Category Archives: Mittens

Mittens Is Going to Be Very Sorry

Posted on by

He probably thinks he has found the key for winning back women’s votes by piling on the old “mommy wars.” But then Chris Hayes found this, from January:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

So, according to Mittens, stay-at-home moms don’t understand the “dignity of work.” Chris Hayes continues,

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And Chris Hayes reminds us that for years we’ve heard that poor and single mothers must be pushed into the work force so that they aren’t lazy and dependent. But wealthier women actually enjoy tax benefits for staying home. If you want to see more of this morning’s program, see the Chris Hayes page.

Ryan Grim spells it out at Huffington Post. See also Alex Seitz-Wald at Think Progress

Most of us who had to work to support ourselves and our children had it up to here with the “mommy wars” years ago. Yes, raising kids is work, but raising kids while working full time is more work. A lot more work. Especially when you can’t afford housekeepers and cooks and nannies.

I think Mittens may be about to find out that the “mommy wars” aren’t the opportunity he thought they were. Let’s see what Mr. Etch-a-Sketch has to say about his welfare policies in the next few days.

This Is What Grasping at Straws Looks Like

Posted on by

Mittens is convinced he can erase the gender gap by exploiting the phony “war on moms” issue. Weirdly, he even dragged Ann Romney onstage to talk about the glories of mommyhood at the NRA convention yesterday. One suspects this was not a predominately female audience.

And now the GOP is pushing “war on moms” bumper stickers and coffee mugs! Yeah, there’s nothing like a slogan on a coffee mug to make me re-think my priorities. (/snark)

Republicans actually have declared the “war on women” to be over, now that they have a “women’s message” they think will overcome the negatives. It’ll be a few days before the polls show us anything, but it’s hard to believe the younger college-educated women who have been driving the increasing “gender gap” are going to be fooled by pro-mommyhood messaging. An appeal to emotions doesn’t erase Mittens’s largely anti-woman agenda.

The Struggles of Ann Romney

Posted on by

Desperate to distract the nation from the fact that their presidential candidate is an upper-crust twit with less personality than Saran Wrap, righties have seized upon an alleged insult to womanhood on the part of a Democratic operative and are struggling mightily to make a controversy out of it.

Good luck with that, chumps.

Mittens, you might recall, has been trying to pass as a friend to women by telling the world he is married to one. And Mrs. Mittens tells him what women really are concerned about, which is the economy, and not all that stuff about their lady parts.

So a guest on CNN named Hilary Rosen called bullshit.

“What you have is, Mitt Romney running around the country saying, ‘Well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues. And when I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing.’ Guess what: his wife has never really worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kind of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and why do we worry about their future.”

Mrs. Mittens took to twitter to let the world know that she was a stay-at-home mom with five boys, which means she worked plenty. After all, she’s also got three mansions to manage, plus all those swimming pools and stables to clean. Shoveling out the stables alone must be a full-time job. I can’t imagine how she does it. (/snark)

Exactly what Hilary Rosen’s connection is to the Democratic Party, or consulting, is a bit murky. But never fear; now that she’s a target, a large part of the rightie blogosphere is busy playing Six Degrees of the White House and finding all the many ways she must be a BFF of the first family.

Plus, OMG, she’s a lesbian who has raised children with two mommies! Just watch; she’s about to become the new Ward Churchill.

The Right is trying to make Rosen out to be an enemy of stay-at-home moms and not, in fact, a woman who has walked the walk, so to speak, which privileged and protected Ann Romney has not. But Mrs. Mittens got on Fox News to tell us that she has struggled, oh lawsy sakes, you do not know how she has struggled …

Ann Romney on Fox News Thursday morning said, “I know what it’s like to struggle.” She admitted that she may not have struggled financially as much as others in the U.S. “I would love to have people understand that Mitt and I have compassion for people who are struggling,” Ann Romney said. “We care about those people that are struggling.”

Seriously. I bet for Christmas she gives lovely fruit baskets to all the hired help, too.

I’m not saying the rich are immune from suffering. They have sorrows and sickness and losses and fears like the rest of us. Ann Romney has been diagnosed with MS and breast cancer, which can’t have been easy. But … struggling? Give me a break. She doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

And with her health conditions, in the U.S. if she weren’t wealthy she’d be dead. That’s a sad fact.

The famous perpetual rivalry between career moms and stay-at-home moms is mostly limited to the 1 percent these days, since most women with children don’t have the luxury of choosing to stay home. This is a point obviously lost on the Mittens family, though.

Republicans tried to make hay with stay-at-home moms back in 1992, when Marilyn Quayle addressed the Republican National Convention and proudly let the world know that she gave up her law practice when she had children, unlike that harridan Hillary Clinton, because of her superior values. The fact that her husband was wealthy and the family didn’t need her income had nothing to do with it.

Moneyed Republican women didn’t get it then, and it appears they don’t get it now.

GOP Denial and the Gender Gap

Posted on by

The gender gap is real, and it’s bigger than it’s ever been since the dawn of political polls. So says Steve Kornacki.

Republican and their media sympathizers respond to this challenge by either denying the gender gap is real or by mistaking us for caterpillars. And then there’s the Michael Gerson route, in which Gerson admits the gender gap is real but denies it has anything to do with Republican maneuvers on contraception or other “women’s” issues.

The media — ever drawn to simple explanations that reinforce their own cultural expectations — have diagnosed Romney’s gender-based electoral weakness as the result of his opposition to the contraceptive mandate. This is both initially plausible and demonstrably false. More than 60 percent of American voters don’t even know Romney’s position on the mandate — a topic they rank near the bottom of their political concerns. And when pressed, a majority of women affirm that religious institutions should be exempted from the mandate.

First — the issue is bigger than just the contraception mandate. It seems that for the past several months there has been one “women’s” issue after another the GOP has bungled. Second, the gender gap is being driven by one particular slice of the demographic pie — college-educated women under the age of 50. They are stampeding to Obama in droves. And you can bet your Jimmy Choo spike-heel booties that those women understand the contraception issue (and everything else) better than Gerson does.

Hilariously, Gerson thinks Mittens can win women back by taking a page out of Dubya’s 2000 playbook, which was co-authored by Gerson …

In 2000, George W. Bush campaigned — in both the primaries and the general election — on increasing the quality of education for poor children, on humane immigration reform and on expanding care by faith-based organizations for the addicted and homeless. These issues were personally important to Bush. They also signaled to independents and women that he could think beyond normal ideological boundaries. This form of “compassionate conservatism” is now broadly reviled among conservatives. The need for an analogous agenda, whatever it is called, remains unchanged. To secure a decent shot at this election, Romney will need to offer some positive vision for the common good.

In other words, the guy already famous for his off-the-cuff remarks about the thrill of firing people, ending Planned Parenthood, and telling financially squeezed college students that they just need to find a cheaper college — and let us not forget the dog — will figure out how to fake caring? Well enough to fool anybody? Right.

See also Ed Kilgore.

Oh, and Frothy is suspending his campaign.

They Don’t Learn, Do They?

Posted on by

A Bloomberg poll says that 77 percent of Americans side with progressives on the question of contraception and women’s health.

Americans overwhelmingly regard the debate over President Barack Obama’s policy on employer-provided contraceptive coverage as a matter of women’s health, not religious freedom, rejecting Republicans’ rationale for opposing the rule. More than three-quarters say the topic shouldn’t even be a part of the U.S. political debate.

More than six in 10 respondents to a Bloomberg National Poll — including almost 70 percent of women — say the issue involves health care and access to birth control, according to the survey taken March 8-11.

Meanwhile, the yahoos in the Arizona legislature think that employers need to be informed about their employees’ contraception use.

A proposed new law in Arizona would give employers the power to request that women being prescribed birth control pills provide proof that they’re using it for non-sexual reasons. And because Arizona’s an at-will employment state, that means that bosses critical of their female employees’ sex lives could fire them as a result.

This is all about “freedom,” of course.

Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.

“I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union,” Lesko said. “So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom and pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs.”

Yeah, I’m sure the women of Arizona will be fine with having to get permission slips from their bosses to be on the pill.

Meanwhile, just weeks after the Komen for the Fail debacle, Mittens promises to get rid of Planned Parenthood:

“The test is pretty simple. Is the program so critical, it’s worth borrowing money from china to pay for it? And on that basis of course you get rid of Obamacare, that’s the easy one. Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that. The subsidy for Amtrak, I’d eliminate that. The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities,” he said.

I’d borrow money from China to buy Mittens some integrity. Or maybe even a brain.

Frothy’s Night

Posted on by

For once Nate Silver was a tad off, but he had said it would be close. So Frothy has won Alabama and Mississippi, and it looks like Noot will be second in both and Mittens third. I tried to see some TV commentary on this, but every time I turned to MSNBC either Frothy or Noot were talking, and I’d rather have my fingernails ripped off than listen to them. But I suspect this isn’t going to help Mittens much.

Do see this cartoon. It’s a hoot.

Mitt Romney, Serial Liar

Posted on by

It’s been a while since I linked to a Steve Benen post about the Mendacity of Mittens, but here is a recent one. See also David Bernstein and Paul Waldman.

So, yes, the GOP field is a pack of mutts, but possibly the most bizarre behavior of the lot of them, which is saying something, is Mitt’s lying. Yeah, politicians lie, but not like this. They spin, they stretch, they take stuff out of context. Romney just makes it up.

Bernstein writes,

I think we’ve seen, over the past couple of months, an important tipping point where much of the national political media now recognizes — as the McCain team did during that January 2008 St. A’s debate — that, in the Romney campaign, they are dealing with something unlike the normal spin and hyperbole. They are realizing that Romney and his campaign simply cannot be trusted, in any way, about anything.

They are also coming to realize just how carefully controlling Romney is about the media, how little access and information the media will get from the candidate and the campaign, and how hostile Romney is toward them.

And Waldman says,

So here’s my question: Just what will it take for reporters to start writing about the question of whether Mitt Romney is, deep within his heart, a liar?

Because he does this kind of thing frequently, very frequently. Sometimes the lies he tells are about himself (often when he’s trying to explain away things he has said or done in the past if today they displease his party’s base, as he’s now doing with his prior support for an individual mandate for health insurance), but most often it’s Barack Obama he lies about. And I use the word “lie” very purposefully. There are lots of things Romney says about Obama that are distortions, just plain ridiculous, or unfalsifiable but obviously false, as when he often climbs into Obama’s head to tell you what Obama really desires, like turning America into a militarily weak, economically crippled shadow of Europe (not the actual Europe, but Europe as conservatives imagine it to be, which is something like Poland circa 1978). But there are other occasions, like this one, where Romney simply lies, plainly and obviously. In this case, there are only two possibilities for Romney’s statement: Either he knew what Obama has said on this topic and decided he’d just lie about it, or he didn’t know what Obama has said, but decided he’d just make up something about what Obama said regardless of whether it was true. In either case, he was lying.

The narrative the Press has been going by is that Ron Paul is a flake, Noot and Frothy are bomb-throwing clowns, and Mittens is the relatively “normal” one. But the truth is Mittens may be the sickest one of all.

The Morning After

Posted on by

Noteworthy items:

Right-wing whackjob and former maha-neighbor “Mean Jean” Schmidt lost her seat in the House in a landslide to her primary opponent, Brad Wenstrup. Unfortunately, from what I’ve read Wenstrup also is a right-wing whackjob, and he’s expected to win in the general election.

I regret that Dennis Kucinich was redistricted out of his House seat. Even though his self-promoting grandstanding sometimes worked against progress rather than for it, his perspective is needed in Washington.

Republicans stripped an 86-year-old World War II veteran of his right to vote. But did they really intend to keep elderly white men from voting? I thought that was their strongest constituency?

Of Mitt Romney’s tepid showing, Dan Balz writes,

Nomination battles often strengthen the winner, but some take a toll. Rarely is there a straight line between March and November that predicts the outcome of a general election. Still, Romney is in worse shape at this point in the campaign than virtually all recent previous nominees.

Demographically, his image among independent voters, the most critical swing group, is more negative now than it was when the primary battle began. He could be hurt among women. He is in trouble with Latinos, a growing part of the electorate that is tilting even more Democratic than it was four years ago. He is not as strong as he needs to be among working-class white voters, among whom President Obama has been consistently weak.

Any other thoughts?