If Republicans REALLY Want to Stop Trump

The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote - Kosh, Babylon 5

Update: Thanks for the link, Infidel753!

Today in half-assed attempts by the Republican Establishment to stop Donald Trump from driving their clown car over the cliff, former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney came out and lambasted Trump using the most direct words yet aimed at the primary front-runner. Openly pointing out Trump's many bankruptcies and personal failures, as the report notes:

Romney then went on an epic take down of the Republican frontrunner, point-by-point, issue-by-issue, critiquing his business acumen, the amount he's worth, his ability to understand foreign policy and his temperament and his honesty...

"Dishonesty is Trump's hallmark: He claimed that he had spoken clearly and boldly against going into Iraq. Wrong, he spoke in favor of invading Iraq. He said he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating 9/11. Wrong, he saw no such thing. He imagined it. His is not the temperament of a stable, thoughtful leader..."

"Mr. Trump is directing our anger for less than noble purposes. He creates scapegoats of Muslims and Mexican immigrants, he calls for the use of torture and for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protesters. He applauds the prospect of twisting the Constitution to limit first amendment freedom of the press. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss..."

With honest regard, everything Romney points out is true and troubling. Problems with this, and I'm not the only one who noticed, are many:

• Mitt Romney, being a rich kid who inherited into wealth and built on that into a clueless oligarch himself, isn't the best candidate to trash Trump on those same grounds.
• Romney lost in 2008 for the nomination because the primary voters didn't view him as Conservative enough, so why would they listen to him now?
• Romney won the nomination in 2012 but wasn't the real choice the Far Right primary voters preferred: they kept voting for any Not-Mitt candidate they could until it was inevitable that Romney would win that nomination.
• As such, the Republican base were NEVER convinced - and there were elements of the Far Right media who pushed the Narrative on it - that Romney was ideologically pure enough to "win" against a "weak" Obama. So when Mitt did lose, it was easy for the GOP to say with sour grapes "well, if we had a pure candidate we'd have won for sure."

So if the Republican Establishment is thinking that Romney's speech is going to shame the Trump voter bloc into stepping back and switching their support to the likes of Rubio, forget it. Romney's not the guy qualified to do it.

It doesn't help that the tone and attitude behind Romney's speech is akin to a stern parent trying to lecture wayward children about that friend of theirs, the one with the bad attitude and smoking habit who hangs out in the woods all afternoon dealing in an illegal Pokemon card trade. The voters backing Trump had already gone to him because of the disdainful, patronizing way the Establishment had been treating the Far Right base - the low-income, low-education people who make up an unhappy plurality of the Republican faithful - and this kind of lecturing is just going to drive them to back Trump even more.

If the Republicans really want to stop Trump, the party leadership and their billionaire backers are going to have to do something they've never done in the last 40 years: they are going to have to end, right here and now, the Far Right Noise Machine they've been using to stir up that voting base into a frenzy of irrational fear and hate.

That is, of course, impossible. That Noise Machine - led by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes and the inheritors of Breitbart's legacy - is still making too much money and generating high ratings pushing Trump every minute of the day on the electorate. And the message - that damned Narrative - of "Obama is evil and must be stopped" can't be pulled back, can't be toned down. You kept telling the Far Right Tea Party base for seven years they needed a strong, bullying SOB to lead the Republicans to glory, and now that they think they have one in Trump you can't take that away from them.

A possible alternative - although it may be too late for that as well - is for the Establishment to actually listen to those angry voters and find out exactly what it is - outside of the crazy racist sh-t - that would placate the mob.

While the Trump coalition of voters are mostly stirred up by the race hatred towards illegals and Muslims as well as railing against the "political correctness" regarding Blacks and women, a good number of those voters are driven by other fears. Linking to this Atlantic article, there's a set of results showing the core identifiers of the Trump Voter:

The single best predictor of Trump support in the GOP primary is the absence of a college degree. In an analysis of Trump's blowout win in New Hampshire, Evan Soltas determined that the factor explaining most of the variance in Trump's support in New Hampshire was education...

...Although white men without a college education haven’t suffered the same historical discrimination as blacks or women, their suffering is not imagined. The Hamilton Project has found that the full-time, full-year employment rate of men without a bachelor's degree feel from 76 percent in 1990 to 68 percent in 2013. While real wages have grown for men and women with a four-year degree or better in the last 25 years, they've fallen meaningfully for non-college men...

If I had to word it, I'd say the average Trump voter is a white male whose employment options shrank during the Great Recession - when Manufacturing and Construction jobs took a major nosedive - and didn't see any employment help forthcoming from either a government in Republican-driven gridlock or a private sector of major corporations shipping jobs overseas.

Told to blame Obama for all that, they did so dutifully. But they're also aware of - and angered by - how the corporations and banks are screwing the poor over regardless of the Democrat in the White House, and they're not about to buy into a Republican leadership being bought up in a Citizens United era by billionaires (despite the irony of Trump himself being a corrupt billionaire) who are eager to keep trading jobs to China in exchange for global market access. There's a reason why Trump's call for a trade war against China is as big a hit with his voters as his call to build a wall along the Mexican border.

And there's another reason: the more the Party Leadership rails against Trump, the more he gains and retains his followers. Because those followers - the hard-core voting base of the GOP - view any attack on Trump as an attack on themselves and what they hope to gain through a Trump ascendancy.

The base of the Republican Party doesn't really care about massive tax cuts for the rich - there's enough of that base that hates those plans as much as Democrats do - and they don't care about deregulation for banks and investment firms and they don't care all that much about gay marriage or abortion restrictions or half of the social conservative agenda (they kinda do but they don't prioritize it the way the Bible Thumper crowds do, which is why Trump's blase attitude towards abortion hasn't hurt him). The base - well the ones backing Trump - are afraid they've lost their political power and their ability to live within their means, and so their backing of Trump in open defiance of the party leadership is an attempt to show "they" still have power to control their fates.

This is the faction that the Republican leadership needs to placate, the ones they need to swing back to their side of the fight. If it means outright buying their support - like the way that same leadership keeps accusing Democrats of "buying" the support of minorities - then that leadership needs to do it.

If the Republicans want to neuter Trump's support with something they can control - they can't stop the racist stuff for now: that particular avalanche overwhelming the Republican campaign has to end when that Far Right Noise Machine turns itself off - they should head into Congress with their House and Senate majorities and do something to bring manufacturing and construction jobs back to the United States. That means the Congressional Republicans are going to have to drum up a Jobs Bill covering such projects as Bridge and Highway Restorations and Upgrades, and coming up with tax credits to corporations that keep jobs stateside and/or boost their workers' wages back to where the Middle Class can thrive again (or levy massive tax penalties on those companies who won't).

Despite the horror that they'll be handing Obama a Jobs Bill they've spent years denying him, the Republicans have to realize that their partisan obstruction on this aspect of domestic policy has killed them more than it's hurt Obama. Because denying those jobs in the Blue Collar arena has hurt the non-college white male working class more than any other ethnic and economic group, and this is the big sin that has come back to bite the Republican Party's leadership on their collective oligarchical ass.

It may be yet another "win" to Obama, one that may anger the racist element backing Trump, but it should alleviate the worries of the more open-minded Trump supporters, and lessen the odds of Trump winning over enough states to secure the delegate counts for the nomination.

There's no other honest way to stop Trump. You have to take away his voters and do so in an open, legitimate way. All other solutions - Staging a "brokered" convention to deny his delegates? Forcing a Third-Party run? - are suicidal and likely to kill the Republican Party for real.

Suck it up, Ryan and McConnell. Give the nation a Jobs Bill that brings hope to the poor working class. You might be able to hold onto your jobs - and your Republican Party - if you do.

What Romney Didn't Want: A View Into Presidential Character

I've wanted to write for a long time about the Presidential Character.  And the recent revelations about Mitt Romney's failed 2012 campaign is a good time to do it.

When I'm talking Presidential Character, I'm looking at the definitions created by political scientist James David Barber who developed the four types of Character based on Active/Passive and Positive/Negative traits: Active-Positive, Active-Negative, Passive-Positive, and Passive-Negative.

As a good example, look to the first four Presidents:
George Washington was, believe it or not, Passive-Negative.  P-Ns only become Presidents because of a sense of duty, not any desire for the office.  They're wary of executive power, and not thrilled with political negotiating.
John Adams was Active-Negative.  A-Ns are aggressive, uncompromising, unhappy both personally and professionally, but do relish a good amount of executive authority and do seek accomplishments to fulfill.
Thomas Jefferson was Active-Positive.  Optimistic, forward-thinking, capable of overreach, reveling in the ceremonial aspects of the Presidency, A-Ps are just as aggressive as A-Ns but more capable of compromise and reaching goals.
James Madison was Passive-Positive.  P-Ps are optimistic and friendly, but unfocused, more akin to being a caretaker letting the People's Business do its own thing.  Things can happen during their tenure but more often the Passive-Positive President is not leading the charge.

There is no bad precedent: Negative or Passive are not bad traits per se.  It all depends on the timing:  Washington was perfect as a Passive-Negative because as the first President under the Constitution it was up to him to define the limits and powers of the office.  By being that self-controlling, he stabilized government and gave it time to settle down.  An Active-Positive at that time could have led to chaos and constant in-fighting against the Congress: an Active-Negative could have made himself dictator out frustration.  On the other hand, Madison as Passive-Positive happened at a bad time: the War of 1812 happened under his watch, something an Active-Negative could have avoided, or an Active-Positive could have managed to greater success.  Passive-Positives could be successful during tenures of great upheaval: sometimes through luck, but most times because such passivity actually makes them flexible and capable of making sound deals with Congress or foreign nations. To that, look at Ronald Reagan: He campaigned as a radical anti-government conservative but in office his P-P nature made him amenable to government's effectiveness, which lead him to revoke his anti-tax stances and eventually pursue ground-breaking treaties with the Soviet Union.

That said, Active-Negatives tend to be very bad for the nation over the long haul: SEE Hoover, Herbert; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Nixon, Richard; Cheney, Dick (I would contend that Dubya himself was a Passive-Positive, allowing an Active-Negative like his Veep Cheney far too much power in his administration).

So what does this all have to do with Mitt Romney, the Man Who Will Never Be President?

Because his circle of insiders - his son Tagg, for example - are now claiming after his 2012 election debacle that Mitt Romney never wanted to be President anyway.

At first glance this looks, walks, and quacks like a case of Sour Grapes: he lost something of "value", so now they're claiming he never wanted it.  But the more you look at it, the more you see how this can fit into the Presidential Character grid that Barber devised.

I wanted to write about Romney's character - or lack of one - a few months back when I wanted to discuss this Presidential Character idea then.  I wanted to point out that Romney's constant flip-flopping on the issues made it impossible to determine just where on the charts he fit.  But then I realized he had a constant - his ever-fixed mark of the massive tax cut - and realized Mitt fit on the chart after all.

Mitt Romney, if he had won the Presidency, was going to be a Passive-Negative.

To refer back to Charles Pierce's Esquire article:

Willard Romney didn't want to be president. Willard Romney expected to be president, and that was his real undoing...
It has been years, probably, since Willard had to go to all the emotional fuss and bother of actually wanting something. If there was something that caught his eye -- a slow-moving company's fat pension fund, a nice house in La Jolla, the governor's office in Massachusetts -- there would be a deal to be struck and whatever it was that should be his would be his. This is not a man who tolerates disappointment well, not because he burns with ambition and avarice -- although he profited for years from very effective simulacrums of ambition and avarice --but, rather, because he rarely has experienced disappointment in his life. He does not want. He expects.

That fits the P-N psyche pretty well.  Passive-Negatives run out of a sense of duty or obligation.  For Romney, it has to do with the legacy of being George Romney's son: his father was an active political figure, running for all the right reasons (George Romney fit well to the Active-Positive if only he had bested Nixon in 1968).  It has to do with Romney being a major political figure within the Mormon church, an Americanized religious off-shoot of Christianity still looking for a President to validate the church's success.

The big difference keeping Mitt from qualifying for Active-Negative was all of Mitt's flip-flopping.  A-Ns, if anything, do have a core set of values outside of political ambitions: even Nixon for all his paranoia and loathing had his limits.  Romney's lack of core values - he honestly did not care one whit about abortion, or war, or poverty, or employment, or governance, or people in general - made him oh so very Passive in that regard.

 

(And at least Passive-Positives are well-liked.  Passive-Negatives?  Unless you're George Washington or Ike, who both earned respect enough to be liked, you're sh-t out of luck).

And what would that have meant?

Think George W. Bush's passive nature in office: he kow-towed to the "experts" in his administration, especially Cheney who quickly pushed his own secret agendas on the nation's energy policies, the nation's economic policies, and then the nation's war policies when 9/11 happened.  But at least against that, Dubya still had some semblance of leadership: he showed pragmatic concern for the GOP to pursue a moderate immigration policy (the Far Right refused), and he pushed for tolerance for Muslims and other faiths at a time the neocon's obsession with waging holy war in the Middle East led to a lot of bad feelings among the Far Right.  And at least during his first two years, before Cheney sunk his hooks further in, Dubya allowed more sensible figures in his Cabinet (Powell at State, O'Neill at Treasury) to craft policy.  Look to Powell's (and Condi Rice's) handling of the Spy Plane incident with China.

Mitt Romney would have filled his administration with the pushiest, meanest set of political hacks - hello, neocons - that dotted the edges of the Dubya administration.  He would have had to: the Far Right in the Republican Party would have insisted on their due, and Romney would accept it because Romney wouldn't have cared who was in charge at State or Defense or anywhere else in his Cabinet.

The Character of any President matters based on the times we as a nation are in.  We are still mired (2012) in a jobless recession requiring serious government intervention and jobs stimulus.  We are still mired in one ground war - Afghanistan - and still trying to clean up the messes of the other - Iraq - while at the same time juggling the political instability of the entire Middle East.  We're in the times where an Active-Positive President would be the most value.  Even an Active-Negative (as long as the Negativity was channeled elsewhere, say, resolving the professional hockey lockout) wouldn't be that damaging.  But a Passive-Negative?

Mitt Romney would have wrecked the United States.

In a way, it's a good thing Mitt really didn't want the Presidency.  He could have ended up being the first President to have been successfully impeached out of office (Nixon resigned, and both Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton stayed in office).

P.S.  That said, how does Barack Obama rate on Presidential Character?

He fits the Active-Positive chart: the reason he lacks more success in an era that needs an A-P President is due to an obstructive Congress.

In the meantime, I seriously recommend James David Barber's text Presidental Character: Predicting Performance In the White House (4th Ed), 2008, ISBN 978-0205652594.

 

It Should Never Have Been This Close

I know this is a partisan sentiment.  Still...

How the hell could this 2012 Presidential campaign be this damn close?  It's a goddamn nail-biter going into Tuesday.

I know I shouldn't view myself as an Only Sane Man.  There are others out there who I know are looking at this same situation and headdesking until there's a foot-deep dent in their worktable.  Besides, sanity is relative: I know I'm coming to this game with some personal emotional issues - depression, social anxiety, PTSD from having survived Tarpon Springs Middle School (shudder) - but even with all that I'd like to think I'm still level-headed and possessing clarity and awareness.

But how the hell could this election be so damned close?

I know our elections are dominated by a strong two-party system, where the base choices are Republican and Democrat and where any viable Third Party choice really aren't that viable at the moment.  I know this tends to force the elections to be closer than they need to be because of tribal identity: people vote their party because dammit that's how they've voted, how their families voted, how their social circles voted and they are not going to change now simply because the party's offering for candidate(s) are moronic wingnuts.  This is pretty much why popular votes - outside of gerrymandered/rigged congressional districts - tend to be around the 55 - 45 percentile breakdown.  But this alone couldn't explain why we're facing a situation where a good incumbent President - Obama, who has pretty much kept a solid majority of his 2008 campaign promises - is not cruising to an easy re-election.  A President Obama who got a health care reform package passed, a President Obama who carried through on ending military operations in Iraq (a war he DID NOT START BUT DID FINISH ON HONORABLE TERMS), a President Obama who made getting Bin Laden a priority after the Bush the Lesser administration basically forgot Bin Laden was America's Enemy Number One, a President Obama who presides over a solid growing economy that is doing tons better than the economically unstable Eurozone stuck in austerity nightmares.  I'm talking about the possibility of reliable, consistent, effective leader President Obama losing the election to the likes of Mitt Romney.

I'm talking about a candidate in Romney who for about five-six months of primary campaigning was NOT the preferred candidate for his own Republican Party.  The primary voters kept flipping over to other candidates, other choices like Cain (?), Santorum (?!), Gingrich (?!?!), all in a desperate attempt to find a candidate who was Not-Romney.

I'm talking about a candidate in Romney who became the Presidential candidate while carrying the weakest likability numbers of ANY candidate since the mid-20th Century.  Even Bush the Lesser had higher likability numbers in 2000, even NIXON had higher likability numbers in 1960 AND 1968.  Romney is so plastic a candidate you can put him next to a statue made out of Lego(tm) and not be able to tell them apart.

I'm talking about a candidate in Romney being so much a flip-flopping panderer that there should be no honest way enough voters should believe Mitt on ANYTHING other than Romney's most consistent platform position: that of his damnable massive tax cut plan that goes far deeper AND CAUSES FAR MORE DAMAGE than Bush the Lesser's proposed plan in 2001.  It's like a mass number of voters have completely forgotten already that massive tax cuts DO NOT CREATE JOBS, DO NOT FIX ECONOMIES, DO NOT SOLVE ANYTHING AT ALL.  WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU VOTERS!  Okay, alright, gotta dial it back, but seriously people why are you still buying this tax-cut snake oil?

I'm talking about a candidate in Romney who LIES SO OFTEN and KEEPS PUSHING THE SAME LIES EVEN WHEN CAUGHT that he's already made himself the least-trustworthy candidate OF ALL TIME.  This is with a candidate list that has Nixon on it (twice!), LBJ, other well-known prevaricators and dissemblers.  I will admit, every candidate lies: Most of them have the common sense not to repeat the lies once caught, most of them have the common sense not to tell big whopping lies that can be easily disproved.  But Romney, dear God: ROMNEY LIES AND KEEPS LYING.  And he's still getting votes?  Because apparently enough people prefer the lies over the facts... and that thought alone should drive any citizen possessed of civic virtue over the edge.

I'm talking about a candidate in Romney who got caught on video at a private fundraiser with fellow super-millionaires (I think some of them in attendance were below the $1 billion cutoff for billionaire status, the slackers) disparaging what he called "The 47 percent" - an arbitrary percentage of Americans who do not pay federal income tax because they are impoverished, not earning enough income that could or should be taxed.  Mitt basically pissed on every poor family, every single mother struggling with two jobs and twenty bills, every disabled citizen in need for federal aid to help pay medical costs, more than just that "47 percent".  It's said that "Character is what you are when you think no one is looking (it's actually "What you are in the dark," but Romney was in a well-lit room so the exact analogy would get nit-picked)," and in that moment when Romney thought no voters were looking he bared his soul to people he thought were like him.  He openly stated he will as President IGNORE such people, he would ignore roughly half the nation, just to indulge the ones he felt he should represent.  Even though the job as President means you're supposed to REPRESENT THE WHOLE NATION, EVEN THE ONES WHO DISAGREE WITH YOU.  Romney spoke his disdain, with a disrespect that would have should have disqualified him for the candidacy right then and there... and yet the SOB is thisclose to becoming President anyway.

And it can't be only because he's the Republican offering on the ballot in a two-party-dominated electoral system.  The entire Republican Party shouldn't be doing this well considering the damage they're still accountable for as a party from 2001 to now.

I'm talking about a Republican Party that has proven over the last 10 years to be fiscally irresponsible, creating massive amounts of debt when they were in charge of the purse-strings and yet still screaming that Obama is going to create even larger amounts of debt.  The hypocrisy of it reeks.

I'm talking about a Republican Party still dominated by neocons regarding foreign policy, claiming that Obama is making the United States un-liked among our allied nations - a blatant lie - and claiming American greatness can be restored by STARTING MORE WARS in places like Iran and Syria.  I'm talking about a group of neocons still convinced that torture is legal and would go back to that regime within a heartbeat of getting Romney into the White House (for all the woes on the civil liberties far left side that Obama is a terrible civil rights President, just remember: THE REPUBLICANS HAVE BEEN AND WILL BE FAR WORSE.  Yes, degrees do matter.  Work with the ones you can trust more than the Cheney acolytes).

I'm talking about a Republican Party that has been so openly obstructionist to where this session's Congress (the 112th) had its popularity numbers around 11 percent approval.  THERE WERE DISEASES MORE POPULAR THAN THIS CONGRESS.  And yet not enough voters woke up to the fact that the persons to blame for our weak economy is not the President - he can enforce the laws, he can propose budgets, but he can't pass them - but the Congress that passed ZERO jobs bills and voted 31 times in a useless gesture to overturn health care reform.  To any voters still out there who are going to vote on Tuesday, please remember this: THE REASON OUR JOB GROWTH WAS SLOW THE LAST FOUR YEARS IS BECAUSE OF CONGRESS, NOT OBAMA.  Please, God, let the voters hear this and remember this...

We're talking about a Republican Party that has been so open and blatant about their voter suppression efforts in key swing states that the entire Party should be charged with violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (and other voting rights laws).

This is what we're up against this year.  This is what's at stake this Tuesday November 6th.  We're voting for a candidate in Obama and a party in the Democrats that have us on the right track in domestic, economic, and foreign policies, against a candidate in Romney and party in the Republicans that would take us back to the domestic, economic, and foreign polices that FAILED during the Bush the Lesser regime.  Worse, if the Republicans win anything, such as the White House or the Senate, they are going to be emboldened by the belief that it was their policies and NOT THEIR LYING, OBSTRUCTION AND YES VOTER SUPPRESSION that won it for them.  Thus emboldened, they will continue to act this way: getting worse with their lying; getting worse with their obstruction; taking away voting rights for minorities, college age citizens and even women, voting rights that we as a nation fought and bled for over 200-plus years to EXPAND not retract.

This is why I keep screaming DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN.  Because this Republican Party is not a party, it's a radical ideology betraying every civic virtue an honest political party would uphold.  Sullivan's been noting for years that this GOP is not conservative, and he's right: the Republicans are dogmatic-obsessives, convinced of the purity of their quest to cut all taxes, kill off government, and form an impossible utopia.

This Tuesday is key.  November 6th is key.

GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT.

DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.  FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.

I can only pray now that Obama wins.  Right now, that's the best any of us can pray for...

Why FEMA Matters. And Why Romney Will Kill FEMA First Chance He Gets.

This is the argument for a government agency like FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), which is simple: there are certain disasters - hurricanes in particular - that go beyond the scale that any privatized agency can reach.  Yes, libertarians, there are emergencies too big for state agencies and private corporations to handle.

Sandy is a perfect example: this is a storm that hit states from North Carolina up to Connecticut. Meaning the hurricane affected Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, and especially the hardest hit New Jersey and New York.  Even land-locked West Virginia was hit by blizzards caused by the hurricane.  Can you imagine all of those states struggling for resources at the same time, with such problems as drinkable water and crashed nationwide power grids affecting them all at once?  And who would coordinate, make the decisions, organize all those states to work together?  This is where the Federal government with its larger-scope powers and deeper pockets can come in real handy.  And which is why a lot of the governors of the hardest-hit states are singing FEMA's praises right now.

And with regards to privatization: will there be just one corporation making deals with all those states, or will there be a competitive market with rival companies offering different services?  Can you imagine rival companies working together, or coordinating their systems to be in sync to work in unison during a disaster?  And given how corporations avoid liability and responsibility for upper management, who will dare take the lead on emergency responses that could make things worse?  With a public agency, there is at least a chain of command that HAS to work, that HAS to coordinate, and that HAS a level of accountability that would ensure that agency works as effectively as possible.

EDIT: Sullivan linked to a wonderful article from someone who works in the insurance business, and who presents in better terms why privatizing disaster aid - pretty much relying on insurance companies to pay for it all under Risk Management - wouldn't work in the real world.

Other examples of privatizing public agency services - such as making prisons corporate-run, the efforts of the Iraqi occupation to have companies handle services that civil engineers and the military could have better performed - make me wary of any privatization effort of services that affect our lives and well-being.  Above all, privatization brings with it billing woes and waste, abuses of authority, lack of oversight, and eventually even higher costs to repair any of the damages done.

And so why does this make a Romney Presidency a disaster in the making?

Because Romney will KILL FEMA.

As recent as his primary debates, Romney made it clear his belief that disaster responses could be best handled by the states (uh, WRONG) and perhaps even privatized by corporations (ah, let's give the corporations even MORE of our money).

As mentioned before about Romney's campaign, his one constant has been his massive tax cut.  A massive tax cut that he's going to have to justify by slashing every federal funding program (other than the Defense budget, which no Republican dare threaten.  If you think Social Security or Medicare are also safe, just remember that the current GOP wants to kill off every last remnant of the Great Society AND the New Deal...) in order to get anywhere close to balancing any budget (which STILL won't happen because all tax cuts do is create more deficits).  If Romney wins the Presidency, he is going to want his massive tax cut.  He gets that tax cut, it WILL be the death-knell of every federally-funded social program on the books, cutting deep into even what the states can do.  And this will kill any disaster relief - federal AND state - that we need to survive any disasters in the coming years.  And hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides, floods are all constant: we get them every year...

This is one very big reason - out of HUNDREDS - to NOT vote for Romney for the White House.  Like it or not, the federal government exists and has powers and authorities above that of the states or any private entity.  The question is who in office will best manage those federal resources to ensure that our government works FOR us.  The question is who in office will take those duties seriously and not pass them off to underlings unqualified to do anything more than manage horse shows (having disgraced ex-FEMA director Michael Brown come out and accuse Obama and his FEMA team responded too QUICKLY is beyond a joke, it's an insult to every victim of Hurricane Katrina).  The question to all of us voting this election cycle is who do we trust to run our government when disaster strikes and who has the experience, focus, and skill to handle those disasters.

Romney is NOT the answer to that question.  Not ever.

For the LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT VOTE FOR MITT ROMNEY.

Romney's Ever Fixed Mark

Gen. Chang - I AM AS CONSTANT AS THE NORTHERN STAR!
Dr. McCoy - I'd give real money if he'd shut up...
- Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country

It's not enough to point how just how often and how severe that Mitt Romney changes his story, changes his opinion, changes his political stance: how he, in fact, LIES on nearly every issue.

It's not enough to pile on to the observation of how Romney's currently best-known nickname got to be "Mr. Etch-A-Sketch".

It needs to be pointed out as often as possible how Mitt Romney is the LEAST-LIKED Presidential candidate in AGES, but that's not the point of this blog entry here.

The point of this article is to focus on what Mitt Romney REALLY WANTS if he becomes President.  It's kind of hard to do when he's got this well-deserved reputation for flip-flopping and pandering in such a way it's made other panderers - both Clintons come to mind - look like sagacious pillars of consistency.  But beneath all the bluster, behind all the constant "re-inventing" and "re-branding", at the base of EVERYTHING on Mitt's clouded and passed-over agenda (the one where he keeps saying "Trust me" as though that's always a good-enough answer): there is one consistent item on the agenda Mitt has NEVER renounced and ALWAYS persisted.

A massive tax cut.

Everything else on the table - abortion, foreign policy, Medicare/Medicaid and health care reform in general, education costs, energy needs - Romney has flipped on at least once this year.

But the tax cut plan, despite the occasional "tweaks" to how it's presented, has pretty much remained the same.  And it's remained the core element of Romney's economic package, as though the massive tax cut will solve all woes, create all jobs, save all mankind.

Even though a majority of Americans ought to f-cking know better by now.  Considering we've had a Republican President pass a massive tax cut plan roughly 11 years ago, and we've had all this time to see what the results have been (first chart from Ezra Klein, second chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) :

The Tax Rate of the cuts for upper income clearly get bigger, doubling and tripling in size for the top three brackets.  What does this say about the tax burden for upper income Americans?  How regressive have these Bush tax cuts really been?

Note how most of the deficit causes shrink eventually: The Bush Tax Cuts NEVER SHRINK AND IN FACT GET BIGGER

And consider this: Romney wants his tax cut plan to go DEEPER than the Bush tax cuts ever went.  He's asking for a $5 TRILLION cut, ostensibly across the board except for the fact that he's scaling it more for upper income over middle-and-lower incomes.  Because hidden in his tax proposal, Mitt wants to kill off the Alternative Minimum Tax and the Earned Income Tax Credit (both of which benefit middle and lower class taxpayers).  Check this chart (from Klein's guest-blogger Dylan Matthews):

Everyone under $25,000 income has to pay MORE taxes by 1 to 2 percent, while the jump from $147,000 to $150,000 income from a 2 percent cut straight up to a 6 percent cut.

This is what Mitt Romney wants.  This is his obsession, his passion, his ever-fixed mark.  Everything else on his platform changes from day-to-day like the Etch A Sketch candidate he is.  He wants this massive tax cut.

Even though FOR THE LOVE OF GOD we have all seen that tax cuts - especially cuts that are NOT PAID FOR by targeted spending cuts to balance it out - DO NOT WORK.  Even though we've got economic experts - from the usual suspects like Krugman to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center to serious fiscal Republicans like David Frum - screaming how Romney's tax plan is IMPOSSIBLE.  Romney is insisting on this tax cut plan, claiming it will "create jobs," "create growth," "fix government."

Tax cuts are not job creators : direct investment into business expansion and start-ups are.  Tax cuts do not stimulate the economy.  Tax cuts do not help curb spending: not only did spending get out of control during the GOP-led Bush era by so-called fiscal conservatives, but even hardcore fiscal conservative Ben Stein is now noting that at the current tax rates - "they're too low" - there aren't enough spending cuts to flatten out the deficit.

And Romney wants to make the tax rates LOWER.  No matter the excuse or justification.  He just does.

This alone should be disqualifying Mitt Romney from even being a Presidential candidate, for God's sake.  But he's up there on the ballot, and GOD HELP US the polls are getting too close for comfort.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT VOTE FOR MITT ROMNEY.

The Failures of Barack Obama

This has been coming up as a talking point for the wingnuts in the social media: that President Obama is a failure; that his policies are failing; that he's an embarrassment to our foreign allies, etc.

Here's a post this morning from a colleague of mine from TNC's Lost Battalion Horde, Geoffrey:

Random right winger I have been jawing with for a week.

I know, listen to the ProTips.

"Anyone supporting Obama is doing so because of ignorance or pure ideology. By any rational measure he has simply been a terrible president. The economy is terrible, the country is more divided than ever, and our foreign policy is in shambles."

This has been floating out there for awhile, and it angers me up every time I see it, because it's clear the person writing this has not really paid attention to what's really going on.  The willful ignorance, it burns...

So here, for all the Fox Not-News viewers who need a boot to the head to let them know just exactly what's going on in the Real World, I present to you the Failures of Barack Obama.

• Obama failed to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice.  Oh, wait...
• Obama failed to save the auto industry.  Except that he pushed for the policies that did stave off bankruptcy for GM and Chrysler and kept linking industries such as the parts-makers dependent on the automakers going, essentially re-starting the entire automobile market and presiding long enough for both GM and Chrysler to pay back their loans.
• Obama failed to end military operations in Iraq.  Except that Obama upheld the existing treaty we had with the Iraqi government to exit all combat troops in 2010, to where our small presence in that war-stricken nation is for ongoing rebuilding efforts (the least we could do considering we invaded in 2003 under false excuses by the liars in Cheney's office).
• Obama failed to bring harmonious relations back among our major allies - especially our allies in NATO such as England, France and Germany - after the foreign relations miscues of the Bush the Lesser administration.  Just don't pay attention to the fact that Obama gets thousands if not millions to turn out at rallies when he goes overseas, that our political allies in Europe and Asia work well with Obama, that a majority of our allied nations would like to see Obama get re-elected... and that our allies and their citizenry are kinda horrified by the idea of a foreign policy fool like Romney getting anywhere near the White House...
• Obama failed in Libya.  As long as you think a simple enforcement of a no-fly-zone (which is as much as our NATO allies closer to the ground would have accepted) to give the Libyan rebels breathing room to free their own nation - brothers doin' it for themselves, bro - from a violent dictator was a bad idea.
• Obama is currently failing to act in Syria.  Considering that a THIRD invasion of a Middle Eastern Islamic nation would be a foreign policy debacle, that we don't honestly have the manpower to open another battlefront while Afghanistan is still a major military operation, that something of this scope requires our nearby allies like Turkey and other NATO nations to make direct efforts even they can't afford to make at the moment...  Expecting someone to just "bomb bomb bomb" everything and call it a win is not sensible foreign policy.
• Obama is failing to stop Iran's nuclear program or overthrow it's brutal theocratic regime.  Except that Obama's economic sanctions are kinda working to where the Iranian economy is in worse shape than Greece's.  And again, is opening a THIRD invasion of a Middle Eastern a good idea?  Because simply bombing Iranian sites will most likely escalate into a ground war...
• Obama failed to create jobs.  Considering every jobs bill proposal he brought to Congress was shot down by obstructionist Republican congressional leaders, then yeah it's totally Obama's fault for sticking to the system of checks and balances in the Constitution requiring such bills be left to the Legislative Branch.
• Specifically, Obama's unemployment numbers during his first term NEVER got under 8 percent, the fiend.  Except that recent numbers adjustments for September 2012's reports found the official unemployment rate - the same rate George W. Bush went by - dropped to 7.8 percent.  As long as we also don't overlook that Obama's tenure saw consistent and large-enough private sector job growth that recouped all the jobs lost under Bush the Lesser's tenure, and as long as we don't note the fact that the public sector job losses - thanks to Republican-led efforts to cut back on social services and government offices - is keeping our unemployment rate an extra 1 percent higher than it would be...
• Obama failed to fix our broken health care system.  Simply by getting passed in the 111th Congressional Session a major health care overhaul called ObamaCare that is based on REPUBLICAN reform proposals of the 1990s.  An ObamaCare package that for the most part stood up to Supreme Court scrutiny and is already showing positive effects on our nation's health care coverage.
• Obama failed on gay rights.  Which is a shame because repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell has proven one year later after Obama's efforts that having Gays in the military does not harm morale or service one whit, and it was a real shame when Obama spoke out this May that he now supports gay marriage because it showed how pro-people he is...
• Obama failed to do much of anything for women's rights.  Except pass the Lily Ledbetter Act enforcing equal pay in the workplace, promoting two women to the Supreme Court making that august body more reflective of the gender population of our nation, stood in defense of Planned Parenthood when the House Republicans sought to nuke it, argued for affordable access to birth control, and openly spoke about how "women are not an interest group: they're half the country and its workforce."
• Obama failed to make the 2011-2012 Congress do much of anything, which led to the 112th Congressional Session to be the WORST EVER CONGRESS.  Except it's not the President's job to make Congress work: it's the Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader's job.  And there's not much Majority Leader Harry Reid could do with a cloture/filibuster system being abused like Punch-and-Judy dolls by obstructionist Republican Senators (Cloture motions have DOUBLED since Obama took office).  Here's a graph by the way of the number of bills passed by the 112th.  Every other Congress since 1947 passed at least 300 bills: the 112th Congress never even came close.

So you see, that's a lot of Failures on Obama's part.  As long as that's how you ignorant morans define Failure, you think?


What I said in the comments to Geoffrey's post:

By any rational measure we would recognize that our allies respect us more with Obama than during the Dubya regime: by any rational measure we would be celebrating Obama's decision to bring Bin Laden to justice the way millions of Americans wanted since even before 9/11: by any rational measure we would be celebrating our ending a military occupation of Iraq as a success: by any rational measure we would note that the economic woes are due to a Congress that is literally THE WORST EVER, failing to consider even ONE JOBS BILL even one that would help get veterans of our current wars off unemployment: by any rational measure we would recognize the country's divisiveness is due to unelected blowhards like Limbaugh, Beck, and the Birthers whose rage against Obama is based purely on emotion and willful ignorance. If Obama is a failure, then by GOD let us fail with him for FOUR MORE YEARS. 

GET THE GODDAMN VOTE OUT, DEMOCRATS.  GET THE GODDAMN VOTE OUT, INDEPENDENTS.  AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.  DO NOT VOTE FOR ROMNEY.  DO NOT VOTE FOR ANY GOP CONGRESSPERSON UP FOR RE-ELECTION, BECAUSE IT IS CONGRESS' FAULT OUR ECONOMY SUCKS, NOT OBAMA'S.  FOR THE LOVE OF GOD...

All comments welcome as long as you can use curse words as effective as BRIAN BLESSED.

Three Problems With Paul Ryan As GOP Veep

Lo and behold, post about veep selections and ye shall receive.

Mitt Romney goes and selects Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) to be his Vice Presidential ticket balance.

Why this is a problem for the Republicans in three easy observations:

1) Ryan is coming from a state that is currently polling well for Obama, with no guarantee that Ryan's selection will turn the tide.  Not to mention that Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes isn't much of a prize compared to larger electoral states like Florida, Ohio, or Pennsylvania which are considered toss-up states (although currently polling well for Obama again) and from which Romney could have tabbed more voter-friendly partners.
2) Ryan is coming from a U.S. Congress (112th on record) that is generally recognized as one of the worst Congresses in American history.  It is certainly the least popular Congress ever.  Everything people hate about Congress will reflect on the people who lead it.  And Ryan is one of the key leaders of the Republican party leadership in charge of the 112th Congress: He is chair of the House Budget Committee, responsible for pushing annual budget plans that hew closely to the party ideology (tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts to social programs and education, and vague unprovable justifications that it will all create budget-balancing revenues which ten years of Bush the Lesser Economics have proven impossible).  He's been touted since 2004 as the Idea Wonk Guy for the House GOP.  You can't separate him from the Republicans' economic platform.  To put him on the main ticket this election cycle - rather than keep him in a safe Congressional seat run (which he can still do under election laws) - puts him and his economic ideas front and center for the whole party.  Which leads to...
3) Ryan's budget proposals - especially his proposals to turn Medicare into a voucher program, privatize Social Security, and cut Medicaid into little pieces - are massively unpopular, and nearly everybody who pays attention knows it.  Obama's campaign is already on the attack, and the evidence is pretty solid that a lot of populations that rely on all three major social safety net programs - the elderly, the poor, the middle class families struggling to care for their own - are going to turn against such ideas and the party backing them in a big damn hurry.  There's a reason why Romney's campaign was quick to claim that Ryan's budget plan will NOT be Romney's budget plan...  But Ryan's budget plan - and the slavish worship the wingnut base had towards both the person and the plan - was what made him Romney's pick for the Veep spot!  You can't have it both ways, people.

I'd throw in the fourth reason why Ryan is a problem pick - he's a fanboy of Ayn Rand - but that's more of a personal peeve I have towards Objectivist utopian hacks.  But you never know, a majority of Americans can come to feel the same way about Objectivism being a destructive political-economic ideology...

I'd like to think this will make it easier for voters nationwide to reject the Republicans and their tax-cut, kill-government ways.  But then there's the problem of voter suppression efforts in key swing states, and the fact that in our Citizens United world of unlimited campaign money the wealthy wingnut crowd can possibly buy this election cycle outright...  I'm still worried that Romney/Ryan could win.  And then it will be the Bush the Lesser years all over again.

For the Love of God, people.  Don't Vote Republican.

Probably Should Get The Veep Distraction Out of the Way

There's a couple of things I want to write about Romney's floundering Presidential campaign, the one of least value ought to go first and be done with it.  Romney's quest for a Vice Presidential co-campaigner.

My earlier viewpoint about the unnecessary Veep selection process - the need of a Vice President really isn't there anymore - still stands: we have a succession process in place if anything should happen, and the Vice President in theory/practice - save for the anomaly that was the Dick Cheney regime - is pretty much a useless cog in the Executive Branch's system.  The only value of a Vice President - tie-breaker vote in the Senate - could be altered with a simple Constitutional amendment re-working the makeup of the Senate (different blog post to go in greater detail later).

But for now we're stuck with it, and so the media speculation about whom Romney should pick for "balancing the ticket" is getting into a fever pitch with the Tampa convention mere weeks away.

So who's on the short list for Romney's ticket?  And how much trouble is each possible choice?

For starters, there are a few people - Jeb Bush and Condi Rice are the most mentioned - who have very direct ties to the George W. Bush administration: Jeb as Dubya's brother, and Condi as one of Dubya's biggest personal allies.  Here's the problem: George W. Bush is still a very unpopular ex-President, and a solid majority of voters still blame Bush the Lesser for the weak economy.  If Romney picks anyone from Bush the Lesser's administration or anyone from the Bush clan, he is directly linking himself to that previous ruined regime.  Not a good idea, ergo don't expect it to happen.

Marco Rubio, Senator from Florida, gets name-dropped on a regular basis for a lot of reasons: the hope he can flip Florida from "Leans Obama" to "Leans Romney"; as a prominent Hispanic Republican, he could keep enough conservative Hispanic voters from fleeing an otherwise hostile party towards "illegals" (which keeps coming across as anti-Hispanic ranting); he's popular with the Far Right base, which doesn't like Romney (still); and he's young for a party whose leadership is visibly aging and needs someone like him to be a standard bearer by 2016.  But even Rubio has problems: he's not as popular in Florida as the GOP would hope - polling on the possibility shows no change in voter trends, so he's not going to swing this state to Mitt - and Rubio's lack of national political experience makes it harder for the Republicans to argue about Obama being "inexperienced" and "not properly vetted yet".

There's been arguments made that Romney wants to do the exact opposite of what McCain did back in 2008 when Sarah Palin was selected as Veep.  Which means two things: not taking a woman, but taking a staid white guy who is not a major boat-rocker.  Which pretty much covers a lot of Republican elected officials at the moment but pretty much narrowed down to the likes of Tim Pawlenty, Senator Rob Portman, Senator Jon Kyl, Senator John Thune, Gov. Bob McConnell, and (insert bland Congressperson from key swing state here).  Big problems with any of these choices: they won't boost the ticket with any enthusiasm, and they represent either small electoral states or states already heavily favoring Republicans (save for Portman from the key state of Ohio, which is why he's got a better chance than most).

Alternatively, there's the argument that Romney HAS to take a woman candidate to blunt the trend of women voting for Obama and the Democrats (as well as change the image of the Republicans as a bunch of stuffy old white men eager to make contraception/birth control illegal, pushing female income inequality, destroying cheaper access to health care, and other well-documented sexist actions).  That brings to the list the likes of Michele Bachmann (crazy evangelical currently spewing anti-Arab sentiment) or Jan Brewer (crazy anti-immigrant from Arizona that's giving whacked-out wingnut places like Florida and Texas a run for Teh Craziest State In America title).

Which brings up the other list of potentials: the wingnut celebrities of the GOP.  While Romney has the Republican nomination locked up, his unfavorables even within the GOP itself are too high.  That has to do with the fact that most of the Teabagger Far Right wingnuts still do not trust Romney (being a habitual flip-flopping liar is a big reason why).  The odds that Romney will have to add to his ticket someone pleasing to the Far Right - which goes against common sense as Romney NEEDS moderate/independent voters in November - are pretty high.  Which is why Bachmann, Brewer, budget-killer Paul Ryan, Rick "Do Not Google" Santorum, Herman "Mike Tyson Did a Damn Good Impersonation" Cain, Nikki "Does the GOP Really Want to Run a Candidate From an Openly Pro-Confederate State" Haley, and Chris "Anger Management" Christie are on the list.  Hell, even Donald "Bankruptcy Court" Trump and Newt "Divorce" Gingrich are possibilities at this point.

To be honest, this might be a good time for the Republican Party to start arguing the need to trade out the Vice President spot for changing the Senate make-up to have the tie-breaker vote handled by a separately elected National Senator.  Ah, SPOILERS for that constitutional amendment idea (TBD), retroactively...

Seriously, I expect Portman to be the sensible common-sense pick.  However, VP selections RARELY go the way people predict (did anyone have Dan Quayle on their radars back in 1988?  Geraldine Ferraro in 1984?  Or Spiro Agnew in 1968?) so don't be surprised if a completely-out-of-the-blue name gets selected (if it's a wingnut celebrity, start laughing and vote Democrat).

These Questions Are Retroactive

These are my questions about Mitt Romney's role at Bain Capital, and Bain Capital in general:

1a) If you, Mitt Romney, were not really CEO of Bain Capital from 1999 to 2002 as you claim today, then who was CEO during that time?
1b) Can we speak with that person to verify that he or she was CEO of Bain Capital, and/or the person responsible for most business decisions?
1c) Was there a press release given to the business media back in 1999 or between 1999 to 2002 that announced who this replacement CEO is/was?

2) If that other person was CEO during that time, why did the company's SEC filings still list you as CEO?  And why were you still signing that paperwork as well as other business filings?

3) If you had retired from Bain Capital in 1999, why were you still receiving a base salary of at least $100,000 well into 2002?  Most retirement plans I've known do not work that way.  Were you receiving a salary for a no-show job?

4) If you had cut all ties from Bain Capital as you claim on your 2011 campaigning forms by 1999, why did you tell Massachusetts election officials under oath in 2002 that you were still regularly involved in Bain's business dealings to justify your residency requirement to run for Governor?

'Cause I'm with Andrew Sullivan on this one:

But responsibility for Bain? Think about it. No one disputes that Romney co-founded Bain, hired most of its staff, and honed its methods and strategies from 1984 to 2002. No one can dispute that he was paid at least $100,000 from 1999 to 2002 for being CEO. There is no massive difference between the kind of strategies Bain pursued from 1984 to 1999 when Romney was managing full-time and from 1999 to 2002, when he was managing part-time and by his own lawyer's assertion that his Bain activities "continued unabated just as they had." Is Romney saying that nothing that happened at Bain after 1999 is his responsibility but that everything that happened after January 2009 is all Barack Obama's fault?
Yep, that's what he's saying. It's a pathetic double standard argument from a suddenly pathetic and panicking campaign...

Romney's had the image problem already with being a habitual flip-flopper; getting nicknamed as the "Etch-A-Sketch" candidate whose ideology/talking points can change with a shake of a toy; of neither being conservative or liberal or even moderate, that he simply has no core belief and says whatever he needs to say at that moment to get what he wants.  Now he's trying to avoid responsibility for something that he claimed with pride back in 2002 to run for Governor, but now refuses to acknowledge as it's embarrassing as hell in 2012.

Now he's on record as being a liar, either lying in 2002 to get what he wanted (Governor of Massachusetts), or lying now in 2012 to get what he wants (President of the United States).

And making it worse for him is the fact that the campaign forms he signed to run for President in 2011 carry with them a penalty of perjury... which is a felony at the federal level.  How long will it take for someone in a position to do so file a criminal complaint to have his signed statements investigated?

These questions aren't going to go away with the next news cycle, Mitt.  If you don't answer, people will assume the worst.  Unless of course the answers are somehow worse...  In which case, the Republicans need to start looking for another candidate...