First off, a programming note — if any of you can get to the Bronx this afternoon, free concert at Lehman College, 3 pm, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy and Ninth Symphony. I think the performance is in the Lovinger Theater, or at least that’s where we have been rehearsing (I’m in the chorus). Freude! Oh, and the 4 train isn’t running to Lehman College today, naturally.
Yesterday Mitt Romney officially sewed up the GOP nomination with a win in the Texas primary. However, the news focused on Donald Trump, with whom Mittens had scheduled a Las Vegas fundraiser.
I’m assuming most of the American people are not paying close enough attention to politics to take in the Mittens-Trump act. Trump is such a buffoon even Wolf Blitzer has had enough of him.
Do people still think of Trump as a businessman, or as an entertainer? I honestly don’t know.
Campaigning with The Donald seems to me like campaigning with J. Fred Muggs. Trump is the act; Mittens is just the straight man. Trump is still going on (and on) about birtherism, and Mittems is refusing to refute him. To me, it doesn’t make Mittens look presidential, just pathetic.
With polls showing same-sex marriage not the hair-on-fire wedge issue it used to be, the GOP is cranking up the talking point that marriage is a state issue, not a federal one, and shouldn’t be an issue in the presidential campaign.
OK, geniuses, so what about the Defense of Marriage Act? Just last week, Republicans in the House voted to stop the Justice Department from using taxpayer funds to oppose DOMA.
And just last week, Romney Adviser Ed Gillespie said that Mittens supports a constitutional amendment that would strip states of the right to legalize same-sex marriage.
So which is it, righties? Hmmmmm?
Wingnuts do have a remarkable capacity for self-contradiction. See Frank Bruni:
I hesitated before picking on Bristol [Palin] because she’s an easy target. It’s like shooting moose from a helicopter flying low over the tundra.
But she so perfectly distills the double standards and audacity of so many of our country’s self-appointed moralists and supposed traditionalists: hypocrites whose own histories, along with any sense of shame, tumble out the window as soon as there’s a microphone to be seized or check to be cashed.
She proves that they’re not going away anytime soon — a new generation rises! — and that they haven’t been daunted by the ridicule justly heaped on Newt Gingrich during the Republican primaries, when he dared to cast himself as a religious conservative.
Certainly Rush thunders on. Last week he bellowed that Obama had decided to “lead a war†on traditional marriage. Seems to me Limbaugh started those hostilities long ago, if not with his first divorce then certainly with his second and third.
However, Bruni says there are people in the “uppermost ranks” of the Republican Party who don’t want the campaign to be about social issues. That nobody in the “grass roots” listens to those people has escaped Bruni’s notice. But we’ll see in the next few days if Mittens is listening to the “uppermost ranks” and backs off same sex marriage.
In the past few days whenever reporters have asked a prominent Republican about same-sex marriage, their comeback line usually is something about creating jobs. I wish someone had asked John Boehner how many jobs bills House Republicans have passed, or even sponsored, since taking over the House in 2010. I believe the answer is “zero.”
Mittens still wants to campaign on his record as a proved master of business and as a jobs creator. The Obama campaign is ready for that, too.
On top of that, Mittens had a terrible record on jobs while he was governor of Massachusetts. Mississippi may have beat the Bay State then; I’d have to look.
Weirdly, the GOP also is trying to charge the President with being too chummy with Wall Street. He’s not socialist enough for them?
Many of us would agree that Obama has been way too soft on the financial sector, and that money from the financial sector speaks way too loudly in both parties. But it’s hard to paint the financial sector as inherently evil when your nominee-presumptive is going around making excuses for the recent JP Morgan meltdown and saying that financial sector regulation would just “hamper” investment. It was just investors, not taxpayers, who lost money with JP Morgan, Mittens said.
Speaking of hampering investments, the New York Times says that investors are getting sour on investing.
Investors are shunning the stock market, and who can blame them? As serial bubbles have burst, faith in the market has been rewarded with shattered retirements. At the same time, trust has been destroyed by scandals and — as demonstrated by the reckless trading at JPMorgan Chase — the slow, uncertain pace of financial reform.
There has been less buying and selling of stock, and there have been huge outflows of investor dollars from domestic stock mutual funds, as detailed recently by The Times’s Nathaniel Popper. If the trend continues, the result could be a less robust market, with fewer companies opting to raise money by issuing shares and fewer investors willing to put their retirement savings into stocks.
Policy makers should pay attention. Evidence suggests that investors are not merely reacting to tough conditions, but rather are staying away because they do not trust the market. Restoring trust is crucial to restoring the market.
We’ll see if restoring consistency is crucial to a political party.
One of the most interesting things I’ve seen all weekend is that a prominent Republican pollster is warning the GOP to back off of outrage over marriage equality. Apparently polls are saying gay bashing is not the winner wedge issue it used to be.
John Stewart notes that a few years ago the Fox Bobbleheads were screaming that marriage equality would allow humans to marry turtles. Now they’re saying that Obama only is embracing marriage equality to get re-elected, a tacit admission that the tides have turned.
Still, Mittens can’t find a sweet spot to stand on anywhere. Last week he said he thought adoption by same-sex couples was a “right”; then the next day he “clarified” that he doesn’t actually support gay adoption; he was just saying it is legal in most states, like it or not.
I’ve been ambivalent about the Washington Post story of Mittens’s alleged preppy-days bullying. Although it’s sourced well enough to be true, probably, and reveals a very ugly side of Mittens, it was 50 years ago. People do change, and there’s plenty of more current stuff with which to bash Mittens.
However, I agree with Joan Walsh that his reaction to the story was bizarre.
What’s giving the story legs isn’t merely the homophobic hair-cutting episode, which a lawyer friend of Romney’s termed “assault and battery,†not “hijinks.†It’s Romney’s callous reaction. His campaign first tried to shrug off the story with an insincere non-apology, but when the details of Horowitz’s tale got people’s attention – the “terrified†classmate John Lauber “with tears in his eyes†as Romney chopped off his hair with a scissor; the callow preppie leading a sight-impaired teacher into a set of closed doors – the candidate made his own statement. And what a statement it was.
After Fox’s Brian Kilmeade shared the Lauber story, Romney actually chuckled, and said:
You know, I don’t, I don’t remember that incident. I’ll tell you, I certainly don’t believe that I or – I can’t speak for others – thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds in the 1960s.
You really have to listen to it to hear that the callow preppie hasn’t changed much in 50 years. As I noted yesterday, it’s rather brazen to say he doesn’t “remember that incident,†but to immediately volunteer that he didn’t think “the fellow was homosexual.†How could Lauber’s being gay have anything to do with an incident he says he doesn’t remember?
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And I remember the 1960s well enough to know that homosexuality was not “the furthest thing from our minds.” Not the first thing on our minds, maybe, but we were hardly Victorians about it.
The story is that in 1965 Mitt was a senior at a preppy private high school. A junior boy showed up after spring break with longish (drooping over his eyes) bleached blond hair. Remember that in 1965 the Beatles released Rubber Soul and the Rolling Stones hit the charts with “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” The Brylcreem look was for old men and losers.
But Mittens couldn’t deal with a blond Beatle bob on a boy, so he led a posse of other boys to tackle the shaggy one and hold him down while Mittens clipped off his hair with scissors. One of the participants remembered it as “viscous.”
In an interview with Fox Radio on Thursday, Romney laughed as he said that he didn’t remember the incident, although he acknowledged that “back in high school, you know, I, I did some dumb things. And if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize.†He continued, “I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school, and some might have gone too far. And, for that, I apologize.â€
There is so much wrong with Romney’s response that I hardly know where to start.
One, the incident as described was not “hijinks.” It was assault. Second, how could he not remember that? Third, this was a classic unapologetic apology. But most of all,
Lastly, this would have been an amazing teaching moment about the impact of bullying if Romney had seized it. That is what a real leader would have done. That is what we would expect any adult to do. …
…While I have real reservations about holding senior citizens to account for what they did as seniors in high school, I have no reservations about expecting presidential candidates to know how to properly address the mistakes they once made.
This is where Romney falls short, once again.
This really does remind me of Dubya making fun of Carla Fay Tucker or giggling about the death penalty in a debate with Al Gore.
There is something seriously twisted about Mittens.
Update: I’m not the first one to notice this resemblance, but I couldn’t find a decent “comparison” graphic, so I made one myself:
“I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids. Thank goodness that we value those people too. And sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us.â€
Somehow I don’t think that’s exactly what she meant to say.
IMO the biggest mistake made by the Obama Administration regarding the Affordable Care Act was not failing to include a public option. It was the fact that the Administration didn’t saturate the nation’s media with public service ads explaining clearly how it would work when it all went into effect. And because most of the big stuff in the law wont go into effect until 2014, the Right has had plenty of time to lie and frighten people into thinking “Obamacare” will kill Grandma.
Polls continue to show that more people than not don’t like the ACA (although one suspects many of the “don’t likes” are liberals who want single payer). So the Right has been vowing to “repeal and replace” the ACA. However, they flounder a bit on the subject of what “replace” will mean.
Now we’re beginning to get some idea of what Mittens would do as president, and it’s not pretty. He’s essentially warming up John McCain’s ideas from the 2008 campaign. For those of you who don’t remember, McCain’s basic idea was to eliminate the tax exclusion for employers who provide health insurance benefits, thereby phasing out such benefits and dumping everyone into the private market. Then, the miracle of “free market competition” would cause insurance costs to go down and provide people with better options. That’s the theory, anyway.
But Mittens also has to steer away from anything resembling his Massachusetts plan, because it’s too much like “Obamacare.” So, says Brian Beutler,
… neither Romney nor McCain’s plans allow individuals to pool risk in insurance exchanges, require insurers to sell insurance to all comers without price-discriminating against sick people or fight the adverse selection problem by requiring both sick and healthy people to enter the pool. Romney isn’t calling for those reforms — because though they would solve the problems with his outline, they would also add up to “Obamacare.â€
In short … this would be a nightmare. It would be all the bad things about the long-standing status quo, but on steroids.
On top of that, Romney has embraced some version of Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan, privatizing Medicare and providing seniors with subsidies to buy insurance on the private market. And he wants to eliminate Medicaid and just give block grants to the states to come up with their own programs to provide health care for the poor. In many states, that’s pretty much guaranteeing that the poor will be left to heal themselves.
What we have to look forward to over the next several months is the following scenario repeated over and over again: somebody says something dumb, it gets elevated into a pseudoscandal, cable news freaks out, there are calls for various people to denounce whatever or whoever, and then eventually the whole thing calms down until the next time, likely because somebody was eaten by a shark somewhere.
So I see that Ted Nugent is threatening to shoot members of the Obama Administration if the President is re-elected. Or else he’s threatening to shoot himself; it’s a bit hard to tell. I’ll let the Secret Service sort that out.
So already people are calling on Mitt Romney to denounce Ted Nugent. just as there have been calls for President Obama to denounce Hilary Rosen and everyone else in North America who has ever said anything that upset the Right.
And y’know what? I don’t bleeping care if Mittens denounced Ted Nugent. A politician should be held responsible for many things; what some brain-damaged gasbag says is not among them, unless the gasbag is on his staff. We’ve got more important stuff to be arguing about.
The survey indicates women voters back Obama over Romney by 16 points (55%-39%), virtually unchanged from an 18-point advantage among women for the president in CNN polling last month.
The poll was conducted two days after Democratic strategist and CNN contributor Hilary Rosen created a controversy by saying that Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life.”
“That remark may have little long-term effect on women voters,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “By a two-to-one margin, the women surveyed saw President Obama as more in touch with the problems facing American women today.”
We won’t know for sure until some more polls come in, but I will be honestly surprised if there is any significant change in President Obama’s approval ratings among women because of Mrs. Romney’s self-centered hissy fit about how hard she works.
However, at the moment I don’t feel conquered. A bit tired, but not conquered.
Speaking of wars — history tells us that at the end of the first day of the Battle of Shiloh, Confederate General Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard telegraphed Richmond that he had won “a complete victory.” History also tells us that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman also assumed the Confederates had won. He sought out his commanding officer, General Ulysses S. Grant, to receive his orders for retreat.
Sherman found Grant hunkered under a tree, in the rain, smoking a cigar. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Sherman said. And Grant, after another puff of the cigar, said, “Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.” There would be no retreat.
The next day Union troops routed the Confederates and won the day, and the battle. Beauregard’s premature assumption of victory haunted the rest of his military career. Although, truth be told, his association with the Confederacy ended up being a worse career move.
I always think of General Beauregard whenever people declare victory a bit prematurely. At the Village Voice, Roy Edroso describes rightbloggers taking virtual victory laps and even performing psychological post-mortems on the conquered Left.
[Rosen’s] comments are a symptom of an underlying intolerance for values that exist outside pockets of liberal majority,” claimed Right Speak. That is, they represent (deep breath) “the mindset that traditional, conservative culture is bad as it exists outside the two coasts and other liberal centers of thought, such as higher education, it is dangerous, because the more it is allowed to be considered as mainstream, the more acceptable it will seem to all when legislation is passed one step at a time that eliminates and erodes many of the values the rest of the country holds.”
“I feel the left is riddled with insecurity,” explained AJ Strata. “They are intimidated by the rich, the powerful (see our military), the successful (another form of rich), and the happy. They thrive on sustaining the moment they revolted from parental oppression (be it religion, sexual orientation, taste in clothes, whatever). Why they even consider having or raising kids is beyond me. Maybe it is more of that lashing out and trying to prove they were right when they went full anarchist to leave the nest.” Whoever would imagine there were enough such people to elect a President? America must be in a very grave state.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Mittens is calling Hilary Rosen’s remarks an “early birthday present.” So far, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Mittens have told us why Mrs. Mittens has been deprived of the “Dignity of Work.”
It may be a few days before we know if the “mommy war” flap put any dent in the gender gap working against Mittens, or if the rightbloggers are pulling a General Beauregard. But if things work out the way I suspect they will, I have some advice for them:
