"Take care of your staff and they will take care of you."
Background: Mr Grenda gave cash bonuses totalling A$15m ($16m, £10m) from proceeds of the sale to employees of his 66-year-old Melbourne-based company.
"Take care of your staff and they will take care of you."
...
At this point, I can take almost anything out of Willard Romney's perfect mouth, out of the perfect teeth through which he so perfectly lies. He won the Inevitability Primary in Florida out-and-out on Tuesday night, and only had to outspend Newt Gingrich five-to-one to do it. So he gets to crow a little. Over the next couple of days, he's going to be bathed in loving analysis from the smart kidz about how he "turned it around" after being outcrackered in South Carolina. But I'm not going to sit there and listen to the cosseted plutocrat son of a millionnaire auto dealer — one who is running on a platform that will make himself and everyone like him richer while warning the rest of us, as he did in his victory speech in Tampa, that "If you're looking for cradle-to-grave help from the government, I'm not your candidate" — go and dragoon into that effort Tom Paine, who would have spat in Willard Romney's face if he'd ever met him. Mitt Romney is someone whose children have a trust fund totaling $100 million. His great-great-grandchildren are not ever going to have to worry about money from their cradles to their graves. Thomas Paine? I'm sorry, but there are levels of bullshit to which I will not agree to descend.
...
...
From establishment pillars to tea party leaders, the emerging consensus is that the vituperative attacks in Florida went beyond the traditional back-and-forth, cresting with Gingrich’s robo-call asserting that Romney had vetoed legislation denying Holocaust victims kosher food.
...
...
“The idea that we would attack each other like this is frustrating and painful,” said Lenny Curry, chairman of the Florida Republican Party, referencing Gingrich’s assault on Bain and Romney’s attack on Freddie Mac. “My face was red with anger when I watched one of these discussions on television because this is not what Republicans are about.”
...
Check out his interview last night on Fox "news" with Sean "My Dwindling Audience of Shut-Ins and Crazy People Think I'm Awesome" Hannity. Here's Gingrich on the Keystone XL pipeline and his first day in office: "I would issue an executive order to build the Keystone pipeline as of that day. And I'm trying to communicate publicly so the people of Canada understand, you don't have to cut a deal with the Chinese. You don't have to go to pipeline across the Rockies. Give us until November, when we beat Obama, you'll have a chance to build that pipeline in January of 2013." You got that? Gingrich is presenting himself as believing that the Canadian government is listening to him and thinking, "Oh, well, of course Newt Gingrich is going to be elected. Fuck all the other plans. We'll just wait, eh?" Whether or not Gingrich actually thinks the Canadians give a happy monkey fuck what he has to say is beside the point. The point was to reach under his barrel-sized belly, grab his AAA battery prick, and yank away. Hannity loved it as Newt jizzed in his face, but that's Hannity, a right-wing cumgobbler of epic appetites.
...
Meanwhile, the media, like teenagers with cell phone cameras filming a hobo with his pants around his ankles, jacking off on the subway, wants to keep the show going, all the way to the convention, as Gingrich has threatened. And it doesn't matter if he takes down the entire Republican party with him. Newt demands that you watch him as he gets keeps on masturbating. The eyes and the cheers keep him hard, keep him going until he comes again.
Sarah Palin Finally Fulfills Her Godly Purpose Of Destroying The GOP
Romney and Gingrich Set the GOP on a Path Toward Self-Destruction
The solution to the puzzle may be to admit that the GOP has forfeited 2012 before the general election even starts. How did this happen so suddenly?
“That’s the great mystery of 2012,” a senior Republican journalist told me while watching the brouhaha in Florida. “We have the weakest incumbent president in 32 years, running on the weakest record in 32 years… and who’s taking the stage in South Carolina and Florida? It has to be the weakest field I can remember. Each of these candidates has in his character, in his history, in his idea set—never mind disqualifying—a guarantee for self-destruction. If Newt is the candidate, he’ll lose badly. If Mitt is the candidate, he’ll lose slightly less badly … So what you have is an almost complete guarantee that if these are the candidates, Barack Obama will be reelected.”
The Virginia Senate, for years a firewall against efforts to restrict abortion, today is poised to pass a bill to require that pregnant women undergo an ultrasound and get a chance to see the image before having an abortion.
...
...
Sen. Janet Howell, D-Fairfax County, was dismayed enough by the bill's progress that she tried to amend it so men seeking prescriptions for erectile dysfunction medication such as Viagra would be required to undergo a rectal exam and cardiac stress test.
She said that's "only fair, that if we're going to subject women to unnecessary procedures, and we're going to subject doctors to having to do things that they don't think is medically advisory." [my em]
...
Norquist: Republicans Will Impeach Obama If He Doesn’t Extend Bush Tax Cuts
But when asked what Republicans should do if faced with a Democratic majority that won’t keep the tax cuts, Norquist had a simple answer: “impeach” Obama.NJ: What if the Democrats still have control? What’s your scenario then?
NORQUIST: Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.
Norquist certainly revels in his power, but suggesting Republicans impeach the president over tax cuts is wildly outlandish. According to the constitution, the president, vice president, or public officials can only be impeached for “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Preserving a tax cut that gives more to the top 1 percent than the average income of the 99 percent hardly qualifies. But if Norquist’s only goal is to “crush the other team,” it seems he’ll stop at nothing to do so.
[...] The morning after Newt shut Mitt down in South Carolina, Rich Lowry, the editor of the pro-Mitt, anti-Newt National Review, channeled the horror of GOP grandees everywhere. “If Romney can’t right himself,” he wrote, then “every major elected Republican in the country will panic” and “every unlikely scenario to get another candidate in the race will be explored.” The names once again being floated — Mitch Daniels! Jeb Bush! Paul Ryan! Bobby Jindal! — have not been known to raise the pulse rate of anyone beyond the 25 percent of the GOP embodied by elite conservative pundits in Washington and New York (my em).
What’s more likely is that the party’s panicked Establishment, and its Wall Street empire, will succeed in their push to crush Gingrich and prop up Romney in any way they can. They still see Mitt as the best available front man for the radical party the Republicans have become — the dutiful Eagle Scout who can hold down the fort as the right’s self-styled revolutionary rabble threaten to overwhelm today’s GOP elites the way the Goldwater insurgents once did Nelson Rockefeller and Romney’s father, George. Some of the same Beltway types who have reinforced Mitt’s presumed victory march since last summer believe he can be rebooted for the fall merely with some stern course correction.
Let's just say right now what voters will be saying in November, once Barack Obama has been re-elected: Republicans deserve to lose.
That's my theory for why South Carolina gave Newt Gingrich his big primary win on Saturday: Voters instinctively prefer the idea of an entertaining Newt-Obama contest—the aspiring Caesar versus the failed Redeemer—over a dreary Mitt-Obama one. The problem is that voters also know that Gaius Gingrich is liable to deliver his prime-time speeches in purple toga while holding tight to darling Messalina's* — sorry, Callista's — bejeweled fingers. A primary ballot for Mr. Gingrich is a vote for an entertaining election, not a Republican in the White House.
Then there is Mitt Romney, even now the presumptive nominee. If Mr. Gingrich demonstrated his unfitness to be a serious Republican nominee with his destructive attacks on private equity (a prime legacy of the Reagan years), Mr. Romney has demonstrated his unfitness by — where to start?
[...] But Messrs. Santorum and Paul are two tedious men, deep in conversation with some country that's not quite America...
Finally, there are the men not in the field: Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour. This was the GOP A-Team, the guys who should have showed up to the first debate but didn't ... If Mr. Obama wins in November — or, rather, when he does — the failure will lie as heavily on their shoulders as it will with the nominee.
What should readers who despair of a second Obama term make of all this? Hope ObamaCare is repealed by the High Court, the Iranian bomb is repealed by the Israeli Air Force, and the Senate switches hands, giving America a healthy spell of Hippocratic government.
All perfectly plausible. And the U.S. will surely survive four more years. Who knows? By then maybe Republicans will have figured out that if they don't want to lose, they shouldn't run with losers.
Castro: GOP Race “Greatest Competition of Idiocy and Ignorance” World Has Ever Seen
Guinness confirms it.
Republicans Looking for Candidate Who's Most Reaganesque
Someone who is both inattentive to affairs of state and a good storyteller.
U.S. in Upper Ranks of Latest Press Freedom Index
Only Finland, Norway, Estonia, Netherlands, Austria, Iceland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Cape Verde, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Ireland, Cyprus, Jamaica, Germany, Costa Rica, Belgium, Namibia, Japan, Surinam, Poland, Mali, OECS, Slovakia, United Kingdom, Niger, Australia, Lithuania, Uruguay, Portugal, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea, Slovenia, El Salvador, France, Spain, Hungary, Ghana, South Africa, Botswana, South Korea, Comoros and Taiwan rank higher.
...
As if Newt Gingrich couldn’t get a bigger ego, Sarah Palin is apparently crowning Newt Gingrich as the new Lord and savior. During an interview on Fox Business, Palin complained about the way people have been treating Newt Gingrich. You know, because they’ve been attacking him with facts about his record and views. So, Palin compared the treatment of Gingrich to how the Roman Empire treated Jesus.
...
Alan West, a tea party-backed congressman from Florida raised questions about his mental stability with comments he made on Saturday arguing that President Obama and other top Democrats should “get the hell out of the United States of America.”
...
Back in 2010 as she defended her state’s harsh immigration law, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) told a newspaper reporter that she was deeply hurt by the terrible names people were calling her. The worst, she said, were the comparisons to the Nazis.
“They are awful,” she said. “Knowing that my father died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany, that I lost him when I was 11 because of that…and then to have them call me Hitler’s daughter. It hurts. It’s ugliness beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.”
...