Another Missed Opportunity To Lead

The Maddow Blog

By Steve Benen

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Tue May 29, 2012 8:00 AM EDT

Mitt Romney will join Donald Trump tonight in Las Vegas for a fundraiser, just a few days after the reality-show host reiterated his support for the ridiculous “birther” conspiracy theory. Asked by reporters yesterday whether Trump’s ugly, borderline-racist antics gives him pause, Romney seemed unconcerned.

“You know, I don’t agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in,” Romney said. “But I need to get 50.1% or more and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.”

That’s not much of a response. By Romney’s reasoning, decency is irrelevant — he should partner with anyone, no matter how vile, so long as it furthers his ambitions and gets him more votes.

The Obama campaign released a new video this morning, contrasting Romney’s response to supporters’ extremism with John McCain’s.

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GOP Primary Show: Non-Stop News And Noise In The Age Of Twitter

Huff Post- Posted: 2/7/12  |  Updated: 2/7/12

Michael Calderone

Last week, Jon Ralston, a veteran Las Vegas Sun columnist, dared reporters to ignore Donald Trump’s unveiling of his presidential endorsement — with low expectations about how that might play out.

“I suggest media boycott of @RealDonaldTrump event in Vegas,” Ralston tweeted. “Anyone with me? That’s what I thought.”

Ralston knew, of course, that the nation’s political reporters — the same tribe who breathlessly covered Trump’s half-hearted flirtation last year with a presidential run, his “birther” sideshow and his thwarted plans to host and moderate a GOP debate — wouldn’t ignore the real estate huckster’s “major announcement.”

And, indeed, they didn’t, thereby sparking the latest mini-drama in the reality show otherwise known as the 2012 Republican presidential primaries.

While any campaign reporter you meet will say it’s ridiculous to give any more oxygen to Trump in this election cycle (and some of them will even go so far as to mock the primaries’ circus-like atmosphere on Twitter) many of them still raced to cover the Trump endorsement.

In their haste, several major news organizations — including the Associated Press, The New York Times, Politico and CBS News — erroneously reported that Trump planned to endorse former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Countless others, including The Huffington Post, repeated those reports. All had to backtrack when it became clear former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would get the Trumpster’s nod. Come showtime, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News all had Romney live, standing at a podium featuring a Trump plaque, in a Trump hotel, accepting a Trump endorsement.

Reporters swarmed the Trump event for the same reason they have pursued and then coughed up almost every other bit of minutiae, no matter how irrelevant or meaningless, around the primaries. In a media landscape replete with Twitter, Facebook, personal blogs and myriad other digital, broadcast and print sources, nothing is too inconsequential to be made consequential.

Political junkies, political operatives and political reporters consume most of this dross, and in this accelerated, 24/7 news cycle, a day feels like a week, with the afternoon’s agreed-upon media narrative getting turned on its head by the evening’s debate. Candidates rise, fall, and rise again, all choreographed to the rat-a-tat background noise of endless minutia.

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Trump Roasts the Weiner: If only Hedda Hopper were here

By G: June 8, 2011

If only Hedda Hopper were around to see this one. Here we are at war with the whole Middle East while in the middle of another great depression, and the most important news on main stream media is about a weiner roast. TMZ, who is noted for their coverage of celebrity gossip is running with a story today about Donald Trump’s video ” Anthony Weiner is a ‘PSYCHO ” , “who should never be allowed to run for office again”.

Trump has a lot of unpremeditated gall, considering his obvious association with sex scandels that go way beyond what is seen on twitter. His pal, real estate mogul, Tevfik Arif, with his pimping for the elite on Ataturk’s old yacht should be enough in itself to keep his pie hole closed. If it isn’t, how about we connect the dots on  his unsavory association with Rudy Giuliani.

Donald Trump can be seen on video @ TMZ

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The Kooky Konservative Klown Kar

Donald Trump at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. Trump recently announced he would not be running for President. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

Tuesday 17 May 2011

by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout

We all want to be big stars
But we don’t know why
And we don’t know how…

– Counting Crows

Say it ain’t so, Donald.

This is so depressing. I was actively looking forward to following the Trump For President crazy train for at least a few weeks longer, if not more. You couldn’t stay in long enough to participate in one debate, Donald? It would have been the show of the year. “Birth certificates the blacks love me derp derp derp…” All lost forever now. The hairpiece has moved on.

I know, I know, it was a joke campaign, a ploy to get people to watch some stupid reality show I am proud to say I’ve never even peeked at once. But you have to understand my perspective here: the quintessential excellence of Trump’s absurd pre-candidacy was the fact that it dragged the fundamental derangement of the GOP base into the light for all to see. After Mr. Obama gelded Trump with the birth certificate release, the explosion of nonsense from the hedgerows of the far right took on an almost mythical quality, and editorial cartoonists from sea to shining sea had great sport portraying Trump and his followers as tinfoil-wearing brain donors.

This is what I’m going to miss. But I guess you can’t have everything, and besides, there is plenty here to play with until the race begins in earnest.

Take Mitt Romney, for instance. Here is a man who, by any meaningful measure, should be the runaway favorite to be the Republican nominee…until, once again, you take the berserkers of the GOP base into account. They are going to be the largest voting bloc in the Republican primaries, and they consider Mormonism a cult (which cracks me up, given the cultish nature of that crew). Add to that the fact that Romney chopped his own legs off last week trying to explain away the fact that he wrote the blueprint for “Obamacare,” which is roundly despised by the party base. E.J. Dionne nailed the crux of Romney’s dilemma in a Sunday column for the Washington Post:

The candidates appear much smaller than they are because the party’s primary voters and core interest groups insist upon cutting them down to size. To win a Republican nomination, a candidate has to move right, recant absolutely any past position that violates the current conservative catechism and never dare to speak the truth that solving our deficit problem will require new revenue – a.k.a. taxes.

Thus we have Mitt Romney defending the individual mandate to buy insurance that was part of the health plan he championed in Massachusetts but then denouncing President Obama for imposing a similar mandate at the national level. This shuffle wasn’t good enough for the guardians of conservative orthodoxy. It ruled that Romney will merit salvation only by fully repudiating his greatest achievement as governor.

And then there’s Newt. I literally jumped for joy when he announced his candidacy. Trump was more entertaining, but Newt will do. Straight out of the gate, he blasted the Paul Ryan plan to destroy Medicare with both barrels, calling it “social engineering,” a loaded phrase for anyone on the far right, especially since the Tea Party freshmen in the House are going to try and roll the plan out again this week. There were perhaps ten beats of silence after Gingrich delivered his broadside before his people scrambled to walk back his comments with the predictable “The liberal media misinterpreted him” claim. Expect many more moments like this as the election approaches; one of these days, Newt is going to open his mouth too wide and fall right in.

Ron Paul is in the race, which should be an effective sop for those in the GOP base who pine for Donald Trump and his bright ideas. Paul is, after all, the fellow who voted against sending federal aid money to New Orleans after the Katrina disaster, and just recently told people along the flooding Mississippi River to build their own levies, because the federal government is too big and too controlling in his opinion. Yet this is the same fellow who wants to pass laws that will charge anyone who gets an abortion with first-degree murder. This is just the kind of obnoxious, witless, false libertarianism the GOP base can really sing its teeth into.

And then, of course, there are Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann to consider. Neither are in it yet – Palin has all but disappeared from public view after covering herself in sackcloth and ashes when Gabrielle Giffords was shot – but one can dream. The bottom of the insanity barrel has not yet been found; there is already a self-described vampire named Jonathon Sharkey running for the Republican nomination, speaking of sinking your teeth in.

How can this not be fun?

SOURCE

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SNL: GOP 2012 Undeclared Candidates Debate (VIDEO)

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SNL: GOP 2012 Undeclared Candidates Debate

Crooks and Liars- By Heather

May 07, 2011 09:35 PM

Since so many of the undeclared potential presidential contenders decided to skip the first official Republican primary debate, Saturday Night Live decided to treat us to their version of the GOP 2012 Undeclared Candidates Debate, with Tina Fey returning as Sarah Palin.

The segment also featured Bill Hader as Fox’s Shepard Smith, Jason Sudeikis as Mitt Romney, Darrell Hammond as Donald Trump, Kristen Wiig as Michele Bachmann, Bobby Moynihan as Newt Gingrich and Kenan Thompson as the Rent is Too Damn High Party’s Jimmy McMillan.

As expected, Fey stole the show with her Palin impression.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

SOURCE

hat tip to Huffington Post for the photo and video

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Donald Trump Has Revealed the Truth About the Republican Party

Donald Trump Has Revealed the Truth About the Republican Party

Johann Hari
Columnist, the London Independent via: HuffPost

Posted: 04/28/11 11:04 PM ET

Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. They have long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals — and it turns out they were onto something. Every six months, the Republican Party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.

Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way!” — but that wasn’t enough. So they found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an “interesting coincidence” that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is “I’m better at what I do because I’m gay,” and argues “there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”

That wasn’t enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn’t anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. A survey suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It’s not hard to see why.

Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past thirty-five years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.

The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: “I would go in and take the oil… I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff.” On Iraq, he says: “We stay there, and we take the oil… In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation’s yours.” It is a view that the world is essentially America’s property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to “stop what’s going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength.” The U.S. must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W. Bush.

The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice — pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest Obama wasn’t born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally) — even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody “ever comes forward” to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea they could remember that far back. Then he said he’d “heard” the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: “I’m very proud of myself.”

The Republican primary voters heard the message right — the black guy is foreign. He’s not one of us. Trump responded to these charges by saying: “I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”

MORE HERE

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BREAKING: Facing Trump Backlash, Groupon Announces It Will Stop Sponsoring The Apprentice

Think Progress- By Judd Legum on Apr 28th, 2011 at 6:15 pm

Potential GOP candidate Donald Trump has been peddling false and malicious attacks on President Obama. He gains much of his prominence from his prime-time NBC show The Apprentice. This morning at 9:30 am on Twitter, ThinkProgress urged concerned citizens to ask Groupon to stop sponsoring the show.

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Dear @Groupon: Are you going to continue to sponsor The Apprentice and support Donald Trump + his malicious attacks on our President?less than a minute ago via TweetDeck Favorite Retweet ReplyThinkProgress
thinkprogress

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Moments ago, a Groupon representative announced that, in the future, they will block their advertisements from appearing on The Apprentice website.

You can contact Enterprise Rental Car, which is telling customers they don’t sponsor The Apprentice, but are currently advertising on their website.

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Trump’s Rebuttal To Proof Of Obama’s Birth Certificate: ‘Somebody’ Told Me ‘It Doesn’t Exist’

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Think Progress- By Tanya Somanader at 11:45 am

America’s current political jester Donald Trump has fed his unquenchable need for attention by repeatedly touting the disproven “birther” myth. Trump purportedly sent a team of researchers to Hawaii on a quixotic search to disprove the fact that President Obama was born in Hawaii. However, when asked what he has found, Trump repeatedly demurred — telling reporters “I’ll let you know that at a future date” and that “it’s none of your business.”

But CNN’s Anderson Cooper made it his business to find out who Trump’s crack team is actually talking to in Hawaii and, in a two-part interview, confronted Trump about his research. Trump informed Cooper that he just learned the the birth certificate is “not there and it doesn’t exist.” Who told him that? “Somebody,” Trump said:

TRUMP: Well I’ve been told very recently Anderson that the birth certificate is missing. I’ve been told that it’s not there and it doesn’t exist. And if that’s the case, that’s a big problem.

COOPER: Who told you that?

TRUMP: I just heard that two days ago from somebody.

COOPER: From your investigators?

TRUMP: I don’t want to say who. But I’ve been told that the birth certificate is not there, it’s missing.[…]

COOPER: Can you name even one person who your investigators have talked to?

TRUMP: I don’t want to do that right now. It’s not appropriate right now.

Watch it:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

CNN researchers decided to save Trump the trouble and actually investigate. First, they spoke with Dr. Chiyome Fukino, former Hawaii Department of Health Director and a Republican, who took advantage of a state law allowing her to see President Obama’s birth certificate stored in a vault. Fukino declared the certificate “absolutely authentic.” She even put disputed Trump’s suggestion that Obama is hiding that he’s a Muslim to rest, pointing out that no birth certificate from that time mentions faith.

Aware of Trump’s concern that no one remembers baby Obama, CNN went ahead and found them too. Not only did Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie (D) reiterate his memory of celebrating the birth with Obama’s mother, but so did Dunham’s college adviser and another mother giving birth in the hospital when Obama was born. She remembered because “in those days, there were hardly any other black babies.”

The repeated debunking of the birther conspiracy has convinced numerous Republicans that Trump offers nothing but a “joke” candidacy. Last night, Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) told CNN’s John King that this issue “is leading our country down a path of destruction.” Americans agree, with 64 percent saying “they would definitely not vote for Trump in 2012″ and half of all Americans believing he’d be a “poor” or “terrible” leader. This, however, seems to be another fact Trump will entirely ignore.

Update:  Yesterday, Fox News anchor Shep Smith stated unequivocally, “Fox News can confirm that the President of The United States is a citizen of the United States, period.”

Watch it:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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Why Are the Republicans Afraid of President Obama?

One of the most often-overheard refrains from the Republican Party and its far-right base is that President Obama is the worst president in American history. Others say he “pals around with terrorists.” They say he’s destroying America. They say that he’s weak, that he dithers and that he’s effete — implying either that he’s gay or effeminate or both. Around half of all Republicans have told pollsters that he’s not even constitutionally eligible to be president, which ought to mandate an immediate removal from office.

But what does all of this say about the men and women who are noticeably hesitant to officially announce their candidacies for the Republican nomination? Not a single one of the well-known frontrunners has declared anything more than “exploratory committees” — quite literally the presidential campaign equivalent of dithering.

At this juncture in the 2008 cycle, most of the major Democratic and Republican candidates were underway with their official campaigns. And yet…

Michele Bachmann, a would-be frontrunner, called the president “even worse” than President Carter. She accused him of being “infantile” and suggested he wouldn’t even run for a second term because the “floor has dropped out” from his support. However, tough-talking Michele Bachmann hasn’t officially declared her candidacy to run against this allegedly unpopular weakling.

Mitt Romney said that his “worst fears” about the president have come true and that the chief executive is pushing an “extreme liberal agenda.” Romney also accused the president of being “tentative, indecisive, timid and nuanced” on Libya. However, tough-talking Mitt Romney hasn’t officially declared his candidacy to run against such a timid and indecisive extremist. How would Mitt react when confronted by actual extremists? Hopefully not with the same timidity he’s exercising in his run for president.

Sarah Palin has screeched nearly every imaginable insult at the president (often while she’s utterly botching commonly-known facts about the Constitution). She accused him of “dithering” on Libya. He’s a “spectator-in-chief,” she said. She’s accused him of being a socialist. She told Sean Hannity that she “fears for our democracy” due to the president’s agenda. She’s famously accused him of being a terrorist sympathizer — this alone ought to compel her to run for president if only to rid the executive branch of an obvious terrorist. However, pit bull Sarah Palin appears to be “dithering” when it comes to her campaign to run against this alleged terrorist, socialist ditherer.

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