Friday, September 28, 2012

Ron Reagan: Morris, Hannity completely out of touch

Ron Reagan is right -- the Republicans are trying to set up an excuse for when they lose large in the election.  They're going to say Obama didn't really win the election because the pollsters suppressed the Republican vote. Already I am receiving Bubble-view stuff from Tea Partiers claiming that Democrats are suppressing the military vote, completely ignoring the voter suppression in their own states with the new photo ID laws Republicans have instituted for voting.  But what about their own Fox News poll, which shows exactly the same thing as all the other polls -- that Obama is far ahead of Romney everywhere?  OOPS. Well, let's just not mention that.... 

FOX NEWS HAS SELF-DELUSION SYNDROME
Ron Reagan, the liberal son of former President Ronald Reagan, on Thursday said that the so-called ‘poll truthers’ at Fox News like Karl Rove and Dick Morris who deny any poll that says President Barack Obama is ahead were so out of touch that they must be smoking a crack pipe in the network’s green room.
During a Monday segment on Fox News, Morris had claimed that Romney was “in a very strong position” even though polls showed him down in all nine battleground states.
“I believe if the election were held today, I believe Romney would win by four or five points,” Morris explained. “I believe he would carry Florida, Ohio, Virginia. I believe he would carry Nevada. I believe he would carry Pennsylvania — Pennsylvania. And I believe he would be competitive in Michigan.”“People need to understand that the polling this year is the worst it’s ever been,” he insisted. “Because this is the first election where if I tell you who’s going to vote, I can tell you how they’re going to vote. … And the models these folks are using are crazy. They assume a Democratic edge of six or seven points.”
On Thursday, MSNBC host Chris Matthews asked Reagan why Fox News would invite Morris on to slam even their own poll — which showed Obama leading Romney nationally, 48-43.
“You sometimes imagine that back in the Republican green room, there’s this giant crack pipe that they’re all hitting on constantly, hitting it hard,” Reagan joked.
“It’s time to say, ‘Don’t bogart that, Morris’ because I think he’s been on that pipe longer than most,” Matthews agreed.
“It’s true, he bought the pipe, I think,” Reagan added. “But let’s not give them too much credit here. The rank and file actually believes some of this nonsense. They believe that evolution didn’t happen, global warming is a hoax, Obama is a Kenyan. But the people like Dick Morris — and Sean Hannity for that matter, who has spread a lot of this kind of propaganda — they know better than this and there is a method to their madness here.”
“They’re not delusional, they’re dishonest. They’re not crazy, they’re craven… What they’re trying to do here and accomplish here is to say in advance, if President Obama wins this election, it’s because the pollsters suppressed the Republican vote, it’s therefore an illegitimate election, he’s not really president. They’re setting the table for that.”

Raw Story (http://s.tt/1oCFC)
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Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Romney can't get Republican crowd to chant his name

When Joe Scarborough saw the video, he called out "Oh, sweet Jesus!" and put his head in his hands as Romney failed to get the crowd at his rally to chant his name.  It's really getting pathetic.  Watching that pitiful scene, I felt embarrassed and sorry for Romney, and I don't even like him! Every time he opens his mouth, he puts his foot in it. He's making it very easy for Obama to keep the presidency. (~.~)  I think Romney has led a golden life of privilege from childhood, which kept him from ever understanding or relating to others who have had to work and scramble for a living. He has the arrogant aura of the ultra rich who never rub elbows with anyone "lesser" than them.  When he speaks, his eyes don't seem sincere. His laugh doesn't seem authentic--he always looks uncomfortable in his own skin and appears to make others around him feel uncomfortable in his presence.  To tell the truth, he doesn't seem quite human--he's more like a robot (but not a very well-programmed one! (~.~)).  I can't imagine him negotiating with any foreign leaders.  They'd have to send a keeper along with him.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/09/26/scarborough-cries-oh-sweet-jesus-as-romney-fails-to-lead-chant/
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Chris Hedges Speaks Truth, Sorry to Say


As on reader's comment puts it:  We have only the illusion of democracy.  To get the full impact of truth, read Hedge's full essay at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_do_you_take_your_poison_20120924/


HOW DO YOU TAKE YOUR POISON? 
By Chris Hedges

EXCERPT: Obama is not in charge. Romney would not be in charge. Politicians are the public face of corporate power. They are corporate employees. Their personal narratives, their promises, their rhetoric and their idiosyncrasies are meaningless. And that, perhaps, is why the cost of the two presidential campaigns is estimated to reach an obscene $2.5 billion. The corporate state does not produce a product that is different. It produces brands that are different. And brands cost a lot of money to sell.

Corporate power, no matter who is running the ward after January 2013, is poised to carry out U.S. history’s most savage assault against the poor and the working class, not to mention the Earth’s ecosystem. And no one in power, no matter what the bedside manner, has any intention or ability to stop it.


Full Reader's Comment:  The whole election process has become nothing more than the illusion of democracy.

We live in a world of illusion and fantasy where reality and truth have been replaced by corporate propaganda and brainwashing.


We are simply peasants working to support a system we no longer have any ownership of, or power to control or change.


The masses are controlled by television where they are told what to think and what to do.


The educational system is controlled by government who is in turn controlled by corporations who desire the system to produce mindless drones who live their lives producing labor and consuming goods and services that keep the corporate gods in their place at the top of the pyramid of humanity.


It is all a joke, unfortunately the joke is on us.





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Chris Hedges Speaks Truth, Sorry to Say

As on reader's comment puts it:  We have only the illusion of democracy.  To get the full impact of truth, read Hedge's full essay at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_do_you_take_your_poison_20120924/


HOW DO YOU TAKE YOUR POISON? 
By Chris Hedges

EXCERPT: Obama is not in charge. Romney would not be in charge. Politicians are the public face of corporate power. They are corporate employees. Their personal narratives, their promises, their rhetoric and their idiosyncrasies are meaningless. And that, perhaps, is why the cost of the two presidential campaigns is estimated to reach an obscene $2.5 billion. The corporate state does not produce a product that is different. It produces brands that are different. And brands cost a lot of money to sell.

Corporate power, no matter who is running the ward after January 2013, is poised to carry out U.S. history’s most savage assault against the poor and the working class, not to mention the Earth’s ecosystem. And no one in power, no matter what the bedside manner, has any intention or ability to stop it.


Full Reader's Comment:  The whole election process has become nothing more than the illusion of democracy.

We live in a world of illusion and fantasy where reality and truth have been replaced by corporate propaganda and brainwashing.


We are simply peasants working to support a system we no longer have any ownership of, or power to control or change.


The masses are controlled by television where they are told what to think and what to do.


The educational system is controlled by government who is in turn controlled by corporations who desire the system to produce mindless drones who live their lives producing labor and consuming goods and services that keep the corporate gods in their place at the top of the pyramid of humanity.


It is all a joke, unfortunately the joke is on us.


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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Uh oh - Ryan goes Rogue: He is now calling Romney the "Stench"

Ryan suddenly woke up and realized his association with Romney has sullied his image, probably irreparably.  Gone are the days when he was looked up to in the Republican party as intelligent and a wonk (never mind that his economic numbers never added up--but Rush Limbaugh's dittohead Republicans hadn't noticed that).  Now Ryan has been revealed to be the dunderhead that he always was, simply by being thrust onto the national stage with Romney.  According to Politico, which has been following him around, Ryan now refers to Romney as "Stench," as in saying to his aides, "If Stench calls, take a message."  Read all about it at: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81618.html

Is the Republican party doomed to have vice presidential candidates who end up going rogue?  Ryan is following Palin's path.  May it turn out exactly the same for him as it did for Sarah.
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Autistic 10-year-old girl memorizes and performs complicated ballet

Such a touching video -- watching it fills the heart with love for this little girl dancing the ballet from memory.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/24/ten-year-old-autistic-gir_n_1909129.html
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Catholic Church tells Germans: Pay church tax or no sacraments

If you ever wanted to know what the bottom line in the Catholic Church is, wonder no more:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/09/25/no-tax-no-sacraments-decrees-german-catholic-church/


Germany’s Roman Catholics who refuse to pay a church tax will be barred from receiving the sacraments or becoming a godparent, under controversial new restrictions entering into force on Monday.  The bishops’ decree said that “if the person who has left the Church has not displayed any regret before their death, a religious burial may be refused.”

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Romney wonders why airplanes don't have windows that open

You couldn't make this stuff up... the accompanying video in the link below gives the answer to Romney's question.  Now I have a question: Does anyone really want this man as President?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/25/rachel-maddow-mitt-romney-airplane-windows_n_1912167.html?utm_hp_ref=media
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Maureen Dowd's latest column re. Romney campaign

The Son Also Sets
by Maureen Dowd, NY Times

SOMETIMES in the course of human events, we must ask, as Hemingway did in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” what is that leopard doing at this altitude?

As a candidate, Mitt Romney is awkward, off-putting and hollow, so bad that if he were a Bain company, he would shut himself down.

The billion-dollar Republican campaign should be sweeping the floor with the deflated President Obama after four years of 8 percent-plus unemployment. Yet it is curdling. The little donations have dried up; how long before the big money follows?

We must also ask the Hemingway question about Stuart Stevens, the Hemingway manqué running Mitt’s campaign. “The Square and the Flair,” The New Republic dubbed the synthetic candidate and his sentient adviser, who started as Eudora Welty’s paperboy and lived by the Oscar Wilde maxim: “Nothing succeeds like excess.”

The 58-year-old Mississippi native has written a sexy political novel, scripts for “Northern Exposure” and Evelyn Waugh-style travel odysseys. He was a consultant for George Clooney on “The Ides of March” and has even written an HBO docudrama about W.’s warrantless domestic spying program, centering on The Times’s decision to publish the article by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau that exposed it.

It’s hard to believe that the self-styled Renaissance Man who wrote this in “Feeding Frenzy” — “But next there was the Fricassee De Homard Breton Au Jus De Viande aux chicons confits au gingembre et citron vert. It was fabulous, contradictory but not conflicting, every taste a surprise” — works for the Tin Man, whose favorite meal is chocolate milk and peanut butter.

Stevens skied 100 miles to the North Pole and biked 450 miles through the Pyrenees. He wrote a piece for Outside magazine about taking steroids for a French bike race. After Oxford and U.C.L.A. film school, he fell into politics as an escapade, and he likes to maintain that larky affect.

In 2000, when he worked for W., as New Hampshire Republicans headed to the polls on Primary Day to deliver a near-fatal 19-point drubbing of his candidate, Stevens headed out from his hotel carrying skis. Asked by a reporter about his insouciance, he replied that there was nothing he could do at that point.

But his “devil-may-care routine,” as The New Republic calls it, may be wearing thin. This isn’t merely a plotline for some future script.

This is the real deal.

You get the sense that the strategist considers himself cooler than the candidate, that he’s too hip to walk through fire for Mitt and that he lacks confidence that Romney could be a better campaigner. He treats Mitt like a cardboard cutout, never asking him to risk anything or pushing him to be big, bold and inspirational.

Ann Romney is clearly feeling the strain. On Radio Iowa, she ordered whining Republicans: “Stop it. This is hard. You want to try it? Get in the ring.” She said Americans should realize “how lucky” they were to have Mitt. She sounded entitled, even as her husband dismissed half the country as entitlement junkies.

An Obama adviser calls the Romney campaign “a study in mismanagement,” while the conservative columnist Peggy Noonan deems it “a rolling calamity.” Yet after Tampa, Romney gave promised bonuses totaling $192,440 to at least nine senior campaign staff members working under Stevens.

Even if voters are inclined to fire the incumbent, they need reassurance about what the replacement would do. Romney has failed to give details where needed, and when he does give details, they contradict his own past stands.

He finally released a tax return from 2011, showing he paid a higher tax rate than required. The press immediately unearthed a Romney quote from July: “If I had paid more than are legally due, I don’t think I’d be qualified to become president.” Case closed.

Aside from Mitt’s penchant for being a piñata, the campaign is a moveable feast of missteps: spending money at the wrong time; putting on biographical ads too late; letting the Obama camp define Romney before he defined himself; staging a disastrous foreign trip; fumbling the convention; and somehow neglecting to tell the candidate that there is no longer any such thing as off the record, if there ever was.

Some Republican strategists, watching it slip away, privately complain that Stevens is a poseur and political atheist who is so busy being a dilettante that he forgets the need to actually have faith.

Was the Hollywood dabbler so swept up in the idea of Clint Eastwood’s benediction that he didn’t vet the 82-year-old actor’s script, or wonder about that empty chair?

He doesn’t realize that having Romney stand for nothing and everything is not as good as having Romney say: Follow me, we’re going to go over here.

“If you don’t believe your guy can lead you to a better place,” said one G.O.P. strategist, “it’s hard to get anybody else to believe it.”

Romney said he liked to fire people. But his downfall may be that he does not.

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Monday, September 24, 2012

Fox News reporting on climate issues is 93% misleading

But you won't be able to change Fox viewers' minds about anything with actual facts.  They prefer right-wing Bubble fiction.  And they'll fight you to the death to defend the lies they've been told and that they wholeheartedly believe to be the truth.  Why even bother to send them proven facts/truth? Their minds are snapped closed with the Faux News vise, which doesn't allow entry to truth.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/09/24/scientists-93-percent-of-fox-news-climate-change-coverage-is-staggeringly-misleading/

Scientists: Fox News is 'staggeringly misleading' on climate change coverage
When it comes to reporting on what scientists say about climate change, the Union of Concerned Scientists told Raw Story that their research shows Fox News can be counted upon to mislead its viewers.
In a study (PDF) published Monday, the group takes Fox News and The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page to task for consistently misleading their audience on climate change. Data collected over six months showed that Fox News was the worst offender on climate issues between the two, allowing misleading statements to permeate “93 percent” of its broadcasts on the subject from February to July 2012. The Journal‘s editorial page did not fare much better, however: the Union said “81 percent” of their climate coverage from August 2011 to July 2012 was “misleading.”
“[Fox News and The Wall Street Journal] both were staggering in the levels of misleading information about climate science,” Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Raw Story. “We found that both Fox News and [The Wall Street Journal] opinion page have staggeringly high levels of misinformation.”  “We can only base [our opinion] on the evidence that we have and the reporting that’s out there,” she added. “The BBC has undertaken similar types of analysis for their own reporting and that’s what we modeled [our research] after, and we call on News Corporation to do the same.”
The report also cites News Corp. media baron Rupert Murdoch himself for ushering his company along a sustainable energy path and lauds him for announcing in 2011 that News Corp. had become entirely carbon neutral. In an internal News Corp. memo, Murdoch bragged that energy efficiency improvements made company-wide paid for themselves in just two years. “We made a bold commitment in 2007 to embed the values of energy efficiency and environmental sustainability into all of our businesses — for the benefit of our communities and our bottom line,” he wrote.
News Corp. isn’t alone either: 343 S&P 500 companies participated in the 2012 Carbon Disclosure Project, and 92 percent of them reported undertaking “board or executive level oversight” on climate-related matters. The British environmental group behind that study said their results show a “tipping point” has been reached when it comes to corporate acceptance of climate change.
“News Corp. needs to help its staff to differentiate between opinions about climate change and scientific facts,” the Union’s report concludes. “It is entirely appropriate to disagree with specific actions or policies aimed at addressing climate change while accepting the clearly established findings of climate science. And while it is appropriate to question new science as it emerges, it is misleading to reject or sow doubt about established science—in this case, the overwhelming body of evidence that human-caused climate change is occurring.”

Raw Story (http://s.tt/1oeCQ)
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Romney flip-flops again: ER care works for uninsured


Romney can't seem to get his story straight.  Does the man have any core beliefs that can't be changed in a millisecond, depending on whose vote he wants at the moment?  He reminds me of the Woody Allen character "Zelig," who had no personality/character of his own and would actually begin to look exactly like the person he stood next to.  At any time, depending on who he was standing next to, he might become a Native American, an African American, a fat man, a thin man, a bearded man, etc.  Looks like we have Zelig running for President on the Republican ticket.

Below are a few excerpts from the article.  Full article can be read at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/23/mitt-romney-60-minutes-health-care_n_1908129.html

Mitt Romney, On 60 Minutes, Cites Emergency Room As Health Care Option For Uninsured

Posted: Updated: 09/23/2012 10:47 pm EDT

Mitt Romney (Mandel Ngan/AFP/GettyImages)

WASHINGTON -- Downplaying the need for the government to ensure that every person has health insurance, Mitt Romney on Sunday suggested that emergency room care suffices as a substitute for the uninsured.

"Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance," he said in an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS's "60 Minutes" that aired Sunday night. "If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care."

This constitutes a dramatic reversal in position for Romney, who passed a universal health care law in Massachusetts, in part, to eliminate the costs incurred when the uninsured show up in emergency rooms for care. Indeed, in both his book and in high-profile interviews during the campaign, Romney has touted his achievement in stamping out these inefficiencies while arguing that the same thing should be done at the national level.

And while Romney refused to agree on Sunday that the government's role is to ensure that every American has health care, he has endorsed such an idea in the past.

When asked in a March 2010 interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" whether he believes in universal coverage, Romney said, "Oh, sure."

"Look, it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility, particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way," he said.

And in a 2007 interview with Glenn Beck, Romney called the fact that people without insurance were able to get "free care" in emergency rooms "a form of socialism."

"When they show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care paid for by you and me. If that's not a form of socialism, I don't know what is," he said at the time. "So my plan did something quite different. It said, you know what? If people can afford to buy insurance ... or if they can pay their own way, then they either buy that insurance or pay their own way, but they no longer look to government to hand out free care. And that, in my opinion, is ultimate conservativism."

Getting rid of high numbers of inefficient emergency room visits was actually a key goal of Romney's health care reform in Massachusetts, as he noted in his book "No Apology"
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Sunday, September 23, 2012

Romney's wife tells us how lucky we are to have him

Speaking of "entitlement," Mitt Romney and his wife Ann seem to have a sense of entitlement to the White House. We of the 47 percent accused by the Romneys of having our own too many "entitlements" (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) should consider ourselves 'lucky' to have the Romneys wanting to take on the job of being our saviors, much as Mitt assumed the job of savior in Bain Capital, when he took over companies and sold them overseas, leaving the U.S. employees without jobs.   

Read full article at: 
  http://consortiumnews.com/2012/09/21/lucky-voters-can-pick-romney/

'Lucky' Voters Can Pick Romney
By Robert Parry

EXCERPTS:  If Mitt Romney were Gen. George Washington after winning America’s independence or even Gen. Dwight Eisenhower back from defeating the Nazis, it might go down easier when Romney and his wife treat the American electorate like peasants who should be simply saying “thank you” for the Romneys’ generosity in deigning to move into the White House.

But Mitt Romney is no George Washington and no Dwight Eisenhower, two men who actually had accomplished great things before they became President. Romney even avoided military service in the Vietnam War, a conflict he says he supported but got deferments to avoid....

Romney and his wife, Ann, apparently see themselves as entitled to become America’s new First Couple. They seem perturbed and perplexed that their road to the White House has not been strewn with rose petals from the cheering masses. They can’t figure out why this mixed-race incumbent is leading in so many polls – and even Republicans are criticizing Romney’s stumble-bum campaign.

The annoyance broke through Friday when Ann Romney was asked what she would say to the GOP complainers. “Stop it,” the would-be first lady snapped. “This is hard. You want to try it? Get in the ring. This is hard and, you know, it’s an important thing that we’re doing right now, and it’s an important election.”

She then added, “It is time for all Americans to realize how significant this election is and how lucky we are to have someone with Mitt’s qualifications and experience and know-how to be able to have the opportunity to run this country.”

Did she really say that running for President is “hard” and tell us “how lucky we are” that Mitt Romney is willing to accept the job? Well, yes, running for President is “hard” though it’s generally regarded as a test for whether someone can handle the position’s complex responsibilities. And seeing how bizarrely disorganized the Romney campaign has been isn’t exactly reassuring.

By contrast, in 2008, the relatively inexperienced Sen. Barack Obama reassured many voters of his managerial competence by running a first-class campaign that bested the heavily favored Sen. Hillary Clinton and then defeated the widely admired Sen. John McCain. Obama’s campaign was not perfect, but he showed toughness, resilience and elegance in weathering a few rough patches.

The opposite has been true of Romney, who entered Campaign 2012 with mainstream journalists gushing about him as a “turnaround artist” and a “managerial wizard.” Yet, his campaign has been a disaster, matched perhaps only by his inept performance as a candidate. Stretching back into the GOP primaries, it’s been one gaffe after another, one unforced error after another.

Sense of Entitlement

But always there has been this sense of entitlement. In April, after Mitt Romney had obliterated his Republican rivals with Dresden-style ad campaigns paid for by his rich backers, Ann Romney was counting the days until Obama and his family would be told to pack their carpetbags and vacate the White House.

“I believe it’s Mitt’s time,” she declared. “I believe the country needs the kind of leadership he’s going to offer. … So I think it’s our turn now.”

Yet, along the way, there were so many annoyances, like impertinent questions from the news media asking why Mitt Romney would release only his two most recent tax returns and not live up to his father’s precedent of 12 years. Mitt and Ann Romney spoke in unison that two years was all the public would get to see.

Just this past week, referring to their wealth and their aggravation with all the criticism about the presidential campaign, Ann Romney told a Fox station in Colorado that Mitt Romney “obviously doesn’t need to do this for a job.”

Then, late Friday afternoon, the second set of tax returns was released for 2011, showing that indeed Mitt and Ann Romney were making plenty of money off their investments, with an adjusted gross income of $13.7 million. But the release raised more questions than it answered.

An accompanying statement by Brad Malt, the trustee for the Romney’s fortune, indicated that the Romneys engineered a higher percentage for their federal taxes for 2011 by not taking $1.75 million in eligible deductions for charitable donations.

That put their effective tax rate at 14.1 percent, about four percentage points higher than it would have been if they had applied all their deductions. The reason, according to Malt, was that the Romneys wanted “to conform to the Governor’s statement in August, based upon the January estimate of income, that he paid at least 13 percent in income taxes in each of the last 10 years.”

Translation: a near single-digit tax payment for a multi-millionaire would look bad, especially after the leaked videotape showing him decrying the “47 percent” of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes as irresponsible moochers who see themselves as “victims.” Many of those low-income wage earners do pay around 15 percent in federal payroll taxes. (Others among Romney’s “47 percent” are retirees and soldiers in combat.)

Yet, if the Romneys’ actual tax rate should have been only around 10 percent in an up-year for equity investments – as 2011 was – what would his effective tax rate have been for 2007 and 2008 at the start of the Great Recession when the equity markets were in free-fall. Some accountants have suggested that Romney might have had zero tax liabilities in those down-years.

Romney moved to squelch such speculation by releasing a statement from the accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers, which summarized Romney’s tax records for 20 years, from 1990 to 2009.  However, PWC’s wording was curious.

The statement said, “In each year during the entire 20-year period, the Romneys owed both state and federal income taxes.” [Emphasis in original.] But why did PWC use the verb “owed” instead of “paid”? Did Romney fail to pay taxes in one or more years but perhaps was later audited and told that he “owed” the Internal Revenue Service money? Or possibly did he carry over losses from a previous year erasing a later year’s tax liability?

Also, the use of the 20-year time frame could be misleading in that it wasn’t until 2003 that President George W. Bush pushed through the sharp reduction of capital gains taxes to 15 percent. Before that, Romney might have paid a much higher percentage in taxes on his investment income. By extending the time frame back to 1990, rather than to, say, 2000, Romney could make his average tax liability appear higher.

Thus, PWC could write, “Over the entire 20-year period, the average annual effective federal tax rate was 20.20 percent.”

In contrast to the curious PWC wording that Romney “owed” taxes in every year, his statement about his 2011 taxes reported that “the Romneys paid $1,935,708 in taxes on $13,696,951 in mostly investment income.” The verb “paid” was used, not “owed.”

But the Romneys have made clear that the public has no right to know any more about their financial history. Presumably, the voters should just be thankful that Mitt Romney has been generous enough to make himself available to be President of the United States. His only comment should be, “you’re welcome.”
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Saturday, September 22, 2012

Thoughtful Essay asking HOW TO SAVE the GOP

Worthwhile reading it in its entirety at: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/45639/how-to-save-the-gop

EXCERPTS:  Unlike Eisenhower’s GOP, today’s breed of Republican displays a willful know-nothing-ism, a determination to wallow in a swamp of anti-intellectualism and made-up facts. In my youth, the Republicans were considered the more reasonable ones.

These troubling Republican trends have gotten worse over several decades but only recently has this reality penetrated the consciousness of the Washington Establishment, finally prompting two committed centrists, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, to detect the reality.

Earlier this year, they penned a Washington Post Outlook article entitled “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are the problem”: “In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

At the top, Republican leaders – from Ayn Rand ideologues to neoconservative warmongers – believe in elitist concepts like “perception management,” i.e. using lies and propaganda to manipulate the rank-and-file. Among the rank-and-file, there’s almost a pride in being manipulated.

So, despite all evidence, high percentages of Republicans believe that Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya, that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Instead of anger over being misled, today’s adherents to GOP orthodoxy react to the truth by hugging the lies more tightly.

If this were the behavior of some fringe group on the Right or the Left, it might not matter much. But the Republican Party is part of the governing structure of the United States, the world’s most powerful nation with a bristling arsenal of nuclear weapons and a vast array of other exotic weapons....

George W. Bush, one recent example of Republican arrogant ignorance, took the United States from an era of general peace, prosperity and, yes, budget surpluses to a desperate time of war, financial collapse and trillion-dollar deficits. Bush’s ineptitude is still being felt by millions of jobless Americans and a struggling world economy.

Yet, the Republicans and their impressive propaganda machine have convinced large numbers of Americans that what is needed is a bigger dose of George W. Bush in the person of Mitt Romney, who, despite his mincing steps contrasted to Bush’s swagger, represents Bush’s policies on steroids, i.e., more tax cuts, more global belligerence.

Romney is trusting that the combination of true-believers and the truly confused will get him over the hump, and some polls show that he remains within range of reaching his goal, the White House. But what would happen if he gets his “50.1 percent”?

...How can the GOP be salvaged when its philosophical leaders are the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter? How can Americans intervene to remake the Republican Party into a constructive – and necessary – counterweight to the Democrats?

The only answer appears to be a series of crushing electoral defeats for this Republican Party. Not just one or two disappointing cycles but a consistent repudiation of this extremist organization until its more moderate elements can reclaim leadership and redirect – not simply repackage – the policies.

Like a person suffering from a violent split personality, the traditional Republican Party cannot coexist with the right-wing radicalism that has taken over my dad’s GOP. Only a determined intervention from the outside – from the American electorate over several election cycles – can give the old Republicans a chance to reemerge.

If the Tea Partiers and the neocons are repudiated again and again, the Republican Party could get back in touch with its earlier traditions of thoughtful policies, those bipartisan ideas that helped build a great nation.
_______
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Mormon Church threatens to excommunicate member who criticized Romney

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/09/21/mormon-church-threatens-to-excommunicate-member-who-criticized-romney/

Mormon Church sure seems to be saying: VOTE FOR ROMNEY OR ELSE!
EXCERPT: But
church (cult) spokesperson Dale Jones insisted to ABC News. “However, we do not direct them on how to vote. We are politically neutral and do not support candidates or political platforms.”

Yeah. Right.  Here's the article. You can judge for yourself:


A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints says that church leadership is on a witch hunt against him after he criticized Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
David Twede, a fifth-generation Mormon, told The Daily Beast that on Sunday his bishop and three other church leaders in Orlando ordered him to “Cease and desist, Brother Twede” after they found discussions about Romney at the blog MormonThink.com.

Twede said that he felt “attacked, cornered, and very anxious” as the church officials informed him that they had scheduled a Sept. 30 excommunication “for apostasy.”

The Encyclopedia of Mormonism defines an apostate as someone who has “seriously contravened or ignored cardinal Church teachings.”

Church leaders also chastised him for only using his first name on his blog, Twede recalled.  “I told them I hide my name precisely because of things like this,” he explained. “I said, ‘Look how fast you got to me.’ I know a lot of members don’t want their life disturbed. In the Mormon church, if you’re not part of the uniform group, you are ostracized.”

“When they interrogated me, they denied that they were on a witch hunt, but they kept asking me, ‘Who are the other individuals you work with on MormonThink?’” Twede said. “They continued demanding that I tell them. But I didn’t.”
But the MormonThink managing editor added that he did not want to place all the blame on church leaders in Florida because they were “acting as agents of HQ leadership in Salt Lake.”

ABC News reported on Thursday that the Mormon church was urging members in Nevada to speak “with one voice” during the presidential election.


“Any Mormon would understand exactly what’s being said there,” Dartmouth religion professor Randall Balmer pointed out. “This is very thinly coded language.”
Church officials, however, have denied that they were encouraging members to support Romney over President Barack Obama.

“The Church has always encouraged people to be a part of the political process and to register to vote,” church spokesperson Dale Jones insisted to ABC News. “However, we do not direct them on how to vote. We are politically neutral and do not support candidates or political platforms.”


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Friday, September 21, 2012

Desperate for Latino votes, Romney darkens his skin and turns Latino

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/20/mitt-romney-dyed-face-brown-fake-tan-univision_n_1900707.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

I noticed Romney's darkened skin tone in the interview.  Clever GOP tactics -- turn him brown and Latinos will relate to him. (~.~)  Yeah. Right.  Their desperation is showing and at this point, they'll try anything.  Are things crazy enough for you yet?  (~.~)  Actually, I won't be surprised if a backpack appears under Mitt's jacket during the presidential debates -- much like the one they strapped to Duhmbya in his 2004 debates, so they could give him some intelligible things to say.  I loved it when Duhmbya said out loud, apparently to the empty air, during one debate--"Yeah, just let me finish!"  Millions of viewers noticed this, but it wasn't reported in our major news.  See article below about the incident -- from the UK, of course. The corporate-owned U.S. mainstream press wasn't about to tell the truth about the idiot President needing wireless technology in order to speak a clear English sentence. Thanks to the Supreme Court, we had to endure him and Cheney for 8 long years!!! What kind of tactics can the big money pull now, to get another Republican idiot put in the White House?  A wireless backpack would be a good place to start, don't ya' think?

Was Bush packing Wi-Fi in TV debate?

Miraculous clarity arouses suspicion

Wireless technology might explain why US President George W. Bush performed better than usual in the last two presidential debates with his opponent, Senator John Kerry.

Unless he's reading a well-rehearsed speech, the President is normally much given to malapropisms and incoherent syntax. When confronted with questions for which he is not prepared, he typically muddles along unintelligibly when starting a reply, until he finds a path to one of his prepared talking points, as he repeatedly did during his televised prime-time press conference of 13 April 2004. It is not unusual for him to take refuge in his prepared points, regardless of what question is asked, and his answers are often irrelevant as well as confused. That is, he tends to stay "on message," rather than "on topic".

Yet, during both presidential debates, he miraculously spoke in clear, organized sentences that were fairly relevant to the questions asked. He stumbled only occasionally, and then only briefly. The public has declared Kerry the winner of both debates - the first by a wide margin, and the second by a narrow one - but it is undeniable that the President far exceeded his baseline performance when confronting the unexpected. Or, said another way, he may have looked bad in comparison to Kerry, but he looked very good in comparison to himself.

Bush's bulge

Interestingly, screen shots of the first debate, courtesy of Cryptome, show a cigarette-pack-sized object positioned between Bush's shoulders, impressing itself on his suit jacket. A wire appears to run from the object, up towards the President's neck. This is best seen in the first column, fourth picture, and in the second column, fourth picture. (Note: The Register has not verified the authenticity of these images. They appear to come from a C-SPAN feed, but we cannot vouch for that.)

Bush: wireless coaching?

The impression is consistent with common wireless gear used by public speakers and entertainers, enabling a remote coach to offer prompts and suggestions. Typically, a rig consists of a wireless radio transmitter used by the coach, and a wireless transceiver used by the speaker. For stealth, the transceiver is concealed under clothing, and connected to a flexible wire device encircling the neck and worn under the shirt, which generates a signal picked up by a wireless receiver within the ear canal, much like a small hearing aid, and virtually invisible.

Additional evidence

The pictures might be suggestive, if not conclusive, but they are not the only evidence suggesting that Bush enjoyed the benefit of a wireless hookup. The very fact that he rarely stumbled or babbled itself suggests that something extraordinary was afoot. And there were a couple of moments in both debates where Bush's behavior is best explained by presuming a remote coach.

In the first debate, during a reply to Kerry, he ranted, "Let me finish!" Oddly, neither his opponent, Senator Kerry, nor the moderator, Jim Lehrer, was attempting to cut him off, and he had plenty of time left on the clock. One explanation is that he was disoriented and confused, as he often is without a script. But a somewhat better explanation, in view of the pictures and his sudden debating competence, is that he was addressing not his opponent or the moderator, but a remote coach who had prompted him to move on to a fresh topic before he was ready to do so.

In the second debate, Bush went off the rails, again in a way that suggests remote coaching. According to the rules, each candidate answers questions in turn. The one to whom the question is addressed gets two minutes to reply, and his opponent gets ninety seconds to rebut. At the moderator's discretion, there may be a one-minute extension, providing each candidate an additional thirty seconds on each question.

At one point, when Bush had taken a question, and Kerry had delivered a spirited rebuttal, moderator Charlie Gibson decided to extend the session. But he had trouble getting the words out, as Bush leapt up and leaned into his face, repeatedly demanding the very extension that Gibson was attempting, without success, to offer him.

Kerry: "We're gonna build alliances; we're not gonna go unilaterally [into war]; we're not gonna go alone, like this President did."

Gibson: "Mr. President, let's extend for one minute..."

Bush: "Lemme just one question; I, I gotta answer this."

Gibson: "Exactly, and with reservists being held on duty..."

Bush: "Let, let me just answer this, what he said about goin' alone."

Gibson: "Well, I wanted to get into the issue."

Bush: "You tell Tony Blair we're goin' alone. Tell Tony Blair we're goin' alone. Tell Servio Belisconi we're goin' alone..."

A fair reading of the scene would have Bush's remote coach urging him to respond at that moment, with enough vehemence to distract the President from what was happening right before his eyes. "You've got to respond to that - you can't let it go. He's insulting our allies," we can imagine the coach saying. And we can imagine Bush getting flustered to the point that he failed to grasp what the moderator was trying to tell him.


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Stunning Evidence of Past Lives: Compelling Major Media Reports on Children Who Could Name Names

Fascinating information to consider.  This message is available online at http://www.WantToKnow.info/nde/past_lives_children


"[Initially skeptical], his parents became convinced that James was in fact remembering the life of James M. Houston, a navy fighter pilot shot down 60 years earlier in World War II. [They spent] three years of hard work verifying all of the details."
  -- ABC video clip on James Leininger's memory of his past life

Stunning major media reports on two children with incredibly clear memories of past lives present powerful evidence that we may have lived before. Both James Leininger and Cameron Macauley not only had clear memories of past lives, these boys could give the names of people in those lives. James was even able to give the name of the warship on which he served as a World War II fighter pilot and the names of some of his shipmates. And it was all verified!

James' story is among the most compelling and well documented cases ever of a child's past life memory being fully verified. His fascinating story was reported on both Fox and ABC News. Watch these intriguing news video clips, both about five minutes in length, relating this most astonishing case and decide for yourself. For an additional CNN report on James, click here.

www.personalgrowthcourses.net/video/reincarnation_boy_pilot_wwii - Fox News

www.personalgrowthcourses.net/video/reincarnation_evidence_abc_boy_pilot_wwii - ABC News

Cameron Macauley of England clearly remembered the name of the British island on which he had lived in his previous life. Not only was he was able to give a clear description of many aspects of the white house in which he lived, he also remembered that he used to watch airplanes landing on a nearby beach through the window of his bedroom. When he was finally taken to the island, it turned out that that there indeed was a white house almost identical to his description just a short distance from the beach where planes landed.

http://www.personalgrowthcourses.net/stories/060908sun.boywholivedbefore.htm - The Sun (UK)

Please understand that this information is not intended to convince anyone of anything. The intention, rather, is to present evidence which raise questions and invites readers to broaden their beliefs of what is possible in life and consciousness. Please disregard anything here which does not work for you. Yet if you find this material to be relevant and meaningful, by all means read on.

A most amazing 16-minute video clip presents some of the most compelling evidence ever of the afterlife. Titled "The Afterlife investigations," this riveting documentary relates a five-year experiment in various forms of communication with the dead which involved numerous scientists who were forced to conclude that no reasonable explanation could be offered for what they personally experienced other than the existence of an afterlife.

http://www.personalgrowthcourses.net/video/afterlife_investigations - The Afterlife investigations

Could it be that life is much more mysterious and exciting than many believe? Could it be that consciousness survives the death of the body? Each of us must decide for ourselves, yet the above material at the least raises some questions about the belief that we have only one chance at life here on planet Earth. For lots of other excellent resources which raise more questions and potentially provide real inspiration, see the box below.


 
For more on past lives:
  • Read concise summaries of eye-opening major media reports which present intriguing past life evidence and inspiring near death experiences at this link.

  • For an excellent online lesson from the Insight Course exploring these fascinating topics and titled "Beyond Life and Death," click here.

  • See our awesome collection of a variety of inspiring resources available here.

  • For concise summaries of intriguing major media articles which stretch beliefs about the nature of reality, click here.

  • Share the inspiration with your friends and bookmark this article on key news websites using the "Share" icon on this page.

  • We need your support. Please help our work to grow and thrive by donating at this link.
 


See our collection of inspirational resources at www.WantToKnow.info/inspirational



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Mind-Expanding Wonder: Yosemite night sky

These views of our night sky from Yosemite are stunning.  We city dwellers don't get to see the millions of stars that can be seen when there is no competing light.  Our earthly life with its worries and problems begins to look pretty small when you see the magnificence of the universe displayed in all its glory.  During this crazy political season, it might be good to look at this video every day, just for a respite from the nonsense. (~.~)  ENJOY!

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Thursday, September 20, 2012

Romney has no clue about real personal responsibility

So true...
WHAT ROMNEY DOESN'T UNDERSTAND ABOUT PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

By Ezra Klein

The worst of Romney’s now-infamous comments about “the 47 percent” came in this couplet: “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Put aside the tin-eared term “those people.” When he said this, Romney didn’t just write off half the country behind closed doors. He also confirmed the worst suspicions about who he is: an entitled rich guy with no understanding of how people who aren’t rich actually live.

The thing about not having much money is you have to take much more responsibility for your life. You can’t pay people to watch your kids or clean your house or fix your meals. You can’t necessarily afford a car or a washing machine or a home in a good school district. That’s what money buys you: goods and services that make your life easier, that give you time and space to focus on what you want to focus on.

That’s what money has bought Romney, too. He’s a guy who sold his dad’s stock to pay for college, who built an elevator to ensure easier access to his multiple cars and who was able to support his wife’s decision to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s great! That’s the dream.

The problem is living the dream has blinded him to other people’s reality. His comments evince no understanding of how difficult it is to focus on college when you’re also working full time, how much planning it takes to reliably commute to work without a car, how awful it is to choose between skipping a day on a job you can’t afford to lose and letting your sick child fend for herself. The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it.

In their book “Poor Economics,” the poverty researchers Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo try to explain why the poor around the world so often make decisions that befuddle the rich.

Their answer, in part, is this: The poor use up an enormous amount of their mental energy just getting by. They’re not dumber or lazier or more interested in being dependent on the government. They’re just cognitively exhausted:

Our real advantage comes from the many things that we take as given. We live in houses where clean water gets piped in — we do not need to remember to add Chlorine to the water supply every morning. The sewage goes away on its own — we do not actually know how. We can (mostly) trust our doctors to do the best they can and can trust the public health system to figure out what we should and should not do. … And perhaps most important, most of us do not have to worry where our next meal will come from. In other words, we rarely need to draw upon our limited endowment of self-control and decisiveness, while the poor are constantly being required to do so.

Banerjee and Duflo’s argument has been increasingly confirmed by the nascent science of  “decision fatigue.” Study after study shows that the more we need to worry about in a day, the harder we have to work to make good decisions.

As economist Jed Friedman wrote in as the World Bank’s development blog:

The repeated trade-offs confronting the poor in daily decision making — i.e. ‘should I purchase a bit more food or a bit more fertilizer?’ — occupy cognitive resources that would instead lay fallow for the wealthy when confronted with the same decision. The rich can afford both a bit more food and a bit more fertilizer, no decision is necessary.

The point here isn’t that Romney is unfamiliar with cutting-edge work in cognitive psychology. It’s that he misses even the intuitive message of this work, the part most of us know without reading any studies: It’s really, really hard to be poor. That’s because the poorer you are, the more personal responsibility you have to take.

Romney, apparently, thinks it’s folks like him who’ve really had it hard. “I have inherited nothing,” the son of a former auto executive and governor told the room of donors. “Everything Ann and I have, we earned the old-fashioned way.” This is a man blind to his own privilege.

Which is his right. But that sentiment informs his policy platform – which calls for sharply cutting social services for the poor to pay for huge tax cuts for the rich — and it suggests he’s trying to make policy with a worldview that’s completely backward.

As president, Romney’s job would be to worry about those people, and to help them. But first he needs to understand what they’re going through.

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Watch video: Chaos on Bullshit Mountain

One of the best yet (in 3 parts) of Jon Stewart on Comedy Central! You'll laugh till you cry, unless you're a Republican -- if you are, you're probably already crying.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/20/jon-stewart-fox-news-romney-47-percent-video_n_1899787.html
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Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Best column by Peggy Noonan - Ever!

http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2012/09/18/time-for-an-intervention/

For a change, Republican Peggy Noonan is speaking sense. She is seeing clearly--and she's panicking. She has some suggestions for the GOP, but it's probably too late for an intervention -- she's right; most Republicans now don't want to join with Romney and get the smell of "loser" on them.  Hopefully the Koch brothers and other billionaire PAC donors are pulling back from Romney but they will still be funding the Congressional races...and they have tons of money.  As for Paul Ryan, it looks like he made a bad deal signing on with Romney -- and, in the process, his own shallow, lying hypocritical personality has been revealed for all to see. He's seeing the handwriting on the wall, too--and is putting out ads now in Wisconsin to save his House seat.  

TIME FOR AN INTERVENTION

What should Mitt Romney do now? He should peer deep into the abyss. He should look straight into the heart of darkness where lies a Republican defeat in a year the Republican presidential candidate almost couldn’t lose. He should imagine what it will mean for the country, for a great political philosophy, conservatism, for his party and, last, for himself. He must look down unblinkingly.

And then he needs to snap out of it, and move.

He has got seven weeks. He’s just had two big flubs. On the Mideast he seemed like a political opportunist, not big and wise but small and tinny. It mattered because the crisis was one of those moments when people look at you and imagine you as president.

Then his comments released last night and made months ago at the private fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. Mr. Romney has relearned what four years ago Sen. Barack Obama learned: There’s no such thing as private when you’re a candidate with a mic. There’s someone who doesn’t like you in that audience. There’s someone with a cellphone. Mr. Obama’s clinger comments became famous in 2008 because when people heard what he’d said, they thought, “That’s the real him, that’s him when he’s talking to his friends.”

* * *

And so a quick denunciation of what Mr. Romney said, followed by some ideas.

The central problem revealed by the tape is Romney’s theory of the 2012 election. It is that a high percentage of the electorate receives government checks and therefore won’t vote for him, another high percentage is supplying the tax revenues and will vote for him, and almost half the people don’t pay taxes and presumably won’t vote for him.

My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning.

This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that. They’re usually young enough and dumb enough that nobody holds it against them, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know much about America.

We are a big, complicated nation. And we are human beings. We are people. We have souls. We are complex. We are not data points. Many things go into our decisions and our political affiliations.

You have to be sophisticated to know that. And if you’re operating at the top of national politics, you’re supposed to be sophisticated.

I wrote recently of an imagined rural Ohio woman sitting on her porch, watching the campaign go by. She’s 60, she identifies as conservative, she likes guns, she thinks the culture has gone crazy. She doesn’t like Obama. Romney looks OK. She’s worried about the national debt and what it will mean to her children. But she’s having a hard time, things are tight for her right now, she’s on partial disability, and her husband is a vet and he gets help, and her mother receives Social Security.

She’s worked hard and paid into the system for years. Her husband fought for his country.

And she’s watching this whole election and thinking.You can win her vote if you give her faith in your fairness and wisdom. But not if you label her and dismiss her.

As for those workers who don’t pay any income taxes, they pay payroll taxes—Social Security and Medicare. They want to rise in the world and make more money. They’d like to file a 1040 because that will mean they got a raise or a better job.

They too are potential Romney voters, because they’re suffering under the no-growth economy.

So: Romney’s theory of the case is all wrong. His understanding of the political topography is wrong.

And his tone is fatalistic. I can’t win these guys who will only vote their economic interests, but I can win these guys who will vote their economic interests, plus some guys in the middle, whoever they are.

That’s too small and pinched and narrow. That’s not how Republicans emerge victorious—”I can’t win these guys.” You have to have more respect than that, and more affection, you don’t write anyone off, you invite everyone in. Reagan in 1984 used to put out his hand: “Come too, come walk with me.” Come join, come help, whatever is happening in your life.

You know what Romney sounded like? Like a kid new to politics who thinks he got the inside lowdown on how it works from some operative. But those old operatives, they never know how it works. They knew how it worked for one cycle back in the day.

They’re jockeys who rode Seabiscuit and thought they won a race.

* * *

The big issue—how we view government, what we want from it, what we need, what it rightly asks of us, what it wrongly demands of us—is a good and big and right and serious subject. It has to be dealt with seriously, at some length. And it is in part a cultural conversation. There’s a lot of grievance out there, and a sense of entitlement in many spheres. A lot of people don’t feel confident enough or capable enough to be taking part in the big national drama of Work in America. Why? What’s going on? That’s a conversation worth having.

I think there is a broad and growing feeling now, among Republicans, that this thing is slipping out of Romney’s hands. Today at a speech in New York with what seemed like many conservatives and Republicans in the audience, I said more or less the above. I wondered if anyone would say, in the Q&A, “I think you’ve got it wrong, you’re too pessimistic.” No one did. A woman asked me to talk about why in a year the Republicans couldn’t lose, the Republican candidate seems to be losing.

I said pre-mortems won’t help, if you want to help the more conservative candidate, it’s a better use of your time to pitch in with ideas. There’s seven weeks to go. This isn’t over, it’s possible to make things better.

Republicans are going to have to right this thing. They have to stabilize it.

It’s time to admit the Romney campaign is an incompetent one. It’s not big, it’s not brave, it’s not thoughtfully tackling great issues. It’s always been too small for the moment. All the activists, party supporters and big donors should be pushing for change. People want to focus on who at the top is least constructive and most responsible. Fine, but Mitt Romney is no puppet: He chooses who to listen to. An intervention is in order. “Mitt, this isn’t working.”

Romney is known to be loyal. He sticks with you when you’re going through a hard time, he rides it down with you. That’s a real personal quality, a virtue. My old boss Reagan was a little colder. The night before he won the crucial 1980 New Hampshire primary—the night before he wonit—he fired his campaign manager, John Sears. Reagan thought he wasn’t cutting it, so he was gone. The economist Martin Anderson once called Reagan genially ruthless, and he was. But then it wasn’t about John Sears’s feelings or Ronald Reagan’s feelings, it was about America. You can be pretty tough when it’s about America.

Romney doesn’t seem to be out there campaigning enough. He seems—in this he is exactly like the president—to always be disappearing into fund-raisers, and not having enough big public events.

But the logic of Romney’s fundraising has seemed, for some time, slightly crazy. He’s raising money so he can pile it in at the end, with ads. But at the end will they make much difference? Obama is said to have used a lot of his money early on, to paint a portrait of Romney as Thurston Howell III, as David Brooks put it. That was a gamble on Obama’s part: spend it now, pull ahead in the battlegrounds, once we pull ahead more money will come in because money follows winners, not losers.

If I’m seeing things right, that strategy is paying off.

Romney’s staff used to brag they had a lower burn rate, they were saving it up. For what? For the moment when Americans would rather poke out their eyeballs and stomp on the goo than listen to another ad?

Also, Mr. Romney’s ads are mostly boring. It’s kind of an achievement to be boring at a moment in history like this, so credit where it’s due: That musta taken effort!

* * *

When big, serious, thoughtful things must be said then big, serious, thoughtful speeches must be given. Mr. Romney is not good at press conferences. Maybe because he doesn’t give enough, and so hasn’t grown used to them, and confident.

He should stick to speeches, and they have to be big—where America is now, what we must do, how we can do it. He needs to address the Mideast too, because it isn’t going to go away as an issue and is adding a new layer of unease to the entire election. Luckily, Romney has access to some of the best writers and thinkers in the business. I say it that way because to write is to think, and Romney needs fresh writing andfresh thinking.

Romney needs to get serious here.Or, he can keep typing out his stray thoughts with Stuart Stevens, who’s sold himself as a kind of mad genius. I get the mad part.

Wake this election up. Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city—don’t they count anymore? A big, dense city with skyscrapers like canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is in bland suburbs and tired hustings. How about: New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice? You say the state’s not in play? It’s New York. Our media lives here, they’ll make it big. How about downtown Brooklyn, full of new Americans? Guys—make it look like there’s an election going on. Because there is.

Be serious and fight.

If you’re gonna lose, lose honorably. If you’re gonna win do it with meaning.

* * *

Romney always seems alone out there, a guy with a mic pacing an empty stage. All by himself, removed from the other humans. It’s sad-looking. It’s not working.

Time for the party to step up. Romney should go out there every day surrounded with the most persuasive, interesting and articulate members of his party, the old ones, and I say this with pain as they’re my age, like Mitch Daniels and Jeb Bush, and the young ones, like Susana Martinez and Chris Christie and Marco Rubio—and even Paul Ryan. I don’t mean one of them should travel with him next Thursday, I mean he should be surrounded by a posse of them every day. Their presence will say, “This isn’t about one man, this is about a whole world of meaning, this is about a conservative political philosophy that can turn things around and make our country better.”

Some of them won’t want to do it because they’re starting to think Romney’s a loser and they don’t want to get loser on them. Too bad. They should be embarrassed if they don’t go, and try, and work, and show support for the conservative candidate at a crucial moment. Do they stand for something or not? Is it bigger than them or not?

Party elders, to the extent you exist this is why you exist:

Right this ship.

* * *

So, these are some ideas. Others will have more, and they’ll be better.

But an intervention is needed.


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