Wow, who could have imagined Mitt Romney would get such a cool reception from the NAACP? (/sarcasm)
Update — faces in the crowd — all saying “You’ve got to me bleeping kidding me …”
Category Archives: Republican Party
Money Don’t Buy You Smarts
Residents of the Hamptons and their rich friends ♥ Mittens. Maeve Reston writes for the Los Angeles Times:
The line of Range Rovers, BMWs, Porsche roadsters and one gleaming cherry red Ferrari began queuing outside of Revlon Chairman Ronald Perelman’s estate off Montauk Highway long before Romney arrived, as campaign aides and staffers in white polo shirts emblazoned with the logo of Perelman’s property — the Creeks — checked off names under tight security. …
… A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. “I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.
“We’ve got the message,” she added. “But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”
Dogby has a chart explaining the impact. And I like the little dig at “everybody who’s got the right to vote.” The next step, of course, is to see to it the unwashed masses don’t get to vote any more, since they make bad choices.
The Zambrellis of New York City said they had been Obama supporters four years ago, but not now.
The Zambrellis scoffed at attempts by the Democrats — who mocked Romney in an ad Sunday as “great for oil billionaires, bad for the middle class” — to wage class warfare. “Would you like to hear about the fundraisers I went to for him?” Sharon Zambrelli said of Obama. “Do you have an hour? … All the ones in the city — it was all of Wall Street.”
Apparently in her mind, attending an Obama fundraiser in ’08 gives one humanitarian cred, something along the lines of tending to lepers with Mother Teresa.
Michael Barbaro and Sarah Wheaton write for the New York Times,
A few cars back, Ted Conklin, the owner of the American Hotel in Sag Habor, N.Y., long a favorite of the well-off and well-known in the Hamptons, could barely contain his displeasure with Mr. Obama. “He is a socialist. His idea is find a problem that doesn’t exist and get government to intervene,†Mr. Conklin said from inside a gold-colored Mercedes as his wife, Carol Simmons, nodded in agreement.
I wish he’d been pressed for an example of a problem that doesn’t exist. Lack of health care, maybe?
Ms. Simmons paused to highlight what she said was her husband’s generous spirit: “Tell them who’s on your yacht this weekend! Tell him!â€
Over Mr. Conklin’s objections, Ms. Simmons disclosed that a major executive from Miramax, the movie company, was on the 75-foot yacht, because, she said, there were no rooms left at the hotel.
Oh, the humanity. BTW, the price of admission to this little shindig was $25,000 a head.
Mittens and His Money
It doesn’t bother me that Mittens has a lot of money. What he does with it is something else again.
Here’s the Vanity Fair article mentioned in the video.
There is also the mystery of Mitt’s IRA account.
His IRA raises two key questions, both of which his campaign has consistently declined to answer: How, despite a $6000 legal limit on annual contributions to an IRA, did Romney’s IRA grow to over $100 million? And did he avoid any U.S. taxes on its enormous returns?
Curiouser and curiouser.
Can Romney Overcome Romney?
© Karen Roach | Dreamstime.com
Except Romney is a sock, and Obama can be tough when he needs to be.
And here’s a surprise — in Nate Silver’s forecast model, Obama’s chances of winning the general election went up slightly last week, and Romney’s went down. My sense of things is that Romney had a better week in media than Obama did, so that’s not what I would have expected.
My suspicions are that the more the American people see of Romney, the less they will like him. His own worst enemy may prove to be himself. However, “the narrative” can go a long way toward putting lipstick on the pig, as they say.
The President’s new policy on immigration drew a typical Romney response.
For hours, Romney tried to ignore the news. Finally, after a rally here with a ragtime band playing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” in a town-square gazebo, Romney made a statement that struck a radically different tone from the hard-line approach he took on illegal immigration during the Republican primaries.
“I believe the status of young people who come here through no fault of their own is an important matter to be considered and should be solved on a long-term basis so they know what their future would be in this country,” he told reporters outside of his campaign bus.
“I think the action that the president took today makes it more difficult to reach that long-term solution, because an executive order is of course just a short-term matter. It could be reversed by subsequent presidents. I’d like to see legislation that deals with this issue.”
But he made no commitment to supporting any particular option.
The less-crazy elements of the GOP understand that they can’t keep pissing off Latinos and expect to win elections. But to endorse the policy would stir up the wrath of the rabidly xenophobic base. So Romney had to find a way to say the policy is fine but the President was still wrong to implement it. One wonders how many hours it took the Romney team to craft the message the candidate finally delivered.
And, of course, the biggest reason the President went ahead with the policy change is that there was no hope there would be “legislation that deals with this issue” in the foreseeable future.
Today Romney is accusing Obama of playing politics to get the Latino vote, but he refuses to say that he would repeal the executive order if elected.
A big chunk of the electorate won’t focus much on the elections until the conventions. My prediction is that as people get a closer look at Romney, the more uncomfortable they will be with him. The only question is whether the Right’s propaganda machine can make up for their candidates’ obvious shortcomings.
Update: See also Romney: Being Vague About My Plans Helps Me Get Elected and Romney Dodges Immigration Questions.
The Republican Jobs Plan
I’m not sure when this happened, but the Republicans are pushing a jobs bill that is actually really truly called “Plan for America’s Job Creators.” Seriously.
I downloaded the full version of the Plan from the GOP site; it is all of ten pages long, and roughly half of that is big graphics. Republicans don’t sweat those pesky details.
The Plan has eight parts. Just for fun, I will list them before below the fold, so you can try to guess what they are without looking. I’m betting all of you will guess at least four of them.
Mitt Romney, Serial Liar
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.
Now, something to read to keep you busy —
Steve Benen, Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity, Vol. XX
Associated Press, FACT CHECK: Romney misses a mark on Solyndra ‘friends and family’ claim. See also Jake Tapper.
Mittens: Presidential or Pathetic?
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.
Republicans Don’t Do Health Care Reform
I hesitate to call any part of the Republican Party “pragmatic,” but apparently some of them have some sense that the entire American public might not see things the way they do.
So over the past several days I’ve seen news stories saying some congressional leaders want to keep some parts of Obamacare. The fix they are in is that some parts of the ACA are now in effect, and most of those parts have proved to be popular.
For example, 2.5 million young adults are now insured on their parents health care plan who couldn’t get insurance before. To date, the ACA has said Medicare recipients $3.5 billion on prescription drugs. Several hundred thousand seniors have taken advantage of the various free preventive care screenings now available to them. This summer $1.3 billion in rebate checks are going out to people who were overcharged for their insurance.
On top of that, if the Supremes strike down the ACA this summer, the Medicare system could be thrown into chaos, at least temporarily.
So, over the past few days I’ve seen several news stories saying that some congressional Republicans are planning to keep the “good” Obamacare bits. In particular, they want to keep the provision that allows children to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26; they want to eliminate the prescription drug doughnut hole; and they want to provide that insurance companies have to insure people with pre-existing conditions.
However, as soon as one of these stories comes out, another story comes out saying that other congressional leaders demand complete and unconditional repeal. No walkbacks. John Boehner seems to take both positions, on alternate days.
At TPM, Sahil Kapur writes that Republicans are being warned not to go wobbly on Obamacare.
FreedomWorks and Club for Growth, two powerful conservative interest groups that are fresh off of purging the Senate’s longest-serving Republican for insufficient fealty to the right, are flexing their muscles.
“The Club for Growth supports complete repeal of Obamacare. And complete doesn’t mean partial. It means complete,” said Barney Keller, a spokesman for the group. “We urge the so-called ‘tea party’ Republicans to keep their promises to voters and continue to fight for complete repeal as well.”
The “pragmatists,” relatively speaking, want to have a fallback position in case the ACA is entirely overturned and the benefits people had begun to enjoy from it dry up. They want to be able to say to voters that they can still have their 20-something children on their health care benefits and that the doughnut hole can still be closed.
As for insurance for pre-existing conditions, there is no way the private insurance industry can do that without the individual mandate, a complication that Republicans refuse to address. But the ideological purists don’t want to promise anything.
Dean Clancy, who leads health care advocacy for FreedomWorks, said the group “would be very concerned about bills to resurrect parts of Obamacare.”
He said Republicans should take no responsibility for the broken system that would result.
“It would be the height of folly for Republicans to say, OK, this is our problem now,” he said. “It’s not the Republicans’ fault if 25-year-old slackers suddenly are dropped from mom and dad’s health insurance policy. It’s not the Republicans’ fault if various other provisions of Obamacare are no longer on the books. … The American people need to have a chance to reflect on the fact that the Democrats basically rammed an unconstitutional bill down their throat.”
We could quibble about who is ramming what, and where.
A few days ago Jonathan Chait recalled that Republicans promised a comprehensive health care reform plan in 1993, when they defeated “Hillarycare.”
In 1993, Bill Clinton tried to reform health care, and it appeared a strong enough threat that Republicans devised their own plan in response. It was a great way to send the message “we have a plan, too.” When Clinton’s plan collapsed, he made feelers toward the GOP plan, but Republicans turned against it, promising instead to start over in the next Congress.
For the next sixteen years, Republicans did zero to advance the cause of comprehensive health-care reform.
I don’t remember them even talking about it, except to pooh-pooh people who complained about the health care system. We have the best health care system in the world, after all [/sarcasm].
In 2009, President Obama started working on health-care reform, and Republicans again insisted they really truly did want to reform the health-care system, just not in this particular way. Plan? TBD. Then they won control of the House and promised to immediately get to work on a replacement plan. Result: zero. Evidence of any progress toward said plan: zero.
Recently Rep. Paul Ryan told editors of the Washington Examiner that it would be a mistake for Republicans to offer any specific legislation before the November election. Instead, they should offer a “vision.” I take it “vision” is the new “bullshit.”
Back to Jonathan Chait:
In the same interview, Ryan says maybe Republicans will reform the deductibility of health insurance: “On tax treatment of health care, some of our folks really like deductions, others like the tax credit route.” That sounds like a possible first step. Except the Ryan budget already assumes that it will close trillions of dollars in tax deductions like that for employer-provided health care, and then it plows all that revenue back into lower tax rates. So, no money for tax credits or any other way to support health insurance.
The health care system is very complicated and made up of countless moving parts that have to work together. That’s why the ACA was so long and complicated. I think Republicans are not intelligent enough to come up with their own legislation, and I will believe that until they prove me wrong and come up with something. And at the rate they are going, I won’t live long enough to see that.
Games Republicans Play
Since the country apparently has no real problems that Congress needs to be addressing, Republicans in Congress have invented a game called “let’s defeat Obama’s budget.” Here’s how it works —
Every few months, to fight the boredom, some Republican will crank out some farce legislation and submit it for a vote as “President Obama’s budget.” Be clear that the legislation is not, in fact, President Obama’s budget, but a Republican concoction inspired by those crazy copy-and-past 5,000-word emails you get from your wingnut uncle. As near as I can tell, the “budgets” are created by taking top line numbers from the President’s actual budget and leaving out about 1,944 pages worth of details, including revenue enhancements. The result is a monstrosity that the White House wouldn’t vote for, either.
For example, the here’s how the White House responded to the most recent gag budget, introduced by Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of MississippiAlabama —
Thus, a White House official said, the Sessions proposal was a “shell that could be filled with a number of things that could hurt our economy and hurt the middle class,†a White House official said. “For example, rather than ending tax breaks for millionaires his budget could hit the revenue target by raising taxes on the middle class and rather than ending wasteful programs, his budget could hit its spending target with severe cuts to important programs.â€
Jason Linkins explains further:
This vote, on a Potemkin “Obama Budget,” is not intended to be taken seriously. It’s a stunt designed to get a slag into the newscycle, and they tend to work. What happens is a Republican legislator presents a “budget proposal” that’s designed to be a satirical presentation of an “Obama budget.” Democrats don’t vote for it, because they recognize that it bears no resemblance to their budgetary preferences.
Good times! Anyway, the Republicans then put the “President’s budget” up for a vote, and because it’s such a joke no Democrat votes for it, either. Then the Republicans send out press releases saying that the President’s budget was unanimously defeated. And that Democrat-controlled liberal media cranks out amusing headlines repeating the charge about the unanimous defeat. The news stories often leave out the detail about how the defeated budget actually was a joke, which makes it all even funnier. And then wingnut bloggers write posts about it like this one:
It’s Hope and Change we can believe in as Obama proposes legislation that sweeps to unanimous votes in the House and Senate:
President Obama’s budget suffered a second embarrassing defeat Wednesday, when senators voted 99-0 to reject it.
Coupled with the House’s rejection in March, 414-0, that means Mr. Obama’s budget has failed to win a single vote in support this year.
It’s great to see Obama uniting Washington and developing some momentum. Especially as that momentum seems to be carrying him to the exit.
Of course (wink, wink) the legislation that was voted down was not what President Obama proposed, but what a Republican imagined the President would propose if he were as demented as they are. But it’s great to see so many people keeping their sense of humor through all these trying times of not having anything else to do.
Update: See also What It Means That The ‘President’s Budget’ Went Down 99 To 0 In The Senate
Update: Some are complaining that the Democrats haven’t introduced a budget lately. Jason Linkins writes,
But if you want to divine what another famous character of the stage termed the “method in the madness,” look at the latter half of Stephens’ statement, and the complaint that the Democrats have not put forth a budget. That’s fair, but it invites a trip into the weeds. There are reasons why the Democrats haven’t done so: 1) they know that any real “Obama budget” is a legislative nonstarter in the current climate of obstruction, and 2) the Democrats hold that the conditions created by the Budget Control Act are their de facto budget. This does not cover the lack of a budget in 2010 and 2011 — those didn’t happen because of the aforementioned obstruction, and some off-year election Democratic Party theories that failed votes would be more costly at the polls than no vote at all. (The results of the 2010 elections suggest that this was, perhaps, too clever by half.)
Let’s face it; Republicans would go ballistic and vote NO NO NO NO if Obama submitted so much as a deli menu. Even so, Dems might as well submit the real budget, which would get a majority of Dem votes. Call out the game-players.
GOP vs. GOP
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.