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Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Romney advisor called out by Fox News
Romney campaign advisor Ed Gillespie is called out by Fox News host Chris Wallace for citing “studies” that don't hold water, in support of a Romney tax plan that doesn't add up. The lies are piling up on the Romney side and former Governor Ted Strickland joins Ed Schultz to discuss the GOP’s lie and deny tactic.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Remember when they stole the election in Ohio?
By
Hey, remember when they stole Ohio? Hahaha, yeah, good times. (Here is a quick story explainering the bizarre discrepancies between exit polls, which showed John Kerry winning handily, and the tabulated results, which flipped that.
It has the special bonus of world’s greatest pollster Dick Morris musing that since exit polls are like never wrong, and are used in Third World countries to determine if an election’s been thieved, Occam’s Razor insists that the easiest answer is not that the machines were hacked, but that the liberal media fixed … the exit polls. To dissuade Bush voters from coming out. A man of fierce intellect, most certainly.)
Right, so! It is time to meet your new Diebold machines, from H.I.G., a company of fine fellows who to the man have donated to Mitt Romney, and a full third of whose board of directors come from Bain? Oh yeah, them.
From The Daily Dolt:
So we’re not saying H.I.G. is going to steal Colorado for good old Miffed Romney. We’re just saying what the fuck was wrong with paper ballots?
Hey, remember when they stole Ohio? Hahaha, yeah, good times. (Here is a quick story explainering the bizarre discrepancies between exit polls, which showed John Kerry winning handily, and the tabulated results, which flipped that.
It has the special bonus of world’s greatest pollster Dick Morris musing that since exit polls are like never wrong, and are used in Third World countries to determine if an election’s been thieved, Occam’s Razor insists that the easiest answer is not that the machines were hacked, but that the liberal media fixed … the exit polls. To dissuade Bush voters from coming out. A man of fierce intellect, most certainly.)
Right, so! It is time to meet your new Diebold machines, from H.I.G., a company of fine fellows who to the man have donated to Mitt Romney, and a full third of whose board of directors come from Bain? Oh yeah, them.
From The Daily Dolt:
Hart InterCivic is a national provider of election voting systems that are used in swing-states Ohio and Colorado, as well as in states we don’t really care about so much because we already know how they’ll turn out (e.g., Texas, Oklahoma, and Hawaii). Private equity firm H.I.G. Capital, LLC bought out a “significant” portion of Hart in July of 2011, and now the majority of Hart’s board directors are employees of H.I.G. (It’s not entirely clear how much of the voting machine company H.I.G. owns, but the financial advisors responsible for the transaction state that “Hart Intercivic was acquired by HIG Capital.”)The Daily Dolt goes on to provide helpful links to all H.I.G.’s board of directors, helpfully pointing out which are former Bain employees and which are current Romney bundlers. (All of them, Katie.)
So we’re not saying H.I.G. is going to steal Colorado for good old Miffed Romney. We’re just saying what the fuck was wrong with paper ballots?
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Your Weekly Address
President Obama talks about his choice to rescue the American auto industry from collapse and save more than one million American jobs.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Fox News furious over Joe Biden's debate performance
After Thursday's vice presidential debate, Fox News and other Republicans were quick to jump all over Vice President Joe Biden for being rude, disrespectful and interrupting Paul Ryan.
Ed Schultz takes a look Fox News' coverage of the debate and their own history of interrupting very important politicians. Democratic Strategist Karen Finney weighs in.
Friday, October 12, 2012
Mr President, grow a pair
By Dave Winer
Most Americans, and I would bet a lot of our
representatitves, don't understand that it's not so much our military that gives
us power around the world, rather it's the fact that our currency, the dollar,
is the safe haven for all value, world-wide. If either the President or the
Congress dropped the ball, that would have shattered, and we would stop being
the exceptional country, and all kinds of bills would come due. Not for future
generations -- right now.
I was appalled
when I saw the President take the 14th
Amendment off the table early in the process. If you recall, the amendment
contains a provision that says that the validity of the US debt will not be
questioned. Clearly, there was no point debating whether we would honor our
obligation. The Republicans can whine all they want. If they want to have an
impeachment, the famously coool President would just look into the camera and
say he was doing what the Constitution told him to do, and the Congress should
get on board. They would still have to get the votes of 2/3 of the Senate,
and it was controlled by Democrats, so they can jump up and down all they want,
nothing was going to change.
Instead, our dreamy-eyed President decided to negotiate
with them! He chose brinksmanship when we should have had some ballsy
leadership.
That's why his
numbers dropped when he did the same damned thing in last week's debate. We were
reminded why this President hasn't yet got the message. The Republicans are
dicks. You can't deal with people like that as if they would respond to reason.
Romney
made that clear from the outset. This debate should have been seen by the
President as an opportunity to get something straight.
"I am the fucking President of the fucking United States,
and if you don't like that, fuck you."
Luckily there's still time for him to get a clue.
This is not a negotiation with Congress or the
Republicans, Mr. President. You are negotiating with your employers, the people
of the United States of America. If this election were being held in August
2011, you would have lost. It's time for you to get the message, that we will
not accept this kind of leadership in the future.
You have my vote. And my money. But I'm glad that enough
of my fellow Americans were willing to tell a pollster that you're too wimpy to
be President. So maybe you'll get a clue and maybe in your second term we can
get a bunch more stuff done. Or at least Washington will be a bit more quiet and
let us get on with our lives, without having everything fall apart for no good
reason.
We all saw the
debt-ceiling spectacle in the summer of 2011. The Republicans in Congress played
an incredibly dangerous game of Chicken with the
President. If either of them blinked at the wrong moment, the casualty would be
American dominance of the world's financial system.
Most Americans, and I would bet a lot of our
representatitves, don't understand that it's not so much our military that gives
us power around the world, rather it's the fact that our currency, the dollar,
is the safe haven for all value, world-wide. If either the President or the
Congress dropped the ball, that would have shattered, and we would stop being
the exceptional country, and all kinds of bills would come due. Not for future
generations -- right now. I was appalled
when I saw the President take the 14th
Amendment off the table early in the process. If you recall, the amendment
contains a provision that says that the validity of the US debt will not be
questioned. Clearly, there was no point debating whether we would honor our
obligation. The Republicans can whine all they want. If they want to have an
impeachment, the famously coool President would just look into the camera and
say he was doing what the Constitution told him to do, and the Congress should
get on board. They would still have to get the votes of 2/3 of the Senate,
and it was controlled by Democrats, so they can jump up and down all they want,
nothing was going to change. Instead, our dreamy-eyed President decided to negotiate
with them! He chose brinksmanship when we should have had some ballsy
leadership. That's why his
numbers dropped when he did the same damned thing in last week's debate. We were
reminded why this President hasn't yet got the message. The Republicans are
dicks. You can't deal with people like that as if they would respond to reason.
Romney
made that clear from the outset. This debate should have been seen by the
President as an opportunity to get something straight. "I am the fucking President of the fucking United States,
and if you don't like that, fuck you."Luckily there's still time for him to get a clue.
This is not a negotiation with Congress or the
Republicans, Mr. President. You are negotiating with your employers, the people
of the United States of America. If this election were being held in August
2011, you would have lost. It's time for you to get the message, that we will
not accept this kind of leadership in the future. You have my vote. And my money. But I'm glad that enough
of my fellow Americans were willing to tell a pollster that you're too wimpy to
be President. So maybe you'll get a clue and maybe in your second term we can
get a bunch more stuff done. Or at least Washington will be a bit more quiet and
let us get on with our lives, without having everything fall apart for no good
reason.Thursday, October 11, 2012
Have You All Lost Your God Damned Minds?
WARNING The language used in this thread, from a blog called Sad Bastard Bar, is not for the timid. Language aside, the message of the blog author is, IMHO, right on target.
By Don
Liberals, you need to get your God Damned shit together. The President lost a debate. He didn’t lose Texas.
For four years, this President has faced off one of the most obstructionist parties in modern American political history. He did this in the center of an economic collapse. He has delivered on too many promises to count, even in the dead heat of this. He’s been running ahead in an election where the opposition was fairly incompetent, where the leading opposition candidate told half the country to go fuck themselves with a stolen rusty tire iron. He has one debate where the opposition is competent, and that’s it. You’re done. You have bad polling days, and you’re done. Let’s just call off the election and use that time to apply for foreign passports. I mean, holy shit, what a bunch of spineless bastards you turned out to be.
I’ve spent the last few days talking to you motherfuckers, and I have several questions, beginning with: did you motherfuckers watch the same debate as me? Cause for the last few days, I’ve heard people saying ‘why didn’t he point out that Romney was lying?’ He did. ‘Why didn’t he tie the economy to education or healthcare?’ He did. He made much of the same case for his Presidency as did Bill Clinton. He just didn’t do it with the bullshit flourish that is Clinton’s specialty.
But shit, for the last four years, he hasn’t done the flourish. He’s been tired almost every day. He’s been tired at every press conference. He’s been tired at every speech and every state of the union with the exception of a handful of incidents. And all of a sudden, you’re surprised he comes off tired?
Fuck yes, he’s tired. For four years, for four years while you were antsy that he was playing the adult in the room, while you thought he was being too nice, he fought daily for every reform at every impasse. Bill Clinton, for all his talents, didn’t do what Barack Obama did. Not for the uninsured. Not for the poor. Not for college students. Not for women. Not for the children of illegal immigrants. Not in a recession.
This President has wound down two wars. He gave the kill order for Osama Bin Laden. He has promoted genuine efforts at democracy in the Middle East, in a region that is in the middle of a revolution that came under his watch.
While everything he does gets fucked daily by the tidal wave of shithead that is the Republican Party, the Israeli Prime Minister, the European economy, probably the whole of the Middle East, some douchebags with YouTube accounts and the state of Arizona, we ask if his heart is in it? Really? If he really wants to be President?
For four years, we sat at his left flank just pissing and moaning while he delivered what none of his predecessors could. He did this against a party that is objectively crazy. And now, one debate, and the question is, is the President’s heart in it?
What happened to chess? Yeah, fuck chess, we had a few bad poll days, time to go beat our own brains in with an ice pick. You know what? Fuck the President’s heart. I know his heart’s in it because while you and I have been fucking around among ourselves, bullshitting into the ether as to what it would mean for the campaign if Obama came off like an angry black man for a second, he’s been there bleeding for us and our progressive policies every goddamn day.
You know whose heart isn’t in it? You know who needs to take the blame right now? You know who is letting everybody down? We are. We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for, and we surely are a huge pile of superstitious assholes.
For four years, this President has made good on his promises even with the shit-storm that has become the political process in America. And he deserves, if not our support, then our resolve. So stop fucking panicking because you had a bad poll day. You know how many bad poll days the President has had? You might know better than he does, because he’s been too busy trying to keep Iran and Israel from becoming the dust and ash filled lands formerly known as Iran and Israel.
So, for fuck’s sake, get your shit together. This is our President. He needs us. He needs our support. He needs our resolve. He needs us to beat Mitt Romney, because that asshole, despite what he said in the debate, would do exactly the damage that George Bush did, and we literally can’t afford that.
We can’t afford more wars. We can’t afford more debt. We can’t afford more tax breaks for wealthy fuckers. We cannot afford more jobs lost, more pensions squandered, more homes drowned in debt just so one more asshole can make his buck at the margins of legality.
We cannot afford losing healthcare reform. People with preexisting conditions who might lose insurance, people whose parents are going to get old and need care and housing, they can’t afford it.
Our generation and our children can’t afford the debt we’d accumulate under Romney. They can’t afford the spending cuts that won’t happen, the wars that will, and every promise that he’ll break as quickly as he made it. We can’t afford this collapse.
And if it happens, it’s not on the President. He did poorly in a debate. If that means he loses the election, it’s on us. Because this man hasn’t been quiet. He has fought for us and our principles and our policies every day, and if he loses this because of a debate, then it means for all our talk, we weren’t ready to fight for him.
Get your shit together. Because you can’t afford not to, because you are better than this, because you need the resolve of the last four years. You have been beaten the fuck down by all the monstrosities there are.
Now is not the time, a month away from an election between a man who has helped us fight and a man who would continue to bludgeon us, to panic. Now is the time to stand, with the fire you need to get through this pulsing through your corroded arteries and your over-extended gut, with the conviction of your principles, and fight for this President the way he’s fought for us. Not because he's got this, but because he might not. Because now, he might need you. Because we might need you.
So please, calm the fuck down, get your goddamn shit together and fight for this because for once, it means something that you do more than talk shit.
By Don
Liberals, you need to get your God Damned shit together. The President lost a debate. He didn’t lose Texas.
For four years, this President has faced off one of the most obstructionist parties in modern American political history. He did this in the center of an economic collapse. He has delivered on too many promises to count, even in the dead heat of this. He’s been running ahead in an election where the opposition was fairly incompetent, where the leading opposition candidate told half the country to go fuck themselves with a stolen rusty tire iron. He has one debate where the opposition is competent, and that’s it. You’re done. You have bad polling days, and you’re done. Let’s just call off the election and use that time to apply for foreign passports. I mean, holy shit, what a bunch of spineless bastards you turned out to be.
I’ve spent the last few days talking to you motherfuckers, and I have several questions, beginning with: did you motherfuckers watch the same debate as me? Cause for the last few days, I’ve heard people saying ‘why didn’t he point out that Romney was lying?’ He did. ‘Why didn’t he tie the economy to education or healthcare?’ He did. He made much of the same case for his Presidency as did Bill Clinton. He just didn’t do it with the bullshit flourish that is Clinton’s specialty.
But shit, for the last four years, he hasn’t done the flourish. He’s been tired almost every day. He’s been tired at every press conference. He’s been tired at every speech and every state of the union with the exception of a handful of incidents. And all of a sudden, you’re surprised he comes off tired?
Fuck yes, he’s tired. For four years, for four years while you were antsy that he was playing the adult in the room, while you thought he was being too nice, he fought daily for every reform at every impasse. Bill Clinton, for all his talents, didn’t do what Barack Obama did. Not for the uninsured. Not for the poor. Not for college students. Not for women. Not for the children of illegal immigrants. Not in a recession.
This President has wound down two wars. He gave the kill order for Osama Bin Laden. He has promoted genuine efforts at democracy in the Middle East, in a region that is in the middle of a revolution that came under his watch.
While everything he does gets fucked daily by the tidal wave of shithead that is the Republican Party, the Israeli Prime Minister, the European economy, probably the whole of the Middle East, some douchebags with YouTube accounts and the state of Arizona, we ask if his heart is in it? Really? If he really wants to be President?
For four years, we sat at his left flank just pissing and moaning while he delivered what none of his predecessors could. He did this against a party that is objectively crazy. And now, one debate, and the question is, is the President’s heart in it?
What happened to chess? Yeah, fuck chess, we had a few bad poll days, time to go beat our own brains in with an ice pick. You know what? Fuck the President’s heart. I know his heart’s in it because while you and I have been fucking around among ourselves, bullshitting into the ether as to what it would mean for the campaign if Obama came off like an angry black man for a second, he’s been there bleeding for us and our progressive policies every goddamn day.
You know whose heart isn’t in it? You know who needs to take the blame right now? You know who is letting everybody down? We are. We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for, and we surely are a huge pile of superstitious assholes.
For four years, this President has made good on his promises even with the shit-storm that has become the political process in America. And he deserves, if not our support, then our resolve. So stop fucking panicking because you had a bad poll day. You know how many bad poll days the President has had? You might know better than he does, because he’s been too busy trying to keep Iran and Israel from becoming the dust and ash filled lands formerly known as Iran and Israel.
So, for fuck’s sake, get your shit together. This is our President. He needs us. He needs our support. He needs our resolve. He needs us to beat Mitt Romney, because that asshole, despite what he said in the debate, would do exactly the damage that George Bush did, and we literally can’t afford that.
We can’t afford more wars. We can’t afford more debt. We can’t afford more tax breaks for wealthy fuckers. We cannot afford more jobs lost, more pensions squandered, more homes drowned in debt just so one more asshole can make his buck at the margins of legality.
We cannot afford losing healthcare reform. People with preexisting conditions who might lose insurance, people whose parents are going to get old and need care and housing, they can’t afford it.
Our generation and our children can’t afford the debt we’d accumulate under Romney. They can’t afford the spending cuts that won’t happen, the wars that will, and every promise that he’ll break as quickly as he made it. We can’t afford this collapse.
And if it happens, it’s not on the President. He did poorly in a debate. If that means he loses the election, it’s on us. Because this man hasn’t been quiet. He has fought for us and our principles and our policies every day, and if he loses this because of a debate, then it means for all our talk, we weren’t ready to fight for him.
Get your shit together. Because you can’t afford not to, because you are better than this, because you need the resolve of the last four years. You have been beaten the fuck down by all the monstrosities there are.
Now is not the time, a month away from an election between a man who has helped us fight and a man who would continue to bludgeon us, to panic. Now is the time to stand, with the fire you need to get through this pulsing through your corroded arteries and your over-extended gut, with the conviction of your principles, and fight for this President the way he’s fought for us. Not because he's got this, but because he might not. Because now, he might need you. Because we might need you.
So please, calm the fuck down, get your goddamn shit together and fight for this because for once, it means something that you do more than talk shit.
The Rude Pundit: What Biden Should Say Tonight 2012
Posted by Rude One
At tonight's debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Republican nominee Paul Ryan, if moderator Martha Raddatz asks Biden about his opinion of Paul Ryan's budget plan, and he doesn't say, "Listen, everyone, before I get to that, I want us all to take a moment and look at Paul Ryan. Just look at him for a moment.
He's young, handsome, a good-looking guy, strong jaw, deep blue eyes that I'm sure made all the girls in Wisconsin just swoon. Look at him. You are literally looking at everything that's wrong with the Congress. You are looking at the problem. You are looking at the reason why we can't get a jobs bill, the reason we can't get a rational tax plan done, the reason that we can't close Guantanamo, all of it, the fact that 'compromise' is a dirty word to Republicans, it's all right there, in one package.
"So, pardon me, Martha and everyone watching and listening, if I say nice things about how he looks - hell, he's probably a good man to his family - and if I don't spend a lot of time complimenting Representative Ryan's abilities as a member of Congress.
Because what you see there, behind the pretty face and the baby blues, is a man who will take everything you love and fuck it to death in front of you before burning it down. Your grandmother, your babies, your wives, your friends. Paul Ryan will line 'em up and, one by one, he'll bend 'em over and fuck them, hard, until they just give out and expire.
Ryan will invite all of his Republican friends in Congress, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, that crazy cracker - Louis Gomer, Gohmert, whatever the fuck that yahoo from Texas calls himself - and he'll give 'em all shish-ka-bobs of your balls to roast on the fire he'll make out of the bodies and your house. The country's gonna burn down and Paul Ryan will simply call for more wood.
"You asked me about his budget. The one that Mitt Romney is running away from like a scared bitch from a switch? Look, you know me. I'm a good Catholic boy. I listened to my nuns all the way through school. I was told to take care of the poor. That's our responsibility.
Ryan slashes everything that helps people who need help. Medicaid, food stamps, housing, it's like he's taking the bodies of those in poverty and cutting extra holes in 'em because the ones they have aren't kinky enough for him to fuck. And then he shits on their faces by cutting taxes for the rich. And then he makes them eat shit by hiking defense spending. How is that visionary? It sounds like every Republican plan ever.
"Shut the fuck up, sonny. I know everyone in your party has lined up to suck your dick like it's made of candy and shoots ice cream on their tits. But shut the fuck up and listen. You and the rest of the GOP have hurt this country by refusing to compromise on anything. That's not what makes you a statesman. It ain't your ability to slam doors. It's the ability to go down the hall and make the deal.
But you're such a little pussy that even when you vote for a deal, the sequester, you deny you did it.
No, Congressman. You voted to cut defense if there's no compromises on spending and taxes. Be a man. It's easy as hell to take food out of the mouths of starving children. It's really hard to tell General Dynamics that their profit margin might decline by a percent or two.
"Martha, once again I find myself on stage with someone who I wouldn't let wash my balls after I workout at the White House gym, let alone be first in line to the presidency. I've walked the walk, son. I wrote the Violence Against Women Act. I stared down Slobodan Milosevic.
What the fuck have you done, junior? Come up with a new way to do the same bullshit things that Ronald Reagan and the Bushes did to fuck over the working class? Put some new makeup on the voodoo economics?
Go back to school, pretty boy, and come back when you get some manners and learn your history, you child, you pathetic tool of the rich, you over-hyped bullshit machine" then the debate will be useless.
At tonight's debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Republican nominee Paul Ryan, if moderator Martha Raddatz asks Biden about his opinion of Paul Ryan's budget plan, and he doesn't say, "Listen, everyone, before I get to that, I want us all to take a moment and look at Paul Ryan. Just look at him for a moment.
He's young, handsome, a good-looking guy, strong jaw, deep blue eyes that I'm sure made all the girls in Wisconsin just swoon. Look at him. You are literally looking at everything that's wrong with the Congress. You are looking at the problem. You are looking at the reason why we can't get a jobs bill, the reason we can't get a rational tax plan done, the reason that we can't close Guantanamo, all of it, the fact that 'compromise' is a dirty word to Republicans, it's all right there, in one package.
"So, pardon me, Martha and everyone watching and listening, if I say nice things about how he looks - hell, he's probably a good man to his family - and if I don't spend a lot of time complimenting Representative Ryan's abilities as a member of Congress.
Because what you see there, behind the pretty face and the baby blues, is a man who will take everything you love and fuck it to death in front of you before burning it down. Your grandmother, your babies, your wives, your friends. Paul Ryan will line 'em up and, one by one, he'll bend 'em over and fuck them, hard, until they just give out and expire.
Ryan will invite all of his Republican friends in Congress, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, that crazy cracker - Louis Gomer, Gohmert, whatever the fuck that yahoo from Texas calls himself - and he'll give 'em all shish-ka-bobs of your balls to roast on the fire he'll make out of the bodies and your house. The country's gonna burn down and Paul Ryan will simply call for more wood.
"You asked me about his budget. The one that Mitt Romney is running away from like a scared bitch from a switch? Look, you know me. I'm a good Catholic boy. I listened to my nuns all the way through school. I was told to take care of the poor. That's our responsibility.
Ryan slashes everything that helps people who need help. Medicaid, food stamps, housing, it's like he's taking the bodies of those in poverty and cutting extra holes in 'em because the ones they have aren't kinky enough for him to fuck. And then he shits on their faces by cutting taxes for the rich. And then he makes them eat shit by hiking defense spending. How is that visionary? It sounds like every Republican plan ever.
"Shut the fuck up, sonny. I know everyone in your party has lined up to suck your dick like it's made of candy and shoots ice cream on their tits. But shut the fuck up and listen. You and the rest of the GOP have hurt this country by refusing to compromise on anything. That's not what makes you a statesman. It ain't your ability to slam doors. It's the ability to go down the hall and make the deal.
But you're such a little pussy that even when you vote for a deal, the sequester, you deny you did it.
No, Congressman. You voted to cut defense if there's no compromises on spending and taxes. Be a man. It's easy as hell to take food out of the mouths of starving children. It's really hard to tell General Dynamics that their profit margin might decline by a percent or two.
"Martha, once again I find myself on stage with someone who I wouldn't let wash my balls after I workout at the White House gym, let alone be first in line to the presidency. I've walked the walk, son. I wrote the Violence Against Women Act. I stared down Slobodan Milosevic.
What the fuck have you done, junior? Come up with a new way to do the same bullshit things that Ronald Reagan and the Bushes did to fuck over the working class? Put some new makeup on the voodoo economics?
Go back to school, pretty boy, and come back when you get some manners and learn your history, you child, you pathetic tool of the rich, you over-hyped bullshit machine" then the debate will be useless.
Debate with Right Wing Zealot
Published on Thursday, October 11, 2012 by RobertReich.org
Memo to Joe, Re: Debate with Right Wing Zealot
Jobless claims plunge to 4 year low
Claims fall 30,000 to 339,000, well below expectations
Greg Robb is a senior reporter for MarketWatch in Washington.
By Greg Robb, MarketWatch
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The number of U.S. workers who filed new
applications for unemployment benefits dropped sharply, by 30,000, last
week to 339,000, the lowest level in more than four years, the Labor
Department reported Thursday.
Economists polled by MarketWatch had expected initial claims in the week
of Oct. 6 to rise 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 368,000. Last week’s
number was revised up by 2,000 to 369,000.
The four week average of new claims, meanwhile, dropped 11,500 to
364,000, the lowest level since late March. The moving average is
considered a more accurate barometer of employment trends because it
smooths out quirks in the weekly data.
Today’s data fit with the improvement in the labor market seen in the
latest monthly jobs report, issued last Friday. The U.S. added 114,000
net jobs in September and the unemployment rate fell below 8% for the
first time since President Barack Obama took office.
Read more on payrolls report.
“Maybe the unemployment rate drop wasn’t a fluke?” said Robert Brusca, chief economist at FAO Economics.
Still. analysts were cautious about reading too much into one week’s
report. They noted that seasonal adjustment factors tend to be positive
at the start of a quarter.
“Should this level hold for another week, it would flag a meaningful
improvement in October nonfarm payrolls,” noted Sal Guatieri, senior
economist at BMO Capital Markets.
Stock futures jumped after the claims data were released. Treasury prices extended losses and the dollar stayed down.
In the week of Sept. 29, the number of people who continued to receive
benefits under state unemployment programs declined 15,000 to a
seasonally adjusted 3.27 million. The four-week average of continuing
claims fell by 7,750 to 3.28 million.
About 5 million people received some kind of state or federal benefit in
the week ended Sept. 22, down 43,970 from the prior week. Total claims
are reported with a two-week lag. There were 6.8 million people
receiving benefits in the same week in 2011.
In a separate report, the government said that the trade gap widened in
August to $44.2 billion as exports declined for the third straight
month.
Private Insurers Profit by Ripping Off Medicare
Published on Thursday, October 11, 2012 by Common Dreams
Report: Private Insurers Profit by Ripping Off Medicare
Researchers say private programs like Medicare Advantage just add waste; Call for reformed, expanded Medicare for All
New research by health care experts concludes that privately run insurance plans designed to supplement the Medicare system serve no truly useful purpose and instead of helping seniors receive better care, Medicare Advantage plans actually undermine traditional Medicare’s fiscal health.
By creating conditions were Medicare is overpaying premiums to these private (mostly for-profit) programs, the report—to be published in the forthcoming issue of International Journal of Health Services—found that as much as $282.6 billion dollars has been drained from Medicare since they were first introduced in 1985.
A majority of that waste, however, has been lost in the last eight years, the report says, following changes enacted under the Bush administration in 2003 which boosted Medicare payments to private insurers to nearly $85 billion through 2012. Those billions of dollars taken a heavy toll on taxpayers, seniors, and ultimately—given the well-known impact of rising national health care costs—have helped drag down the entire US economy.
“In 2012 alone, private insurers are being overpaid $34.1 billion, or $2,526 per Medicare Advantage enrollee,” said Dr. Ida Hellander, lead author of the study.
Concluding that the creation of the private programs and subsequent attempts to reform or modify them have all been fiscal failures, co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler said: “It’s time we look to proven, cost-effective ways of providing high-quality care to Medicare’s beneficiaries and to the entire population. That means taking a fresh look at the single-payer model of reform.”
The research, which the authors suggest is the first of its kind, comes at a time when lawmakers in Washington, including vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, have proposed a dramatic expansion of private Medicare plans and criticized the Obama administration for the modest cuts in the overpayments contained in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). However, the administration has also touted the fact that private plans are on the upswing and supports the basic continuation of the public-private partnership.
The report concludes that private insurers profit from Medicare in five basic ways, including: cherry-picking healthier seniors and making it harder for riskier patients to join programs; gaming Medicare's so-called "risk-adjustment' schemes; lobbying Congress for mandated payment structures; creating bonus payments schemes that generate no useful improvements in care; and by duplicating payments demands for care never even given by the plan.
“We’ve long known that Medicare has been paying private insurers more than if their enrollees had stayed in traditional free-for-service Medicare, but no one has assessed the full extent of these overpayments,” said Hellander. “Nor has anyone systematically examined the many ways that private insurers have gamed the system to maximize their bottom line at taxpayers’ expense.”
Woolhandler concluded: “It’s clear that having Medicare Advantage programs compete with Medicare doesn’t save us money. In fact the opposite is the case. The private plans only add waste, and the aggregate waste is staggering – enough to be a significant drag on the economy."
“Unfortunately, recent legislative and technical attempts to reduce Medicare’s overpayments to these insurance firms have had little or no impact,” she said.
Read the full report here (pdf).
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Can you afford to get fooled again?
President George W. Bush's famous statement "you can't fool me again" should serve as a reminder to Americans for what's on the line this election season. Ed Schultz goes through Mitt Romney's lies from last week's debate and sets the record straight.
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
A scrubbing on foreign policy
By Dana Milbank, Published: October 8
In 1967, a TV interviewer asked George Romney to explain why he supported the Vietnam War after a trip to that country in 1965 but opposed it two years later when he was running for president.
“You know, when I came back from Vietnam, I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody could get,” Romney said.
“By the generals?” asked Lou Gordon, from Detroit’s WKBD-TV.
“Not only by the generals but also by the diplomatic corps over there,” the candidate said. “They do a very thorough job.”
Susceptibility to brainwashing is apparently an inherited trait. If brainwashing accounts for a change in position, George’s son Mitt has had his gray matter cleansed more often than most people shampoo their hair.
The “brainwashing” interview ended the elder Romney’s career. But brainwashing doesn’t carry the stigma it did 45 years ago. Scrubbing one’s brain clean of previous positions has been Mitt Romney’s stock in trade. In fact, his foreign-policy speech Monday to the Virginia Military Institute was one long gargle-and-rinse of the candidate’s previous positions.
Last year, Romney called the Obama administration’s intervention in Libya “mission creep and mission muddle.” On Monday, he accused Obama of declining to use “America’s greatest power to shape history” and of eschewing “our best examples of world leadership” in that same corner of the world.
Last year, Romney said American troops “shouldn’t go off and try to fight a war of independence for another nation. Only the Afghanis can win Afghanistan’s independence from the Taliban.” On Monday, he spoke of that same conflict as a matter of the utmost national importance, saying the route to “attacks here at home is a politically timed retreat that abandons the Afghan people to the same extremists who ravaged their country and used it to launch the attacks of 9/11.”
Last year, Romney reversed his earlier support for the Iraq war, saying, “If we knew at the time of our entry into Iraq that there were no weapons of mass destruction . . . obviously we would not have gone in.” On Monday, he was back to his original view, accusing the Obama administration of an “abrupt withdrawal” from Iraq and portraying the situation there as part of “a struggle between liberty and tyranny, justice and oppression, hope and despair.”
Just a few months ago, Romney said “there’s just no way” to achieve peace between the Israelis and Palestinians because Palestinians are “not wanting to see peace.” He said it was necessary to “recognize this is going to remain an unsolved problem.” On Monday, he said he would “recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security” with Israel.
Rub-a-dub-dub! Four positions got scrubbed.
Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom famously predicted that the candidate would use an Etch-a-Sketch approach in the general election to erase his previous positions. But nobody predicted that the entire exercise would occur in the space of one week — and just a month before the election. Stranger yet, Romney hasn’t been shifting all his views to the center in recent days. While his domestic policies are moderating, his foreign policy is moving to more of a neocon hard line. The only consistency is inconsistency: Whatever Romney’s positions were, they are no longer. As his dad might have said, it has been a very thorough job.
The process began last week in Denver, when Romney stipulated that he would not reduce the share of taxes the wealthy pay, that he would not enact a tax cut that adds to the deficit and that he would not cut education spending.
This was followed a couple of days later by the most thorough brainwash. After weeks of defending his secretly recorded claim that 47 percent of Americans are mooching off the government, he told Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity: “I said something that’s just completely wrong.”
These came on top of Romney’s reversals of long-standing positions on abortion, taxes, Ronald Reagan, global warming, economic stimulus funding, the auto-industry bailout and gun rights. So by the time he arrived in Lexington, Va., for Monday’s speech, Romney might as well have been carrying a bottle of Listerine: Another wash was obviously coming.
After Romney dismissed Afghanistan last year as unworthy of American involvement because it’s a “war of independence,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) scolded the candidate, saying he sounded like Jimmy Carter. But after Romney employed his Afghanistan tough talk on Monday, Graham issued a new statement saying that Romney would “return America to our traditional leadership role in the world.”
As the lather rinses, questions remain: Was Romney brainwashed before? Is he being brainwashed now? Or is it a continuous cleaning cycle?
danamilbank@washpost.com
In 1967, a TV interviewer asked George Romney to explain why he supported the Vietnam War after a trip to that country in 1965 but opposed it two years later when he was running for president.
“You know, when I came back from Vietnam, I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody could get,” Romney said.
“By the generals?” asked Lou Gordon, from Detroit’s WKBD-TV.
“Not only by the generals but also by the diplomatic corps over there,” the candidate said. “They do a very thorough job.”
Susceptibility to brainwashing is apparently an inherited trait. If brainwashing accounts for a change in position, George’s son Mitt has had his gray matter cleansed more often than most people shampoo their hair.
The “brainwashing” interview ended the elder Romney’s career. But brainwashing doesn’t carry the stigma it did 45 years ago. Scrubbing one’s brain clean of previous positions has been Mitt Romney’s stock in trade. In fact, his foreign-policy speech Monday to the Virginia Military Institute was one long gargle-and-rinse of the candidate’s previous positions.
Last year, Romney called the Obama administration’s intervention in Libya “mission creep and mission muddle.” On Monday, he accused Obama of declining to use “America’s greatest power to shape history” and of eschewing “our best examples of world leadership” in that same corner of the world.
Last year, Romney said American troops “shouldn’t go off and try to fight a war of independence for another nation. Only the Afghanis can win Afghanistan’s independence from the Taliban.” On Monday, he spoke of that same conflict as a matter of the utmost national importance, saying the route to “attacks here at home is a politically timed retreat that abandons the Afghan people to the same extremists who ravaged their country and used it to launch the attacks of 9/11.”
Last year, Romney reversed his earlier support for the Iraq war, saying, “If we knew at the time of our entry into Iraq that there were no weapons of mass destruction . . . obviously we would not have gone in.” On Monday, he was back to his original view, accusing the Obama administration of an “abrupt withdrawal” from Iraq and portraying the situation there as part of “a struggle between liberty and tyranny, justice and oppression, hope and despair.”
Just a few months ago, Romney said “there’s just no way” to achieve peace between the Israelis and Palestinians because Palestinians are “not wanting to see peace.” He said it was necessary to “recognize this is going to remain an unsolved problem.” On Monday, he said he would “recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security” with Israel.
Rub-a-dub-dub! Four positions got scrubbed.
Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom famously predicted that the candidate would use an Etch-a-Sketch approach in the general election to erase his previous positions. But nobody predicted that the entire exercise would occur in the space of one week — and just a month before the election. Stranger yet, Romney hasn’t been shifting all his views to the center in recent days. While his domestic policies are moderating, his foreign policy is moving to more of a neocon hard line. The only consistency is inconsistency: Whatever Romney’s positions were, they are no longer. As his dad might have said, it has been a very thorough job.
The process began last week in Denver, when Romney stipulated that he would not reduce the share of taxes the wealthy pay, that he would not enact a tax cut that adds to the deficit and that he would not cut education spending.
This was followed a couple of days later by the most thorough brainwash. After weeks of defending his secretly recorded claim that 47 percent of Americans are mooching off the government, he told Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity: “I said something that’s just completely wrong.”
These came on top of Romney’s reversals of long-standing positions on abortion, taxes, Ronald Reagan, global warming, economic stimulus funding, the auto-industry bailout and gun rights. So by the time he arrived in Lexington, Va., for Monday’s speech, Romney might as well have been carrying a bottle of Listerine: Another wash was obviously coming.
After Romney dismissed Afghanistan last year as unworthy of American involvement because it’s a “war of independence,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) scolded the candidate, saying he sounded like Jimmy Carter. But after Romney employed his Afghanistan tough talk on Monday, Graham issued a new statement saying that Romney would “return America to our traditional leadership role in the world.”
As the lather rinses, questions remain: Was Romney brainwashed before? Is he being brainwashed now? Or is it a continuous cleaning cycle?
danamilbank@washpost.com
Monday, October 8, 2012
New ad questions Romney's ability as Commander-In-Chief
A new campaign ad by the Truman National Security Project questions
whether Mitt Romney is qualified to serve as the Commander-in-Chief even
bringing up his string of gaffes during his recent European tour.
The ad highlights Romney’s foreign policy problems to include his campaign’s reluctance to discuss national security, his failure to mention the war in Afghanistan and to honor the troops there during his nomination acceptance speech and the overall confusing nature of his Afghanistan policy.
The ad features several 9/11 era veterans questioning his qualification, or lack thereof, to serve as the nation’s Commander-in-Chief with one Army veteran noting: “You have shown us from London to Libya that you are over your head”.
If you are unfamiliar with them, the Truman National Security Project is a national security leadership institute based in Washington, D.C. It is the nation’s only organization that recruits, trains, and positions progressives across America to lead on national security.
http://samuel-warde.com/2012/10/new-ad-questions-romney-ability-as-commander-in-chief/
The ad highlights Romney’s foreign policy problems to include his campaign’s reluctance to discuss national security, his failure to mention the war in Afghanistan and to honor the troops there during his nomination acceptance speech and the overall confusing nature of his Afghanistan policy.
The ad features several 9/11 era veterans questioning his qualification, or lack thereof, to serve as the nation’s Commander-in-Chief with one Army veteran noting: “You have shown us from London to Libya that you are over your head”.
If you are unfamiliar with them, the Truman National Security Project is a national security leadership institute based in Washington, D.C. It is the nation’s only organization that recruits, trains, and positions progressives across America to lead on national security.
http://samuel-warde.com/2012/10/new-ad-questions-romney-ability-as-commander-in-chief/
Third Party Candidates Offer Substance-Rich Alternatives to Obama/Romney Debate
By Ernest A. Canning on 10/7/2012, 12:49pm PT
As she has done in the past, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! offered a real-time alternative to the narrow constraints of a Presidential debate, which constricted the scope of political discourse to that which had been presented by the two major party candidates.
Two third party Presidential candidates, Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party and former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party, responded to questions posed by Presidential debate moderator Jim Lehrer following the initial responses of President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson was invited but declined to take part in the Democracy Now! forum.
Democracy Now's 10/4/2012 segment of the "expanded debate" featuring President Barack Obama (D) and Gov. Mitt Romney (R), as well as Dr. Jill Stein (G) and Mayor Rocky Anderson (Justice) follows below...
Where much of the post-debate analysis focused on the President's failure to forcefully respond to his opponent's deceptive claims or to point to his weaknesses, such as outsourcing in relation to his tenure at Bain Capital and his 47% remark, the scope of the two-party debate was also constricted by the questions posed by moderator Jim Lehrer.
As Goodman observed, "some domestic issues went virtually unmentioned…including immigration policy, global warming, gun control, incarceration rates and poverty." One could add to that the disturbing failure to include such issues as Supreme Court appointments, Citizens United, Occupy Wall Street and issues of gender equality and women's health.
But, even within the confines of Lehrer's myopic questions, Stein and Johnson offered responses that suggest how including all Presidential candidates who have qualified to be on the ballot, into a single, extended debate, would serve to enhance the knowledge base of the U.S. electorate...
Jobs
Stein began with a litany of reasons to support her assessment that the economic crisis that began during the Bush administration is "not getting better":
To that, Anderson added that 60% of the jobs lost at the outset of the crisis "were mid-skill and mid-paying jobs," but only "20% of the new jobs fall are mid-skill, mid-paying jobs."
Stein asserted that both Romney and Obama offer a rehash of the last twelve years. She proposed, instead, a "Green New Deal" which would be nationally funded but controlled at the local level. Local communities, she said, should determine "which kinds of jobs they need both in the green economy and meeting their social needs."
Anderson called for a "WPA type program investing in our nation’s infrastructure."
Stein stressed that the New Deal, "got us out of the Depression" and "created approximately four million jobs in as little as two months." Anderson said the WPA created eight million jobs. He predicted that a new WPA type program could put 20-25 million people to work.
Anderson also insists that "outrageous 'free trade' agreements," which provide the basis for outsourcing, must be replaced with fair trade.
Medicare, Affordable Care Act and Social Security
Stein made an unconvincing case that there's no difference between the President and Romney on Medicare. The fact is very clear that Obama is opposed to Romney/Ryan's "voucher care" proposal.
She suggested that there is a need to "fix [Medicare] Part D [prescription drug plan] so that it is no longer a...giveaway to pharmaceutical companies."
Where the President suggested that all that was needed to insure Social Security solvency were some tweaks, both Stein and Anderson were specific. They said solvency would be insured by lifting the cap on income subject to Social Security tax deductions. Stein claimed the President intends to cut the cost of living adjustment for seniors.
Anderson called for a single-payer, "Medicare for All" healthcare system. Stein concurred, adding that "it's a sign how hijacked Washington is right now" that we adopted the Affordable Care Act (often known as "ObamaCare") instead of a single-payer system.
Anderson echoed the substance of our critique in "Single-Payer and the 'Democracy Deficit.'" The per capita cost of health care in the U.S. is nearly double that of single-payer countries, yet the U.S. ranks 37th in health care delivery. Administrative costs in single-payer countries range from 1% to 2%. In the U.S., private carriers siphon off 31% of health care dollars.
While the Affordable Care Act reflects an improvement on the prior unregulated, privatized insurance system that was not merely corrupt and dysfunction but responsible for the deaths of nearly 45,000 U.S. citizens each year simply because they can’t afford coverage, Obama’s exclusion of single-payer advocates during the health care debate and his insistence upon an insurance company-drafted half-measure, patterned upon "RomneyCare" in Massachusetts, significantly reduced the President’s ability to challenge Romney’s so-called "free-market" privatization scheme.
Role of federal government
Anderson countered the President's statement that the central role of government is to keep its citizens safe, by claiming that citizens are concerned about being safe from our own government. He excoriated the encroachments on civil liberties, including government spying and the President targeting U.S. citizens for assassination. He lamented the absence of the rule of law and elite impunity, proclaiming there was " no sense of a one-tiered system of justice." He called for a repeal of the USA PATRIOT Act.
Stein concurred and raised concerns about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and the criminalization of the right to protest.
Closing remarks
Stein said that we are "at the breaking point not only for people, but the planet, for the economy, and for our democracy." She claimed that both "Democrats and Republicans are making it worse and imposing austerity on the everyday people of this country while they continue to squander trillions on wars for oil, Wall Street bailouts and tax breaks for the wealthy." She added that her Green Party slate was "on the ballot for 85% of the voters" and offers the opportunity for "a real change in course."
Anderson ominously warned that this election is "about whether our nation will continue...toward totalitarianism." He said that both the Bush and Obama administrations "have shown utter contempt for the rule of law, due process, and the restrictions under the War Powers Clause of the United States Constitution."
Anderson contrasted the gross inequalities reflected by "a bad Ayn Rand novel or Mitt Romney speech," with "our most fundamental values" which entail working "together for equality of opportunity, equality under the law, liberty and justice --- economic justice, social justice, environmental justice for all."
As she has done in the past, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! offered a real-time alternative to the narrow constraints of a Presidential debate, which constricted the scope of political discourse to that which had been presented by the two major party candidates.
Two third party Presidential candidates, Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party and former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party, responded to questions posed by Presidential debate moderator Jim Lehrer following the initial responses of President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson was invited but declined to take part in the Democracy Now! forum.
Democracy Now's 10/4/2012 segment of the "expanded debate" featuring President Barack Obama (D) and Gov. Mitt Romney (R), as well as Dr. Jill Stein (G) and Mayor Rocky Anderson (Justice) follows below...
Where much of the post-debate analysis focused on the President's failure to forcefully respond to his opponent's deceptive claims or to point to his weaknesses, such as outsourcing in relation to his tenure at Bain Capital and his 47% remark, the scope of the two-party debate was also constricted by the questions posed by moderator Jim Lehrer.
As Goodman observed, "some domestic issues went virtually unmentioned…including immigration policy, global warming, gun control, incarceration rates and poverty." One could add to that the disturbing failure to include such issues as Supreme Court appointments, Citizens United, Occupy Wall Street and issues of gender equality and women's health.
But, even within the confines of Lehrer's myopic questions, Stein and Johnson offered responses that suggest how including all Presidential candidates who have qualified to be on the ballot, into a single, extended debate, would serve to enhance the knowledge base of the U.S. electorate...
Jobs
Stein began with a litany of reasons to support her assessment that the economic crisis that began during the Bush administration is "not getting better":
One out of two Americans are in poverty or living at
low income and heading towards poverty. About 25 million people are
either jobless or working in jobs that do not pay living wages. There
are [approximately eight million] who have lost their homes…and we have
an entire generation of students who are effectively indentured servants
who are trapped in unforgiving loans and do not have the jobs to pay
them back. We have an unemployment and underemployment rate of about
50% among young people.
To that, Anderson added that 60% of the jobs lost at the outset of the crisis "were mid-skill and mid-paying jobs," but only "20% of the new jobs fall are mid-skill, mid-paying jobs."
Stein asserted that both Romney and Obama offer a rehash of the last twelve years. She proposed, instead, a "Green New Deal" which would be nationally funded but controlled at the local level. Local communities, she said, should determine "which kinds of jobs they need both in the green economy and meeting their social needs."
Anderson called for a "WPA type program investing in our nation’s infrastructure."
Stein stressed that the New Deal, "got us out of the Depression" and "created approximately four million jobs in as little as two months." Anderson said the WPA created eight million jobs. He predicted that a new WPA type program could put 20-25 million people to work.
Anderson also insists that "outrageous 'free trade' agreements," which provide the basis for outsourcing, must be replaced with fair trade.
Medicare, Affordable Care Act and Social Security
Stein made an unconvincing case that there's no difference between the President and Romney on Medicare. The fact is very clear that Obama is opposed to Romney/Ryan's "voucher care" proposal.
She suggested that there is a need to "fix [Medicare] Part D [prescription drug plan] so that it is no longer a...giveaway to pharmaceutical companies."
Where the President suggested that all that was needed to insure Social Security solvency were some tweaks, both Stein and Anderson were specific. They said solvency would be insured by lifting the cap on income subject to Social Security tax deductions. Stein claimed the President intends to cut the cost of living adjustment for seniors.
Anderson called for a single-payer, "Medicare for All" healthcare system. Stein concurred, adding that "it's a sign how hijacked Washington is right now" that we adopted the Affordable Care Act (often known as "ObamaCare") instead of a single-payer system.
Anderson echoed the substance of our critique in "Single-Payer and the 'Democracy Deficit.'" The per capita cost of health care in the U.S. is nearly double that of single-payer countries, yet the U.S. ranks 37th in health care delivery. Administrative costs in single-payer countries range from 1% to 2%. In the U.S., private carriers siphon off 31% of health care dollars.
While the Affordable Care Act reflects an improvement on the prior unregulated, privatized insurance system that was not merely corrupt and dysfunction but responsible for the deaths of nearly 45,000 U.S. citizens each year simply because they can’t afford coverage, Obama’s exclusion of single-payer advocates during the health care debate and his insistence upon an insurance company-drafted half-measure, patterned upon "RomneyCare" in Massachusetts, significantly reduced the President’s ability to challenge Romney’s so-called "free-market" privatization scheme.
Role of federal government
Anderson countered the President's statement that the central role of government is to keep its citizens safe, by claiming that citizens are concerned about being safe from our own government. He excoriated the encroachments on civil liberties, including government spying and the President targeting U.S. citizens for assassination. He lamented the absence of the rule of law and elite impunity, proclaiming there was " no sense of a one-tiered system of justice." He called for a repeal of the USA PATRIOT Act.
Stein concurred and raised concerns about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and the criminalization of the right to protest.
Closing remarks
Stein said that we are "at the breaking point not only for people, but the planet, for the economy, and for our democracy." She claimed that both "Democrats and Republicans are making it worse and imposing austerity on the everyday people of this country while they continue to squander trillions on wars for oil, Wall Street bailouts and tax breaks for the wealthy." She added that her Green Party slate was "on the ballot for 85% of the voters" and offers the opportunity for "a real change in course."
Anderson ominously warned that this election is "about whether our nation will continue...toward totalitarianism." He said that both the Bush and Obama administrations "have shown utter contempt for the rule of law, due process, and the restrictions under the War Powers Clause of the United States Constitution."
Anderson contrasted the gross inequalities reflected by "a bad Ayn Rand novel or Mitt Romney speech," with "our most fundamental values" which entail working "together for equality of opportunity, equality under the law, liberty and justice --- economic justice, social justice, environmental justice for all."
Sunday, October 7, 2012
The pathological liar, Mitt Romney
By Sam Smith
A little over a month ago, I wrote about Romney’s unusual capacity for lying, but in the weeks that followed, have come to believe that I was too cautious. What we seem to have is not merely a bad politician but a pathological liar who is psychologically disoriented to a degree found, for example, only in about one in a thousand repeat juvenile offenders.
Consider, for example, this assessment of Romney by Michael Cohen in the Guardian:
Romney persists in repeating the same lies over and over, even after they've been debunked. This is perhaps the most interesting and disturbing element of Romney's tireless obfuscation: that even when corrected, it has little impact on the presumptive GOP nominee's behavior.
This is a pretty good description of pathological lying. Here’s another from the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry:
Falsification entirely disproportionate to any discernible end in view, may be extensive and very complicated, and may manifest over a period of years or even a lifetime.
Wikipedia offers these characteristics of the disease:
The fabricative tendency is long lasting; it is not provoked by the immediate situation or social pressure as much as it is an innate trait of the personality.
The stories told tend toward presenting the liar favorably. For example, the person might be presented as being fantastically brave, knowing or being related to many famous people.
Some might argue that Romney is actually a sociopathic liar, defined by one scholarly site on deception as a person who is “often goal-oriented (i.e., lying is focused - it is done to get one's way). Sociopaths have little regard or respect for the rights and feelings of others. Sociopaths are often charming and charismatic, but they use their talented social skills in manipulative and self-centered ways.”
There is, however, something oddly robotic about Romney’s behavior, including a bizarre smile that does not fade whatever the topic, suggesting not deliberate falsehood with a stealthily conceived goal so much as an unthinking soldier over-drilled in the art of mendacity.
Just in the past few days, Romney has been caught lying about several things that an ordinary good liar would probably avoid.
- He made up a fictional account of his time as a Mormon missionary in Paris complete with misleading descriptions of his economic conditions at the time and the state of his bathroom.
- He was found to have misstated his residency status in two states at the time that he was launching his bid for for governor there.
- His campaign has run an ad featuring an Ohio auto dealer claiming that Obama’s auto firm bailout had cost dealer jobs in the state. While it may have caused that dealer jobs; in fact, across Ohio dealership jobs increased.
Only one of these lies – the residency issue – was significant because of the benefits it might produce, i.e. making it legal for Romney to run for Massachusetts governor. The other two were trivial, easily exposed, and ultimately pointless.
Romney – unlike, say, a Nixon or Clinton – lies out of habit and nature rather than out of perceived necessity. And he doesn’t just exaggerate; he makes up wholly fictitious tales.
Romney has been greatly aided in this by the demise of American journalism, which now - like much of the country – considers any message to be a reasonable facsimile of reality and, further, one from which one may, with impunity, “walk back” should it prove embarrassing. The days when the conventional press was more loyal to the truth than to favored sources has well passed and now honesty has no embedded press corps to cover it.
What is not clear about Romney, however, is whether his propensity for deception is a personally developed dysfunction or whether it is the result of what can fairly be called brainwashing by the Mormon Church, where he rose from missionary to bishop.
Here again you can expect no help from the conventional media which is afraid to question the role of religion in our culture or politics for fear of seeming biased. And so the press has not dared to look into the scary history and practices of the Mormon Church even as they affect someone running for the White House.
As we’ve noted in the past, Romney is not your average run-of-the-mill three hour a week Christian. When he was young he was a Mormon missionary. He went to a Mormon university, Brigham Young. He was a ward bishop, a home teacher, a church counselor, and later president over the Boston Stake, a collection of congregations with over four thousand members. He always tithed to the church, and by 2011 his family’s annual contribution was around $2 million.
No one who has held such a high position in any church has ever before ended up within a handful of percentage points of the presidency.
Further, no one has come this close to the White House who has been subjected to a level of mental manipulation such as takes place during one’s rise in the Mormon Church.
Read, for example, this by former seminary principal and teacher Ken Clark on “lying for the Lord:”
Evidence presented in this essay establishes that when the church image or its leaders needed protection it was and is, okay to fib, deceive, distort, inflate, minimize, exaggerate, prevaricate or lie. You will read quotations by church leaders who admitted that deception is a useful tool to protect the church and its leaders ‘when they are in tight spot,’ or ‘to beat the devil at his own game.’ They admit engaging in moral gymnastics; that God approves of deception - if it's done to protect the ‘Lord's Church’ or ‘the brethren’ as the leaders are called. . .
I went into this further in my piece last month but another quote is particularly revealing:
As a full-time Mormon missionary from 1975 to 1977, I lied for the church countless times. Like my colleagues in the South Dakota-Rapid City Mission, which served the Dakotas and adjacent areas, I spoke truthfully about my background, but touted many Mormon teachings that contradict the Bible. After my mission ended, however, I examined these doctrines more closely. The harder I tried to reconcile the contradictions, the more evident they became. So, after extensive prayer and study, I resigned my church membership in 1984. . .
I can't remember all of my missionary lies. Some were small, others grandiose, but all were false and misleading. Here are ten I'll never forget.
1. We're Not Trying to Convert You
2. The Bible is Insufficient
3. We're the Only True Christians
4. We're the Only True Church
5. We Have a Living Prophet
6. The Book of Mormon is Scripture
7. You're Saved By Works
8. People Can Become Gods
9. You're Born Again By Becoming a Mormon
10. Temple Marriage is Required for Eternal Life
This is what Romney was teaching regardless of what sort of bathroom he had.
He was trying to sell people a faith with false promises and false descriptions, including that of the real character of its founder.
Whether this reflects his intrinsic character or whether he has been indoctrinated into the art of deceit we will probably never know. But what we can be sure of is that we don’t need a president so chronically and irredeemably committed to telling lies.
A little over a month ago, I wrote about Romney’s unusual capacity for lying, but in the weeks that followed, have come to believe that I was too cautious. What we seem to have is not merely a bad politician but a pathological liar who is psychologically disoriented to a degree found, for example, only in about one in a thousand repeat juvenile offenders.
Consider, for example, this assessment of Romney by Michael Cohen in the Guardian:
Romney persists in repeating the same lies over and over, even after they've been debunked. This is perhaps the most interesting and disturbing element of Romney's tireless obfuscation: that even when corrected, it has little impact on the presumptive GOP nominee's behavior.
This is a pretty good description of pathological lying. Here’s another from the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry:
Falsification entirely disproportionate to any discernible end in view, may be extensive and very complicated, and may manifest over a period of years or even a lifetime.
Wikipedia offers these characteristics of the disease:
The fabricative tendency is long lasting; it is not provoked by the immediate situation or social pressure as much as it is an innate trait of the personality.
The stories told tend toward presenting the liar favorably. For example, the person might be presented as being fantastically brave, knowing or being related to many famous people.
Some might argue that Romney is actually a sociopathic liar, defined by one scholarly site on deception as a person who is “often goal-oriented (i.e., lying is focused - it is done to get one's way). Sociopaths have little regard or respect for the rights and feelings of others. Sociopaths are often charming and charismatic, but they use their talented social skills in manipulative and self-centered ways.”
There is, however, something oddly robotic about Romney’s behavior, including a bizarre smile that does not fade whatever the topic, suggesting not deliberate falsehood with a stealthily conceived goal so much as an unthinking soldier over-drilled in the art of mendacity.
Just in the past few days, Romney has been caught lying about several things that an ordinary good liar would probably avoid.
- He made up a fictional account of his time as a Mormon missionary in Paris complete with misleading descriptions of his economic conditions at the time and the state of his bathroom.
- He was found to have misstated his residency status in two states at the time that he was launching his bid for for governor there.
- His campaign has run an ad featuring an Ohio auto dealer claiming that Obama’s auto firm bailout had cost dealer jobs in the state. While it may have caused that dealer jobs; in fact, across Ohio dealership jobs increased.
Only one of these lies – the residency issue – was significant because of the benefits it might produce, i.e. making it legal for Romney to run for Massachusetts governor. The other two were trivial, easily exposed, and ultimately pointless.
Romney – unlike, say, a Nixon or Clinton – lies out of habit and nature rather than out of perceived necessity. And he doesn’t just exaggerate; he makes up wholly fictitious tales.
Romney has been greatly aided in this by the demise of American journalism, which now - like much of the country – considers any message to be a reasonable facsimile of reality and, further, one from which one may, with impunity, “walk back” should it prove embarrassing. The days when the conventional press was more loyal to the truth than to favored sources has well passed and now honesty has no embedded press corps to cover it.
What is not clear about Romney, however, is whether his propensity for deception is a personally developed dysfunction or whether it is the result of what can fairly be called brainwashing by the Mormon Church, where he rose from missionary to bishop.
Here again you can expect no help from the conventional media which is afraid to question the role of religion in our culture or politics for fear of seeming biased. And so the press has not dared to look into the scary history and practices of the Mormon Church even as they affect someone running for the White House.
As we’ve noted in the past, Romney is not your average run-of-the-mill three hour a week Christian. When he was young he was a Mormon missionary. He went to a Mormon university, Brigham Young. He was a ward bishop, a home teacher, a church counselor, and later president over the Boston Stake, a collection of congregations with over four thousand members. He always tithed to the church, and by 2011 his family’s annual contribution was around $2 million.
No one who has held such a high position in any church has ever before ended up within a handful of percentage points of the presidency.
Further, no one has come this close to the White House who has been subjected to a level of mental manipulation such as takes place during one’s rise in the Mormon Church.
Read, for example, this by former seminary principal and teacher Ken Clark on “lying for the Lord:”
Evidence presented in this essay establishes that when the church image or its leaders needed protection it was and is, okay to fib, deceive, distort, inflate, minimize, exaggerate, prevaricate or lie. You will read quotations by church leaders who admitted that deception is a useful tool to protect the church and its leaders ‘when they are in tight spot,’ or ‘to beat the devil at his own game.’ They admit engaging in moral gymnastics; that God approves of deception - if it's done to protect the ‘Lord's Church’ or ‘the brethren’ as the leaders are called. . .
I went into this further in my piece last month but another quote is particularly revealing:
As a full-time Mormon missionary from 1975 to 1977, I lied for the church countless times. Like my colleagues in the South Dakota-Rapid City Mission, which served the Dakotas and adjacent areas, I spoke truthfully about my background, but touted many Mormon teachings that contradict the Bible. After my mission ended, however, I examined these doctrines more closely. The harder I tried to reconcile the contradictions, the more evident they became. So, after extensive prayer and study, I resigned my church membership in 1984. . .
I can't remember all of my missionary lies. Some were small, others grandiose, but all were false and misleading. Here are ten I'll never forget.
1. We're Not Trying to Convert You
2. The Bible is Insufficient
3. We're the Only True Christians
4. We're the Only True Church
5. We Have a Living Prophet
6. The Book of Mormon is Scripture
7. You're Saved By Works
8. People Can Become Gods
9. You're Born Again By Becoming a Mormon
10. Temple Marriage is Required for Eternal Life
This is what Romney was teaching regardless of what sort of bathroom he had.
He was trying to sell people a faith with false promises and false descriptions, including that of the real character of its founder.
Whether this reflects his intrinsic character or whether he has been indoctrinated into the art of deceit we will probably never know. But what we can be sure of is that we don’t need a president so chronically and irredeemably committed to telling lies.
In every campaign, there's a moment you know it's all over
Posted by Rude One
In every campaign, there's a moment you know it's all over. When John McCain chose Sarah Palin in 2008, for example. Or when Bob Dole became the GOP nominee in 1996. For Mitt Romney, there have been so many of these moments that it's hard to pinpoint which one is actually the hook or the card at the end of the movie that reads "Fin," which we know Romney would understand because he lived in a castle in France during the Vietnam War, something that would have automatically disqualified him from being a Republican nominee a couple of decades ago.
(Seriously, can you imagine how the right would spin a Democrat having gotten a deferment on the draft so he could hang out in Europe? Oh, right. It's one of the things they attacked Bill Clinton for in 1992, except, you know, he was a Rhodes scholar, not a door-knocking street preacher, and he was against the war.)
The Rude Pundit has long believed, going back to mid-2011, that not only would President Obama win this election and defeat specifically Mitt Romney, but that he would win by a big margin, not in an Ohio squeaker, not in a Florida clusterfuck, but by as much of a margin as he did in 2008, perhaps more. And that's for several reasons, the primary one being that, no matter what he tries to do, Mitt Romney is just an absolute dickhead. And by picking Paul Ryan, he actually fucked the GOP in way worse ways than simply being the nominee. Now, more people give a shit about what's in the Ryan budget. Most used to hear the phrase "Ryan budget" and believe the right-wing hype about it. By putting Ryan on the ticket, Romney pulled back the curtain to reveal that the wizard is just another bumbling man.
Today, this post was going to be about how Romney is trying to run on the innate goodness of himself, that, perhaps one last time, he could win because he's a competent white man, and shouldn't that be who leads us? Yes, this was going to be about the emptiness of the Romney campaign, the failure to offer even one goddamn example of a tax loophole that might be closed, the way that Romney and Ryan have to tell outright lies to even get anyone to pay attention to them, and more.
But then U.S. embassies in Egypt and Libya were attacked, with the ambassador to Libya and staff members murdered (yes, murdered, and their killers should be treated as murderers, not elevated to warriors, as some on the right wish to do), and Romney demonstrated vividly and for all to see why he not only shouldn't be president, but why he has no business in politics. First, his campaign issued a statement that, as many have reported, read as if the unvetted, ass-saving statement by a frightened U.S. embassy in Egypt, just before it was attacked, was the gospel of the Obama administration, fucking up not only the source of the statement, but also the fact that no one had been killed when the Cairo statement was issued. Said the Romney campaign, "It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks." In other words, another fucking lie.
Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a clear statement last night that condemned the attacks outright, saying, more or less, everyone needs to stop being such fucktards when their invisible sky wizard might be offended. That was followed this morning by an even more impassioned spoken statement by Clinton, which was followed by another statement mourning the deaths and condemning the violence by President Obama.
Wedged in-between those statements was a press conference called by Mitt Romney, and that, dear readers, was the end of the Romney campaign.
No, he didn't have to stand by the President. That would have been ludicrous. But Romney offered nothing that he hasn't already said repeatedly on the campaign trail: "An apology for America’s values is never the right course." Romney repeatedly condemned the statement of the embassy, even though, as Romney himself noted, "The embassy in Cairo put out a statement after their grounds had been breached. Protesters were inside the grounds. They reiterated that statement after the breach."
So let's get this straight: Mitt Romney believes that at that moment, with their lives perhaps on the line, the U.S. embassy employees still in the building should have said something that pissed off the protesters further. He said, "I think it’s a terrible course for America to stand in apology for our values, that instead when our grounds are being attacked and being breached, that the first response of the United States must be outrage at the breach of the sovereignty of our nation." The man really could have used a factchecker or two.
But forget that for a moment and look at this exchange:
Reporter: If you had known, if the Ambassador had died, would you have issued such a strongly said statement.
Romney: I’m not going to take hypotheticals about what would’ve been known, what and so forth.
At that moment, Romney could have repeated his condolences to the family of Ambassador Chris Stevens. He could have looked like he gave a flying fuck about it. He didn't even have to say he jumped the gun. A little bit of humanity goes a long way. But he looked like another corporate douchebag who thinks he's right just because he's who he is, not wanting to be bothered with the feelings of the employees he's firing, smirking and acting like the meanest bitch in the poodle kennel.
It's over. It's over because now that foreign policy is back in the mix, Mitt Romney cannot out-tough the man who kills Islamic terrorists with drones every week. Shit, a real candidate would run against that fact, but he's not. And Romney seems to have forgotten that he's not running against Senator Obama, who, by the way, still had more elected experience than Romney. He's running against the guy who took out bin Laden and helped take down Gaddafi. (By the way, the Libyan government, showing extraordinary class and balls, condemned the attacks.)
Now remind us all: what's Romney's foreign policy credentials? Cayman Island shell corporations? The fucking Olympics?
In every campaign, there's a moment you know it's all over. When John McCain chose Sarah Palin in 2008, for example. Or when Bob Dole became the GOP nominee in 1996. For Mitt Romney, there have been so many of these moments that it's hard to pinpoint which one is actually the hook or the card at the end of the movie that reads "Fin," which we know Romney would understand because he lived in a castle in France during the Vietnam War, something that would have automatically disqualified him from being a Republican nominee a couple of decades ago.
(Seriously, can you imagine how the right would spin a Democrat having gotten a deferment on the draft so he could hang out in Europe? Oh, right. It's one of the things they attacked Bill Clinton for in 1992, except, you know, he was a Rhodes scholar, not a door-knocking street preacher, and he was against the war.)
The Rude Pundit has long believed, going back to mid-2011, that not only would President Obama win this election and defeat specifically Mitt Romney, but that he would win by a big margin, not in an Ohio squeaker, not in a Florida clusterfuck, but by as much of a margin as he did in 2008, perhaps more. And that's for several reasons, the primary one being that, no matter what he tries to do, Mitt Romney is just an absolute dickhead. And by picking Paul Ryan, he actually fucked the GOP in way worse ways than simply being the nominee. Now, more people give a shit about what's in the Ryan budget. Most used to hear the phrase "Ryan budget" and believe the right-wing hype about it. By putting Ryan on the ticket, Romney pulled back the curtain to reveal that the wizard is just another bumbling man.
Today, this post was going to be about how Romney is trying to run on the innate goodness of himself, that, perhaps one last time, he could win because he's a competent white man, and shouldn't that be who leads us? Yes, this was going to be about the emptiness of the Romney campaign, the failure to offer even one goddamn example of a tax loophole that might be closed, the way that Romney and Ryan have to tell outright lies to even get anyone to pay attention to them, and more.
But then U.S. embassies in Egypt and Libya were attacked, with the ambassador to Libya and staff members murdered (yes, murdered, and their killers should be treated as murderers, not elevated to warriors, as some on the right wish to do), and Romney demonstrated vividly and for all to see why he not only shouldn't be president, but why he has no business in politics. First, his campaign issued a statement that, as many have reported, read as if the unvetted, ass-saving statement by a frightened U.S. embassy in Egypt, just before it was attacked, was the gospel of the Obama administration, fucking up not only the source of the statement, but also the fact that no one had been killed when the Cairo statement was issued. Said the Romney campaign, "It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks." In other words, another fucking lie.
Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a clear statement last night that condemned the attacks outright, saying, more or less, everyone needs to stop being such fucktards when their invisible sky wizard might be offended. That was followed this morning by an even more impassioned spoken statement by Clinton, which was followed by another statement mourning the deaths and condemning the violence by President Obama.
Wedged in-between those statements was a press conference called by Mitt Romney, and that, dear readers, was the end of the Romney campaign.
No, he didn't have to stand by the President. That would have been ludicrous. But Romney offered nothing that he hasn't already said repeatedly on the campaign trail: "An apology for America’s values is never the right course." Romney repeatedly condemned the statement of the embassy, even though, as Romney himself noted, "The embassy in Cairo put out a statement after their grounds had been breached. Protesters were inside the grounds. They reiterated that statement after the breach."
So let's get this straight: Mitt Romney believes that at that moment, with their lives perhaps on the line, the U.S. embassy employees still in the building should have said something that pissed off the protesters further. He said, "I think it’s a terrible course for America to stand in apology for our values, that instead when our grounds are being attacked and being breached, that the first response of the United States must be outrage at the breach of the sovereignty of our nation." The man really could have used a factchecker or two.
But forget that for a moment and look at this exchange:
Reporter: If you had known, if the Ambassador had died, would you have issued such a strongly said statement.
Romney: I’m not going to take hypotheticals about what would’ve been known, what and so forth.
At that moment, Romney could have repeated his condolences to the family of Ambassador Chris Stevens. He could have looked like he gave a flying fuck about it. He didn't even have to say he jumped the gun. A little bit of humanity goes a long way. But he looked like another corporate douchebag who thinks he's right just because he's who he is, not wanting to be bothered with the feelings of the employees he's firing, smirking and acting like the meanest bitch in the poodle kennel.
It's over. It's over because now that foreign policy is back in the mix, Mitt Romney cannot out-tough the man who kills Islamic terrorists with drones every week. Shit, a real candidate would run against that fact, but he's not. And Romney seems to have forgotten that he's not running against Senator Obama, who, by the way, still had more elected experience than Romney. He's running against the guy who took out bin Laden and helped take down Gaddafi. (By the way, the Libyan government, showing extraordinary class and balls, condemned the attacks.)
Now remind us all: what's Romney's foreign policy credentials? Cayman Island shell corporations? The fucking Olympics?
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Melissa Harris-Perry's open letter to George Will
By Jamil Smith
Sat Oct 6, 2012 3:17 PM EDT
Today's show had plenty of highlights. Perhaps tops among them was Melissa's open letter to Washington Post George Will, whose October 1 column posited that President Obama's good fortune in the polls to this point was due less to white guilt over giving up on America's first black president.
I have another take on this of my own which I may offer later, but I doubt I'll do better than the response Melissa offered today. She offered another explanation, other than melanin, for the President's poll advantage:
Sat Oct 6, 2012 3:17 PM EDT
Today's show had plenty of highlights. Perhaps tops among them was Melissa's open letter to Washington Post George Will, whose October 1 column posited that President Obama's good fortune in the polls to this point was due less to white guilt over giving up on America's first black president.
I have another take on this of my own which I may offer later, but I doubt I'll do better than the response Melissa offered today. She offered another explanation, other than melanin, for the President's poll advantage:
Mitt Romney's Disdain For The Middle Class: He Said It, He Meant It
Remember when Mitt Romney said 47% of Americans are "victims" who don't "take responsibility for their lives"? Seventeen days after it leaked, he's saying he didn't mean a word of it.
Romney, conservatives fight imaginary Obama, jobs numbers
MSNBC host Toure and author Goldie Taylor discuss the imaginary President Obama Mitt Romney is trying to fight – and the conspiracy theories on polling and today’s jobs report some of his supporters are pressing.
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Friday, October 5, 2012
Insanely Low New Unemployment Numbers
The new Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment report came out, and more Americans are working, the unemployment rate dropped to 7.8%, and jobs numbers were revised upwards in July and August.
Was President Obama less forceful in the debates to avoid being seen as an ‘angry black man’?
Professor Tricia Rose joins Cenk Uygur, Michael Shure, Jayar Jackson and Ana Kasparian to discuss how much avoiding the “angry black man” label factored into the way President Obama engaged Mitt Romney during the Denver debate. Cenk asks, “Is that a legitimate possibility?” Rose says, “It’s more than a possibility. There’s not an ice cube’s chance in hell that both sides have not been acutely aware of the mountains of scholarly evidence that black men are perceived as a threat before they speak.”
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Random Observations on Last Night's Presidential Debate
Posted by Rude One at 10:28 A.M.
1. If Republican Mitt Romney had an actual plan that he could describe without lying about it, last night would have been a game-changer. Romney was aggressive, only occasionally crossing that line into belligerent dickishness, and he sounded confident in the bullshit that he was heaving over towards the President. That's why everywhere you are seeing that he won.
Because, in the shallow terms of how these nonsensical debates (where, truly, most people must have tuned out about twenty minutes in, thinking, "Okay, fuck, we get it, one of you wants to raise taxes on rich people, one of you doesn't, move the fuck on"), Romney was in command. So if you're a Romney supporter (or, more accurately, an Obama hater), you were pretty much in heaven last night because you knew that there was a chance that, had Obama been spoiling for a fight, Romney was going down in flames.
Instead, you got milquetoast professor-at-a-colloquium Obama, and that never wins against imbecilic arrogance. So congrats, conservatives. You live to fight another day.
1a. Of course, Romney was repeatedly stretching, breaking, or reaming the truth. Of course, Romney's plan does cut taxes by $5 trillion, to be paid for by these mythical loopholes, sure, but it does cut the taxes. Of course, there is a tax break for companies who send jobs overseas (about which Romney said, "I have no idea what you're talking about. I maybe need to get a new accountant, heh-heh"). Of course, the Obamacare board will not tell patients what treatments they can have.
In other words, of course, Mitt Romney said nothing but lies and vague promises and vastly different positions.
Seriously, have any conservatives said they're concerned that Romney said, "I won't put in place a tax cut that adds to the deficit"? Because that pretty clearly says that if he can't find the $480 billion a year to pay for the tax cut, he won't do it, and it's pretty clearly the opposite of what his campaign has been saying.
1b. Obama brought up not lowering taxes on the very wealthy people and companies who are considered small businesses, 3% of the total, by Romney. Romney retorted, "Those businesses that are in the last 3 percent of businesses happen to employ half - half of all the people who work in small business. Those are the businesses that employ one-quarter of all the workers in America." Umm, shouldn't we be discussing that Mitt Romney considers businesses that have thousands of employees "small"?
2. The Rude Pundit is not going to give into the temptation, a deep, deep temptation, to become Captain Hindsight here. What Obama could have said is of no matter. He didn't say it, no matter how loud any of us yelled it at the TV screen, to support green energy, to go after Romney on education, to say that Paul....See? Too tempting. Obama fucked it up. Hard.
Generously, you could say that he had just had to deal with the fact that Turkey was retaliating against Syria for lobbing a mortar shell across the border. Or that Michelle probably shouldn't have given him that anniversary blow-job in the green room just before the debate started. So he was distracted or his energy was sapped.
He lost on style, he lost on his ability to actually get his points across. It was head-slappingly embarrassing when he tried to echo Bill Clinton's "arithmetic" line. However, if you were scoring based on things like, you know, "facts" and "truth," he won. But Joe Biden should rescind his 2007 remark that Obama is "articulate."
3. Obama did, towards the middle and end, finally get in some good points, about the emptiness of Romney's proposals, about how Obamacare is based on Romney care. But he always said them in a convoluted way. Here's how he described Romney's health care proposal that says only people who had insurance can get their preexisting conditions covered in a new policy:
"But let's go back to what Governor Romney indicated, that under his plan, he would be able to cover people with preexisting conditions. Well, actually Governor, that isn't what your plan does. What your plan does is to duplicate what's already the law, which says if you are out of health insurance for three months, then you can end up getting continuous coverage and an insurance company can't deny you if you've - if it's been under 90 days."
What the fuck? It's like he went in for an undercut and his hand turned to jello.
4. This ain't an excuse for Obama's shitty performance, but Jim Lehrer has no business moderating a presidential debate. He repeatedly interrupted the President. He had virtually no control over Romney, who ran Lehrer and his walker over repeatedly in the crosswalk.
To give one example, Lehrer said, "Governor Romney, do you have a question that you'd like to ask the president directly about something he just said?" Then he let Romney go on for several minutes and finish without interruption and without Romney ever asking a fucking question. That's not moderating. That's just being an old lump who's wondering if his hotel room will be too cold.
5a. According to Mitt Romney, his children are lying sons of a bitch.
5b. Mitt Romney likes coal. Mitt Romney likes Big Bird. He will give money to help coal. He will take money away from Big Bird. Mitt Romney's affection is meaningless.
5c. Which is probably why his terrible sons are such liars.
6. Obama may have done more to depress voter turnout than all the i.d. laws combined. We like our candidates to be willing to show off their moves. Someone needs to get all Mickey Goldmill on Obama's ass.
Romney repeatedly called President Obama a liar without being called on it. That's demoralizing shit, right there.
Dude, you have facts on your side. Use them with clarity and conciseness.
Fight, motherfucker.
Get off the ropes and get your footing and punch back.
Or the country's going down for the count.
1. If Republican Mitt Romney had an actual plan that he could describe without lying about it, last night would have been a game-changer. Romney was aggressive, only occasionally crossing that line into belligerent dickishness, and he sounded confident in the bullshit that he was heaving over towards the President. That's why everywhere you are seeing that he won.
Because, in the shallow terms of how these nonsensical debates (where, truly, most people must have tuned out about twenty minutes in, thinking, "Okay, fuck, we get it, one of you wants to raise taxes on rich people, one of you doesn't, move the fuck on"), Romney was in command. So if you're a Romney supporter (or, more accurately, an Obama hater), you were pretty much in heaven last night because you knew that there was a chance that, had Obama been spoiling for a fight, Romney was going down in flames.
Instead, you got milquetoast professor-at-a-colloquium Obama, and that never wins against imbecilic arrogance. So congrats, conservatives. You live to fight another day.
1a. Of course, Romney was repeatedly stretching, breaking, or reaming the truth. Of course, Romney's plan does cut taxes by $5 trillion, to be paid for by these mythical loopholes, sure, but it does cut the taxes. Of course, there is a tax break for companies who send jobs overseas (about which Romney said, "I have no idea what you're talking about. I maybe need to get a new accountant, heh-heh"). Of course, the Obamacare board will not tell patients what treatments they can have.
In other words, of course, Mitt Romney said nothing but lies and vague promises and vastly different positions.
Seriously, have any conservatives said they're concerned that Romney said, "I won't put in place a tax cut that adds to the deficit"? Because that pretty clearly says that if he can't find the $480 billion a year to pay for the tax cut, he won't do it, and it's pretty clearly the opposite of what his campaign has been saying.
1b. Obama brought up not lowering taxes on the very wealthy people and companies who are considered small businesses, 3% of the total, by Romney. Romney retorted, "Those businesses that are in the last 3 percent of businesses happen to employ half - half of all the people who work in small business. Those are the businesses that employ one-quarter of all the workers in America." Umm, shouldn't we be discussing that Mitt Romney considers businesses that have thousands of employees "small"?
2. The Rude Pundit is not going to give into the temptation, a deep, deep temptation, to become Captain Hindsight here. What Obama could have said is of no matter. He didn't say it, no matter how loud any of us yelled it at the TV screen, to support green energy, to go after Romney on education, to say that Paul....See? Too tempting. Obama fucked it up. Hard.
Generously, you could say that he had just had to deal with the fact that Turkey was retaliating against Syria for lobbing a mortar shell across the border. Or that Michelle probably shouldn't have given him that anniversary blow-job in the green room just before the debate started. So he was distracted or his energy was sapped.
He lost on style, he lost on his ability to actually get his points across. It was head-slappingly embarrassing when he tried to echo Bill Clinton's "arithmetic" line. However, if you were scoring based on things like, you know, "facts" and "truth," he won. But Joe Biden should rescind his 2007 remark that Obama is "articulate."
3. Obama did, towards the middle and end, finally get in some good points, about the emptiness of Romney's proposals, about how Obamacare is based on Romney care. But he always said them in a convoluted way. Here's how he described Romney's health care proposal that says only people who had insurance can get their preexisting conditions covered in a new policy:
"But let's go back to what Governor Romney indicated, that under his plan, he would be able to cover people with preexisting conditions. Well, actually Governor, that isn't what your plan does. What your plan does is to duplicate what's already the law, which says if you are out of health insurance for three months, then you can end up getting continuous coverage and an insurance company can't deny you if you've - if it's been under 90 days."
What the fuck? It's like he went in for an undercut and his hand turned to jello.
4. This ain't an excuse for Obama's shitty performance, but Jim Lehrer has no business moderating a presidential debate. He repeatedly interrupted the President. He had virtually no control over Romney, who ran Lehrer and his walker over repeatedly in the crosswalk.
To give one example, Lehrer said, "Governor Romney, do you have a question that you'd like to ask the president directly about something he just said?" Then he let Romney go on for several minutes and finish without interruption and without Romney ever asking a fucking question. That's not moderating. That's just being an old lump who's wondering if his hotel room will be too cold.
5a. According to Mitt Romney, his children are lying sons of a bitch.
5b. Mitt Romney likes coal. Mitt Romney likes Big Bird. He will give money to help coal. He will take money away from Big Bird. Mitt Romney's affection is meaningless.
5c. Which is probably why his terrible sons are such liars.
6. Obama may have done more to depress voter turnout than all the i.d. laws combined. We like our candidates to be willing to show off their moves. Someone needs to get all Mickey Goldmill on Obama's ass.
Romney repeatedly called President Obama a liar without being called on it. That's demoralizing shit, right there.
Dude, you have facts on your side. Use them with clarity and conciseness.
Fight, motherfucker.
Get off the ropes and get your footing and punch back.
Or the country's going down for the count.
Reaction to the First Presidential Debate
Andrew Sullivan: "Look: you know how much I love the guy, and you know how much of a high
information viewer I am, and I can see the logic of some of Obama's
meandering, weak, professorial arguments. But this was a disaster for
the president for the key people he needs to reach, and his effete,
wonkish lectures may have jolted a lot of independents into giving
Romney a second look."
Glenn Reynolds: "Romney was channeling Reagan. Obama was channeling Biden."
James Fallows: "If you had the sound turned off, Romney looked calm and affable through more of the debate than Obama did, and the incumbent president more often looked peeved. Romney's default expression, whether genuine or forced, was a kind of smile; Obama's, a kind of scowl. I can understand why Obama would feel exasperated by these claims and arguments. Every president is exasperated by what he considers facile claims about what he knows to be impossibly knotty problems. But he let it show."
Brad Phillips: "This debate is an easy one to call: Romney won in a landslide, while Obama appeared flatfooted, tired, and somewhat detached."
Nate Silver: "My own instant reaction is that Mr. Romney may have done the equivalent of kick a field goal, perhaps not bringing the race to draw, but setting himself up in such a way that his comeback chances have improved by a material amount."
Greg Sargent: "Romney took steps towards reversing his image as an out of touch plutocrat. During the extended jousts of numbers crunching, he humanized himself in an unexpected way -- by converting his boardroom aura from something cold and aloof into an aura of earnestness. He skillfully played the part of the technocratic centrist he used to be and whose balanced approach to policy and government he has completely abandoned."
Marc Ambinder: "This first debate shows why it's so tough to be an incumbent in an economy that, frankly, is anemic and barely growing. It didn't really matter that Romney didn't present a plan; it did matter that he presented a vision that cohered. A lot of people watching the debate will see Romney's energetic performance, remember his theme, look at a halting Obama, and say, OK, well, there ARE two people running."
Ezra Klein: "Mitt Romney won the debate tonight. He was more focused, specific, energetic and prepared than President Obama. The Obama campaign's silver lining was in what he Romney specific about. Expect, for instance, that Romney's admission that he will voucherize Medicare to make its way to ads in some swing states near you."
Joe Klein: "Did the President send out his body double tonight? Because if that was the actual Barack Obama out there, I'm not sure he can communicate well enough to be an effective President in a time of trouble, to say nothing of winning a second term."
Chris Cillizza: "There's a fine line between sober/serious and grim/uninterested when it comes to the optics of these debates, and the incumbent was on the wrong side of it Wednesday night. Whether it was his habit of looking down for the majority of Romney's answers or the pique he displayed when debate moderator Jim Lehrer interrupted him, Obama looked like he'd prefer to be somewhere else."
Glenn Reynolds: "Romney was channeling Reagan. Obama was channeling Biden."
James Fallows: "If you had the sound turned off, Romney looked calm and affable through more of the debate than Obama did, and the incumbent president more often looked peeved. Romney's default expression, whether genuine or forced, was a kind of smile; Obama's, a kind of scowl. I can understand why Obama would feel exasperated by these claims and arguments. Every president is exasperated by what he considers facile claims about what he knows to be impossibly knotty problems. But he let it show."
Brad Phillips: "This debate is an easy one to call: Romney won in a landslide, while Obama appeared flatfooted, tired, and somewhat detached."
Nate Silver: "My own instant reaction is that Mr. Romney may have done the equivalent of kick a field goal, perhaps not bringing the race to draw, but setting himself up in such a way that his comeback chances have improved by a material amount."
Greg Sargent: "Romney took steps towards reversing his image as an out of touch plutocrat. During the extended jousts of numbers crunching, he humanized himself in an unexpected way -- by converting his boardroom aura from something cold and aloof into an aura of earnestness. He skillfully played the part of the technocratic centrist he used to be and whose balanced approach to policy and government he has completely abandoned."
Marc Ambinder: "This first debate shows why it's so tough to be an incumbent in an economy that, frankly, is anemic and barely growing. It didn't really matter that Romney didn't present a plan; it did matter that he presented a vision that cohered. A lot of people watching the debate will see Romney's energetic performance, remember his theme, look at a halting Obama, and say, OK, well, there ARE two people running."
Ezra Klein: "Mitt Romney won the debate tonight. He was more focused, specific, energetic and prepared than President Obama. The Obama campaign's silver lining was in what he Romney specific about. Expect, for instance, that Romney's admission that he will voucherize Medicare to make its way to ads in some swing states near you."
Joe Klein: "Did the President send out his body double tonight? Because if that was the actual Barack Obama out there, I'm not sure he can communicate well enough to be an effective President in a time of trouble, to say nothing of winning a second term."
Chris Cillizza: "There's a fine line between sober/serious and grim/uninterested when it comes to the optics of these debates, and the incumbent was on the wrong side of it Wednesday night. Whether it was his habit of looking down for the majority of Romney's answers or the pique he displayed when debate moderator Jim Lehrer interrupted him, Obama looked like he'd prefer to be somewhere else."
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Romney stuck at the corner of 47th and Bain
Politico’s Ken Vogel and Democratic strategist Julian Epstein debate how big an
albatross Mitt Romney’s Bain career and his “47 percent” comments are - just a
day before the debates.
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Monday, October 1, 2012
The Paul Ryan Legend Dissipates
By Jonathan Chait
Paul Ryan’s selection as Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential candidate is subjecting him to all manner of strange new indignities, such as questions about public policy that are different than those that his own press staff would have written.
The Washington Post reported this weekend that Ryan has opposed bipartisan compromises to reduce the budget deficit. The facts in the story aren’t new. (If anything, they understate the active, crucial role Ryan has played in killing these deals.) What’s new is that the publicly available facts about Ryan’s opposition to bipartisan deficit reduction is penetrating the media narrative about him, which has always presented him as the very opposite.
And then there was Ryan’s surreal interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News:
In the interview, Wallace tries to walk through the facts with Ryan. He begins by asking about the cost of the rate cuts, which is about $5 trillion over a decade. Ryan refuses to answer the question. He tries various tricks to avoid it. First he pretends Wallace is asking a different question — that he’s asking about the net cost of the entire plan, rather than the gross cost of the rate cuts. He cracks jokes about the unreliability of statistics. He filibusters by making a speech about economic growth.
Wallace asks the question seven times, and Ryan fills one minute and 48 seconds avoiding it. Finally, the final time Wallace asks Ryan to give him the math, Ryan asserts, “It would take me too long to go through all the math.” There was plenty of time if he hadn’t spent two minutes dodging the question! In any case, the math doesn’t take a long time to explain, but Ryan doesn’t want to explain it, because it would reveal unavoidable and unpopular trade-offs in the campaign’s tax plan that he’d rather conceal.
A person who thinks highly of Ryan, or who notes the sudden souring of his media coverage, might suspect that the problem lies in the fact that he is now defending Romney’s plan rather than his own. But that is not the case. Ryan’s plan is worse. His would cut tax rates lower than Romney’s (the Ryan budget would reduce the top tax rate to 25 percent, against the 28 percent Romney proposes) and rather than hold rates on investment income constant, he would eliminate all taxes on investment income. Taxes are one of the many black holes in the Ryan budget. He asked the Congressional Budget to score his plan as if it held revenue at a constant level, and the CBO basically said, “well, okay, if you say so,” but Ryan never comes close to saying how he would fill in the trillions of dollars of missing revenue that would require.
And nobody has ever asked him. Because Ryan’s role in the budget discourse was not to be questioned, but to question others. If he was asked to comment, it was to express his sadness over Obama’s alleged unwillingness to enact the bipartisan debt plans that Ryan in fact killed.
Update: Ryan explains his strategy to a talk radio host, "When you're offering very specific, bold solutions, confusion can be your enemy's best weapon." In other words, when you're specific and bold, your enemy will try to trap you into being specific. Don't let them!
Paul Ryan’s selection as Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential candidate is subjecting him to all manner of strange new indignities, such as questions about public policy that are different than those that his own press staff would have written.
The Washington Post reported this weekend that Ryan has opposed bipartisan compromises to reduce the budget deficit. The facts in the story aren’t new. (If anything, they understate the active, crucial role Ryan has played in killing these deals.) What’s new is that the publicly available facts about Ryan’s opposition to bipartisan deficit reduction is penetrating the media narrative about him, which has always presented him as the very opposite.
And then there was Ryan’s surreal interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News:
Wallace is trying to do something that Ryan is not used to: ask him how the numbers in his plan add up. The Romney tax plan is premised on a mathematical impossibility. It promises to reduce tax rates by 20 percent and cover the lost revenue by eliminating tax deductions, exempting tax breaks for investment income. Even making a series of assumptions ranging from friendly to impossibly friendly, it can’t add up. The lost revenue from the tax rate cuts on income over $250,000 exceeds the available revenue from eliminating deductions. Even Republican attempts to disprove this finding have inadvertently confirmed it.
In the interview, Wallace tries to walk through the facts with Ryan. He begins by asking about the cost of the rate cuts, which is about $5 trillion over a decade. Ryan refuses to answer the question. He tries various tricks to avoid it. First he pretends Wallace is asking a different question — that he’s asking about the net cost of the entire plan, rather than the gross cost of the rate cuts. He cracks jokes about the unreliability of statistics. He filibusters by making a speech about economic growth.
Wallace asks the question seven times, and Ryan fills one minute and 48 seconds avoiding it. Finally, the final time Wallace asks Ryan to give him the math, Ryan asserts, “It would take me too long to go through all the math.” There was plenty of time if he hadn’t spent two minutes dodging the question! In any case, the math doesn’t take a long time to explain, but Ryan doesn’t want to explain it, because it would reveal unavoidable and unpopular trade-offs in the campaign’s tax plan that he’d rather conceal.
A person who thinks highly of Ryan, or who notes the sudden souring of his media coverage, might suspect that the problem lies in the fact that he is now defending Romney’s plan rather than his own. But that is not the case. Ryan’s plan is worse. His would cut tax rates lower than Romney’s (the Ryan budget would reduce the top tax rate to 25 percent, against the 28 percent Romney proposes) and rather than hold rates on investment income constant, he would eliminate all taxes on investment income. Taxes are one of the many black holes in the Ryan budget. He asked the Congressional Budget to score his plan as if it held revenue at a constant level, and the CBO basically said, “well, okay, if you say so,” but Ryan never comes close to saying how he would fill in the trillions of dollars of missing revenue that would require.
And nobody has ever asked him. Because Ryan’s role in the budget discourse was not to be questioned, but to question others. If he was asked to comment, it was to express his sadness over Obama’s alleged unwillingness to enact the bipartisan debt plans that Ryan in fact killed.
Ryan is still an extremely skilled bullshitter — vastly better at it than Romney. But he’s actually seeing, for the first time, questions that attempt to pry information out of him, rather than the batting practice lobs to which he’s accustomed. He’s going to emerge from the race with his legend punctured.
Update: Ryan explains his strategy to a talk radio host, "When you're offering very specific, bold solutions, confusion can be your enemy's best weapon." In other words, when you're specific and bold, your enemy will try to trap you into being specific. Don't let them!
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