Open Mic August 3

Mean­while, Rom­ney con­tin­ues to use out­right lies as the basis for his cam­paign against Pres­i­dent Obama.

I’m link­ing to Poli­ti­fact above, which I nor­mally don’t do. In this case, they’ve included a good his­tory and good links to other sites and doc­u­ments. I encour­age read­ers to do some of their own research here, and not merely to take Politifact’s word for it.

Fox “News” is cov­er­ing this from the Rom­ney campaign’s angle, and is declin­ing once more to pro­vide an accu­rate descrip­tion of what’s going on.

In short: After the recent elec­tions, Ohio has now restricted a lot of the early vot­ing rules it used to have, mak­ing harder for Ohioans to vote. They will still allow early vot­ing for mil­i­tary per­son­nel up until the day before the actual elec­tion, but for non-​​military vot­ers the cut­off wil be Fri­day. That is, non-​​military vot­ers will not be able (as they were in past years) to vote the week­end before the actual election.

The Obama cam­paign has sued the state of Ohio in an effort to rein­state the early vot­ing rules for non-​​military cit­i­zens. The Rom­ney cam­paign is dis­hon­estly pre­sent­ing this as an attempt by the Pres­i­dent to restrict the vot­ing rights of mil­i­tary per­son­nel, thus pre­cisely revers­ing the intent of the Obama campaign’s lawsuit.

It will be inter­est­ing to see, dur­ing the remain­der of this cam­paign, whether Rom­ney is able to come up with any actual true or hon­est statements.

Monotreme, that ad does look to me like it goes too far. It may be hon­est in as far as the guy blames Rom­ney (if in fact he does). But it feels sleezy.

The point is that Rom­ney caused busi­nesses to close and /​ or lay off employ­ees. Some of those employ­ees there­fore lost insur­ance cov­er­age, and some may well have died because of that. And that’s a valid point, if a bit manip­u­la­tive. But the direct causal­ity is missing.

A bet­ter cul­prit is our bro­ken health care sys­tem, and a more rea­son­able crit­i­cism should be that Repub­li­cans (Rom­ney included) want to un-​​do ACA which would have helped to pro­tect this man’s wife (though a sin­gle payer sys­tem would almost cer­tainly be bet­ter still).

Dear Repub­li­can Party,

Now that there’s been another mass shoot­ing only a few days after the last mass shoot­ing, is it time yet to talk about ban­ning assault weapons and large mag­a­zine clips?

If not, when is the right time? Tell us, and we’ll put it on the calendar.

Sin­cerely,
Amer­ica

I think it’s going to be a long three months for Mitt Rom­ney. He is locked into cam­paign mes­sages that are dev­as­tat­ing for the econ­omy, and absolutely toxic for his candidacy.

Mitt Romney’s attack on “green jobs” has risks

Mitt Romney’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign has been sav­aging what it calls Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s “unhealthy” obses­sion with “green jobs.” The Repub­li­can chal­lenger crit­i­cizes the gov­ern­ment pro­gram that propped up solar man­u­fac­turer Solyn­dra, and he mocks Obama’s vision of a boom in employ­ment, cit­ing a Euro­pean study to argue that new solar or wind-​​energy posi­tions would destroy jobs elsewhere.

But when a cam­paign spokesman said last week that Con­gress should let a tax break for wind energy pro­duc­ers expire at the end of the year, some Repub­li­cans were con­cerned the can­di­date had gone too far.

Repub­li­can Rep. Tom Latham, R-​​Iowa, not­ing that nearly 7,000 Iowans work in the wind indus­try, assailed the Rom­ney cam­paign for “a lack of full under­stand­ing of how impor­tant the wind energy tax credit is for Iowa and our nation.” Iowa’s senior sen­a­tor, Chuck Grass­ley, told reporters he didn’t believe Rom­ney really opposed the exten­sion, and he joined five other GOP law­mak­ers in vot­ing for it in the Sen­ate Finance Committee.

Because of the Repub­li­can base’s inflex­i­bil­ity in their mind­less oppo­si­tion to any­thing hav­ing to do with Obama, Rom­ney must pan­der to them even if it means sup­port­ing the destruc­tion of thou­sands of jobs sim­ply as a way of attack­ing the President.

So, we now have the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date openly sup­port­ing the destruc­tion of Amer­i­can jobs. Oh, and he is sup­port­ing the idea of rais­ing taxes on small busi­nesses, America’s “job cre­ators.” His only alter­na­tive is to sup­port one Pres­i­dent Obama’s poli­cies — worse, to sup­port Demo­c­ra­tic “green jobs.”

Yes, mclever. Fas­ci­nat­ing, isn’t it?

In point of fact, the changes the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion is putting in place are more strin­gent that the Clin­ton rules.

Rom­ney, once more, is sim­ply lying. His entire cam­paign con­sists of one lie after another.

Okay, for our friends who refuse to admit Repub­li­cans are engag­ing in voter suppression –

In Ohio, the county can­vass­ing boards are all bipar­ti­san, with equal num­bers of Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans. In coun­ties that are major­ity Repub­li­can, the can­vass­ing boards have voted unan­i­mously to extend early vot­ing on evenings and week­ends before the Novem­ber elec­tion. Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans have voted to keep early vot­ing evenings and week­ends — in Republican-​​majority counties.

In Democratic-​​majority coun­ties, all Repub­li­cans on the can­vass­ing boards have voted against extend­ing early vot­ing hours on evenings and week­ends.  This causes a tie in the can­vass­ing board votes. The tie is bro­ken by the Ohio Sec­re­tary of State, who is a Repub­li­can, and who has voted, in every case, not to extend early vot­ing hours in Democratic-​​majority districts.

So: in Ohio, in all of the Republican-​​controlled coun­ties, there will be early vot­ing on evenings and week­ends before the elec­tion. In Democratic-​​majority coun­ties, there will not be early vot­ing on evenings and week­ends. And this dif­fer­ence is entirely due to Repub­li­can officials.

Now, con­ser­v­a­tive read­ers — make a case that there is not an inten­tional effort going on to sup­press votes of peo­ple likely to vote Democratic.

I dare you.