McCain begins to take off the gloves

Look at the smile on his face. This is beginning to get very interesting.

Why Rudy? Why?

Is this for real?


This is becoming routine? D'oh!


New York City's biggest tough guy doesn't even wear the pants?

Mitt flip flops on Houston?

So I see that Mitt goes to Houston to panhandle. Oh, even trust fund babies worth a quarter billion are permitted to do that. What Makes this so different?



Well for starters, there's this:

This is what happens when you don't have zoning.

-Mitt Romney after a visit to Houston, Texas

Romney attack site on Thompson update

The Google news count has doubled in the past 24 hours 327.

Slick Willard Passes The Buck

google news has 129 posts of romney passing the buck on his gutter sniping attack site on thompson. lots have weighed in, but where the heck is matt drudge?!: (update: the count is now at 176. Romney's gonna have a rough day tomorrow)

redstate
msnbc
cbs
cbn
realclearpolitics
foxnews
abc
cnn
new york times
the guardian
reuters
forbes
San Francisco Chronicle
washington post
townhall
newsmax
newsday
usatoday
boston globe

McCain lays the smackdown in NH

Raise your hand if you think John McCain won the NH debate:




GO JOHN!

Romney's Third Stool Problem

So Mitt Romney's final stool problem regards the third leg of his stool: strong families. We all know Mitt wheeled out his wife to cozy up to Planned Parenthood so he'd have pro-choice cred when running for office in Massachusetts. But what kind of husband when pressed about such a donation says this:

"Her positions are not terribly relevant to my campaign."

I just had my three year anniversary last month. Guess what? In these 37 months, I've learned that's about the dumbest thing a husband can say about his wife. And Mitt said this while speaking face to face with a New York Times reporter.

Romney's stool has some major problems. Could it be he's not Reagan after all?

Mitt Romney's Second Stool Problem

Romney's second leg in his three legged stool is a strong economy. So why on earth did he say the EU added 3 million jobs in the same amount of time it took the United States to add 30 million jobs?

Romney's Economic Miracle

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney erred when he claimed U.S. job growth had been nearly 17 times faster than that of Europe:

Romney: We are the largest economy in the world. We’ve added – during the time Europe added 3 million jobs, we’ve added about 50 million jobs in this country.

That miraculous-sounding statistic is way off. It has taken since the end of 1978 for total employment in the U.S. to grow by 50 million jobs, according to official figures kept by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But total employment for the 15 core members of the European Union (those who joined before 2004) grew by well over 33 million between 1978 and 2005, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Europe has added even more jobs since. In fact, the 27 current EU nations added nearly 3 million new jobs last year alone, according to the EU statistics agency Eurostat. That's well over the 2.3 million jobs created last year in the United States.

Romney was misquoting an outdated and highly dubious figure, which was used by an author who no longer stands behind it. Romney cited a 2005 article in The American Enterprise magazine, published by the pro-business American Enterprise Institute. In the article, titled "America Still Beckons," author Joel Kotkin wrote: "Since the 1970s America has created some 57 million new jobs, compared to just 4 million in Europe (with most of those in government)." Kotkin told FactCheck.org he wouldn’t use the figure today.

We concur. The 4 million figure is a somewhat garbled version of what another author, Karl Zinsmeister, had written in another American Enterprise article from 2002, “Old And In The Way (Decline and Fall of Europe).” Zinsmeister put the figure at 5 million – not 4 million or 3 million – and the time period as "since 1970," rather than Kotkin's "since the 1970s," which implies a somewhat more recent time. “I don't know how it got changed," Kotkin said. In any case Kotkin told us it was his sense that Zinsmeister's 5 million figure referred mainly to Germany and France, not to all 15 pre-2004 European Union members, let alone the 27 current EU members. In any case, it refers to statistics covering years prior to 2002. “This was an old number,” Kotkin said. His advice: “I would not use that.”

Mitt Romney's Stool Sample Problem

Hugh Hewitt traded his credibility as a right-wing pundit for a pair of Mitt Romney pom poms. For the latest blatant example, look no further than this exchange with Hugh and Willard:

Hugh Hewitt: What is…do you have a target for GDP expenditure on defense matters?

Mitt Romney: For me, the target is we’re going to reach about 4%, and I think you’re going to see us hit the 4% level. I think we need to hit that level. I don’t think we have to sustain that level forever, but we’ve dropped below that. It used to be as high as 6% during the time when Ronald Reagan was president. Of course, Bill Clinton pulled back the scale of the military, pulled back the spending on our equipment. We have been underinvesting in equipment and maintenance now for a long, long time, and we’re going to have to rebuild our capacity.

In Hugh's warped mind, this actually makes sense. oof.

Now we all know Romney touts his stool, or to be more precise, his three legged stool. One of the three legs: strong military.

"GREAT," the passive conservative passerby may say. "I too want a strong military"

What's wrong with that? ROMNEY... HAS... A... STOOL... SAMPLE (which he pegged at 4%)... PROBLEM (see page 140)...

For me, the target is we’re going to reach about 4%

Read a book Willard. Spending for 2007 is projected to be 4.1%! And the country has been at 4% for the previous two years. What's more, spending is projected to increase in 2008. Perhaps even more baffling is that Romney considers spending 3% of the GDP on the military to be dismantl[ing] it. So in conclusion, 3%=dismantling; and a cut from 4.1% to 4=making the military strong.

No wonder McCain took you to task on your legendary parsing of words in the latest Foxnews debate:


Romney waffling on Iraq (specifically the surge) puts the Waffle House to shame:

Ouch...

Fred announces