August, 2012 archive
Balancing the Ticket 0
Reg Henry considers the dynamics of Paul Ryan’s being selected for the Republican vice presidential nomination. A snippet:
(snip)
As you can see, I think Mitt Romney has boldly answered his critics who were suspicious that he might be secretly reasonable, compassionate and sane despite all his tough talk during the campaign.
Read the rest.
The Voter Fraud Fraud 0
Honoring the troops, the Republican way. Ronnie Polaneczky reports:
That’s because Joe didn’t have a driver’s license. He long ago lost track of his birth certificate and his military identification. He didn’t even have utility bills proving his residence, since his last residence was a nursing home where he tried to regain his strength after his cancer spread.
Without any of these documents, there would have been no reasonable way for him to obtain the voter ID that the Commonwealth Court on Wednesday reiterated is needed to cast a ballot on Election Day.
More at the link.
Romney’s Bain 1
Jacob Weisberg takes an intense look at the leveraged buy-out industry (AKA vulture capitalism), which makes money by gutting companies, and how it differs from industrial capitalism, which makes money by building companies.
A nugget:
This difference encapsulates the change from corporate titans who lived in the same world as the people who worked for them, in an America with real social mobility, to a financial overclass that makes its own rules and has choked off social mobility. The elder Romney wasn’t embarrassed to explain what he’d done as a businessman or to release his tax returns.
No End in Sight 2
Dick Polman theorizes why Mitt the Flip gets away with the lies:
So Romney gets away with it – not just the factual inaccuracy, but the not-so-subliminal racial message about a black president who supposedly wants to hand out welfare checks to Those People. And sure enough, racists are hearing the message loud and clear. The other day, a neo-Confederate website approvingly quoted Romney’s welfare lie, and said: “Mitt Romney is speaking to our people, promoting popular issues with subtle and not so subtle racial themes….Mitt Romney is a solid White guy with a large, very beautiful White family.”
They won’t stop until the news stories begin with “Mitt Romney told another lie today . . . .”
Ryan’s Hope 0
I seldom read Maureen Dowd. She does snark well, but too often behind the snark there is emptiness. I have enough emptiness of my own, thank you.
But in a column in today’s local rag (not linked because they often do not put syndicated columns on their website), I think she’s on to something of substance.
I remarked to someone the other day that the underlying unifying quality to the policies of the contemporary Republican Party seems to be a delight in cruelty.
It’s Republican family values.
- Dying and can’t afford medicine? Suffer, baby!
- Unemployed and foreclosed by on a robo-signing bankster? Suffer, baby!
- Job shipped to China for a point on the stock market? Suffer, baby!
- Raped and pregnant by your uncle? Suffer, baby!
- Living in your car starving under a bridge? Suffer, baby!
A snippet from the column:
I’d been wondering how long it would take Republicans to realize that Paul Ryan is their guy.
He’s the cutest package that cruelty ever came in. He has a winning air of sad cheerfulness. He’s affable, clean cut and really cut, with the Irish altar-boy widow’s peak and droopy, winsome blue eyes and unashamed sentimentality.
Who better to rain misery upon the heads of millions of Americans?
He’s Scrooge disguised as a Pickwick, an ideologue disguised as a wonk. Not since Ronald Reagan tried to cut the budget by categorizing ketchup and relish as vegetables has the G.O.P. managed to find such an attractive vessel to mask harsh policies with a smiling face.
Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0
Mitch McConnell gets his continuing wish.
Still no significant change:
(snip)
Today’s report showed the number of people continuing to receive jobless benefits declined by 31,000 in the week ended Aug. 4 to 3.31 million.
The continuing claims figure does not include the number of Americans receiving extended benefits under federal programs.
Those who’ve used up their traditional benefits and are now collecting emergency and extended payments decreased by about 63,900 to 2.36 million in the week ended July 28.
The Missing Link 0
Herewith linked and buiding on today’s QOTD–The dirty truth behind one-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand press coverage, from Tom Levenson at Balloon juice:
That is to say, as everyone reading this already knows—but too many in the country haven’t grasped, yet—the basic policy presumptions of the Republicans either have been tried and been seen to fail (see, e.g. tax cuts and economic growth, George Bush II edition) or can be analyzed and recognized as disastrous. (See, e.g., the GOP and Ryan plan to return health care to the status quo ante of the pre-Obamacare universe, only worse, with no cost controls and the burden of paying for health care inflation shifted from a national insurance pool to an individually aging population, AKA You and Me).
News Straight from the Ticker 0
Warning: Even worse taste than usual, but the bit about Randian Paul Ryan is worth it.
Speaking of Guns and Stupid . . . 0
Drive down the road and end up in target practice.
(snip)
New Hanover police arrested three audults and three juveniles who were target practicing in their backyard of a nearby home on the 3300 block of New Hanover Square Road.
Follow the link for details. These bozos had quite the arsenal.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 1
Show courtesy to your fellows when attending the theatre:
(snip)
“Witnesses inside the theater at the time the shot was fired stated that a (man) was adjusting himself in his seat when a gun he had on him discharged,” Sparks police Sgt. Pay Dyer said in a statement.
What’s with the mutual attraction between guns and stupid?
Aside:
Adjusting himself.
Indeed.
The Vast WasteNo Man’s Land
2
IOKIYAR 0
Republicans–they can dish it out, but they sure don’t want to take it.
Paul Ryan, Responsible Fiscal? 0
Rachel Maddow thinks not, and has the evidence.
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Excerpt:
In essence, the (Ryan budget–ed.) is Robin Hood in reverse.
Via Raw Story.
Pay No Attention to the Man behind the Curtain 0
Republicans: Pay attention to what they do, not to what they say.
Methinks They Doth Protest Too Much (Updated) 0
Ye bolt hath struck home.
Addendum, Later That Same Morning:
Chauncey Devega’s has his own typically trenchant analysis of this. A nugget:
(snip)
In all, the vast majority of references to chains have little to do with the horrors of slavery, the Middle Passage, and the Black Holocaust. That Romney’s campaign would play with such historically potent imagery–efforts made even more insincere given the Tea Party GOP presidential nominee’s blatantly racist Barack Obama is a lazy negro welfare king ads–is not surprising.
Blowing the Horatio Horn 0
My father had a number of Horatio Alger books, which he likely inherited from his father, as most of them were written in the Gilded Age.
In this new Gilded Age, Robyn Blumner wonders whether the endurance of the Horatio Alger myth has something to do with white men’s attraction to the macho “Let ’em eat cake” posturing of the Republican Party and its glorification of vulture capitalists.
Americans are all about hard work. We’ve increased productivity by 80 percent since 1979, but with almost no corresponding income gains for average workers. It nearly all flowed to the top 1 percent. Shhh, don’t tell the working stiffs.
Obama does better among white women and minority voters because they never bought into the self-made-man myth. After all, for them, no matter their work ethic or ability, longstanding societal barriers stood in the way of climbing the economic ladder. It took antidiscrimination and fair-pay laws to wrench open opportunities. Government was an essential player in making the marketplace fairer.
Read the whole thing.