Mitt Romney: Wobbling From His Carefully Constructed Equilibrium
Posted by Glenden Brown in 2012 Elections, Elections, This Blog on September 23, 2012
The Mitt Romney who is running for president simply cannot be the same Mitt Romney who ran Bain or even the Olympics. The Mitt Romney who did those things had to be clear, decisive, and gaffe free. He had to rally diverse groups of people and had to create effective working teams who accomplished things. Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has been oddly chaotic, marked by a series of missteps and topped by the last, disastrous week, which I think is the worst week I remember any presidential campaign experiencing. Mitt’s off his game.
What’s going on?
Well, Kristine Haglund suggests a solution grounded in the Mormon conception of masculinity: Read the rest of this entry »
Funny Stuff!
Posted by Larry Bergan in Liberal, This Blog on September 23, 2012
America needs a laugh:
Plus:
We aren’t idiots!
People in the middle east aren’t/ain’t any more idiotic then we are, but there are those who would make us believe that.
Frank Rich – the American Right is in Despair
Posted by Glenden Brown in 2012 Elections, 4th Estate (Media), Activist groups, Conservative on September 22, 2012
Frank Rich spent a week immersed in the American right and emerged with some surprising insights:
What did I learn in my week imbibing the current installment of the Reagan revolution? I came away with empathy for those in the right’s base, who are often sold out by the GOP Establishment, and admiration for a number of writers, particularly the youngish conservative commentators at sites like the American Conservative and National Review Online whose writing is as sharp as any on the left (and sometimes as unforgiving of Republican follies) but who are mostly unknown beyond their own ideological circles. What many of the right’s foot soldiers and pundits have in common is their keen awareness that they got a bum deal in Tampa, a convention that didn’t much represent either their fiercely held ideology or their contempt for the incumbent. They know, too, that their presidential candidate is the Republican counterpart to Al Gore—not only in robotic personality but in his cautious hesitance to give full voice to the message of his troops. Even Paul Ryan, the right’s No. 1 living hero, let many of his fans down with his convention speech—not because he fudged facts but because he soft-pedaled his “big ideas” about small government once in the national spotlight. Ryan left some conservatives wondering if the only thing they gained from having him on the ticket was his name on a lousy T-shirt.
About the fact that Republicans are overwhelmingly white:
I found it hard to tell whether the GOP really believes it’s being unfairly criticized for its homogeneous racial and ethnic makeup or just wants to play the victim card for political expediency: It knows it can’t win a national election without wooing back the Hispanics it has alienated with immigration jeremiads—and without whites who like the idea of America as a place where Obama can be president (even if they don’t like Obama). But even if it’s true that the GOP is earnestly trying to reach out to minorities, it’s clear it has no idea of how to do so. Herman Cain is still running neck and neck with Condoleezza Rice to be the party’s marquee black attraction; Neil Cavuto of Fox tried to jolly him into vying for Commerce or Treasury secretary in the next administration. Even now, the GOP seems oblivious to the fact that its alliance with Donald Trump, the nation’s preeminent birther, is enough to cancel out any serious outreach to African-Americans in 2012. Were it not for Isaac, Trump might have hijacked the convention on opening night.
The overall sense I got from the piece is that the Republican base and the Republican leadership are deeply out of step with one another, that many in the base are feeling pushed aside and ignored. There’s a palpable sense of anger and frustration among many on the right that Rich summed up in a quote – we have to beat the Rrepublicans before we can beat the Democrats.
It’s a longish piece, but the whole thing is worth a read.
Mitt Romney’s Shattered Public Image
Posted by Glenden Brown in 2012 Elections, Economy, Elections, Mitt Romney, Party Politics, This Blog on September 21, 2012
Mitt Romney worked hard to create an image of himself – a competent, detail oriented business man who had things under control. Well, in the last few weeks, that image has been shattered.
What we can pronounce DOA, however, is the image of Mitt Romney as an organized, meticulous business man whose past success was the result of his tireless due diligence and relentless focus. What America has seen is a sharp contrast to that image.
The Mitt Romney of the 2012 Presidential campaign is a man whose plan for success began by gathering the biggest pile of beans and ended by making the case that the candidate with the biggest pile of beans must be the obvious choice to win. How did Mitt Romney get his big pile of beans? Mitt Romney had us believe it was the result of his organization, hard work, and focus. If you did not vote for the guy with all the beans then, well, you must be disorganized, lazy, and distracted.[snip]
In this environment, campaign onlookers are discovering that in the decade that he has been running for President, the so-called meticulous businessman did not prepare a contingency plan if, say, campaigning as an arrogant rich guy just did not work. You’ve been doing this for a decade and you have not campaign message Plan B? Egads.
And so, the story that Mitt Romney tells about himself to make middle class voters admire him has become the story Mitt Romney tells that makes middle class voters turn away in disgust. And his only way out of it has been to toss his hat in with the mob.
Mitt Romney may or may not be a decent man with a great sense of humor and dedicaton to the homely virtues of family, but the public Mitt Romney has been revealed as a haphazard, entitled jackass. Feldman described Romney as having a gaping wound that cannot be healed:
What does exist, however, are moments where one candidate is left with a gaping wound–a moment so damaging that it rises above the tit-for-tat of politics and cuts to the core of how we think about ourselves as Americans.
Mitt Romney’s video is exactly that kind a wounding moment and no matter what the Romney campaign does from this point forward, they will never be able to stitch him up. From this point forward, they need to slap some vaseline over the cut, send him back into the ring, and hope for the best.[snip]
It is a grand moment of country club condescension caught on video. Romney is saying that be someone in this category of the 47% is to be less than a full thinking individual. You are a person guided by emotions, not reason. You are easily manipulated and lazy. And how does he know that you are like this? Because your lack of “personal responsibility” has left your bank accounts less substantial than his. The 47%, Romney is saying, are not as good as the rest of us.
If Mitt Romney ultimately ends up winning the election, pundits will write post-scripts talking about the end of an America based on equality, the rise of neo-feudalism, the Dickensian Presidency.
If Mitt Romney ultimately ends up losing the election, pundits will return to the video as the moment a vast majority of America felt judged by the Republican candidate and, accordingly, turned away in disgust.
Either way, Mitt Romney has doomed himself to a long and painful future with a gaping wound that will never heal.
Your Hoverround is Not a Car
Posted by Glenden Brown in This Blog on September 21, 2012
The thing about common sense is that it’s awfully uncommon.
In the last two days, I’ve seen individuals on Hoverrounds – you know those motorized wheelchairs – do startingly stupid things.
First, I saw a man on his motorized wheelchair in the turn lane on the road. He wasn’t crossing the street – he was in the left hand turn lane on the road waiting to go through the intersection.
Second, I saw woman try to drive hers through the drive through at the sandwich shop. (Of course it wasn’t big enough for the sensors to pick her up so no one inside knew she was there and no one tried to take her order.) She was furious.
Seriously?
They have motors. They are not cars.
Who Are The ‘Lucky Duckies’?
Posted by Richard Warnick in 2012 Elections, American People, Economy, Mitt Romney, National Politics, This Blog, Unemployment on September 21, 2012
It was the Wall Street Journal that coined the term “lucky duckies” to describe what they call “the non-taxpaying class.” This, of course, is typical right-wing projection. In reality, the so-called non-taxpayers of the 47 percent actually pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes than Willard (“Mitt”) Romney does. They pay state income taxes, they pay Social Security, they pay Medicare, they pay sales taxes, they pay gas taxes, they pay property taxes. But the right is trying to portray half the country as freeloaders, in order to promote polices that would drastically increase the number of Americans in poverty.
Who are the “lucky duckies”? According to the Tax Policy Center (PDF):
- 44 percent are retirees over age 65 (many of whom vote Republican)
- 30 percent are low-income workers who qualify for credits for children and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). What the right never mentions is that the EITC is a corporate subsidy that enables employers to get away with paying less than a living wage.
- The rest includes unemployed Americans, students, and military service members in combat zones, whose pay is exempt from income tax.
- In 2011, 78,000 tax filers with incomes between $211,000 and $533,000 paid no income taxes; 24,000 households with incomes of $533,000 to $2.2 million paid no income taxes, and 3,000 tax filers with incomes above $2.2 million paid no income taxes.
Eight of the top 10 states with the lowest income tax liability are Republican-leaning states. The other two are Florida, a swing state, and New Mexico, a blue state.
UPDATE: All 50 states impose higher tax rates on low-income households than their richest 1 percent.
UPDATE: How Romney’s Tax Plan Reflects His Comments About The ’47 Percent.” He wants to roll back the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit while providing huge tax cuts for the wealthy.
‘Planetary Emergency’ Not An Issue in 2012 Campaign
Posted by Richard Warnick in 2012 Elections, Climate Change, Democracy, Democrats, Disaster, Environment, Global Warming, Party Politics, Republicans, Science, This Blog on September 20, 2012
This image made available by NASA shows the amount of summer sea ice in the Arctic on Sunday, Sept. 16, 2012, at center in white, and the 1979 to 2000 average extent for the day shown, with the yellow line. Scientists say sea ice in the Arctic shrank to an all-time low of 1.32 million square miles on Sunday, Sept. 16, 2012, smashing old records for the critical climate indicator. That’s 18 percent smaller than the previous record set in 2007. Records go back to 1979 based on satellite tracking. (AP Photo/U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center)
‘Planetary emergency’ due to Arctic melt, experts warn
By Agence France-Presse
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Experts warned of a “planetary emergency” due to the unforeseen global consequences of Arctic ice melt, including methane gas released from permafrost regions currently under ice.
Columbia University and the environmental activist group Greenpeace held separate events Wednesday to discuss US government data showing that the Arctic sea ice has shrunk to its smallest surface area since record-keeping began in 1979.
Satellite images show the Arctic ice cap melted to 1.32 million square miles (3.4 million square kilometers) as of September 16, the predicted lowest point for the year, according to data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.
“Between 1979 and 2012, we have a decline of 13 percent per decade in the sea ice, accelerating from six percent between 1979 and 2000,” said oceanographer Wieslaw Maslowski with the US Naval Postgraduate School, speaking at the Greenpeace event.“If this trend continues we will not have sea ice by the end of this decade,” said Maslowski.
While these figures are worse than the early estimates they come as no surprise to scientists, said NASA climate expert James Hansen, who also spoke at the Greenpeace event.
“We are in a planetary emergency,” said Hansen, decrying “the gap between what is understood by scientific community and what is known by the public.”
What do the major-party presidential candidates have to say on the subject of climate change? President Obama says nothing. Willard (“Mitt”) Romney mocks the President for something he said in 2008.
“President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”
Both candidates, of course, are backed by coal, oil and gas money.
Individual Mandate Tax Penalty to Hit Nearly 6 Million Uninsured Americans
Posted by Richard Warnick in Barack Obama, Democrats, Federal Budget, Health Care, National Politics on September 19, 2012
WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly 6 million Americans — most of them in the middle class — will face a tax penalty for not carrying medical coverage once President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law is fully in place, congressional budget analysts said Wednesday.
The new estimate amounts to an inconvenient fact for the administration, a reminder of what critics see as broken promises.
The numbers from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office are significantly higher than a previous projection by the same office in 2010, shortly after the law passed.
… And the budget office analysis found that nearly 80 percent of those who’ll face the penalty would be making up to or less than five times the federal poverty level. Currently that would work out to $55,850 or less for an individual and $115,250 or less for a family of four.
Average penalty: about $1,200 in 2016.
When they get dumped onto the individual private insurance market after their employers decide it’s too expensive to provide health care coverage, a lot more people will end up having to pay the penalty because they cannot afford the insurance (families with their own health insurance plans paid $414 per month on average in 2011). In fact, the penalty would be less than the average annual deductible of $2,935 for individuals and $3,879 for families.
Remember, in 2008 candidate Obama campaigned AGAINST the individual mandate, ridiculing it by saying, “if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house.” And he campaigned FOR the public option, which the ACA does not have (or any other effective cost controls).
Willard’s Plan For Redistributing Wealth
Posted by Richard Warnick in Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, National Politics, Republicans, Tax Policy on September 19, 2012
Source: Think Progress
Pat Garofalo on Think Progress explains that while Willard (“Mitt”) Romney accuses President Obama of believing in redistribution (pointing to a selectively-edited audio clip from an October 1998 conference at Loyola University, when Obama was an Illinois state senator), Romney is the candidate who actually proposes to redistribute wealth, even though he denied it today:
“There’s a tape that came out just a couple of days ago where the president said yes he believes in redistribution. I don’t. I believe the way to lift people and help people have higher incomes is not to take from some and give to others but to create wealth for all.”
According to a Tax Policy Center analysis (PDF), Romney’s plan would increase after-tax income for those making more than $200,000 annually, while reducing it for everyone else.
The upshot of Romney’s plan is that “taxpayers with incomes over $1 million would see their after-tax income increased by 8.3 percent (an average tax cut of about $175,000), taxpayers with incomes between $75,000 and $100,000 would see somewhat smaller increases of about 2.4 percent (an average tax cut of $1,800), while the after-tax income of taxpayers earning less than $30,000 would actually decrease by about 0.9 percent (an average tax increase of about $130).”
The number one economic challenge in America is growing income inequality, and a shrinking middle class. Median household income dropped 1.5 percent and the gap between the wealthiest Americans and those in the middle grew in 2011, according to Census data. Romney wants to make this problem worse.
UPDATE: Peggy Noonan: “It’s time to admit the Romney campaign is an incompetent one. It’s not big, it’s not brave, it’s not thoughtfully tackling great issues. It’s always been too small for the moment.” Anonymous GOP strategist (Mark McKinnon?): “[T]hey have the stench of a losing campaign… There are cascading controversies and problems and they’re drowning out any positive message Romney wants to put out there and any ability for Romney to do a sustained attack on Obama.”
UPDATE: 8 Very Bad Things That Happened to Mitt Romney…Just This Morning. The Romney campaign is having another extremely bad day.
UPDATE: More fallout: Scott Brown Won’t Say If He Still Supports Romney’s Candidacy.
Strom Thurmond Was A Malevolent Forrest Gump
Posted by Glenden Brown in 4th Estate (Media), American History, American People, Bullying, Conservative, Conservative Sell-Outs, Conservatives, Human Rights, Liars (politics) on September 19, 2012
So says Michael O’Donnell in a review of Strom Thurmond’s America by Joseph Crespino at the Washington Monthly. Thurmond was the exemplar of an unfortunately common Southerner of his time. O’Donnell’s summary of Thurmond:
Like many artists and most bigots, Strom Thurmond was highly productive early in life. By the age of fifty-five, the humorless South Carolina reactionary had run for president as a Dixiecrat, secured election to the U.S. Senate, penned the neo-confederate “Southern Manifesto” denouncing Brown v. Board of Education, and performed the longest one-man filibuster in the Senate’s history: a ghastly King Lear with pitchfork and noose, in which Thurmond denounced the 1957 Civil Rights Act as the death of liberty. (It ended when he grew hoarse and sat down.) When Lyndon Johnson pushed the much toothier Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress, he again did it over Thurmond’s filibuster. The following year, Thurmond fought the Voting Rights Act. His political idols were John C. Calhoun, Robert E. Lee, and Spiro Agnew. In his most famous speech, Thurmond pledged in 1948 that there were not enough troops in the Army to force “the southern people” to “admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.” But apparently they were allowed into “our” beds: in 1925 the twenty-two-year-old Thurmond sired a child with a sixteen-year-old African American family maid. His illegitimate daughter remained anonymous until her father’s death in 2003.
What makes Crespino’s book noteworthy is that he is able to move is focus past Thurmond’s racism and observe:
. . . it is precisely Thurmond’s loathsomeness on racial issues that obscures his larger role in American politics. Like some malevolent Forrest Gump, Thurmond was there at all the major choke points of modern conservative history: the 1948 breakaway from the Democrats of the short-lived States’ Rights Democratic (or Dixiecrat) Party, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in 1968, and Ronald Reagan’s ascendance in 1980. A Democrat until 1964, Thurmond was the fulcrum on which the parties traded places on race issues. His trademark use of nasty populism dressed up in constitutional principle has echoes today on the far right — the territory of Rush Limbaugh and the shrillest of the Tea Partiers. Yet he also helped cement the association between conservatives on the one hand and big business, the Christian right, and anticommunism on the other.
O’Donnell’s review is worth the read – and it sounds as if Crespino’s book is as well.
‘Papers Please’ Now Can Be Enforced in Arizona
Posted by Richard Warnick in Civil liberties Infringement, Immigration, National Politics, Republicans, The Constitution on September 18, 2012
Thanks to our partisan right-wing Supreme Court, Arizona’s un-American “Papers Please” law is now going to take effect despite being ruled unconstitutional by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton signed the formal order this afternoon dissolving the injunction she issued more than two years ago blocking the state from enforcing key provisions of the 2010 law.
Police can now demand to see proof of citizenship or legal residence. You will be arrested and taken to jail if your “papers” are not in order. If you visit Arizona, bring a passport. Or better yet, don’t visit Arizona!
Romney Tells Wealthy Donors That 47% Of Americans Are Lazy Moochers
Posted by Richard Warnick in 2012 Elections, Barack Obama, Economy, Mitt Romney, National Politics, Party Politics, Poverty, Tax Policy on September 17, 2012
Via Think Progress.
A hidden-camera recording obtained by Mother Jones captures Romney at a private fundraiser telling donors that, “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.
And I mean the President starts off with 48, 49… he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich…”
Um, in public doesn’t Romney claim the rich won’t get a tax cut, and that he has no plans to raise taxes on the middle class?
David Corn comments:
Here was Romney raw and unplugged—sort of unscripted. With this crowd of fellow millionaires, he apparently felt free to utter what he really believes and would never dare say out in the open. He displayed a high degree of disgust for nearly half of his fellow citizens, lumping all Obama voters into a mass of shiftless moochers who don’t contribute much, if anything, to society, and he indicated that he viewed the election as a battle between strivers (such as himself and the donors before him) and parasitic free-riders who lack character, fortitude, and initiative. Yet Romney explained to his patrons that he could not speak such harsh words about Obama in public, lest he insult those independent voters who sided with Obama in 2008 and whom he desperately needs in this election. These were sentiments not to be shared with the voters; it was inside information, available only to the select few who had paid for the privilege of experiencing the real Romney.
More info: Misconceptions and Realities About Who Pays Taxes
UPDATE: Romney doubles down, stands by “47 percent” comments.
UPDATE: David Brooks comments on Romney’s utterly clueless performance, and inadvertently highlights the hypocrisy of the right wing.
Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A.? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare?
…The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees.
UPDATE: 8 Falsehoods, Lies and Misstatements From Romney Fundraising Video
UPDATE: The 47% Who Pay No Income Tax – A Pure Creation of Republicans, Serving Republican Needs
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