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Hypocrisy alert: John McCain supported Condoleeza Rice who misled the public on WMD, causing thousands to die, but now attacks Susan Rice.

Remember when Condoleezza Rice misled the public about Iraq’s WMDs and over 4,000 Americans died? John McCain doesn’t seem to. McCain is trying to sell the idea that Susan Rice appearing on TV to tell the American people what the intelligence community had ascertained about Libya on September 18 was wrong. She should have chosen not to speak on the subject without more certainty, he and Lindsay Graham claim.

Yet, Susan Rice’s statement made it clear that things were not certain. Here, once again, is her statement to the media on September 18 (emphasis mine):

RICE: Well, first of all, Chris, we are obviously investigating this very closely. The FBI has a lead in this investigation. The information, the best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack… Obviously, we will wait for the results of the investigation and we don’t want to jump to conclusions before then. But I do think it’s important for the American people to know our best current assessment.

Later, when the intelligence community updated their information, we learned that perhaps things didn’t go down as they first thought. Here’s a shocker for Republicans: Now there are reports saying that it might have had something to do with the video after all. The lesson here is that it takes time to gather the information. The Obama administration wanted to give the public the information it had on that date in September, and they continued to update us as they learned more. You can’t know what you don’t know yet. This is not hard to understand. (more…)

Makes you wonder what on Earth McCain saw in the 23 tax returns Romney gave him…

John McCain and Mitt Romney share a secret. It’s 23 years of Mitt’s tax returns.

Mitt gave them to McCain in 2008 when McCain, then the GOP presidential nominee, was vetting VP candidates.

This time around, Mitt has won the GOP nomination, but now he’s hiding those 23 years of returns from the American people. He handed them to McCain in exchange for a VP bid. But Mitt is denying that information to the American people when he’s asking them for something more important – the presidency.

Mitt, a quarter billionaire, disclosed his federal payments to fellow one percenter McCain, who owns so many houses he couldn’t count them. To America’s middle class riffraff, Mitt has divulged significantly less — a partial return for 2010 and a promise of the 2011 return when he finishes it.

Ann Romney told ABC reporter Robin Roberts last week that the riffraff need far less to determine who will be their President than McCain did to pick a VP. Here’s what Ann said:

“We have given all you people need to know and understand about our financial situation and about how we live our life.”

You people. That would be the uppity riffraff who dare to question the rich Romneys.

Mitt has explained all this before. He’ll tell voters what’s good for them. And what’s good for them is part of one year’s return and maybe another year later. That’ll do it. Here’s how he put it to CNN:

“People always want to get more. We’re putting out what’s required plus more. Those are the two years that people will have, and that’s all that’s necessary for people to understand something about my finances.”

That’s all that’s necessary. Got it? Mitt told you. Now go home and shut up about it.

Mitt might do better with middle class voters if he got down off his high-steppin’ dressage horse. But if he did that, he might never get taxpayers to repay him the $77,000 he lost on that horse. That $77,000 loss, an amount larger than most Americans earn in a year, was revealed in the partial return Romney did release. No wonder he’s reluctant to disclose more.

Ann Romney described Mitt’s refusal to give additional years this way on ABC:

“There are so many things that will be open again for more attack. And you just want to give more material for more attack. And that’s really – that’s just the answer.”

The answer, Ann Romney said, is that there are so many things in those secret returns that would provoke criticism. And the quarter billionaire running for president don’t countenance no criticism from riffraff. (more…)

The booing of Mitt Romney at the NAACP convention is just the latest hilarious result of Republican presidents and presidential candidates straining to court the African-American vote at the annual event.

Here’s a trip down Memory Lane…

1981: President Ronald Reagan Pretends He Will Enforce Civil Rights Laws

In June 1981, the new president sought to reassure the NAACP that his conservative revolution did not mean a rollback of civil rights, saying, “My administration will root out any case of government discrimination against minorities and uphold and enforce the laws that protect them. I emphasize that we will not retreat on the nation’s commitment to equal treatment of all citizens.”

Of course, what Reagan then did was root out the people in government who actually wanted to prosecute civil rights violations. George Mason University Prof. Michael Fauntroy covered the Reagan civil rights enforcement record in his essay, “Conservatives Roll Back the Clock on Civil Rights Enforcement”:

The dismantling of Federal civil rights enforcement under Reagan took two forms occurring concomitantly. First, was the freezing or reducing of funding for agencies charged with enforcement of federal civil rights laws and regulations. Rather than overtly end these programs and agencies, the Reagan administration sought to starve them to prevent them from doing their work. In this way, they could largely achieve their goal of civil rights deregulation without seeking the abolition of the programs and agencies, thereby providing some political cover. Second, was the hiring of individuals to lead these organizations, or take high-ranking positions therein, who were ideologically pre-disposed to not enforce federal civil rights laws and regulations as aggressively as their predecessors… (more…)

Republicans jammed together a mess of old, failed and vague schemes and called it a jobs bill. Sen. John McCain conceded the reason for the rehash:  “Part of it is in response to the president saying we don’t have a proposal.”

They still don’t.  This despite the fact that they promised voters during their campaign to take control of the U.S. House one year ago that they’d create jobs. That they’d focus on jobs. That nothing was more important to them than jobs.

Now, what they’ve offered instead of actual jobs is a polyglot of GOP talking points. It’s certainly no vision to move the country forward. It’s a plot to set the country back – to repeal the health care law that will soon help provide coverage for the nearly 50 million Americans without insurance, to rescind the Wall Street reform law designed to prevent another financial sector-caused meltdown, and to thwart regulations, like those that stopped distribution of listeria-infected cantaloupe that killed 25.

GOP Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio called the Republican polyglot a “pro-growth proposal to create the environment for jobs.” It is, in fact, a pro-business proposal to permit corporations to destroy the environment for humans.

It is another GOP ploy to appease, accommodate and absolve corporations. It is another GOP ruse to firmly establish in America an economy designed for, dedicated to and directed by corporations rather than a just economy controlled by and beneficial to the 99 percent.

Republicans offered up their “Jobs Through Growth Act” mishmash after the GOP minority in the Senate wielded the filibuster again to block a vote on President Obama’s $447 billion American Jobs Act, a measure that even Republican economists determined would create 1.9 million jobs and reduce the nation’s aching 9.1 percent unemployment by as much as 1 percent.

The Republican measure, by contrast, could hurt the economy, according to Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody’s Analytics, an independent firm whose chief economist advised the McCain presidential campaign. Here is what Faucher said:

“Should we look at regulations and make sure they make sense from a cost benefit standpoint? Certainly. Should we reduce the budget deficit over the long run? Certainly.  But in the short term, demand is weak, businesses aren’t hiring, and consumers aren’t spending. That’s the cause of the current weakness, and Republican Senate proposals aren’t going to address that in the short term. In fact, they could be harmful in the short run if the focus is on cutting spending.”

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By Steven Capozzola
Media Director, Alliance for American Manufacturing

Hey everyone: QUICK TRIVIA QUESTION: Where are iPads and iPhones manufactured?…

Need we even tell you the answer? Aren’t all of you quite obviously aware that these omnipresent, hi-tech gizmos are “Made in China?”

Brace yourself: In an interview on ABC This Week, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., stated that iPads and iPhones are manufactured in the United States.

Apparently, McCain was trying to make the point that the U.S. makes cool hi-tech goods and just needs free trade agreements to gain more overseas market access.

Unfortunately, the good Senator is wrong on several counts:

1. In addition to iPads and iPhones, China manufactures a tremendous amount of hi-tech equipment.  Those products are NOT made in USA. (more…)

Zach Carter
Economics Editor, AlterNet  

Do today’s economic conservatives actually want to live in a functional society, or are they striving for an economy that runs on Monopoly Money? 

NPR’s Planet Money recently did a fun segment on the classic board game and its relationship to actual economics, featuring commentary from a couple of actual economists. Russell Roberts, an economist at the notoriously conservative George Mason University, argued that Monopoly could be improved with a new tax feature. If successful Monopoly players had to transfer some of their wealth to their less-prosperous competitors, Roberts said we could turn children off to the evils of progressive taxation. Here’s the money quote: “You could get kids to resent taxes at an even earlier age.” 

James Kwak does a nice job emphasizing that taxes actually do something useful for society, but I think Roberts’ point creates a deeper and more obvious dilemma. Roberts is arguing that the basic goals of real, living human beings are essentially the same as those of a Monopoly player. A Monopoly player wins by pushing everyone else into total poverty in order to control all resources and establish complete economic domination over his peers. People in the real world who are fueled by such motivations are not ordinary, model citizens–they are completely insane. Life is not a quest to get our hands on as much stuff as we can so our neighbors don’t get to it first. A society that allows a few people to establish supreme economic dominion over all others is not a society at all–it’s just a bunch of nasty brutes trying to destroy each other. (more…)

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Right-wing radio gabbers, anti-worker Republican politicians and conservative think tanks are at it again. This time they charge that the Jones Act, a U.S. maritime law, is the culprit standing in the way of Gulf clean-up efforts. The Jones Act says that ships operating between U.S. domestic ports—for example from New York to Miami—be crewed, built, owned and flagged American. Most if not all other major maritime nations have laws that basically require the same thing.

Those behind the campaign attacking the Jones Act have two aims: To discredit the federal response to the disaster and to attack unions. They falsely state that the Jones Act is keeping ships that fly foreign flags from the Gulf operations and that the Obama administration has turned away offers of aid from many nations because the maritime unions want to skim up all the disaster-related profits.

Not true. In fact, the Obama administration has not turned down any offers of assistance because of the Jones Act. According to FactCheck.Org:

The Jones Act has yet to be an issue in the response efforts. The Deepwater Horizon response team reported in a June 15 press release that there are 15 foreign flagged ships currently participating in the oil spill cleanup. None of them needed a waiver because the Jones Act does not apply. (more…)