New GOP just like Old GOP: Of 'gaseous rhetoric' and other noxious smells

Watching the Tea Party die a slow death takes me back to our era of Free Love. Great times of in-your-face, bra-waving, van rockin' wild orgy sexual freedom looks and sounds a lot like Tea Party in-your-face, English-mangled sign waving, race baitin' wild flirtations with unfounded conspiracies and stupidity.

Yup, it's all fun and freedom until you've got exploding rates of STDs, this new thing called AIDS and kids running around named Rainbow, Sunshine and Unicorn (that latter I'm presuming is the boy). As a cultural movement, the Tea Party offered even more downsides with its clinging to blatant racism, Second Amendment remedies and all manner of rape lunacy. Sure the Summer of Love was tons more fun than our adventures in Tea Party astroturf but both faced a common threat -- reality.

Now the GOP, which previously welcomed the young insurgency supposedly under the watchful eye of trusted stalwart Dick Armey, is stuck with the stench of burned tea after losing an election that was only theirs to lose. And they're working hard to figure out what went wrong with the most well-funded campaign ever waged in the most low rent manner possible.

The Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky notices the lack of genuine effort on the GOP's part. "Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio recently laid out a vision for the GOP’s future," he writes. "Too bad it shows Republicans have learned nothing at all from their historic trouncing on Election Day."

Despite upholstering their speeches with ample liberal rhetoric ... Rubio and Ryan both stuck hard to current-day GOP gospel. Raising tax rates isn’t an option. Relying on government isn’t the answer, and all the rest. ... But it was only about messaging. The substance of their positions, to them, is fine and dandy.

Neither they nor the people they’re talking to are ready to accept that they’ve been wrong about anything except messaging, and until they are, this is just gaseous rhetoric.

A USA Today editorial demonstrates how ineffective the GOP has been in matching action to its newfound rhetoric. The party's failure to meaningfully recalibrate after last month's election losses sent the GOP over the reality cliff when the usually sober Senate Republicans voted down the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in a move that "reflected the continuing influence of a fringe that gets frantic about anything involving the United Nations," the paper wrote.

The most stunning example of the New GOP's thinking remaining as muddled and convoluted as the Old GOP's came from the Senate floor in the name of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who effectively filibustered his own bluff when it was called out by Harry Reid. The Clown Car of Crazy was so bizarre, it gave Sen. Claire McCaskill, attempting to preside over the Republican asylum, a mild case of whiplash.

“This may be a moment in Senate history, when a senator made a proposal that, when given an opportunity for a vote on that proposal, filibustered his own proposal. I don’t think this has ever happened before,” quipped Illinois Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin in the wake of the fiasco.

The danger of nodding off after elections

Following the bruising President Barack Obama put on Willard Romney and his GOP minions, I was determined to not replicate my mistakes in 2008. Yes, he won that time, too, but I, like so far too many other supporters kicked back to take a break after our well-earned victory. That was a major mistake. Our President had no visible backing either from his liberal base or the ConservaDem wing of the Democratic caucus.

The rest of us got caught napping when CNBC financial analyst Rick Santelli set off a Tea Party explosion, exploited by big money backers, that set hard-working Americans into an anti-healthcare reform frenzy that masked an ugly, racially-tinged underbelly. The entire episode put these citizens on the wrong side of their own best interests and amplified the nature of their darkest angels.

It was against this tide that I found my voice, no longer willing to simply wave off the virulence as merely crazy talk. Turns out, my countrymen aren't as discerning as I'd assumed. In fact, they're not just ignorant, they wish to become moreso -- railing against education and, in my home state of Texas, slipping into their Republican platform a plank denouncing the teaching of critical reasoning.

The remaining thinking class woke up one day after a 2010 Tea Party rout horrified at what had happened to our country and determined to take back OUR country. To change our tone, our rhetoric, our patriotism. Someone was surrounded alright, as Glenn Beck posited back in 2009, but unfortunately it turned out to be us -- the sober, the sane, the REAL Americans.

I can't speak for anyone else but I can no longer afford my traditional post-electoral Tryptophan-esque stupor. There's work to be done and I've got to wake up and get to it. I will ask for help but if others around me don't feel the same urgency, fine. I'll do it myself. Don't want to, not my personality, but I will go it alone. I'll register voters. I'll start petitions. I'll educate my neighbors. I'll fight draconian Republican measures. Whatever means necessary.

It's time to get busy and move #Forward. I am.

The vacation that wasn't ... how healthcare popped onto my radar

I wanted to return home to Texas after a much-deserved two-week break -- refreshed, locked and loaded for the political fray, with some very specific goals in mind. I spelled out my top priorities in a post entitled "Starting the good fight." You'll note healthcare was nowhere on my list of priorities.

Life, the 1960s pop reference goes, is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. And so it went this year as my brothers and I stood around our mother's hospital bed Thanksgiving Day as she fought her way back from a semi-coma.

What a difference a day can make. Standing there watching100-plus years of fight take on death and win, I couldn't help but realize how much of a Thanksgiving we were getting in real time. Not only were we privileged to witness Life win over death, we did it in the only state in our Union that has comprehensive healthcare. We would not be a family bankrupted by medical bills nor one that had to stop care immediately after the emergency room. 

There would be rehab, in-home nursing and post-medical services. Sure, there will be the random bill from a lab or so, but thanks to my parents' lifelong labors in a place we jokingly called Taxachusetts, they earned coverage beyond that of their relatives living in other states.

It is inconceivable to me that there still exist families who are not this fortunate: either in the battle of Life over Death or in their choice of homestead. I know of people who have been bankrupted by such medical emergencies and it should not be so in this The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twelve. 

We need Obamacare and we need it enacted for every citizen who works hard, plays by the rules and only expects in return a modicum of dignity in times of illnes. I say we make sure they get that.

Starting the good fight

Am currently on vacation but want to start my to do list for the coming term of our Democratic presidency. Last election, the cohort of Obama supporters, the Democratic-led Congress and the Obama administration itself was blind-sided by Dick Armey's astroturfed Tea Party insurrection at the mid-terms. I will do my damnedest to make sure that doesn't happen again.

There are some critical preparations that must be attended to in advance of the 2014 mid-term elections:

1. The drive to register new voters and convince inactive Democrats to get to the voting booth; there can not be another off-year election in which the New Democratic Coalition is outnumbered at the polls by the aging, predominantly white Republicans.
2. Activists must work at the state and local levels to right all previous efforts to disenfranchise minority voters both fraudulently and strategically. We need to get ahead of efforts that, even in defeat, are regenerating new efforts to further cage out identifiable Democratic voting blocs.
3.  At the national level, we must be aware of initiatives being undertaken by the Obama Administration and remain in touch with the grassroots Dashboard tools and other partisan organizations such as MoveOn, Occupy Wall Street and congressional Democrats' messaging.
4. We must identify & prioritize the issues about which we care most deeply and form coalitions to get Congress on board with our agenda. We must be insistent without disparaging. Clear with proposed legislative ideas that can be enacted with proper push.

Among my personal goals are addressing such issues as improving Veterans' services, economic fairness, combating climate change, drug enforcement equity and prison reform. I'm sure there are many others and depending on input both on Twitter and in the comments here, they may change depending on the way our coalitions shape up.

I will update this blog after I return from a much needed rest but wanted to jot down some basics while they are on my mind.

Welcome to the good fight and I look forward to working with you stalwarts. MKSinSA

Join the #RollingJubilee: “You Are Not A Loan” ow.ly/fpfVJ via @prwatch #OWS
— Occupy Wall Street (@OccupyWallStNYC) November 19, 2012

Can't keep a good man down .. but you CAN keep a bad party in disarray. 2014 is close at hand. Are you registered? rockthevote.com
— MKSinSA (@mksinsa) November 19, 2012

SimCoach: a new way for Vets and their families to find expert help & support services for #PTSD.braveheartveterans.org/SimCoach
— Ls (@pettybooshwah) November 20, 2012

Hail to the Chief: President Obama 44 + 4!

And the other winner is ...

Meet Nate Silver

"The FiveThirtyEight blogger had correctly predicted 49 out of the 50 states in the 2008 presidential election. But Silver may do even better than that this election. Not only did he predict Obama’s victory, the statistician still has a chance of going a perfect 50 for 50 provided Florida, which had not been called as of early Wednesday morning, goes the president’s way."

Willard's wild 'Welfare on Wheels' joyride

 Who in the hell is Willard Romney trying to fool taking the high ground on welfare reform after he was such a train wreck on the subject in Massachusetts?

Aside from his request for the very exemption about which he lyingly bashes President Obama, he went all in on a program he created to give welfare recipients free cars, which included AAA membership and state-funded insurance. His Democratic successor Deval Patrick shut it down due to the budget crisis he inherited.

 Under Romney’s Car Ownership Program, the state paid out one year’s insurance, inspection, excise tax, title, registration, repairs and a AAA membership for cars that were donated to welfare recipients. Under the plan, those who lost their jobs and ended up back on welfare were allowed to keep their free wheels. ...

The Patrick administration, mired in a fiscal crisis, hit the brakes on the program that year after a Herald front-page story sparked public outrage.

#Romneywheels

Mittens, gay Latina? Oh, dear!

The raid Romney dreams of commanding

Is there ANYTHING American about Romney?

Romney, Bain buddies and dirty money in play.

First it was U.S. Olympic uniforms made in Burma.

Then it was American jobs shipped to Chinese sweat shops.

Throw in tax havens in about any country not the United States and you've painted a pretty grim picture of a man without a patriotic bone in his body.

Now, reports today throw his entire campaign into full-on foreigner category:

 Restore Our Future, the super-PAC supporting Republican Mitt Romney's run for president, received a $1 million donation in mid-August from reinsurance company OdysseyRe of Connecticut, a "wholly-owned subsidiary" of Canadian insurance and investment management giant Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited.

Citizens' United, that gobsmack of a Supreme Court ruling, be damned -- the law of this country remains that it is illegal for a foreign national to either directly or indirectly contribute money to influence American elections.

Latina not amused by Romney's Latino fundraiser joke

Outsourcer-in-chief keeps outsourcing badly

Buried deep in the breaking news about election fraud enveloping Willard Romney and the Republican party is a nugget that could negatively impact the candidate's ability to rally his troops in advance of November 6.

The bombshell hidden behind the fraud allegations is the fact that the Romney campaign had depended on the firm behind the scandal for much of its GOTV (Get Out The Vote) efforts in some hotly-contested swing states. Willard's team outsourced this activity to the RNC, which in turn paid state parties which further paid consulting firm Strategic Allied Consulting to energize the base and ensure voters showed up to cast ballots.

The development puts the ground game advantage back into the Obama team's court.

After dumping about $3.1 million into the coffers of the Republican vendor, now under investigation for submitting 108 fraudulent voter registrations in Florida, Romney and the party pulled away from deals with the company. The GOP political teams, aware of the firm's past allegations of electoral indiscretions, agreed to embrace the business if it changed its name, so as "to not be a distraction."

Story of Mitt's very different 47-percent moocher class

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what ... who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it," Romney said in the fundraiser video.

Chart via Huffington Post

Forget Romney's dismissal of "dependency" of low-wage, federal income tax non-payers, his campaign apparently is rife with moochers riding the coattails of his own wealthy donors. One can hardly wait for the secret tape of him disparaging yet another group of Americans -- his own small non-donor class.

Tick tock goes the clock, Now summer's gone away?

The lyrics are from "Doctor Who"'s Night Terrors Nursery Rhyme, the horror is Willard Mitt Romney's alone, as voters start sealing the deal by casting early votes. Below is the schedule for states early voting that may well seal the lying Weathervane Willard's destiny.

Bonus entertainment round: Video of The Tick Tock Nursery Rhyme from "Doctor Who."

Science slaps Republican ignorance upside the head

Republican embrace of creation theory over empirically-determined scientific knowledge leads to serious stumbles along the campaign trail. The GOP strategy for fixing the nation's dearly beloved safety network raises voter eyebrows because their methodology defies easily verifiable biology.

Face it, people make babies, babies grow older, some take care of their parents and later some elders are cared for their kids. The Romney/Paul message to seniors is "We're cutting the social fabric down to a tiny voucher just not for you." Now that's all well and good until scientific realities remind you that many of those seniors have children for whose futures they have concerns. And then you have that moment when those children realize that Mitt's talking about them.

"Stop it, this is hard." Mitt muffs the math on healthcare.

Another area that eludes the education averse right wing is mathematics - that lynchpin of all things scientific. Seniors 65 and older comprise 17 percent of all active voters; alas, this is dwarfed by the 83 percent of the 18-64 age group. Therefore, pandering reassuringly to a smaller group of voters, while waving off younger groups with vague generalities, explains why the electorate, as it wakes with a pounding hangover after indulging too heavily in the sweet Romney party juice, is feeling morning after remorse and returning to the Obama fold.

When a campaign caricatures its Faithful

[UPDATE: 9/25/2012 Bonus video added]

A funny thing happened during Willard's black March to the White House. Somewhere along the way it stopped doing what campaigns do out of tradition -- sketch out the broad outlines of its candidate -- and bizarrely put pen to paper to draw the most farcical caricature possible of its ardent supporters.

Led by the odd choice of putting a rambling old man on stage to hold court with an empty chair, Mitt Romney's staff has stumbled into simultaneously painting the boss and his adherents as something his earlier campaign most decried: weird.

That word first spoken in a still, small voice -- describing Mitt's religion, his cardboard stiffness, his inability to relate to people -- has crescendoed into a cacophonous roar of disapproval for nearly everything he touches.

“What Romney does not get,” says Jack Blum, a veteran Washington lawyer and offshore expert, “is that this stuff is weird.” - Vanity Fair, Aug 2012

"Bill Kristol: ‘Kinda weird’ Romney pays lower tax rate than middle-class people" - Raw Story, Aug. 20, 2012

"Romney: Old Rich Weird Dude" - WRKO Boston, Aug. 28, 2012

"Romney Aides Call Eastwood Speech ‘Strange,’ ‘Weird,’ ‘Theater Of The Absurd’" - Talking Points Memo, Aug. 31, 2012

Fox, Ann Romney still whine about getting picked on

[Update: 9/23/2012] In our latest bawlfest, Miss Ann lashes out at Republicans for taking her husband to task for his “rolling calamity” of a presidential run. After breaking the "no crying in politics" rule yet again, the Romneybot's Best Asset and Woman Whisperer was yanked off the trail and relegated to scrounging for cash. Bonus "This is Hard" video courtesy of ColumnFiftyFive.

[Now back to our regularly scheduled entertainment from Fox Comedy]

Based on this interview, Fox News should immediately surrender their White House press credentials, not being members of "the media" and all. Top that with the ongoing whinging of poor, pathetic Ann Romney who's spent her life living comfortably on the backs of outsourced American jobs and off-shored American tax dollars.

Break out the hankies before viewing our aspiring First Bellyacher in her heroic campaign to stand beside our first Wimp-in-Chief. This political soap opera will just break your heart.

Been outsourced? Offshored? Thanks Mitt!

The Romney campaign's awe-inspiring response to the Washington Post grenade that blew up his "job creator" braggadocio?

"This is a fundamentally flawed story that does not differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus off-shoring"

 HAHAHAHAHA ... Comedy gold. Oh, here's one back atcha, Mr. "I'm unemployed, too".

Two unemployed #Sensata workers are sitting in a bar drowning their sorrows over losing their jobs and having to face their families with the news..

The outsourced guy turns to the other and asks, "Hey dude, were you outsourced or off-shored?"

"Off-shored," replied the second man, "yet neither of us has a job."

'Nuff said.

Butter and jam for your #Romneytoast

AmericanBridge Pac 21st Century  strikes back

GOP tax pros throw in towel on Mitt's 'middle income' plan

Suppose a group of Republican economists got together with just one purpose -- to prove "liberal bias" of a non-partisan tax policy think tank report that found their candidate's tax plan raised taxes on the middle class.

Eureka! The team declared. We discovered fire can make Romney's plan work, pronounced President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors chief Martin Feldstein. Nip an alternative minimum tax here. Lop off the estate tax there. Slice away almost every deduction for people making $100K or more and, voilà, you got your revenue neutral tax plan that doesn't touch the middle.

Then, almost immediately after revealing their great discovery, the candidate on whose behalf they're a-cyphering decides to define "middle income" as $200,000-$250,000 or less. Being good economists, despite their conservative motives, they'd been working from a ceiling of $100,000 for their "middle class."

 In an article first published in the Wall Street Journal last month and expanded on later, Feldstein said that "it is feasible to combine tax cuts and base broadening as Gov. Romney suggests without raising the budget deficit or imposing any middle-class tax increase."

Well, then their candidate opened his mouth during a "Good Morning America" interview and changed the parameters of the calculus. "Middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less," Romney declared. The analysts were left gobsmacked.

Like his money and our jobs, Willard promises to off-shore foreign policy decisions on Israel

Thank goodness for phones.

Had Alexander Graham Bell never invented the telephone, a Mitt Romney presidency would be devoid of a working policy on relations with Israel and the general Middle East. In chiding Republican contender Newt Gingrich in a 2011 primary debate for calling Palestine an "invented" people, Romney made clear just who would pull the strings for his administration in all things pertaining to the Middle East.

“Before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say: ‘Would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do?“

According to a New York Times article, a United States ambassador to Israel under Clinton Martin S. Indyk, said that whether intentional or not, Mr. Romney’s statement implied that he would inappropriately “subcontract Middle East policy to Israel.” Others have warned of a shadow government that would operate with impunity within a Romney administration and cover a vast network of policy decisions.

Netanyahu has pulled Romney's governance strings since he took the reins of Massachusetts as governor back in 2003. The Times again tells us that the prime minister has advised Romney over the years in matters of politics, economics and the Middle East.

 When Mr. Romney was the governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Netanyahu offered him firsthand pointers on how to shrink the size of government. When Mr. Netanyahu wanted to encourage pension funds to divest from businesses tied to Iran, Mr. Romney counseled him on which American officials to meet with.

Adventures in Wingnutia: High Priest of The Stupid Edition

 Speaking before a conservative audience at the annual Values Voter Summit Saturday, former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum said that conservatives “will never have the elite smart people on our side.”

“We will never have the elite smart people on our side, because they believe they should have the power to tell you what to do,” said Santorum, adding, “So our colleges and universities, they’re not going to be on our side.

Chinese formally chide Willard, outs his source of wealth

"I also want to make sure that if a nation cheats like China has cheated, we call them on the carpet and don't let it continue." - Romney at Sept. 13 campaign rally in Virginia

 Just one day after climbing atop his high horse vowing to clamp down on China, calling it a "currency manipulator" and a "cheat," Romney was toppled by a scathing swipe from one of the country's official government newspapers.

Citing the irony of America's outsourcer-in-chief bashing China's currency values after having cashed in on it to great personal advantage, the article noted Romney has damaged relations between the countries and suggested he abandon "short-sighted China-bashing tricks and adopt at least a little bit of statesmanship on China-U.S. ties."

 What is more sensational is that this millionaire GOP candidate has vowed to declare China a currency manipulator on the first day of his presidency if elected.

Yet it is rather ironic that a considerable portion of this China-battering politician's wealth was actually obtained by doing business with Chinese companies before he entered politics.

The piece contends that Romney's "blaming-China-on-everything remarks are as false as they are foolish" and went on to lay blame for U.S. economic woes at the feet of its debtor, as only a note-holder might.

When Americans fight for their lives against terrorists overseas, Romney critiques their choice of weapons

I get that political campaigns are intramural sport. Protecting American lives is not. Americans rightly expect presidential candidates to know the difference.

Hitting send on their fax machines even as American public servants overseas were being slaughtered by rocket-bearing marauders, the Romney campaign, in it's effort to cross the finish line and shout "First," proved it could not distinguish between the two.

It wasn't just about his habitually dickish shoving to get his entitled, pasty ass at the head of line (son Tagg on dinner: "Dad always goes through the line first") it was about his warped sense of "winning." Just as he did at Bain, Romney merely saw the dead and dying Americans in harm's way as nothing more than a means to furthering his personal fortunes.

Displaying the most unpatriotic, unAmerican crassness imaginable, Mitt Romney saw not dead and injured foreign service workers who could be serving him if, God or Mohammed forbid, he were president, but a commodity to be traded on the public opinion market. In that moment, the Great Mormon Hope went from auditioning for Head of State of the most powerful nation in the world to The Great American Head Case by sniping at the embassy's weapon of choice as the assault of their compound became imminent.

The bi-partisan gut reaction was swift, visceral and resoundingly negative. The moment was called Romney's "Lehman" moment, harkening back to his predecessor John McCain's campaign meltdown in the face of the financial crisis. But it was much greater than even that. And his current opponent Barack Obama didn't miss the point.

"Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later."

Look who says America's doing better four years later

via Washington Monthly's
Political Animal

 Consider this remarkable exchange between Romney and conservative radio-host Laura Ingraham late [Sept. 4, 2012]:

INGRAHAM: You’ve also noted that there are signs of improvement on the horizon in the economy. How do you answer the president’s argument that the economy is getting better in a general election campaign if you yourself are saying it’s getting better?

ROMNEY: Well, of course it’s getting better. The economy always gets better after a recession, there is always a recovery. […]

Fallon gives comedic 'tribute' to Willard and his company

After hearing James Taylor perform some of his hit songs at the Democratic National Convention, late night host Jimmy Fallon was apparently inspired to honor Mitt Romney's ability to lose his own convention to a crazy man and a chair. Fallon took the lyrics to Taylor's "Fire and Rain" mixed in comedic convention postmortems and gives us "Romney and Bain."

Lyrics below the fold ...

Crap! Even the cheerleading section is getting ticked off

Transcript below the fold ...

The GOP's ever-shrinking pup tent

Romney thinks you're stupid, you are if you invite Bush back into your home

Imagine you just hosted a big neighborhood gathering. Everybody came over, ate the food, drank the beer and left the typical big old mess. Then, on top of that, you realize that one sketchy neighbor, whom you really never trusted in the first place, got a hold of your laptop while everyone was distracted by the festivities and hacked into your bank account wiping it out.

As though the theft itself wasn't bad enough, not only could you not get law enforcement's attention but as you're falling behind in various payments and losing your home, the neighbors for some alternate reality reason all pitched in and decided to help the thieving neighbor because he'd blown through his ill-gotten and is now teetering on bankruptcy.

Now, would any right-thinking person expect you to .. or even ask you to ... invite this miserable soul to your next get-together? I'd think not. But former governor Romney thinks you should and, remarkably, that you would offer such thievery re-entry to your home. 

 In May of 2000, when George W. Bush was running for president on a platform of extravagant tax cuts for all, his campaign did something that would be considered remarkable today: it submitted his tax plan to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, to see how much all those tax cuts would cost the Treasury.

The bipartisan committee ran through the details provided by the campaign and predicted that the tax plan would cost about $1.3 trillion over nine years, an underestimate but a clear sign of its high price tag. With the budget in surplus at the time, Mr. Bush didn’t dispute that cost, and never tried to pretend that the cuts would be free. Within a decade, in fact, they would turn out to be the biggest factor in the huge deficit he created.

Twelve years later, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, claims his far deeper tax cuts would have a price tag of exactly zero dollars. He has no intention of submitting his tax plan to the committee or anywhere else that might conduct a serious analysis, since he seems intent on running a campaign far more opaque than any candidate has in years.

Romney's message to voters? We decide, you abide.

Romney scores first negative bounce in poll's history

From the goldmine that is No More Mister Nice Blog:

 The question in the CNN/ORC poll (PDF) was "Does what you saw or read of the Republican National Convention in Tampa make you more likely or less likely to vote for Mitt Romney?"

More people said "less likely" than "more likely."

That's the first time a candidate has ever been underwater on that question in the history of CNN polling.

Romney campaign dishes first dose of truth

 President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede.

FLASHBACKS

"I think we are going to get a bump; I think we have a better opportunity for the bump as a party, as a challenging party... I can't give you a scope, but I can tell you I think it's going to be real and it's going to be visible, but I don't know what it will end up being."

-- Reince Priebus (minus vowels=RNC PR BS)

Romney is going to have a great convention. It's going to be incredible. 

He should gain a 5 or 6 point lead.

-- Dick "People Are Stupid Enough to Keep Paying Me" Morris

As a result of all that positivity and the flood of coverage, Romney, like many before him (pretty much everyone other than John Kerry in 2004) will receive a post-convention bounce in the polls that will likely be short lived, but significant enough to make headlines.

-- Brian McGovern, SaveJersey.com

In case you thought this slipped our minds: #releasethereturns

'Don't serve as a high priest wearing magical underwear'

"I will not take God out of our platform," the Republican nominee [Romney] said after reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. "I will not take God off our coins, and I will not take God out of my heart."

Of course he won't .. 'cause

"When you vote for Mitt Romney, you get a Mormon president."

The Old Man and The Seat

Laughed at or with? Clint Eastwood at RNC in Tampa

I've always pretty much appreciated most of Clint Eastwood's early works but it wasn't until Gran Torino that I found him both inspired and inspiring. Then came his "Morning in America" ad, which spoke to an ailing nation looking for a ray of hope and he knocked it out of the park.

I don't much idolize actors or actresses, whether they politically agree with me or not. I recognized the absolute star power Oprah brought to a young senator's campaign in 2008 and I was excited that she lent her gravitas to the affair. I was similarly impressed to see the Hollywood lineup that stood in support of Barack Obama. Not that they swayed my thinking on the politician, it just made the campaign more fun and I do tend to gravitate toward and support like-minded individuals. Sue me, I'm human.

On the other hand, I still watch re-runs of Frasier, howbeit with fewer personal laugh lines after learning of Kelsey Grammer's support for the Tea Party. Frankly, I more hold him in contempt for being a manwhore and stinking up my TV than for his political views. He's comported himself as a relatively sane Tea Party supporter, unlike the few third string losers such as Nugent, Norris and Voight with little else to lose, and have hitched their fading stars to that mob.

So now we return to Eastwood standing on stage talking to a chair. Despite Bill Maher's  full-throated defense (which seems so desperate, one wonders where his defense of Clint's comedic efforts ends and his own begins) of the roundly mocked schtick, it did "kill," as Maher contends -- just not in the way Bill thinks.

The other attempted defense is that of "senior abuse." Read how The Examiner valiantly works to distort Rachel Maddow's critique of the farce into some horrifying form of attack on seniors:

The Lighter Side of Mittmania

Mitt's USA, Inc. was no slip but HELL YEAH it's showing

If you pay attention to nothing else uttered by Willard Romney in the course of this election season, mark his following words as those which illuminate the soul and motivations of the former governor of Massachusetts in his run for the presidency:

"We understand how Washington works. We will reach across the aisle and find good people who, like us, want to make sure this company deals with its challenges. We’ll get America on track again."

His words should terrify you.

On its face, this statement, in particular the underlined word, seems merely one of those gaffes Beltway insiders get all giggly over and regular voters, like us, just shrug off. I cannot state how strong a warning these words serve nor how devastating their impact will be for this country should Romney win this election.

If you think I've somehow set my hair on fire in hysteria, consider that similar words threw off balance a man described as "a voracious dealmaker and not a very scrupulous one." Yes, none other than Rupert Murdoch, a man in many ways now master of the Republican candidate's destiny.

"At one point, Mr. Romney declared that 'I would probably bring in McKinsey,' the management consulting firm, to help him set up his presidential cabinet, a comment that seemed to startle the editors and left Mr. Murdoch visibly taken aback."

 This consultancy gambit is the high-performance engine that drives the Romney campaign. It is a backdoor attempt to pad his personal wealth using the clan's "blind" trust (a ruse as he has called the practice in past) as his personal piggy bank. The same trust that openly enriches his family and stashes proceeds accumulated in league with Bain co-conspirators.

Romney takes campaign etch-a-sketch way downmarket

AP/Romney scrawls his meandering lie on a whiteboard in SC

"Name calling to me and somehow by you repeating a number of $716 billion, that you can make that stick when [you say] that figure is being 'stolen' from Medicare, that's not true. You can't just repeat it and make it true, sir."

- Soledad O'Brien, CNN

Willard must tell this lie and it is vital to his divine candidacy that you believe it: President Obama's prescription for Medicaid surgically removes $716 billion from the program in the form of reductions in benefits to seniors.

He is compelled to repeat this lie until hopefully it sinks into the American electorate's consciousness by some sort of osmosis.

Thank you for the job, Mitt Romney

Hey, hey, over there!
It's Job Creator Extraordinaire.
Willard! Outsourced jobs buy fancy hair!

In the video below Willard Romney is thanked by the workers who owe their employment to Mitt's Bain adventures. Of course, every one of the grateful folks are sending those thanks from a variety of countries ... none of which is the United States.

DEVO unleashes Seamus: Don't Roof Rack Me, Bro

Jerry Casales, of DEVO, tells Rolling Stone that in tribute to Seamus and disrespected dogs everywhere, his group has released a web video entitled, "Don't Roof Rack Me, Bro."

The track also comes as Devo's founder and commercial director, Gerald V. Casale, kicks off his Remember Seamus campaign, which is supposed to help "make 2012 the year where animals like Seamus are valued and honesty is praised."

Devo is also helping to back Dogs Against Romney, with Casale designing a special edition shirt for the group. Casale is also involved in an upcoming smartphone game called "The Crate Escape: Seamus Unleashed," which sees release on August 26th, otherwise known as National Dog Day.

Ryan: Let them eat corn!!

Unless you're someone who makes the state fair circuit a regular pastime, news that Iowa State Fair's giant pumpkin competition took a huge hit this year is barely a blip on your radar.

Due to a persistent drought and the hottest July in the recorded history of Julys, this year's weigh-in for the behemoth gourds showed significant weight reduction among its top giants. For the first time in years, the winner clocked in at under 1,000 pounds.

As though to soften the competitive blow, farmer Dan Carlson, half of the winning Peterson-Carlson team for the past three years, pointed to farmers facing fates worse than their own, asking, "Have you seen the corn crop lately?”

It was among all this talk of less than super-sized pumpkins and drought and devastated corn crops that Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan came to stump for votes.

Mitt proves his campaign stops DO go better with coke

Mitt Romney held a campaign event Monday evening at a Miami juice shop owned by a convicted cocaine trafficker, according to a report on the CBS News web site.

 Romney appeared at El Palacio de los Jugos, which is owned by Reinaldo Bermudez. Court records show that Bermudez pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine in 1999 and served three years in federal prison.

Stumping for now-elusive Florida votes after his pick of Paul Ryan as his running mate, Willard and Marco Rubio managed to pick the one juice joint in all of Miami belonging to a guy who can't even vote for either due to his felony conviction and Florida law.

And it wasn't just you regular old campaign stop either. The Romney campaign was actually memorializing the visit by filming a political campaign ad at the juice bar. Bermudez was busted for shipping nearly 500 pounds of coke concealed in containers filled with fish that were imported from Trinidad.

The two guys seem to have common ground in their affinity for tiny Caribbean islands: Romney has money hidden in Bermuda to avoid US taxes; Bermudez got busted for shipping cocaine from a nearby south Caribbean island. Guess campaigning is a lot more fun when you can swap stories of solidarity concerning your off-shore activities.

But it's all good, Bermudez notes.

"Here in Miami there are a lot people with money who have had problems with the law."

Whoa, dude, keep your mitts off my offshore account

Watch the pained expression on Willard Romney's face as he listens to new soul mate Paul Ryan put in harm's way the millions he's squirreled away overseas as the realization hits that he forgot to get that goshdarned prenup signed.

 "What we're saying is, take away the tax shelters that are uniquely enjoyed by people in the top tax brackets so they can't shelter as much money from taxation, that should lower tax rates for everybody to make America more competitive."

OOPS!

The Wall Street Journal: Our advice is that Mr. Romney go on offense on Medicare. He could hit Mr. Obama with ads in Florida and elsewhere ...

"Americans don't believe GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney hit a home run with his choice of Paul Ryan as a running mate, a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, with more of the public giving him lower marks than high ones."

"Only Palin, then the governor of Alaska, and Quayle, a two-term senator from Indiana, were rated lower than Ryan."

"Only Dan Quayle in a 1988 Harris Poll of likely voters was viewed less positively than Ryan, with 52% rating Quayle as a "fair" or "poor" vice presidential choice.

Pulling back the curtain on the GOP flim-flam men

One must admire the sheer hubris of a political party that touts an alleged belief in small government yet turn into American Hoggers whenever they get their hands on the country's coffers. Or engages in a level of household espionage so great, it attempts to control  individual bodily functions, except, of course, any required to pull a trigger.

That's the modern Republican Party ... all poke, no policy.

Well, that's not completely true. There are some GOP policies that are etched in stone: line the pockets of the country's wealthiest citizens is one; screw the middle-class voters they keep ignorant by withdrawing access to education then convincing them to vote for them is the other. Tax breaks for the top 2-percent ... encouraging businesses to decimate wages by lighting the exits as they head off-shore ... hoggishly banking the big bucks with friends leaving just scraps for workers who invested in that wealth through sweat equity and hard work based on their faith in a broken social contract.  

These are the immutable Republican policies.

Now the titular head of the Party of Pigs has named himself a running mate ... a man whose economic policies are so debase and cruel, his own church in a series of letters has condemned them as moral failures and a group of nuns took to a bus in protest.

Happy Days are here again! Ryan joins the Willard ticket

The 1 percent can now pop that Shipwrecked 1907 Heidsieck bubbly they've been saving for a happy occasion now that Willard Galt Romney has picked little Richie Rich Ryan to join his of out-of-touch team of whiners. Back to the future we go.

Pilgrim Willard crashes campaign into a Plymouth Rock

 OMG.This might just be the moment Mitt Romney lost the election.Wow. politico.com/news/stories/0…
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) August 8, 2012

What mind-blowingly awesome utterance could Willard's brilliant team have issued that sent arch Conservative Erick son of Erick of Redstate into such a twitter? Oh, this:

 Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul, responding to a harsh new super PAC ad featuring a man who blames Bain Capital for his uninsured wife’s death, broke new ground for the campaign by praising Romney’s health insurance mandate.

 As word spread throughout the Wingnutia blogosphere that Romeny spokeswoman Andrea Saul dared speak these words, "To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Gov. Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care." Ears of the Republican's base perked up on hearing the attack command.

Willard gives the Jewish kibbutz swift kick in the teeth

Apparently feeling his foreign ventures weren't really terrible enough, Mitt the Mouth took a slam on the kibbutz, the collective farming model that was central to the early economic and political life of Israel.

At a fundraiser at Maggiano’s Little Italy in downtown Chicago, Romney told supporters that American individualism is nothing like a collective, a kibbutz or "some little entity."

“It’s individuals and their entrepreneurship which have driven America. What America is not is a collective where we all work in a kibbutz or we all in some little entity,” Romney told his gathered supporters.  

After having praised Israel's culture on his ill-fated visit there and simultaneously angering Palestinians with remarks that prompted their chief negotiator to exclaim, “Oh my god, this man needs a lot of education. What he said about the culture is racism,” Team Romney seems to have realized back home that they missed a country on their Insultathon.

Romney's comments Tuesday were not overlooked in the Jewish press, with one writer at Jewish Daily Press noting that such comments call into question the Republican presumptive nominee's basic understanding of Israel's culture.

 In the quote, Romney contrasts the pursuit of dreams and the building of successful business with the kibbutz, the collective farming model that was central to the early economic and political life of Israel.

It’s hard to separate Israel’s economic culture from the country’s kibbutznik roots, so today’s comment seems to make the culture statement look even more like a gaffe. 

Well, no oversea troop visit ... but review from Economist

Yo, Mitt! Where da troops on that overseas junket?

After declaring in 2011 the U.S. is operating under a "peacetime economy," Willard Romney crafted an overseas trip that seemed intent on erasing our nation's wartime efforts by ignoring the people still fighting and dying in his Forgotten War.

Romney flies over troops based overseas; stops to meet none of them.

Romney might have mitigated his dazzling display of stunning foreign policy ignorance by spending some time on the ground meeting troops serving overseas. He simply flew over our military stationed at any  number of foreign outposts; stops to meet none of them.

Imagine the difference in media outcomes  had the would-be Commander-in-Chief set aside  time with service members rather than scandal-ridden bankers.

It's downright impossible to stick your foot in your over-privileged mouth when, rather than trying to impress the elites and your crazies back home, you're listening to down-to-earth troops. And you wouldn't have had to shake up your panderthon fundraising much to have made it happen.

Huge signs appear at Romney rally in Poland ...

... supporting Ron Paul

..

"Under the headline 'Governor Romney won’t like this' we saw a big sign in the crowd for Rep Ron Paul." - Greta Van Susteren, FOX reporter

Romney bores a friend in Poland

At long last! After making a shambles of his first two stops on his foreign policy junket and angering any number of dignitaries along the way, Willard Romney met with one leader, well a former leader, who gladly handed the Republican presumptive nominee his unofficial endorsement.

Nobel Peace Prize recipient Lech Walesa, once known as a formidable pro-union activist, praised Romney effusively -- using four variations of the word "success" but not really saying much else.

Then, following his half hour encounter with the nominee, Walesa turned to Polish news to declare that Charisma is something Mr. Romney "doesn't really yet have," suggesting he needs to do "some rallying," according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Romney puts friendly FOX in petting zoo

"There has been no press access to Governor Romney since we landed in Poland. We (press) are in a holding pattern (I can’t help but feel a bit like the press is a modified petting zoo since we are trapped in a bus while Polish citizens take pictures of us.)  Under the headline 'Governor Romney won’t like this' we saw a big sign in the crowd for Rep Ron Paul."
- Greta Van Susteren

Now is this any way to treat The Help your traveling staff?