Who's Responsible For Libya?

Since the vice-presidential debate in which Joe Biden expertly defeated the hapless Paul Ryan who couldn't even keep his lies straight, Team Romney/Ryan have been trying to change the message into an attack on President Obama for the tragic killing of the US ambassador in Libya.

Only thing is their advisors forgot to vet the story before launching it.

If they had, they would have seen that the Republicans had cut off funding for sufficient security at US embassies and allowed far less funding than what was requested or needed. And this is cumming from their own surrogates:



Read the whole thing here.

Grassroots Tosa: Stop The Romney/Ryan Attack On Women

Hot from the inbox:

Friends,

Grassroots Tosa is please to announce a forum highlighting the attacks on women and womens' rights planned by the Romney campaign.
Romney and Ryan promise to:

• Oppose equal pay laws for women. Paul Ryan has voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
• Restrict/ban a woman’s right-to-choose.
• Block the Violence Against Women’s Act.
• Support extremist legislation extending full rights of “personhood” that makes all abortions illegal.
• Uphold a bill that would outlaw certain types of contraception and in-vitro fertilization.
• Block any expansion of paid sick-time for many low wage female workers.
• Reduce Medicaid healthcare services resulting in a disproportionate impact on poor women.
• Undercut the important role of government and the safety net for women, seniors, people with disabilities, and children.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17TH
WAUWATOSA LIBRARY- FIREFLY ROOM
76TH & NORTH AVENUE
6:30 P.M.

Guest Speakers:

• Eileen Dagen, MSE, Educator and Consultant – Income Parity for Women
• Carmen Pitre, Co-Executive Director, Sojourner Family Peace Center – Violence Against Women
• Gretchen Fincke, LCSW, Diplomate in Sex Therapy – Healthcare and Reproductive Rights

Hope you can make it!

The Paul Ryan Finish Line

Our friends at One Wisconsin Now will be hosting the Paul Ryan Finish Line at the Milwaukee Marathon, pointing out how the Romney/Ryan plan "comes up short" for middle class Americans. From their press release:

One Wisconsin Now will be hosting a “Paul Ryan Finish Line” at mile 20 of Sunday’s Milwaukee Marathon to highlight how the Romney-Ryan plan comes up short for Wisconsin’s middle class families according to Executive Director Scot Ross.

Ross, who has completed more marathons than Paul Ryan, criticized the GOP ticket’s plans that come up short by calling for:

• $5 trillion in tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires that will either increase taxes on the middle class or explode the deficit;
• Slashing over $700 million from Medicare;
• Repealing ObamaCare and putting big insurance companies back in charge of health care decisions instead of patients and their doctor; and
• Reductions in Pell grants that help for students afford the costs of higher education.

He concluded, “While we’re having a little fun at our fake finish line, the underlying message, that the Romney-Ryan plan is a disaster for Wisconsin children, seniors and middle class families, is no joke.”

One Wisconsin Now previously sponsored several “Run Against Walker” events, in which runners and walkers protested the attacks on the middle class by Gov. Scott Walker’s policies.

And speaking of OWN, check out their new website honoring none other than Ron "Sunspots" Johnson.

The Walker Budget Keeps On Working! Part CXLVII

If you want to know what a Romnney/Ryan led country, just look at Fitzwalkerstan, where the rich are already getting huge tax breaks and the costs are borne by the working families:

Seven months after Tom and Betty Schoenberger bought Boese’s Home Bakery from Dick Boese, a gas oven malfunctioned and exploded on April 4, 1968. Tom Schoenberger suffered first and second degree burns and the family’s Oregon Street bakery was closed for a month.

Once it re-opened, though, Schoenberger’s Pastry Shops would grow to need locations on both the south and north sides, to deliver fresh baked breads and buns to restaurants from Milwaukee to Borth and to survive long enough to become the last stand-alone bakery in Oshkosh.

But after 45 years, Betty Schoenberger and her daughter, Karen Schulz, have decided there’s not enough dough in dough. The family-run business will close its doors for good Sept. 30.

[...]

But times have changed and now, Schoenberger and Schulz said, the rise of grocery and convenince store baked goods and the general economy have forced them to end their run. An auction in early October will sell off much of their equipment.

“It’s just not a viable business anymore,” Schoenberger said. “We are grateful to the customers and restaurants who use us, but it’s just not enough. We can’t keep putting money into the business and not getting it back.”

This is not the way to run a state or a country. They must not be allowed to keep hurting the good people.

Raw Footage Of Sean Duffy At WISGOP Strategy Summit

The following video was brought to Cog Dis at great risk of life and limb. It is a taping of Sean Duffy at a WISGOP strategy summit held earlier today in Wausau, WI. The quality isn't the greatest because the person taping the session had to infiltrate the meeting. They got about 11 minutes of the meeting before they were found out and kicked out of the meeting. Pay close attention to what Duffy is saying and you can tell a lot of things that the Republicans don't want us to know:



Here are some of the bigger points I came away with from the video:

• Mitt Romney's 47% comment really has hurt the Republicans, not just the Romney/Ryan ticket, but it's spilling over to races like Tommy Thompson's floundering campaign
• The Republicans are publicly backing off the Ayn Rand philosophy, but are still privately pushing the same principles.
• The public is not very receptive to the Republicans' message.
• Duffy is trying to ride Paul Ryan's popularity, even as it's dwindling.
• Republicans aren't polling well with the Hispanic population.
• Duffy is nervous about his own race.
• Class warfare is one of the Republicans' key strategies as shown by Duffy's comment about a "better class of people" going on food stamps. It could also be interpreted as race baiting.
• Duffy considers "doing his part" as watching his own children.
• Duffy sure can hit those high notes (at the very end of the video)

What did you get out of it?

Dodgeball

From the incomparable Stuart Carlson:

Failed Election Simile

Elliot Stearns uses the jobs numbers to make the simile that voting for Obama would be like "the passengers voting to re-elect the Captain of the Titanic."

Using that line of thought, as I just pointed out, then voting for Romney/Ryan would be like the passengers voting for the iceberg.

Why Clint Eastwood And His Empty Chair Was Political Genius

As I'm sure the gentle reader is already aware of, the Republicans made a bold move to have a special guest speaker on the last night of their convention. The guest speaker was Clint Eastwood who did a peculiar routine with an empty chair and a make believe President Barack Obama. Here is an abridged version of his stunt:



If you really want to see the full 12-minute version, click here.

The reactions were mixed, but trended to the negative.

The people that did like it were the socially and emotionally disfunctional ones like Dad29, who also thinks the answer to everything is to buy more ammo.

Another fan of Eastwood's performance is the Las Vegas Badger, who also thinks that actors and actresses shouldn't be allowed to have an opinion. Of course, since he only has this issue when it comes to liberal women, it could be that he is simply a hypocritical misogynist.

Scott Walker thought that the stunt was cringe-worthy. Other Republicans also wasted no time in backpedaling from Eastwood's bizarre routine.

But for all their hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing, the undeniable truth is that they all gave him a standing ovation when he was done. Not exactly what you would call a thumbs down.

The Democrats and liberals, which aren't always the same thing, were having a field day panning the routine.

Zach Wisniewski opined that Eastwood won a bet on how badly he screwed over Mitt Romney, and said, "started out as a train wreck and quickly turned into an unmitigated disaster,and his speech tonight will likely go down in history as one of the worst nominee lead-ins of all time."

I respectfully disagree with Zach and others who think that Eastwood hurt Romney. If anything, I think it helped him. Reince Priebus probably new that it would take a crazy old man yelling at an empty chair to make Romney look normal.

Too bad for them that even this attempt at boosting Romney's normalcy didn't pan out. The whole convention, a week of pomp and circumstance to anoint their chosen one, failed to give him even the slightest of bumps in the polls.

Hell, if it wasn't for Eastwood, Romney probably would have continued to lose ground as he's been doing since he doubled down on dumb by selecting Ryan as a running mate. And no, not that kind of running, mate.

Romney/Ryan Logo - Fixed

During the Republican convention last week, there was a detail that kept nagging at me. Being the nice guy that I am, I decided just to see to the matter myself and fixed the problem.

To whoever it is from that Romney/Ryan campaign that is assigned to monitor the blogs, tell your bosses they are welcome and may feel free to use their new logo, which I fixed for them.