Rush Limbaugh would like to make a clarification. A day after creating a stir by saying he is ” ashamed of America ,” the conservative radio host talked in-depth Friday about exactly what he meant by that comment. Rush Limbaugh: The Left Has Won “The Left has beaten us,” Limbaugh lamented. “They have created far more low-information, unaware, uneducated people than we’ve been able to keep up with… “I’ve always had a Civics 101 view of the country: People get what they want, they vote what they want, and they get the way they vote.” Limbaugh went on to say Democrats “control the education system… pop culture, movies, TV and books” and they do it by creating “dependency,” scaring voters into believing the Right will take it all away if elected. “I’m fed up with it,” he concluded. “I can’t do it anymore…. The whole thing is shamefully absurd. I don’t know how else to say it.” What do you think of Limbaugh’s comments? Has the Left really won? Is there hope remaining for conservatives? And should both sides celebrate the possibility that Rush really is done?
President Barack Obama said on Al Sharpton’s radio show that the one thing holding the Republican party together these days is its love of rich people. Obama: Love of Rich Binds GOP Together Obama said on Al Sharpton’s radio show: “My sense is that their basic view is that nothing is important enough to raise taxes on wealthy individuals or corporations.” “They would prefer to see these kinds of cuts that could slow down our recovery over closing tax loopholes. That’s the thing that binds their party together at this point.” Whoa, tell us how you really feel, B!! Delivering such a blunt assessment right now, as opposed to during campaign season, seems more than a bit unwise, with the “sequestration” looming. On March 1, massive spending cuts will kick in unless Obama, the Democratic-controlled Senate and the GOP-led House resolve the current budget impasse. Even as he contacted House Speaker John Boehner and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell Thursday to talk about the budget, Obama is holding is ground. “Unfortunately, I think Republicans right now are so dug in on this notion of never raising taxes that it becomes difficult for them to see an obvious answer right in front of them,” Obama added. Wisely or not, he’s steadfastly sticking to a position that many GOP legislators have rejected when it comes to resolving the current budget stalemate. He said 75 percent of Americans support his “balanced approach” of tax increases and spending cuts, criticizing the GOP for favoring only spending cuts. At this point, both sides seem willing to let sequestration kick in on principle, rather than compromise. Time will tell if they blink – or what the consequences might be.
Former Utah Governor and 2012 presidential candidate Jon Huntsman is speaking out in favor of same-sex marriage, saying it’s actually a very conservative idea. In an op-ed for The American Conservative, Huntsman writes about pushing for civil unions and equality for the LGBTQ community as Governor of Utah. Now, the Republican adds, it’s time for his party to step up. “Conservatives should start to lead again on this issue and push their states to join the nine others that allow all their citizens to marry,” he writes. “There is nothing conservative about denying other Americans the ability to forge that same relationship with the person they love.” “This is both the right thing to do and will better allow us to confront the real choice our country is facing: a choice between the Founders’ vision of a limited government that empowers free markets, with a level playing field giving opportunity to all, and a world of crony capitalism and rent-seeking by the most powerful economic interests.” Huntsman’s gay marriage stance is not only surprising in how it’s framed – as a conservative concept – but a symbolic step forward for both Republicans and Mormons. Spencer W. Clark, executive director of Mormons for Marriage Equality, said: “Over the last several years we have been seeing more and more Mormons from across the political spectrum come out in support of marriage equality.” “I am thrilled that Gov. Huntsman has taken this stand and hope that it will prompt other Mormons to join in building stronger families by ensuring that same-sex couples and their children have access to the same protection and benefits under the law that my family has.” Huntsman’s advocacy comes a day after a new ad from the Respect for Marriage Coalition debuted a bipartisan ad featuring conservative and liberal leaders. The TV ad, which began airing Wednesday, features President Obama, Colin Powell, and Dick Cheney. Former First Lady Laura Bush was removed from the ad. Same-sex marriage : Support Oppose View Poll »
U.S. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is clearly worried about running for reelection in 2014 against actress / Democratic activist Ashley Judd. He’s posted ANOTHER ad attacking her and she’s not even running yet! Ashley Judd Attack Ad – Obama’s Kentucky Candidate McConnell’s ad goes after Judd and three other possible Democratic challengers pretty hard, labeling them collectively “ Obama’s Kentucky Candidate .” The premise is that Obama is holding some sort of town hall meeting to pick Sen. McConnell’s opponent, and he goes from one person to the next. The video editing is clever and the result is humorous, no doubt. First up is Ed Marksberry, a former congressional candidate, then former U.S. Ambassador to Sweden Matthew Barzun, followed by Ashley Judd. Then President Obama calls on “the young lady with the pink, white blouse right there…. Wait until the microphone comes up introduce yourself.” Next thing you know, there’s Judd at the podium at last year’s Democratic convention, saying, “From the Volunteer State, I proudly stand to nominate … “ “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” goes Obama in the reaction shot, cut to make it appear as if he disapproves of the fact that she’s actually a resident of Tennessee. The 44-year-old was a 2012 Democratic National Convention delegate from the Volunteer State, not from Kentucky, where she was born and raised. The ad goes on to make it abundantly clear that possible Senate candidate Ashley Judd is not a Kentucky resident and is close with Barack Obama. Kentucky went big for Mitt Romney last fall, so it’s not a bad strategy … but it begs the question: Why is McConnell running this ad so early, if at all? Why did he run the previous ad attacking her alone , when she hasn’t even said if she’s running in an election that takes place 21 months from now? Well, only 17 percent of Bluegrass State voters said they would be sure to support McConnell – the GOP’s highest-ranking U.S. Senator – in 2014. Even in a conservative state, he is LITERALLY the least popular member of the entire Senate, a walking embodiment of partisan gridlock and obstruction. It’s possible that leaves an opening for Judd. Al Cross, associate professor of journalism at the University of Kentucky and political columnist, writes: “It’s safe to say that if she ran, she could put in big money, raise a lot more and perhaps put McConnell under unprecedented scrutiny at a time when he’s not all that popular.” In short, expect more ads like this … for the next two years.
Fox News Journalist Slams Media For Not Addressing Racism In Politics Fox News journalist and former NPR employee Juan Williams recently took the time to do something we rarely see done on the often one-sided network: speak out against racism in politics . Williams held nothing back in a recent piece putting the media on blast for overly vilifying black Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after he recently made a joke to his colleagues in court, while over looking the far more blatantly racist actions of other politicians on a regular basis. via Fox News Last week during an oral argument, Justice Thomas appeared to make a joke to his fellow members of the Supreme Court. His words were not completely audible to the people in the court. When it was noted that the defendant’s counsel went to Yale, Thomas’s alma mater, Justice Thomas apparently said something to this effect: If the defendant’s lawyer was a Yale Law graduate maybe he didn’t have adequate counsel. Ha! Ha! The idea that black people – liberal or conservative – are not allowed to speak out as independent thinkers is apparently a truth for a lot of liberals and conservatives. Blacks are supposed to stay in neatly defined political boxes. However, as the never-ending assault on Justice Thomas’s integrity shows, the deepest vein of intolerance is to be found on the Left for minority conservatives. Isn’t about time for someone in the mainstream media called out the haters and the race hustlers? Williams then went on to assert that black people were singled out for voting President Obama into office in overwhelming numbers, while little attention was given to the fact that a large majority of white people also voted against President Obama. He then shared his own personal struggles with being a black conservative. The fact is that despite the caricatures of black political thought there is a wide variety of opinion among blacks just as there is among whites, Hispanics and Asians. Yes, it is true that more than 90 percent of black Americans voted for President Obama. It is also true that close to 60 percent of white voted against President Obama. But that is not reflective of the variety of political views of black or white Americans. When I ask why civil rights leaders fail to take on gangster rappers who glamorize violence I was labeled as ‘Not-Authentically-Black.’ As one NPR executive put it to me – just before I was fired from NPR – the old guard of white liberals at NPR did not appreciate a black man with conservative social views and some conservative friends. When will the mainstream media call attention to this type of ‘intolerance’ that is absolutely racist thinking at its worst? Williams points out what so many people have been questioning throughout much of Obama’s presidency, and before. Racism in politics alive and well…..and the call for attention to this topic is long over due.
Another day, another ignorant Obama hating racist in the news. This time trying to blame Obama’s health care program for his hater ways. Via Salt Lake Tribune reports : First, the owner of a smoothie bar in Vernal is charging liberals more for a cup of juice . Now, a Cedar City business owner who let two workers go because of Obamacare costs said he picked the pair in large part because of their support for President Obama. Terry Lee, owner of Terry Lee Forensics, showed his support for the Vernal smoothie bar’s practice of trying to recoup the costs it says are incurred because of liberal policies by posting in the comments section of a story about it in Thursday’s Salt Lake Tribune. “Love it. We had to let two employees go to cover new Obongocare [sic] costs and increased taxes,” Lee wrote. “Found two Obongo supporters and gave them the news yesterday. They wanted the idiot in the Whitehouse [sic], they reap the benefits.” Contacted by The Tribune Thursday, Lee said he picked the two employees in large part on the basis of their politics. “They were Obama supporters. We just knew they were,” Lee said. “I implied that sort of tongue and cheek [in the comments section] but there were other issues, too. They were not top performers.” “Is your political affiliation protected?” he added, explaining that he thought what he did was not illegal. “I don’t believe it is, but I don’t know.” Federal and Utah law do not prevent private employers from firing employees on the basis of political affiliation. The one exception is if they are a government employee. Of course it’s all BS because The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act imposes penalties on companies that don’t provide a healthcare plan only if they have over 50 employees, meanwhile his company only has nine!!! SMH meanwhile he wants to claim there were other reasons for firing these people while he uses racial slurs about the President. GTFOHWTBS! Action Sports Photography / Shutterstock.com
A visibly distraught U.S. President Barack Obama fought back tears as he addressed the media following this morning’s Connecticut school shooting tragedy. “The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old,” Obama said during a national TV address. Obama Cries During Speech on Connecticut Shooting After pausing to compose himself for five whole seconds, he added, “They had their entire lives ahead of them: birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.” Then the president wiped the corner of his eye. The massacre allegedly carried out by Adam Lanza (not his brother, Ryan Lanza , as was first reported) is enough to make anyone sick, but especially parents of young kids. For Obama, who has two daughters, Malia, 14, and Sasha, 11, with wife Michelle, the thought of 18 children slain at an elementary school kid particularly close. Obama said that, like other parents across the country, he and wife Michelle will hug their children tonight, and tell them how much they love them. “But there are families in Connecticut who cannot do that tonight,” he lamented. “And they need all of us right now. In the hard days to come, that community needs us to be at our best as Americans. And I will do everything in my power as president to help.” Obama cited the scenes of other shootings – a shopping mall in Oregon, a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, a movie theater in Colorado and “a street corner in Chicago.” “These children are our children,” he said, and “our hearts are broken today.” The president added, “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” Our hearts and thoughts go out to the victims and their families, as well.
It’s easy to draw parallels to President Obama in Steven Spielberg ’s historical Oscar hopeful Lincoln , a portrait of the 16th American President who stood tall, orated well, united a divided nation across color and party lines, and was re-elected to office for a second term. But Spielberg insists he had no specific political agenda in mind when the long-gestating Lincoln came to fruition. “I would have been very glad to have made Lincoln in the year 2000,” Spielberg explained recently in Los Angeles, “the year after I met [author Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln was adapted by Lincoln scribe Tony Kushner]. It took her a couple years to write the book. It took us more than a couple years to get the screenplay written. So, I wasn’t waiting for a certain time.” The divided politics of Lincoln’s presidency, as explored at length in Spielberg’s film, find pointed parallels in President Obama’s tenure in the White House: A President with a humanistic streak tasked with bringing war to an end, Lincoln is depicted wrestling with military crises, huge wartime losses of life, moral questions of personal freedoms, Constitutional history-making, all-too eager rivals, and, notably, his own family issues at home. Still, Spielberg says the Obama-Lincoln parallels have nothing to do with it. “At one point I flirted with coming out on the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, but we weren’t ready to make the picture then,” said Spielberg, who spent years wooing star Daniel Day-Lewis and had even resigned himself to not making Lincoln without the actor. “People say ‘Oh, you made it because of what’s happening in politics today.’ No, we were ready to make it during the Bush administration. It had had nothing to do current politics.” That’s not to say no inference at all should be drawn into Lincoln ’s messaging as a reflection of modern politics; it’s just that, despite “tremendous similarities” between politics in the time of Lincoln and today, reading too much into the details might be confusing because of how much the intervening 14 decades have altered America’s political system. “There’s a lot of confusion about the political ideologies of both parties, [which] have switched 180 degrees in 150 years,” he explained. “It’s just too confusing. Everybody claims Lincoln as their own. And everybody should claim Lincoln as their own, because he represents all of us, and what he did basically provided the opportunities that, that all of us are enjoying today.” So while a theatrical release on Friday should bring President Lincoln and his legend to vivid life in the wake of Tuesday’s Obama re-election, those few extra buffer days allowed Spielberg to get some distance from the real-life Presidential race. “I just wanted people to talk about the film, not talk about the election cycle. So I thought it was safer to let people talk about film during the election cycle in this run-up with ads on TV and posters going up and all that, but the actual debut of the film should happen after the election’s been decided. That was my feeling.” Despite peeling the curtain back on Lincoln — the film reveals intimate glimpses of his home life and career, but leaves ambiguous the fringe theories of his sexuality, as hinted at by Kushner in an interview with Metro — Spielberg is happy to continue letting people talk and wonder at any deeper messages seeded within what he otherwise says was meant only to be a portrait of a great figure in American history. “I’m really excited to see how deeply people will reach to contemporize our film,” he said with a smile, “far beyond how it deserves to be contemporized.” Read more on Lincoln , in select theaters Friday . Lincoln closes the 2012 AFI Fest on Thursday. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
