evidence‘ linking wildfires in Arizona to illegal immigrants. The Arizona senator accuses Mexican immigrants of starting wildfires, but he is fanning the flames himself – of prejudice.
Does it surprise anyone that Arizona Senator John McCain has blamed undocumented immigrants for the wildfires in his state?
Hard economic times drives desperate people to do desperate things. Throw in the subject of immigration and a little bit of xenophobia … and shazzam! You have the recipe for a political ideology: blame the Mexicans! Send that recipe into Arizona and you have the perfect storm:
• Uneducated and unable to find a [high-paying] job? Blame the Mexicans.
• Social security and Medicare going broke? Yup, it’s the Mexicans.
• Terrorism in the Middle East has you up at night? Blame the Mexicans for your insomnia, send troops and wall the US-Mexico border.
• Crime, drug usage and communicable diseases on the rise? You know the answer.
Blaming Mexicans, or “illegal aliens”, is a tradition here; and in Georgia and Alabama, too … the whole country, really. Last year, McCain claimed that “illegal aliens” were intentionally causing accidents on freeways.
American XENOPHOBIA: Anti-Immigrant FEAR, HATE and LOATHING
[CLICK PLAYLIST FOR MENU]
McCain’s charges read like comedy but here in Arizona, immigration is serious business – and so is scapegoating. It is [Sheriff Joe] Arpaio country, where racial profiling is American as apple pie. It is this state that gave us SB 1070 – based in large part on the unproven allegation that Arizona rancher Robert Krentz was killed by “illegal aliens”. Amazingly, another whopper was conjured up one week after SB 1070 was signed – that a Pinal County sheriff’s deputy had been shot by Mexican drug smugglers (the incident was self-inflicted). And two weeks before SB 1070 was set to go into effect, Governor Jan Brewer began to warn people about finding headless bodies in the Arizona desert. But the fantastical tales don’t end there: in this state, it’s not even that Mexican migrants are falsely blamed for real problems; they are also blamed for invented problems. Dana Milbank from the Washington Post writes about this:
“Border violence on the rise? Phoenix becoming the world’s No 2 kidnapping capital? Illegal immigrants responsible for most police killings? The majority of those crossing the border are drug mules? All wrong.”
Per the FBI, we know that the border region is safer than it was a decade ago, and that many of the safest US cities are along the US-Mexico border. But when it comes to fueling xenophobia in this country, facts never get in the way.
For example, Tucson’s highly successful Mexican American Studies programme is on the verge of being eliminated because our current attorney general, Tom Horne, has long maintained that the classes foment revolution (“Viva Che!”). A recent independent audit found all the charges against the programme to be false.
“Illegal aliens” causing Arizona wildfires? While the US Forest Service has made no such claim, McCain and his ideological supporters would have us accept his speculation as fact. What’s next? Blaming Mexicans for increased sun spot activity?
Reckless ‘Psycho Talk‘: 2008 Loser John McCain Blames Immigrants For Arizona Wildfires
Playlist: ‘Apartheid’ States in The U.S.
Playlist: American Anti-Immigrant Xenophobia
Playlist: American Anti-Immigrant Xenophobia — Immigrants For Sale
Aliens vs. Senator: Puppet John McCain blames illegal immigrants for starting the wildfires in Arizona, hiding his remote and taking his reading glasses.
“Sen. John McCain said today that he’s ‘not sure what all this controversy is about’ surrounding his unsubstantiated claim that illegal immigrants caused some of the wildfires raging across eastern Arizona.
Cochise Co. ‘Sheriff Larry Dever will tell you that the Monument Fire was started when the park, the forest was closed. So anyone who was in there is illegal,’ McCain said in an interview on ‘Good Morning America.’” — ABC.News
Racists have blamed undocumented workers for increasing crime rates, drug trafficking and crowded schools, but this is the first time anyone, let alone a respected politician, has blamed immigrants for wildfires.
McCain attempted to glibly dismiss the controversy by saying “The fire was started when the forest was closed. So anyone who was in there is illegal.” McCain is being disingenuous, he knows that he was referring to undocumented workers, and not to citizens who were camping illegally.
Pardon the pun, but McCain’s words are inflammatory and reprehensible. As a political leader McCain should be focusing his energy on helping the victims of the fire, instead of scapegoating hardworking and law-abiding undocumented workers.
I have my opinion, but I will leave it to my readers to decide if McCain is senile or a racist.
It was a rare confessional moment for Barack Obama. At a Miami fundraiser in mid-June, the president acknowledged that it’s “not as cool” as it was in 2008 to support him. It isn’t just a matter of fewer hip posters and viral videos. It’s a matter of votes. Rekindling the enthusiasm of African-Americans, educated white liberals, Latinos, young people, and union members–the Democratic Party’s most loyal and progressive members–will be a huge challenge. After all, you can only elect the first African-American president once, and the past two and a half years have deeply disappointed many liberals. “I know a lot of the kids who worked hard in 2008,” says Hodding Carter III, adviser to the last one-term Democratic president (Jimmy Carter) and now a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “They walk around like cattle who’ve been hit with stun guns between their eyes. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”
