Earlier this year, Romney aired an ad where showing Obama saying “if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose”. Which was, of course, Obama quoting McCain, not Obama confessing weakness on the economy. When pressed about this deceptive ad, Romney’s team offered no apologies, and said the ad was “intentional” and that it “worked”.

Yesterday, Mitt Romney said he is “not concerned about the very poor”. Not long thereafter, as this quote got widely circulated, he followed that up with this:

“No no no no. I — no, no. You’ve got to take the whole sentence, all right, as opposed to saying, and then change it just a little bit, because then it sounds very different,” said Romney.

I say we stick with his original policy. So you heard it, folks: Mitt Romney says he’s not concerned about the very poor. I’m sure that quote was “intentional”.

Bill Maher explains it:

We’ve mentioned before Mitt Romney’s appalling treatment of his own dog.

That’s why we’d now like to refer you to Dogs Against Romney.

Starring Justin Long!

During a GOP debate, Mitt Romney challenged Rick Perry on one of Perry’s claims about Romney. Romney, sure he was right, challenged Perry to a $10,000 bet on who was correct. Critics said this made Romney look out of touch to the average taxpayer, for whom $10,000 is a huge amount of money.

Now that Romney has released his tax returns, and since we know he earns $56,986 per day, we can find out exactly how much of a dent $10,000 would put in Romney’s pocket. And we can compare it to your pocket.

Take your annual income and divide it by 2,080. That’s the same impact on your wallet that $10,000 has to Mitt Romney. (For instance, if you make $50,000 a year, the equivalent bet for you would be $24. TWENTY-FOUR DOLLARS.)

And that is why Romney could make an off-the-cuff $10,000 bet. It’s chump change for him.

Search for “romney” on Google, and the #4 hit is already this.

As a dog owner, I approve of this meme.

Wondering why Canada doesn’t have Fox News? Because it’s literally against the law there. And going to stay that way.

Canada’s broadcast regulator has rejected a proposal from Canada’s right-wing government to loosen a law that prohibits misleading or false news. As Media With Conscience put it:

Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canadian regulators announced last week they would reject efforts by Canada’s right-wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.

Canada’s Radio Act requires that “a licenser may not broadcast … any false or misleading news.” The provision has kept Fox News and right-wing talk radio out of Canada and helped make Canada a model for liberal democracy and freedom. As a result of that law, Canadians enjoy high quality news coverage, including the kind of foreign affairs and investigative journalism that flourished in this country before Ronald Reagan abolished the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987.

According to the Pew Research Center,

…about two-thirds of the public (66%) believes there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and the poor—an increase of 19 percentage points since 2009…

According to the new survey, three-in-ten Americans (30%) say there are “very strong conflicts” between poor people and rich people. That is double the proportion that offered a similar view in July 2009 and the largest share expressing this opinion since the question was first asked in 1987.

As a result, in the public’s evaluations of divisions within American society, conflicts between rich and poor now rank ahead of three other potential sources of group tension—between immigrants and the native born; between blacks and whites; and between young and old.

As John Fugelsang put it, “‘Class Warfare’ is when the bottom 98% fights back.”

I want to make a joke here using Santorum’s last name and “bullshit”, but really, when you see all these quotes put together, it really stops being funny and you realize what a dangerous nutjob this guy is.

Go on. Read the list.

For those not following Stephen Colbert’s involvement in the SC GOP primary, his editorial in The State recaps it quite well. In brief: the SC GOP insisted that taxpayers cover much of the costs of the primary, so Colbert’s “Super PAC” agreed to cover the bill if they got naming rights (“The Colbert Super PAC South Carolina Republican Primary”), and if SC put a non-binding referendum on the ballot about corporate personhood.

The GOP agreed… at first.

Then the unthinkable happened — the activist judges of the S.C. Supreme Court ruled that the counties, not the GOP, would be responsible for funding the primary. And, in what I can only see as a personal attack on corporate persons, they ruled that all non-binding referenda be struck from the ballot.

The S.C. Republican Party no longer needed my $400,000, but being Southern gentlemen, they gracious[ly] offered to still want it.

Colbert’s editorial has the whole (hilarious) story.

As Raw Story reports:

As Rep. Stenny Hoyer (D-MD) attempted to call for a vote to extend a payroll tax cut to middle class and working Americans, his Republican colleagues adjourned the House and walked out of the chamber. And if that weren’t odd enough, it got even stranger: As Hoyer railed against them for failing to help working Americans, footage from C-SPAN went silent, then cut away.

Moments later, C-SPAN took to the Internet to explain that it wasn’t their doing, but someone working for House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

The incident occurred mere moments after the House went into session. Hoyer made a motion for a vote on the Senate’s payroll tax cut extension, which would extend the lower rates for another two months, but the Republican presiding over the House did not acknowledge the motion. He instead adjourned the House, then got up and walked out.

Newt Gingrich, who is campaigning that he wants to “reassert the Constitution”, said in an interview on Face the Nation that, as President, he would have U.S. Marshals arrest Supreme Court justices whose decisions were “out of touch with American culture” and that their rulings should be ignored.

“Reassert”, apparently, means, “to ignore”. At least, as long as the Constitution still has those pesky “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” clauses.

Public criticism coupled with personal profit? Why, that kind of hypocrisy sounds nothing like the Newt Gingrich that I know!

Newt Gingrich seized the TV airwaves in 2009 to bash newly elected President Obama’s stimulus package, calling it “entirely a pork-barrel bill” that would do little to solve the recession.

Later, in a separate web video, the former House speaker stepped back from his blanket criticism. He explained that he strongly supported spending $27 billion of stimulus funds to encourage doctors and hospitals to create electronic medical records for their patients. Left unsaid was that his private consulting business in Washington has received large payments from medical technology companies that stand to profit from the federal money.

It is now legal in Virginia to deny someone an adoption because the would-be parent is gay.

This sort of homophobia is, sadly, almost expected in many parts of the country. But guess what: this decision also makes it perfectly legal to deny someone an adoption solely because they’re a registered Democrat. Or because they go to a synagogue. Or because they’re a woman. Likely? Maybe not. Wholly legal? Yep!

The Virginia State Board of Social Services voted 5 to 1 on Wednesday to allow licensed adoption agencies to refuse to approve adoptions or foster parents based solely on a would-be parent’s sexual orientation as well as six other characteristics.

The board took that action by rejecting for the second time this year an adoption related rule change first drafted in 2009 by state social services officials under former Governor Tim Kaine.

The proposed change called for banning discrimination in the state’s adoption and foster care system solely because of someone’s sexual orientation, religion, age, gender, disability, political beliefs, or family status.

(emphasis added)

Remember, it’s more important to keep a kid in foster care or an orphanage than to let them end up in a gay person’s house. Thanks, Virginia.

My friend Greg has started this terrific new project: Liberal Bias.

Life just isn’t fair to conservatives. Everywhere you look, there is liberal bias. When companies pollute, they are punished by the liberal environment with unsightly smog and all kinds of health problems. When taxes on the wealthy were raised in the 1950′s and the 1990′s, the liberal economy boomed in spite of good old conservative common-sense. And when we bully and attack foreign countries, they act like liberals and get all mad at us instead of greeting us as liberators. Clearly, reality has a liberal bias. Our job here is to expose it.

Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic covers two new ads from the Israeli government that attempt to scare Israelis about what will happen if you (or your children) marry an American Jew:

The idea, communicated in these ads, that America is no place for a proper Jew, and that a Jew who is concerned about the Jewish future should live in Israel… The message is: Dear American Jews, thank you for lobbying for American defense aid (and what a great show you put on at the AIPAC convention every year!) but, please, stay away from our sons and daughters.

“The story of two men trapped in one body…”

A Farleigh Dickinson poll finds

that Sunday morning news shows are the most informative, while Fox News actually leads people to be less informed than those who consume no news at all…

“The (poll’s) results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all,” said Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the poll.

Also no surprise:

Those who watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart performed well on the questions. Sixty percent of Daily Show viewers correctly answered that opposition forces in Syria have not yet toppled the government, second only to NPR. Forty-five percent of Fox News viewers answered “no.”

MSNBC reports:

A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by the MSNBC program “Up w/ Chris Hayes.”

The proposal was written on the letterhead of the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford and addressed to one of CLGC’s clients, the American Bankers Association.

CLGC’s memo proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the protests and allied politicians. The memo also asserts that Democratic victories in 2012 would be detrimental for Wall Street and targets specific races in which it says Wall Street would benefit by electing Republicans instead.

According to the memo, if Democrats embrace OWS, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street. … It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.”

I know we’ve all had a good laugh over how bad Rick Perry was during the debate in trying to name three departments he’d cut, but in all the hoopla, many people haven’t yet seen this train wreck:

A reporter asks Herman Cain’s opinion of Obama’s handling of Libya. Cain first double-checks with the reporter as to which side Obama supported(!), then stalls for a minute and a half before giving half-answers, dodges and circumlocution for several minutes more.

(Seriously, if you haven’t seen this — it’s one of the most painful things you’ll see all day. Cain is completely out of his element. Folks, let’s remember this guy wants to be the leader of the free world. And he wasn’t sure which side of the Libyan civil war we supported.)