Who Said It: Mitt Or Groucho?

Mitt Romney has announced that he is running for the U.S. Senate in the State of Utah (it must be nice having residences in multiple states).  It is a sign of how degraded our politics have become that he is now considered by some to be an honest broker and paragon of American values -- and compared to the current occupant of the White House, I suppose he is.  But only by comparison.  We should not forget the mendacity of this loser of both the popular vote and the electoral college in the 2012 presidential election.  (See, e.g., Mitt Romney and the Odor of Mendacity)  In the piece below, originally posted on May 18, 2012, I attempted to make this point with more humor and less rancor.

Mitt Romney is sounding more and more like Groucho Marx all the time -- except he's not trying to be funny.  Take the quiz below, and identify the quote as coming from Mitt or Groucho.  (And here's wishing Mitt would sound more like Harpo.)

(a) "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them, well, I have others."
(b) "I’m not familiar precisely with what I said, but I’ll stand by what I said, whatever it was.”
(c) "People ask me, 'what would you do to get the economy going?’ and I say, 'well look at what the president's done and do the opposite.’"
(d) " I don't know what they have to say, it makes no difference anyway, whatever it is, I'm against it."
(e)  "The president should have built a credible threat of military action and made it very clear that the United States of America is willing, in the final analysis, if necessary, to take military action to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon."
(f)  "It's too late [to prevent war]. I've already paid a month's rent on the battlefield."
(g) "I'm not a big-game hunter. I've made that very clear. I've always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will."
(h) "I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know."
(i) "I believe marriage should be preserved as an institution for one man and one woman."
(j) "Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?"
(k) "Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy."
(l) "My wife drives a couple of Cadillacs."
(m) "My dog likes fresh air."
(n) "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
(o) "I worked my way up from nothing to extreme poverty."
(p) "I should tell my story. I'm also unemployed."
(q) "I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in. That's the America I love."
(r) "Members of the faculty, faculty members, students of Huxley and Huxley students.  Well I guess that covers everything."
(s) "America cannot continue to lead the family of nations around the world if we suffer the collapse of the family here at home."

(t) "Behind every successful man is a woman and behind her is his wife."
(u) "If you think this country's bad off now, just wait till I get through with it."

Answers: (a) Groucho; (b) Mitt; (c) Mitt; (d) Groucho; (e) Mitt; (f) Groucho; (g) Mitt; (h) Groucho; (i) Mitt; (j) Groucho; (k) Groucho; (l) Mitt; (m) Mitt; (n) Groucho; (o) Groucho; (p) Mitt; (q) Mitt; (r) Groucho; (s) Mitt; (t) Groucho; (u) Mitt Groucho

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Mitt Romney And The Odor Of Mendacity

Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?... There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity... You can smell it.  -- Tennessee Williams from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Several months ago, Paul Krugman wrote about Mitt Romney's dishonest campaign and penchant for uttering false and fraudulent statements:  "Won’t Mr. Romney pay a price for running a campaign based entirely on falsehoods? He obviously thinks not, and I’m afraid he may be right."

Krugman went on to predict that "Romney will probably be called on some falsehoods" but "most of the news media will feel as though their reporting must be “balanced,” which means that every time they point out that a Republican lied they have to match it with a comparable accusation against a Democrat — even if what the Democrat said was actually true or, at worst, a minor misstatement."

Fast forward to last week's article in the New York Times, "Fact-Checking Obama and Romney," which stated that:

Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney are filling speeches with facts and figures designed to enhance their case and diminish the other guy’s, in the process often making assertions fundamentally at odds with one another. Along the way, both candidates are at times stretching the truth, using statistics without context, exaggerating their own records and misrepresenting their opponent’s. 

A classic example of balance and false equivalence, the article concluded that "[d]etermining who is the worse dissembler can be a subjective exercise, even in an age when news organizations, blogs and partisan groups blitz out regular fact-checks.

But while the Obama campaign's rhetoric can be at times misleading, it cannot be compared to Romney's incessant lying.  Steve Benen at Rachel Maddow's blog has been chronicling Romney's lies for months.  (See his 23rd weekly installment here.)

As Michael Cohen of the Guardian summarizes Romney's "cavalcade of untruths" and concludes:

Granted, presidential candidates are no strangers to disingenuous or overstated claims; it's pretty much endemic to the business. But Romney is doing something very different and far more pernicious. Quite simply, the United States has never been witness to a presidential candidate, in modern American history, who lies as frequently, as flagrantly and as brazenly as Mitt Romney.

And how can Romney get away with it?  Cohen explains:

Now, in general, those of us in the pundit class are really not supposed to accuse politicians of lying – they mislead, they embellish, they mischaracterize, etc. Indeed, there is natural tendency for nominally objective reporters, in particular, to stay away from loaded terms such as lying. Which is precisely why Romney's repeated lies are so effective. In fact, lying is really the only appropriate word to use here, because, well, Romney lies a lot. But that's a criticism you're only likely to hear from partisans.

Pollsters and pundits seems to agree that the election will be extremely close.  Whether the media will ignore the powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity that surrounds Mitt Romney will be a key factor in the outcome.

Mitt Meme

I first encountered Robbie Conal's work when I was living in D.C. in the 1980s, working on Iran-Contra related litigation, and Conal's posters would magically appear throughout the City.  He had -- and continues to have -- the remarkable ability to capture in a drawing with a few choice words the corruption, dishonesty and hypocrisy of our political, religious and financial leaders.

He just made this Mitt Meme, which he promises will soon be a poster.  Click on the link and make your own caption.  I added the caption above, which provokes the eternal question:  Mitt or Groucho?

Relax 'Mitt,' Just Be Yourself

By Tina Dupuy, cross-posted from her website

Mitt Romney’s off-the-cuff comments are starting to seem like Barack Obama’s bowling: Not good. Kind of spectacularly bad. Kitsch on a kind day.

Romney keeps on rolling gutter balls in front of the cameras: “The trees are the right height.” “I like being able to fire people.” “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” “I’m Mitt Romney—and yes Wolf, that’s also my first name.”

Normally the adage “a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth” applies. On the Jay Leno show, Obama famously compared his bowling skills to those in the Special Olympics. Many, including myself, were offended by the remark (mainly because the Special Olympics athletes are far better bowlers than Mr. Obama). The President apologized profusely for the statement.

But Romney’s greatest gaffes are less accidental nuggets of candor (like, “I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners.”) and more what you’d call disquieting sound bites of misfired pandering. Moments that can be summed up by the phrase “cheesy grits.”

Yes, he told a crowd in Mississippi during the primary, he had “cheesy grits” (as opposed to cheese grits) for breakfast and he was learning how to say, “ya’ll.” He would have been better off saying sweet tea (a diabetic coma-inducing regional syrup served over ice) is best with Splenda and he was learning how to talk … real … slow.

(Rick Santorum won Mississippi, by the way.)

Yes, when Romney attempts to show how in touch he is with Americans…he ends up displaying exactly how in touch he is with Americans. Meaning: Not at all.

DREAM On

The Obama Administration's announcement that it will no longer deport young immigrants who came to the U.S. as children is not only good politics, but good policy.

As the New York Times reports:

The administration said the change will affect as many as 800,000 immigrants who have lived in fear of deportation. It bypasses Congress and partially achieves the goals of the "DREAM Act," legislation that would have provided a pathway to citizenship for young illegal immigrants who went to college or served in the military.

Under the administration plan, illegal immigrants will be able to avoid deportation if they can prove they were brought to the United States before they turned 16 and are younger than 30, have been in the country for at least five continuous years, have no criminal history, graduated from a U.S. high school or earned a GED or served in the military. They also can apply for a work permit that will be good for two years with no limits on how many times it can be renewed. 

Jed Lewison explains at Daily Kos that "unlike the DREAM Act, this move doesn't create a path to citizenship because that will require an act of Congress, but removing the threat of deportation from hundreds of thousands of law-abiding residents who came to America as children is still an important step towards achieving the goals of the DREAM Act."

Thomas A. Saenz, President and General Counsel at MALDEF issued the following statement:

Today’s bold Obama Administration announcement holds out the promise of significant, even transformative, benefit to the entire nation by ensuring that some of our most capable and committed young people are finally given the opportunity to work and to safely contribute to our economic competitiveness and our national development. Today’s announcement is the clear product of the hard work of those same DREAM students to enlighten the nation and its policymakers.
We look forward to swift, fair, and comprehensive nationwide implementation of the important administrative steps announced today on this thirtieth anniversary of the prescient Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe, which established the importance to our national future of educating all students.
This administrative action is consistent with the DREAM Act, supported by a majority of both houses of Congress in 2010 but blocked only through a craven Senate exercise of the hoary power of filibuster. Congress should move swiftly to enact the DREAM Act as a longterm guarantee and protection of the powerful national resource embodied in the DREAM student population.
We also call upon Governor Mitt Romney to commit, if elected, to following the wise national policy announced today as a policy that is in the clear best interests of the entire nation.

And what does Romney have to say about this?  His typical obfuscation: "I think the action the president took today makes it more difficult to reach that long-term solution because an executive is of course a short-term matter. It can be reversed by subsequent presidents."   Of course, Romney won't say what his long-term solution is and when asked whether he would reverse Obama's new policy, he refused to answer.

Courting Disaster: What Romney Would Do To Our System Of Justice

As I have previously written, Romney's choice of Robert Bork as co-chair of his Justice Advisory Committee is a disturbing sign of the kind of radical jurists Romney would nominate to the federal bench.  (See Romney Gets Borked.)  Not to mention what Romney could do to the Supreme Court -- which is already the most conservative it has been since the 1930s -- if given the opportunity.  (See Supreme Court Matters.)  As the economy faulters and Obama's gaffes get picked apart, it is critical to focus on how disastrous a Romney Presidency would be for our system of justice.  -- Lovechilde

A Romney Presidency Could Mean A Hostile Takeover Of The Federal Courts

By Jessica Mason Pieklo, cross-posted from RH Realty Check

As it stands the state of the federal judiciary is one of crisis. More than 160 million Americans live in a community with a federal court vacancy. Additional funding cuts threaten to shut down courts or suspend trials in some areas which means individual seeking justice for claims must wait longer, if they have access to the courts at all. Judicial vacancies not only stress the functioning of the federal judiciary, they threaten the ideological stability as well. A significant reason the federal judiciary is chronically understaffed is because Congressional Republicans refuse to act on nominees out of partisan and ideological spite. The result is a federal bench significantly lacking in any diversity rendering judgments over an increasingly diverse population. Sounds bad, doesn't it? It is, and if Mitt Romney wins the presidency, it will only get worse.

Early in his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, Romney developed a reputation as a man with an eye toward good governance and transparency. His early judicial appointments reflected a wide array of ideologies and experiences and Romney even undertook more substantive structural reforms to combat the practice and perception of political cronyism in judicial nominations.

But it quickly became clear that in order to advance his political career Romney would have to embrace a harder-line conservatism in both ideology and approach to the courts. Chronicles of Romney's political evolution from moderate to hard-right plutocrat are not difficult to come by, but it is his approach to the courts, their independence and their function that deserves much closer scrutiny. And that scrutiny shouldn't be limited to simply the kind of judges a President Romney would appoint to the federal bench, but how his administration would help or hinder the function of the courts in its entirety.

If Romney's early judicial selections as governor of Massachusetts illustrate a belief in the necessity of an independent and ideologically diverse judicial system, his later selections show an embrace of rigid conservatism and the benefits of political payback. In Massachusetts Romney went from nominating openly gay judges to beneficiaries of Bain capital and from embracing oversight of the judicial nomination process to openly working against it.

Fast forward to Romney's current presidential run. Under any other political climate than the current one, having failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork as a judicial advisor would be considered a political liability at best and the end of any serious presidential wish at worst. After all, Bork's political and legal career first drew attention back in 1973 when as solicitor general and under direct order from then-President Nixon, he fired Archibald Cox as special prosecutor in the Watergate cover-up. Bork's views on civil rights, including the idea that because women make up a majority of the population gender discrimination is an impossibility, and his belief that integrating public accommodations under the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an "unsurpassed ugliness," would eventually go on to shape a belief that the judiciary must bend its will to that of the people unless expressly prohibited by the Constitution.

The Bain Of Our Existence

By Mike Lux, cross-posted from Crooks and Liars

I love this Bain debate. It is exactly the kind of debate about the nature of business and job creation we need to be having in this campaign. The Republicans, along with pro-Wall Street Democrats, are squealing like stuck pigs about the Obama campaign “attacking free enterprise” because they want to change the subject fast. They are saying to themselves: please, let’s talk about anything else. Deficits would be their first choice, but anything would be preferable. Maybe we’ll see them start talking about contraceptives and how people shouldn’t have sex again just to change the subject. Because this debate goes straight to the heart of what kind of economy we should be trying to build in this country.

This is isn’t about being for or against free enterprise. This is about how the economy should work better for everyone in it, not just the top 1 percent. The Republicans -- and Democrats like Cory Booker and Harold Ford, who both have raised millions of dollars in Wall Street money (including money from Bain) for their campaigns -- say that it is great when financial corporations like Bain make money by loading up the companies they buy with debt, taking all the tax write-offs the law allows, and then walking away with tons of money whatever happens to the original company. In fact, the companies Bain bought frequently went bankrupt, and Bain usually profited when those companies did go belly-up because of tax write-offs and sucking the companies’ assets dry. But in this line of reasoning, it’s all good, because capitalism should be unrestrained and some people got very rich.

What Obama and other Democrats are arguing is that our government should be on the side of the businesses that create not just wealth for a few at the top, but jobs and incomes for a lot of people. That is why Obama made the incredibly gutsy move to save the American auto industry, a policy that saved 1.45 million jobs in the short run, and kept desperately needed manufacturing jobs in this country for years to come. It is why Obama has made big investments in the budget for Small Business Administration jobs. It is why investments have been made in clean energy jobs of the future. It is why the U.S. Department of Agriculture has emphasized rural economic development and small business development in areas where jobs and incomes are desperately needed.

Democratic policies are in fact far more pro-business than policies like the Romney-Ryan budget, which independent studies estimate would cost the nation more than 4 million jobs in the next two years. That’s a lot of business customers who no longer have money to spend.

The Republican attack machine (helped by Democrats like Booker and Ford who have been feeding at the Wall Street trough for their entire careers) wants to intimidate the Obama campaign by making the claim that any attack on greedy business practices like the ones Romney perfected at Bain is an attack on all business and the market. It’s the same kind of argument Republicans make when they complain about class warfare politics when Democrats suggest that millionaires ought to pay a little more in taxes. It is an utterly soulless, amoral argument. But this is a fight Democrats can and will win if we make our case, because I think most people understand that there are ethical and unethical business practices. And they get that there is a difference between making money by manipulating the tax code and squeezing all the value out of businesses before throwing them away, and making money by making and selling good products that people want to buy. Biden laid this case out beautifully in a speech in Youngstown:

Obama Should Be Attacking Casino Capitalism

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website
 

I wish President Obama would draw the obvious connection between Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase.

That way his so-called “attack” on private equity is neither a personal attack on Mitt Romney nor a generalized attack on American business.

It’s an attack on a particular kind of capitalism that Romney and JPMorgan both practice: Using other peoples’ money to make big bets which, if they go wrong, can wreak havoc on the economy.
It’s the substitution of casino capitalism for real capitalism, the dominance of the betting parlor over the real business of America, financial innovation rather than product innovation.

It’s been terrible for the American economy and for our democracy.

It’s also why Obama has to come out swinging about JPMorgan. The JPMorgan Chase debacle would have been prevented if the Volcker Rule were sufficiently strict, prohibiting banks from using commercial deposits to make bets except very specific offsetting bets (hedges) on narrow classes of trades.

But Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan have been lobbying like mad to loosen the Volcker Rule and widen that exception to include the very kind of reckless bets JPMorgan made. And they’re still at it, as evidenced by Dimon’s current claim that the rule that eventually emerges would allow those bets.

As a practical matter, the Volcker Rule is hopeless. It was intended to be Glass-Steagall lite — a more nuanced version of the original Depression-era law that separated commercial from investment banking. But JPMorgan has proven that any nuance — any exception — will be stretched beyond recognition by the big banks.

So much money can be made when these bets turn out well that the big banks will stop at nothing to keep the spigot open.

There’s no alternative but to resurrect Glass-Steagall as a whole. Even then, the biggest banks are still too big to fail or to regulate. We also need to heed the recent advice of the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, and break them up.

At the same time, there’s no point to the “carried interest” loophole that allows private-equity managers like Mitt Romney to treat their incomes as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent, when they’ve risked no money of their own.

If private equity were good for America it wouldn’t need this or the other tax preference it depends on, elevating debt over equity. But the private equity industry has huge political clout, which is why these tax preferences remain.

Get it? Bain Capital and JPMorgan are parts of the same problem. The President should be leading the charge against both.

What The Bain Debate Is Really About

By Terrance Heath, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

DonkeyHotey

The 2012 presidential election may go down as one of the strangest political seasons in recent memory, for the simple reason that the influence of the financial sector in politics, policy and the economy has caused Republicans to sound like Democrats and Democrat to sound like Republicans — usually with confounding results.

When Republicans sound like Democrats, like Newt Gingrich attacking Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital, they tend to start arguments they can't win. When Democrats start sounding like Republicans, like Cory Booker defending Bain Capital, they tend forfeit arguments they could win. That's because, in both cases, the politicians are arguing about the wrong things, in order to avoid the real argument  — the one America needs to have, and Americans need to win; the argument over what kind of economy we will have going forward.

Gingrich's attack on Romney's record confused many conservatives, who equated it with an attack on capitalism itself. Newark Mayor Cory Booker echoed the concerns of confused conservatives when he called the Obama campaigns ads attacking Romney's record at Bain Capital a "nauseating" attack on private equity, labeling them a distraction. "It's either going to be a small campaign about this crap or it's going to be a big campaign, in my opinion, about the issues that the American public cares about," Booker said.

What Booker, Democrats like him, and conservatives now lauding his diatribe ignore or don't realize is that the issues affecting voters don't come much bigger and don't get much more real than the kind of capitalism Bain represents.

Bain Capitalism

As Digby said, if Romney is going to run on his Bain Capital record and tout his private equity background as his main qualification for the presidency, then his track record at Bain is fair game. I summed up that track record in my original post about his brand of "vulture capitalism."

A former managing partner at Bain, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, made it clear that job creation was never the point at Bain.

Bain managers said their mission was clear. "I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation," said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years before forming his own firm. "The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors."

Under Romney's leadership, Bain certainly created wealth for its investors, no matter what happened to the companies it acquired or the the people worked for them. The Wall Street Journal's revealing look at Romney's time at Bain shows that 22% of the companies Bain invested on under Romney's watch either filed for bankruptcy, reorganized, or closed their doors — sometimes with substantial job losses. As Pat Garofalo pointed out, that's nearly one fourth of the companies Bain invested in.

Wall Street, Romney, And Obama

By Mike Lux, cross-posted from Crooks and Liars

The most critical battle in this election year is the battle over Wall Street. Candidates all over the place, from the high profile candidates like Elizabeth Warren to a slew of others all over the country, are battling over who is on Wall Street’s side, who wants to keep bailing them out, and who is pushing them to go to jail. But nowhere is this battle being played out more prominently than in the race for the White House.

The Obama campaign is doing a major push in the coming weeks on Mitt Romney’s sordid history at the helm of Bain Capital. His fellow Republicans called it vulture capitalism, and they were right. Mitt bought companies (many of them doing just fine at the time he bought them), loaded them up with massive amounts of debt that Bain could write off on their taxes, in many cases destroyed and outsourced jobs and cut pay and benefits, and then frequently carved them up and sold off the pieces to maximize short-term profits. A few of these companies ended up surviving this brutal process and becoming more profitable, and we will hear a lot from Mitt about those examples. But way too many times, Mitt and Bain left these companies, and especially their workers, far worse for the wear, leaving behind a lot of shattered lives in the process, while Mitt and his fun-loving pals stuffed money in their pockets and walked away. High School wasn’t the only place Mitt brutalized those weaker than him, and he enjoyed doing it.

Bain Capital was Wall Street at its worst. But the cutthroat, anything-goes-in-the-pursuit-of-one-more-dollar culture at Bain has infected our entire banking system. The Obama campaign is right to attack on Bain and on the culture of Wall Street; it is in my view their single most powerful attack line. However, that attack will be undercut unless they buttress their own credibility on taking on Wall Street. Republicans aren’t going to hesitate coming after Obama hard on his ties to Wall Street (ironically with a lot of Wall Street money) in order to weaken the campaign’s credibility when they attack Bain, and we are seeing signs of that right now.

Etch-A-Sketch Quote Of The Day

“I’m not familiar precisely with what I said, but I’ll stand by what I said, whatever it was.” -- Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney's Commencement Advice: WWCCD (What Would Charles Colson Do)?

Mitt Romney, in an attempt to assure the Religious Right of his social conservative bona fides, delivered the commencement address at Liberty University, the Evangelical Christian University founded by Jerry Falwell.

The reviews are in and it appears that he was a hit with the white Evangelicals he was trying to win over.  As the Christian Science Monitor reports, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, praised Romney's "well-delivered speech," which "accentuated the core values issues that are essential to a strong nation and of great importance to evangelicals . .  that America's financial greatness is directly tied to moral and cultural wholeness.”  And Richard Land, the Baptist pastor from Tennessee who heads The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, agreed, finding shared "values and a similar worldview" on marriage and abortion.

It was this common worldview which Romney stressed in trying to bridge the gap between his Mormon faith and that of these conservative Christians:  

People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology. Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview. The best case for this is always the example of Christian men and women working and witnessing to carry God’s love into every life - people like the late Chuck Colson.

Yes of course, "always the example" of the late Charles Wendell Colson, former hatchet man for Richard Nixon, whose ruthlessness was captured by his oft-quoted remark that he would "walk over my own grandmother" if it would help Nixon get re-elected.  H.R. Haldeman wrote that Colson “encouraged the dark impulses in Nixon’s mind and acted on those impulses instead of ignoring them and letting them die.”  Among his many dastardly acts was compiling Nixon's infamous "enemies list," orchestrating the effort to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, and hiring E. Howard Hunt, who later led the Watergate break-in.

Hunter S. Thompson described Colson as "the guiding light behind Nixon's whole arsenal of illegal, immoral, unethical 'black advance' or 'dirty tricks' department."  (See Fear and Loathing at the Watergate, where HST writes about his "abortive plot" to "seize Colson out of his house and drag him down Pennsylvania Avenue tied behind a huge gold Oldsmobile Cutlass" and "cutting him loose in front of the White House Guard Gate," an idea hatched out of frustration that Colson -- at that time -- appeared to be "the only one of Nixon's first-rank henchmen who would probably not even be indicted."  But I digress.)

Turns out Colson was indicted on obstruction of justice charges for leaking information to the press about Ellsberg, for which he served seven months in federal prison.  By then he had become an Evangelical Christian, and while serving time founded a prison ministry.

He thus became, as Sarah Posner writes, "the original culture warrior," who "helped forge the Catholic-evangelical alliance against abortion."

He was nothing short of a battle commander in the cosmic culture wars, the manufactured showdown between the “Christian worldview” — the only “true” way to see things — and other “worldviews” he insisted were antithetical to it.

Put another way, as Ed Kilgore does, Colson

was for many years the chief advocate among conservative evangelicals of a “united front” with other conservative Christians (notably Catholic “traditionalists”) to pursue an aggressive cultural agenda wrapped in claims that those enemies of the “Christian worldview” were threatening religious liberty, which happens to have become the battle-cry of Christian Right opposition to Barack Obama. 

So what better role model could young conservative Christians have than Chuck Colson because, as Hunter at Daily Kos writes

when you think about how to be a good, upstanding Christian, you should be thinking about convicted Watergate felon Chuck Colson, who did nasty things for partisan political gain, got caught, got sent to prison, and then discovered that mentioning Jesus was a fine way to make a generation of religious conservatives consider your own felon-for-your-party path through life as a decent career choice. Be like Chuck!

GOP = Cognitive Dissonance

Jon Stewart brilliantly connects the dots:

The Daily Show
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Just Another GOP Warrior Against Women: Romney Fails To Put Money Where His Mouth Is On Pay Equity

Mitt Romney supports pay equity in principle. Does he support the Paycheck Fairness Act?

By Laura Clawson, cross-posted from Daily Kos

DonkeyHotey

Senate Democrats are trying to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, to take the next big step past the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Senate Republicans blocked it in 2010 despite a 58-vote majority in favor at the time. What could make congressional Republicans change their mind? Well, there's this little thing called a presidential election, and their party's presumptive nominee has said that he is favor of pay equity—in principle.

If Mitt Romney said he supported the Paycheck Fairness Act, might that flip some Republican votes? Greg Sargent argues that it might, and it would certainly put Republicans who care about winning the presidency in a tough spot if Romney embraced fair pay as a way to make the case to women that he would represent them and their economic concerns. But I'm with DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz: It's not going to happen.

“It speaks volumes that Romney can’t say whether or not he would have signed [Lily Ledbetter] into law,” Wasserman Schultz said on the call. “And so I feel quite certain that he also opposes the Paycheck Fairness Act.” “That bill is not law, because Republicans blocked it,” she continued. “Republicans have absolutely no interest in ensuring pay equity in this country ... Romney would turn back the clock and leave us stagnant and stifled.”

Republicans blocked this law once, and Mitt Romney—he's a Republican. And he's no kind of leader. Not only does he not want to see women have a better chance at fair pay, he would never take the political risk of trying to get Senate Republicans to do something they don't want to do.

But if Romney is going to go around the country making claims about Barack Obama having been bad for women economically, he really needs to tell us where he stands on this. Pay equity in principle is all very well, but where does Mitt Romney stand when it comes to making the principle reality? Does he stand with women and against discrimination, or does he stand with employers looking to save a buck by discriminating against women and with Senate Republicans fighting the War on Women?

Whatever Mitt Romney thinks, tell your senators to vote for the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Obama Plays The Republican "Macho" Game

As Peter Bergen reported in the Sunday Times, President Obama is "one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades."

Mr. Obama decimated Al Qaeda’s leadership. He overthrew the Libyan dictator. He ramped up drone attacks in Pakistan, waged effective covert wars in Yemen and Somalia and authorized a threefold increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan. He became the first president to authorize the assassination of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and played an operational role in Al Qaeda, and was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. And, of course, Mr. Obama ordered and oversaw the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Nevertheless, the "American public and chattering classes continue to regard the president as a thinker, not an actor; a negotiator, not a fighter."  So, I understand why Obama believes that he needs to tout his national security chops.  And the one-year anniversary of bin Laden's death provides the perfect opportunity to do so.  This may be good politics, but it is nonetheless distasteful.

As Digby puts it:

I get why the Democrats are doing it. I'm sure it's extremely satisfying to land those punches on the right wing blowhards after all the years of taunting and jeering about liberal cowardice. To be able to say they killed the evil mastermind where the swaggering codpiece failed is probably too much of a temptation for them to pass up. I get it.

But I hate it. I hated it when the Republicans did it and I hate it now. I don't believe the most powerful nation on earth should be running its democracy via schoolyard power plays. This is how we ended up stuck in Vietnam and how we have found ourselves floundering about in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It's why we can't stop spending trillions on useless weapons systems, why we "have" to continue to fund ridiculous programs like Star Wars and why everyone in the political establishment assumes that the only answer to budget problems is to cut the so-called "entitlements."

I know we live in a dangerous world. But this nation is extremely rich and extremely powerful and its most important assets are morality and mystique. I'm not going to argue about the morality of killing Osama bin laden, but it should be remembered that our unilateral wars,torture regimes and insistence on imperial prerogatives have already taken a toll on America's reputation for moral behavior.

As for mystique, well let's just say that schoolyard taunts and manly chest beating doesn't leave much to the imagination. I don't expect the macho worshiping conservatives to ever change this. It's fundamental to their very identity. I was hoping for something a little bit more sophisticated and a little bit more mature from the so-called "reality-based community."

That said, Romney's response -- that he or any other President, even Jimmy Carter for Gawd's sake, would have done the same thing with regard to bin Laden -- was not only asinine but contravenes earlier remarks that he wouldn't focus on hunting down bin Laden and that candidate Obama was misguided in asserting that he would unilaterally go into Pakistan to get bin Laden.

And hey, shouldn't the media be all over Romney for criticizing our foreign policy successes?  Shouldn't they be asking why he hates America? 

As Greg Sargent points out:

Back in 2004 and 2006, when Republicans were showcasing George W. Bush’s war-on-terror routine as central to their case for reelection, and Dems were responding by attacking Republicans for politicizing national security and pointing to Bush’s failures, Dems were widely described as the ones taking the big political risk then, too.

We were told again and again during the 2004 and 2006 campaigns that Dems risked coming across as not rooting for American military success; there was little discussion of any danger for Republicans in playing up Bush’s “war president” routine. Now the situation, roughly, is reversed — and this time we’re talking about the Obama administration’s successful targeting of America’s number one global arch-enemy — yet again it’s Dems who are seen to be playing with political fire here.

This remains the Republican's game.  As Sargent concludes, "there’s still a strong built-in presumption of political dominance for Republicans on national security, and [] any gains Dems have made on the issue are not deeply felt by Beltway establishment types."

For better or worse, that's not going to prevent Obama from trying.

The GOP's Death Wish

Why Republicans Can't Stop Pissing Off  Hispanics, Women, and Young People

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

What are the three demographic groups whose electoral impact is growing fastest? Hispanics, women, and young people. Who are Republicans pissing off the most? Latinos, women, and young people.

It’s almost as if the GOP can’t help itself.

Start with Hispanic voters, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they comprise an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney by more than two to one, according to a recent Pew poll.

The movement of Hispanics into the Democratic camp has been going on for decades. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? Replicating California Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s disastrous support almost twenty years ago for Proposition 187 – which would have screened out undocumented immigrants from public schools, health care, and other social services, and required law-enforcement officials to report any “suspected” illegals. (Wilson, you may remember, lost that year’s election, and California’s Republican Party has never recovered.)

The Arizona law now before the Supreme Court – sponsored by Republicans in the state and copied by Republican legislators and governors in several others – would authorize police to stop anyone looking Hispanic and demand proof of citizenship. It’s nativism disguised as law enforcement.
Romney is trying to distance himself from that law, but it’s not working. That may be because he dubbed it a “model law” during February’s Republican primary debate in Arizona, and because its author (former state senator Russell Pearce, who was ousted in a special election last November largely by angry Hispanic voters) says he’s working closely with Romney advisers.

Hispanics are also reacting to Romney’s attack just a few months ago on GOP rival Texas Governor Rick Perry for supporting in-state tuition at the University of Texas for children of undocumented immigrants. And to Romney’s advocacy of what he calls “self-deportation” – making life so difficult for undocumented immigrants and their families that they choose to leave.

As if all this weren’t enough, the GOP has been pushing voter ID laws all over America, whose obvious aim is to intimidate Hispanic voters so they won’t come to the polls. But they may have the opposite effect – emboldening the vast majority of ethnic Hispanics, who are American citizens, to vote in even greater numbers and lend even more support to Obama and other Democrats.

Or consider women – whose political and economic impact in America continues to grow (women are fast becoming better educated than men and the major breadwinners in American homes). The political gender gap is huge. According to recent polls, women prefer Obama to Romney by over 20 percent.

So what is the GOP doing to woo women back? Attacking them. Last February, House Republicans voted to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. Last May, they unanimously passed the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” banning the District of Columbia from funding abortions for low-income women. (The original version removed all exceptions – rape, incest, and endangerment to a mother’s life – except “forcible” rape.)

Earlier this year Republican legislators in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Idaho, and Alabama pushed bills requiring women seeking abortions to undergo invasive vaginal ultrasound tests (Pennsylvania Republicans even wanted proof such had viewed the images).

Republican legislators in Georgia and Arizona passed bills banning most abortions after twenty weeks of pregnancy. The Georgia bill would also require that any abortion after 20 weeks be done in a way to bring the fetus out alive. Republican legislators in Texas have voted to eliminate funding for any women’s healthcare clinic with an affiliation to an abortion provider – even if the affiliation is merely a shared name, employee, or board member.

All told, over 400 Republican bills are pending in state legislatures, attacking womens’ reproductive rights.

But even this doesn’t seem enough for the GOP. Republicans in Wisconsin just repealed a law designed to prevent employers from discriminating against women.

Or, finally, consider students – a significant and growing electoral force, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? Attack them, of course.
Republican Budget Chair Paul Ryan’s budget plan – approved by almost every House Republican and enthusiastically endorsed by Mitt Romney – allows rates on student loans to double on July 1 – from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. That will add an average of $1,000 a year to student debt loads, which already exceed credit-card debt.

House Republicans say America can’t afford the $6 billion a year it would require to keep student loan rates down to where they are now. But that same Republican plan gives wealthy Americans trillions of dollars in tax cuts over the next decade. (Under mounting political pressure, House Republicans have come up with just enough money to keep the loan program going for another year – safely past Election Day – by raiding a fund established for preventive care in the new health-care act.)

Here again, Romney is trying to tiptoe away from the GOP position. He now says he supports keeping student loans where they were. Yet only a few months ago he argued that subsidized student loans were bad because they encouraged colleges to raise their tuition.

How can a political party be so dumb as to piss off Hispanics, women, and young people? Because the core of its base is middle-aged white men – and it doesn’t seem to know how to satisfy its base without at the same time turning off everyone who’s not white, male, and middle-aged.

 Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Beyond Outrage.

Jamming Too Slow On Student Loans

"I'm President Barack Obama, and I too want to slow jam the news."

You've probably seen this already -- President Obama's appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon during which they "slow jam the news" on the need for Congress to prevent interest rates on student loans from doubling (Congress must do so by July 1, or rates will go up from 3.4 to 6.8%):



At this point Republicans are predictably against extending the current rates, and their presidential candidate, Mr. Etch-a-Sketch, used to be with them.  Remember when he said students shouldn't count on the government's help:  “It would be popular for me to stand up and say I’m going to give you government money to pay for your college, but I’m not going to promise that . . .  And don’t expect the government to forgive the debt that you take on.”

But Romney is beginning to understand how potent an issue this is, and this week conceded that he would support an extension of the current interest rates on Stafford-loans, although as Amy Davidson points out, "there was no musical component to the announcement."

His fellow Republicans in Congress obscure their opposition to having the government assist students with their debt by claiming they don't object to extending the lower interest rates (although the Ryan Budget that passed the House doesn't do so) but are concerned with how to pay for it.  As Greg Sargent points out they are floating various ways to pay for the extension that seem likely to get shot down by the Democrats.

And while Democrats are merely trying to maintain the status quo, it is worth making the important point, as Robert Borosage does, that they should be building the groundwork for more progressive reforms to help students, such as 0% loans and/or free tuition at public colleges.

Judicial Activism: Right Wing Edition

Judge Janice Rogers Brown

Whatever disappointments the left may have with President Obama, it must be understood how devastating a Romney Presidency would be in terms of the Supreme Court (and lower federal courts) and the preservation of fundamental rights, liberties and democratic principles.  (See Supreme Court Matters; Romney Gets Borked.)  

Janice Rogers Brown was an extreme right wing justice on a very right wing California Supreme Court from 1997 to 2005, when she was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by President Bush, where she currently sits.  Rogers Brown, who has been known to trumpet Ayn Rand and decry Supreme Court decisions upholding the New Deal as "the triumph of our own socialist revolution," is precisely the kind of judge likely to be nominated by the next Republican president.  Professor Adam Winkler cites a recent Brown opinion to illustrate why this should scare us into action.   -- Lovechilde

Startling Conservative Judicial Opinion Should Motivate Progressives

By Adam Winkler, cross-posted from American Constitution Society

The age of judicial activism - err, I mean "judicial engagement" - is upon us. Having realized that they don't always win with voters, leading conservatives are abandoning their traditional emphasis on judicial restraint and respect for the decisions of democratically elected officials. After years of berating liberal judges for overturning laws in the name of controversial constitutional principles, conservatives are now embracing the notion of an active, "engaged" judiciary.  Only they want one that aggressively protects those rights conservatives prefer: property rights, rights of religious expression, the liberty of contract, the right not to buy broccoli - regardless of decades of established case law.

For evidence of this trend, one need not look further than startling concurring opinion by D.C. Circuit Judge Janice Rogers Brown in Hettinga v. United States. Brown, who is often mentioned as a potential Supreme Court nominee in a Republican administration, used her opinion to audition for a leadership role in this new movement. The time has come, she wrote, to end the pernicious practice of allowing legislatures to regulate the economy. "America's cowboy capitalism was long ago disarmed by a democratic process increasingly dominated by powerful groups with economic interests antithetical to competitors and consumers. And the courts, from which the victims of burdensome regulation sought protection, have been negotiating the terms of surrender since the 1930s." The proof? The "Supreme Court allowed state and local jurisdictions to regulate property, pursuant to their police powers, in the public interest, and to adopt whatever economic policy may reasonably be deemed to promote the public welfare."

Besides Brown’s Bizarro world premises in which things like consumer protection laws harm consumers, her ode to the Lochner era reminds us of the importance of judicial appointments. For decades, Republican presidents have used the lower federal courts as a farm team for the Supreme Court, smartly filling positions with potential stars to see how they perform. This is a smart strategy, though one Democrats haven’t followed. Instead, Democratic presidents have tended to name competent, diverse people who aren’t likely to be controversial. But in the current political climate, even these clear consensus nominees are held up in the Senate, leaving the federal courts with a critical number of vacancies and a troubling imbalance in our courts. To counter the newly “engaged” judicial conservatives like Brown, legal liberals need to be fighting for judges, particularly those judges with the intellectual fortitude to go toe-to-toe with the leading lights of conservative constitutionalism. Respect for our Constitution and settled precedent demands nothing less.

Graphic Of The Day

Mitt Romney has been running for President for so long that it is easy to forget how little actual experience he has working in government -- one term as governor of Massachusetts.   Steve Benen created a graphic documenting the years of experience in public office or active-duty military service for all of the recent major-party nominees, which shows that "Romney has less experience in public service than any modern presidential candidate."

(Purple = active-duty military service; red = state executive; green = mayor; gray = state legislator; light blue = U.S. Congress; orange = presidential Cabinet or in a cabinet-level position; dark blue = president or vice president.)

Romney's Lies And Fake Outrage Won't Obscure His Anti-Women Policy Positions

Tom Tomorrow

Mitt Romney's campaign is suffering from a potentially debilitating gender gap, which is not at all surprising given his and his party's neanderthal positions on reproductive rights, health care, gender discrimination and a host of other issues.  So what do they do?

First, lie, and argue that it is Obama who is actually waging the war on women. 

Then when an opportunity presents itself, lie some more and gin up the faux outrage machine.

Hilary Rosen, a Democratic contributor to CNN -- with no connection to the Obama campaign -- inappropriately notes that Ann Romney “hasn’t worked a day in her life” as part of a larger point that while her husband is  propping her up as a compassionate defender of all women, "she's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we -- why do we worry about their future."

The Romneys and Republican Party are now in full outrage mode, falsely claiming that Rosen is an Obama operative, demanding apologies and using the statement to show that it is really the Obama and Democratic Party that disrespect women.

Do we need to counter this by trotting out all the bat-shit crazy stuff about women spewed by random Republicans?  Or how about just those who are official Romney advisors?

Think Progress has a handy list for starters:

• Donald Trump: The flamboyant reality show star is “a top Mitt Romney surrogate” according to Politico’s Mike Allen. Trump recorded robo-calls supporting Romney in primary states and he participated in “a ton of talk radio for Romney in Michigan, Arizona and Ohio.” Trump also has a long history of sexism, including telling the male contestants on his reality show to “rate the women” contestants on how sexually attractive they are. Calling TV personality Rosie O’Donnell a “big, fat pig” and an “animal,” after she criticized Trump. And, just this month, offering to expose his “very, very impress[ive]” penis to a top woman attorney. The top Romney surrogate, however, is also quite unfazed by criticism of his sexism. As he told Esquire in 1991, “it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of [expletive].”


• Bay Buchanan: Yesterday, in an attempt to overcome Romney’s weak poll numbers with women voters, the Romney campaign hosted Bay Buchanan on a press call as an official campaign surrogate. Bay, the sister of disgraced former TV pundit Pat Buchanan, has a long history of opposition to women’s rights. In a 2003 speech on the “four failures” of feminism, Bay Buchanan claimed that women are being “sold a bill of goods” when they pursue careers instead of having children, and she compared modern women to “alleycats” with respect to sex.


• Robert Bork: Former judge and failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork is the co-chair of Romney’s “Judicial Advisory Committee.” Bork opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans employment and other discrimination against women, calling the idea that laws can require private companies to cease discriminating a “principle of unsurpassed ugliness.” More recently, the top Romney legal advisor mocked the very idea that gender discrimination even exists. In Bork’s words, “[i]t seems to me silly to say, ‘Gee, they’re discriminated against and we need to do something about it.’ They aren’t discriminated against anymore.”

Joan McCarter focuses on the real issue here: "what the Romney-Ryan budget would do to women who do know what it's like to struggle financially. "  As McCarter explains, the budget Romney has embraced would  "shred every bit of support women and their families need through every stage of life."

• At least $291 billion will disappear from WIC, nutrition assistance, Head Start, child care, job training, Pell Grants, and more programs that support struggling families.
• $134 billion from SNAP, or food stamps, will mean something like 8.2 billion meals not served, in a single year; food out of the mouths of children and the elderly, a disproportionate number of which are female.
• $2.4 trillion from Medicaid and other health services will mean mothers will have a harder time finding medical care for themselves and their children, and for their elderly parents, again which are disproportionately female.
• 56 percent of Medicare beneficiaries are women, and the Romney-Ryan voucher plan will make them pay more and more each year out of their own pockets, to try to keep their medical care.

That is something to get outraged about.