I don't like to mince words. Mitt Romney is getting slapped around worse than Cory Booker after a Meet the Press appearance. There are redheaded stepchildren and rented mules who are having an easier time of it than the Mittster. In Nate Silver's model, if the election were held today, Romney would have a 2.2% chance of winning. His chances on November 6th are down to 18.1%, and they are only that high because Silver is still assuming a bit of a convention bounce and some economic headwinds that will keep Obama's numbers down. In any case, things are bad enough that Silver decided to try to figure out if Obama could possibly do as well or better in November as he did in 2008. Things are bad enough that Chris Cillizza decided to tell us all that they won't get much worse. Mr. Cillizza assures us that Mitt Romney won't get blown out, and Mr. Silver basically agrees, although he allows that it's at least as likely as Romney coming back to win.

Let's start with Cillizza's argument. He says that 2008 was a historically good year for the Democrats, which is true. It's always hard to break your own record for excellence. Cillizza also says this:

"Not only did then-candidate Obama galvanize a national movement behind his campaign, he also benefited from the fact that opponent Sen. John McCain could never get out from under George W. Bush’s shadow or convince the American public that he was well-versed on the economy."

Obama's national movement still exists. He's going to shatter his record for attracting small donor donations, and his sixty-plus field offices in Iowa just started taking people to the polls today. As for John McCain, he was a flawed candidate, but he was revered by tens of millions of Americans, including the vast majority of the press corp. He served his country and he paid a very high personal price, and that counts for something. Mitt Romney appeals to no one. There are no people who revere him. There are no people who think he's paid his dues. If John McCain had a rematch and took more care with selecting his running mate, he'd do a lot better than Mitt Romney is going to do because he is a much better politician with a lot more innate appeal than Mitt Romney. Which is why Cillizza's next point is overstated.

...the spending edge that Obama had over McCain not only won’t be replicated but should be reversed. Romney and the Republican party have $40 million more to spend than Obama and the Democratic party in the final weeks of the campaign — a not-insignificant sum split over just six weeks. And that doesn’t include outside groups, where Republicans continue to dominate.

I don't think Cillizza's numbers are right. It's Obama who has $40 million more than Romney. The problem is that the RNC has almost $70 million more than the DNC.

President Obama ended August with nearly $40 million more cash in the bank than Republican challenger Mitt Romney, campaign financial reports indicated...

FEC filings indicate the RNC ended August with $76.6 million cash on hand to the DNC's $7.1 million.

Obama and the DNC together started September with $95.9 million, The Hill said. The Romney campaign and the RNC had $112 million available.

That's not chump change, but a $16 million differential isn't too big of a deal when you spread it out across the whole battleground. It's the outside money that is worrisome. But the outside money can't do anything other than advertisements and mailers. The main thing that this money parity is doing is preventing Obama from trying to organize new states like Missouri and Arizona. So, in that sense, it is narrowing the president's potential upside. But I can guarantee you that Obama would be expanding the map if he had the same money advantage he enjoyed four years ago.

The last part of Cillizza's argument I want to address is this:

No one — not even the most loyal Obama allies — would argue that the political environment in 40 days will be anywhere close to as favorable as it was in November 2008.

I don't agree. The president is running against Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. They are a much weaker pair than John McCain and Sarah Palin. Romney is the worst retail politician I have even seen on this level, and that includes Sarah Palin and Dan Quayle. And Paul Ryan's Medicare ideas are the most poisonous and ridiculous ideas I have ever seen a major party run with in a national election.

And there's something else to consider. President Obama has proved himself. We don't have to wonder about a 3 am phone call anymore. If you look at Nate Silver's chart, Obama has improved his position the most in states like West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. That's because he isn't so exotic and untested anymore. It may also be because Mitt Romney is a Mormon. Obama isn't going to win in those deep red states, but he has improved his position simply by going to work every day and doing a competent job.

Something else to look at are Nate Silver's charts on the projected popular vote and the projected likelihood of victory. Both charts show a basically uninterrupted upward trajectory for Obama from June until today. The only downward slope in the charts is from an adjustment Silver imposed to counteract a possibly temporary post-convention bounce. Every day the campaign goes on, Obama's projected share of the vote goes up. We all know there must be a ceiling, but it's anybody's guess when Obama will hit it.

What's limiting the size of Obama's potential victory are two factors. The first is that Romney and outside groups have enough money to keep Obama pinned in the battleground states. The second is that there are only a few states out there that Obama narrowly lost in 2008. To win more than one or two extra states, he needs get his share of the popular vote up to the very high 50's, which is not easy to do. Romney will give him a shot at it though. I have seen nothing from him to indicate that he will stop bleeding before Election Day. Early voting might even be a curse.

What models and conventional wisdom can't measure is a disaster of the magnitude of the Romney/Ryan campaign.

Just watch the video. It says it all:

CBS Atlanta 46

No, that's not my belief. However, it is the "theological position" of Catholic Bishop Thomas John Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois. And he makes no rosary beads about it, telling Catholics in his diocese that they will put their eternal soul at risk should they vote for Barack Obama and other Democrats for elective office this November.

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Springfield, Illinois, is warning that the Democratic Party has endorsed “intrinsic evils” and consequently, voters who back Democratic candidates have put their eternal salvation at risk. In the Catholic Times, the official newspaper of the Springfield diocese, Bishop Thomas John Paprocki uses the manufactured controversy about mentioning “God” in the Democratic Platform to argue that the Democrats are hostile to faith, and went on to attack Democrats for endorsing gay rights and opposing the criminalization of abortion. He said those two planks demonstrate that the Democrats “explicitly endorse intrinsic evils,” while noting that he has “read the Republican Party Platform and there is nothing in it that supports or promotes an intrinsic evil or a serious sin.”

Ah yes, intrinsic evil. I wonder if Bishop Paprocki agrees that the Catholic Church's support of General Franco's murderous regime in Spain that resulted hundreds of thousands of deaths and other human rights atrocities participated intrinsic evils, especially since these Church officials gave Franco their support in able to solidify their own position and power in the country.

When Franco took power he converted Spain into the past. He outlawed anything that did not agree with catholic beliefs; this included contraceptives, homosexuality, practice of any other religion, prostitution, and divorce(all are presently legal). Franco even went as far has outlawing any other language than Spanish and took away all rights given to the autonomous regions of Spain. At this time church and state of Spain were one body and it was the responsibility of both to enforce the change towards unity. All forms of education and censorship were directed by the church. Franco was given the power from the Vatican to elect church officials, a rare privilege given by the Vatican. Isolation was another concept that described Spain.

Franco even slaughtered Catholic Basques, but no matter, the Church stood firmly in Franco's camp. Did the officials in the Catholic Church in Spain who supported his murderous and oppressive regime condemn their souls to eternal damnation, Bishop Paprocki? Did the Catholic Church that under Franco participated in a massive baby trafficking scheme suffer the fate that you claim will happen to Obama and Democratic voters?

Up to 300,000 Spanish babies were stolen from their parents and sold for adoption over a period of five decades, a new investigation reveals.

The children were trafficked by a secret network of doctors, nurses, priests and nuns in a widespread practice that began during General Franco’s dictatorship and continued until the early Nineties.

But the women, often young and unmarried, were told they could not see the body of the infant or attend their burial.

In reality, the babies were sold to childless couples whose devout beliefs and financial security meant that they were seen as more appropriate parents.

Inquiring minds want to know. You see, Bishop Paprocki, the Catholic Churches support for right wing dictatorships all over the world, not just in Spain, constitutes intrinsic evils to me far more heinous than the simple act of casting a vote in a democracy. But what do I know? I'm not even Catholic, for which I am eternally grateful after reading the claptrap you published in a silly and ugly attempt to frighten your followers into voting for Romney and Republicans. Shame on you for misusing your position is such a petty and nasty display of what we like to call around here, voter suppression.

Apparently you'd rather have as President a man whose party's goals are to destroy our country's safety net for the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society, a party who rejects investing in America's economy so millionaires and billionaires can make more profits and cause more misery for your parishioners by outsourcing their jobs overseas, destroying our elementary and secondary education system through cutting funds and demonizing teachers, and making it harder for their children to attend college by slashing government aid for students. You'd rather they vote for a Presidential candidate who thinks the Emergency Room is an adequate health care provider for the poor, and whose whose party's stated goal is to eliminate President Obama's health care reforms, making it ever more difficult for all but the uber-upper classes to obtain and afford decent health care. You'd rather scare them into voting for Republican politicians who care more about corporate people than real ones, and who think starting a third war in the Middle east by a attacking Iran would be a great idea, after our failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ended up killing and hundred of thousands if not millions of innocent civilians for a lie.

To be honest Bishop Papracki, it sounds to me as if your actions have far more in common with the "intrinsic evils" you rail against than anyone who votes for Obama and other Democrats this Fall. To which I can only say, if there is a hell, you sir certainly belong there. I'm not exactly sure where Dante would place you, but somewhere in either the 8th or 9th circles would seem appropriate, based on your hypocrisy and malicious and fraudulent actions. It's Christians like you that have perverted the message of peace, social justice and forgiveness preached by Jesus into just another malevolent cult.

You don't wait until you have been in a car accident to purchase car insurance; you don't wait until your house has been flooded to buy flood insurance, and you don't wait until your home is ablaze to buy fire insurance. That is not how insurance works. And it most certainly is not how health insurance should work. That's why we have Medicare. Medicare is a program designed primarily for people who are 65 years old or older, most of whom are either retired or working part-time. Their income has gone down at the precise time that their health risks are beginning to skyrocket. These people often don't have the extra money lying around that they need to pay for either insurance or for prescription drugs and other care. The insurance companies are not interested in insuring the health of the elderly, and if they do offer a plan, it's going to be astronomically expensive. It's easy to see why. Someone who needs dialysis at 70 may have paid their insurance company for fifty years by the time they need to make a claim. But someone who has only been a customer since they turned 65 will use up all the money they paid in after only a few treatments. It isn't profitable to insure old people at any reasonably affordable rate.

So, what we do instead of asking the elderly to go out and buy health insurance is to have them pay into Medicare when they are younger and working full-time. They spread the cost of their health care out over their whole lives, making it more affordable. If they want more coverage than Medicare provides, there are supplemental insurance policies that are much less costly.

But the Republicans don't like the system. They want to destroy Medicare. If you don't believe me, take a look at this YouTube of former Bush Secretary of Health & Human Services Tommy Thompson explaining his qualifications to "do away with Medicare and Medicaid." He's running for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin.

The real architect of killing Medicare is Mitt Romney's running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan. He's the chairman of the House Budget Committee, and he has created two budgets (for fiscal years 2012 and 2013) that would force seniors into the private insurance market. Under his proposal, anyone who isn't enrolled in Medicare by 2022 will be ineligible to join the program. Instead, they will be given a voucher (i.e., a check) from the federal government to go out and buy insurance on the for-profit market. Actually, you'll never actually have possession of this voucher. The government will send it to the corporation of your choosing. This is supposed to save the government a lot of money, which is another way of saying that you would receive much less money under Ryan's plan than you will under current law. Also, the Ryan Medicare plan increases the retirement age from 65 to 67 by 2033. So, many of you would have to wait an extra two years to get your earned benefits.

When the Ryan budget plan came up for a vote in 2011, all but four Republicans voted for it. When his second budget came up for a vote in 2012, all but ten Republicans voted for it. In neither case did any Democrats support the plan. It's not hard to see why the Democrats voted against it. The American people hated Ryan's budget, and particularly his voucherization of Medicare. A recent poll of battleground states showed that the American people still hate Paul Ryan's Medicare plan.

Here in the Philly suburbs, both Rep. Jim Gerlach (6th District) and Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (8th District) voted for Ryan's budget both times it came up. They like to pass themselves off as moderates, but as I showed last week with their votes to destroy Planned Parenthood, they have been voting no differently from the most radical and Southern-wing of the Republican Party. Both Gerlach and Fitzpatrick voted to destroy our Medicare program and replace it with inadequate vouchers that make no sense.

And that's not all they voted for by supporting Ryan's budgets. They also voted to repeal the president's signature Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act without replacing it with anything. They voted to vastly reduce the Medicaid program, even repealing acute care services for elderly beneficiaries. They voted to cut discretionary spending in half over the next decade. They voted to eliminate "the Alternative Minimum Tax, cut the 35 percent corporate rate to 25 percent and eliminate taxes on foreign profits." Although they won't admit it, the Ryan Budget envisions paying for these tax cuts by eliminating "loopholes" like your home mortgage deduction.

To summarize, the Ryan Plan, which Romney has endorsed and Gerlach and Fitzpatrick both voted for twice, would destroy our Medicare system, slash our Medicaid program, introduce massive new tax cuts for the wealthy while taking away tax deductions for the middle class and cutting the non-entitlement budget in half, even while increasing defense spending.

If that sounds insane, that's because it is. If that sounds radical, that's because it would totally reshape our government while massively shifting wealth away from the poor and middle class into the hands of people like Mitt Romney.

But there are no moderate Republicans anymore. Just like Gerlach and Fitzpatrick co-sponsored a bill that redefines rape to only include "forcible" rape, they went along with the radicals in their party on the Ryan Budget.

These aren't southeastern Pennsylvania values. And that's why we need to replace Jim Gerlach with Manan Trivedi and Mike Fitzpatrick with Kathy Boockvar.

[The author is a consultant for Democracy for America]

If you needed a lawyer and your choices were President Obama or Mitt Romney, who would you choose? They're both smart; they both have Harvard Law degrees. They're both very successful, although not so much as lawyers. Would you choose the guy who won a Nobel Peace Prize without even trying or the guy who insulted everyone at the Olympics so badly he was rebuked by both the prime minister of the U.K. and the mayor of London?

And what if you did hire Mitt Romney only to discover that he kept changing his theory of your case? First he told you that you could beat the rap. Then he told you he could get you a plea bargain to a lesser charge. Then he told you to forget that, but you could plea and get a lesser sentence. Finally, he told you that he never said or meant any of those things, and you probably ought to just plead guilty to everything and throw yourself on the mercy of judge. That's essentially what Mitt Romney has done between 1994 and today. He has flip-flopped on nearly every subject under the Sun, all the while denying that there are any inconsistencies in what he has to say.

I don't care if you are from Massachusetts, California, or Tennessee, no one in their right mind would hire Mitt Romney over Barack Obama to represent them in court. He's too unreliable and he has a way of offending people.

And if you wouldn't hire the guy to represent you in court, why would you hire him to represent you to the world?

If you skim down to the bottom of this article, you will find something remarkable and newsworthy. The Obama campaign has an internal poll that shows them leading in Arizona. And they are somewhat perplexed about it because they would obviously like to win the state if it is within reach, but they don't want to overextend themselves and risk losing their lead in the states he needs for victory. No one has really been talking about Arizona as a possible pick-up, but the most recent public poll of the state (from Purple Strategies) only has Obama down by three points. The most recent non-Rasmussen poll of the Senate race in Arizona has the Democrat, Richard Carmona, a single point behind the Republican, Jeff Flake. And that poll is now old enough that it is entirely reasonable to assume that Carmona has moved ahead. After all, Romney has been sinking like a stone over the last three weeks, and that isn't good for the other Republicans on the ballot.

Personally, I think it is important to do more than just try to win with the same map from 2008, minus Indiana. I expected (and predicted) that other states would come into play as Romney melted down under the heat of the campaign. Arizona is the first new state to get within striking distance, and the Obama campaign should put in some resources now while there is still time to shift them back out if the key battlegrounds start trending badly. We need that Senate seat very badly. With six-year terms, any gettable Senate seat has to be strongly contested. Carmona is doing very well and he could use the boost from a winning top of the ticket.

What the Obama campaign's ambivalence tells us is that we probably cannot expect them to make a strong play for several more states, even if they come into view. They may make a play for Arizona, but it doesn't seem like they're going to get too cocky. That, more than anything else, is what the outside money is doing. It's limiting Obama's upside by forcing him to stay in the battlegrounds.

But it may not matter. Obama will win California without making much of an investment. He can win other states without investing, too, if Romney doesn't arrest his downward slope soon.

Mitt Romney kicked himself in the balls when he opposed the auto bailout, and it's killing him in Ohio. That probably explains something that is puzzling Nate Silver. Why is Obama performing better in Ohio than he is nationally, when that never happens for a Democrat? It's because one in eight jobs in Ohio are tied to the auto industry. It doesn't help that the Republican governor of Ohio picked a high-profile fight with the labor unions and lost. If you think white working class guys in Ohio are lining up to vote for the "plutocrat married to a known equestrian," you are quite mistaken. Ask them who is better on the economy and they will tell you 'Obama.' This is evidence that the GOP is no longer a national party. Ohio is supposed to be a right-leaning state that Democrats can occasionally win. But, right now, it is a left-leaning state. And it will probably stay that way, just like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Do you ever get tired of reading analysts who ignore that the presidential contest is a competition between two human beings and try to predict what will happen by looking at economic data or other historical factors? For me, the only historical factor that matters is how the American people have treated incumbent presidents. Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton were each reelected by much larger margins than they won in their initial campaigns. Carter and Poppy Bush were voted out. The three presidents who started land wars in Asia that we couldn't win (Truman, Johnson, and Dubya) damaged themselves. Only Dubya even had the chutzpah to run for reelection, and he barely won.

To believe that Obama would lose, you had to think that his presidency was following the pattern of Carter and Poppy Bush. In other words, the economy was too weak for Obama to win reelection. But it's a mistake to blame Carter and Poppy Bush's defeats on the economy. They faced, respectively, the most talented Republican and the most talented Democratic opponents of their generation. Reagan and Clinton were political giants, and that is why they won. Bad economic times helped them, but they would win in almost any environment. They had political talent.

I don't know why so few people looked at this election as a contest between a gifted politician, organizer, and orator and a complete buffoon. It's mystifying to me. There was never any chance in hell that Mitt Romney would be competitive in this election regardless of economic conditions. He is a truly awful politician. Everyone should have been able to see that.

I think that Paul Waldman is probably right that the conservatives will learn approximately nothing from their drubbing in November. In fact, the logical reset will be to look to Jeb Bush to save the Republicans in 2016, but he will probably do about as well in the primaries as Jon Huntsman did this year. If Hillary Clinton runs, she will be the next president, and will almost definitely serve for two terms. At that point, the Republicans will be able to look back 36 years and realize that they won the popular vote once (in 2004) in that entire period of time. Will they blame themselves for this? It's not likely. They will blame the media and their own candidates, but they will never entertain the idea that the American people aren't anywhere near as crazy as they'd like to believe.

If the election were held today, Nate Silver's model gives the president a 96.4% chance of winning. He also shows Obama trailing in South Carolina by 0.2% in his weighted poll average. It's worth keeping your eye on. I've been waiting to see Georgia move into the toss-up category, but, based on admittedly sparse polling, it seems to be moving away from the president. Of all the states that Obama lost, only Montana and Missouri were closer than Georgia.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the Republicans are suffering a bit of a malaise because they don't really like their candidate. They don't really trust him, and he isn't really any more likable to them than he is to the rest of America. That's why we could really see some drop-off in participation if the polls don't tighten sufficiently to offer some hope of victory. That's also why we've seen a sudden outbreak of foolishness about "unskewed" polls by Dick Morris and others. It's critical to the hopes of downticket Republican candidates that the base doesn't give up and stay home. This may happen on the West Coast regardless, once they see Florida, Virginia, and Ohio declared for the president. But as long as the east coast and central time Republicans believe the Rasmussen and other skewed polls are accurate, they may be able to get a decent turnout.

One thing I hope the Obama administration is thinking about is that we have senate elections in Indiana, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and Arizona that are all critical. Forget what the polls say today, the president won Indiana and Nevada four years ago, he barely lost Missouri, he did admirably well in Montana, and he probably would have won Arizona if John McCain had not called it his home state. I don't want the president to take states that are essential to his Electoral College victory for granted, but I want to see him invest a little effort campaigning in some of these states with big senate races. Even if he doesn't win them, by holding down the margins he can improve the senate candidates' chances of prevailing.

And he might want to schedule a stop in South Carolina.

He needs to keep working to shore everything up so he is confident of victory. But there should come a time when he can take a couple of shots at flipping an extra state or two. Widening the playing field will also send an important message. It will not only strike fear into the Republicans, but it will tell America that this election is being contested in more than just a dozen "swing-states."

As I have mentioned several times before, David Brooks loves his dichotomies. His approach to almost every column is to reduce a problem down to two categories and then let those two categories duke it out until the one he agrees with emerges victorious. So, for Mr. Brooks, it used to be that there were two kinds of conservatives. One was your basic rapacious capitalist who exemplified the American spirit with his risk-taking derring-do. He just wanted the government out of his hair so he could exploit workers and befoul our rivers and streams. The other kind of conservative was a Norman Rockwell family man who liked things pretty much the way they were and didn't want any radicals upsetting the family structure or having sex out of wedlock or experimenting with new-age religion and agnosticism.

But nowhere in this picture is the kind of conservative who would rather lynch a black man than let him look at his daughter or register to vote. There are no paranoid John Birchers or Tea Partiers screeching about fluoridation or birth certificates. Lunatic preachers who blame our country's misfortunes on gay sex and secularism are lacking. There's no resentment about integrated schools or busing or welfare queens and their Cadillacs. No one is freaking out about all the Mexicans who have overtaken the soccer field at the local park. If Mr. Brooks' Burkean archetype is uncomfortable with women's liberation, he isn't calling anyone who uses birth control a 'slut.'

And neither does Brooks include any warmongers who insist that we fight one land war in Asia after another, regardless of the meager bang for the buck we seem to gain from them.

There's been a realignment in this country that has been going on since long before David Brooks joined the National Review in 1984. Pretty much every intolerant asshole in the country has moved to the Republican Party, if they weren't already there. The only exceptions are a few holier-than-thou progressives who can't enjoy one moment of life if even one person is going hungry.

With that lone exception, all the prudes and bigots and tsk-tskers and money-grubbers and polluters and religious freaks and misogynists and fraudsters and warmongers have aligned with the conservative movement.

Yankee Republicanism is dead. All we have is the reactionary right aligned with a bunch a greedheads. You won't find an inch of daylight between Pat Robertson and Mitt Romney or Mitt Romney and Paul Wolfowitz or Grover Norquist and Mitt Romney. We have the worst of all worlds.

The Green Bay Packers got hosed last night because the regular NFL referees are in a labor dispute with the NFL owners and are not working. Instead, a bunch of high school and small college referees are doing the pro games, and they aren't very good. They made a couple of ludicrous calls, including one on the final play of the game that wrongfully handed victory to the Seattle Seahawks. That's a shame. But it's laughable that Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker asked for the real refs to return and then insisted that it wasn't a pro-union comment. Pay the professionals, who happen to be unionized, or horrible calls will continue to happen.

Politico is getting pretty desperate. They accuse the president of running a campaign that is lacking in audacity. I get that they are riffing on the title of the president's book, but "audacity" is not normally seen as a good thing. That's why the book title was clever. To see that this article is stupid, all you have to do is realize that they open with a bit of advice from Napoleon and then they never manage to refute it. What exactly Napoleon said may never be known, but the gist of it was that you should never interrupt your enemy when they are in the process of a making a mistake. The point being, for Politico, that the Obama campaign isn't making bold and risky moves because Mitt Romney seems to wake up each morning and light himself on fire. Why change the subject?

Politico actually has no answer to that question, although they do get a quote from the nation's favorite concern troll, Ed Rendell, and another from former McCain aide Steve Schmidt, the man who gave the nation Sarah Palin. Both of those geniuses argue that playing a prevent defense is needlessly risky, despite the fact that the president's standing in the polls has been rising steadily. It seems to me that Romney and his troops are being routed on the field of battle, and one GOP pundit after another is throwing down their weapons and fleeing for safety.

So, obviously, now would be the time for the president to shift strategies and offer up some nice targets for Romney's artillery. What's missing here is the recognition that Obama has already had an audacious presidency. What do you call passing health care reform in the face of massive headwinds from a horrible economic meltdown, an aroused and unified Tea Party opposition, and all the usual corporate opponents? How easy is it to re-regulate Wall Street or set up a consumer protection bureau that goes after predatory lenders and dishonest contracts? How easy is it to take on Big Oil and Big Coal and make massive investments in clean and renewable energy? How easy is it to cut the private lenders out of the college loan economy? How easy is it to end wars that aren't going well?

It is Mitt Romney who is offering the audacious program in this election. It takes quite a bit of audacity to tell the American poor and middle class that they will have to make do with less earned benefits from Social Security and Medicare, get less help when they lose their jobs, go without health insurance, pay more in taxes, all so Romney can blow another hole in the federal budget with tax cuts for rich people and corporations. That takes "brass," as Bill Clinton put it in a slightly different context at the Democratic National Convention. Romney doesn't really want to talk about his plans because they are unpopular, but that's what's he's using to attack Obama's Citadel. Other weapons include a promise to harass Latinos so badly that they self-deport, the intent to appoint judges who will ban abortion, an opposition to gay marriage, support for laws that disproportionately disenfranchise blacks, and a new foreign policy where Israel makes our decisions in Middle East for us and war with Iran becomes a certainty.

If the battle is for public opinion, Romney's policies are blunt and broken tools which have no hope of breaching the president's fortifications. The only thing he can catapult is the propaganda. All Politico is trying to do is to lull the president out of his impregnable castle so he can be attacked with sticks and stones.

They have no advice to offer the president, and he doesn't need any.

He's a member of the middle class.

The Emergency Room is the best health care system in the universe (except for people like - Him).

Firing People is fun, fun, fun!

Corporations are people -- except you can steal from them, raid their pension funds, fire their workers and send their jobs overseas, drive them into bankruptcy and still make a personal profit from killing them!

Lobbyists are honorable folks.

Unemployed people are Lay-Zee whiners, wanting food, decent health care, government cheese and Cadillacs when they don't deserve them.

Paying taxes is something only stupid people do.

He's unemployed (except when he's not).

CEO's know what is best for America.

Global Warming, abortion as a right, stem cell research and Health Care Reform are fairy tales he doesn't believe in anymore.

Bullying is so not a problem. Especially bullying homos.

There ought to be a law against "servants" owning cell phones with video cameras.

Disabled people should get out of their wheelchairs, disconnect their oxygen tanks, and get a job. Take some responsibility, dammit!

War is Good!

Paying for War with Taxes is Bad!

Teachers are highly overrated.

Those barbed wire fences around Chinese factories are to keep people out.

Everything worth learning can be learned in Harvard Business School.

Vouchers will solve all our problems.

Some of his best friends are Latinos (until he fired them).

Electing him will improve the American economy overnight, and he won't have to lift a finger to make it so.

His son should have the right to decide whether a surrogate mother has to abort a fetus, but women should not.

He's losing because Obama is mean.

Except really he's winning.

Paul Ryan knows what he's talking about, and is never wrong.

He saved the Olympics! All by himself! Without any help from (cough, cough) government.

The trees in Michigan are just the right height.

He earned everything he owns without any help from Dad.

The Cayman Islands are a great place to put your money.

Releasing Tax Returns is for Democrats.

He's not really a heartless, soulless robot - he just plays one on TV.

His wife is a political asset, unless people see her, or hear her speak, too often.

Fundraising is campaigning.

Obama single-handedly ruined the Middle East by sucking up to Islamic Terrorists.

But it can't be fixed anyway so we might as well use it for testing our military weaponry.

The American Military is the finest in the world. American Veterans, on the other hand, are leeches and parasites.

Show horses are great tax write-offs.

More deregulation for Big Banks is a great idea!

So are more tax cuts!

And less government spending!

Except for military spending, of course.

The secret to a great marriage is giving your wife a rose everyday.

Women make great stay at home moms.

The invisible hand of the free market is like God, sort of, only more infallible.

Liberals don't understand how great America is. Freedom of religion is great - for Christians.

Government bureaucrats are evil; Insurance company bureaucrats, on the other hand are the only salvation for our health care crisis.

He hates Europe.

But he loves France. Good times, good times ....

Black people would love him if they only understood him better.

Latinos too.

Women do love him.

It makes no sense to him why people would ever vote for a Democrat.

Just because his Dad was born in Mexico and got to live here and become rich doesn't mean all the other people who came here from Mexico to better their lives deserve to stay. In fact thy should start packing their bags yesterday.

He cares deeply about others. Especially if they can still contribute to his campaign.