Washblog

As you have probably heard by now, the Washington State Senate Democratic Majority Leader, Lisa Brown, announced about a week ago that she will not be seeking re-election. For those of you who missed her farewell party last Wednesday, her is short clip of her farewell speech. Her official announcement of retirement, additional commentary, and full video can be read/watched at SpokaneWatch.net. I used hand-held cam. Sorry about the unsteadiness.

We have put up a website against Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers. It is called We-Can-Do-Better.org. On the site, we tear down the myth that McMorris is a good-old gal, citizen legislator looking out for Eastern Washington.

Rep. McMorris Rodgers the Career Politician

Cathy McMorris-Rodgers has risen quickly through the Republican ranks to the 4th most powerful member of the Republican Party in the U.S House of Representatives. She has done this by making calculated decisions for power and position that further her political career and personal wealth.

Seattle - Attorney Sheryl Gordon McCloud has entered the race for the Washington Supreme Court, Position 9.  McCloud will bring two decades worth of experience in handling cases before the Washington Supreme Court, as well as every other appellate court in the state of Washington, to the job.

Yes, Mitt Romney is a terrible political candidate. Sure, Santorum could embarrass Romney in Ohio. Gingrich could raise questions by winning Georgia. And Paul could upset Romney in some small caucus state.
And of course, Romney will continue to stick his foot in his mouth and say things to remind everyone he is an out of touch rich guy.
It just doesn't matter.
On a 1 to 10 scale for candidates (with 1 being George McGovern and 10 being Ronald Reagan), Mitt Romney is, at best, a 1.2. But since all of his GOP current and former opponents are precisely negative infinity, it just doesn't matter.
Mitt Romney has already won the GOP nomination--we all might as well come to grips with it.
So why do I claim Romney has a 2 in 3 chance of beating Obama?
For starters, contrary to popular belief, the GOP will rally around Romney. Why? Because the base of the Party is motivated by one thing only: hatred of President Obama--nothing else. Romney is irrelevant to that equation.
Some political insiders persist in spreading the idea that it would not be logical for Tea Party members and fervent conservatives to support Romney, given his numerous past liberal positions on social issues, not to mention Romneycare. Astute observers will instantly spot the flaw in the previous sentence: I used the word "logical" and "Tea Party" in the same sentence.
Remember, the Tea Party ostensibly stands for eliminating Washington of its career politicians and insiders, traditional values and is in favor of reducing government spending. So for much of the last 3 months most self-professed Tea Party members have supported Newt Gingrich, a 35 year Washington career politician who has enriched himself while making government bigger, all the while showing contempt for traditional values.
If the Tea Party can pretend to love Newt out of principle, then they will surely find a way of supporting Romney out of some other string of illogical nonsense.
Romney will have a unified party behind him.
There are three primary scenarios for the fall election.
Scenario one. The economy continues to improve. Team Obama makes no flubs. Optimism flourishes. Romney runs a lackluster, flub-filled campaign. Yes, under this scenario, Obama wins, but not by a large margin.
Scenario two. Europe's economy takes a major tumble this summer. Unemployment numbers for the U.S. trend up in September and October. Optimism plummets. The only message that resonates with independent and moderate voters is "the economy and unemployment are awful and getting worse. Obama had a chance. Let's try the other guy--he couldn't be worse." If this happens, Obama loses to Romney. The same scenario applies if China's real estate bubble bursts or any other economic problem infects the world economic bloodstream.
Scenario Three. The economy holds, but the Roger Ailes/Fox News/Karl Rove/Rush Limbaugh/GOP message slime machine does what it does best, it creates an utterly phony issue out of thin air that destroys Obama's credibility and allows Romney to win the White House.
Republicans might not be very good at governing, but no one can deny that they are great at sliming, vilifying and character assassinating Democrats. Here's a quick review:
1.    1988. Michael Dukakis was destroyed because of "Willie Horton ad" nonsense regarding a furlough program that most Republican governors in the country had also implemented.
2.    1992, 1996. True, the best Democratic politician of the last 70 years, Bill Clinton, was able to prevent the GOP slime machine from destroying his campaigns. But let's not forget, the GOP propaganda mill did convince a majority of Americans that their taxes had gone up, that the deficit was worse than ever and that the economy was shrinking in 1994. None of those things were true, but those lies resulted in the GOP takeover of the House and led the ground work for the successful Ken Starr Witch Hunt and the impeachment of Clinton in 1998.
3.    2000. We all remember how Al Gore got himself in trouble by lying, exaggerating and claiming "I invented the Internet" and that he was the inspiration for the characters in "Love Story." The only problem is that he never actually said these things (I dare you, try to find a literal quote anywhere of Gore saying "I invented the Internet" that didn't have its origins in a GOP press release). It turns out that the GOP message machine just created the scandal of "Gore is a liar and exaggerator" out of thin air and through constant repetition, it became a reality.
4.    2004. John Kerry, for all his flaws as a candidate (and yes, there were many) was a genuine war hero. Bush was a draft dodger and a national guardsman who appears to many to have gone AWOL. But the GOP Slime Machine created its "Swift Boat" campaign and they successfully inverted reality until most independent voters perceived Bush as the war hero and Kerry as the coward.
5.    2008 was a rare misstep for the GOP message machine. GOP slime merchants were obsessed with Hillary Clinton and just assumed she would be the Democratic Nominee. They were so excited about the prospect of reusing their greatest "Slime Hillary" hits that they weren't thinking clearly. They thought all they'd have to do is trot out the "Hillary killed Vince Foster" nonsense or ""Hillary is a Lesbian" garbage and win. So they were uncharacteristically caught flat-footed when the unknown Obama won the nomination running against an 8 year record of Bush-GOP incompetence.
But since the 2008 campaign, the GOP slime machine has regained its footing and has continued doing what it does best: creating completely phony BS scandals about a Democratic president and then getting not only the conservative media but the mainstream media to obsess over it for months at a time. Birth certificates? Obama is a Muslim? The Administration hates Catholics? At this point, the only thing that should surprise us about the right wing message machine is if they don't wage an all out 2-month war claiming Obama personally poisoned Andrew Breitbart.
The bottom line is that the GOP Message Machine has an excellent quarter century record of slimy accomplishment. And this machine couldn't care less whether they or anyone else likes the GOP nominee. The only difference between 2012 and other years like 2004 or 1988 is money. This year the Republicans will have at lease several hundreds of millions of dollars more (via Super PACs) to run completely phony, BS, manufactured ads to demonize Obama.
And this is why Mitt Romney is the clear-cut, prohibitive favorite to be the next President of the United States.
TJ Walker is the founder of AmericanLP www.americanlp.org, a Democratic Super PAC.

No not me... people read stuff into it and I wanna point that out.

We at AmericanLP have created a new ad to spotlight Mitt Romney's hypocrisy on the issue of bailouts. By now, most observers have learned that Mitt Romney was against a bailout for Detroit. But what even many political insiders don't realize is that Mitt Romney has been the beneficiary of a Federal bailout of sorts. As head of Bain and Co in the early 90s (he had been brought back from Bain Capital to sort out the mess at the mother company), Romney was in charge of keeping Bain from imploding under a huge mountain of debt. In addition to firing lots of people (naturally), Romney also squeezed suppliers and other creditors. What's more, Bain had a $38 million loan from the Bank of New England, and that the Bank of New England had its own problems and had been taken over by the FDIC.

Romney shrewdly re-negotiated the Bain loan from $38 million to $28 million. So what does that mean, exactly? Well, since the FDIC is an arm of the Federal government, that means, essentially, that the FDIC (ahem, taxpayers) ate the difference. In other words, Romney conned the government into giving him and his cronies a $10 million bailout.

Yes, this was legal for Romney to do--other business people do it all the time. But it was a bailout to the tune of $10 million, Romney did personally benefit, and it's a bit rich for Romney to be so sanctimonious about other people getting bailouts. Critics of our ad would suggest that it is unfair to imply that Romney benefited personally from the $10, million write-offs. While the money went to Bain and Co, Romney actually benefited to a much greater degree than $10 million. If Bain and Co had not gotten the bailout, it would have likely imploded. If Bain and Co had imploded, it would have likely tainted Bain Capital to such a degree that it would have been destroyed. If Bain Capital had been dismantled, Romney would have never been able to make his quarter billion that has allowed him the life of the perpetual candidate. Yes, this stuff is complicated--but that's why rich finance guys like Romney are able to play the system to their advantage.

We start the ad with images of Ronald Reagan talking about the Chicago welfare queen in a Cadillac. This was a story Reagan told over and over again in the 1976 and 1980 campaigns. Even though Reagan never specified it was a black woman, it was widely assumed by most observers across the spectrum that Reagan was in fact talking about a black woman from Chicago with 80 different fake names. (It turns out that Reagan didn't have his facts straight on this--surprise, surprise)

By showing Reagan at the beginning of the ad, we are trying to evoke the warm feelings conservative Republicans have toward Reagan and his beliefs about "welfare queens." That is why we are literally showing what appears to be a woman driving a pink Cadillac in an inner city. We then show that in fact the "woman" is none other than Mitt Romney in drag. Romney should actually be seen as a modern day welfare queen who ripped off the government for more than any "welfare queen" from the inner city could ever imagine.
By portraying Romney this way, we are attempting to turn ugly racist beliefs on their head and make people realize that the biggest freeloaders on the government system are actually people who look like Mitt Romney.

At the end of the ad, we show Mitt Romney's vacation mansion worth $10 million. We aren't suggesting that Romney criminally stole tax dollars to buy his house illegally. But money is fungible, so any money that benefits Romney in one account can be used to purchase luxuries from any other account.

The point is that Romney and his colleagues at Bain were already wealthy by the early 1990s when the difficulties with the loan arose. Because, as we know, "corporations are people," Romney and his cronies weren't personally liable for the full $38 million. Instead, just the corporate entity of Bain and Company was liable. But there was nothing stopping Romney or his wealthy colleagues at Bain from paying back the full $10 million out of their own pocket at the time. For that matter, Romney and his colleagues could have paid the Government back in later years, after they'd all become super, super rich.

The bottom line is Romney got the best deal he could, just because he could. And yet he belongs to a political party that says people who do that are evil parasites for not being "rugged individuals" and succeeding on their own merits.

Finally, our goal here is to make conservatives sickened by the hypocrisy of Romney taking bailouts and for moderates and independents to be disgusted by Romney for making himself richer at the expense of average taxpayers. This bailout for Romney is a perfect window into why Romney should be seen as an utterly detestable and phony candidate regardless of one's ideological position. Please take a look at the ad below.

http://youtu.be/-L8oCg_pM2M

More info ar www.americanlp.org

The Stimulus Act of 2009 has been working.  The Act has helped to create jobs in Liberty Lake, Wa, and boost Washington employment in general.

The Demand Energy project in Liberty Lake, WA, will retain and create about 90 Liberty Lake jobs in the County of Spokane. As part of the 2009 Stimulus Package, the company Demand Energy received a $1. 5 million grant to make energy storage devices for on-site users of electricity.

     AmericanLP covers all the top headlines in politics on both sides of the aisle in this morning's news brief. Major headlines yesterday once again pointed to a rebounding economy. New applications for unemployment hit a 4-year low. Also, the DNC released a new ad, which you can view at the 1:15 mark, highlighting the diverging ideologies between the Obama administration's decision to save the auto industry and Mitt Romney's 2008 Op-Ed "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt". The bailout was unequivocally a successful administrative decision for President Obama, and coupling this with the rate for unemployment applications falling, and last week's news that the overall unemployment rate has fallen to 8.3 percent, we have public opinion of the President quickly on the rise. 44% of Americans, according to a Pew Research Center poll believe economic conditions will be better in 2013 than this year. This coincides with a CNN poll yesterday showing the President's approval rating is back to 50% for the first time in 8 months. The administration, and the Obama re-election campaign, have really begun hammering home the jobs numbers, focusing not on the unemployment rate so much, as that number is still unfortunately high, but rightly talking about how bad things were when Obama came into office (750,000 jobs hemorrhaging from the economy per month) to how his policies have vastly turned this country around (250,000 jobs added in January; a 1 million point swing) and have created the most manufacturing jobs since the 1990's.

Romney's victory at CPAC reveals clearly that there are exactly three (and only three) core principles animating modern day conservatives:

1.    Any Democrat in office, no matter how moderate or conservative, is the biggest problem in the world.

2.    Barack Obama, even if he governed exactly like Ronald Reagan, is a European/African-style Socialist/Communist/Muslim and must be removed from office by any means necessary.

3.    Getting and holding onto presidential power is all that matters for Republicans.
   

There...that's it. That is the total sum of conservative beliefs in 2012 in America. If you thought the list included something like smaller government or lower deficits then you are an ignorant rube who just fell off of a turnip truck.

What Mitt Romney thinks about economy

What are Mitt Romney's "In-Context" Economic Views?
Mitt Romney and his campaign have complained incessantly about being quoted "out-of-context" on his economic views. In an effort to help the Romney campaign we have gathered all of his economic views in one place and organized them in a comprehensive manner in order to give voters a complete and thorough view of Romney's economic philosophy.

What are your suggestions on this proposed anti Romeny ad?

Bill Maher makes a great point by shedding light on the fact that its not the fact that Romney is wealthy that we dislike him, its his tactics in getting rich and his money flaunting habits. Unlike other great entrepreneurs in history, such as Walt Disney, Steve Jobs etc. Romney seems to be missing that humble side of him that Americans love. Maher, in a rather funny, "new rule" compares Romney to the money loving, in-your-face artists of hip-hop. Take a look.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJyC9wnuSXE&feature=g-upl&context=G24ce3a3AUAAAAAAAFAA

To Democrats, moderates, progressives, liberals and independents, i.e. 60% of America; it is, indeed, a confusing political time. While many of us want Obama to win re-election, most of us concede that any incumbent President running for re-election with 8.5% unemployment is highly vulnerable and likely to be defeated. So it just seems weird that that the Republicans don't seem to be treating this whole election-thing seriously.

The Democratic Party and President Obama's re-election brain trust are doing cartwheels and giving each other high-fives over the news that Newt Gingrich is surging in the polls in Florida and won the South Carolina primary.