Month: October 2012

Ole Moderate Mitt

by digby

Michelangelo Signorile:

In my last blog post, which lit up the Internet and social media, I quoted Mitt Romney making shocking remarks that were highlighted in investigative reporter Murray Waas’ Boston Globe story last week. Now, for the first time in this campaign, video has surfaced of Romney making those bigoted claims about gay parents while pushing his heartless policy against their children.

One of two video clips that Waas has now uploaded to YouTube shows Romney speaking to conservative voters in South Carolina in 2005, as he was testing the waters for a presidential bid in 2005, discussing his battle with the Registry of Vital Statistics and Records regarding the birth certificate forms…

The second clip, from C-SPAN, includes footage of Romney speaking before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C., a few months earlier (at the 6:11 mark). In that clip he speaks about child development.
[…]
Romney outlined his battle with the Registry of Vital Statistics to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding changing the birth certificate forms. He defended his position to the Judiciary Committee (and again claimed it was about changing the form to include boxes labeled “parent A” and “parent B” when that was not the case) even as a Massachusetts Department of Health attorney warned that it didn’t conform to legal statues and could disadvantage the children later in life, impeding their ability to apply for school and get passports, drivers licenses or other forms of identification, particularly in a post-9/11 world where they might be viewed as security risks with altered birth certificates.

As Signorile concludes:

What seems clear now, looking at Romney’s record, in which he made a lot of promises to gays in those early years but never delivered, is that the pandering he did was to gay activists and the voters of Massachusetts, as the devout Mormon used that state as a stepping stone to the presidency. The real Romney is the guy who actually delivered to cultural conservatives and sought to harm the children of gay couples, and who is now running for president with the backing of those very same religious extremists.

If there is one thing that is obvious about Mitt Romney it is that he is an extremely traditional white male conservative. Every time he’s asked about any kind of cultural change or social progress you can almost see the cogs turning in his mind, trying to figure out how to talk about it in a way that doesn’t betray the fact that these changes go against his deeply held personal and religious beliefs. He’s the poster boy for patriarchy.

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If Republicans had their way: Natural Disaster Edition

by digby

Remember this? Good times:

The final two years of George W. Bush’s presidency were marked by a major controversy over budget cuts at the National Hurricane Center, a dispute that eventually cost the center’s director his job. But those controversies did not end with the conclusion of the Bush administration. When Republicans retook the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010, they made deep cuts in the President Barack Obama’s 2011 request for the Polar Joint Satellite System, a system of new satellites needed to replace the old ones, which currently provide 85 percent of the data used in hurricane forecasting. House Republicans proposed further deep cuts in the program in fiscal year 2012.

Here’s how that went:

The House of Representatives is debating the Full Year Continuing Resolution Act (H.R. 1) to fund the federal government for the remainder of fiscal year 2011. The Republican leadership has proposed sweeping cuts to key programs across the climate change, clean energy, and environmental spectrum. They have also decided that accurate weather forecasting and hurricane tracking are luxuries America can no longer afford.

The GOP’s bill would tear $1.2 billion (21 percent) out of the president’s proposed budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. On the surface, cutting NOAA may seem like an obvious choice. The FY 2011 request for the agency included a 16 percent boost over 2010 levels that would have made this year’s funding level of $5.5 billion the largest in NOAA’s history.

Because, you know, who needs it?

You’ll recall that the National Hurricane Center is a Democratic plot to thwart the Republicans. At least according to Rush last month:

LIMBAUGH: So we got a hurricane coming. The National Hurricane Center, which is a government agency, is very hopeful that the hurricane gets near Tampa. The National Hurricane Center is Obama. It’s the National Weather Service, part of the commerce department. It’s Obama. The media, it’s all about the hurricane hitting next week, and they’re not talking about Biden, they’re talking about this Hurricane Isaac thing. Well, you know, we who live in south Florida become experts. We don’t need the National Hurricane Center, and we don’t need all these weather dolts analyzing this for us. Well, we need the center, we can look at their charts and graphs, we know what to do, we can read the stuff. I’ve been tracking the charted forecast track of the storm, and they’re moving it sometimes to the east. The latest, 11 o’clock, they moved it to the west as a cat 1 impact in Naples, Fort Myers area.

This morning at five a.m., the impact was Miami. We’re still not talking about ’til next Tuesday, so it’s gonna be all over the ballpark between now and then. We don’t know where this thing is gonna hit. The models are moving it more and more out into the Gulf. I wouldn’t be surprised if this thing hits in Louisiana someplace when it’s all said and done. Just kidding. Nobody knows, but they’re desperately hoping, they’re so desperately hoping for Tampa. The media, you know, I can see Obama sending FEMA in in advance of the hurricane hitting Tampa so that the Republican convention is nothing but a bunch of tents in Tampa, a bunch of RVs and stuff. (laughing) Make it look like a disaster area before the hurricane even hits there.

Yeah, they’re just a bunch of hacks. Obviously they cooked this one up to help Obama too.

By the way, the idea of privatizing the national Hurricane Center has real currency among folks like Mitt Romney. This paper from right wing Hillsdale College suggests full privatization of the National Weather Service. Acknowledging that hurricane prediction and study might not a lucrative profit center, it suggests this:

Finally, there is the question of what to do with organizations like the National Hurricane Center, that do some very specialized and valuable research, such as flying aircraft into hurricanes. For these organizations I suggest an alternative form of privatization, which was used, for example, in the privatization of the Building Research Establishment, and similar scientific organizations in the UK. The BRE was privatized as a charitable trust, rather than as a for-profit body, and has become “one of the world’s leading research led consultancies on innovation, risk and sustainability with business world-wide.” I would suggest that certain industries, such as the insurance industry, would have a keen interest in the success of such a charitable body and would become major funders.

And, you know, if the insurance companies don’t do a good job you could always start your own hurricane research center to provide some needed competition.

If you’d like to know what these natural disasters in a modern country would be like if Ayn Rand’s vision were realized, check out Howie’s post this morning featuring excepts from a dystopian Randian novel’s treatment of a hurricane under a Paul Ryan-style administration. It sounds chillingly believable.

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Romney’s desperate anti-FEMA gamble

by David Atkins

Win or lose, the story of Mitt Romney’s run for President goes something like this:

1) run to the far-right base in order to win the Republican primary;

2) stay there, in the hope that a sluggish economy plus a rabid conservative base would naturally ease the President out of power;

3) realize sometime before the first debate that that strategy wasn’t working;

4) Completely reinvent himself as a pseudo-moderate, lie to the American public with shameless abandon, and totally reorient the campaign in the final month with the help of a pliant media unable to ask tough questions or hold him accountable to his earlier statements.

Call it the Etch-a-Sketch strategy. The most important aspect of the strategy from the Romney campaign point of view is that no statement in the final month of the campaign need match any statement made previously. The press will simply call it a “bold move to the center” and accept it at face value.

Which is why Romney’s consistency in attacking FEMA even in the face of an unprecedented hurricane bearing down on New York is somewhat surprising:

Tonight, the Huffington Post asked the Romney campaign to comment on what appears to be the suggestion that FEMA be shut down, and the Romney campaign refused to deny the underlying allegation, and then appeared to explain why it’s better to, in essence, block-grant FEMA to the states.

In fact, Romney called it immoral, citing concerns about the deficit:

Why stick to his guns on this, of all things?

It’s hard to know what is going on in the campaign’s brain trust, but my best guess is that the Romney campaign knows that it’s behind in several states it needs to win, most especially Ohio and Virginia where the storm will be a top concern over the coming days.

The Romney campaign knows it needs to provide a contrast with the Obama campaign on disaster relief. The “me too” stance Romney took during the foreign policy debate won’t cut it. And unfortunately from the point of view of conservatives, at worst the President stands to look Presidential in disaster relief mode at worst, and at best the storm will take precious air time from the campaign. Air time that Romney needs to gain ground.

So one of Romney’s last hopes has to be that the President somehow botches the relief effort, allowing Romney to step in, declare the federal government incompetent to handle it, and take a federalist stand to devolve FEMA to the states. That’s a desperate and risky political gamble.

The only alternative is to believe that Romney actually believes that attacking FEMA during an emergency that has yet to fully hit is somehow good politics and a safe bet for a candidate with momentum and in the lead. The Romney campaign isn’t that stupid.

The only conclusion that makes sense is that the Romney campaign is praying for an anti-miracle: heavy hurricane damage combined with incompetent relief, allowing the Republican challenger to pounce. Not only is that an untenable stance morally, it’s also an undesirable stance politically. Yet it may be one of Romney’s few remaining options.

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Batten down the hatches

by digby

Here’s hoping all of my readers, tweeps and personal friends back east are safely tucked up somewhere cozy tonight and that this storm turns out to be far less devastating than expected.

And, in case you were wondering, Mitt Romney thinks federal disaster relief is immoral:

Maybe it’s just me, but Romney had a lot more energy and fire when he was in full blown wingnut mode. You certainly don’t get the feeling that he’s unsure of himself.

If you want to know the full extent of GOP callousness on this issue, check this out.

Update: Maybe this is why

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For California voters

by digby

Credo and Courage Campaign have helpfully put together another of its Progressive Voter Guides for California.  It’s murder trying to get through it all, so this can be very helpful.

My Plan for America

by David Atkins

My fellow Americans,

Before the invigorating election of 2012, it would never have occurred to me to run for President of these United States. I assumed with somewhat too much confidence that the job required a serious mind, a firm commitment to hard-nosed reality, and an ability to navigate complex budgetary and political issues.

I now know that to be false. Which leads me, a man with no name recognition and unqualified for the job, to feel comfortable in asking to lead this nation in 2016. This, despite my lack of eligibility due to age requirements because, as we all know, age requirements are just a number. Numbers are flexible.

I do this because, in light of the seriousness, sustainability and sensibility of the plan being offering by the Republican challenger in 2012, I feel prepared to offer the American People a better one:

1) Rather than a 20% across-the-board tax break for all Americans paid for with unspecified deductions, I offer a 100% tax break for all Americans. It will also be paid for just as credibly by eliminating deductions. But not most of the deductions people use. I’ll hold those as sacrosanct. Trust me, I’m a numbers guy. It’ll work. The math works.

2) In addition to 1,000 more battleships placed at D4, D5, F6 and points north, south, west and east of there somewhat, I will build a Death Star with facial recognition software and pin-point laser system to kill every single human on the Romney kill list, and to obliterate the wasteful Mars Curiosity Rover that is wasting our tax dollars. This will be unfunded, of course, because no amount of military spending is too big to preserve our freedom.

3) I also plan to deliver Universal Healthcare to replace the patchwork system currently in place. While I still plan to pay for this with deductions from my 100% tax break idea, keep in mind that it would be less expensive for America than voucherizing Medicare and putting Social Security into the stock market. My plan may not be the height of fiscal responsibility, but it’s much more responsible than that silly idea.

4) In order to deal with climate change, I propose an Apollo Program for renewable energy to the tune of $5 trillion, which will pay for itself according to a formula I wrote on a napkin called the Atkins Curve. I call it Energy Supply Economics, or Sunshine Down Economics. As for disaster relief, I agree with Mitt Romney that we can afford to cut back on that–but in my plan, the only cutbacks would occur for hurricanes and tornadoes that strike wealthy, white Republican areas, as those folks are the only hard-working people in America. They should have no trouble rebuilding that, as they built it all themselves in the first place.

5) I will give every mother in America the opportunity to stay at home to raise her children, without risk of negative economic consequences. Also, every father, too. We need to do that for our kids.

6) Finally, I propose to give a $100 billion dollar reward from the federal treasury to anyone who can figure out how Mitt Romney’s economic plans work. Because those are ridiculous, and I figure an entire cottage industry could be developed in parsing them and discovering a potentially brand-new mathematics.

But if none of that works for you, there is a sensible alternative.

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It’s not the polls that are skewed, it the right wing psyche

by digby

The formerly obscure analyst who became famous recently for making the spurious case that the polls were all skewed in favor of Obama has decided to go mano a mano with Nate Silver and challenge his methodology. Well, not really. He’s decided to be an asshole:

Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he’s made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats.

Apparently, Nate Silver has his own way of “skewing” the polls. He appears to look at the polls available and decide which ones to put more “weighting” on in compiling his own average, as opposed to the Real Clear Politics average, and then uses the average he calculates to determine that percentages a candidate has of winning that state. He labels some polling firms as favoring Republicans, even if they over sample Democrats in their surveys, apparently because he doesn’t agree with their results. In the end the polls are gerrymandering into averages that seem to suit his agenda to make the liberal Democrats candidates apparently strong than they are.

He claims to have been highly accurate in predicting the 2008 election results, and perhaps he was. But it’s highly unlikely his current methods and projections will have the level of accuracy unless he changes then quite a lot between now and election day. The race has shifted profoundly in favor of Mitt Romney while Nate Sillver is still projecting an Obama win. Unless he changes that, the credibility he earned in 2008 will be greatly diminished after this years election.

You’ll notice that this fine fellow got so caught up in his little fantasy about Silver’s alleged effeminacy that he forgot to put together anything resembling a serious critique of his methods.

Judging by the similarity in tone, I’m going to guess that this guy’s “credibility” after this race is going to look a lot like this* looks now:

November 6, 2000
RCP Electoral College Analysis: Bush 446 Gore 92
Bush 51.2 Gore 41.8 Nader 5.7

CNN/USA Today/Gallup, MSNBC/Zogby and Newsweek have done a nice job closing the polls for Vice President Gore. All three polls now have Gore within two points and supposedly gaining. We’ll see Tuesday whether the propaganda campaign to keep Democrats from becoming disillusioned and voting for Nader was successful in diluting the size of the Bush victory.

As we have said all along, Gore needed to close to within 2% in our RCP Composites to have a realistic chance to win. He has not done so. (RCP Tracking Composite Bush 47.3 Gore 41.2, RCP National Poll Composite Bush 47.0 Gore 42.8) George W. Bush will be elected President of the United States tomorrow by the American people. But the last minute Gore push in some polls has perhaps given enough liberal Democrats hope to not waste their vote on Nader.

The real debate is not who is going to win the election, but whether Bush will win 308 electoral votes or 474 electoral votes. The media’s fantasy of Bush winning the popular vote and losing the electoral college is not going happen. The worst case scenario for a Bush victory will be a 2-3 point win in the popular vote and 10-20% more than the necessary 270 EC votes.

For those who still maintain Mr. Gore has a chance of winning, consider the scenarios under which this is possible. If Gore does not win Florida (the evidence indicates he will not), he must run the table, taking IL, CA, PA, MI, MN, WI, WA, OR, TN, AR, WV and DE along with his base 92 votes for a 273-265 EC win. It won’t happen. Even with a victory in Florida, Gore must win at least 70% of the remaining battleground states to eke out a victory. The truth is that George W. Bush has a better chance of carrying New Jersey and Vermont than Al Gore does of becoming the next President of the United States.

When you sift through the haze of polls and media disinformation, the anecdotal facts are clear. Bush and Gore are fighting it out in Democratic Iowa, West Virginia, Minnesota and even Gore’s home state of Tennessee. Bush is reaching out to moderate Democrats and independents while Gore is frantically trying to energize his base. The media openly acknowledges Bush’s base is more energized and that Gore faces a significant threat from Nader on his left. Yet the pundits still talk as if the election is too close to call and could go either way.

On Tuesday night the talking heads will all be abuzz with their exit poll analyses showing how Bush destroyed Gore in the male vote, broke even with women, carried over 40% of the Hispanic vote, and the surprising strength of Ralph Nader. All of this is clear today, but it will take the network exit polls to make it clear to the national press.

We continue to see a landslide of over 400 electoral votes and a Bush win by 7-10 points. We will have to wait until tomorrow to see whether the “tightening polls” may have worked to save Illinois, California, Minnesota and a few others for the Vice President.

An explanation of each critical battleground state can be found on the Critical Battleground State page.

Now that was skewed.

It’s part of the right’s “bandwagon” strategy — they always hope they can get people to switch to their guy if they perceive he’s a winner. And probably some simply delusion as well — they have a very hard time believing that America (which they rightfully own) could ever legitimately elect someone other than a Republican. This time I’m guessing they are also hoping it’s close enough that they can challenge the legitimacy of the vote in several states. Setting up a situation where some polling “showed” Romney ahead only to lose at the polls will help that cause.

*Dave Weigel dug that Real Clear Politics “analysis” from 2000 up on the Wayback Machine

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Creepy image of the day

by digby

It fits him somehow, doesn’t it?

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Hey ladies: get over it!

by digby

“Romney has condemned — I mean, one part of this is nonsense. Every candidate I know, every decent American I know condemns rape. OK, so why can’t people like Stephanie Cutter get over it? We all condemn rape.”

That’s Newtie, of course, being the jackass he is.

This reminds me so much of the way so many people went off the rails during the Clinton campaign. Misogyny and sexism is so ingrained that they don’t have any idea that what they are saying is insulting and illogical. This thought process is so normal for them that it doesn’t even cause a ripple of vague discomfort when they say it.

This is why feminists have to be vigilant about women’s rights at every turn, even when it annoys their male allies who have argued as long as I can remember that there is always something “more important” on the agenda or that women don’t really understand what’s in their own self-interest.(Coincidentally I’m sure, it always tends to be whatever is important to these men.)

I’ll quote my friend Deb Coop one more time:

For women ALL Roads to freedom and equality – economic equality and most particularly the ability to avoid poverty START with control of their bodies. If they can’t control how they get pregnant and when they will have a child then poverty is the result.

There is theory about something called the Prime Mover – the first action or the first cause. Well for women it IS reproductive rights. It precedes everything. It really is simple. Without the abilty to control your own body then you are a slave to everything else.

Frankly sexism, the need to control women’s lives by controlling their bodies and the things that arise from it, are endemic to any social structure. It is ever enduring and even when it seems to be quashed it returns in another form. That is the story in the modern era of women’s rights. One step forward after a long struggle – suffrage and then a step back. (And no way do I say that women are not complicit in their own subjugation. We are.)

I am reading The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin. In the epilogue he makes a point of saying that the loss of power and control is what the elite and the reactionary fear the most. More than a specific loss itself the fear the rising volcano of submerged anger and power. And for them it is most acutely felt compulsion for control in the “intimate” arena. That is the most vexing and disturbing of all.

It is why they want to control women. And controlling their reproductive lives is the surefire way to control them.

It is why abortion rights are absolutely central to every other kind of freedom.

Rape is a terrible act of violence and these awful men deserve every bit of disapprobation they are getting. But this issue is not about “the method of conception” as Paul Ryan would say. It’s the idea that these people would tell any woman that she must give up her body and procreate against her will. It is fundamental to a woman’s individual liberty and rights as a human being that she be the one to make that decision for herself.

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This Is How Nutty Our Discourse Is

by tristero

The New York Times endorsed Barack Obama for re-election. No surprise there, but it does make interesting reading. What especially leaped out for me was this little aside:

[Romney] says he is not opposed to contraception, but…

And that perfectly illustrates how sick and nutty our discourse is today. First of all, notice the binders full of qualifiers. Romneys “says,” i.e., he claims – but the Times can’t be sure. And notice that they do not say Romney “supports” contraception, just that he is “not opposed,” meaning that, at best, Romney “tolerates” birth control. And notice that even this tolerance is immediately qualified with Romney’s very big “but.”

That’s hardly the worst of it. Here we are, in 2012, the 21st century, and a man is running for president whose views on women, morality, sexuality, and reproductive rights are well over 100 years behind the times.

In our mainstream discourse, this country can continue to re-fight all the lost battles and factual errors the modern right wing is obsessed with arguing about – the right to birth control, the fact of evolution, marriage equality, universal health care. If so, we will continue to ignore, to our peril, the very real problems our country faces in the early decades of the 3rd millennium. The alternative is to find ways to marginalize these loons, hunker down, and fashion some semblance of a rational discourse.

A presidential candidate so out of touch with modern realities that, at best, he tolerates contraception? That’s just plain nuts. Dangerously nuts.

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