Romney takes campaign etch-a-sketch way downmarket

AP/Romney scrawls his meandering lie on a whiteboard in SC

"Name calling to me and somehow by you repeating a number of $716 billion, that you can make that stick when [you say] that figure is being 'stolen' from Medicare, that's not true. You can't just repeat it and make it true, sir."

- Soledad O'Brien, CNN

Willard must tell this lie and it is vital to his divine candidacy that you believe it: President Obama's prescription for Medicaid surgically removes $716 billion from the program in the form of reductions in benefits to seniors.

He is compelled to repeat this lie until hopefully it sinks into the American electorate's consciousness by some sort of osmosis.

Thank you for the job, Mitt Romney

Hey, hey, over there!
It's Job Creator Extraordinaire.
Willard! Outsourced jobs buy fancy hair!

In the video below Willard Romney is thanked by the workers who owe their employment to Mitt's Bain adventures. Of course, every one of the grateful folks are sending those thanks from a variety of countries ... none of which is the United States.

DEVO unleashes Seamus: Don't Roof Rack Me, Bro

Jerry Casales, of DEVO, tells Rolling Stone that in tribute to Seamus and disrespected dogs everywhere, his group has released a web video entitled, "Don't Roof Rack Me, Bro."

The track also comes as Devo's founder and commercial director, Gerald V. Casale, kicks off his Remember Seamus campaign, which is supposed to help "make 2012 the year where animals like Seamus are valued and honesty is praised."

Devo is also helping to back Dogs Against Romney, with Casale designing a special edition shirt for the group. Casale is also involved in an upcoming smartphone game called "The Crate Escape: Seamus Unleashed," which sees release on August 26th, otherwise known as National Dog Day.

Ryan: Let them eat corn!!

Unless you're someone who makes the state fair circuit a regular pastime, news that Iowa State Fair's giant pumpkin competition took a huge hit this year is barely a blip on your radar.

Due to a persistent drought and the hottest July in the recorded history of Julys, this year's weigh-in for the behemoth gourds showed significant weight reduction among its top giants. For the first time in years, the winner clocked in at under 1,000 pounds.

As though to soften the competitive blow, farmer Dan Carlson, half of the winning Peterson-Carlson team for the past three years, pointed to farmers facing fates worse than their own, asking, "Have you seen the corn crop lately?”

It was among all this talk of less than super-sized pumpkins and drought and devastated corn crops that Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan came to stump for votes.

Mitt proves his campaign stops DO go better with coke

Mitt Romney held a campaign event Monday evening at a Miami juice shop owned by a convicted cocaine trafficker, according to a report on the CBS News web site.

 Romney appeared at El Palacio de los Jugos, which is owned by Reinaldo Bermudez. Court records show that Bermudez pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine in 1999 and served three years in federal prison.

Stumping for now-elusive Florida votes after his pick of Paul Ryan as his running mate, Willard and Marco Rubio managed to pick the one juice joint in all of Miami belonging to a guy who can't even vote for either due to his felony conviction and Florida law.

And it wasn't just you regular old campaign stop either. The Romney campaign was actually memorializing the visit by filming a political campaign ad at the juice bar. Bermudez was busted for shipping nearly 500 pounds of coke concealed in containers filled with fish that were imported from Trinidad.

The two guys seem to have common ground in their affinity for tiny Caribbean islands: Romney has money hidden in Bermuda to avoid US taxes; Bermudez got busted for shipping cocaine from a nearby south Caribbean island. Guess campaigning is a lot more fun when you can swap stories of solidarity concerning your off-shore activities.

But it's all good, Bermudez notes.

"Here in Miami there are a lot people with money who have had problems with the law."

Whoa, dude, keep your mitts off my offshore account

Watch the pained expression on Willard Romney's face as he listens to new soul mate Paul Ryan put in harm's way the millions he's squirreled away overseas as the realization hits that he forgot to get that goshdarned prenup signed.

 "What we're saying is, take away the tax shelters that are uniquely enjoyed by people in the top tax brackets so they can't shelter as much money from taxation, that should lower tax rates for everybody to make America more competitive."

OOPS!

The Wall Street Journal: Our advice is that Mr. Romney go on offense on Medicare. He could hit Mr. Obama with ads in Florida and elsewhere ...

"Americans don't believe GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney hit a home run with his choice of Paul Ryan as a running mate, a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, with more of the public giving him lower marks than high ones."

"Only Palin, then the governor of Alaska, and Quayle, a two-term senator from Indiana, were rated lower than Ryan."

"Only Dan Quayle in a 1988 Harris Poll of likely voters was viewed less positively than Ryan, with 52% rating Quayle as a "fair" or "poor" vice presidential choice.

Pulling back the curtain on the GOP flim-flam men

One must admire the sheer hubris of a political party that touts an alleged belief in small government yet turn into American Hoggers whenever they get their hands on the country's coffers. Or engages in a level of household espionage so great, it attempts to control  individual bodily functions, except, of course, any required to pull a trigger.

That's the modern Republican Party ... all poke, no policy.

Well, that's not completely true. There are some GOP policies that are etched in stone: line the pockets of the country's wealthiest citizens is one; screw the middle-class voters they keep ignorant by withdrawing access to education then convincing them to vote for them is the other. Tax breaks for the top 2-percent ... encouraging businesses to decimate wages by lighting the exits as they head off-shore ... hoggishly banking the big bucks with friends leaving just scraps for workers who invested in that wealth through sweat equity and hard work based on their faith in a broken social contract.  

These are the immutable Republican policies.

Now the titular head of the Party of Pigs has named himself a running mate ... a man whose economic policies are so debase and cruel, his own church in a series of letters has condemned them as moral failures and a group of nuns took to a bus in protest.

Happy Days are here again! Ryan joins the Willard ticket

The 1 percent can now pop that Shipwrecked 1907 Heidsieck bubbly they've been saving for a happy occasion now that Willard Galt Romney has picked little Richie Rich Ryan to join his of out-of-touch team of whiners. Back to the future we go.

Pilgrim Willard crashes campaign into a Plymouth Rock

 OMG.This might just be the moment Mitt Romney lost the election.Wow. politico.com/news/stories/0…
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) August 8, 2012

What mind-blowingly awesome utterance could Willard's brilliant team have issued that sent arch Conservative Erick son of Erick of Redstate into such a twitter? Oh, this:

 Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul, responding to a harsh new super PAC ad featuring a man who blames Bain Capital for his uninsured wife’s death, broke new ground for the campaign by praising Romney’s health insurance mandate.

 As word spread throughout the Wingnutia blogosphere that Romeny spokeswoman Andrea Saul dared speak these words, "To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Gov. Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care." Ears of the Republican's base perked up on hearing the attack command.

Willard gives the Jewish kibbutz swift kick in the teeth

Apparently feeling his foreign ventures weren't really terrible enough, Mitt the Mouth took a slam on the kibbutz, the collective farming model that was central to the early economic and political life of Israel.

At a fundraiser at Maggiano’s Little Italy in downtown Chicago, Romney told supporters that American individualism is nothing like a collective, a kibbutz or "some little entity."

“It’s individuals and their entrepreneurship which have driven America. What America is not is a collective where we all work in a kibbutz or we all in some little entity,” Romney told his gathered supporters.  

After having praised Israel's culture on his ill-fated visit there and simultaneously angering Palestinians with remarks that prompted their chief negotiator to exclaim, “Oh my god, this man needs a lot of education. What he said about the culture is racism,” Team Romney seems to have realized back home that they missed a country on their Insultathon.

Romney's comments Tuesday were not overlooked in the Jewish press, with one writer at Jewish Daily Press noting that such comments call into question the Republican presumptive nominee's basic understanding of Israel's culture.

 In the quote, Romney contrasts the pursuit of dreams and the building of successful business with the kibbutz, the collective farming model that was central to the early economic and political life of Israel.

It’s hard to separate Israel’s economic culture from the country’s kibbutznik roots, so today’s comment seems to make the culture statement look even more like a gaffe. 

Well, no oversea troop visit ... but review from Economist

Yo, Mitt! Where da troops on that overseas junket?

After declaring in 2011 the U.S. is operating under a "peacetime economy," Willard Romney crafted an overseas trip that seemed intent on erasing our nation's wartime efforts by ignoring the people still fighting and dying in his Forgotten War.

Romney flies over troops based overseas; stops to meet none of them.

Romney might have mitigated his dazzling display of stunning foreign policy ignorance by spending some time on the ground meeting troops serving overseas. He simply flew over our military stationed at any  number of foreign outposts; stops to meet none of them.

Imagine the difference in media outcomes  had the would-be Commander-in-Chief set aside  time with service members rather than scandal-ridden bankers.

It's downright impossible to stick your foot in your over-privileged mouth when, rather than trying to impress the elites and your crazies back home, you're listening to down-to-earth troops. And you wouldn't have had to shake up your panderthon fundraising much to have made it happen.