Daily Kos

Some people who should know better treat the right to vote and voting itself as no big deal. They say all politicians are the same, that big money demolishes the impact of an individual's vote and that after election day, from the mayor's office to the Oval Office, nothing will change no matter how they cast their ballot. This is balderdash. But, worse than that, it's an insult to the men and women who lost their blood and sometimes their lives in the struggle to ensure citizens' fundamental right to choose their own leaders.

This is not to say that voting is the end-all, be-all of democracy. Voting doesn't solve every problem. Sometimes those leaders we choose turn out to be flam-flam artists, unprincipled, corrupt, stupid, bloodthirsty, or just folks who have managed to wangle themselves a lucrative sinecure. Everybody can come up with his or her own examples. Even many of the good leaders, the honest, well-intentioned, highly principled, forward-thinking politicians, disappoint us in various ways.

Nobody ever said our system isn't flawed, that it doesn't need adjusting or some more transformative change. But while the struggles to make those adjustments or transform how we govern ourselves always begin outside the electoral system—inside the hearts of reformers and "in the streets"—voting is crucial to making those changes. Every reform in U.S. history has started outside the legislatures and executive branches of the state and federal governments. But all that succeeded were also confirmed by elected representatives of the people.

Social Security wouldn't exist without pressure from the people. Nor would unions or equal rights for women, people of color and gays. Our rivers would still catch fire from pollution. Ten-year-olds would still work 12-hour shifts in factories.

Some people know full well how important the right to vote is. Spurred by groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, they've been working assiduously to suppress the vote, specifically the vote of people without political clout—young people, people of color, low-income people. People who tend to vote Democratic. In South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere, their goal is always the same: to keep such people from going to the polls by putting obstacles in their way. Not as brazen as in Jim Crow days, to be sure. More clever than that. But with similar impact.

And calling their subterfuge no big deal.

But, like the legislator in Pennsylvania who said the highly restrictive voter-ID law would swing the election into the Mitt Romney column, they know it is a big deal. Making it difficult to vote for just a few percentage points of citizens in a few swing states could mean the difference of who sits in the White House come 2013. Not to mention the impact on state legislatures and Congress. They know this. It is their purpose even as they smile as say "What me, suppress?"

Citizen advocates have been fighting this voter suppression in the courts and by working hard to ensure that people are registered and have the proper identification so their ballots will be counted.

Tuesday, Sept. 25, has been designated  National Voter Registration Day as a way to bring more attention to the subject. You can find registration events taking place across the country by clicking here and plugging in your ZIP Code.

It's a good time to take stock of your personal situation. Are you registered? Are you sure? I moved recently and used California's new on-line registration procedure to change my address so I will be able to walk two blocks to my new precinct's polling station and cast my ballot on Nov. 6 without any hang-ups. I could have asked for one of the state's no-questions-asked absentee ballots, but I prefer to queue up with other voters. However you choose to cast your ballot, however your state allows you to do so, make sure you are set to go even if you have been voting for decades, as I have.

With this little widget, you can fill out a registration form, print it off and mail it in ... or, if you're lucky enough to be in a state where you can register online, as I am, it will take you directly to your secretary of state's website. Do it now! And share it with family and friends. Remember, as Rep. John Lewis said, voting is "the most powerful, nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union."

If you have time to donate, join a voter registration group and volunteer to help. The list at the link above contains numerous groups in your area to choose from. Time is short. Deadlines for cutting off registration are fast approaching in most states.

We need public officials in office whose objective is to go out of their way to ensure that everyone who wants to vote gets to do so. Those who throw up obstacles, especially obstacles with a partisan impact, in the way of citizens exercising a constitutional right—a right that racist murderers have tried to destroy within living memory—need to return to the private sector. There is only one way to replace these undemocratic officials and that is to vote them out. Can't do that without completing the first step and making sure everyone you know who agrees in this matter is also registered.

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2011—Warren Buffett made his tax return public last month

So yesterday, Sen. John Cornyn and other Republicans were very smug about their latest crassgotcha scheme, demanding Warren Buffett release his tax records (not caring or believing that the Tax Policy Center has backed up the possibility that Buffett's secretary could indeed pay more in taxes than he does).

So here's the thing. Warren Buffett has already made his tax return public.
Appearing on Charlie Rose last month, the billionaire investor brought his tax return along to prove his point about the Buffett Rule, which has become the centerpiece of President Obama's new plan to raise taxes on the super-rich.

A group of Republicans on Capitol Hill is calling on Buffett to release his tax return to the public, to prove whether or not he actually pays a lower percentage in tax than his secretary. Buffett made no secret of the numbers to Rose, and explained how the income breakdown works.

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Tweet of the Day:

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From 9.am. to noon ET, Daily Kos Radio can be found here. Friday's Kagro in the Morning show reviewed coverage from the Senate debates in Massachusetts  and Virginia, and talked polling & punditry trends with Greg Dworkin. From there, it's another extended connect-the-dots session pulling in the "fiscal cliff," the old "Super Committee," Blue Dogs and their dwindling influence, the stimulus plan vote, and Kent Conrad's commitment to the Zombie Simpson-Bowles "report."

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High Impact Posts. Top Comments.

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by Election Diary Rescue

Sunday Edition

Tonight's sampling:

[OH-Sen] Laf, IN - OH GOTV by Raj47905 - Diarist seeks people in Lafayette Indiana or Ohio to participate in GOTV efforts, ground game for Obama and Sherrod Brown (D-OH). Josh Mandel (R) is his opponent.

[TN-27] TN Majority Leader Gerald McCormick(R) caught stealing signs by Sandy on Signal - The Republican House majority leader Gerald McCormick got caught stealing yard signs for Democrat Frank Eaton in Tennessee's 27th district, then cussed Eaton out in front of his wife. This is not acceptable behavior, even in TN. Richard Floyd (R) is Eaton's opponent in the race.

[MN-Voter ID Amend] My LTE re: MN voter ID amendment by Rosebuddear - Offering of diarist's Letter to the Editor of the Star-Tribune regarding the proposed voter ID amendment in Minnesota.

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Today's EDR covers rescued down-ticket election diaries published between noon on September 22nd till noon on September 23rd.

This edition of Election Diary Rescue includes the following gems dug up by our miners, for a total of (15) diaries:

Senate: (5) posts, (5) states
House: (4) posts, (4) states, (4) districts
State: (1)
Ballot Initiatives: (1)
General: (4)

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More diaries and information about this project beneath the
Orange Squiggle of Down-Ticket Power

Hot damn, he is the gift that keeps on giving:

Pelley: Now, you made on your investments, personally, about $20 million last year. And you paid 14 percent in federal taxes. That's the capital gains rate. Is that fair to the guy who makes $50,000 and paid a higher rate than you did?

Romney: It is a low rate. And one of the reasons why the capital gains tax rate is lower is because capital has already been taxed once at the corporate level, as high as 35 percent.

Pelley: So you think it is fair?

Romney: Yeah, I think it's the right way to encourage economic growth, to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work.

In Mitt Romney's world, the only people that matter are the people that start businesses. The poor schlubs who shop at them just don't count. And before you complain about him wanting business owners to pay lower taxes than their customers, just pause for a moment and be glad he's willing to pay any taxes at all.

vic•tim
noun ˈvik-təm\

• a living being sacrificed to a deity or in the performance of a religious rite
• one that is acted on and usually adversely affected by a force or agent (the schools are victims of the social system): as in

     (1): one that is injured, destroyed, or sacrificed under any of various conditions (a victim of cancer) (a victim of the auto crash) (a murder victim)

     (2): one that is subjected to oppression, hardship, or mistreatment (a frequent victim of political attacks)
  

• one that is tricked or duped (a con man's victim)

(Merriam Webster Online Dictionary)

• a person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action: victims of domestic violence, earthquake victims
• a person who is tricked or duped: the victim of a hoax
• a person who has come to feel helpless and passive in the face of misfortune or ill-treatment: I saw myself as a victim [as modifier]: a victim mentality
• a living creature killed as a religious sacrifice: sacrificial victims for the ritual festivals

(Oxford English Online Dictionary)

(Continue reading below the orange fleur de lys)

Given the current course of the 2012 presidential campaign, the leak of the following remarks from a private fundraiser may forever be known in political circles as the event that stopped the downward spiral of the Romney campaign, and sent it straight down the drain instead:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

Romney's first and most obvious problem is the declaration that were he president, he would give absolutely no regard for half of the population. This terrible declaration has predictably allowed the Democratic Party and President Obama's reelection campaign to target groups among the so-called 47 percent that Romney wrote off: full-time students, for instance, or seniors and the disabled on low fixed incomes.

Romney's second major problem is his false premise that anyone who doesn't pay income taxes is inherently a loser and a parasite on society. Near and dear to his heart would be the several thousand millionaires who pay no income taxes. Less near and dear, as evidenced by their exclusion from Romney's keynote at the Republican National Convention, would be active duty military deployed to combat zones, who receive an exemption from paying federal income taxes precisely because they are at risk of sacrificing their lives on behalf of this nation. And somewhere in between would be however many Americans take advantage of the multitude of exemptions written into the tax code to provide incentives for particular economic activity. Just to name a few, the Earned Income Tax Credit, for instance, was specifically designed to exempt lower-income Americans from paying income taxes to provide incentives to get off welfare, and the mortgage interest deduction makes it much more worthwhile to buy real property. And certainly, not everyone who takes advantage of deductions like these to eliminate their federal income tax burden is a worthless parasite on society.

Writing off half the electorate is bad. Characterizing troops in combat zones as leeches is even worse. But perhaps worst of all is the challenge that this new narrative presents to traditional Republican economic orthodoxy.

(Continue reading below the fold.)

Today is the anniversary of the birth of John Coltrane, jazz saxophonist and composer, who was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, in 1926, and died July 17, 1967 on Long Island, New York. "Trane," as many who knew him called him, was one of the giants of the jazz genre, and though he died young, at 40, during his life as a musician, he changed the medium for all time.  

The biography on the his Foundation website states:

"Coltrane felt we must all make a conscious effort to effect positive change in the world, and that his music was an instrument to create positive thought patterns in the minds of people"

Jazz fans and critics all have their own favorite Coltrane recordings, but there is almost universal agreement that one of the greatest jazz recordings of all time was his quartets' "A Love Supreme," with Coltrane on tenor sax, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums.  

The album is a four-part suite, broken up into tracks: "Acknowledgement" (which contains the mantra that gave the suite its name), "Resolution", "Pursuance", and "Psalm." It is intended to be a spiritual album, broadly representative of a personal struggle for purity, and expresses the artist's deep gratitude as he admits to his talent and instrument as being owned not by him but by a spiritual higher power.

Coltrane's personal struggle to successfully conquer his own demons and find inner peace and liberation resonate today with those who hear his message.

I'm neither a musician nor a jazz critic. There are stacks of books, magazines and scholarly articles that can do more justice to Trane's music and legacy than I can.  

But on his birthday I'm musing about how jazz helped shape my thinking, and yes, even my politics. I am thinking about jazz, a music that was birthed in racial alienation, yet incorporated both African and European musicality, and how good it feels today to have a president and first lady in the White House who embrace, celebrate and nurture this music that is so essentially American, and now universal.

(Continue reading below the fold.)

The most vexing and compelling question of the 2012 election cycle is not, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" much to the frustration of the Romney campaign and the right-wing spin machine.

No. While mostly unspoken and unacknowledged, a much bigger question has been driving the American political machine for well more than a year. That question is, "At his core, just who is Mitt Romney, really?"

People of all political stripes want to know. It is the driving force that makes all his position changes and flip-flops and contradictions and walk-backs relevant and newsworthy. On the topic of who Mitt Romney is and what he believes there are more stories to keep straight than in a season's worth of To Tell The Truth contestant panels.

And it was reasonable to think, given his history, Romney was at least a pretty competent and intelligent person. But then, how to reconcile that with his stewardship over multi-million dollar organization know as Romney for President, Inc.? The last time a Michigander spent this much money on such a disastrous national endeavor the country coined a new synonym for failure: The Edsel.

Was young Mitt Romney really the man described by Ann at the Republican National Convention as an impoverished youth, eating off an ironing board and subsisting only by selling off his stock portfolio? Or was young Mitt Romney really a privileged prep school grad and Ivy Leaguer who found himself tapped by the national magazine of the swank set, socialite journal Town and Country, as one of the most eligible bachelors of 1967?

In his heart is Romney really the man who promised in 1994 to be better on gay rights than Ted Kennedy? Or is he the man who in 2012 has pledged his allegiance to the darkest anti-gay forces in the country? Is he really the Romney who said in 2002, "I will preserve and protect a woman's right to choose"—or is he the Romney of 2012 who's definitely against a woman's right to choose and not really clear if that includes cases of rape, incest, and the life or health of the mother?

Is Romney the man who, as governor of Massachusetts, signed a law extending health care to everyone in his state? Or the man who promises to repeal the same for the country?

People both left and right were curious—is Romney really a moderate Republican pretending to be a radical, reactionary conservative, or was Romney a radical, reactionary conservative who pretended for a time to be a moderate Republican?

Oddly, none of these things felt quite right. It was difficult to imagine him as being authentically any of the things he was being packaged as. They didn't ring true.

It was precisely because Romney is a cipher that the Republican primaries were a drawn-out and torturous affair for the Republican Party, and a party for the Democrats.

Primary voters flocked from one "Not Romney" candidate to the next. Virtually very faction of the party never really trusted that Romney was really one of them. In the end, Mitt Romney did not win the Republican nomination. He merely failed to lose it.

Though never accused of being charismatic, there is something compelling about the campaign and not just as the latest trainwreck TV sensation. The public was patiently waiting for the real tell that would finally solve the mystery of who Mitt Romney really was, since his words are meaningless and constantly subject to change.

And on Sept. 17, like the fictional presidential candidate played by Martin Sheen (the bad one, from the Stephen King film The Dead Zone) Romney's presidential potential hit an ignoble brick wall, when Mother Jones provided a jarring glimpse into the candidate's true character.

Libertarian leaning Josh Barro at Bloomberg News played his once-a-cycle "It's over" card saying: Today, Mitt Romney Lost the Election.

(Continue reading below the fold.)

• In case you missed it:
  

  Arctic sea ice cover likely melted to its minimum extent for the year on September 16, according to scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). Sea ice extent fell to 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles), now the lowest summer minimum extent in the satellite record.

  “We are now in uncharted territory,” said NSIDC Director Mark Serreze. “While we’ve long known that as the planet warms up, changes would be seen first and be most pronounced in the Arctic, few of us were prepared for how rapidly the changes would actually occur."

• One book can change the world. In praise of Rachel Carson.
• Just read:
  

  Glen A. Doherty, a security contractor and former member of the Navy SEALs, was killed in Libya on Sept. 12, 2012, while defending the American Mission in Benghazi, Libya. During a memorial service for Mr. Doherty and the three other Americans killed in the attack — the Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Tyrone S. Woods and Sean Smith — President  Obama said of Mr. Doherty: “He believed that his life he could make a difference, a calling that he fulfilled as a Navy SEAL…in Benghazi, as he tended to others, he laid down his life, loyal as always, protecting his friends.”

  Mr. Doherty’s best friend and former SEAL Team 3 comrade, Brandon Webb, has written a goodbye letter that we are publishing in full.

• There's yet another wingnut legal challenge to Obamacare brewing. Jack Balkin:
  

  My bottom line is that PLF's arguments are likely to fail under existing law. But, I also point out, that is hardly the end of the matter. Most constitutional scholars thought that the Commerce Clause arguments in NFIB v. Sebelius were implausible, and they garnered five votes on the Supreme Court. The events of the last two years should have taught us that the considered judgments of legal academics and legal professionals mean far less than we would like to think they do when a major political party forcefully takes a stand on a key constitutional question.

  The real question is not what legal academics think. It is whether the Republican Party, conservative media, and conservative intelligentsia are up for another all-out assault on Obamacare. If they are, then the PLF's arguments will probably move quickly from "off the wall" to "on the wall;" and if the PLF can find a single federal district court to agree with them, it will be--to quote the immortal philosopher Yogi Berra--like deja vu all over again.

• Digby summarizes the entire Republican political ethos: They just cheat.
• You always knew it was Rush Limbaugh's ugly little secret.
• How many climate denialists could you fight off?
• Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathay is still championing bigotry.
• Kevin McClatchy, the former owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team, has come out:
  

  He once did some arithmetic. Over the last four decades, he said: “Tens of thousands of people have played either professional minor league baseball or major league baseball. Not one has come out and said that they’re gay while they’re playing.” Nor has any active player in the principal leagues of football, basketball or hockey, America’s three other major professional sports. That silence is a sobering, crucial reminder that for all the recent progress toward same-sex marriage and all the gay and lesbian characters popping up on television, there remains, in some quarters, a powerful stigma attached to homosexuality.

  Coaches, managers and corporate chieftains in those four big sports are almost as unlikely to come out as players are. Rick Welts rated the front page of The Times last year when, as the president and chief executive officer of the Phoenix Suns basketball team, he revealed that he’s gay.

  McClatchy, whose interview with The Times was his first public acknowledgment of his sexual orientation, could do considerable good. He remains well known in baseball — he’s been informally advising the mayor of Sacramento on the city’s interest in having a major league team — and is the chairman of the board of the McClatchy Company, which publishes more than two dozen newspapers, including The Sacramento Bee and The Miami Herald.

• Yet another climate change denier lie debunked. The science is clear, but the liar deniers won't let that stop them.
• New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016? Frack no or frack yes or frack hell no?
• President Obama has created a new national monument:
  

  Republicans and Democrats in Congress have worked on the designation for two years, but it had stalled in the U.S. Senate.

  "Making Chimney Rock a national monument will be an extraordinary boost for the region by preserving and protecting the site and driving tourism," said Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo.

• By joining David Cameron's disastrous austerity regime in Great Britain, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has all but destroyed his party. The Lib Dems now poll as only Britain's fourth most popular, having dropped below the fringe anti-immigrant, anti-environment, anti-science, anti-tax UK Independence Party, which has never won a single seat in the House of Commons.
• It's that time of year in Bavaria.
• If you're going to ruin a piece of art, you might as well cash in on it.
• No Doubt is about to release its first album in eleven years, and return to tour with a collective eight kids in tow. The political angle?
  

  Today, Stefani is a bona fide A-lister who was recently asked to host a fundraiser for President Obama at her house in LA. "My kids had a complete meltdown when Michelle Obama arrived. The exact opposite of what you want to happen when the First Lady turns up at your house," she smiles and Kanal looks at her proudly.

  And before the conservatives and Republicans start their usual whining about Hollywood liberals, perhaps they can explain Hollywood conservative Clint Eastwood's shameful and embarrassing performance at the Republican National Convention, or Hollywood Conservative Arnold Schwarzenegger's disastrous performance as California's governor.
• I'm with Misty:
  

  Autumn is my very favorite season.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson The NFL Players Association is calling on the league to end its referees lockout, and accompanied that call with a withering denunciation of the lockout. The letter, coming from the NFLPA's 12-member executive committee, details safety concerns that could lay the groundwork for the players to ultimately refuse to play while the lockout is ongoing—their collective bargaining agreement does not allow them to strike but does allow them to refuse to play if doing so would compromise their safety.

Your decision to lock out officials with more than 1,500 years of collective NFL experience has led to a deterioration of order, safety and integrity.  This affirmative decision has not only resulted in poor calls, missed calls and bad game management, but the combination of those deficiencies will only continue to jeopardize player health and safety and the integrity of the game that has taken decades to build. [...]

It is lost on us as to how you allow a Commissioner to cavalierly issue suspensions and fines in the name of player health and safety yet permit the wholesale removal of the officials that you trained and entrusted to maintain that very health and safety. It has been reported that the two sides are apart by approximately $60,000 per team. We note that your Commissioner has fined an individual player as much in the name of “safety.”  Your actions are looking more and more like simple greed.

As the NFLPA letter notes, the past week has brought "embarrassing" headlines thanks to the scab officials, from a scab who told Philadelphia Eagles running back LeSean McCoy that he needed him on his fantasy team (NFL refs aren't allowed to play fantasy football) to a scab removed from officiating a New Orleans Saints game after he posted pictures of himself in Saints gear on Facebook.

While the teams and coaches have been told not to criticize the lockout or the officiating it produces, serious frustration has come through at times. Additionally, former officials and players have been blunt in their criticism. For instance, the father of Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III has said he believes poor officiating allowed an opposing player to kneel on and bruise RGIII's leg after a play had ended, and:

... former NFL official Jerry Markbreit told USA TODAY Sports Friday that he saw a skirmish in Thursday night's New York Giants at Carolina Panthers game that replacement officials allowed to continue when veteran officials would have stepped in and seized immediate control.

Last week, Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young was blunt in his assessment that:

Everything about the NFL, now - it's inelastic for demand. There's nothing that they can do, to hurt the demand for the game. So the bottom line is, they don't care. Player safety doesn't matter, in this case because in the end, you're still going to watch the game. We're all going to complain and moan and gripe, and say it's—all these problems. All the coaches will say it; the players will say it. Doesn't matter—let them eat cake.

NFL management and the NFL Referees Association did negotiate briefly last week, only to once again break off over the league's insistence that the officials give up their defined benefit pensions.

Sign our petition calling on NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and the league's billionaire owners to stop locking out experienced referees out of what the NFLPA is calling "simple greed."

(Full text of NFLPA letter below the fold.)

Over a week ago, at the height of the post-Democratic Convention Obama surge, I posed the following question during the nightly Daily Kos Elections Polling Wrap:

Is there an active effort to minimize the Obama convention bounce?

That question was inspired by a number of media reports. First, there was the curious decision by Gallup to measure the Obama bounce simply by the change in Obama support, rather than the change in the margin between the two candidates. This had the causal effect of essentially halving the bounce, in Gallup's assessment. This was followed by ABC's decision to fixate on the rather small change in the margin of their likely voter screen (which moved three points in Obama's direction), while totally ignoring the far larger change in the margin of their less restrictive pool of registered voters (which had moved a total of seven points in the direction of the president).

Then, just two days later, CNN upped the ante when they declared Obama leads of five points in the states of Florida and Virginia to be a "tie." Such a characterization is not only absurd on its face, but it also is counter to how the Associated Press advises polls to be reported. Indeed, the words "tie" or "statistical dead heat" are only supposed to be used when the race is actually ... well ... tied.

Ironically, this week continued the trend of using (or, more appropriately, misusing) data to paint a picture of a toss-up where the data seems to suggest otherwise. This week's effort, ironically, was perpetrated by none other than the aforementioned Associated Press, who received an enormous amount of attention for their poll of the presidential race.

In what was a fairly good polling week for Barack Obama, it was the AP that set off Drudge Sirens midweek, and warmed the hearts of Republicans everywhere. They did so by declaring the race between President Obama and Mitt Romney to be merely a one-point race.

That poll result has found its way into countless efforts at analysis of the current state of play of this election. Journalist after journalist has cited the AP poll as a solid piece of evidence that this race is, indeed, far from over.

(Continue reading below the fold.)

You want to know one of the many reasons why Mitt Romney is losing? Look at this:

Mitt Romney intensified his own rhetoric on Tuesday and called President Obama's recent comments about small business "insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America."

And this:

Just a word to the women entrepreneurs out there. If we become, if we become president and vice president we want to speak to you, we want to help you. Women in this country are more likely to start businesses than men. Women need our help.

And this, from his convention speech:

Fourth, to assure every entrepreneur and every job creator that their investments in America will not vanish as have those in Greece, we will cut the deficit and put America on track to a balanced budget.

Indeed, the GOP's whole convention revolved around "you didn't build that," although they helpfully made Pres. Barack Obama's point by morphing that into "We built it!"—exactly the point Obama was making before his comments were sliced and spliced to mean something entirely different.

So is Romney wise to focus so intensely on entrepreneurs. First of all, are there even enough entrepreneurs to give Romney a significant electoral boost? There are about a billion ways to define the word, as this article explains. They range from 27 million small businesses, to 6 million small businesses with employees, to less than two million small businesses with employees that have been around less than five years. And you can keep getting more restrictive than that if you'd like.

Put another way, is a taxi driver or chiropractor or yoga instructor an entrepreneur the same way that Steve Jobs and Sam Walton were? Of course not. So the word itself suffers from vagueness.

But let's use the more expansive definition anyway, as I assume that most self-employed people fancy themselves entrepreneurs. I could be wrong, but let's assume that for argument's sake. If you've started a business, whether it's a dentist's office, or a consultancy, or an eBay or Etsy shop, or Facebook, then you're an entrepreneur. And 27 million of them is a significant number.

Still, that's less than 10 percent of the American population, less than the 37 million African Americans in the country, or the the 50 million Latinos.

(Continue reading below the fold.)

If Mitt Romney were to declare that his plan for Medicare relied on fairy dust, people would laugh. If he said that he was waiting for Superman—literally Superman, the one with the blue red 'S' and the dangling spit curl—to teach America's children, everyone would assume it was a joke. If Romney swore that bug-eyed aliens were central to his foreign policy, it would generate well-deserved snickers.

And if he said any one of these things over and over, if he insisted they were true, if he included them in nearly every speech, proudly repeated them to the press, and made them the centerpiece of his campaign... if he did that, the laughter would turn sour. Surely Romney wouldn't be able to give a speech without being met with derision. He wouldn't make it through an interview without the media tearing into his ridiculous and unworkable plans. He'd be laughed right out of the race.

So when Mitt Romney declares that his economic plan involves reducing taxes on the wealthy as a means of growing the economy... where's the laughter?