Romney Doesn’t Understand Why You Can’t Roll Down Windows On A Plane
On Monday, Mitt Romney offered a remedy to the problem that caused his wife’s airplane to land prematurely last week: Allow passengers to roll down the airplane windows.
Ann Romney’s plane wasgrounded Fridayafter the main cabin filled with smoke. The small electrical fire caused no injuries, but apparently did cause the Presidential candidate to forget the dangers of altitude.
“When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly,” hetold the LA Times. “And you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem.”
Air crafts do not open windows because the cabins are pressurized to fly safely at an altitude of tens of thousand feet. Opening a window in an airplane would seriously sicken the passengers and crew.
Romney, u ok?
“I’m very concerned about this very divisive rhetoric the president is using when he continues to talk about ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ and this thing that I think is really contrary to the principles that I mentioned, as far as life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.”
—Representative Allen West (FL-R)
GOP 2012: Equality and Fairness are Anti-American
-Joe
8 Reasons Why Mitt Romney Is More Right Wing Than George W. Bush
thinkprogress.orgDuring the primary season, Mitt Romney was frequently derided by his Republican opponents as a “Massachusetts Moderate.” This isn’t true.
Last week, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee suggested the policies advanced this year by Mitt Romney and the Republicans would be like the “policies of the Bush administration…just updated.”
A close review of Romney’s positions shows that Romney has “updated” George W. Bush’s positions by moving substantially to the right in a number of key areas. As detailed below, compared to this year’s presumptive Republican nominee, Bush looks moderate:
1. Bush passed a huge tax cut plan, mostly benefiting the wealthy. Romney’s tax cut plan is four times larger, more heavily weighted to benefit ultra wealthy.
GEORGE W. BUSH: Passed $2.5 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years, 12.5% benefiting the top 1/10 of 1%. [ThinkProgress, 2/22/12; David Cay Johnston. 3/1/12]
MITT ROMNEY: Proposing $10.7 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years, 33% benefiting the top 1/10 of 1%. [ThinkProgress, 2/22/12; David Cay Johnston. 3/1/12]
2. Bush signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. Romney supports repealing virtually all campaign finance laws.
GEORGE W. BUSH: Signed into law the landmark McCain–Feingold campaign finance reform, which put restrictions on “soft money” and limitations on spending from outside groups. [White House, 03/27/02]
MITT ROMNEY: Strongly defended the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which overturned key provisions McCain–Feingold. Supports repealing virtually all campaign finance laws. [Mitt Romney, 2/18/10; ThinkProgress, 12/21/11]
3. Bush supported comprehensive immigration reform, a path to citizenship for 12 million undocumented immigrants and provisions of the DREAM Act. Romney opposes all of it.
GEORGE W. BUSH: Supported comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for 12 million undocumented immigrants and provisions of the DREAM Act. [Reuters, 6/29/07; White House, 10/24/07]
MITT ROMNEY: Opposes comprehensive immigration reform and opposes providing a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants and the DREAM Act. [Fox News, 04/03/12; ABC, 12/31/12]
4. Bush enacted a historic expansion of Medicare. Romney wants to end Medicare as we know it.
GEORGE W. BUSH: Successfully pushed for a major expansion of Medicare, providing seniors with prescription drug benefits. [CNN, 12/08/03]
MITT ROMNEY: Would end Medicare as we know it by turning into a voucher system. [TNR, 12/9/11]
5. Bush signed a substantial increase to the minimum wage. Romney opposes increasing the minimum wage.
GEORGE W. BUSH: Signed legislation increasing the minimum wage from $5.85 an hour to $7.25 an hour [Employer Advisor, 5/30/07]
MITT ROMNEY: Opposes increasing the minimum wage. [CNBC, 3/5/12]
6. Bush created higher fuel efficiency standards. Romney says even current standards are too high.
GEORGE W. BUSH: Signed higher fuel efficiency standards for cars into law, raising CAFE standards to at least 35 miles per gallon by 2020. [ThinkProgress, 3/25/08]
MITT ROMNEY: Opposes raising CAFE standards, saying existing standards have “hurt domestic automakers.” [Mitt Romney, 2/24/12]
7. Bush acknowledged global warming is caused by humans. Romney says “we don’t know.”
GEORGE W. BUSH: Acknowledged that carbon emissions by humans is causing global warming stating, “I recognize the surface of the earth is warmer and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem.” [NYT, 1/10/07]
MITT ROMNEY: Refuses to acknowledge that carbon emissions by humans is causing global warming, stating “we don’t know what’s causing climate change.” [CBS, 10/28/11]
8. Bush launched one of the biggest land conservation programs in U.S. history. Romney says the federal government owns too much land.
GEORGE W. BUSH: Used his executive authority to create the world’s largest marine preserve and considered “launching one of the biggest conservation programs in U.S. history” without congressional approval. [NPR, 5/23/08]
MITT ROMNEY: Questions the value of federal conservation, saying, “I don’t know why the government owns so much of this land.” [ThinkProgress, 2/2/12]
Romney is positioning himself as the most conservative Republican nominee since Barry Goldwater in 1964.
“The ideas that children and young adults are only capable of digesting mush, or that the only way to discuss sophisticated themes is to include explicit sex and violence are pure hogwash. Young people are capable of fairly sophisticated reasoning, of empathy, and even of significant evil, and many of them can rise to meet fairly high bars as readers... Simply because these novels are also appropriate for younger readers doesn’t mean the ideas in them are stupid or the prose is unworthy. ”
—Alyssa Rosenberg, “Why Snobs Like Joel Stein Are Wrong About Adults and YA Literature”Herman Cain Offers His Fifth Position On Abortion in 17 Days.
thinkprogress.org
Abortion Is ‘Her Choice’: Over the course of one Fox News interview on Oct. 11, Cain insisted that “people shouldn’t be free to abort because if we don’t protect the sanctity of life from conception, we will also start to play God relative to life at the end of life.” But when asked whether a rape victim should have the choice, Cain said, “That’s her choice. That’s not government choice.”
Don’t Tell Women What To Do: On Oct. 19, Cain seemed to further his seemingly pro-choice position. “It’s not the government’s role, or anybody else’s role, to make that decision” on whether a sexual assault victim should seek an abortion, he said. “It ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make. Not me as president.”
A Family Can Have An ‘Illegal’ Abortion: On Oct. 20, Cain tried to shut out the uproar over his confusion: “I am 100 percent pro-life. End of story.” But the very next day, he added another chapter to his position. “Look, abortion should not be legal. That is clear. But if the family made a decision to break the law, that’s that family’s decision. That’s all I’m trying to say,” he said on Fox.
Pro-Life, No Exceptions: In that same interview, Cain finally declared that he was “pro-life from conception, no exceptions.” Apologetic for his “problematic” answers, he stated with finality, “I don’t know how much more I can say that if I am pro-life from conception no exceptions.
Pro-Life, With Exceptions: As noted, Cain’s campaign clarified yesterday that Cain actually does believe in exceptions and that “Abortions should be allowed in the instances of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at stake.”
More Zombie Lies: GOP Candidates Bring Back False Claim That Higher Tax Rates On The Rich Destroy Jobs | ThinkProgress
thinkprogress.orgI can counteract every stupid Republican statement in this article. I’m not generally this biased, nor do I generally generalize, but I know stupid when I see it.
ThinkProgress: Wall Street Journal: Women Shouldn't Be in Combat Because Men Poop
thinkprogress.orgI feel dumber for having read this (The Wall Street Journal article, not ThinkProgress’ account of it). I found it incredibly hard to believe that a publication the stature of The Wall Street Journal would publish such juvenile filth … and then I remembered:
The Wall Street Journal is owned by NewsCorp. Yes, that NewsCorp.
5 Crazy things we have learned from CPAC via Think Progress
thinkprogress.orgWe know the far right is off their rocker, but CPAC and the GOP provide them safe harbor, so here are a few of the crazies spouting their ideas.
But alongside the National Organization for Marriage and the NRA are a cavalcade of fringe organizations warning of the dangers posed by the United Nations, secularism and foreign languages. Here are five of the craziest views advanced by their literature:
1. Marxists Control The Catholic Church. Fringe fundamentalist Cliff Kincaid’s organization America’s Survival is handing out a brochure warning Roman Catholics that the church “has been compromised philosophically — not only by infiltrators from the homosexual movement and Marxists. but by adherents of the so-called ‘New Age’ philosophy.” So vast is the communist infiltration within the Catholic Church, one “Catholic insider” told the organization that the bishops “made a deal with the devil to get Obamacare passed.”
2. The UN Will Take One-Quarter Of America’s Land. The American Jobs Alliance, a conservative business advocacy group, is handing out hundreds of fliers warning attendees of the dangers posed by the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an undeniably controversial free trade agreement that the United States is currently negotiating with a handful of South Pacific nations. Instead of reasoned criticism however, AJA sounds the alarm over Sharia Law, and claims that the Partnership “cedes 1/4 of U.S. to Foreign Control. A quarter of the entire U.S. land area will fall under UN court jurisdiction.”
3. Marriage Equality Must Be Opposed. Reason #8 in the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Prosperity’s “10 Reasons Why Homosexual ‘Marriage’ is Harmful and Must to Opposed” brochure: “It Imposes its Acceptance on all Society.” One example of the horrors of acceptance? “Rental property owners will have to agree to accept same-sex couples as tenants.” 10 reasons weren’t enough for the Ruth Institute, who have a brochure of their own with “77 Non-Religious Reasons to Support Man/Woman Marriage.”
4. George Soros Controls Everything. In another brochure published by Cliff Kincaid’s America’s Survival organization, author Zubi Diamond proclaims that President Obama “hates America just like his master George Soros.” Racially questionable language aside, Diamond’s obsession with French financier George Soros spills over to the rest of the brochure, going so far as to claim that former Fox News firebrand Glenn Beck was fired from the network for “exposing George Soros.”
5. Puerto Rico’s Statehood Referendum Was Rigged. ProEnglish’s singular mission — to promote English as country’s official language and wage war on any attempts to provide civic services in Spanish or any other foreign language — is laid forth in an 8 page newsletter on display at CPAC. Such articles include “Canada’s Struggles with Bilingualism Continue,” “ProEnglish Ally Rep. Steve King Re-Elected,” and cover story “Rigged Vote in Puerto Rico Produces Artificial Majority for Statehood.”
After a $900 million budget cut to education, Pennsylvania teachers resolve to work for free "as long as we are individually capable"
thinkprogress.org‘Faced with such a shortage of funds, the school district informed its staff that it will not be able to pay their salaries come Wednesday. So the teachers decided to work for free. As one teacher put it, students “need to be educated, so we intend to be on the job.” At a union meeting at Chester High School on Tuesday night, the employees passed a resolution saying they would stay on “as long as we are individually able.”’
Article by Tanya Somanader, ThinkProgress.org
