http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/hank-williams-jr-obama-muslim-president-130155210--politics.html
Hank Williams Jr., whose "Monday Night Football" theme song was pulled by ESPN last year after he compared President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, lashed out at the president during a Labor Day weekend concert.
"We've got a Muslim for a president who hates cowboys, hates cowgirls, hates fishing, hates farming, loves gays, and we hate him!" Williams reportedly told the crowd at the Stockyards Music Festival in Fort Worth, Texas, on Sunday. Williams was the headliner.
Concert goers "let out a loud but less-than-unanimous cheer," Thor Christensen wrote in The Dallas Morning News.
According to Christensen's review:
The 63-year-old singer began his anti-gay commentary a few songs earlier, mocking "queer guitar pickers" in the middle of "All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down" before moving on to his next target: Liberal politicians, who he told to "move to Mexico" at the end of "We Don't Apologize For America."
Before it was pulled, Williams' song "All My Rowdy Friends" had opened "Monday Night Football" broadcasts for 20 years.
[Related: Are you ready for some Hitler? Williams says comments misunderstood]
While appearing as a guest on "Fox & Friends" to break down the 2012 GOP presidential field last October, Williams—who campaigned for John McCain in 2008—said the president's golf outing with House Speaker John Boehner at the height of the debt deal talks in June "would be like Hitler playing golf with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu." He later called Obama and Vice President Joe Biden "the enemy."
After ESPN pulled the song, Williams issued a statement:
Some of us have strong opinions and are often misunderstood. My analogy was extreme—but it was to make a point. I was simply trying to explain how stupid it seemed to me—how ludicrous that pairing was. They're polar opposites and it made no sense. They don't see eye-to-eye and never will. I have always respected the office of the president.
Williams then wrote and recorded new lyrics directed at ESPN and Fox for his song "I'll Keep My":
So Fox 'n Friends wanna put me down/Ask for my opinion/Twist it all around. Well, two can play that gotcha game you'll see.
Obama aide: ‘The country is better off’
As the Democratic National Convention opens on the heels of some of President Barack Obama's surrogates fumbling when asked if the country is better off than it was four years ago, Obama campaign aides took the question head-on Tuesday morning.
"The country is better off," declared Stephanie Cutter, the president's deputy campaign manager.
Joined by fellow Obama campaign architects Ben LaBolt and Jim Messina, Cutter sat down with Yahoo News' Olivier Knox and ABC News' Diane Sawyer and Jake Tapper for a live "Newsmakers" broadcast.
Summing up their point, Obama's aides reinforced the "bumper sticker" line credited to Vice President Joe Biden: "Osama bin Laden is dead, GM is alive."
"We broke the back of al-Qaida," Cutter said. "The auto industry was on the verge of bankruptcy…and now they're creating hundreds of thousands of jobs."
Cutter also hit back at a Mitt Romney campaign aide's contention during last week's "Newsmakers" at the Republican National Convention that "we're not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers."
"We do care about fact checks. We do care about the honesty of our ads," she said.
At the RNC last week, Romney's wife, Ann, took the stage tasked with humanizing her husband, and the role is no different for Obama's wife, Michelle, who speaks tonight.
"I think that what the first lady can do better than anybody else is give a lens into the values that drive the president," Cutter said.
And, like their Romney counterparts, the Obama advisers were mum on yet another convention-speaker mystery: who will introduce the president on Thursday night at the Bank of America Stadium—a venue with nearly 74,000 seats that Team Obama said again on Tuesday they will be able to fill up amid questions about enthusiasm and weather.
Looking toward November, Obama's aides agreed that it's going to be a tight race that they're careful to characterize as a "choice" for voters.
"We're confident in the choice, and we're confident when people understand that choice that we're going to win this election," Messina said.
"Confident," Cutter said.
"Ditto," LaBolt agreed.
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