The Benton Harbor, Michigan based Whirlpool corporation, which recently received a $19 million dollar stimulus grant from the Dept. of Energy to develop smart grid capable appliances, moved forward with plans to close it’s Evansville, Indiana refrigerator plant and build a new plant in Mexico.
Whirlpool closed the plant in June, eliminating 1,100 full-time jobs. They did this all the while the company is collecting public subsidies while eliminating jobs.
After buying the Maytag brand in 2006 Whirlpool shut down the manufacturing headquarters which at its peak Maytag had 4,000 workers in Newton, Iowa a town of 16,000 people 30 miles east of Des Moines. Newton is a great case study on what happens when the company town packs up and leaves. The devastating effects are quickly dominoed throughout the town and surrounding towns. Those 4,000 plus workers were supporting the other local businesses. When Maytag left, people had to leave to find work. When people left we have ghost towns that are popping up all over the United States. Towns that used to thrive, towns that people used to be proud to call home now sit mostly vacant. Is this the ‘new modern economy’ America will build it’s future around?
Taxes? That’s for poor people…
Whirpool, the world’s largest appliance maker, has been a major tax dodger. The company had negative income tax rates over the past three years, and reported a $64 million income tax benefit last year. It expects similar results this year:
Meanwhile sales at the appliance maker rose 7 percent to $18.4 billion last year after dropping during the housing slump of the previous two years. In the year-earlier quarter, the company attributed a rise in revenue to increased productivity.
Whirlpool had negative effective income tax rates in 2010, 2009 and 2008. Last year, the company reported an income tax benefit of $64 million and an effective tax rate of negative 10.9 percent, according to company filings. The company expects a similar tax benefit in 2011.
We keep hearing about how corporate taxes have to be cut in order for companies to "create jobs." When companies pay no taxes and still get refunds, how much more government largesse do they need?
If you look at the records of "successful businessmen' who run for President on the GOP side, you'll find that all of them involve active participation in the systematic gutting of this country's middle class.
I guess he just looked sane when compared to Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Because what else other than batshittery explains this:
Mitt Romney yesterday praised former Vice President Dick Cheney, saying he would seek a running mate who shared many traits of longtime, and often controversial, political figure.
At a town hall meeting in a retirement community in Arizona, Romney was asked whether he would name a Tea Party person as his vice presidential nominee. He didn’t answer directly, instead saying that his “overwhelming critera” was that they be ready to become president.
“I think it was last weekend I was watching C-SPAN, and I saw Vice President Dick Cheney and he was being asked questions about a whole host of issues -- following 9/11, the affairs in various countries in the world,” Romney said, according to MSNBC . “And I listened to him speak and said whether you agree or disagree with him, this is a man of wisdom and judgment, and he could have been president of the United States.”
“That’s the kind of persona I’d like to have – a person of wisdom and judgment,” he added.
Romney has filed an application with the city to bulldoze his 3,009-square-foot, single-story home at 311 Dunemere Dr. and replace it with a two-story, 11,062-square-foot structure. No date has been set to consider the proposed coastal development and site development permits, which must be approved by the city.
The former governor of Massachusetts purchased the home three years ago. According to a description from the listing agent, the Spanish-style residence at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac is sophisticated and understated in its décor, “offering complete privacy and unsurpassed elegance.”
Tentative plans call for new retaining walls and a relocated driveway, but would retain the existing lap pool and spa.
“This offering represents a truly unique opportunity for a buyer who appreciates the scarcity of this caliber of real estate,” the listing said.
Constructed in 1936, the three-bedroom, 4.5-bathroom home was among the first built in the Barber tract neighborhood, according to the La Jolla Historical Society, and has a stretch of lawn sloping to the white sand beach.
“I wanted to be where I could hear the waves,” Romney told a gaggle of media last year at a book signing in University City. “As a boy we spent summers on Lake Huron and I could hear the crashing waves at night. It was one of my favorite things in the world; being near the water and the waves was something I very badly wanted to experience again.”
We now return you to the endless right-wing litany of shrieking over Barack Obama's two week stay in Martha's Vineyard. Because only Republican presidents are allowed to take vacations. Especially when they wear "rancher" drag while doing it, because that makes all the manly-men of the media feel all, like, you know, manly.
Republican Presidential front-runner Mitt Romney is now trying to explain his way out of controversial and racist remarks about President Barack Obama. During a campaign stop in New Hampshire, the presidential hopeful referenced “hanging Obama by the neck” as a way to defeat him in the next election.
During a dinner hosted by Americans for Prosperity, Romney said "Reagan came up with this great thing about the ‘misery index’ and he hung that around Jimmy Carter’s neck and that had a lot to do with Jimmy Carter losing." He then said, "Well, we’re going to have to hang the ‘Obama Misery Index’ around his neck."
For some odd reason, Romney kept going down the path of no return when he said, "I’ll tell you, the fact that you’ve got people in this country really squeezed, with gasoline getting so expensive, with commodities getting so expensive, families are having a hard time making ends meet. So, we’re going to have to talk about that, and housing foreclosures and bankruptcies and higher taxation. We’re going to hang him with that, so to speak, metaphorically."
(And to the comment on JP's post criticizing him for daring to criticize Obama and me for allowing his July 4 post, all I can say is that the day we are not allowed to criticize a sitting president is the day we really have lost our freedom. Republicans may march in lockstep like mindles automatons, but we prefer to apply pressure to OUR leaders to keep them honest.)
Did you honestly think that the Bush family would go away quietly, even though their scion just wrecked the country? The United States may be a ruin of a fiefdom for the Bush family and their friends, but it is, in their mind, THEIR fiefdom for the Bush famiily and their friends.
Don't kid yourself that this "National Council for a New America" is about rethinking, or even rebranding, the Republican Party. This is the greed wing, the Grover Norquist wing, of the Republican Party making a pre-emptive strike against Evita Mooselini, Bobby the Exorcist Jingles, and the rest of the Christofascist Zombie Brigade that hijacked John McCain last year and now threatens to hijack the rest of the party in the upcoming midterm elections and into 2012. And while Mitt Romney has a prominent role, the savior for the interests of the wealthy that is making the Greedmeisters get all tingly in the groin is Jeb Bush. Oh, they're putting Eric Cantor out there to equate "freedom" with "rich people being able to do whatever they want to amass as much cash as they want no mattter from whom they take it", and Mittster is calling for the nomination of a "center-right" Supreme Court nominee, but don't kid yourself -- these guys are Jeb Bush's stalking horses. They may all run in 2012, but Cantor and Mittster and even Newtie are just flies to be brushed off the back of America's self-styled royal family.
It's amusing to see Jeb Bush painted as a "new young fresh face" in the Republican party. Maybe he'll cut a hip-hop album to appeal to those pesky Gen-Y-ers and Millennials who voted for Obama because they're having trouble finding a job that will allow them to move out of their parents' house and might listen to the siren song of Wall St. riches again. "Who ya gonna believe," the Republicans are telling the kids, "...me or your lying eyes?" So far the kids are alright in believing their eyes, not the false promise of greed.
Eric Cantor, douchebag and objectionist extraordinaire. Cantor, as Congressional minority whip, has been one of the prime motivators of the "Just Say No" policy. It is his "persuasiveness" that has helped the GOP fall to its lowest identification level in over 40 years. I am sure they were frying his brain on those anti-drug ads.
Mittens Romney, failed candidate and out-of-touch billionaire. Romney failed to resonate much of a message with his own base during the primary season last year. Many have said he would have been a "great" VP candidate when the markets collapsed - and compared to Palin he would have been. Then again anyone, including Michele Bachmann, would have been better than Palin. Considering the state of the financial industry and how people feel about bailouts and finance companies - does anyone really think the former CEO of a venture capital firm is the one to send a message?
Jeb Bush, brother of the biggest failure and most hated president in American political history. He might as well change his name to Jeb Stalin, Jeb Hitler or Jeb Khan, it will be much more palatable.
I think DCap is perhaps a bit more dismissive of Jebbie's prospects than he should be. Remember, this is the same country that allowed his wastrel cokehead brother to get close enough to winning to steal two elections.
It's really hard for me to defend anyone who's Mormon these days, certainly not after the disgusting, and unfortunately successful efforts of the Mormon Church on Prop. 8 in California. Usually my attitude towards ANY religion, even Christianity, is that if that's what you need to get you through this God-forsaken level of reality, have at it. Just don't expect me, or anyone else, to believe as you do.
But Mitt Romney, of all people, has a largely sensible op-ed about the automobile industry in today's New York Times that if John McCain is reading it, ought to make him misty-eyed at what might have been, had he been able to put his own animosity aside and not listened to the Rovian wingnuts who decided that Sarah Palin would win him the election.
IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.
Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.
[snip]
The new management must work with labor leaders to see that the enmity between labor and management comes to an end. This division is a holdover from the early years of the last century, when unions brought workers job security and better wages and benefits. But as Walter Reuther, the former head of the United Automobile Workers, said to my father, “Getting more and more pay for less and less work is a dead-end street.”
You don’t have to look far for industries with unions that went down that road. Companies in the 21st century cannot perpetuate the destructive labor relations of the 20th. This will mean a new direction for the U.A.W., profit sharing or stock grants to all employees and a change in Big Three management culture.
The need for collaboration will mean accepting sanity in salaries and perks. At American Motors, my dad cut his pay and that of his executive team, he bought stock in the company, and he went out to factories to talk to workers directly. Get rid of the planes, the executive dining rooms — all the symbols that breed resentment among the hundreds of thousands who will also be sacrificing to keep the companies afloat.
Investments must be made for the future. No more focus on quarterly earnings or the kind of short-term stock appreciation that means quick riches for executives with options. Manage with an eye on cash flow, balance sheets and long-term appreciation. Invest in truly competitive products and innovative technologies — especially fuel-saving designs — that may not arrive for years. Starving research and development is like eating the seed corn.
Just as important to the future of American carmakers is the sales force. When sales are down, you don’t want to lose the only people who can get them to grow. So don’t fire the best dealers, and don’t crush them with new financial or performance demands they can’t meet.
It is not wrong to ask for government help, but the automakers should come up with a win-win proposition. I believe the federal government should invest substantially more in basic research — on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like — that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry, along with many others. I believe Washington should raise energy research spending to $20 billion a year, from the $4 billion that is spent today. The research could be done at universities, at research labs and even through public-private collaboration. The federal government should also rectify the imbedded tax penalties that favor foreign carmakers.
But don’t ask Washington to give shareholders and bondholders a free pass — they bet on management and they lost.
Note that I said "largely sensible." The automobile industry in this country and the UAW essentially created the middle class. The UAW over the years was able to obtain for its members generous pay and benefits packages that ought to be standard in any industry. Conventional wisdom has had it for years that it is precisely this rank-and-file compensation structure that ruined the automobile industry, and that UAW members bear the sole burden of cutting costs. Romney's piece unfortunately plays into this myth. A race to the paycheck bottom is no way to keep this country strong.
That said, I have to give Romney credit for acknowledging the responsibility of management pay and benefits, alongside boneheaded decisions like continuing to crank out and market gas-guzzlers even while Americans were dying in Iraq in pursuit of foreign oil. This is the industry that when faced with an oil crunch in the 1970's, gave us, instead of the Civic and the Corolla, the Ford Pinto and the Chevy Nova. This is the industry that decided to stop making the then-compact Dodge Dart/Plymouth Valiant line -- as good a warhorse of a car as was ever built -- and replace it with the legendarily awful Dodge Aspen/Plymoth Volare line. I remember a friend of Mr. Brilliant's family once trying to sell us a Chevrolet Citation -- another legendarily awful car.
To pump money into these companies and let them operate as usual buys those who will pay for it nothing, and buys rank and file auto workers only time -- and not much of that. I think that Romney underestimates the very real pain that auto workers, and those who rely on auto workers for THEIR income, are going to experience if we let the Big Three go into bankruptcy, and because he is a Republican, his ideas don't call for any kind of financial assistance and/or retraining of those who are going to be casualties of decades of bad decisions and short-term thinking on the part of auto industry management. Something must be done so that the Rust Belt cities and states that rely on the auto industry don't turn into ghost towns. If that means a huge financial assistance package, free education, and even a Federal make-work program that also provides health coverage for displaced auto workers, so be it. And of course Romney refuses to go that far. But at least let the money be put towards healing the wound.
All of this brings us back to John McCain, who, if he reads this today, has to be wondering right now what might have been had he made his decision on a running mate with his head.
MATTHEWS: Does Al Gore have a truth problem, and is it going to hurt him?
ESTRICH: He's got this little problem, but it's not really about truth. I mean, you have to say about Clinton that when he lied, at least it was worth it to lie.
MATTHEWS: Right. Let me put it this way --
ESTRICH: Gore -- this is like --
MATTHEWS: -- you're not answering the question --
ESTRICH: -- [former Rep.] Dan Rostenkowski [D-IL] --
MATTHEWS: -- I want to try it again. No --
ESTRICH: -- and postage stamps.
MATTHEWS: -- no. If you apply to college, or you apply for a job, and you say, "I discovered Love Canal, I invented the Internet," these little --
ESTRICH: Oh, no.
MATTHEWS: -- problems are serious questions of character and resume inflation.
Mitt Romney acknowledged yesterday that he never saw his father march with Martin Luther King Jr. as he asserted in a nationally televised speech this month, and historical evidence shows that Michigan's Governor George Romney and the civil rights leader never did march together.
Romney said his father had told him he had marched with King and that he had been using the word "saw" in a "figurative sense."
"If you look at the literature, if you look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of in the sense I've described," Romney told reporters in Iowa. "It's a figure of speech and very familiar, and it's very common. And I saw my dad march with Martin Luther King. I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort."
But historical evidence, including news accounts at the time, shows that George Romney never marched with King, though he supported King's agenda.
Susan Englander, assistant edi tor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, who is editing the King papers from that era, told the Globe yesterday: "I researched this question, and indeed it is untrue that George Romney marched with Martin Luther King."
She said that when he was governor of Michigan, George Romney issued a proclamation in June 1963 in support of King's march in Detroit, but declined to attend, saying he did not participate in political events on Sundays. A New York Times story from the time confirms Englander's account.
Does it all depend on what the definition of "saw" is?
The last time we heard Chris Matthews say anything substantive about Mitt Romney was December 13, when he talked about Romney's "As long as you believe in a Great White Alpha Male in the Sky, you're an American" speech. As the "My father marched with Martin Luther King" story has developed over the last week, and Romney has devolved into Clintonesque parsing, Matthews has been strangely silent. Given Matthews' harping on statements falsely attributed to Al Gore, is his fawning, nearly homoerotic praise of Romney from August 13, going to keep him from giving Romney the same treatment he gave Al Gore in 2000?
UPDATE: OK, so he expressed some mild exasperation on Friday's show. That still doesn't equate to the relentless hammering he gave Al Gore in 2000.
Life after the morning shows? Planet Earth on Discovery Channel..... The world outside seems pretty big sometimes.... and the pathological bullshit going on in here is sort of unbearable in the face of this:
These guys can stay down for up to 30 mins! Forget the tiny pandering of the animals with the biggest egos on this planet. we've got nothing compared to the survival skills that are evolving every day out there on Planet Earth...Pick your nature show, folks, and sit right down for a heart warming HD journey into how small we really are in the scheme of things. Maybe I'm getting old, and maybe its that I resisted the new technology for so long, but high definition really is the new hallucinogenic for people of a certain age.
And that drowning feeling? Well, after long strange dreams about swimming in the tropics with old ex-friends who I hope to never see again, I was brought back to Mitt Romney by Frank Rich, who shines a light once again on the should-be criminal ball-dropping of the pundits and press in this country. The frustration of that on this icy morning, chipping away at the path, and fuming about how a swift boat attack is all that could stand between us and a Romney presidency, is just too much for my weakened sensibilities! Surely, its our fault because we give them the ratings, but then, we also don't have much choice, do we? Why would it be so wrong to bring back some type of fairness doctrine? What are they so afraid of if they are so right...?
Pushed over the edge by his peers’ polite chatter about Mitt Romney’s sermon on “Faith in America,” Mr. O’Donnell branded the speech “the worst” of his lifetime. Then he went on a rampage about Mr. Romney’s Mormon religion, shouting (among other things) that until 1978 it was “an officially racist faith.”
That claim just happens to be true. As the jaws of his scandalized co-stars dropped around him, Mr. O’Donnell then raised the rude question that almost no one in Washington asks aloud: Why didn’t Mr. Romney publicly renounce his church’s discriminatory practices before they were revoked? As the scion of one of America’s most prominent Mormon families, he might have made a difference. It’s not as if he was a toddler. By 1978 — the same year his contemporary, Bill Clinton, was elected governor in Arkansas — Mr. Romney had entered his 30s.
The answer is simple. Mr. Romney didn’t fight his church’s institutionalized apartheid, whatever his private misgivings, because that’s his character. Though he is trying to sell himself as a leader, he is actually a follower and a panderer, as confirmed by his flip-flops on nearly every issue.
Polite chatter. That's what gets me. Its politeness that got us where we are now...so, for Christ's sake, lets at least look at the truth before we install another idiot president in place of the current one. The words that we shall not speak are the ones that need to be spoken, so lets look at the skull and bones underpants of this thing. The Iraq war shows us that if we keep quiet in the runup to a disaster, it can be nearly impossible to disentangle ourselves from the ensuing mess.
Racism; I keep hearing it mentioned as a cautious point on why we shouldn't support Obama. He might not be able to win the general. But that caution belies a disconnect with what is really going on out there. Its evident in how the press and other candidates on both sides underestimated the Oprah-Obama factor. Its evident in the condescending way with which Oprah, who is arguably a spokeswoman for not only African Americans in general, but American women and her fan base, which spans larger than most of us realize, was dismissed as a pop-icon with no real weight in something as heady as an election. Think again. The woman who decided to turn her back on trash talk, and who got the country reading again, is more powerful than maybe Jesus, and probably, at least as powerful as the M$M's script for this thing. At least she knocked things around a bit and made the contenders show some of their real colors. This is not Springsteen or Bon Jovi rallying the kids; Oprah is another animal altogether and she speaks to a different place in the psyche of real people who are struggling to get by. Why? I really don't know. Call it a mysterious phenomenon; but don't disregard it.
Oprah is a populist who has taken chances for her convictions, and as much as she turned her back on the wrestling masses that Jerry Springer gave a stage to for ratings, she still has been a forgiving force who finds the common ground that represents every person in every trailer park, every upper east side matron, and those in-between. Its uncanny how she has built on that and has managed to remain above the fray in her objectives, and its not something that anyone could have predicted. But, I would think that people who watch this stuff for a living might be a little more aware of who Oprah is.
Even as Oprah represents the black thing when she goes into her hey girl! ghetto voice or does her MLK I have seen the mountain tone,she crosses a line that white America cant cross; not even Hillary as the wife of the "first black president," or whatever he was....but as she crosses those lines, she does it as if white and brown America are right there with her. She makes people of all colors warriors in a battle that is more intellectual than anyone realizes. She is talking about racism, which is absolutely knee-jerk visceral in those who grew up in places where it was ingrained, but she does it as if we were all in the battle together against what might even be something even within ourselves. What works about this is that she has a tone of self-forgiving and understanding, which makes it all more understandable and acceptable as something that we all need to change. I say all of this as someone who doesn't much watch Oprah and who is not much of a fan, unless she has on a specific subject that I want to see.
According to Rich, though, the worry about ingrained racism shouldn't be that much of a problem for Obama:
Race is certainly a part of the groundswell, but not in a malevolent way. When I wrote here two weeks ago that racism is the dog that hasn’t barked in this campaign, some readers wrote in to say that only a fool would believe that white Americans would ever elect an African-American president, no matter what polls indicate. We’ll find out soon enough. If that’s the case, Mr. Obama can’t win in Iowa, where the population is roughly 95 percent white, or in New Hampshire, which is 96 percent white.
I’d argue instead that any sizable racist anti-Obama vote will be concentrated in states that no Democrat would carry in the general election. Otherwise, race may be either a neutral or positive factor for the Obama campaign. Check out the composition of Oprah’s television flock, which, like all daytime audiences, is largely female. Her viewers are overwhelmingly white (some 80 percent), blue collar (nearly half with incomes under $40,000) and older (50-plus). This is hardly the chardonnay-sipping, NPR-addicted, bi coastal hipster crowd that many assume to be Mr. Obama’s largest white constituency. They share the profile of Clinton Democrats — and of some Republicans too.
And that sticky religion thing? The things that we might prefer not to mention? Oprah and Obama both come off as pretty heavily religious, but they are not exclusive or freaky, like the underpants that Romney and his folks wear:
“Church free” is the key. This country has had its fill of often hypocritical family-values politicians dictating what is and is not acceptable religious and moral practice. Instead of handing down tablets of what constitutes faith in America, Romney-style, the Oprah-Obama movement practices an American form of ecumenicalism. It preaches a bit of heaven on earth in the form of a unified, live-and-let-live democracy that is greater than the sum of its countless disparate denominations. The pitch — or, to those who are not fans, the shtick — may be corny. “The audacity of hope” is corny too. But corn is preferable to holier-than-thou, and not just in Iowa.
I don't know about anyone else, but the idea of an Obama candidacy seems sort of nice to me. I don't want another Clinton crammed down my throat and I want real chance. I'm willing to, at least, pretend that there is some choice and that big corporations and oil interests don't control everything. Whats the worst thing that can happen? Hasn't it all happened already?
But it's worth keeping in mind just how wrong the media echo chamber can be when it comes to predicting winners and losers. At about this time four years ago, Vermont Gov. Howard Dean was the press-anointed darling who could seemingly do no wrong in Iowa. Dour John Kerry was scorned by reporters as the should-have-been who had blown it and couldn't possibly win. But on caucus night, Kerry wound up the victor—and Dean wound up screaming. Reporters were left to wonder what they had missed. One story the talking heads may be missing this time: just how badly John Edwards hates to lose.
I'm so tired of being told who my candidate is gonna be. I'm so tired of the likes of Chris Matthews and his ilk bleating on about how Hillary cant possibly lose...so, why bother even voting? It seems to me that as the networks have a responsibility to not give results too early on election day, they should try to act like there is a choice and try to encourage people to vote. The problem with them is that their responsibility is to the shareholders and not to the process. Every time I get the feeling that I'm being told to not bother any longer, I send Edwards some money. I honestly think he is the best one for the job at this time, and I honestly think that he has a chance. I also would like to make Chris Matthews and Tim Russert wrong (even though they have started to change course already...cue Sam Seder's backup beep!) Its just nice to see a little coverage of Edwards, as if he were there and an entity in this race, and its also a nice article. It acts as if he is some new guy that no one knows about...but the background never gets old in a race like this.
Huckabee is on the cover of the New York Times Magazine this week and if you needed any further evidence of his particular brand of insanity, just look to the third paragraph for Huckabee's joy at the endorsement of Tim LaHaye, the author of the Left Behind series and game. I wrote about the game a year ago here, and, really, if Huckabee believes in the wrathful Jesus of the Left Behind series, and that our kids should be playing a game that allows them to ride at the side of the angry Jesus and kill those who were not raptured up to heaven (your choice of automatic weapons!)...you know, the left behind...kill 'em all! This is when I start to wonder what the fuck is going on in the republican party; what could they be thinking?
Chris Matthews played a video today of a fake Huckabee commercial that is supposedly posted on Andrew Sullivan's site. I didn't see it there, or on YouTube, but I am looking for it.
Godspeed to John Edwards. With the Iowa Caucuses offering probably the most fair picture of middle Americans (albeit, jaded by this rather heady process that allows most of them to meet and talk with the candidates,) barreling towards us, and Barack and Hillary neck and neck, with only one mistake possible between the two of them, John is well within the margin of error, with a good network already in place in New Hampshire. I really believe that Edwards is the only electable candidate that isn't under the sway of the powers of the ego/career trap or the big power of the ruling corporations that quake at the idea of Edwards raining on their parade. For God's sake, when are Americans going to look at the hard facts and cast a vote that serves them and their fortunes, instead of voting on a vague impression taken from media bytes being thrown about by the M$M.
I would be very interested in seeing Barack Obama win this thing too; as opposed to Hillary....BUT...I don't know if he has enough political experience to get things done in the office, and whoever gets this one has to hit the ground running. At the same time, I like the idea of ideals being tossed about; I liked the West Wing and I can easily see Obama starring in the next generation. But I get this red flag warning, strobing G-R-I-D-L-O-C-K. Maybe it will be that way to an extent anyway, considering that the war will become ours on inauguration day, and we are doing nothing to make it clear that there is a laundry list of criminals here, and their crimes are being glaringly ignored. If we don't go after the criminals now, we deserve what we get. Can Obama handle the fallout of 8 years of the Bush crime syndicate?
To me, Edwards holds the key to the undoing of the insane policies that have been sliding into place since Reagan. He also doesn't care anymore what they say about him and what they do to him. He has been through it all and acts with the air of someone who is just concentrating on being himself, and screw the handlers and bullshit. Edwards still has a chance and I hope to god that he has the support in Iowa among people who are weighing the actual policies of the candidates. And to be absolutely sure of this, it looks to me in hi-def, like Edwards has recently freshened up his botox, as has Chris Matthews. Whatever it takes, I'm for it!
On the other side, its clown-time all the time...its never over. Rudy cackled through Timmeuh Russert's, "tough as they get..." according to Chris Matthews, questioning (NOT!) on Meet the Press. Every time he was asked about his scandalous ongoing rip-off of NYC during his tenure, he cackled hysterically, like a crazy man. But then, Matthews talking about cackling, is a bit of pot-kettle-black, and his ranking of who is a tough interviewer....well, these guys are so involved with each other's asses that its not worth getting angry anymore. Oh, and by the way, Matthews thought that Romney's not-Mormon, religion speech, was the best speech of the campaign! Huh? Hasn't he heard Edwards? Obama?...hell, even Oprah reading off cards, in her MLK-black voice, was better than that. He made no sense and he came off as disingenuous.
Lets get real about the church of Mormon and Mitt Romney's bullshit speech that has already gotten too much airtime by now. Mormon: There is a self appointed leader to whom,it is purported, Jesus himself appeared in 1820, and subsequently an angel dictated the Book of Mormon to him. Thus began a cult of Jesus-freakishness, in which Jesus is considered the creator of everything, replacing God, except to get a little help or direction from him here and there. There is some sort of planetary influence a la Scientology, a disgusting amount of sexism and racism, and the belief that those who don't practice this particular form of Christianity will not go to heaven. The notion that the followers were sent from heaven where they previously resided with god, and that they are following a predestined path in order to gain experience for their return to heaven, removes basic responsibility from them of having to question their assumed authority about all things Jesus; the rest of us be damned...unless we want to get baptized into the cult...then I guess we're saved, only to be explained away as some wandering sheep that have found their way back to the fold; as part of the grand predestined design, of course...like, to teach the rest a lesson...?
Mitt says that America's founders didn't mean to separate church from state THAT much, but at the same time he says that he will do his best to keep the two separate, except that...he is a devout Mormon, and so he must have believed the particularly disgusting teachings that he no doubt followed in his early 20's, such as the belief that blacks are from Mars, while Mormons are from Venus! yup....This group has a dirty history worth looking into, and old Mitt, by proclaiming his devotion throughout the years, particularly naming times of his life that he was still a Mormon, has made it clear who he is...exactly clear.
Larry O'Donnell hit this straight on yesterday on McLaughlin. I was so relieved to see someone able to express the disgust that I have been feeling about the fundamentalism coming from sectors of the republican party, that I started to count the minutes until this showed up on the YouTubes. Larry O'Donnell has the first comment, and its really the only thing you need to hear on this joke of a debate on religion and what the candidates intend to do with it.
I'm not a religious person, but I respect the urge in others, if it gives some comfort. Its certainly nice to have some belief and community in this world; something that I personally lack. I just cant see anyone with the devout belief that a certain group of people are going to heaven (coming from heaven, even,) and the rest of us are going to hell, (or are from hell,) as capable of being a leader to us all. Can one just set those sorts of beliefs aside? I didn't get the feeling from old Mitt's speech that he is able to separate anything from his religion.
The Republican candidates for president seem to be having a contest as to which one can be the most idiotic in the quest to appeal to the worst reptilian brain components of their constituency.
First we had Rudy Giuliani saying that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would invite Osama bin Laden to their inauguration (and would that be so terrible if it meant he were apprehended?). Now we have Mitt Romney saying that Adam and Eve looked "promiscuous".
Romney: Adam and Eve looked slutty November 10, 2007 6:39 PM
OK, that's not quite what he said, but still...the former Massachusetts Governor (and current Iowa and New Hampshire GOP frontrunner) made an odd joke, it seemed to me, while campaigning in New Hampshire today, reports ABC News' ace cub reporter Matt Stuart (LINK).
At one young couple's house, Romney remarked at the large leaves on their tree, quipping, "Adam and Eve would not have looked as promiscuous if they had had leaves this big."
Huh?
Adam and Eve were naked. (Before eating from the Tree of Knowledge, that is, after which they became ashamed of their nakedness.)
Does naked = promiscuous?
Asked what he meant, a Romney spokesman told Stuart he meant what he said.
Adam and Eve looked promiscuous? Remember that scene from Bananas in which the new "President" of San Marcos dictates that all citizens must change their underwear every half hour and wear it on the outside, so he can check:
Doesn't sound like just the stuff of screwball comedies anymore, does it?
To Mitt Romney, about $1000 & change. His campaign spent in the vicinity of five-million dollars to collect 4,516 votes in the Iowa Repug straw poll. Not even real votes that got him elected to anything. He would have at least that number & saved a lot of money had he simply handed out five crisp hundred dollar bills to anyone promising to vote for him.
Can you imagine the hue and cry if, say, progressives were equating writing blog entries with fighting in Iraq?
So why is it OK for conservatives to do so, especially those who are well within the age range of being able to serve?
In 2005, Max Blumenthal reported in The Nation on a convention of College Republicans. Here are some of the chickenhawks he spoke to who think giving lip service to supporting the Iraq war suffices for not serving:
I chatted for a while with Collin Kelley, a senior at Washington State with a vague resemblance to the studly actor Orlando Bloom. Kelley told me he's "sick and tired of people saying our troops are dying in vain" and added, "This isn't an invasion of Iraq, it's a liberation--as David Horowitz said." When I asked him why he was staying on campus rather than fighting the good fight, he rubbed his shoulder and described a nagging football injury from high school. Plus, his parents didn't want him to go. "They're old hippies," Kelley said.
"I know that I'm going to be better staying here and working to convince people why we're there [in Iraq]," Hauser explained, pausing in thought. "I'm a fighter, but with words."
"The country is like a body," Palmer explained, "and each part of the body has a different function. Certain people do certain things better than others." He said his "function" was planning a "Support Our Troops" day on campus this year in which students honored military recruiters from all four branches of the service.
By the time I encountered Cory Bray, a towering senior from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, the beer was flowing freely. "The people opposed to the war aren't putting their asses on the line," Bray boomed from beside the bar. Then why isn't he putting his ass on the line? "I'm not putting my ass on the line because I had the opportunity to go to the number-one business school in the country," he declared, his voice rising in defensive anger, "and I wasn't going to pass that up." [...] "We're the big guys," he said. "We're the ones who stand up for what we believe in. The College Democrats just sit around talking about how much they hate Bush. We actually do shit."
Now we have nine Republican candidates and potential candidates for the presidency, all of whom support endless war in Iraq, only three of whom (John McCain, Ron Paul, and Duncan Hunter) have any military experience at all, and only one of whom (McCain) actually has a child in military service. Sam Brownback was too late for the draft (and never enlisted for post-Vietnam service). Newt Gingrich never served. Rudy Giuliani got work-related and educational deferments. Tom Tancredo was reclassified as not available in 1970 because of "stress-related anxiety". (Today, of course, this wouldn't matter; they'd just fill him up with Xanax and send him off.) Fred Thompson received a "daddy deferment" during the draft years. And Mitt Romney got a deferment so he could proseletyze for the Mormons in France.
Not that stops Romney from being an unabashed supporter of the war, even if it means spouting utter falsehoods (such as the one in the June 5 debate, in which he claimed that Saddam Hussein had refused to allow weapons inspectors into Iraq before the 2003 invasion).
After this story broke yesterday, Romney's campaign released a video of his entire answer to the question. In the interest of accurate reporting, the transcript (courtesy of TPM Cafe) is reprinted below:
"Well, the good news is that we have a volunteer army and that's the way we're going to keep it. My sons are all adults and they've made their decisions about their careers and they've chosen not to serve in the military and active duty. I respect their decision in that regard. I also respect and value very highly those who make a decision to serve in the military. I think we ought to show an outpouring of support just as I suggested. A surge of support for those families and those individuals who are serving. My niece, for instance, just to tell you what a neighborhood can do and how touching it can be.
"My niece, Misha, living out West, her husband I think he got a call on a Tuesday. He's in the National Guard. He got a call on a Tuesday that he was going to be called up and shipped overseas on a Thursday. And they just bought a home -– they hadn’t landscaped it -– but the rules in the neighborhood were that unless you got your home landscaped within a year of the time that you bought your home, they began fining you, because they didn’t want people having mud holes in front of their homes. And she was very worried and just before the year expired, she woke up one morning and looked out the window and all the neighbors were out there, rolling down sod, putting up trees, getting it all done."
"It’s remarkable how we can show our support for our nation and one of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping to get me elected, because they think I’d be a great president. My son, Josh, bought the family Winnebago and has visited 99 counties, most of them with his three kids and his wife. And I respect that and respect all of those in the way they serve this great country."
I'm not sure that it isn't even WORSE in context. For one thing, Romney doesn't say his nephew is going to Iraq, he says he's going "overseas." For another thing, he's describing people who live in the kind of planned community where they fine you if your landscaping isn't in tip-top shape. And this is their biggest concern? There are families just barely making ends meet whose breadwinners signed up for the National Guard thinking they were going to be on call for disaster preparation and relief here in the U.S. and instead are being sent to Iraq. And Romney thinks that neighbors taking care of his nephew's landscaping in an exclusive, gated community is the same as people holding bake sales so that soldiers can have body armor?
Can you imagine the hue and cry from the Republicans if John Edwards had delivered remarks like this?
I can't imagine what it must be like to be a parent whose lost a son or daughter in this war, or a wife who wakes up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night with a premonition that her husband is going to be killed, or a child whose father came back a stranger, or a 21-year-old facing a life without any legs, without his sight, and permanently disfigured. And I sure as hell can't imagine what it must be like for such people to hear a presidential candidate from a prominent family equate having his sons campaign for him with breaking down doors in an insurgent stronghold in 115-degree heat.
But what's even more disturbing is that there are enough Republicans who believe that giving lip service to supporting the war is EXACTLY THE SAME as actually fighting it to give Romney a lead in most polls.
Keith? I think you blew it last night. Mitt Romney should have been your Worst Person in the World.
Are Americans still stupid enough to mistake tough talk for actual toughness?
All but the most ardent Bush-fellaters have realized by now that all the cowboy swagger and the talk of "dead or alive" was just so much posturing. That Republicans are now swooning over someone who's a REAL actor instead of a bumbling wannabe like George W. Bush hardly gives one confidence in their ability to intelligently select a nominee. But the two current frontrunners who have actually declared don't inspire confidence either, because both are all-hat-no-cattle tough talkers, each playing the Tom Davis role in the old SNL Wilton Adcock/Pete Tagliani sketch to Hillary Clinton's or John Edwards' or Barack Obama's Al Franken. But in the aftermath of the 2004 election, which saw actual soldiers denigrated as cowards while a blow monkey who went AWOL from his own cushy service was portrayed as a military hero, all I can do is quote Ronald Reagan: Here we go again.
Nothing unites the Republican candidates for president or excites the conservative base more than their bellicose barking about war and confrontation. The GOP presidential debates often sound like a tough-man competition, with Rudolph Giuliani denouncing the "cut-and-run" Democrats, Mitt Romney demanding a double-size Guantánamo detention camp, and the rest of the pack struggling to keep pace with the snarling alpha dogs.
Yet while their rhetoric is invariably loud and aggressive, none of these martial orators has seen a day of military service -- except for John McCain, whose prospects are rapidly deflating, and Duncan Hunter, whose campaign never got enough air for a single balloon. Unfortunately for those two decorated veterans, their party seems to prefer its hawks to be of the chicken variety.
None of this may matter much. Most of the Democratic candidates lack military experience, too. But when the most belligerent Republicans start to beat the war drums, it's important to look at what they're trying to hide.
Consider Giuliani, the former New York mayor who has remained among the most vocal supporters of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He never hesitates to suggest that politicians with differing opinions simply lack guts. When he spoke at the 2004 Republican convention, he gleefully insinuated that Democratic nominee John Kerry lacked the fortitude to combat terrorism. Now he denigrates the supposedly spineless Democrats running for president in 2008.
But he has always confined his enthusiasm for war to podium speeches and position papers. Born in 1944, young Rudy was highly eligible for military service when he reached his 20s during the Vietnam War. He did not volunteer for combat -- as Kerry did -- and instead found a highly creative way to dodge the draft.
During his years as an undergraduate at Manhattan College and then at New York University Law School, Giuliani qualified for a student deferment. Upon graduation from law school in 1968, he lost that temporary deferment and his draft status reverted to 1-A, the designation awarded to those most qualified for induction into the Army.
At the same time, Giuliani won a clerkship with federal Judge Lloyd McMahon in the fabled Southern District of New York, where he would become the United States attorney. He naturally had no desire to trade his ticket on the legal profession's fast track for latrine duty in the jungle. So he quickly applied for another deferment based on his judicial clerkship. This time the Selective Service System denied his claim.
That was when the desperate Giuliani prevailed upon his boss to write to the draft board, asking them to grant him a fresh deferment and reclassification as an "essential" civilian employee. As the great tabloid columnist Jimmy Breslin noted 20 years later, during the former prosecutor's first campaign for mayor: "Giuliani did not attend the war in Vietnam because federal Judge Lloyd MacMahon [sic] wrote a letter to the draft board in 1969 and got him out. Giuliani was a law clerk for MacMahon, who at the time was hearing Selective Service cases. MacMahon's letter to Giuliani's draft board stated that Giuliani was so necessary as a law clerk that he could not be allowed to get shot at in Vietnam."
[snip]
If Giuliani has a draft problem, Romney's may be even worse. The former Massachusetts governor, whose supporters object strenuously to any discussion of his religious beliefs, got his military service deferred thanks to the Mormon church.
Like Giuliani and millions of other young American men at the time, Romney started out with student deferments. But he left Stanford after only two semesters in 1966 and would have become eligible for the draft -- except that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Michigan, his home state, provided him with a fresh deferment as a missionary. According to an excellent investigative series that appeared last month in the Boston Globe, that deferment, which described Romney as a "minister of religion or divinity student," protected him from the draft between July 1966 and February 1969, when he enrolled in Brigham Young University to complete his undergraduate degree. Mormons in each state could select a limited number of young men upon whom to confer missionary status during the Vietnam years, and Romney was fortunate enough to be chosen. (Coincidentally, or possibly not, Mitt's father, George W. Romney, was governor of Michigan at the time.)
Now Romney echoes Giuliani by asserting that if he had been called, he would have served. "I was supportive of my country," he told Globe reporter Michael Kranish. "I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam." Perhaps. But it is hard to blame Romney for choosing missionary work over military service. After all, the Mormons didn't send him to proselytize in the slums of the Philippines, Guatemala or Kenya.
They sent him to France.
With the exception of the suddenly tragic figure of John McCain, those talking toughest about war are the guys who ever served; the guys who like so many men of their generation, did whatever they could to find a way out of being fed into a meatgrinder. I can't fault the young men of the late 1960's and early 1970's for not wanting to fight a pointless war -- except to the extent that they supported, and still support, OTHER men dying in pointless wars.
Sen. Clinton has reinforced enemy propaganda? Made it impossible for you to get your ego-driven, blood-steeped win in Iraq?
Then take it into your own hands, Mr. Bush.
Go to Baghdad now and fulfill, finally, your military service obligations.
Go there and fight, your war. Yourself.
And take with you those chickenshit weasels who think tough talk makes them tough guys, but who lacked the toughness to serve when it was THEIR turn -- and who now seek to succeed you in office. Just don't ask the real soldiers you've sent over there to die to clean up your underdrawers after the bunch of you pisses your collective pants in fear within ten minutes after your arrival outside the Baghdad Green Zone.
You've got to love those moral values Republicans. From so-called pastors involved in sexual abuse to Rudy's Bible Belt campaign chair being a coke dealer -- I'm beginning to understand why they NEED Jehovah -- because without a Big Daddy deity to make them afraid and a good, forgiving Jesus to wash away their disgusting, foul, vile, inhuman perversities -- sins that ONLY religious wingnuts seem to commit -- they'd probably slit their own throats from having to live in their own heads.
In a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, 133 plaintiffs have alleged that Robert Lichfield, co-chairman of Romney’s Utah finance committee owned or operated residential boarding schools for troubled teenagers where students were “subjected to physical abuse, emotional abuse and sexual abuse.”
The complaint, which plaintiffs amended and resubmitted to the court last week, alleges children attending schools operated by Lichfield suffered abuses such as unsanitary living conditions; denial of adequate food; exposure to extreme temperatures; beatings; confinement in dog cages; and sexual fondling.
A second lawsuit filed by more than 25 plaintiffs in July in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of New York alleges that Lichfield and several partners entered into a scheme to defraud them by operating an unlicensed boarding school in upstate New York. The suit does not allege physical or emotional abuse.
These are two active lawsuits against Lichfield. Several others suits have alleged child abuse on behalf of dozens of plaintiffs, but judges have thrown out the suits for procedural reasons. As a result, the merits of the allegations have not been weighed. In some suits, plaintiffs have settled their cases for undisclosed amounts of money.
The allegations could force Romney to re-examine his relationship with his Utah finance co-chairman or put pressure on him to give away the contributions Lichfield helped raise.
In defending the Iraq war, leading Republican presidential contenders are increasingly echoing words and phrases used by President Bush in the run-up to the war that reinforce the misleading impression that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In the May 15 Republican debate in South Carolina, Senator John McCain of Arizona suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would "follow us home" from Iraq -- a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not.
Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that "these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago. "
However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney identified numerous groups that he said have "come together" to try to bring down the United States, though specialists say few of the groups Romney cited have worked together and only some have threatened the United States.
They want to bring down the West, particularly us," Romney declared. "And they've come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent."
Assertions of connections between bin Laden and terrorists in Iraq have heated up over the last month, as Congress has debated the war funding resolution. Romney, McCain, and Giuliani have endorsed -- and expanded on -- Bush's much-debated contention that Al Qaeda is the main cause of instability in Iraq.
[snip]
But critics, including some former CIA officials, said those statements could mislead voters into believing that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks are now fighting the United States in Iraq .
Michael Scheuer , the CIA's former chief of operations against bin Laden in the late 1990s, said the comments of some GOP candidates seem to suggest that bin Laden is controlling the insurgency in Iraq, which he is not.
[snip]
The belief that there is a clear connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks has been a key determinant of support for the war. A Harris poll taken two weeks before the 2004 presidential election found that a majority of Bush's supporters believed that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks -- a claim that Bush has never made. Eighty-four percent believed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had "strong links" with Al Qaeda, a claim that intelligence officials have long disputed.
But critics have maintained that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney encouraged these ideas by using misleading terms to describe the threat posed by Iraq before the war.
Bush, for instance, repeatedly spoke of Hussein's support for terrorism -- which many Americans apparently took to mean that Hussein supported Al Qaeda in its jihad against the United States. The administration, however, sourced that claim to Hussein's backing of Palestinian terrorist groups targeting Israel.
Now, some GOP presidential candidates refer to "the terrorists" as one group, blurring distinctions between Al Qaeda, which has attacked the United States repeatedly, and groups that former intelligence officials say have not targeted the United States.
Romney said Friday: "You see, the terrorists are fighting a war on us. We've got to make sure that we're fighting a war on them."
Romney's comment in the earlier debate that "they've come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda" struck some former intelligence officials as particularly misleading. Shia and Sunni, they said, are branches of Islam and not terrorist groups. There are an estimated 300 million Sunni Muslims in the Middle East, many of them fighting Al Qaeda.
[snip]
No point has been emphasized more strongly at GOP debates than the link between the Iraq war and Al Qaeda. During the debates about war funding, GOP leaders have downplayed the role of sectarian violence in Iraq and emphasized the role of Al Qaeda.
On Friday, McCain called any attempt to cut Iraq war funding, "the equivalent of waving a white flag to Al Qaeda."
But specialists say that the enemy the military calls "Al Qaeda Iraq" is a combination of Iraqi jihadists and an unknown number of fighters from countries throughout the Middle East. "AQI" came together after the US invasion. And while there is evidence that AQI members coordinate attacks among themselves, there is little evidence that they coordinate closely with bin Laden.
In pressing his case for continued war funding, Bush last week said a previously classified intelligence report indicated that bin Laden had sent a messenger in early 2005 to urge the late Iraqi terrorist chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to aim more attacks at the United States.
But there is no further evidence that bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, exerts control over Al Qaeda Iraq, according to a senior military official in Baghdad in an interview last week.
"We don't have any direct information that would link Al Qaeda Iraq to getting e-mails, memos, whatever, from bin Laden," the military official said, speaking under condition of anonymity.
Not one of these idiots has the slightest idea what he's talking about. So why on earth should we trust them with the keys?
Glenn Greenwald has an extraordinary post today (and it's no joke) about the authoritarian tendencies of today's Republican party.
This is what the former party of less government now believes:
Various Republican candidates attended a meeting of Club for Growth, and afterwards, National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru spoke to Cato Institute's President Ed Crane about what they said. This brief report from Ponnuru is simply extraordinary:
Crane asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review. Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind.
Mitt Romney can't say -- at least not until he engages in a careful and solemn debate with a team of "smart lawyers" -- whether, in the United States of America, the President has the power to imprison American citizens without any opportunity for review of any kind. But in today's Republican Party, Romney's openness to this definitively tyrannical power is the moderate position. Ponnuru goes on to note:
Crane said that he had asked Giuliani the same question a few weeks ago. The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.
It sounds like Giuliani is positioning himself in this race as the "compassionate authoritarian" -- "Yes, of course I have the power to imprison you without charges or review of any kind, but as President, I commit to you that I intend (no promises) to 'use this authority infrequently.'"
Two of the three leading Republican candidates for President either embrace or are open to embracing the idea that the President can imprison Americans without any review, based solely on the unchecked decree of the President. And, of course, that is nothing new, since the current Republican President not only believes he has that power but has exercised it against U.S. citizens and legal residents in the U.S. -- including those arrested not on the "battlefield," but on American soil.
What kind of American isn't just instinctively repulsed by the notion that the President has the power to imprison Americans with no charges? And what does it say about the current state of our political culture that one of the two political parties has all but adopted as a plank in its platform a view of presidential powers and the federal government that is -- literally -- the exact opposite of what this country is?
