Justin's Political Corner

On Wednesday, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus published an editorial lambasting the mainstream media for “covering up” Planned Parenthood’s “support for infanticide.” According to Priebus, the national women’s health organization — in addition to providing contraceptive services, STD testing, cancer screenings, and reproductive care for millions of women across the country — is also in the business of murdering live babies. He claims that a recent committee hearing in Florida proves that Planned Parenthood officials support “the right to post-birth abortion.”

What’s “post-birth abortion”? What exactly happened in Florida? And how did this controversy explode in the right-wing media?

To understand the root of the current smear campaign against Planned Parenthood, it’s important to understand the context of the committee hearing that Priebus is referencing. That hearing was a debate over HB 1129, a politically-motivated piece of legislation seeking to ensure that any infant born alive “during or immediately after an attempted abortion” is entitled to all of the same rights “as any other child born alive in course of natural birth.” The “Infant Born Alive” measure rests upon the fundamentally flawed assumption that this type of situation is a real risk for women seeking to terminate a pregnancy. In fact, Florida does not perform abortions after the fetus has reached viability, so the situation that HB 1129 intends to address is incredibly unlikely.

And the original version of the legislation went even further. In this hypothetical medical situation, where an infant is “born alive” after an incredibly late-term induced abortion, the woman would have also been stripped of all parental rights. The Florida Association of Planned Parenthood Affiliates opposed HB 1129 because of this particular provision, which they believe is simply intended to intimidate and shame women. Planned Parenthood officials pointed out that the implicit assumption is that women who choose abortion can’t possibly be fit to care for a child — and that’s not something that should be codified into state law.

Last week, a lobbyist representing Planned Parenthood, Alisa LaPolt Snow, testified about the organization’s opposition to that aspect of HB 1129. During the hearing, she was questioned by a panel of anti-abortion state lawmakers who demanded that she respond to questions about this highly unlikely hypothetical situation. According to sources from the organization, the Republican lawmaker who sponsored HB 1129 repeatedly insinuated that women who choose abortions cannot be trusted, defending the provision revoking parental rights because “there is at least suspicion that that biological mother may not have the best interest of that born infant in mind.” When posed with a hypothetical scenario in which “a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion,” Snow attempted to make the point that legislators don’t need to get in the middle of medical situations. “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician,” Snow said.

That was enough for the right-wing media to proclaim that Planned Parenthood endorses “infanticide.” After the Weekly Standard posted a video of that portion of the exchange, it spread throughout conservative outlets — eventually inspiring Priebus’ breathless editorial suggesting that any politician who supports Planned Parenthood may also support infanticide.

Perhaps the ultimate irony of the right-wing’s imagined controversy is that — even in states where it’s not against the law to perform late-term induced abortions — Planned Parenthood clinics don’t provide that type of service. Many Planned Parenthood affiliates only perform abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy, when women can either take a pill or have a less-invasive surgical procedure. It’s actually the women who don’t have access to Planned Parenthood clinics, which are under attack across the country as GOP-controlled legislatures do their best to shut them down, who are forced to resort to dangerous, illegal, late-term abortion services like the ones described at the Florida hearing.

h/t:  Tara Culp-Ressler at Think Progress Health

In the continuing fallout from their failure to retake the White House in November, Republicans have been having a spirited (if not downright cannibalistic) debate about the future of their party. Accusations have been thrown out, lines have been drawn in the sand, and reasons for their failure have been postulated - all in an effort to reconcile the unexpected losses in an election where most conservatives thought they would win by a landslide. Are they finally looking at their own media mechanisms (like Fox News) and how they don’t always report in a “fair and balanced” manner? Heck no. 

Reince Priebus (Chairman of the Republican National Committee) told the media on Thursday they the RNC would be releasing the findings of their post-election “autopsy” on the GOP’s failure in the last election. In highlighting what could be expected when he speaks at the National Press Club, Priebus said the GOP needs to work on “controlling the debate process, getting involved in moderators and networks and all of these other issues so that we don’t have chaos. I mean, we just can’t have MSNBC hosting a debate at the Reagan Library only to have their network make the commentary afterwards for three hours about the debate of the Republican Party. I mean, it’s ridiculous.”

On her show Thursday evening (after Priebus made the now-infamous comments blaming MSNBC for the GOP loss), Rachel Maddow interviewed former presidential senior adviser  David Axelrod and discussed the GOP’s new scapegoat. “We learned that the autopsy that the Republican Party commissioned to figure out why they did so badly and what is wrong with them as a party…that autopsy is done,” she said.

Fresh from claiming the GOP’s 2012 run was “a great campaign—a nine-month campaign”; that only went awry at the end, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus now wants to rig the Electoral College so that when Republicans lose they still might “win.”

Specifically, Priebus is urging Republican governors and legislators to take up what was once a fringe scheme to change the rule for distribution of Electoral College votes. Under the Priebus plan, electoral votes from battleground states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and other states that now regularly back Democrats for president would be allocated not to the statewide winner but to the winners of individual congressional districts.

Because of gerrymandering by Republican governors and legislators, and the concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas and college towns, divvying up Electoral College votes based on congressional district wins would yield significantly better results for the GOP. In Wisconsin, where Democrat Barack Obama won in 2012 by a wider margin than he did nationally, the president would only have gotten half the electoral votes. In Pennsylvania, where Obama won easily, he would not have gotten the twenty electoral votes that he did; instead, under the Priebus plan, it would have been eight for Republican Mitt Romney, twelve for Barack Obama.

Nationwide, Obama won a sweeping popular-vote victory—with an almost 5-million ballot margin that made him the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to take more than 51 percent of the vote in two elections. That translated to a very comfortable 322-206 win in the Electoral College.

How would the 2012 results have changed if a Priebus plan had been in place? According to an analysis byFair Vote-The Center for Voting and Democracy, the results would have been a dramatically closer and might even have yielded a Romney win.

Under the most commonly proposed district plan (the statewide winner gets two votes with the rest divided by congressional district) Obama would have secured the narrowest possible win: 270-268. Under more aggressive plans (including one that awards electoral votes by district and then gives the two statewide votes to the candidate who won the most districts), Romney would have won 280-258.

“If Republicans in 2011 had abused their monopoly control of state government in several key swing states and passed new laws for allocating electoral votes, the exact same votes cast in the exact same way in the 2012 election would have converted Barack Obama’s advantage of nearly five million popular votes and 126 electoral votes into a resounding Electoral College defeat,” explains FairVote’s Rob Richie.

The RNC chair is encouraging Republican governors and legislators—who, thanks to the “Republican wave” election of 2010, still control many battleground states that backed Obama and the Democrats in 2012—to game the system.

“I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue [Democratic in presidential politics] that are fully controlled red [in the statehouse] ought to be considering,” Priebus says with regard to the schemes for distributing electoral votes by district rather than the traditional awarding of the votes of each state (except Nebraska and Maine, which have historically used narrowly defined district plans) to the winner.

Already, there are moves afoot in a number of battleground states to “fix” the rules to favor the Republicans in 2016, just as they have already fixed the district lines for electing members of the House. Thanks to gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic votes, Republicans were able to lose the overall nationwide vote for US House seats by 1.4 million votes and still take control of the chamber—thus giving the United States the divided government that voters have rejected.

h/t: John Nichols at The Nation

Washington (CNN) – Despite a rough election for the GOP, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus is seeking re-election and Friday reached out to state Republican officials across the country asking for their support, sources familiar with the conversations told CNN.

Several officials familiar with the process said they think as of now Priebus has enough support to win.

Priebus, the former head of the Wisconsin Republican party, two years ago took the helm of a Republican National Committee that was deep in debt. He is credited with turning it around financially after the controversial tenure of former chairman Michael Steele.

The committee will meet in January to elect the chairman.

h/t: PoliticalTicker.CNN.com

After Akin declared last month that women cannot get pregnant from “legitimate rape” because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” nearly every prominent Republican called on the Missouri Republican to drop out, includingRNC Chairman Reince Priebus. When a reporter asked him at the Republican National Convention last month whether the party would support Akin even if he didn’t drop out, Priebus was unequivocal: “no, no, no.”

REPORTER: If he stays in, is y’all’s position eventually going to change and you’re going to have to support him?

PRIEBUS: No, no, no. He can be tied, we’re not gonna send him a penny.

Today, after Akin stayed in the race and polls showing it tied, Priebus took a far different tone:

Asked directly if he considered Akin to be a better option for Missouri voters than McCaskill, Priebus did not hesitate.

“Well, absolutely,” he said in the interview. “That’s a given, and as chairman of the party, I have an obligation to make sure we win as many seats in the Senate as possible.”

Excuse me, Reince! Your party had a TERRIBLE week.

Mitt Romney had a good week even as his “47 percent” comments dominated the headlines, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said Sunday.

“I think that we had a good week last week,” Priebus said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I think in retrospect, in that we were able to frame up the debate last week in the sense of, what future do we want and do you want out there.”

That came after Priebus said, earlier on in the interview, that Romney has been clear his “47 percent” remark “probably wasn’t the best-said moment in the campaign” and, ultimately, this was “probably not the best week in the campaign.”

That comes even as many high-profile Republicans, including Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, have begun arguing that the Romney campaign needs a turnaround and that, even more fundamentally, the Republican Party needs to change.

h/t: Jennifer Epstein at Politico

Amid complaints on the right about missing context in the leaked video of a Mitt Romney fundraiser, the RNC released a new video containing three deceptively edited clips of President Obama.

Obama was referring to the so-called Buffet Rule, an Obama proposal that would change the tax code so the super rich don’t pay a lower tax rate than the middle class, but the RNC video removes that context. Polling from around the time showed the public overwhelmingly supported the idea.

The video ends the quote at “some people call this class warfare” — but Obama expressly denounces that label in the very next sentence.

The next quote, now familiar from dozens of similar ads and videos, is Obama saying, “If you got a business, you didn’t build that” during a Virginia speech. While the clip is an improvement on previous Republican ads that deliberately spliced together multiple lines from Obama’s remarks to radically distort his meaning, it still leaves out key context. Mainly, the sentence before and afterward — missing from the RNC video — show Obama wasn’t talking about building a business, he was talking about infrastructure like roads, bridges and the Internet that help businesses flourish.

h/t: Benjy Sarlin and Evan McMorris-Santoro at TPM

TAMPA, Fla. — In his prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday evening, vice presidential hopeful Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) illustrated economic failure under President Barack Obama with an anecdote about a factory that closed before Obama took office. 

Ryan said, “Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said, ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.’ That’s what he said in 2008.” 

“Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year,” Ryan continued. “It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.”

It’s an attack Ryan has used before, and one that the Detroit News has called inaccurate: “In fact, Obama made no such promise and the plant halted production in December 2008, when President George W. Bush was in office,” Detroit News reporter David Sherpardson wrote earlier this month. “Obama did speak at the plant in February 2008, and suggested that a government partnership with automakers could keep the plant open, but made no promises as Ryan suggested.”

Senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod pounced on the claim in a tweet: “Again, Ryan blames Obama for a GM plant that closed under Bush. But then, they did say they wouldn’t “let fact checkers get in the way.”

UPDATE: 8/30 — For more on the closure process, which was announced in mid-2008, see the local Gazette Xtra. More than 2,000 Janesville GM workers were laid off immediately; another 57 stayed on until April 2009 as production wound down.

h/t: Huffington Post

Mitt Romney’s speech to the Republican National Convention on Thursday night was riddled with misleading claims and critical omissions. In no section was this more true than Romney’s discussion of foreign policy. The GOP presidential nominee devoted only 202 words to national security and while his speech completely ignored the war inAfghanistan and any homage to American servicemembers, it contained a shocking number of misstatements and false and baseless attacks on President Obama:

1. Obama and America: “I will begin my presidency with a jobs tour. President Obama began with an apology tour. America, he said, had dictated to other nations. No Mr. President, America has freed other nations from dictators.”

THE FACTS: The notion that Obama went on an “apology tour” has beenrepeatedly and conclusively debunked, though it remains a staple of Romney’s post-truth campaign. The “dictated” line is likely of a similar provenance, but there’s an irony to the second half of that sentence — Obama has “freed other nations from dictators,” as he helped form and lead an international coalition that toppled Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Romney’s position on the Libya intervention, by contrast, was something of an incoherent muddle.

2. Iran: “Every American was relieved the day President Obama gave the order, and Seal Team Six took out Osama bin Laden. But on another front, every American is less secure today because he has failed to slow Iran’s nuclear threat. In his first TV interview as president, he said we should talk to Iran. We’re still talking, and Iran’s centrifuges are still spinning.”

THE FACTS: There’s a reason the President decided to talk to Iran — the Obama administration is quite aware of the consequences of a nuclear weapons-equipped Iran, if its leaders decide to go that route, and has determined that diplomacy presents the “best and most permanent” means of resolving the crisis. Moreover, the diplomatic approach has produced concrete dividends. 

3. Israel and Cuba: “President Obama has thrown allies like Israel under the bus, even as he has relaxed sanctions on Castro’s Cuba.”

THE FACTS: The claim about Israel is utterly false; both stepped-up U.S. defense assistance and the statements of Israel’s own leaders testify to Obama’s record. As for Cuba, it’s true that Obama has relaxed restrictions on travel to Cuba, but that’s a good thing. The Cuba embargo is is an obviously failed policy with serious human costs, giving the Castro regime an excuse for the failures of communism while immiserating ordinary Cubans.

4. Russia and Poland: “[Obama] abandoned our friends in Poland by walking away from our missile defense commitments, but is eager to give Russia’s President Putin the flexibility he desires, after the election. Under my administration, our friends will see more loyalty, and Mr. Putin will see a little less flexibility and more backbone.”

THE FACTS: Romney conveniently ignores that Obama’s new missile defense plan provided Poland with a system it was “ready to participate” in, perhaps because Polish officials preferred it to the previous arrangement. Obama’s “flexibility” comment to Putin didn’t really worry Eastern European governments, but Romney’s hostile rhetoric about Russia is alienating a country whose cooperation is important on U.S. priorities like the Iranian nuclear program.

Romney concluded his remarks by saying “We will honor America’s democratic ideals because a free world is a more peaceful world. This is the bipartisan foreign policy legacy of Truman and Reagan. And under my presidency we will return to it once again.” 

h/t: Zach Beauchamp at Think Progress Security

TAMPA, Fla. — The 2012 Republican National Convention began with a day of canceled events, and ended with a bizarre unscripted moment in which Clint Eastwood lectured an empty chair. And there were few true bright spots in between.

The party’s rising star, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, failed to impress with his much-hyped keynote address. The vaunted vice presidential nominee? His speech took a pounding from fact-checkers, potentially knocking the Romney campaign off kilter just as it enters the home stretch.

And then there’s the racially charged flying legumes.

There was much for Republicans to celebrate in Tampa: the fresh faces on stage who energized the room and revealed a deep Republican bench of young talent, the emergence of Ann Romney as a beloved national figure and a final night that went a long way toward humanizing Mitt Romney with compelling personal stories.

• Isaac

The weather system known as Isaac (which strengthened from a tropical storm to a hurricane and back over the course of the convention) cast dark clouds over Tampa in the days leading up to the official start of the convention Monday. Though the storm took a turn away from the convention site, organizers had to scramble and cancel a day, leading to public bickering over who was to blame for placing the convention and its thousands of attendees in the path of a major storm.

• The Ron Paul Revolution

For months, Ron Paul supporters exploited obscure primary and caucus rules long after Romney’s victory was apparent to amass a decent minority of delegates, many of them bound to Romney, for the convention. But when RNC officials passed new rules trying to prevent Paul backers from poaching more delegates in 2016, the Paul crowd erupted in anger.

On the first day of the convention, tensions boiled over as they staged a rowdy protest during the official roll call vote. On the second night, they sat for a video tribute to Paul, then walked out en masse, chanting anti-RNC slogans.

Paul Ryan’s Factually Challenged Speech

Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan fired up the crowd with a tough speech attacking Obama’s economic record Wednesday night. But numerous factual inaccuracies in his address were so glaring that they quickly became a major story of their own.

In the most-cited example, Ryan excoriated Obama over a GM plant that closed in his Janesville, Wis., district, which he trumpeted as a sign of the president’s economic failures. But the plant closed in 2008 under President Bush, mostly due to market trends that long predatedObama. As Obama’s auto czar Steve Rattner noted, Ryan’s insistence that Obama should have saved the individual assembly line also ran directly counter to his frequent refrain that the government shouldn’t be in the business of “picking winners and losers.”

• Constant Distractions, On Stage And Off

Mike Huckabee marred the RNC’s outreach to women when he made a personal joke about DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on stage, which Democrats saw as sexist. Ann Romney, despite impressing just about everyone with her poised and warm address Tuesday, marred the Romney campaign’s outreach push to Hispanics when she said of Puerto Ricans, “you people know how to party.” Some Hispanic Republicans in the room were not happy.

• Clint Eastwood Debates An Empty Chair

The Romney campaign couldn’t have been more excited when word leaked that Clint Eastwood, a former Republican mayor in California, would make a surprise primetime appearance for the final night of the convention.

The Republican delegates loved it, at least. And so did the Internet, where people began taking photos of themselves arguing with chairs in a meme dubbed “Eastwooding.”

h/t: Benjy Sarlin and Evan McMorris-Santoro at TPM