One can debate whether the country is better off as a result of the slash and burn venture capitalism he helped pioneer or whether it has much relevance to being an effective President (it sure did not do much in creating jobs in Massachusetts), but Mitt Romney has accomplished a lot in his business career.  But his phoniness is so transparent it makes this blogger want to barf.  It also explains the tepid enthusiasm for him in an awful Republican field.

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• pepper spray is essentially a food product, so presumably it is no problem to spray it into their face (though the bobble-heads acknowledge that some people ended up in the hospital)
• Davis is a liberal campus, so perhaps these students had it coming
• The police chief may be a scapegoat, even though video evidence suggests (even the bobble-heads acknowledge) that she may have lied about the level of threats in justifying the pepper spraying.  Personally, I believe Chancellor Katehi should be gone too.

Most egregious is the excuse trotted out in the past to justify torture, that we have no right to Monday Morning Quarterback the police.  It is a dangerous philosophy that can be used to justify any sort of government brutality.  Video below:

Even liberal blogs have acknowledged that a long term occupation of cities by a group that has not articulated concrete demands at some point brings diminishing results.  But that does not justify the wave of police gassing or clubbing citizens peacefully assembled in protest.  But then Faux News is primarily concerned about the tyranny of government health care and other conspiracy theories they peddle about the Obama administration.   Meanwhile Megyn Kelly’s latest idiocy has gone viral on twitter.  Check out the hashtag #FakeMegynKelly

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This is the latest salvo in a campaign where a president who lowered taxes, oversaw a return of corporate profits to pre-recession levels, prevented a collapse of the Detroit auto-makers, passed a healthcare plan originally drafted by Republicans, ordered the raid that took out Osama deep in the heart of Pakistan and midwifed the fall of Muammar Gaddafi is somehow a befuddled America hating marxist/socialist naif.  Mitt Romney should know better, but then we already know that there is nothing he will not do to gain the Presidency.

Problem is, others can take Romney quotes out of context to lie as well (video below):

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As Conor Friedersdorf  notes Newt Gingrich was outright scary on assassinating US citizens.   Friedersdorf reserves his praise for the two Republicans who understand why we do not torture, why it is counterproductive and how it militates against American values.  Neither of them will get the nomination, though Jon Huntsman could win the general election if nominated.  Ron Paul, while he has some kooky economic theories and is an isolationist, has always had the moral courage to stand up for what he believes in (like refusing to join the post 9/11 frenzy to rubber stamp the Patriot Act) – unlike most of the weasels in public life today.

The clip below highlights the stark contrast between the candidates of the soundbite (Cain and Bachmann) versus two men who have clearly given it some thought.

I don’t praise Republicans often in this blog, but today I will.  Thank you Mr. Paul and Mr. Huntsman for having the guts to stand up for American values and opposing a practice that has been illegal for over a century.

I wonder how loudly the rest of the candidates would howl in outrage if another country subjected captured Americans to “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

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On its face terming a charismatic and successful CEO and former governor of the Kansas City Federal Reserve a Know Nothing would seem odd.  Alas, Herman Cain like most of the other Republican candidates not named Huntsman, Ron Paul or Romney (on non-foreign policy issues), is an empty shirt.  Rarely has a candidate at the top of the polls expressed such total lack of awareness of public policy (domestic or foreign).  This is compounded by bizarre leaps into bigoted Islamophobia, a seeming willingness to electrocute illegal immigrants at the border (which may or may not have been a joke, since Mr. Cain characterized his comments both ways depending on the audience), an ignorance on the constitutional limitations on restricting Congressional activities and the constitutional amendment process, a bizarre financial plan that may have been lifted from the Sim City game, departures into race baiting when it is convenient and finally a proud ignorance on any matters relating to foreign policy.  Then came a barrage of sexual harassment allegations dating back to the 1990s when he lead the National Restaurant Association.  The flailing response from the Cain campaign (even though they had 10 days to prepare for the story’s publication) demonstrated an operation not ready for prime-time.

Seeing the debacle, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that the Cain campaign for the presidency is a publicity seeking stunt gone awry.  The candidate did not help dispel such rumors last month by disappearing from the campaign trail for a book signing tour.  After all, a half-term quitter from Alaska has provided a blueprint on cashing political celebrity into millions of dollars.  The Clintons have demonstrated just how lucrative life post-presidency can be.

When challenged on his ignorance, Mr. Cain has a few stock answers.  His critics are wrong, he is right and trust him.

The ignorance on domestic policy is bad enough. (Video below):

Foreign policy is worse.  After repeated attacks on his foreign policy credentials he assured us that he is not as foreign policy dumb “as they think”.  Video below:

After making that bold assertion, Mr. Cain provided us the gem below.  This makes Governor Perry’s brain fart pale in comparison and highlights what happens when you get your rote learning jumbled up in your head.  For 5:16 Herman Cain struggles to answer a basic question on a war conducted and concluded in the past six months and to highlight why exactly he opposed Obama’s policy (other than the typical knee-jerk opposition to Obama):

To make it worse, his campaign trotted out the excuse (not for the first time) that the candidate was operating on 4 hours sleep.

This sleep deprived soul should not have his fingers on the nuclear trigger and has no business running for President.

The Herman Cain comedy hour may be coming to a close.  The new hope of the anti-Romney brigade appears to be a former speaker whose passionate patriotism drove him to adultery.  Somewhere Saturday Night Live writers are cheering.

If/when Romney does get the Republican nomination, I have his acceptance speech prepared for him. Video below:

Go for it Mitt…

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Other examples of Romney’s extraordinary agility are very easy to find on YouTube:

This is the latest one

This is not a new charge.  The last election cycle provided some entertaining Whack-a-Mitt sessions as the rest of the field piled on the candidate they despised.

Huckabee vs. Romney

Romney does come with strong business credentials (though his business experience often seems to have resulted in acquiring companies, sucking out their assets and bankrupting them).  While he was a pragmatic governor, his job creation record was at best mediocre. On foreign policy he resorts to the same fluff and platitudes that the rest of the Republican field not named Jon Huntsman or Ron Paul resort too.  But ultimately he is a pragmatic candidate who has some appeal to the center.  He was a competent and pragmatic governor.  He probably will be an adequate President (more than can be said for any of his opponents other than Huntsman).  But where in the political spectrum a President Romney will govern from remains a mystery.  The Weather Vane is probably still monitoring the winds. To take a DNC quiz on where Romney has stood on issues to date – click here (includes videos).

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I wish Senator Franken has the opportunity to similarly debunk on video some of the bullshit being spewed by some Republicans that the United States should default by not raising the debt ceiling, particularly the two nuts from his home state running for president.

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Meanwhile, Palin like many other celebrities before her has got the Downfall treatment.  Video below:

Inside Palin Campaign HQ – Launch of ‘The Undefeated’ Fails from Moosehelmet Films on Vimeo.

I still have a hard time seeing Palin launch a credible campaign for President.  Her fellow loony tunes seeking the Presidency have not had a great couple of weeks either.  In a week where large chunks of the Republican party embraced insanity by welcoming an American default, the fringe candidates added their mite too.

• Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann jumped at the opportunity to sign a controversial family values pledge.
• Bachmann’s husband drew attention for his controversial counselling to cure homosexuality and now she may have to answer questions about her health.
• Herman Cain took his anti-Islam bufoonery to new levels.  Video below:

• Mitt Romney who should be able to brand himself as the adult of this bunch draws so little enthusiasm that a large section of the Republican party is still seeking a white knight (whose spouse will permit a presidential run).  With Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie not running, Rick Perry is up next.  It remains to be seen whether Perry’s accounting gimmicks that have created a fiscal disaster in Texas and other skeletons in his closet will hold up under the scrutiny of the national media.

It is a pity Jon Huntsman is gathering no traction in the menagerie running for the Republican nomination. Heck, Romney has no principles but I will take him (or Huntsman) over the rest of this lot.

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Yet the Republicans are refusing to budge unless medicare and medicaid are slashed (insulating them from the negative effects of the Ryan plan to privatize medicare) and tax loopholes for big-oil and other profitable corporate fat cats are retained.  With some Republicans departing from reality that a default would not be so bad (congrats Chamber of Commerce you helped elect these guys), some commentators like Bruce Bartlett have opined that President Obama can simply ignore the debt limit – because it is unconstitutional.

The argument stems from two sources.  First, is the text of Section 4 of the Constitutional Amendment most hated and ignored by Republicans – the 14th Amendment:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

On its face, the text refers to the suppression of insurrection.  Which brings up the second leg of the argument – the 1935 Supreme Court case (before the “activist liberal court” derided by conservatives) of Perry v. United States, 294 U.S. 330 at 350, 351, 354 interpreting the clause above as follows:

The government’s contention thus raises a question of far greater importance than the particular claim of the plaintiff. On that reasoning, if the terms of the government’s bond as to the standard of payment can be repudiated, it inevitably follows that the obligation as to the amount to be paid may also be repudiated. The contention necessarily imports that the Congress can disregard the obligations of the government at its discretion, and that, when the government borrows money, the credit of the United States is an illusory pledge.

We do not so read the Constitution. There is a clear distinction between the power of the Congress to control or interdict the contracts of private parties when they interfere with the exercise of its constitutional authority and the power of the Congress to alter or repudiate the substance of its own engagements when it has borrowed money under the authority which the Constitution confers. In authorizing the Congress to borrow money, the Constitution empowers the Congress to fix the amount to be borrowed and the terms of payment. By virtue of the power to borrow money ‘on the credit of the United States,’ the Congress is authorized to pledge that credit as an assurance of payment as stipulated, as the highest assurance the government can give, its plighted faith. To say that the Congress may withdraw or ignore that pledge is to assume that the Constitution contemplates a vain promise; a pledge having no other sanction than the pleasure and convenience of the pledgor. This Court has given no sanction to such a conception of the obligations of our government…

…The Fourteenth Amendment, in its fourth section, explicitly declares: ‘The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law , … shall not be questioned.’ While this provision was undoubtedly inspired by the desire to put beyond question the obligations of the government issued during the Civil War, its language indicates a broader connotation. We regard it as confirmatory of a fundamental principle which applies as well to the government bonds in question, and to others duly authorized by the Congress, as to those issued before the amendment was adopted. Nor can we perceive any reason for not considering the expression ‘the validity of the public debt’ as embracing whatever concerns the integrity of the public obligations.

The decision is old enough (and unrelated to gun rights or election funding restrictions on corporations) to possibly draw stare decisis protection from the current conservatives on the Supreme Court.  However, even such an assertion followed by the predictable Republican and tea party hyperventilation could still spook the markets.  However, in addition to holding the Democrats and the economy hostage the Republicans are caught between their own Scylla and Charybdis.  On one side are the tea partiers and a bunch of their presidential candidates adamantly opposed to raising the debt ceiling, though it is hard to envision a legitimate scenario where the government can cut enough expenditure to avoid raising the ceiling.  On the other side is the Chamber of Commerce which is sweating bullets at the Russian roulette played on with economy.

The fragile economic recovery (already buffeted by a series of global weather disasters, the European debt crises, the global food price hike, etc.) hangs in the balance.  Please, please, please let sanity win the day.

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Now a democratic operative in South Carolina has added to Romney’s misery by preparing the attack ad below composed almost entirely of Romney statements.

Note to the rest of the Democrats – there is a treasure trove out there on YouTube that is begging for attention.  Much of it does not even need to be “quoted out of context.”

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As MediaMatters notes, the end of the video highlights the sheer stupidity of birthers.   According to Bolling and Geller the fact that the family of the doctor (who died in 2003 before Barack Obama entered the national spotlight after his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention) was unaware he delivered a future President more than 40 years before his death casts doubt on the authenticity of the certificate.  Nice to know that Fox Business lives down to the low standards of its parent “news” network.

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The tipping point for the President may have been a recent interview with George Stephanopoulos on fiscal matters that veered off to the world of birthers.  So the President went to the trouble of asking the State of Hawaii for special permission to access his long-form birth certificate (a standard no other politician in recent memory has been held to), and the long suffering State complied.  This was followed up by the presidential statement below:

Even though he claimed credit for the release of the certificate, Donald Trump did not respond to being lumped by the President with “sideshows and carnival barkers.”

Of course this will not end the story.  The birther fringe will not go away.  Donald Trump, whose own son-in-law bought his way into Harvard, has now started the racially charged drumbeat questioning how Barack Obama was admitted to two ivy league schools.  Since he is black and did not have the blessings of legacy admissions like Messrs Gore and Bush, there is supposedly no way he was “smart” enough to go there (an assertion that drives James Fallows bonkers).

The funny part of this sorry episode is that Barack Obama was not the 2008 Presidential candidate born outside the United States (though that candidate satisfies the naturally-born citizen requirement).  Also even if Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, as the child of a United States citizen (his mother) he would probably still be a naturally born citizen.  So lets sit back and see the birthers make bigger fools of themselves and hope that the media starts ignoring Donald Trump like they are ignoring Sarah Palin.

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This is yet another piece of evidence that the mythology created by the Bircher, Birther and Know-Nothing rump of the Republican Party today does not comport to the reality of their hallowed President.  (Note: In the interest of being fair and balanced one must note that Reagan broke the air-traffic controllers union when they went on strike on the obvious public safety grounds, but as a man who drew his support from blue-collar Democrats did not actively attack the Unions).  The man was no bleeding heart liberal but had the pragmatism to raise taxes when needed, bailed out GM and Chrysler (sound familiar), refused to demonize gays, was willing to cut his losses and withdraw from Lebanon without trying to avenge the dead Marines, was willing to deal with the evil Empire and even Iran, and was willing to genuinely compromise with the Democrats instead of taking a position of “my way or the highway.”  Frankly none of the Republican Presidents since World War II would satisfy the purity test imposed on today’s Republican candidates.

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It started with anti-abortion Republicans in Congress trying to limit the Federal funding of abortions by attempting to redefine rape.  Then, a legislator in South Dakota introduced a fetus protection bill so loosely drafted that it could have allowed a pregnant woman’s immediate family to kill anyone (including doctors) who tried to provide that woman an abortion with her permission.  Thankfully the legislator saw the dangers of legalizing homicide of doctors performing still legal acts and withdrew the bill.  Undaunted a Nebraska legislator has introduced a similar bill that will grant such justifiable homicide rights to any third party vigilante.

Then you have Republican legislators in states like Montana discovering their inner John C. Calhoun and trying to pass nullification statues.

But this one takes the cake and is truly beyond belief.  Georgia State Rep. Bobby Franklin has introduced a bill that would make women who miscarry felons unless they can prove that there was “no human involvement whatsoever in the causation” of their miscarriage.  Such a felony could be punishable by death.  So much for innocent until proven guilty.  Even the infamously misogynistic Taliban never dreamed up such an obscenity.

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This was grist to the mill for MSNBC’s Chris Matthews (no Sarah Palin fan) and the quote for the title of this post comes from Cynthia Tucker in the video below:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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In recent years public figures (in government and media) who cannot hide behind the veil of (possible) schizophrenia have engaged in similar rantings.  They did not cause Loughner’s murderous spree, but should know better than to reaffirm the world view of similarly disturbed folk.  If advertisements can influence shoppers, Hollywood can corrupt teens surely the words of people in positions of trust can influence people to act…sometimes disturbed people.

It is not an argument I expect to win.  One thing I have realized over the years is that political conversations between people of different beliefs can resemble ships passing in the night.  Which is why, I am glad President Obama declined the overtures of some on the hard left to descend into the muck and engage in what is becoming a partisan political brawl.  This was a virtuoso performance that brilliantly turned a somber occasion into a hopeful celebration.  The hope will dull when the hard political reality of divided government returns next week.  But for now bask in the euphoria.  Full video of the speech below:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Another thing the Republicans seem to forget when howling about passing lame duck legislation is their impeachment of Bill Clinton in the 1998 lame-duck session after LOSING seats (something that almost never happens to the opposition party in the sixth year of a presidency).  Enjoy the achievements of the most productive Congress in a generation.  The next two years will not be pretty.

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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Worst Responders
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

The second video is much more sober.  Stewart sits down with some 9/11 responders needing help to pay for their bills while taking some shots at John Kyl for asserting that working on Christmas was somehow sacrilegious and Mitch McConnell’s teary farewell to Judd Gregg.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
9/11 First Responders React to the Senate Filibuster
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

The third video is an interview with former Arkansas Governor and presidential candidate (also a Fox “News” host) Mike Huckabee who urges Republicans to vote for the bill.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Mike Huckabee
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

Stewart’s rage from the bully pulpit seems to have woken up the media and shamed some Republicans.  Below is an unusual video of a Fox anchor breaking the party line and calling out Republicans for their obstruction (other Fox personalities generally blame Congress and not Republicans in the Senate) – well maybe not that unusual since it is one of their rare fair and balanced journalists Shep Smith.

Yet the grinches are still around.  Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn objects to funding the bill by closing a tax loophole and is seeking further review on a bill that has been floating around Congress for most of the year.  He has vowed to block the bill adding to conservative unease on the wisdom of continuing to block the bill.  It also hands Democrats a political softball epitomized by their new video below:

It begs the question whether all this public shaming is sufficient to force Senate Republicans to act rather than merely provide their usual vocal support for 9/11 first responders.

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