Countdown to Election 2012: Week Sixteen in Review

by Sunnyjane

 Just take the photo, lady,  I'm sick of your bawling kid!

Somewhere in this raggedy and rampage-filled week, Mitt Romney started buying more Twitter followers.  Now I'm not sure how that's done -- or what his campaign is trying to prove by doing it -- but it smacks of  fourteen-year-olds with raging hormones sending love letters to themselves.  Besides that, the tweets from these accounts are so bad, it is my belief that he's outsourcing the whole thing to China.  Adding insult to injury, Politicususa points out that Romney still has only two hundred thousand real human followers, while President Obama has almost eighteen million.  This is not a new thing, of course; Romney was buying Twitter followers back in 2011.  Gingrich, Palin, Bachmann, Pawlenty -- they've all played this little game.  Hey, what's the going rate for a Twitter follower these days, anybody know?


That Taxing Tax Tangle

Are they laughing at me?  They're
laughing at me, aren't they?

On Friday the 13th, Mitt told the country -- and anyone else who had the misfortune to be watching their TV at the time -- that he ain't gonna release any more tax returns, dadgum it all and that's all there is to it so stop asking him! 


Republican leaders and their talking heads throughout the land have publicly called on Romney to hand over the tax returns -- to no avail.  I have the feeling if Mitt makes it to the White House, he's going to have an Enemies List long enough to reach one of Bain's call centers in India.


And though they are certain that Mitt has nothing to hide, even that revered conservative ragazine National Review has told him in no uncertain terms that he should release the returns, respond to any attacks they bring, and move on.  While speculation abounds regarding what's in those returns that he doesn't want anyone to see, a highly probable one is that he took the 2009 tax amnesty for hiding money in a secret (non-disclosed to the IRS) Swiss bank account when Switzerland's largest bank, caught up in an international tax evasion dispute, said it would disclose the names of more than 4,000 of its U.S. account holders.  Remember that while he disclosed twenty-three years to the McCain campaign in 2008, they would not have seen the year 2009 return.  TaxReturngate, anyone?


Mitt dismisses the whole Show Us Your Tax Returns brouhaha as [The Obama campaign's]  opposition people look for anything they can find to distort, to twist, and to try and make negative, and I want to make this a campaign about the economy and creating jobs. And they want to make this campaign about attacking people and diverting attention from our job picture in this country.   [Memo to Mitt: If there's nothing to attack in those returns, what's your problem?] 

Perhaps Mitt will Pull a Palin and release his tax returns the day before the election, eh?

When the Missus Muffs the Message

Sorry, but you people don't
deserve the full 'Ann wave.'

Since the Romney campaign most likely couldn't find a viable Republican to take their candidate's side in this imbroglio, they decided to trot out Mrs. Mitt to hammer home the point.  Whether Ann said people or you people in her interview with Robin Roberts, the message was clear: nobody's getting any more information about our financial situation and about how we live our life.   Take that, you Ninety-Nine Percenters!   Lost in the people/you people noise, however, is something more telling.  When pressed by Roberts on why they didn't just show the returns,  Ann responded, Because there are so many things that will be open again for more attack... and that's really, that's just the answer.  Hmmm...


This is not Ann's first bout of Foot-in-Mouth disease.  We all remember that she doesn't consider herself wealthy, that she loves the fact that there are women out there who don't have a choice and must go to work and raise their children, and that she's going to unzip Mitt to prove he's not stiff.   [Way too much information, Ann.  Seriously.]


From the A Village is Missing Its Idiot File

*Rush Limbaugh decided that Bane, one of the characters in the movie Dark Knight Rises, is part of a liberal media conspiracy against Romney and Bain Capital.  Do you think that it is accidental that the name of the really vicious fire breathing four eyed whatever it is villain in this movie is named Bane? he asked his fire-breathing-four-eyed listeners.   


Considering that Bane has been a comic book character since 1993 would suggest that Rush has been diving into the Oxycontin bottle big time.  


Of course the next day, most likely after he came out of his drug-induced stupor, he denied the whole thing: I never said that. I didn't say there was a conspiracy theory.

Akk!  There are Muslims
everywhere! 

*From her subterranean hidey-hole in North Bugged-Eyedistan, Michele Bachmann created a veritable shitstorm by accusing Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff and aide to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, of being an infiltrator for the Muslim Brotherhood.  John McCain wasted no time taking to the Senate floor and ripping Ms. Bachmann a new one.  He was joined by others in condemning Bachmann, and rightly so.  Perhaps the most telling criticism came from Ed Rollins, Bachmann's former campaign chairman, who wrote in a damning Fox News op-ed, I am fully aware that she sometimes has difficulty with her facts, but this is downright vicious and reaches the late Senator Joe McCarthy  level.   Bachmann then decided to go after Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim ever elected to the U. S. House of Representatives and the first African American elected from Minnesota,  insisting that he has a long record with the Muslim Brotherhood.  Wrong!   

Even the Anti-Defamation League forcefully condemned the allegations, saying in a recent statement: Absent clear evidence of direct ties between these individuals and the  Muslim Brotherhood, such allegations foment fear and cast the kind of suspicion that undermines rather than advances American counterterrorism efforts.


After having his arm twisted, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (House Intelligence is as perfect an oxymoron as you'll see in a long time) finally dropped his support for Bachmann's little witch hunt.  

*Bill O'Reilly has decided that Obama wants to ‘restrain capitalism’ because of slavery ‘grievances'  and loud-mouthed Romney surrogate John Sununu went totally berserk on Fox News and said of President Obama, He has no idea how the American system functions, and we shouldn't be surprised about that because he spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something, spent the next set of years in Indonesia, another set of years in Indonesia, and, frankly, when he came to the U.S., he worked as a community organizer, which is a socialized structure, and then got into politics in Chicago.   And not to be outdone, Rush Limbaugh pounded his desk and said, This is what we have as a president: a radical ideologue, a ruthless politician who despises the country and the way it was founded and the way in which it became great. He hates it.

*George Zimmerman says he has no regrets for killing Trayvon Martin because doing so was God's plan.  Georgie, that God's plan thingy didn't work for Sarah Palin in 2008, and I sincerely doubt it's going to work as a good defense for you in this particular instance.  But Zimmerman also wants African Americans to apologize to him.  Uh huh.

*Using brietbart.com as a viable source, The Donald reiterated his Obama Birther shtick again by tweeting With @BarackObama listing himself as "Born in Kenya" in 1999 http://bit.ly/JaHQW0  HI laws allowed him to produce a fake certificate. #SCAM.  Not to be outdone, Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced his investigative team has found secret codes -- or something like that -- on President Obama's fraudulent Hawaiian birth certificate.  

*The Romney campaign was delivered quite a blow when Gregory Peterson, a well-connected Utah fundraiser, was arrested for multiple rapes.  Further information on Peterson can be found here and here.


Nice company you're keeping there, Mitt. 

Other Inanities from the Right


It seems that doughy-jowled Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader (who hopefully will remain in the position of minority) was for disclosing the names of high-money contributors before he was against it.  In fact, he was for more disclosure than outlined in a bill being voted on in 2000 concerning 527 Political Groups.  He told Tim Russert of Meet the Press, Republicans are in favor of disclosure... the more disclosure, the better. If you’re going to do that, and the Senate voted to do that, and I’m prepared to go down that road, then it needs to be meaningful disclosure.  The ‘527s are just a handful of groups. We need to have real disclosure. And so what we ought to do is broaden the disclosure to include at least labor unions and tax-exempt business associations and trial lawyers so that you include the major political players in America. Why would a little disclosure be better than a lot of disclosure?   [The Senate voted against the Disclose Act last week.]

Thumbody in Mith's campaign loth my
imbitathun to thpeak at tha conbenthun

Calls for Sarah Palin -- whose voice makes woofers and tweeters wince -- to screech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa are beginning to surface and there is some debate as to the wisdom of that.  Gingrich says Absolutely, she should, while others think absolutely not! [Just to clarify, there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that the campaign doesn't want her to speak because they're afraid she'll call their candidate Gov. O'Rama.]  


John McCain didn't help her cause when he recently said of his vice-residential selection in 2008, I picked Sarah Palin because she was the better candidate.  No doubt we'll hear more about this in the very near future, as the convention is barely a month away.  


Of God and Gun Rights: The Massacre in Aurora 

There is little to say about the horror in Colorado except to acknowledge the outrageous and inhumane philosophies of the Right.


That certified Cretin Russell Pearce of Arizona seemed to blame the victims for not being armed, saying on his Face Book page, Had someone been prepared and armed they could have stopped this "bad" man from most of this tragedy. He was two and three feet away from folks, I understand he had to stop and reload. Where were the men of flight 93????


Louie Gohmert of Texas blames the whole thing on America's turning away from Judeo-Christian values.


John Boehner, Speaker of the House, taped a warm little speech praising the First Responders who got to the theater complex in two minutes of the shooting.  Of courses, he failed to add that the House Republicans have dramatically cut spending for First Responders.  


And the NRA's response?   ++++crickets++++


UPDATE:  Interesting article on the Five Issues that Divide Gun Owners and NRA Leadership.  Maybe there's hope?


End Note

President Obama:  Can you believe that?  Ann Romney actually said we'd find more things in their tax returns to attack.