Editorial: Hard Truth for the Left

Some of our readers have taken us to task for supporting President Obama and the Democrats in the upcoming election instead of promoting other alternative candidates on the left, such as Green Party nominee Jill Stein, or Justice Party candidate Rocky Anderson, or even Libertarian Gary Johnson. But our job is to tell the truth — not what we wish was the truth. And the truth is that Barack Obama is the most progressive candidate who can get elected president on Nov. 6.

We were told in 2000 that there was not enough difference between the two major parties to warrant a progressive vote for Al Gore. You can argue until you’re blue in the face about whether progressives who voted for Green candidate Ralph Nader in Florida share responsibility for George W. Bush’s presidency. We think it is clear that Gore would have been a much better president than Bush, who ignored concerns about al Qaeda’s threat to the US until it was too late. Then Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney used the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq. And, perhaps most significantly in long-term damage, Bush replaced conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist and moderate Republican Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court with John Roberts and Samuel Alito, right-wing ideologues who have joined with Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and increasingly hardline Anthony Kennedy to form a right-wing bloc on the Court that swept aside a century of precedents in 2010 with the Citizens United decision, which allowed corporations to engage in political activity. Now the right-wing majority appears poised to enact a laundry list of right-wing initiatives from the bench.

In a recent interview with Sam Seder, Jill Stein said the relationship of Democrats to progressives was abusive. “The lesser evil vote is interpreted as a mandate and will lead to more of the same,” she said. Obama is “able to do much worse than George W. Bush was able to do in terms of expanding the wars, the Wall Street bailout and the attacks on our civil liberties because the opposition essentially goes away.”

But we are not sure that it does much good for the Greens to run a presidential campaign that gets at most a few percentage points of the total vote. If anything, it seems to demonstrate what little support there actually is for the Green agenda.

Ralph Nader had a national reputation as a progressive consumer activist in 2000, when he got 2.88 million votes, or 2.74% of the total, for president. In 2004 Nader ran again as an independent and finished third with 465,650 votes (0.38%) while the Green nominee, David Cobb, finished sixth with 119,859 (0.1%). The Green candidate in 2008, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, got 161,603 votes, or 0.12% of the total.

We don’t doubt the sincerity of those candidates, or of Stein, a physician from Lexington, Mass., but she is virtually unknown outside the Commonwealth, where she ran for governor in 2002, finishing third with 3.5% of the vote, and again in 2010, finishing fourth with 1.4%. She won a town meeting seat in 2005 and 2008 and lost a 2006 race for Secretary of the Commonwealth.

The Greens are on the ballot in 32 states, including at least six “swing states” and hope to be on 40 ballots for the general election. (The Greens got on the Texas ballot in 2010 with the help of a Missouri-based nonprofit corporation with ties to Republican activists which paid more than half a million dollars from undisclosed sources for the ultimately successful petition effort.) Libertarians, headed by former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, will be on at least 41 ballots; the Constitution Party, headed by conservative former US Rep. Virgil Goode of Virginia, is on 21 ballots and the Justice Party, headed by former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, is on 12 ballots, according to Ballot Access News.

(We believe that all those candidates — and any candidate who will be on enough ballots to contest 270 electoral votes — should be included in the presidential debates, which are scheduled for Oct. 3, Oct. 16 and Oct. 22, as well as a vice presidential debate Oct. 11. However, the two major parties set up the Commission on Presidential Debates in 1987 largely to keep aggressive questioners and alternative party nominees out of the debate.)

Losing general election campaigns discourages a movement. But Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has shown it is possible to run as an independent progressive populist and win statewide. After starting in the 1970s running also-ran campaigns as the anti-war Liberty Union candidate for the Senate and governor, he ran for mayor of Burlington in 1981, narrowly beating a six-term Democratic incumbent. He followed a progressive course that got him re-elected three times. With that local base, Sanders ran for governor in 1986, finishing third with 14.5% of the vote. He then turned his sights on the state’s at-large seat in Congress when Jim Jeffords (R) ran for the Senate in 1988. Sanders lost to Republican Lt. Gov. Peter Smith that year, but in a 1998 rematch Sanders defeated Smith, 56% to 40%, becoming the first independent elected to the US House in 40 years and the first self-described socialist in 60 years.

Sanders was a co-founder of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and and has a 100% lifetime legislative score with the AFL-CIO but he has balanced that with the rural state’s native conservatism. For example, he voted against the Brady Bill in 1993 and in favor of an NRA-supported bill restricting lawsuits against gun manufacturers in 2005. When Sen. Jeffords announced he would not seek a fourth term in 2006, Sanders entered the race to succeed him. With the backing of Democratic leaders, Sanders headed off a significant Democratic challenge and went on to defeat a Republican businessman in the general election by a 2 to 1 margin.

In the Senate, Sanders has caucused with the Democrats. He has been a persistent critic of the Wall Street bailout, joined three Democratic senators in opposing the nomination of Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary and led the successful amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that required an audit of the Federal Reserve. On Dec. 10, 2010, he delivered an 8-1/2 hour speech against the extension of the Bush-era tax rates and other tax credits in a deal that also extended benefits for long-term unemployed workers. The text of that speech was published in February 2011 as The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class by Nation Books.

In his weekly “Brunch with Bernie” radio show with Thom Hartmann on Sept. 7, Sanders noted, “We have to remember where we were when Bush left office and we were losing 750,000 jobs a month.” He said he would like to hear President Obama say how he would put people back to work. “You’re not going to have the kind of economy this country needs and you’re not going to create the millions of jobs we have to create unless we deal with Wall Street,” he said. “You can’t continue to have a handful of huge banks led by JP Morgan and Chase with so much wealth and so much power. In my own view, you’ve got to start breaking up these large financial institutions. At the very least, they need to be significantly re-regulated.”

But Sanders said it was vital to re-elect Obama and keep the Democratic majority in the Senate and regain the House majority. “This really is a pivotal moment in American history,” he said. “If the Republicans win, I fear very much that along with Citizens United and along with the grotesquely unfair distribution of wealth and income in this country that we’re going to he moving pretty rapidly to an oligarchic form of government, where a handful of families — a few hundred families — have significant control of the economic and political life of this country.”

At the same time, he said, progressives need to organize at the grassroots to put pressure on Democrats to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and other progressive principles. “Now is not the time to despair and throw our hands up in the air,” he said. “We need to work hard and get in the streets to to make sure the President moves forward in a progressive direction.”

Sanders is up for re-election this year and he deserves your support, as do progressive Dems such as Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Ben Cardin (Md.), Bob Casey (Pa.), Shelton Whitehouse (R.I.) and newcomer Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts. And yes, the other Dems are worth supporting, too, if for no other reason than to keep Mitch McConnell from becoming majority leader. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2012

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Mitt Caught In 36 More Lies This Week

It was a busy week for Mitt Romney, possibly alarmed at President Obama bouncing out of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte with a widening lead in tracking polls. The Republican nominee again played fast and loose with the facts in attempting to close that gap.

Steve Benen, in the 34th installment of his "Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity" series at Rachel Maddow's blog, documented at least 36 more departures from the truth on Romney's campaign path. By our count, that raises the total of lies Mitt has told to 654 since Benen started keeping count in January.

Benen also noted that, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos Friday morning, Romney looked ahead to the upcoming debates and said he'll have a challenge to deal with: "[T]he president tends to, how shall I say it, to say things that aren't true."

Benen commented, "There's no sense of shame and no sense of irony."

Benen also noted that a Washington Post/ABC News poll out Friday shows a plurality of Americans believes the Obama campaign is saying things "it believes to be true" rather than "intentionally misleading people." On the other hand, a plurality of Americans believes the opposite about the Romney campaign.

See Benen's previous editions of Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity: Vol. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII,XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII.

Selections from the October 1, 2012 issue

COVER/Michael Moore
‘President Romney.’ It could happen

EDITORIAL
Hard truths for the left

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Women can make the difference

DISPATCHES
Obama bounces, Romney spins;
Spinning for dollars;
Repubs start eyeing lifeboats;
Mitt can’t get back to center;
Ryan touted military cuts he now blames on Obama;
GOP's lost weekend;
Mitt breezes past 600 lies in War on Facts;
Messing with voters is part of GOP plan;
Poll shows Bachmann in peril;
GOP voters credit Mitt with Bin Laden kill:
Dems fighting for Senate control;
Texas AG enjoys suing feds;
Jobless rate down as employment rises, bad news?
Uncomfortable truths for Republicans;
Boycott of Palermo's Pizza continues;
Texas nurses win union victory;
Don Siegelman back in prison ...

MARK ANDERSON
Citizens fight corporate takeovers

BOB BURNETT
Obama vs. Romney: the popularity contest

CHARLES CULLEN
Empty suit vs. the working man

ROGER BYBEE
Ryan carpet-bombed factories, strafed first aid

WENONAH HAUTER
Environmental defense fund: stop sellouts

JIM GOODMAN
Don’t take my vote for granted

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
The elephant at the Republican convention

SAM URETSKY
Limits of obstruction

JOHN BUELL
Libor crooks

WAYNE O’LEARY
The great constitutional charade

FR. DONNELL KIRCHNER
Paul Ryan’s questionable Catholic positions

SETH SANDRONSKY
Public education advocacy and donor secrecy

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Voting defensively

ROB PATTERSON
The fine art of the celebrity crush

and more ...

Stiff Upper Lip

By Charles Cullen

It hasn't always been our style as Democrats or Liberals to shut up and follow our leader; nor should it be. Debate is healthy and it's what makes our party strong. When our elected representatives don't do what we want them to do, essentially breaking their verbal contract with us, our instinct is to speak out. But I am asking every American of voting age who thinks that President Obama would make a much, much, better leader for the United States than would Mitt Romney to stifle that instinct to criticize what Obama has done wrong somewhat, at least until the election. Look at the body of work and not just the single thing Obama did that you didn't happen to like. Then, proudly wearing your "I voted" sticker, go back to nitpicking every move the President makes.

Don't worry, the Republicans will do all the attacking needed. They will attack Obama for being soft on war even as they attack him for being a war-monger. They will call his economic plan awful even as they draw up a secret economic plan that would make Donald Trump blush. The Republicans have no problem with lies and contradiction. We do. That's why we have to win.

The unfortunate truth is that getting Democrats/Liberals to agree is like herding cats. And that's fine unless you are entering the final stages of a generation-defining Presidential race. Then you need to come together with your fellow voter and, whether or not they agree with you on EVERY issue, reelect the President.

I'll put it out there: I wish Obama had closed Guantanamo. I wish that more troops were coming home from Afghanistan. I wish they were coming home faster. I have not lost a wink of sleep over the killing of Bin Laden, as I tend to believe that if you orchestrate a deadly attack on United States civilians, your life is forfeit. In fact, I believe that being a member of ANY terrorist group that takes serious action against the United States populace should be very hazardous to one's health. I also believe that we should focus our resources on our own workforce, using our military might cautiously and as rarely as we have to.

I disagree with some of the President's moves. Does that mean I'm going to stomp my feet and refuse to vote for him, or worse, vote Romney? Does that mean I'm going to hold my breath until a candidate who agrees with me on every issue comes along? Of course not. I'm going to vote for the best man for the job, who in this case happens to be President Obama.

Finally, I believe that an Obama who is in his second term will tilt back toward the progressive ideals he espoused during his first campaign. An Obama who doesn't have to worry about his reelection bid because he's being blamed for things that occurred before or just days after he took office is an Obama I can believe in.

If Charlotte and the range of speakers can be taken as any indication; I'm right and we can expect a more progressive, economy-focused Obama. If I'm wrong, we can still expect a man who exposes Romney/Ryan as the extremists they are. Either way it's a much better bet than a Romney ticket beholden to the Ultra-Conservatives who helped him.

Details from advisors shows Romney would follow same basic foreign policy, but would he do it as effectively?

By Marc Jampole

 

Mitt Romney’s foreign policy advisors Eliot Cohen and Richard Williamson have provided details of Romney’s differences from Obama on foreign policy. But if we take the New York Times version as approximately accurate, it boils down to nuances and that Romney would continue the basic post World War II U.S. foreign policy. But would he do it as effectively as the President?

Here are the four differences reported in today’s New York Times. We’ll take them one at a time:

“…he would have already told Iran that he would not allow it to get close to building a bomb, setting a “red line” in a far different place from President Obama’s.” Note that they don’t say where.  The red line of course means the circumstances under which we would go to war with Iraq. Until Romney says at what point he would draw this red line for combat, we have to assume that at best he’s being a little more aggressive, but basically following the Obama line of negotiation and economic sanctions.

“He would tell the Egyptians that if they wanted $1 billion in debt forgiveness — as promised by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this month — they would have to put far more effort into protecting American interests in the country, starting with the United States Embassy.” The Egyptian government has already beefed up security and tussled with protesters.  Linking a show of support for a fragile democratic government to doing something it has already done strikes me as little more than bluster.

“And he would provide far more aid to elements of the Syrian opposition, including…  ‘facilitating’ the provision of lethal arms from other Arab states. But, like President Obama, he would stop short of arming them directly.” This ostensibly aggressive statement turns out to be nothing different as well, because only the naïve don’t recognize that any aid to the Syrian opposition facilitates the provision of lethal arms, because everything reduces to money and if you have to pay less for x, y and z, you’ll have more for weapons and ammo. If the advisors mean that they would provide more money and “advisors,” they’re merely grandstanding because they have no idea what the Obama Administration has really done to help the Syrian insurgents.   

“And the United States would have been far more involved in the formation of a new Libya, the advisers insisted, though they conceded it was not clear that could have stopped the attack that killed the American ambassador there and three other American officers.” Again, they don’t say how much more they would have done and they can’t say how involved the U.S. was, because they really don’t know.   

Romney has surrounded himself with neo-con advisors and wherever there’s a microphone or an Internet connection the neo-cons expatiate on the differences between their policy and mainstream U.S. foreign policy under the Democrats. Despite their protestation, it’s practically the same policy, except the neo-cons think we’re in a holy war with Islam and are a bit more trigger-happy when it comes to extraordinary measures and sending in troops.

But no Democrat Administration has called for disarmament or even the unilateral dismantling of our nuclear capability. All base foreign policy on the economic interest of U.S. multinational corporations and the need to secure a supply of oil. While stepping back from the extremes of waterboarding and other torture, the Obama Administration has shown itself willing to circumvent U.S. and international law and due process.  We still have thousands of contractors in Iraq and we still rely on these mercenaries to wage war.  The many successes in the war against terrorism scored by the Obama Administration have come through violence.

After 9/11, a Democratic president would have responded as bellicosely as Bush II to the threat of terrorism and troops would have gone somewhere, probably Afghanistan and Pakistan. That they went to Iraq was a bad executive decision. We will never know why the Bush II Administration decided to invade Iraq because the reasons they gave the world turned out to be lies.  Based on history, there is every reason to believe that both a Democratic and Republic regime would be prone to another enormously tragic and expensive error in judgment.

My conclusion: the strategy will be nearly the same under Romney, but what about the execution?

We know that Romney wants to install as key policy makers many of the men who advised the Bush II Administration. The argument I would make here is the same one Bill Clinton made on domestic affairs: They screwed it up before, so why should we give them another chance?

And then there’s the two leaders—Obama versus Romney on foreign affairs. The nation rates Obama way ahead and so do I. As I detailed in blog entries of September 13 and August 1, Romney has shown himself to be surprisingly unsuited as a diplomat. He doesn’t pick up on standard etiquette cues that everyone else seems to get and he tends to speak before he has enough facts. He also suffers frequently from “foot-in-mouth” disease, which is never good when dealing with foreign governments whose heads have their own little red buttons connected to missile silos. On a talk show earlier this week, Republican royalty Peggy Noonan compared Mitt’s style to Dick Nixon’s, and she didn’t mean it as a compliment.

By contrast, Obama has taken most of our troops and contractors out of Iraq, found Osama bin Laden and other terrorists, organized most of the world against Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, regained the respect in the world that we lost under Bush II and remained friendly trading partners with China. I am confident that McCain would have tried to complete most of this agenda because it’s all part of long-term U.S. foreign policy. But Obama did it, and I trust him more than I trust Romney to keep doing it, even as I condemn much of what constitutes our long-term policy such as focusing so much on the needs of multinationals and not immediately dismantling all our nuclear bombs.

Contrast in foreign policy styles: Obama is rational & resolved. Romney shoots from hip, then lies

By Marc Jampole

The terrorists who planned and pulled off the attack on the American Embassy in Libya that killed four Americans should be condemned. They are violence-loving extremists with an irrational hate of the United States.

But the people who created and distributed the scurrilous and lie-soaked film that incited Egyptians and Libyans to exercise their right of free protest and thereby inadvertently provided the terrorists cover in Libya are also to be condemned, even if we must support their right of free speech.  They (the filmmakers, not the protesters) are also extremists with an irrational hate of Islam.

President Obama’s response to the tragic situation has been appropriate: He has stated unequivocally that the United States is going to track down the perpetrators of the attacks and murders.  And he has the track record to back up his resolve, having tracked down Osama bin Laden and other terrorists.

At the same time, though, the President and the Administration have reached out to the Egyptian and Libyan government and also made it clear that they do not condone the message of the film, ironically title, “The Innocence of Muslims.”

History suggests that there is no immediate role for the opposition in this type of crisis.  As many have pointed out, past challengers have limited comments to sympathy for the victims and support of the United States. It’s what Reagan did in 1980 and what the Democrats did in the weeks after 9/11. The idea is to show solidarity to the rest of the world and not let politics impede the complicated task of responding to the threat. Months later, opposition criticism might blossom, but not in the 24 or 48 hours after such a tragedy.

That Romney took another path demonstrates once again that he is unqualified to be president. I’m not talking about his positions on issues, but about his basic modus operandi. Romney blundered so badly that even loyalist Republicans like Representative Peter T. King, Peggy Noonan and Ed Rogers have criticized it.

Here are the three major mistakes that Mitt has made over the past two days in his effort to turn the terrorist attacks into a political controversy. Note that he has made all three mistakes in the past:

1. He shot from the hip. Romney made his first statement which condemned the Administration for apologizing to the terrorists and used as evidence a statement the U.S. Embassy in Egypt had issued criticizing the film. At the time, he didn’t know that the embassy’s statement had come before the Libyans gathered outside the embassy in Benghazi and he didn’t know that the terrorists had killed four Americans.  As Martin Bashir, Rachel Maddow, Jennifer Granholm and countless other TV journalists have noted, Romney also embarrassed himself by shooting from the hip before all the facts were in about the Chinese dissident Chen Guangchen.  Some of his foolish comments about security at the London Olympics could also be seen as examples of “shooting before aiming.”
2. He lied. Anyone who has been following the story closely is probably sick of the expression “double down,” which has been used by journalists of all political persuasions to describe Romney’s statements yesterday afternoon, when he kept repeating that the United States apologized to terrorists, even when the facts emerged. Lying seems to come naturally to this year’s Republican ticket. The lies his running mate Paul Ryan made in his acceptance speech have been thoroughly analyzed by the news media.   One commentator has compiled a list of 533 documented lies that Romney has told over the past 30 weeks. That’s a little more than 17 a week, week after week.
3. He broke long-existing etiquette and tradition. As I discussed before, Mitt should have followed the American tradition of closing ranks and expressing sympathy. It’s not the first time that Romney couldn’t figure out proper protocol. Remember that during his disastrous trip abroad he revealed that he had received a special briefing in London from the British government that other foreign leaders have received for years. Unlike all others, Romney made the confidential briefing public. That Romney doesn’t pick up on these standards of governmental etiquette is very surprising, considering his background in business.  Perhaps he thinks he’s too important to conform.

Most pundits say that Romney’s foolishness was a desperation move because he sees the polls moving inexorably towards Obama and feels the election slipping away from him.

I disagree: Romney’s statements over the past few days are completely consistent with his past:  He shoots from the hip, he lies and he doesn’t have a good sense of etiquette and protocol, at least when it comes to foreign policy.  Not the right guy to place in charge of dropping bombs and waging wars.

Are there any appreciable foreign policy differences between Obama and Romney?

By Marc Jampole

 

Like many of the left with pacifist leanings, I am disappointed with President Obama’s foreign policy.  I don’t like the fact that Guantanamo is still open and that we still have 16,000 mercenaries (I’ll refrain from using the current euphemism, “military contractor”) in Iraq and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and mercenaries in Afghanistan. Killing Osama bin Laden without a trial and using drones to assassinate American citizens, again without a trial, seem like continuations of the Bush II reign of illegality.  I would prefer a budget that cuts military spending even more than what the Democrats are proposing.  Moreover, on principle I am disappointed in any President who does not unilaterally dismantle our nuclear capability.

But that’s me. I’m anti-war deep into my bones.

What would the mainstream view of Obama’s foreign policy be?

When placed in the context of American foreign policy since the 1940’s, when judged by the criteria of the Cold War and post-Cold War strategies, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than that Obama has one of the best—if not the best—foreign policy record since FDR.  He has pretty much eradicated world terrorism as a military threat and he has brought home virtually all the troops—U.S. and mercenary—from Iraq. He has mustered surprising world support for the U.S. positions regarding Iran and Syria. He has continued to upgrade military technology, as witnessed by the infamous drones. Both Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are immensely popular with foreign leaders and populations, primarily for not being Bush II. Anyone who thinks Obama has been too weak or mealy-mouthed with any of our enemies, perceived or real, just hasn’t been listening to his rhetoric. There have been no new foreign policy fiascos or government scandals. That’s a pretty good record when judged by the U.S. State Department standards in effect for the past 65 or so years.

The Republicans aren’t talking much about foreign policy, and with good reason: when you start from the premises of their worldview, Obama’s foreign policy should rate highly. When you go to the Romneycampaign website you mostly get generalizations. He does seem to repeat several points, all of which I found well-articulated in a speechMitt gave on foreign policy at the Citadel about 11 month ago:

• He believes in American exceptionalism, which means that the United States can play by its own rules because there is something special about its mission, kind of the equivalent of Jews believing they are a “light unto the nations.”
• He believes that we are in a war against radical Islam.
• He doesn’t want a world in which there are rival powers, and mentions China and Russia as two potential rivals.
• He wants to spend more on the military.

In all these positions, he is only slightly to the right of centrist mainstream State Department positions, in other words to Obama himself.

Would Mitt pull troops out of Afghanistan faster or slower than Obama? Is he more or less likely to start a war somewhere? Will he stop the use of drones to assassinate people our spy network thinks are terrorists? Or will he bring back waterboarding and other forms of torture? 

Mitt’s not saying, but my guess is that the answer to all these questions is about the same as Obama’s, maybe a little quicker on the trigger with China and Russia.  Keep in mind that no matter who wins:

1. We can’t afford to pay for another major war and everyone knows it, including the Iranians.
2. Only the top echelon at the State and Defense departments are political appointments. The rest will remain as part of the continuing foreign policy establishment which has employed the following strategy to guide the United States since the birth of the Cold War: Let’s bully our way because we have the most weapons.

These two facts will serve to push a Romney Administration towards the Obama centrist foreign policies.

Mitt Breezes Past 600 Lies This Week

It's been a relatively slow week for Steve Benen's "Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity" series at The Maddow Blog, as Romney spent several days out of the public eye, preparing for next month's debates, but the indefatigable Benen did record 16 "stretchers" for Vol. XXXIII. That brings the running total to 618 lies told by the Republican presidential nominee since Benen started documenting Romney's departures from the truth in January.

Memento

By Charles Cullen

Andrea Mitchell and all the other dingbat talking-heads whining about Obama's speech clearly suffer from the same brain injury the main character in Memento suffers from. When I first watched the film I thought it was just a neat piece about a guy who can't remember new things for more than a few seconds (or minutes, depending on the time in the film), I didn't realize it was a documentary. We have to help these people.

First we have Andrea Mitchell's wrong-headed criticism that there wasn't enough cold, hard, substance in the President's speech. Seasoned reporters, heck, casual observers, know that every speaker at a convention has a relatively specific job to do. Whether it's firing up the base (Michelle Obama), appealing to undecided voters (Lincoln Chaffee) or attacking voter suppression laws (John Lewis), they didn't just amble on stage accidentally. They went there with a plan, and a speech geared to advance it.

It's so migraine-inducingly obvious that Bill Clinton, among other things, intended to be very policy-oriented and to give voters an idea of what Obama would do in a second term. You know, specifics.

In it's purest form, Clinton's speech was designed to specifically highlight the President's accomplishments and give voters an idea of what to expect if they re-elected him. Obama, Clinton intimated, would continue the long work of healing the United States after Bush/Romney economics nearly destroyed it. Clinton did this so that Obama wouldn't be weighed down by the necessity of a wonkish speech, and could accept his nomination properly.

As it happens there was plenty of substance to sift through in Obama's speech, unlike Romney's, and there was plenty of oratory. That was the other (and in a so sad it's funny kind of way) criticism leveled at Obama's acceptance. "It wasn't as good as his keynote speech" in 2004, whined many a moron. Guess what: when you are a keynote speaker, you get to deliver speeches like the one Obama is famous for. When you are a sitting President, you are expected to behave rather more Presidentially.

I honestly don't know how a large portion of the television news media dresses themselves in the morning if they don't realize what's going on here, or that their criticisms are contradictory.

This fury crystallized a notion that had been growing for me throughout my coverage of the campaign: Obama is the most put-upon President since World War II. Say what you will about Nixon, Johnson or Clinton, they've got nothing on President Obama. As he tries desperately to clean up a Republican-made disaster, his life has become like a baseball player who is expected to hit a home run every time he steps to the plate and is eviscerated if he does not. Know what, kids? Even the best hitters in the game will tell you that you can't hit 'em all out of the park. Do we criticize Ted Williams because every ball he hit didn't go 450 feet into the stands? No. But we do criticize Obama for not doing the political equivalent every time he opens his mouth to speak.

It's irresponsible, reckless, and, for lack of a better word, just plain stupid.

A Peek Behind the Curtain

By Charles Cullen

Yesterday I arrived at the Convention Center and Charlotte Bobcats Arena early, partially because I was excited by the list of speakers and partially because the nightmare of hoops to jump through that was Tampa was still very fresh in my mind. Let me make this clear; when I say I arrived early, I don't mean "I got there before most," or "I had more than enough time to set up." I mean I got there before almost everybody. Including the Democrats themselves.

While embarrassing, this mistake allowed me the chance to see what goes into creating the visuals that were seen on TV, and will be played again and again, throughout the week by news organizations. It was fascinating. The Democratic staffers were meticulous, down to forcing Debbie Wasserman-Shultz to practice her walk again, and again, and again. Then debating whether or not she stepped too near a power source. "She stepped on the power chord," one convention consultant said, "She did not!" retorted another, loudly enough for the microphones to pick up. This is really how the sausage gets made: speakers names were tested out, then it was time for the band to rehearse. Did I mention I arrived early?

Everything was tested. Everything had to be pitch-perfect. And, by and large, everything was. Say what you will about Obama, but his messaging team leaves nothing to chance. And I suppose that's what was so impressive about last night; the delegate day is SUPPOSED to be the day of flubs, the day people misspeak, go off script, contradict themselves. Not so in camp Obama. Everyone, including the "civilians" who presumably do not spend their spare time speaking to nationally-televised crowds in packed stadiums, were on point almost down to the second.

The Democrats were raucous, happy, and incredibly enthusiastic. In stark contrast to Tampa, the only delegate interruptions were constant cheers of "Four More Years," "USA, USA, USA," "Fired up, ready to go," and more than a few variations of "I love you Michelle!" when the First Lady spoke.

As for the other speakers, they delivered hay-maker after hay-maker to Romney. And the crowd was eating it all up with a spoon.

Whether it was the line "Mitt Romney proudly wrote an op-ed entitled 'Let Detroit go bankrupt,' to which President Obama responded "Not on my watch!" or Newark Mayor Cory Booker's line that "being asked to pay your fair share isn't class warfare; it's patriotism."

The delegates seemed to feed off the energy of the speakers and give back as good as they were getting, especially when it came to women's rights, healthcare (the Affordable Care Act), and the issue of wealth/opportunity-inequality. If there is an enthusiasm gap, I've seen no evidence of it. Rather, I think we have one party who is running desperately for President, and one party whose guy IS the President and because of that seems somewhat less frenzied than it was at the end of the Bush years.

Cats Offer An Opinion on the President

By Kevin Kreneck

Mostly Quiet On the Western Front

By Charles Cullen

Today I am in Charlotte, North Carolina, covering the Democratic National Convention and was witness to the not quite awesome power of "Operation Chaos," or whatever Seussical name the Republicans were using in Tampa for their plan to disrupt the Convention here. So far, "Operation Chaos" has consisted mostly of a very, very small group of Republicans locking arms and sitting down outside the Charlotte Convention Center ... then, getting hot, and crestfallen because no one was paying attention to them, leaving.

Rep. Paul Ryan is hovering around in Greenville, giving short speeches that seem in danger of swerving into the Ayn Rand nonsense that got him in trouble in the first place. There's even a "Paul Ryan Rally" planned. But it suffers from the same problem as the Republican arm-lockers; no one really seems to be paying much attention. Everyone at a Paul Ryan rally has made up their mind. This isn't news or persuasion; it's just pandering.

An Internet ad has also been produced, juxtaposing Obama's speeches from 2008 to his speeches from 2012. The tag-line is "Same Speeches, Same Promises." But at least Obama is consistent. Were the Democrats to run a similar attack ad against Ryan and Romney, they'd find nothing but contradiction. Mitt Romney has taken every possible position on just about every political issue, while Ryan has had to repudiate his philosophical compass (Ayn Rand) in light of her less than conservative-kosher beliefs.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus looks like he's trying not to vomit as he outlines the many states that Romney needs to campaign heavily in, and win, to overtake the President.

And while Priebus is doing a good job of keeping it all down, and of lying through his teeth, I am increasingly confident that this race is President Obama's to lose.

Into and Out of the Heart of Darkness

By Charles Cullen

My experience at the RNC Convention has lead me to a few unshakable beliefs. First, whomever decided to have the convention at the Tampa convention center was making a purely political calculation (the Republicans want to win Florida) without any consideration for human life or reporter sanity. The whole thing was a horror show of newly blocked-off roads, cone mazes and rightly short-tempered law enforcement. I saw more crazy driving in Tampa in those few days than I did in the last half-decade. I almost hit a police-woman because her partner yelled at me to drive.

Second, someone really should have appealed to the Ron Paul folks -- if they did so at all -- more. The Ron Paul Nation howled at the party speakers as they changed the convention rules, staged walkouts, and generally did whatever they could to be disruptive all the way up to the final night. Then, it seemed, they were content to let Clint Eastwood carry on a bizarre conversation with an empty chair; overshadowing a perfectly serviceable and unusually gaffe-free speech from Romney.

Third, this election is absolutely vital for the Democrats and the country as a whole. If Romney wins, the absolute fringe of the Republican party will see it as a vindication of their dishonest strategy and upside down morality. As long as we operate under a basically two party system, we need the other side of the aisle, the Republicans to at least be sane. And sanity is something the Tea Party (etc.) has avoided like the plague. I didn't recognize it before but the Tea Party attitude was born under Bush. And it has now become organized and politically diverse in way that one could hardly have imagined. We, as a party, have to acknowledge that Obama's policies are more in line with what a moderate Republican of yore than with liberal Democrats. Liberal Democrats occupying high offices are few and far between. More likely, the true liberals are working behind the scenes; as organizers, politicos, and so on. It's the best they can do. They survey the political landscape, and see what I see: a nation that has been dragged so far to the right that moderates are called liberals, and extremists are called innovators.

Old Times There Are Not Forgotten (Why Southern States Still Need Voting Rights Act pre-clearance)

Graduates of the class of 1973 at St. Martinville, La., Senior High School decided that, after nearly 40 years, they would stop holding segregated class reunions. But old habits die hard, and after the reception before the homecoming game on Friday, Sept. 21 (to which all graduates are invited), the class reunion invitation lists an "After Game Get Together (White Graduates Only)."

Harold Cook, a political humorist from Austin, Texas, mocked Republican complaints that the Justice Department has contested voter suppression laws, particularly in Southern states regulated by the Voting Rights Act because of those states' historic suppression of black voters. "Do Southern states still need Voting Rights Act pre-clearance?" he asked rhetorically. "Because, really, all those attitudes are behind us. Right?"

Talk to the Chair

By Charles Cullen

It's never good to get upstaged on the night you accept your nomination to run for President. It's even worse if you're upstaged by a seemingly unhinged elderly man, engaged in a lively debate with a chair. But that is exactly what happened to Mitt Romney on the night he was set to give what (to that point) would be the most important political speech of his career. Clint Eastwood put on a bizarre and somewhat offensive display that took too long, and shifted the media focus from Mitt (who actually acquitted himself quite well) and onto the sometimes impromptu ramblings of a very good actor/director. And, as it turns out, absolute train wreck of a convention speaker.

This was supposed to be Romney's hour but the damage had already been done by the time he entered the spotlight. He took the stage too late, when all but the people who were going to vote Republican no matter what had turned off the television, and delivered a perfectly passable acceptance speech. He'll never reach the oratorical heights of President Obama, but few can. The real problem was that night, and the next day, people were talking about and trying to figure out just what the heck Eastwood was doing. The comedy shows had a well deserved field day with Eastwood's antics, and the rest of the media was left scratching their collective heads.

Most, including NBC political reporter Chuck Todd, reckoned that Romney's only path to victory was to increase his popularity among "Undecided" voters, despite most polls showing that there aren't enough truly undecided voters to put Romney in the White House.

Lies, money, and voter suppression are the only way Romney wins this race. And judges around the country seem to be trying to keep an eye on voter suppression.

That doesn't mean every good Democrat should take the race off. In fact, they should work like hell to get the President re-elected. But a couple of days of joy at the damage done to Mitt Romney can certainly be excused.

Another 30 lies by Mitt Romney Documented

Steve Benen records another 30 lies by Mitt Romney in his 32nd installment of the weekly series, "Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity." Benen writes:

"Love Romney or hate him, it's an experiment of sorts -- we're seeing the first real-world test of a post-truth campaign. Team Romney lies, without shame, because it's certain the line between fact and fiction has been blurred out of existence, and if lies will give Romney vast power, the ends justify the means.

"But for those who still like to think reality has some meaning, I hope they'll take some time to consider the 32nd installment of my weekly series, chronicling Mitt's mendacity. (For the record, this week, I'm only including falsehoods from Romney himself. Including every lie told at the convention would have caused a mendacity overdose.)"

With this edition, Benen has documented 602 lies* by Romney this past year as Romney leads the Republican War on Facts.

See previous editions of Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity: Vol. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII,XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI

* Note: This post was updated 9/7/12 with a new count of the lies through the 32nd week. As of 9/7/12, with Mitt's Mendacity XXXIII, the count of Mitt Romney's lies actually is up to 618.

Romney will do a good job at implementing whatever plan his masters give him

By Marc Jampole

 

Mitt Romney comes to the American people with business acumen as his best selling point.

No doubt about it: Mitt Romney has demonstrated that he is a highly successful business executive. He made hundreds of millions for his company when he headed Bain, and then did a competent job as the leader of the business called the Olympics. As governor of Massachusetts, he had no great ideas, but he competently administered and implemented the ideas of others—including the healthcare reform system that was the model for Obamacare (see Paul Starr’s Remedy and Reaction for details).

But while admiring Romney’s success in business, we should also remain aware of the drawbacks and baggage that expertise brings.

First and foremost, business executives are amoral and emotional—they’re taught to be that way in business school and business seminars.  As Michael Corleone, the fictional leader of the mythic American family business once put it, “It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.”   Business executives who don’t cultivate this attitude can’t lay off people, deny someone a raise, take a sneaky loophole out of a contract, shut down manufacturing facilities in one-plant towns, hotly pursue the business of despicable individuals, steal accounts from competitors, or play hardball with unions.

That’s why it’s so easy for a successful business executive such as Lou Gerstner to go from one industry to another and keep achieving business success.

What that means is that Mitt Romney will do a competent job implementing the program of whoever is pulling his strings.  Kind of like Albert Speer, Hitler’s talented Nazi architect and executive.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not conflating Romney with the Nazis. That would be like labeling as a Socialist a Democrat slightly to the right of Dwight Eisenhower—say, Barack Obama.

Although it is true that Romney’s current masters want to end a woman’s right to have an abortion, severely limit her access to birth control, turn back the clock on gay rights and end the teaching of science in the schools. The Nazis did believe in most if not all of these ideas.

Another thing to remember about the business executive is that the definition of success is nothing more nor less than return of maximum value to the investors. A company may pollute, create unsafe conditions for employees, pay its workers low wages and create social problems wherever it establishes operations, e.g. Walmart, and still be considered successful because the investors all get rich.

Romney is used to defining success as creating wealth for the few, and that’s exactly what you want in a business leader, even if you are enlightened enough to include the employees among the happy few. Mitt’s admitted economic program suggests that he will continue to follow that basic strategy as president.

But the objective of a country is to protect and provide opportunities for all its citizens.  This idea is inherent in our important early documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And one can read the history of the United States as a great struggle to extend rights, protection and opportunities to more and more of our people.

Sometimes the issue in an election is competence. That was certainly the case in 1960 between Nixon and Kennedy, when both sides shared exactly the same foreign policy and were coalescing around the same set of ideas to address domestic challenges. The same can be said about the election of 1976 between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

But in 2012 the issue is ideology, which is a bit ironic, since one of the candidates has demonstrated that he has none.  All he wants to do is do the best job he possibly can for whoever is paying the bill.  In the case of Romney, it’s the extreme social and economic right, which wants to send the country back to medieval times.

Six Worst Lies in Paul Ryan's Speech Only the Beginning...

Aviva Shen at ThinkProgress.org lists the Six Worst Lies in Paul Ryan's speech at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night, noting that, "His speech was riddled with false claims, so much so that even Fox News wrote:

"To anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech."

But disregard for the truth seems to be standard operating procedure for the Romney-Ryan campaign whose pollster said Tuesday the campaign is not concerned with being labeled false by independent fact-checkers. “Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers,” Romney pollster Neil Newhouse said at a forum hosted by ABC News and Yahoo! News.

Indeed, Steve Benen of MaddowBlog.com has documented 533 lies told by Mitt Romney in the past 30 weeks in his continuing series on "Mitt's Mendacity," Fred Clark noted at Patheos.com. (See Benen's most recent update.) That gives Romney claim to the title of the most shameless liar in US politics — a considerable feat, given the competition. With secretive corporate-funded "super PACs" as well as campaigns able to repeat these lies with advertisements despite the fact-checkers' refutations, James Fallows of The Atlantic sees the media moving into the "Post-Truth Age."

Talking Sense May Be Hazardous to Your Health Plan

By Charles Cullen

Dr. Alice Chen is a Yale graduate, received her medical degree from Cornell, and now splits her time between being an "internal medicine hospitalist," and working as an assistant professor at UCLA. She also happens to be the executive director of "Doctors for America," an activist website and group sporting the slogan "Patients Over Politics." So I think it's safe to say that she's a pretty smart cookie.

I had the pleasure of a brief interview with Dr. Chen, whose primary professional concern, when not working in internal medicine or manning her post at UCLA, is making sure that everyone is covered for medical care.

She seems genuinely perturbed by the number of people in the United States lacking real access to medical treatment. So she and many of her colleagues have rented a bus and embarked on a trip from the Republican National Convention to the Democratic National Convention. The trip is jokingly called "Docs Gone Wild." Though a quick perusal of her website leads me to believe that the official name of the trip is the "Patients Over Politics Bus Tour." I rather think the former name is catchier, but as long as they're out fighting the good fight, I couldn't care less what they're called.

I asked Dr. Chen about her thoughts regarding the current political climate. She responded by referring me to political commercials based on poor science that would make it more difficult for people to receive medical care.

"Honestly," she said, "what I think to myself is this ad is going to kill people if the person behind it gets their way." I couldn't help but agree. She spoke more about political and medical hot-button issues, eventually landing on contraception. "With the contraception debate everything seemed to be getting blown out of proportion," she told me, "We learned that many people were using contraception, like the pill, for a different reason." While she was reluctant to wade into the deep end of the political muck with me, I sensed that she was trying, in a roundabout way, to say that these contraceptive users were using contraception to maintain general health; whether through family planning or other health related concerns. In other words, no one was trying to anger god, folks were just trying to be healthier. She did mention the role of religion in the health care debate, saying "You see the Catholic Church and all these other people getting involved and it's just a mess."

At the end of our conversation I couldn't help myself and asked her to comment on the Rep. Todd Akin stir. "Mr. Akin," she said, laughing, "that's why it's important to have people who actually see patients and who [she searched for the right words] know science."

I was very impressed by Dr. Chen. And as impressed as I was, I couldn't help but notice that all of her positions were held by most Democrats and opposed by most of the Republicans. I realize that having "Patients Over Politics" as a motto is useful when running an organization that, by and large, seeks to include fairly wealthy people. I am in no way upset with, or dissappointed by Dr. Chen; she has a very specific, and very valid concern: healthcare in the United States. But when all of your positions seem in line with the Democrats and at great odds with the Republican platform, it seems unusual to take a non-political stand. Even if acknowledging that Democrats are much, much more in sync with the idea of affordable healthcare means angering some of the people who support you.

“We built it” doesn’t mean much when the “it” depends on so many things built by society

By Marc Jampole

The people carrying the “We built it” signs on the floor of the Republican Convention are not referring to the same “thing” to which President Obama referred when he rhetorically said “You didn’t build that” to business owners in a speech weeks ago.

The “We built it” standard bearers are talking about their businesses and wealth.

What Obama means are the roads and airports that transport goods and services to and from the businesses; the electrical grids delivering electrical power to run the lights; the public education system that trained most of the employees; the police force and army that protect the business from civil disturbances; the system of laws and business customs that ensure marketplace consistency and a stable economic environment. He also meant that some businesses depend on special grants of government property such as land and airwaves; others depend on advantageous tax codes and tariff laws.

As I have written before, building on philosopher Daniel N. Robinson’s Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Application, the people who built their “its” don’t even deserve that much credit for their work, whether the “it” is Apple or a mom-and-pop provider of IT services.  A lot, and maybe most, of their success stems more from luck than anything else.

Here's some of what that luck comprises:

• Mental or physical talent with which one is born. If you have it, you will be able to do something naturally that most others have to struggle to learn. Even if you work hard to hone that talent, remember that someone with less talent could work just as hard and not accomplish as much. Wouldn’t he or she be just as deserving of reward?
• Social-economic standing of your family: Over the 200+ year history of the United States there has been very little social mobility—which means people moving up or down from the class in which they were born—and recent studies show that we have less mobility today than ever before. As a brief look at Mitt Romney and his family substantiates, rich families can pay for lessons, send kids to specialty camps, pay for private tutors and educational consultants, contribute sums to prestigious schools, call friends of friends of friends to introduce children to influential people in their chosen careers and finance business or artistic ventures. Middle class families can do some of these things and poor families very few, if any.
• Family’s emotional situation: The individual has no say in whether she or he ends up in a loving, stable family or in a family of drug addicts.
• Secular conditions, referring to the social and economic conditions of the era: My favorite example of the impact of social conditions on individual success is Willie Mays, on everyone’s short list of the greatest baseball player of all time, who would have been a field slave if born 100 years earlier.
• The value society puts on your talent: Bankers, attorneys, neurosurgeons, professional athletes, business owners—all these people get paid more than high school teachers, players in classical symphony orchestras and plumbers, who may work as hard and be just as talented in their field. A plumber could work just as hard as an investment banker does and make far less money. Does that make the plumber less praiseworthy than the banker?
• Just plain old “luck” luck, such as the luck to be in an intersection 10 seconds before or after an accident or for your professor to bring you onto his long-term research team.

The argument behind “You didn’t build that” answers the Republican claim that we shouldn’t tax so-called wealth creators because it shows how little their efforts really contributed to creating the wealth that they are enjoying.

Another way to look at the issue is to consider the value of protection and stability that government provides to each individual.  If your house is worth $150,000, you are getting protection and stability (and water, sewer service and other utilities) to support $150,000.  If your house is worth $500,000, the protection and security is worth more and so you should be paying higher taxes.

The “We built it” crowd likes to confuse the issue by falsely saying we have a high tax rate (we don’t—it’s historically low) and then blaming that rate and our deficit on programs for the undeserving.  This argument confuses two distinct issues:

1. What constitutes the minimum standard of living, education and healthcare that every person deserves by virtue of being a human being in an advanced civilization?
2. Who will pay for the goods and services that government provides?

No matter where one stands on the first issue, keep in mind that the major plank in the economic program of Mitt Romney and the Republicans is to make the poor and middle class pay even more for government than they already do, while the wealthy pay even less.