Let his people go
by digby
I was wondering when someone on the right was going to pipe up about this:
Limbaugh Advises Romney Campaign To Say “We Do Have Victims In This Country, And They Are Victims Of Barack Obama”
If there’s one thing the right wing will.not.have is anyone claiming more victimhood they have. Conservatives are the most oppressed people in history.
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Let my people vote
by digby
A lot of celebrities get in involved in politics, but none do it with Sarah Silverman’s panache:
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Proud to be an American
by David Atkins
America gets a lot of things wrong when it comes to public policy. But at least we can be grateful for our free speech laws which prevent things like this from happening:
France’s Catholic Church has won a court injunction to ban a clothing advertisement based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Christ’s Last Supper.
The display was ruled “a gratuitous and aggressive act of intrusion on people’s innermost beliefs”, by a judge.
The church objected to the female version of the fresco, which includes a female Christ, used by clothing designers Marithe et Francois Girbaud.
The authorities in the Italian city of Milan banned the poster last month.
The French judge in the case ordered that all posters on display should be taken down within three days.
The association which represented the church was also awarded costs.
The designers are said to be planning an appeal, saying they did not intend to offend anyone with the campaign.
This is the image in question:
If that’s “illegal”, there’s a big problem.
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Harvesting defeat
by digby
Everybody’s talking about Romney saying that Bain “harvested” profits from companies it took over, which is a very evocative image. He said:
Bain Capital is an investment partnership which was formed to invest in startup companies and ongoing companies, then to take an active hand in managing them and hopefully, five to eight years later, to harvest them at a significant profit…
But David Corn makes what I think is the bigger point at the end of his article about it:
In this clip, Romney mentioned that it would routinely take up to eight years to turn around a firm—though he now slams the president for failing to revive the entire US economy in half that time.
I suppose they could try to make the argument hat “fixing” a company is more complicates than turning around the economy of the richest country in the world.
This isn’t to say that the administration did everything it could to get that job done. But I think we can all agree that it was a very big job. Maybe even bigger than getting Staples in shape for profit harvesting. In fact, it is so much bigger that I would guess Mitt’s “experience” in turning around Staples is completely irrelevant to the qualifications for president. In fact, at this point, I’m willing to say that anyone who’s run a Vulture Capital firm might automatically be disqualified.
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Priorities
by digby
Among likely libertarian voters, the presidential horserace currently stands:
Romney 77%
Obama 20%
Other 3%Romney’s share of the libertarian vote represents a high water mark for Republican presidential candidates in recent elections.
I’m not going to argue that on civil liberties, drugs and military adventurism that Obama isn’t something less than a libertarian hero. But if those issues were your priority, you certainly wouldn’t vote for Romney, who is advised by some of the most repressive, warmongering nutballs America has produced in the last hundred years.
Nutballs who would reinstitute torture:
Mr. Romney’s advisers have privately urged him to “rescind and replace President Obama’s executive order” and permit secret “enhanced interrogation techniques against high-value detainees that are safe, legal and effective in generating intelligence to save American lives,” according to an internal Romney campaign memorandum…
“We’ll use enhanced interrogation techniques which go beyond those that are in the military handbook right now,” he said at a news conference in Charleston, S.C., in December.
Whatever. Romney wants to slash taxes for rich people and cut off help for the half of America that are parasites, moochers and looters. That’s what makes him so darned attractive to these highly principled folks.
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It’s harder to work when you’re poor
by digby
I flagged a piece by Ezra the other day talking about how much effort it takes to get through life when you’re poor (and how clueless he rich are when they assume otherwise.) Here’s a politician who decided to see for himself, at least with respect to what it’s like to live on very little money for food:
When local activist groups challenged Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton to live on a food stamp budget for a week to mark Hunger Awareness Month, he took them up on the offer and found out just how hard it was. Stanton kept a diary on the challenge, which allotted him roughly $29 a week, the same amount 1.1 million Arizonans receive from the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP) each week.
By day four, Stanton noted that he was “tired” and “it’s hard to focus” after leaving the house for work without time to scramble eggs or eat a decent breakfast:
OK- ran out the door today with no time to scramble eggs or even make a sandwich. So I’m surviving on an apple and handful of peanuts, and the coffee I took to the office until dinner. I’m tired, and it’s hard to focus. I can’t go buy a sandwich because that would be cheating- even the dollar menu at Taco Bell is cheating. You can’t use SNAP benefits at any restaurants, fast food or otherwise. I’m facing a long, hungry day and an even longer night getting dinner on the table, which requires making EVERYTHING from scratch on this budget. It’s only for a week, so I’ve got a decent attitude. If I were doing this with no end in sight, I probably wouldn’t be so pleasant.
Oh suck it up whiner. 29 dollars a week should be plenty. Just ask multi-millionaire Sean Hannity:
I don’t believe people are going to bed hungry. Do you know how much, do you ever go shopping? I go sometimes but I hate it. Do you ever go? … you can get, for instance I have friends of mine who eat rice and beans all the time. Beans protein, rice. Inexpensive. You can make a big pot of this for a week for negligible amounts of money and you can feed your whole family.
Look, you should have vegetables and fruit in there as well, but if you need to survive you can survive off it. It’s not ideal but you could get some cheap meat and throw in there as well for protein. There are ways to live really, really cheaply.
See? 29 bucks will certainly buy you a big pot of beans and rice. You can throw in a couple of onions and some canned corn and couple of chicken feet or something and then just eat a bowl a day. Why you might even be able to afford an apple and a banana if you’re really frugal. What are these people complaining about?
And hey, if you happen to be a parasite who’s lolling about on dialysis all day, I’m afraid that’s not our problem either. There must be something you can do to insure you’re paying your fair share of taxes right along with the decent hard-working people. There’s just no excuse for all this dependency.
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Florida
by digby
Just …. Florida:
When I knocked on Justin Lamar Sternad’s door Wednesday, I noticed a sign warning, “Trespassers leave — or get wet.” I didn’t leave and got wet.
When a woman in her 30’s, presumably Mrs. Sternad, opened the door, she splashed a pitcher of water on me and then slammed the door shut.
I went to the home hoping to get some answers from Justin Lamar Sternad, who ran for the Democratic nomination to Congress last August in the 26th District. That’s where Republican David Rivera is the incumbent.
But Democratic candidate Joe Garcia, who won the primary, suspected early on that Sternad was a straw candidate put into the race by Rivera.
Sternad, a political neophyte with little money, sent out at least a dozen sophisticated campaign mailers to voters in the congressional district. The printer and mail facility that handled the mailers have been used in the past by Rivera and at least one owner says Rivera was involved in Sternad’s campaign. Rivera has consistently denied ever knowing Sternad or helping in his campaign.
The apparent go-between was political consultant Ana Sol Alliegro, who has had both a personal and professional relationship with Rivera, including posting pictures of the two on her Facebook page. She managed Sternad’s campaign.
Alliegro was scheduled to speak with FBI agents investigating the Sternad campaign and its alleged link to Rivera, but she has disappeared. The FBI began a probe into Sternad’s campaign funding last month.
Howie’s been on this Rivera story (and others) for years. He is, among other things, very close to Marco Rubio.
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Doesn’t every teenager drive a BMW convertible?
by David Atkins
Larissa Faw, Forbes Contributor, and the latest exhibit of elite wealth bubble cluelessness, attacks the Millennial generation for having too high expectations of motor vehicles. After all, she and her friends wouldn’t touch anything less than a BMW and a convertible for their 16th birthday.
Today’s teens and Millennials are often called the entitled generation for a reason. They expect to drive their very own fully-loaded luxury vehicle with retractable roof and multi-speaker audio system. If they can’t have their specific dream car, then they don’t want anything and won’t waste time getting a driver’s license. Past generations of young drivers, by comparison, were satisfied with any piece of metal that moved.
My brother and I, like many other Millennials, weren’t willing to downgrade, compromise, or to be forced to drive a parent’s vehicle. I received my license at age seventeen only after I had my red convertible sitting in the driveway. My brother refused to even look at the driver’s manual until he received his BMW at age eighteen. It is this sense of entitlement that is reshaping how automakers market and develop vehicles to appeal to Millennials. “It’s an entire soup-to-nuts makeover. The old recipe isn’t going to work,” says Hubert.
Cluess, spoiled rich kid has entitlement complex. Therefore everyone in her whole generation must have one. Sharp deduction skills there, and all too typical of the wealth bubble in the country. Still, it’s hard to believe that she believes 16-year-olds driving convertibles and BMWs amounts to a generational problem. That goes beyond a bubble mentality to cluelessness on an epic scale.
But beyond that, Faw then goes on to blame Millennials for expecting too much of the cars on the market, insisting that we still care a great deal about cars. Needless to say, that too is wrong.
As someone who has actually done interviews and focus groups with Millennials about cars (unlike Ms. Faw), I can attest that what’s actually going on with Millennials and cars is pretty simple: most of us can barely afford one, and especially among urban young adults, many of us would prefer not to have to drive one most of the time if we can afford not to. Having a car available is a good thing and necessary for freedom, but we don’t invest ourselves and our identities in our cars. On a personal level, I want a self-driving car yesterday so that I don’t have to waste productive time playing the world’s most boring and potentially deadly videogame. I’d rather be getting work done on my Droid.
But if we are going to drive a car, we expect it to be as streamlined, efficient and technologically savvy as our electronic devices. We expect it to have the same decent set of “apps” that we have in our pockets every day. We expect it to perform the task of driving down the road decently well. And we expect it not to cost an arm and a leg. What we don’t need? Unnecessary size and performance. We expect a car to do its job and not have to think about it so that we can go about living lives more of meaning than of pointless acquisition.
Larissa Faw, spoiled princess at Forbes magazine, takes her own warped, consumerist upbringing and uses it to accuse Millennials of being unrealistic consumers. The reality is that for us, owning a car is less an opportunity than an unfortunate necessity. When we must have one (and we usually must), we want it to work as well as our smartphones.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy for those like Ms. Faw who have grown up insulated from the realities of the rest of us is that they are missing out on the real cultural transformation that is occurring as this generation reacts and adapts to the reality of a future that will create less consumer wealth for them than existed for their parents.
That cultural transformation is a positive one, being among other things a move away from vulgar consumerism and the taking of self-identity from one’s material possessions or employment. It’s the sort of thing that a convertible-driving writer for Forbes will never fully understand.
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What, no references to pimps and and Colt 45?
by digby
Here’s Newtie totally not being a racist piece of work:
“[Obama] really is like the substitute [National Football League] referees in the sense that he’s not a real president,” Gingrich told Greta Van Susteren on Fox News Tuesday night. “He doesn’t do anything that presidents do, he doesn’t worry about any of the things the presidents do, but he has the White House, he has enormous power, and he’ll go down in history as the president, and I suspect that he’s pretty contemptuous of the rest of us.
This is a man who in an age of false celebrity-hood is sort of the perfect president, because he’s a false president,” he said. “He’s a guy that doesn’t do the president’s job.”
You have to wonder what he’s doing. I’m assuming that there’s some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don’t understand. Whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play basketball for a while or watch ESPN, I mean, I don’t quite know what his rhythm is, but this is a guy that is a brilliant performer as an orator, who may very well get reelected at the present date, and who, frankly, he happens to be a partial, part-time president.”
I hear he’s a good dancer too.
Unsurprising coming from the guy who coined the phrase “food stamp president” I suppose. But I honestly haven’t heard anyone of national stature talk this way since Jesse Helms shuffled off his mortal coil.
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QOTD: President Obama
by digby
“I’m a blue dog. I want fiscal restraint and order.”
Woodward says he also tells people ” “I don’t want to cut entitlements in any way that would hurt vulnerable populations.” So that’s good. He’ll only cut “entitlements” a bit. I feel so much better.
Read the whole interview (published in Pete Peterson’s Financial Times, by the way) if you want to see some Village conventional wisdom. I particularly like this:
TFT : Americans are still “left with a struggling economy,” you conclude, because things could not be worked out. We’re approaching the fiscal cliff –
BW: Not just the fiscal cliff. We are approaching a time when the congressional authorization to borrow more money will be exhausted. We’re going to be back in the soup with the same problem of not having enough money to pay the bills.
Both the question and the answer are 100% prime cut bullshit. But you knew that, right?
And for those who still wonder if the President is serious about a Grand Bargain, this might clear that up for you:
TFT: So it’s your belief that Obama was sincerely looking for that commission to produce ideas and solutions that could be implemented?
BW: Yes, I think so. He told me he’d “willingly lose an election” if he could solve these fiscal and spending and tax issues in the right way.
If Boehner hadn’t balked and the cuts to Social Security and medicare had passed in the summer of 2011, we might be seeing that willingness tested. He’s just lucky the Tea Party saved him.
The only good news in the article is that Woodward doesn’t think the Democrats will go along with “entitlement” cuts. Unfortunately, so far, we only have 28 Democratic Senators willing to stand up and say no. That’s not enough. It will all hinge on Reid and I’m not sure he’ll defy his newly elected president. The Republicans will still control the House in the lame duck session (and probably beyond.) Let’s hope the Tea Party doesn’t wise up in the meantime.
h/t to ms