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Mitt: Profile in Courage

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

CNN gets it right:

“In 1968, France was a dangerous place to be for a 21-year-old American,” Borger says, “but Mitt Romney was right in the middle of it.”

(via Mediaite)

Not too many now remember the deep seated fear that we all had of going to France in ’68.

I remember.

The mass protests, the insistence that we be allowed to go to Vietnam instead. Anything to avoid the risks of fatty cheese and cheap wine. But Romney was a man with guts. He skillfully avoided Vietnam expressly to weather the greater risks of France, knowing full well, as the documentary shockingly reveals, that he would be risking occasional interruptions of electrical service and slow arriving checks from home. One can easily see why he demonstrated in favor of the draft. Was it too much to ask his social inferiors to bear the lesser risks of Vietnam while he, almost alone, took on France?

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All that’s necessary

Monday, September 3, 2012

Abe Lincoln was a smart guy, but I was reminded, while reading this in a Kos post, that he could sometimes get it wrong:

Romney wants to test one of this nation’s most famous political maxims, as he attempts to fool all of the people all of the time.

(via Daily Kos)

Abe was right, as far as he went. But the fact is that you don’t need to fool all of the people all of the time. The Republican’s, and Romney’s, aim is more modest: to fool most of the people all of the time. But even that isn’t necessary. It suffices quite well to fool most of the people most of the time, and the fact is, they’ve succeeded admirably at that. It helps, of course, to have a base that you can fool all of the time.

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Register

Saturday, September 1, 2012

The Obama campaign and the Democrats are doing something you won’t find on any Republican site: making it easy (or as easy as they can, considering the Republican’s ongoing voter suppression) to vote. They are distributing open source code that anyone can use to register. For reasons I can’t fathom, I can’t seem to make the form “sticky”, so that it stay as a lead article, but I’m hoping this post will stay put. Click on the register link to the right and vote Democratic.

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In Defense of Paul Ryan

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Yes, I know it seems unlikely, but when a guy is unfairly traduced, it’s my duty to defend him, whether he’s a smarmy, lying toady for the rich or not. So I just can’t stand silent while Ryan is unfairly called a world class liar just because he claimed to have run a sub three hour marathon and claimed to run multiple marathons when he’s actually run only one, and he almost broke four hours, but not quite.

Look, I’ve both swum and run competitively. I can easily understand how Ryan’s memory might have become a little hazy, so it’s not like he was lying this time, he was just mis-remembering.

I mean, even now, I can’t remember how many marathons I’ve run. It might be zero, or it might be six or seven. How can I be expected to remember something like that? Or take my swimming career, during which I’m fairly sure that I broke 4 minutes for the 400 yard freestyle. Maybe I’m remembering wrong. Maybe it was six minutes, and maybe I never did that, possibly, but really, when you consider that two minutes in relation to the age of the universe (which Ryan will now no doubt tell you is as much as 6,000 years), what’s the difference, and who can be expected to remember such trivialities?

The important point is that at the time he said what he said, Ryan believed it to be true, or, just as legitimately, believed that it should be true and that it could become true, if he said it. How was he to know that some reporter at Runner’s World would act like a journalist and check in to his claim, after he’d grown used to reporters in Washington? 

So let’s all lay off the guy. He lives in a world in which truthiness is all, and in that world, he ran as fast as he said he did, or even faster.

Oh, and Al Gore is still a liar for saying he invented the internet, even though he didn’t say that, and that lie reveals much about his character, even though it wasn’t a lie. But as to Ryan, his conversion of fantasy to truth tells us nothing.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, August 31, 2012

For as long as I can sustain it, I’m going to feature pieces by bands that have demanded that Republicans stop playing their songs. This first one may not qualify, as Paul Ryan has never, so far as I know, ever played a Rage Against the Machine song at one of his functions, but he has said they are his favorite band, something the band does not take kindly:

“Paul Ryan’s love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades,” Mr. Morello said.

Tom Morello is the lead guitarist for the band. I confess to knowing little about them, though it always seemed to me that their politics were fairly clear from their sobriquet. A group of Ryan’s persuasion might more likely be called Carefully Tend the Machine or something to that effect. Ryan’s professed love of the band speaks either to an amazing ability on his part to put artistic appreciation over politics, total political cluelessness, or it is a barefaced lie arising out of some sort of twisted need to be perceived as cool. The latter seems the best bet, given his historic achievement a few nights ago. You have to go some to give the most mendacious political speech in American history, but he apparently did it. This conclusion (that he’s cluelessly trying to look cool-Republicans just aren’t cool) is further reinforced by ore of the milder lies he told. He noted that he was of an entirely different generation than Romney, which he demonstrated by noting that his iPod playlists included songs from AC-DC to Zeppelin. I’m showing my age here, but I’m from Romney’s generations and so was Led Zeppelin, and so, for that matter, was AC-DC. That’s not to say Romney was listening to either one, his musical tastes likely run to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, if he has any appreciation of music at all.

So, on to the musical portion of the program, Killing in the Name:

As a bonus, here’s a video of the band at the Republican National Convention in 2008. Needless to say, they are on the outside, while Ryan, presumably, is on the inside, carefully tending the machine. Apparently the police refused to let them perform on stage in front of the protestors, so they went into the street and led an a cappella sing along.

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A lot of nickels

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

I can't resist passing this along. Not likely to be on a purely political junkie's radar, but I subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds dedicated to computers. Seems there's an internet hoax to the effect that Samsung is paying Apple in nickels, and lots and lots of people believe it. You can read all about it here.

Also, from the same source, we learn that there is an entire website devoted to people who believe things they read in the Onion, among whom, not surprisingly, are Republican Members of Congress.

Sometimes it's really easy to understand why the Republicans find it so easy to get huge numbers of people to vote against their own self interest.

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The plutocrats are flaunting it

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Remember when John Kerry was caricatured as an out of touch elitist when he went windsurfing? And the press ran with it. One must wonder if we will hear more about this, or whether it will sink beneath the waves:

Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign toasted its top donors Wednesday aboard a 150-foot yacht flying the flag of the Cayman Islands.

The floating party, hosted by a Florida developer on his yacht “Cracker Bay”, was one of a dozen exclusive events meant to nurture those who have raised more than $1 million for Romney’s bid.


(via ABC News)

I must credit Brad DeLong, from whom I have shamelessly stolen the gist of this post. If this were a tweet, it would be a re-tweet. My only defense is that I think this is a story that should get as wide a circulation as possible.

Filed in Corporate Crime, Republicans, Romney | | Comments (0)

New Blog Theme

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

For some reason the Blog’s title was ascending out of the title bar of the old theme, and I could figure no way of fixing the problem other than changing themes. Also, for some reason, the typeface has changed. Still working on that.  If the typeface on this looks odd, that’s why.


As I do most of my blogging on my iPad, and haven’t been looking at my posts once I post them, I was unaware of these changes until recently. If anyone knows how to contol fonts and font sizes on WordPress, I’d appreciate some tips. 
Filed in Announcements | | Comments (2)

I won’t be watching

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Well, the fact is that we no longer have a television, but could watch on-line if we really cared to do so. But gone are the days when the Republicans let people like Pat Buchanan let the world see what the Republican party is really all about. Unlike Democrats, Republican’s learn their lessons, at least when it comes to manipulating perceptions. Democrats are hardly past the days when people actually believed you could manipulate by appealing to reason.

Since we can’t expect any dust ups (though there’s always hope) inside the convention, I prefer to spare myself. Why rant at my computer screen in response to a Republican lie when I can sit quietly reading a book?

No, this year the Republicans will not hang themselves by allowing any loose lips at the convention, but they may do so by what comes out of their pens, which are presumably made out of goose quills as the founders intended. For lo and behold, the sheep may be looking up and noticing that the Republicans are planning on shearing them:

Scratching my head on this one: a majority of voters are actually interested in learning more about the Republican Party platform during this week’s convention. That’s more than care about Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech. As for that platform, there’s a lot there Team Romney might prefer voters didn’t pay too much attention to.

(via Hard To Figure | TPM Editors Blog)

Indeed. The Obama folks might seriously consider simply running ads with quotes from the Republican platform. They can start with the part where the Republicans promise to deliver on Ryan’s plan to end Medicare, or their endorsement of the Akin world view. That would be just for starters. There’s gold in them thar clauses, though it may take miners more skillful than Democrats to exploit it.

Okay, put this in the category of thing I’m glad to be wrong about. Looks like the Paul loonies aren’t going quietly into that goodnight. 

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Required Reading

Sunday, August 26, 2012

I just finished reading Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality. It really should be required reading for everyone, but at least for every Democratic politician, starting with the guy living on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Oddly enough, there's nothing in the book that any progressive minded individual wouldn't know, but it's packaged persuasively and with authority.

His prescriptions would probably find favor with 80% of the 99%, were they to be instituted. It speaks volumes about the extent to which our politics has been captured by the 1% that the chances of their adoption are remote, that neither political party has embraced them or anything near them (though to a great extent he is calling for the Democrats to bring back their glory years), even though failing to adopt them may assure our continued decline.

Speaking of decline, our rapid fall from the peak makes you want to take your hat off to the Romans.

 

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