Our guest blogger is John Boccieri, a former Congressman from Ohio and U.S. Air Force Instructor Pilot.

I’ve been honored to serve Ohio in both Statehouse chambers and in the United States Congress. And if there is one thing I’ve learned about Ohioans, it’s that you don’t cross those who dedicate their lives to service and expect to get elected.

Unfortunately for his campaign, Governor Romney has managed to upset both veterans and nuns this week.

Gov. Romney began the week by infuriating veterans when his efforts to bolster his campaign through blatant lies about the Commander-in-Chief backfired. Seeking the votes of Ohio veterans, Romney intentionally misconstrued the President’s lawsuit against the Ohio Secretary of State and Attorney General as an attack on our service members. This transparent political move angered veterans and active military members – like me – throughout the country, who rightfully resent his misuse of the goodwill and respect we have earned through our sacrifices.

Here are the facts that Mitt Romney eagerly distorted: In an effort to reduce lines at the polls, Ohio instituted an early voting period that extended through the Monday before Election Day. However, after the 2008 election, partisan conspiracy theorists, bitter about the Democrats’ historic victory, blamed this early voting period for the President’s success in Ohio. After conservatives took over the state legislature, they fought to push back the early voting deadline. They were able to do so for all voters except active duty military, who enjoy special protection under federal law.

President Obama’s suit seeks to reinstate the early voting period for all Ohioans. He wants service members to continue to be able to vote early, as well as every other Ohioan – including the state’s 913,000 veterans and our military family members who are not protected by the special federal law. Our voting rights are sacred and the numbers we’re talking about should alarm everyone. In 2008 alone, 93,000 voted during this early voting time period. More than enough to sway the outcome of this election.

Governor Romney’s campaign twisted the intent of this lawsuit, and falsely claimed that the President was attacking the rights of military voters. Knowing our country’s deep appreciation for the contributions of our military, his campaign is attempting to manipulate the goodwill of voters and turn them against the President. Lying about our men and women in uniform in this disgraceful manner is politics at its dirtiest, and Governor Romney’s tactics have angered veterans and military personnel throughout the country. We who serve do not appreciate our work and sacrifice being turned into false fodder for his personal political gain.

As if using military service members in his campaign smears was not unscrupulous enough, Governor Romney’s campaign has also spent the last week levying insults at our nation’s struggling poor. His most recent attacks focus on welfare and welfare reform, charging that the President has not been as hard on those in poverty as his democratic predecessor President Bill Clinton.

Not only have these accusations angered President Clinton, who has adamantly rejected this characterization of himself and the current president, but they have also upset nuns working for social justice. Yesterday, Sister Simone Campbell, Executive Director of the Catholic organization NETWORK, issued an invitation to Governor Romney to join her and her Sisters for a day of service, where he can witness firsthand (as the nuns do every day) the hardship faced by Americans living in poverty.

Misleading voters, abusing veterans, vilifying the poor, angering nuns – these are not the campaign tactics of a successful candidate for the presidency of the United States of America. There are moral standards in politics, and Governor Romney is going to learn that when the election returns come in from Ohio.

Battling for reelection in a new left-leaning district, Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) identified oil subsidies as one area where lawmakers can trip government spending, during a town hall in Elk Grove Wednesday.

“Get rid of subsidies for the big oil companies if you want. Do it,” Walsh declared to loud applause, calling the move “important”:

WALSH: You can do anything you want to. Bring our boys and girls home from Afghanistan, that’s what I want to do. Do it. Get rid of the federal Department of Education. That’s what I want to do. Do it. [Applause] Get rid of subsidies for the big oil companies if you want. Do it. [Applause] You can go on down the line and nail all of these things — and they’re important — but they’re billions. When it comes to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, we’re talking about trillions.

Watch it:

Of course, Walsh doesn’t have to just pontificate on the issue. He is one of 535 people in the country whose job it is to decide whether taxpayers continue to give oil companies $4 billion in subsidies every year. And when he had the opportunity to vote on the matter last year, he took the opposite position, voting in sync with House Republican colleagues to protect oil company subsidies.

Walsh didn’t mention this vote when skewering the subsidies in front of constituents, however, leaving the impression that he supported ending handouts to oil companies.

Mitt Romney spent his first full week back from Europe attacking President Obama for policies he has supported in the past.

On Tuesday, the campaign accused Obama of gutting welfare, even though the administration had merely granted governors the kind of flexibility Romney himself had requested in 2005. On Thursday, Romney ignored his own record of mandating all health organizations in Massachusetts to offer women the morning after pill and portrayed an Obamacare measure that requires insurers to offer women birth control as a war on religion. And on Friday, the campaign capped off the week by incredulously arguing that Obama had “already taken over” the energy industry.

This latest distortion touts a soundbite from Obama’s campaign speech about the auto industry turnaround, falsely suggesting that the president seeks to bail out every industry with government funds. In a press release, Romney claimed that Obama has already started the process with the energy sector.

But the idea of a “government takeover” of energy is ridiculous. The reality is that domestic oil production has experienced a renaissance, reaching it’s highest level since 2003 under Obama as imports have declined to under 50 percent. The largest oil companies also recorded record profits last year. The coal layoffs and shuttered plants Romney points to can be blamed on economic forces, not regulations, as utilities have moved toward attractive investments in cheap natural gas. And the campaign points to solar loans and wind energy tax credits as evidence of “energy takeover,” although Romney himself endorses continued $4 billion in annual subsidies for the oil industry.

As governor, Romney supported cap and trade, and stricter regulations on coal pollution “that kills people.” He also created a multi-million-dollar green energy fund in his home state where the solar industry now “flourishes.”

But now that he’s running for president, Romney is engaging in dishonest attacks, teasing, ‘I know you are, but what am I?‘

GOP Representative and Missouri Senate Candidate Todd Akin has a long history of extremism, particularly with respect to the role of religion in public life. As it turns out, that shouldn’t be much of a suprise: one of Akin’s principal political influences appears to be Reverend D. James Kennedy, a minister who spent his life organizing a movement dedicated to reorganizing the American government along radically conservative evangelical lines.

Kennedy is widely believed to be a leading advocate for a variant of dominionism, (roughly) the idea that the American government should be run according to Christian, biblical lines. “It must be remembered that D. James Kennedy is a leader among the distinct group of ‘Christian Supremacists’ who seek to ‘reclaim America for Christ’ and turn the U.S. into a Christian nation guided by their strange notions of biblical law,” Abraham Foxman, the President of the Anti-Defamation League, explains.

Indeed, the Reverend has called the US a Christian nation that should be governed by Christians, sought to “rebuild America based on the Bible,” and suggested that Darwinism was responsible for the Holocaust.

Though he died in 2007, Kennedy is respected throughout the GOP, and was particularly influential on Akin’s worldview. According to a Politico profile of Akin, “[t]wo sermons by Dr. D. James Kennedy have been very influential for Todd and he references them frequently in discussions of government.” Akin told Kennedy’s Truth in Action (formerly Coral Gables Ministries) organization that “Dr. Kennedy understood how to connect the principles of Scripture with the practical applications of what keeps a nation free, the principles that America was founded on.” Akin also co-sponsored a resolution last year that “honors Dr. Kennedy’s lifetime of service and sacrifice to his God, his country, [and] the ideals of the Christian faith.”
Read more

A new ad targeting Tea Party Congressman Allen West (R-FL) over his extreme positions on women’s rights portrays him in a boxing ring throwing punches at an elderly woman, another white woman, and a middle class family.

The ad, released by a group called the American Sunrise PAC, is narrated by a woman who criticizes West’s voting record on Medicare, women’s health care and taxes for the middle class. Each point is punctuated by a caricature of West in boxing gloves punching out voters. Watch the ad below:

West responded to the ad yesterday, calling it “reprehensible,” and adding that “it cheapens the very real and tragic occurrences of violence against women and seniors.”

Most troubling though are the racial undertones of the ad, which only distracts from the very legitimate criticism of West’s extreme voting record in Congress.

The ad also serves as a reminder of the effects that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling has had on electoral politics. The rise of outside groups like the American Sunrise PAC has allowed well-funded donors to circumvent campaign finance limits to finance irresponsible ads like this, with little accountability for their contents. West’s Democratic opponent Patrick Murphy has so far offered no comment on the ad other than to say his campaign does not respond to third-party ads, though disclosure forms show that Murphy’s father is the single largest contributor to the PAC responsible for the ad.