The Shallow End - Bad Lip Reading with Rick Santorum

You're not a legitimate Republican presidential contender until the folks at Bad Lip Reading target you in one of their videos. I think they may finally have "jumped the shark" with this Rick Santorum edition, although there are still enough winning lines to make this share-worthy.

Mr. Santorum....it's your turn, sir.

 Here are a few of my personal BLR favorites in case you missed them.

• Bad Lip Reading with Mitt Romney
• Bad Lip Reading with Rick Perry
• Bad Lip Reading with Ron Paul

More Bad Lip Reading With Rick Perry

The Bad Lip Reading folks take on Rick Perry again, this time when he's wandering the hillsides in his Brokeback Mountain coat.

Perry's overall cultural relevance has an expiration date that coincides with his upcoming defeat in the South Carolina primary, so enjoy it while you can.

Perry Attacks Gay Marriage Law in New Hampshire

Rick Perry has called for the repeal of a New Hampshire law passed in 2009 that legalized gay marriage. During a New Hampshire campaign stop on Friday, Perry applauded the efforts of a small group of Republican legislators who are working to repeal the state law, despite the fact that 62% of the state's citizens support the law.

This exemplifies the kind of desperation politics that cost the Republicans the White House in 2008. When the solutions posed to address the nation's real issues ring hollow with a majority of voters, far right candidates fall back on anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant hate messages in an attempt to rally their conservative base.

This strategy will garner headlines and it may raise a candidate's profile with the fringe, but it solves nothing and ultimately loses elections. Keep up the good work, Mr. Perry, and don't worry, Texas will take you back when it's all over.

If Perry Skips Debates, He Should Go Home

Perry and Romney getting touchy during a debate.

Texas Governor Rick Perry may not have time to attend all the upcoming Republican presidential debates. With eight debates completed and twelve more planned, Perry's campaign team said that the number of debates is taking away valuable on-the-ground face time with voters in key early primary states.

What they didn't say is that Perry's debate performance has completely sucked and that he ultimately ends up losing more ground than he gains through the debate process. 

I don't think all Americans feel this way, but I need a President who doesn't run from intellectual discourse. Study hard, show up, and represent Mr. Perry, and if your limited intellect and fragile ego can't handle the scrutiny, then you should pack up and go home.

Of course, if the Republicans would just adopt my idea of having a baby-calming contest in place of the debates, this could all be avoided.

Perry's Flat Tax and Economic Plan Simplified

Rick Perry's "postcard" tax return
 (Photo by Mary Ann Chastain/AP)

Presidential candidate Rick Perry unveiled his plan for righting the American economic ship in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece published Tuesday.

In the article which he authored, Perry offered his vision for simplifying the tax code and shrinking government toward the end goal of boosting the economy and balancing the budget.

Not to be out-marketed by rising Republican star Herman Cain and his 9-9-9 Tax Plan, Perry named his economic package the slightly less catchy Cut, Balance, and Grow Plan.

The three pillars of Perry's plan, cut taxes and spending, balance the budget, and grow the economy offer nothing new on the surface, but the devil is always in the details. Sadly, when you dig into the details of Perry's plan on his campaign website (which I already did to save you the suffering), what you don't find is anything new. What you find instead is an endless scroll of self-evident charts and graphs that are at best irrelevant (five different pie charts and a bar graphs to illustrate that the tax code is burdensome seems like overkill), and at worst misleading (a chart labeled "Swimming in Debt" shows we have the highest debt-to-GDP ratio since World War II, but fails to explain how this resulted largely from the Bush administration's refusal to raise taxes while waging two wars).

Congress Stalls Jobs Act, Offers Nothing New

Senators Harry Reid (D) and Mitch McConnell (R)
Photo: Sam Stein/Huffington Post

In the wake of Republican procedural maneuvers that blocked the President's full American Jobs Act last week, Senate Democrats are planning to take a more piecemeal approach to job creation. I'm skeptical they can do even that, but it's fine with me - just show you can all work together to get something done.

Like most Americans, I'm growing increasingly frustrated with Congress' failure to make progress. Democrats have proven themselves to be unable to gain Republican support for their ideas through either persuasion, political outflanking, or sheer muscle, and Republicans continue to suffer from a perpetual dearth of new and decent ideas of their own.

While standing in staunch opposition to the jobs bill proposed by the White House, Congressional Republicans have proposed little to spur job creation and economic growth beyond removing regulations from various industries (which worked out well in the financial sector, right?), repealing Obamacare (which didn't come into law until after the economy was well down the road to hell), and drilling in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge (regardless of the economic impact, Republicans seem bent on defiling this piece of wilderness).

Beyond the halls of Congress, Republican presidential candidates have busied themselves re-packaging the same failed economic policies that led us to the promise land we enjoy today. Texas Governor Rick Perry wants to resurrect the "drill baby, drill"mentality and he has done some funny math (according to Republican journalist David Frum) to try and substantiate the validity of this approach. Meanwhile, Herman Cain is breaking no new ground with his 9-9-9 tax plan which offers the same old Republican recipe of robbing from the middle class to protect the top 10%.

My advice to all of them is the same now as it was when the President first proposed his jobs bill in early September - get busy conducting the nation's critically important business or get ready to be swept out of the way in November 2012.

Mormons, and Christians, and Cults, Oh My!

Last weekend at a "family values" conference in Washington D.C., Robert Jeffress, a conservative Baptist minister called Mormonism a cult, and then subsequently attempted to dissuade attendees from voting for Mormon practitioner and presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The bigoted comment sparked a great deal of media attention, but much of the real news, since no one really cares what one fundamentalist Baptist pastor says, turned out to be the reaction to the comment, or lack thereof, from other GOP candidates.

According to politicos like Slate's William Saletan, Herman Cain and Rick Perry, who were so quick to jump on the prior week's "N-----head" controversy, should have been stronger in their repudiation of the "cult" comment. Saletan argues that the reason for the lack of a more vociferous renunciation is that it is still generally acceptable to discriminate against Mormonism - that the idea of being repulsed by anti-Mormon bias has yet to be cemented in our collective conscience in the way that racial discrimination has been. Saletan rightly takes his criticism of Cain and Perry a step further by advising us all on the deeper and more profound ethical lesson of this incident.

"The prejudices you need to work on aren’t the ones you recognize in your grandparents’ generation. They’re the one you don’t recognize in your own generation, and in yourself."

Mitt is From Mars, Perry is From Venus

Interesting Republican presidential debate analysis and recap from Slate.