– Since Buck O’Neil was inducted into the Hall of Famous Missourians, it’s been one of those things I think about visiting but never actually do. Now, not so much.
– Aphra’s Reading Room: Women’s History Month Edition, Part I
– While, of course, we should take things like potential threats to Rush Limbaugh seriously, it seems Glenn Reynolds jumped the gun.
I’ve criticized Romney for a lot of things. He’s definately part of the 1%, his career (and success) are an example of everything that’s wrong with Wall Street and government policy today, and his priorities are screwed up – partly because he can’t see beyond his own rather narrow world-view. He also has the charisma of a used-car salesman and is an opportunist, switching positions at whatever point it seems to favor him most (and then denying he had ever done so).
But I’ve never accused him of not being smart. He’s well-educated and by every account worked extraordinarily hard in school, earning his J.D. (law) degree near the top of his class at an Ivy-League school. And although his father was well-off financially as the head of (what was then) a major American car manufacturer, his father seems to have largly earned his position through hard work – a lot of the time for the federal government as a civil-service employee.
Yesterday Romney’s staff tried to convince journalists (and indirectly his primary opponants) to give up the race by pointing to the math. They argued that with the convention delegates Romney has already acquired, it would be near-impossible for any other candidate to get the nomination from the remaining states on the table.
But Romney’s campaign as a bigger problem than that. The Republicans have to appeal to the knuckle-dragger base among them in order to get anywhere in the general election. In short, they have to double-down on the argument that President Obama is an “elitist snob”.
In 2000 we learned the danger of electing a president who wasn’t particularly bright, and counting on his vice-president and advisers to keep him heading in the right direction. The argument (made after the election) was that the electorate felt more comfortable watching football and sharing a beer with Bush than they did with Gore.
But after the 2008 economic collapse, Americans wanted a president smart enough not to be manipulated by his advisors (and others) who had their own interests and agendas.
But with the question of “elitism” and “snobbery” being bandied about, we have to ask – “compared to whom?” Santorum has a B.A., an M.B.A., and a J.D. (law) degree (although many law schools have joint MBA/JD programs). Gingrich has a PhD in history and spent all his non-public career in academia (albiet north-Georgia academia is a pretty small pond for someone claiming to be the big fish). Ron Paul has an M.D. degree and was a practicing physician. And as mentioned before, Romney has a B.A. and a J.D. from an Ivy-League university.
Therefore, all five remaining candidates for the Presidency have impressive academic credentials.
So is Romney ever going to really appeal to the nuckle-draggers out there who think “common sense” (i.e., whatever they think is right at the time) is better than a high-school degree? His attempts to appeal the working classes have fallen quite flat – he’s been appearing in public in jeans, but they appear to be knew and even pressed (who irons jeans????). Everyone knows that his only job outside of Wall Street and as a Mormon missionary was a short stint while a student as a security guard (to pay for trips home to see his girlfriend without his father finding out about it). His claim that he’s currently “unemployed” is a slap in the face of those who have lost their jobs and their homes. His claim to have worried about getting a pink slip before never had any credence at all.
Romney should just drop the act, and admit that this is going to be a race between two well-educated smart guys, but who have markedly different priorities.
The nuckle-draggers got left behind in this race a long time ago, they are left only with the choice between voting for the white wall street investment banker or the black incumbent President.
Mmm… Pork…
http://vimeo.com/36558736
Quick, grab your bailout bag and your AR-15 and head for your bunker. We’re all gonna die!!!
Mass Shooting of the Day (TM)
As you know, this is a regular feature on HA, because hardly a day goes by without some Deranged Madman (TM) picking up a gun and shooting a bunch of people somewhere in the United States.
Today a Deranged Madman (TM) (possibly two) shot a bunch of people, including a cop, at a Pittsburgh psychiatric clinic. I assume he was a patient, not a doctor, but you never know for sure. Some of those shrinks are a little weird, too.
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_n.....pittsburgh
Roger Rabbit Commentary: A gun is not a dangerous instrumentality until some crazy person picks it up and uses it. Guns aren’t the problem, people! The problem is Republican lawmakers who believe anyone should be able to get a gun without a background check or any restrictions and carry it anywhere without a permit or firearms safety training.
How to fool the TSA.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1785.....y-to-fool/
That’s assuming the things are actually on and work.
Gee, wasn’t some Fox News Pundit (wingnut) postulating (speculating) that President Obama himself had set up Rush Limbaugh by inserting the student into the controversy over contraception and insurance requirements?
Gee, if Obama really did that, he’s got a talent I’ve never given him credit for – the ability to manipulate Limbaugh from afar and putting words into his mouth!
# 4: Gee, what are the odds that one would find a deranged person at a psychiatric clinic?
@4
2 dead 7 wounded. If you’re really pissed at someone you you can turn them into a bloody mess with a chunk of two-by-four, but it’s pretty damn hard to kill 2 and wound 7 with a two-by-four.
“Gee, what are the odds that one would find a deranged person at a psychiatric clinic?
I know a pyschiatrist who is depserately in need of his own help. If you can’t find the crazies in the psychiatrist’s waiting room, try his office or his residence. You’ll have no trouble finding a loony toon.
Then there’s this:
“Police were called around 9:30 a.m. and notified by a woman that someone was breaking into her home. The homewowner was awakened by a noise and immediately retrieved her handgun. The noise she heard was the sound of a man kicking in the door of her apartment. She met the intruder at her bedroom door, pointed the gun at him and demanded he leave. The trespaser fled without hesitation. (The Telegraph, Nashua, NH, 13/13/11)”
American Rifleman, March 2012, page 10.
The date in the above post should read 12/13/11, not 13/13/11. My bad – typos happen.
@3 One of the few times I’ve seen the Northern Lights was from the air about 15 years ago. I was returning from a business trip on a late United flight from Chicago to Seattle. The captain told us that there was a big solar storm on, flew along the Canadian border and coaxed the half-full 737 to 40-plus thousand feet. Sure enough, with the cabin lights turned off we got quite a show through the starboard windows. Later on it occurred to me that we’d also received a rather large dose of radiation.
“Later on it occurred to me that we’d also received a rather large dose of radiation.”
Well, that explains a lot!
There’s certainly a contrast between Mitt the campaigner and the Mitt who successfully ran a business, helped make the Winder Olympics in Salt Lake City a tremendous success and did a creditable job as a moderate governor of Massachussetts. In fact, if we must have a Republican in the White House, I’d much rather it be that “other” Mitt than just about anyone I can think of. It may well be that the “good” Mitt’s still lurking in there waiting to get the job done if he wins, but that the only way to survive the GOP freak show and get into the final race is to pander to the lunatics. Problem is, it gives me the willies to think that maybe he’s been spouting all the approved slogans for so long that he’s started to believe them himself.
# 14: There was once I guy I worked with who was incredibly ambitious, in a bad way. He thought the best way to get to the top quickly was to tell lies about co-workers, sabatoge their work, and back-stab them at every opportunity. But a lot of the time you almost felt sorry for him, he seemed a bit insecure and was badly in need of a friend.
I wasted the better part of a year trying to figure out if he was basically a good guy who thought he occassionally had to act badly to get ahead, or basically a bad guy who occassionaly thought he had to act good in order to get people’s sympathy.
I finally realized that it didn’t matter, you just had to look at his actions and judge him accordingly.
Likewise, the problem with Romney is you don’t know who will appear after the election. Would it be the moderate Romney who was governor of Massachusetts, or will it be the Romney who caters to the Tea Party? It doesn’t really matter, because you can’t trust which one will show up and have to assume the worst (which is part of the reason the Tea Party and Evangelicals don’t like him, either).
If the Tea Party continues to control at least the House or Senate, Romney will pretty much bee their stooge. I have images of Rush Limbaugh wielding a paddle while Romney, clad only in his shorts, bends over and cries “Yes Sir! May I have another one, Sir!”
I got a kick out of this one:
Republican Headgear
14
I think his presidential campaign has made abundantly clear that Mitt Romney has no principles, he has no soul. There is simply no there, there. Who knows which Mitt show up if he got elected? I doubt even he knows.
Anyone notice any walkers i.e. trolls drag in “critical race theory”??
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Bell
This man, now deceased, was an american hero and now the degenerate moron acolytes of the late Andrew Breitbart are promoting a smear job against his academic work and trying to bring down Barack Obama with it.
I guess this was the “college tape”. Obama introducing Bell at a rally at Harvard protesting a decision to withhold tenure from a black female law professor.
Like the overwhelming majority of their smear jobs, this one too will fail.
@12
Never seen ’em any any major way, just some flashes of light on the horizon. Seeing the northern lights up close and in person is definitely a bucket list kinda thing for me.
@10
No one on here wants to take guns away from sane, law abiding, citizens who are eligible to own them. Nor do we dispute that firearms can me used in self defense, even if the odds are 10 to 1 that a gun will be used to kill its owner or a loved one over some evildoer.
What we do question is the ease of availability of firearms to the mentally ill, to criminals, and the lack of prosecution of people and gun stores involved in straw purchases of firearms.
# 18: I heard some excerpts on the radio last night on the way home from work, Breitbart’s colleagues are trying to carry this forward by describing Bell as a “radical extremists” who advocated blacks starting a race war against whites.
Of course, as you said, it’s just another smear job – try to smear someone else with falsehoods, lies, and innuendo, then link Obama to the “tarnished” person. It didn’t work in the 2008 campaign, and it’s not going to work now. It might energize the knuckle-draggers among the GOP base, but it’s only going to drive the independents away from them.
Funny how Brietbart said they had a tape, and in the coming weeks it would be release and would be a “game changer” in the election. If this is it, it’s landed more like a dull thud than a game-changer. I figured he was going to wait until October and throw something out as an “October Surprise”, leaving little time to respond. But Brietbart’s colleagues are promising to release the tape to Hannity within a week to ten days.
Why the delay? If they have a damaging tape, and they don’t want to wait until late in the campaign for strategic purposes, then why do they need a week or ten days? The only reasons I can think of is (a) they wanted to doctor the tape so it’s original release sounds worse after come creative editing, as Brietbart did as a matter of course, or (b) they wanted time to smear Bell first, then linke Obama with Bell.
If this is all Brietbart had, then it’s going to go down just like Rove’s promised “October Surprise” he promised Republican donars in 2008. In that year it was clear that McCain was fighting a losing battle, but the Republicans somehow had to keep their base motivated and increase the money flow from doners. The fact that there was no “October Surprise” just shows that Republicans will lie to their own people whenever it suits them.
This is an old open thread, so I may re-post this when a new open thread appears.
Most of us who’ve ever worked in the private sector know what happens when the boss screws up. The innocent people lose their jobs, their pensions, their bonuses, their accumulated vacation time, etc. If they are lucky they find another job within the next three months, and spend the next five years or so “catching up” to the level they were at before their company laid them off.
But what about the top executives? The ones who if not personnaly guilty of negligence, malfeasance, fraud, or bad judgement, at least justified their high salary because of the “risks” they took, and the extraordinary impact they claimed to make on behalf of the corporation?
Well, they continue to be rewarded at extraordinarily high rates. Consider:
MF Global Executives Could Get Six-Figure Bonuses Despite Collapse
Usually The Fiscal Times articles are worthless Republican wishful-thinking. But this one seems unusually astute.
In short, it says that the problem the Republicans are facing is that the rank-and file are blindly believing that there is no way President Obama will be re-elected, so they can afford to be picky about which of the GOP candidate most expresses their vision of of what the GOP agenda should be like for the next four (or eight) years after November’s election. That’s why they haven’t been able to get behind a single candidate, and their choices don’t seem to take into account the chances of their potential nominees in the general election.
Why Romney Can’t Beat Obama in 2012
Of course, the professional Republican strategists know differently. They know that the GOP has a difficult race against the President, despite their best efforts to portray him in a bad light. But they can’t get to that topic because they keep getting derailed by the machinery of their own making: Fox News, Radio wingnuts like Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh, etc., who turn off independent voters every time they go off on a tangent.
All President Obama has to do now, aside from hoping for even better economic news, is to sit back. He knows he can blame the Republicans for being insensitive to the unemployed, as the Dec. 2010 refusal to extend unemployment benefits proved. The Republican’s only answer for the economy was giving more tax cuts to the rich. Republicans are being clueless when they don’t see that as a political problem in the upcoming election.
Breaking: R Primary voters more than 90% white.
OK, not exactly breaking news but this renders it beyond all doubt:
National Journal
# 24: Actually, I’m surprised that 10% of the Republican primary voters outside of Florida and Arizona would be non-white.
As RR said before, a black voting for a Republican is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.
@25: Also too: Asians, Hispanics, … They all split 10%. That’s remarkable. The Rs are demographically fucked.
@25
shorter RHP: we dont need any uppity negroes thinking for themselves and deciding not to vote the party line.