From my friend Annabel Park, co-founder of the Coffee Party USA, also co-director of the film award-winning 9500 Liberty (among her many accomplishments). Listening to Annabel’s mom, I can see where she got her smarts from, that’s for sure! 🙂

Transcript below the fold. The bottom line: although Romney’s “using all his talents as a salesman” to pretend to be about “change,” in reality “we know what change looks like,” and what Romney’s proposing ain’t it!

Now, in the closing weeks of this campaign,  Governor Romney has been using all his talents as a salesman to dress up these very same policies that failed our country so badly, the very same policies we’ve been cleaning up after for the past four years, and he is offering them up as change. He is saying he is the candidate of change. Well, let me tell you, Wisconsin, we know what change looks like. What the Governor is offering sure ain’t change. Getting more power back to the biggest banks isn’t change. Leaving millions without health insurance isn’t change. Another $5 trillion tax cut that favors the wealthy isn’t change. Turning Medicare into a voucher is change, but we don’t want that change. Refusing to answer questions about the details of your policies isn’t change. Ruling out compromise by pledging to rubber stamp the tea party’s agenda as president, that’s definitely not change. In fact, that’s exactly the attitude in Washington that needs to go.

Here’s the thing, Wisconsin. After four years as president, you know me by now. You may not agree with every decision I’ve made. You may be frustrated at the pace of change, but you know what I believe. You know where I stand. You know I’m willing to make tough decisions even when they’re not politically convenient, and you know I’ll fight for you and your families every single day as hard as I know how. You know that. I know what change looks like because I have fought for it. You have too. After all we’ve been through together, we sure as heck can’t give up now. Change is a country where Americans of every age have the skills and education that good jobs now require. Government can’t do this alone, but don’t tell me that hiring more teachers won’t help this economy grow or help young people compete. Don’t tell me that students who can’t afford college can just borrow money from their parents. That wasn’t an option for me. I’ll bet it wasn’t an option for a whole lot of you. We shouldn’t be ending college tax credits to pay for millionaires’ tax cuts. We should be making college more affordable for everyone who is willing to work for it. We should recruit 100,000 math and science teachers so that high-tech, high-wage jobs aren’t created in China. They’re created right here in Green Bay, Wisconsin. We should work with community colleges to claim another two million Americans with skills that businesses are looking for right now. That’s my plan for the future. That’s what change is. That’s the America we’re fighting for in this election.

(UPDATE: Let’s add a few more. 51) Allen voted against providing emergency health care for Katrina survivors.  52) Allen voted against a Lieberman amendment to provide financial relief for those affected by Katrina. 53) Allen voted against a Schumer amendment to restore $300 million in funding to FEMA’s disaster relief account.   – promoted by lowkell)

There are many reasons why Virginians should vote for Tim Kaine over George Allen this coming Tuesday (or before, if you’re voting absentee). Here are 50 that sprung to my mind, but I’m sure you can think of many more.

1. He has a long and pathetic record in a wide variety of areas. The following three items are all from this same link.

2. He voted for Bush administration budgets – huge tax cuts for the wealthy, two unpaid-for wars, an unpaid-for new Medicare benefit – that turned surpluses as far as the eye can see (under Bill Clinton) into enormous deficits which we’re still dealing with today.

3. He wouldn’t say whether he would have voted for the Lilly Ledbetter Paycheck Fairness Act.

4. Along with Jim Gilmore, Allen “managed to stick Virginia with unprecedented deficits that Mr. Warner has spent most of his time trying to erase.”

5. He attacked Jim Webb’s award-winning novels “to try to suggest that the explicit war time experiences Webb writes about are demeaning and repugnant.”

6. He refused to oppose Virginia’s invasive ultrasound measure.

7. He voted against the Family and Medical Leave Act three times.

8. He pledged to defund Planned Parenthood.

9. He  supported the Blunt Amendment, which would allow any employer to deny their employees contraception coverage.

10. He  voted to partially privatize Social Security.

11. He  praised the Ryan budget, which would end Medicare as we know it.

12. He  praised the Ryan budget, which would end Medicarrepeatedly calls federal employees “sanctimonious social engineers” and “federales.”

13. He said his top priority was electing more Republicans, not working for the best interests of Virginia.

14. He voted against pay-as-you-go budget rules six times.

15. He voted for 52,319 earmarks worth $121.8 billion and has refused to disclose his own earmarks.

16. He voted against raising the minimum wage four times.

17. He has mocked clean energy, including wind and solar, which the vast majority of Americans strongly support.

18. He loves tax subsidies for big oil companies that don’t need them.

19. He and his American Energy Freedom Center mock the scientifically proven fact of man-made global warming. That alone should disqualify him, especially after what we just saw with “superstorm” Sandy.

20. The Jack Abramoff connection.

21. More on the Abramoff-Allen connection.

22. The Tony Rudy connection.

23. His abysmal environmental record.

24. The fact that he was bored in the Senate.

25. The Koch brothers connection.

26. The white supremacist connection.

27. The little deer head in a black man’s mailbox incident.

28. His support for a personhood amendment that would outlaw certain forms of contraception, embryonic stem cell research, and abortion in ALL cases.

29. His love for dirty energy that’s trashing the planet (but enriching him).

30. “Macaca” of course. Also note that after he used the racist slur against an Asian-American man, he then lied, claiming he’d never heard of the word, that he really meant to say “caca,” etc.

31. The Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum connection.

32. The bat****-crazy, right-wing extremist Washington Examiner endorsed him.

33. He voted with his party 96% of the time.

34. He is as partisan and nasty as you can get, saying he enjoys knocking Democrats’ “soft teeth down their whiny throats” for instance.

35. He dragged his sister upstairs by the hair.

36. He “slam[med] a pool cue into [his sister’s] new boyfriend’s head”.

37. He “saw dentistry as a perfect profession–getting paid to make people suffer.”

38. He threw his brother Bruce “through a sliding glass door”.

39. He spray-painted “‘die whitey’ and other ‘racially tinged’ graffiti on the walls of Palos Verde High School.”

40. He “plastered the school with Confederate flags.”

41. He was one of only 27 Virginia House of Delegates members in 1984 who voted against a state holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.

42. He co-sponsored “a resolution expressing ‘regret and sorrow upon the loss’ of William Munford Tuck, a politician who opposed every piece of civil rights legislation while in Congress during the 1950s and 1960s and promised ‘massive resistance’ to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision banning segregation.”

42. He used the “n word” “on a regular basis” in college.

43. He angrily asserts that implying he might have Jewish heritage – which of course is true, as his mother’s side of the family is Jewish – was “making aspersions” on him.

44. To make it even clearer that he had no Jewish heritage, Allen claimed that “I still had a ham sandwich for lunch. And my mother made great pork chops.”

45. He has a truly sordid, ugly history on racial issues.

46. The Washington Post reports that even “some Republicans…[contend] that Allen compiled an undistinguished legislative record, even for a one-term senator.”

47. He criticized Sen. John Warner for attempting to reach a bipartisan agreement on breaking gridlock over judicial nominees.

48. He opposed comprehensive immigration reform.

49. He even opposed an immigration bill signed by Ronald Reagan, saying it would “cause a mass invasion by persons unable to speak or read English.”

50. He has been criticized by veterans for voting against “billions for veterans care,” and for calling veterans programs (and other government programs) “a waste.”

( – promoted by lowkell)

Recently, Rep. Eric Cantor has been flooding the airwaves and people’s mailboxes with attack ads aimed at Wayne Powell, the candidate that Cantor’s own senior strategist called the congressman’s “most serious opponent to date.”

Beyond mailers and television ads which cite Cantor’s own website as their factual source (something every freshman English class warns against), Mr. Cantor has also gotten some mileage out of a subpoena he attained that requests that Wayne appear in court to answer for a bar complaint.

Forget for a moment that the original complaint from 2011 was tossed out by the presiding judge, or that the individual that filed this recent complaint is a former Republican staffer. What we would like to know is how in the world did Cantor get his hands on a subpoena before it had even been delivered to its intended recipient?

A willingness to abuse power and the desire to grasp at straws is a dangerous combination, it seems.

Speaking of grasping at straws, with all of the noise the Cantor’s camp has made these past few days over trumped-up and dubious claims of impropriety, we were curious if all of Cantor’s hot air was just an attempt to dissuade inquiring minds from looking into his own legal history.

And we’re glad we did.

Because it seems Mr. Cantor hasn’t been completely honest when it comes to his former career as a lawyer with a tax collection agency.

You see, when a lawyer is elected to Congress, they are required by law to recuse themselves from their legal practice and forego the income they would have otherwise made. Small price to pay for becoming one of only 437 individuals tasked with setting the legislative goals for an entire country, right?

Maybe not to Eric Cantor. Put simply, when he was first elected, in order to comply with congressional regulations,  Mr. Cantor “sold” his portion of the legal firm Cantor & Cantor. However, instead of paying him for this sale, the firm simply gave him a promissory note, a note he has held for over a decade and continues to claim on his congressional finance reports.

And therein lies the problem: This seemingly-innocuous note doubles as monetary stake in the company. And despite making over $5 million over the last 11 years, Cantor’s former law firm has never gotten around to legitimately purchasing his portion of the firm. The result?

Eric Cantor, the self-appointed crusader for law-firm ethics, maintains control of a segment of a wildly-successful collection agency that he claims to have sold years ago.

As Wayne’s campaign manager Christian Rickers put it, “It’s hard to believe Cantor’s firm took in over $5 million from a no-bid contract, he’s still holding a note after all these years, and there’s been no hanky panky.”

If you’re going to spend money, time and effort falsely criticizing someone, the least you can do is make sure you aren’t guilty of the type of wrongdoing you yourself have spent months condemning.

Eric Cantor is grasping at straws all right, but unfortunately for him, he just drew the short one.

Six years ago today, remember this classic from conservative commentator George Will?

But Allen, who makes no secret of finding life as a senator tedious, is fighting ferociously for another term, a fate from which his Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, is close to rescuing him. As a result, Allen is dabbling in literary criticism. He has read, or someone has read for him, at least some of Webb’s six fine novels, finding therein sexual passages that have caused Allen — he of the football metaphors, cowboy regalia and Copenhagen smokeless tobacco — to blush like a fictional Victorian maiden and fulminate like an actual Victorian man, Anthony Comstock, the 19th-century scourge of sin who successfully agitated for New York and federal anti-obscenity statutes and is credited with the destruction of 160 tons of naughty printed matter and pictures.

Webb, a highly decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam combat, includes sexual scenes in his fictional depictions of young men far from home and close to combat, something about which he knows a lot and Allen does not. Allen says the scenes are demeaning to women and are evidence of flaws in Webb’s character.

This ham-handed grab for women’s votes may help Allen win but will not help him escape the perception that, as a presidential aspirant, he is problematic…

Hey, George Will might be a right-wing tool, but he nailed it on this one. (Also check out John Grisham unloading on Allen for his “desperate campaign”).

While we’re on this subject, check out the video (from 10/28/06) of Jim Webb ripping Allen for having “nothing to report,” and for that reason making “smears” (Webb also referred to Allen and company as “unprincipled, small-minded, power hungry character assassins“) the centerpiece of his campaign. Webb specifically called out Allen for attacking his “faith” and his “character.” Webb continued ripping into Allen in ways that Tim Kaine is far too nice to do, but that’s refreshing to recall because none of Webb’s characterization of Allen was incorrect, nor has it changed with the passage of 6 years:

I’ve lived in the real world. I fought in a real war and I saw it ugliness while George Allen was hanging out at a dude ranch!  I have written about what I have seen.  That is the duty of a writer…George Allen might understand this if he read books.  George Allen doesn’t read books. Someone said that I’ve WRITTEN more books than George Allen has READ!

In sum, George Allen was a pathetic, cringe-inducing embarrassment to Virginia in 2006, and he remains a pathetic, cringe-inducing embarrassment to Virginia today. This coming Tuesday, let’s send him back to his “career” having pathetically lame football metaphor books ghost written for him, and of course shilling for Big Oil. What a guy.