Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2012 5:52 pm Post subject: Only a GOP candidate could get away with this...
This is just my opinion of course and in case anyone has not seen it already, but I was watching the GOP debate on CNN and it was crazy how an immoral and unethical S.O.B. like Newt Gingrich could get a standing ovation despite his personal and professional history. I guess if you regurgitate GOP rhetoric on live TV (even if you were Satan himself) you'll have the GOP's back. One last point on this for me also is why is the GOP so religion based? What does governing a country have anything to do with what faith you are? What makes this even more ridiculous is although all the GOP candidates are Christian they gain/lose votes over which branch of Christianity they are. It is all so insane. As an American myself who is living in Canada I am sad to see the state the state's are in (and heading towards).
Anyway for those who haven't seen the debate I have the video below and the article on the whole embarrassing debacle should be below the video. Enjoy.
The video:
The article:
The ex-wife of a Republican politician alleges her then-husband asked if they could have an open marriage, so evangelical “values voters” rethink their support for him, right?
Not so fast, say some evangelical leaders and experts.
Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s second ex-wife, Marianne, made the “open marriage” allegation in an interview that aired Thursday night on ABC News.
But because of political circumstances and the way Gingrich parried a question about the accusation during Thursday’s CNN debate, the episode may cause relatively little fallout among evangelical voters, who are expected to make up about 60% of the vote in Saturday’s South Carolina primary.
Some say the drama may even help Gingrich among such voters.
“To a degree, it will give [evangelical voters] pause, but there’s a much more insatiable appetite to defeat President Obama,” said David Brody, chief political correspondent at CBN News at the Christian Broadcasting Network.
“Gingrich has never claimed to be a patron saint,” Brody said. “People have known for years about Gingrich’s marriage issues. In a way, his well-known history of troubled marriage works for him here.”
CNN moderator John King opened Thursday’s debate in Charleston, South Carolina, by asking Gingrich about whether he would like to respond to the allegation.
“No,” Gingrich responded to mounting applause, “but I will.”
"To take an ex-wife and make it, two days before the primary, a significant question in a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine," Gingrich went on, calling the allegation “false” and provoking a standing ovation from the debate audience.
It’s a safe bet that evangelical Republicans were among those clapping.
“The press is so unpopular with Republican voters that his answer helps him in the short term - it was a tactically brilliant answer,” said Richard Land, the public policy chief for the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest evangelical denomination.
“Whether it will work strategically is another question,” Land said.
The Christian Broadcasting Network’s Brody said that Gingrich’s response to the “open marriage” question “took a weakness and turned it into a strength.”
“Evangelicals have been bashed by the media for decades, so this is a common bond he’s able to play up with them,” he said. “He was able to develop a kinship with evangelicals over this last night.”
Brody said that Gingrich has spent lots of time on the campaign trail discussing stances that matter to evangelicals, like opposition to abortion and confronting radical Islam.
Land said the allegation from Gingrich’s ex-wife may hurt the candidate in the long run because it reminds voters that he was seeing his current wife, Callista, while married to his second wife.
Gingrich has admitted to his affair with Callista, whom he married in 2000.
“This reminds people that Callista is the other woman,” Land said, “and that the other woman could become the first lady.”
Gingrich’s evangelical backers have not shied away from discussing his past marital problems. In a conference call with evangelicals last week, Gingrich spoke extensively about his failed marriages.
“We're all quite aware that there was a season in Speaker Gingrich’s life in which his lifestyle was unacceptable,” Jim Garlow, a prominent evangelical pastor who was on last week’s call, said in an e-mail message. “He does not defend it. Nor would any evangelical. Nor do I.”
“He is as flawed as King David in the Old Testament,” wrote Garlow, who helped lead the campaign to ban gay marriage in California in 2008. “However, that did not keep God from restoring King David and using him after his moral failures, for the benefit of the entire nation.”
Still, even before this week’s allegation from his ex-wife, Gingrich’s personal baggage had given many evangelicals pause.
“Forgiveness is not the issue here, trust is the issue,” Land said. “Redemption is something that’s in our code as evangelicals, but trusting someone with the presidency is something entirely different.”
His attempt to claim the moral high-ground while the foundations of his argument are rotten is laughable. But it seems the audience work on that level too...
i think the audience, and lot of the republican party, hate most of the media so much that they'll join any chance to cheer an attack on the media. but it was bizarre that a guy who cheated not only on one wife but two could somehow claim the high ground.
i see bill o'reilly on fox saying he wouldn't have done the interview with newts ex wife. but if you'd swap newt and obama, and a second ex wife of obama who had been cheated on was making the same claims thats newts wife was, o'reilly would have been all over that story!
if you want an obama win though, you want newt to win the republican nomination - because all the stats and polls i've seen show in a newt v obama election, obama will win. only romney or paul do well against obama in the polls.
thats probably why romney is doing well, even though most republicans don't seem to like him, but they see him as their best chance of beating obama, and ron paul's non interventionism scares the shit out of them.
i think romney will win the nomination, but i think obama will win the election. i was reading something the other day, and it was showing that in 98% or some really high percent of past elections, the candidate with the most money in the campaign wins. obamas got most money by far. a lot of top donors to obama and romney are the same as well, so they're hedging their bets, but they're giving more to obama.
personally, i'm backing vermin supreme for president. he's offering mandatory dental care and free ponies for everyone, plus he wears a boot on his head
can someone explain to me how the delegate system works? i thought the person who won this republican nomination would be the one who got the most votes overall, or who won the most states, but apparently its all about the number of delegates they get.
'To win the nomination, a candidate needs 1,114 delegates of the 2,226 who will attend the party convention in Tampa, Florida, in August. '
so who/what are these delegates? how does it work? is all this voting by people meaningless?!
did anyone else watch the debate tonight? that was truly scary their views on cuba - especially santorum but all of them, except paul, are just crazy on cuba
Ron Paul quietly amassing an army of delegates while GOP frontrunners spar Paul's tightly-organised campaign is racking up delegates even in states where he did poorly in the popular vote. It's all part of a complex system that could make Paul the election kingmaker
Paul Harris @paulxharris
guardian.co.uk,
23 February 2012
While the Republican nomination race is focused on the ongoing battle between frontrunners Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, the Ron Paul campaign is waging an under-the-radar "delegate strategy" that could make the libertarian-leaning Texan the surprise kingmaker of the race. In states that have already voted via a caucus system – rather than a straight primary ballot – Ron Paul supporters are conducting an intensively organised ground effort aimed at securing as many convention delegate slots as possible, often in numbers that far outweigh the number of actual votes that Paul got in the ballot.
If successful, it means Paul's campaign could arrive at the August Tampa convention at the head of an army of delegates far larger than the proportion of votes that it won during the nomination contest. It could also increase the chances of a contested convention – where no candidate has enough delegates to declare the winner – as well as give Paul much greater ability to inject his beliefs into the Republicans' 2012 policy platform.
The strategy is based on the fact the GOP race is in fact a "delegate contest" despite an overwhelming focus by the media and most campaigns on "winning" individual states by coming top of the popular vote. But in reality, each state, weighted proportionally by population, sends a number of delegates to Tampa where a nominee is then chosen. A total of 2,286 delegates are sent to Tampa and so a candidate must secure the support of 1,144 of them in order to win the nomination. However, a bewilderingly complex set of rules, often varying from state to state, exists to actually assign these delegates. Ron Paul's campaign is seeking to work that system in order to maximise its delegate count.
So far signs are that the campaign is being so successful at its strategy that it may be able to "win" delegate counts in states where it did not win the popular vote. "They will be able to perform well enough that in some states where they came in third or fourth in the straw poll, they will come in first or second in terms of the delegate totals. I am fairly confident in making that bet," said Professor Josh Putnam, a political scientist at Davidson College who runs the Frontloading HQ blog dedicated to tracking the delegate fight.
How the strategy works
The strategy works because of the varying ways each state assigns the delegates that get sent to Tampa. Some states hold a "winner takes all" primary that will assign all its delegates to the candidate who tops the vote. Others assign delegates proportionally according to the vote, splitting the delegates roughly according to the results and ensuring each major candidate gets some delegates. But it is in the caucus states that the Ron Paul campaign is focused. There the method of assigning delegates is complex and lasts a long time. In caucus states that have voted so far like Iowa, Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota and Maine, the process of assigning delegates in support of each candidate has barely begun.
That process begins on caucus night when each precinct votes and then chooses delegates to send to a county convention to be held later in the year. Those county conventions will then choose a smaller number of delegates to send to a state convention or conventions held in each state's congressional districts. Those state and district level conventions are the bodies that actually finally choose which delegates to send to the Tampa national convention. However, at the start of the process – the precinct level meetings held on caucus day – the delegates selected to go to the later county conventions are frequently under no obligation to declare which candidate they are supporting or to support the "winner" of the day's actual voting.
Ron Paul's campaign strategy is to get enough of his precinct-level supporters to volunteer to become delegates to the county conventions so that they outnumber other campaigns. "Their strategy is to gobble up as many of these slots as they can," said Putnam. Then, if you manage to stack the beginning of the process with Ron Paul delegates, as the system moves through the county conventions and the district and state-wide conventions the chances of Ron Paul-supporting delegates emerging at the end and being chosen to go to Tampa is greatly increased. The entire strategy is helped by the fact that Paul's supporters are seen as far more organised and dedicated than other campaigns.
Is it successful? It is currently impossible to say. No caucus state that has already voted has yet held any county conventions at which an idea of the number of Ron Paul-supporting delegates chosen at the precinct level may emerge. Those first indications should come in March. However, the Ron Paul campaign itself, which is at pains to point out their strategy is entirely within the rules, has released information from Colorado that shows how they hope it could be playing out.
In one precinct in Larimer County there were 13 delegate slots available. Santorum had won the precinct's vote by 23 votes to Paul's 13, with five votes going to Romney. But Paul supporters took all the delegate slots. In a Delta County precinct all five delegate slots went to Paul supporters though he came behind Santorum and Romney in the popular vote. In a Pueblo County precinct Paul supporters got the two delegate slots available despite the fact Paul finished fourth in the precinct's vote with just two actual votes.
Those examples are likely cherry-picked by the Paul campaign as best case scenarios. But Colorado party officials are – officially, at least – sanguine about what is going on as it obeys the party rules. "We are just here to play out the process. Whatever happens happens," executive director of the Colorado GOP Chuck Poplstein told the Guardian. But Poplstein did say a successful delegate strategy was not easy to pull off. "It is difficult for any campaign. You have to be very well organised and in all of the counties. It is not an easy process. You have to have a very good ground game," he said. But that might not be too much of a problem. The Ron Paul campaign is highly organised and focused. "We are also seeing the same trends in Minnesota, Nevada and Iowa, and in Missouri as well," the campaign said in its statement on the precinct performances in Colorado.
A recent report by the Washington Post from a caucus in Portland, Maine, revealed a dedicated activist organisation complete with pre-printed lists of which delegates should be voted for at the precinct level. That is likely true across all the caucus states. "They do tend to be very organised and very enthusiastic for Ron Paul," said Professor Tim Hagle, a political scientist at the University of Iowa.
What impact could it have? The fact is that Paul's delegate strategy would have little impact in a normal Republican race. The system is set up with enough winner-take-all and primary states to ensure that Paul's strategy has no chance whatsoever of picking up enough delegates via this method to actually win the nomination himself. But it all changes when the Republican race becomes protracted and closely fought. If Santorum, Romney and Newt Gingrich all stay in the race beyond Super Tuesday and start to amass their own large piles of delegates, then reaching the vital 1,144 delegates needed to win starts to become more difficult. If that scenario plays out – something most experts see as possible but unlikely – then Paul's delegate total becomes crucial. He could become a kingmaker, agreeing to throw his hefty delegate total behind one candidate who could then claim victory.
As a candidate with a very clearly defined agenda – on foreign policy, the role of government and fiscal issues, especially the Federal Reserve – Paul could demand a high policy price for that support. However, even if a nominee emerges prior to the convention, Paul's delegates will still be important. If he amasses a loyal and large delegate total he will able to secure a high-profile, possibly primetime, speaking slot. He will also be more able to get his agenda into the party's official policy platform. Given Paul's stance on issues like American foreign policy and the wars in Afghanistan, that could upset the party elite and the nominee.
Modern conventions are supposed to be highly organised, tightly controlled displays of party unity. At the very least a successful Paul delegate strategy could shatter that prospect.
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regarding my earlier question about delegates, this article goes into some detail. but i still don't really get it. i mean, it just doesn't seem right to me - although apparently its all legit - that you can come last in the popular vote, but still get the most delegates - which is what apparently matters in the end. its like you might as well not bother with the popular vote!
Obama campaign leaves Mitt Romney trailing as focus shifts to November Shackled by the internal battle for the GOP nomination, Romney has been closing offices in key battleground states while the president has been firing on all cylinders for months
Ed Pilkington, Amanda Michel
guardian.co.uk
4 April 2012
Barack Obama is quietly accumulating a powerful army of field organisers and volunteers, giving his bid for a second term in the White House a substantial head start over his Republican rivals. In crucial swing states across America, the Obama re-election campaign, backed by the Democratic party, is already in full battle mode with more than 200 offices open, staff hired and thousands of election events underway. By contrast, all four Republican candidates – including the increasingly dominant frontrunner Mitt Romney – are so shackled by their internal battle over the party's nomination that they have actually been shutting down operations in critical states at the end of each primary.
In the classic swing state of New Hampshire, Romney closed his only office immediately after the January 10 primary. To the astonishment of local Obama organisers, a "for lease" sign was hung outside the Romney headquarters four days before the vote was held. Obama, by contrast, has seven offices up and running in the state, with more than 25 paid staff. A Guardian survey of the activities of the Obama re-election campaign, based on data posted to BarackObama.com, reveals 4,200 election events between now and June. Such an aggressive launch of a presidential election campaign so early in the cycle is unprecedented and threatens to leave the eventual Republican nominee far behind in terms of its grassroots organisation.
At this stage, the emphasis of the Obama campaign is on phone banking and voter registration drives designed to mobilise support, as well as online organising skills and social media training. Though the events are spread across 47 states, they are heavily concentrated in the most critical battleground states that are likely to determine the outcome of the presidential election.
The disparity between Obama's advanced organisation and the relative lack of any equivalent infrastructure on the Republican side devoted to the presidential election in November is stark. It helps explain the rising chorus from conservative leaders calling for a swift end to the party's nomination race and for Rick Santorum, Romney's main contender, to stand aside and let him focus on Obama. That chorus is likely to grow in volume following Romney's convincing win over Santorum in Wisconsin on Tuesday.
The problem that Romney faces as the Republican nomination drags on is underlined in Florida. The sunshine state is considered by many political analysts to be the ultimate battleground state, with 29 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. Here, the Obama re-election campaign already has 22 offices firing on all cylinders. Some opened as long ago as early 2009, four as recently as last Saturday. Between them, they claim to have put together 6,500 training sessions, planning sessions, house parties and phone banks. Events are being staged across Florida at a rate of up to 30 a day.
Romney until recently had three offices in Florida, all directed to his primary battle against Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul. Yet despite the fact that no Republican has won the White House while losing Florida since Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Romney closed all three offices after the January 31 primary. Calls to the main number of Romney's Florida headquarters are sent to voicemail; the mailbox is full and will not accept further messages. The headquarters was situated in an office block shaded by palm trees on one side of the Hillsborough River in Tampa. A few hundred yards away on the other side of the river is the Tampa Bay Times Forum where the Republican National Convention is expected to annoint Romney as the party's nominee in August.
For prominent Floridian Republicans, the prolonged nomination contest is becoming increasingly frustrating. Art Wood, chairman of the Hillsborough County Republican party that covers Tampa, said that watching the Obama team gather their forces while his side was having to put direct campaigning on hold was "very painful. We had hoped that the nomination would be clinched by now, but that hasn't happened. "The Democrats are putting together a gigantic organisation through Obama For America. They have millions of dollars at their disposal and are solely focused on getting Obama elected. That's painful to watch as well."
Hillsborough County GOP is only now installing phone lines for phone banking at its party headquarters in Tampa, and the actual work of identifying and contacting prospective voters won't begin until next month at the earliest. Wood is confident that after the Republican national convention in August, his party's declared nominee will close much of the gap in funding, organising and digital technology and by November will be better placed to take the state than in 2008 when Obama won it by just a 2.8% margin. But he still deeply regrets having to bide his time until then.
The scale of the Obama team's outreach is startling by comparison to the Republicans. Rolling Stone magazine reports that Obama volunteers had already logged one million phone calls to potential supporters as early as last November – fully a year before the presidential election. The Guardian's review of the Obama re-election campaign, based on a survey of activity logged on BarackObama.com carried out at the end of last month, further illustrates the gulf. Across the country, Obama supporters are gathering in McDonalds fast-food outlets, churches, hair salons, public libraries, farmers markets, living rooms and dining rooms, retirement community centres and even a Missouri funeral parlour.
More than 200 offices are actively campaigning, the majority of which are official Obama For America sites set up directly by the Obama team. About a third of these campaigning offices are run by the Democratic party. Energy is concentrated in the critical swing states. Florida is top of the events list, with 500 phone banks, voter registration drives and training sessions planned by June, almost half organised by the Obama staff and half by volunteers. Other battleground states receiving intense attention, judging from events listed on BarackObama.com, include Colorado (287 events planned), Nevada (104), New Hampshire (93), North Carolina (269), Ohio (154), Oregon (344), Pennsylvania (302), Virginia (359) and Wisconsin (220). Illinois, the president's home state, is also rallying local support early, with some 240 events on its calendar.
The gulf in the electoral readiness of the two main parties is made more extreme by a digital divide that has opened up. The Obama re-election team, based in Chicago, has invested in a vast digital data operation centred on Facebook and its potential to unleash the political power of friendship. The strategy revolves around a unified computer database that stores information of millions of committed and potential Obama voters, allowing local organisers to target messages designed to raise money, encourage volunteers and on November 6 get out the vote.
On the Republican side, effort has been put into compiling similar data, but it has been fragmented. Both the prominent conservative strategist Karl Rove and the oil tycoons the Koch brothers have been putting together their own voter databases, but there is understood to be no communication between the lists, thus limiting their potency. Mitt Romney has also been generating his own voter list, but it is nowhere near as comprehensive as Obama's.
The big question is whether the technical prowess of the Obama campaign this year can overcome the inevitable waning of voter passion and enthusiasm that flows from a bid for a second term. Obama's first presidential election in 2008 unleashed exceptional levels of devotion from supporters across the country, and though his senior staff claim they are already witnessing similar levels of enthusiasm this year, few independent observers expect such a spectacle to be repeated.
It remains to be seen whether the Obama campaign can hustle its vast grassroots network into action and translate that into eventual votes. The Guardian's survey of all events on BarackObama.com revealed little to no obvious activity in 20 states, though they tend to be the less electorally sensitive ones where the outcome of the election is in less doubt.
About a third of all upcoming events in the campaign's website are organised by the campaign offices, suggesting that the Obama re-election team and Democratic Party remain strong top-down drivers of volunteer activity. There are exceptions in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Arizona, where the grassroots boasts far more events than both the Obama campaign and Democratic Party combined.
In 2008 the Obama campaign galvanised the youth vote as never seen before, but a close review of events on BarackObama.com also shows relatively few on campuses or oriented toward students. In Florida, too, the Obama team says it is focusing on the youth vote, a reflection of the importance of that demographic in 2008 when 15% of those who voted in Florida were under 30. Obama commanded 61% of their ballots to John McCain's 37%.
A training session for Obama campaign staff A training session for Obama campaign staff on how to use social media for election purposes in St Petersburg, Florida. Photograph: Ed Pilkington/guardian.co.uk
At a digital training event in St Petersburg, Florida, about 30 people gathered to hear a key Obama staffer talk about the importance of Facebook and Twitter in this year's contest. One of the attendees was Merida Lloyd, aged 23, a graduate student at the University of South Florida. She was invited by the Obama campaign in January to become one of their "spring fellows" – a volunteer organiser – and now spends about 15 hours a week canvassing for the president on campus. Lloyd has set up a university Facebook page and has access to the central Obama database from which she draws the details of potential supporters in the 18 to 24 age range. "The most effective way to reach people is to go to them," she says. "So I go to the bars where they hang out and talk to people of my own age group."
Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida, said that in a close race in Florida, Obama's superiority in on-the-ground organising could prove decisive. "The bottom line for Obama is that he has to match the mobilisation he achieved in 2008 among minority and young voters. One of the best ways to do that is to have direct voter contact – that's more effective than spending millions advertising on television."
But John Geer of Vanderbilt University, who has studied the impact of negative TV advertising, said it was not a matter of either/or. "Obama has a phenomenal organisational strategy, but he will also be incredibly well funded to have heavy TV advertising." Geer added that Romney still had time to play catchup. "You can get a field operation up and close the gap pretty quickly. There's a lot of uncertainty among voters out there, and in the end this election will be determined by the state of the economy and whether Obama can make a case for having four more years."
Picture a world without pornography': Adult film stars unite for video protest against Santorum after his promise to ban 'hardcore' films
The porn industry is rallying against Rick Santorum's war on sexually explicit material with an online video protest of the GOP presidential hopeful.
The satirical clip on Jest.com, entitled 'Porn Stars Against Santorum', follows the conservative's pledge last month to ban hardcore pornography if elected.
Not to be outdone, adult film stars Allie Haze, Chastity Lynn and Chanel Preston feature in the two-minute video, calling for a co-ordinated protest on May 1 to protest the politician's anti-pornography stand.
Jest teamed up with producers at Los Angeles-based porn industry behemoth Vivid Entertainment to make the campaign video.
The clip, which also features adult actor Jerry, begins with Haze noting: 'If elected, Rick Santorum has vowed to prosecute our industry on infrequently enforced obscenity laws.'
The actors then go on to imagine what life would be like in a world with no X-rated movies.
'Picture a world without pornography. As porn stars and Americans, we can't let that happen. Pizza delivery boys with nothing to dream about. People masturbating to Facebook photos. Or, worst of all, people using just their imaginations.'
They continue: 'Santorum says watching porn causes profound brain changes, resulting in negative consequences. Besides not being supported by any facts, wouldn't the opposite be true?
'Porn lets you visualize your fantasies, so you don't walk around like a tightly wound sexually repressed time bomb,' they say.
They then go on to encourage viewers to join in a simultaneous sex act in protest against the candidate's policies.
The actresses also encourage viewers to vote for Santorum in the remaining primary elections, 'because if he wins the primaries, he will definitely get crushed by Obama. And Obama would never try to stop the porn industry.'
Santorum launched his proposal last month, writing on his website that he would order his attorney general to 'vigorously enforce' existing laws that 'prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV, in retail shops and through the mail or by common carrier.'
The social conservative candidate wrote that 'America is suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography,' and accused the Obama administration of turning 'a blind eye'.
'It is toxic to marriages and relationships. It contributes to misogyny and violence against women. It is a contributing factor to prostitution and sex trafficking,' the website reads.
'While the Obama Department of Justice seems to favor pornographers over children and families, that will change under a Santorum administration.'
Industry insiders have argued that making hardcore pornography illegal would be an infringement of free speech and would threaten their livelihood in already economically tough times.
Vivid founder Steven Hirsch decried the idea as 'ridiculous', reported the Daily News.
Hirsch believes that outlawing pornography could not happen, saying that 'legislating morality never works.'
Mitt Romney Was A High School Gay-Bashing Bully
David Badash
May 10, 2012
thenewcivilrightsmovement.com
Mitt Romney, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, was a gay-bashing high school bully who said, “Atta girl,” to effeminate boys and shockingly had a days-long emotional attack that culminated with him pinning down a gay classmate and cutting off his bleached-blond long hair. Governor Romney claims he has no memory of any of these incidents that date back to 1965, according to a lengthy and heart-wrenching exposé in today’s Washington Post.
An excerpt: John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.
“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.
“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”
“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”
The Post article concludes with an emotional note about John Lauber:
He came out as gay to his family and close friends and led a vagabond life, taking dressage lessons in England and touring with the Royal Lipizzaner Stallion riders. His hair thinned as he aged, and in the winter of 2004 he returned to Seattle, the closest thing he had to a base. He died there of liver cancer that December. He kept his hair blond until he died, said his sister Chris. “He never stopped bleaching it.”
But Lauber was not the only target for the gay-bashing Mitt Romney. In an English class, Gary Hummel, who was a closeted gay student at the time, recalled that his efforts to speak out in class were punctuated with Romney shouting, “Atta girl!” In the culture of that time and place, that was not entirely out of the norm. Hummel recalled some teachers using similar language.
Saul, Romney’s campaign spokeswoman, said the candidate has no recollection of the incident. Yes, it was 1965, a different time, when these acts of anti-gay bullying were not just ignored or accepted, but often condoned. But the handful of Mitt Romney’s classmates who either participated or didn’t stop it, not only remember his gay-bashing, they feel terrible about it. For Romney to not remember, and thus not be affected by his own gay-bashing, speaks volumes about his character.
The Romney campaign, and others, no doubt would say it was 1965. It doesn’t matter. But Mitt Romney married his wife Ann in 1969, just four years later, and that certainly matters in his campaign. And they have on their campaign website a video that shows Mitt’s life, beginning with 1968, with the note: “I think there’s one word that would be high on my list of a few words you would describe Mitt with. It would be trust. I think the qualities Mitt would bring to the Oval Office would be integrity, intelligence, an ability to see a problem and see a solution and make people recognize that he has those leadership qualities that would unite many people.” – Ann Romney
Anti-Obama Artist Strikes Again Jon McNaughton, the artist who depicted Obama burning the Constitution, has a new painting. He's aiming to sell it to the highest bidder, between $50,000 and $100,000.
Michael Hastings
BuzzFeed
Jun 22, 2012
Conservative artist Jon McNaughton has released a new painting, the latest in his controversial series of anti-Obama artwork. The Empowered Man—which shows President Obama watching in horror as a thirty something white male, standing in front of the White House holds up the U.S. constitution in one hand and a wad of cash in the other—was released this week.
“I wanted this painting to reflect the hope many Americans are having that we can steer our country back on track,” McNaughton emailed BuzzFeed. “I used real models and it took a couple of months to paint.”
The Empowered Man is a follow up to another painting called Wake Up America, which included inflammatory images of President Obama standing in a rain shower of corporate cash while American workers trudged along in chains. Both paintings feature the same “everyman” character, who in McNaughton’s telling, has chosen to break off the chains of an oppressive federal government.
The Provo, Utah based painter has struck artistic gold with his series, tapping into a widespread libertarian distrust of Washington, as well as a deep-seated hatred of President Obama, which critics says is animated by racial bias.
McNaughton has now sold two works of art for six figure sums this year, an almost unheard of feat in the art world. One painting was purchased by his most prominent art patron, Fox News host Sean Hannity. He’s currently taking bids on the painting, and expects to get between $50,000 and $100,000 for the original canvas of the Empowered Man.
"Look at those Republican debates. I must say, I’m literally, literally feeling embarrassed as an American when I see those people all right. One of them sounds like a medieval Savanarola, another one is trying to explain why he has some of his wealth hidden in the Cayman Islands, and someone else would go back to 1780 and then there is someone who is using his credentials as a repudiated Speaker of the Congress to be president. I mean, this is just…embarrassing. "
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but all of them, except paul, are just crazy on cuba
