Nicklaus may have been a great golfer, but he doesn’t know jack about politics, economics or the way societies work

By Marc Jampole

 

Jack Nicklaus, who is on everyone’s short list as one of the greatest golfers of all time, has been travelling with Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee for president campaigns through Nicklaus’ home state of Ohio. 

Nicklaus is a loud supporter of Mitt and seems to hold the Romney view that people succeed almost exclusively by their own efforts, and that the social infrastructure of roads, bridges, schools, market rules, laws, hospitals, security and the inventions and contributions of other people like computers and the Internet matter not a whit. This belief is summed up by the “We Built That” theme of the Republican National Convention, which was based on a purposeful truncation and misunderstanding of a statement by President Obama.  As anyone who has gone to the tape knows, when Obama said “You didn’t build that,” he was not referring to the individual companies of successful businesspersons, but to the social infrastructure.

Here are Nicklaus’ comments at a Westerville, Ohio rally, as reported by Gail Collins in her column this morning in the New York Times:

“…at the Romney rally here in Westerville, Nicklaus was telling the crowd that he chose golf as his profession because it didn’t require teamwork. (“I didn’t lean on somebody else in tough times.”)

Then Nicklaus introduced Mitt Romney. “What you heard from the Golden Bear ... the words he spoke, he touched my heart,” said the candidate.”

While it’s true that Jack hit the long drives and sank the tough putts, I want to ask Jack some questions.  I’ve set up an empty chair to serve as a stand-in for the Golden Bear. It’s a little bit bigger than the chair Clint Eastwood pretended was Obama, because, let’s face it, Jack has put on a few pounds since retirement:

Did you teach yourself golf or did you have a teacher and instruction manual?

Did you own the factory that made your golf clubs?

What about the golf balls?

What about the golf courses when you were just starting out? You build those?

Did you single-handedly design and construct the golf courses that have your trade mark name on them?

Did you keep the greens, serve the drinks in the clubhouse, take the tickets, raise the tents and keep the golfers and onlookers safe?

How did you get to the tournaments? Did you fly through the air like Superman or use airplanes protected in flight by government employees and roads built and maintained by government money?

Did you run the PGA?

Did you run the cameras, broadcast the matches and sell the advertising that enabled millions to see you play on TV and thereby become your fans and buy a whole mess of stuff with your name on it?

The answer, of course, is no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no and no!

You didn’t do that, Jack.

And you don’t know jack about the way that all business owners—from the ma-and-pa who own a candy store to investment bankers like Mitt—depend on society and government to provide infrastructure, goods and services and well-functioning markets.

The infrastructure is crumbling because of more than 30 years of policies that lower taxes, especially for the wealthy, and cut government spending for needed infrastructure and job creation. The markets are weak because of more than 30 years of policies that transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy, leaving us with fewer people who can afford to play golf, but more importantly, to feed their families and put their kids through college or vocational schools.

Jack Nicklaus doesn’t like teamwork. He just likes sucking all the wealth he can out of the team called the United States and returning as little as possible. That’s the Republican plan and that’s the Romney plan.

Charitable giving by Romneys and Obamas in 2011 proves they’re generous and nothing else

By Marc Jampole

Several of the Romney supporters who read OpEdge have pointed out how much more money the Romneys gave away to charity in 2011 than the Obamas.  While the Obamas are well off—certainly part of or close to the notorious 1%--the Romneys are the much wealthier of the two families. But even on a percentage of income basis, Romney gave more: a little more than 29% for Ann & Mitt compared to a little less than 22% for Michelle & Barack.

Both families should be applauded for their generosity.  Traditionally when people consider the appropriate percentage of income to give to charity, what comes to mind is “tithing,” which means giving away 10% of your income. Both candidates gave a much greater percentage of their income away last year.

Some have chided the Romneys for only declaring about $2.25 million of their income, suggesting that their motive was to make the amount of federal income tax they pay as a percentage of income not look so paltry. That’s really petty thinking, because not declaring some of the charitable contributions did result in Ann & Mitt paying more in taxes, which is what they would be doing if we had a more equitable tax system. I’ve learned that it’s best to judge people on what they do and say and not what they’re thinking, so bravo to the Romneys for deciding to pay more in taxes, at least in 2011. 

But what do these numbers really mean?

Absolutely, nothing, as far as I can tell.

First of all, the wealthier you are, the higher percentage of your income you can afford to give away and the more you are expected to give away. The Romneys can afford to be more generous than the Obamas, just as the Obamas can afford to be more generous than the average middle class family. The social norm in virtually every society throughout millennia that I have studied has always been that the more you have, the more you give.

More important, though, is the simple fact that what one gives to charities has nothing at all to do with one’s competence to be president of the United States or to serve in any other position or job, either in public service or the private sector.  While generosity is a positive characteristic in all humans, we judge presidents on their political views and their competence.  That the Romneys gave more does not change my evaluation of Romney’s positions as mainly benefiting the wealthy nor of his lack of competence in the foreign policy arena.

So thanks, Ann & Mitt, for the extra money into our depleted federal coffers. But let’s hope that by next year the Bush II temporary tax cuts for those earning $250,000 or more will have ended and you pay even more. And let’s also hope that Congress ends the cap on income that can be taxed for Social Security purposes and thereby secures the future of perhaps our most successful and certainly our most important social service program. Most of all, let’s hope that Ann & Mitt write the check from one of their many homes (perhaps the one with the elevator for cars), and not from the White House.

Fox News and Wall Street Journal mislead American public with their coverage of climate change

By Marc Jampole

 

The Union of Concerned Scientists yesterday announced the findings of a study it undertook of the accuracy of Fox News and Wall Street Journal (WSJ) opinion page coverage of climate change, which has become the polite euphemism for describing the rapid and destructive warming of the Earth. Note that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owns both of these media outlets.

In announcing the results, a climate scientist with the organization noted that they began the study because they had heard a large amount of anecdotal information that “suggested that there was bias and misrepresentation at the News Corporation of the fact that human-induced climate change is happening...” In other words, instead of accepting the anecdotes, the organization did what scientists are supposed to do: they objectively gathered the facts and then analyzed them.

And the results don’t draw a pretty picture of the intellectual honesty of either Fox or the Journal.

The analysis found that over a recent six-month period of prime time coverage, 93% of all references to climate change on Fox News had misleading information.

For the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, another six-month analysis revealed that a mere 81% of climate change mentions had misleading information, but get this—every single example of an accurate presentation of climate change facts and issues came in letters to the editor in rebuttal to inaccuracies presented in Journal columns, articles and editorials.

The study found that on Fox News, the most common criticism of climate science was to dismiss the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring or human-induced. In the Journal (quoting the report), “most of the misleading editorials, op-eds, columns, and letters attempted to broadly undermine the major conclusions of climate science. Instances of attacks on individual scientists, mocking the science, and cherry picking data were all equally common.”

The results of this analysis are stunning because they reveal to what extent large numbers of people are being manipulated by the lies and false assumptions of climate change deniers. We expect this kind of mendacity from Fox News, but for years, the Wall Street Journal has had a mostly deserved reputation for accurate reporting of news events.

Just in case you were wondering, the Union of Concerned Scientists has been around since 1969. Its mission statement states that “The Union of Concerned Scientists is the leading science-based nonprofit working for a healthy environment and a safer world. UCS combines independent scientific research and citizen action to develop innovative, practical solutions and to secure responsible changes in government policy, corporate practices, and consumer choices.”

My first thought in reviewing the study was that it was proof that there has been way too much consolidation of media properties. There used to be laws preventing companies from owning more than a certain number of radio or TV stations. The laws were there for a reason: to prevent one company or person from being able to dominate the news media and therefore replace the free marketplace of ideas. It was a great example of government regulation increasing democracy and freedom.  These rules are mostly gone, and the result is that about 8 companies now control most of the broadcast and print media and the publishing industry.

But then I checked Google News to see how many stories there were about this study one day after its release. The answer is not very complimentary to the rest of the media: it was a number less than 2.

Yes, dear readers, so far only one media outlet has found and covered the news that News Corporation’s two flagship media outlets regularly deceive the public about one of the most important issues of the 21st century. Whether that’s an example of shoddy reporting or self-censorship I’ll leave to my readers to decide.

To help you with your decision, I’ll close by noting that an update on the stormy romantic relationship between an actor and an actress got 146,000 hits on Google News, while the suspension of the driving license of another actress garnered 110,000 hits and the bachelor party of another actor got a mere 5,140 hits.

Ughh!

Mitt Nears 700 Lies

Mitt Romney was caught in 28 more lies during the past week as he continued to run a campaign that has so little regard for the truth that his pollster recently boasted the campaign would not be "dictated by fact checkers."  

"I thought many months ago that it was at least possible that Mitt Romney would be more cautious about telling falsehoods as the election drew closer," Steve Benen wrote in his 35th weekly installment of "Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity at Maddowblog.com. "After all, candidates can get away with more in, say, April than in September -- there's far more scrutiny now.

"Alas, Romney seems unfazed, both by the calendar and by life under a microscope -- he keeps repeating falsehoods without any real concern for consequences," Benen noted.

Since Benen started keeping count of Romney's lies in January, he has documented 682 Romney lies through Friday, according to our count.  He appears likely to break through 700 lies in the coming week. 

With only six weeks remaining before the election, Romney will have to step up the pace, needing an average of 53 lies a week to reach the plateau of 1,000.  His average is 19.48 lies per week since January, with a personal high of 37 lies in week 31, ending Aug. 24. But as his increasingly desperate campaign enters the stretch run, the temptation to stretch the truth can only increase.

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, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV
— Jim Cullen

Mitt Romney declares class warfare against poor and near-poor

Others have already done a good job of reporting and analyzing the latest manifestation of Mitt Romney’s foot-in-mouth disease, aka his declaration of class warfare against the poor and near-poor that he recently made in front of a group of wealthy donors. 

For those who have been visiting Jupiter or Mars, here is the kernel of his remarks:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what… All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the 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. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them….And they're hopeless…I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

The 47% figure refers, of course, to the number of American households that pay no federal income tax.

Journalists have rightfully jumped all over the Mittman. DavidWeigel analyzed the statement in detail in Slate, pointing out the several conflations, e.g., assuming that the 47% who don’t pay income taxes are all on welfare. As Weigel, National Public Radio and others have already written, the 47% includes most senior citizens receiving Social Security and military personnel. Many have remembered to say that those in the “47%” pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, plus state, local and sales tax. Most journalists from all points of the political spectrum have discussed how bad Romney looks in this latest dust-up. Some have even dared to utter the words “class warfare,” a phrase usually proffered by arch conservatives opposed to returning tax rates for the wealthy to what they were before the Bush II temporary cuts.

There’s not much more I can add to the discussion that’s new, but I did want to take a look at those in the 47% who are not part of the military or seniors on Social Security: those whose taxable income after deductions is lower than the threshold for paying federal income taxes. To state the obvious—they don’t pay taxes because their income is too low!

Who are these people?

They serve you in fast food restaurants and they sweep your floors. They’re the cashiers in supermarkets and Wal-Mart. They may be fixing your roof or parking your car. They change your bedpan in the hospital. They may be on the assembly line of non-unionized companies. A lot of twenty-somethings with college diplomas and no job prospects are in this group.

The crime here is not that these good, hardworking people don’t pay income taxes, but that they earn so little money that after tax credits they fall under the threshold for paying taxes.

Be it senior citizens who have worked and paid into the Social Security system for decades, the honorable men and women we send off to risk their lives often in meaningless wars or the poor and near-poor, these people do not deserve the angry and offensive criticism of Romney and the Tea-partiers. These people are neither “hopeless,” nor do they refuse to take “personal responsibility for their lives,” as Mitt put it. Blaming the victim is an old game for right-wingers. That a candidate for the presidency is playing it is shameful and shocking.

I’m going to end by going out on a limb and stating unequivocally that when those sympathetic to Romney’s view close their eyes and conjure an image of the 47% of the population who they believe are sucking society dry, all they see is black and brown. Like “food stamp president,” “47%” is a racial code word for African-Americans and Hispanics. They won’t say it, because they don’t have to.  That’s the beauty—and the ugliness—of code words.

An argument in favor of reading the daily news in a hard copy newspaper

By Marc Jampole

We’ve been having some irritating problems with our home delivery of the New York Times lately, so I over the past few weeks I have gone back and forth between reading the Times online and in hard copy.  Reading the newspaper for a few days in one medium and then switching to another has enabled me to recognize some contrasts in the newspaper reading experience between paper and screen. 

What I’m talking about is a once-a-day review of the news that many people do in the morning or evening, not the constant grazing for “new” news or to follow a breaking story that so many of us now do using computers or computer-like devices. I like to read the hard copy of the newspaper over tea and breakfast (but after I have checked my email, Twitter and Facebook), but when it doesn’t arrive, I end up going through it online as soon as I turn on my computer.

For all three of the major differences I find in the online and hard copy read experience, I prefer the hard copy in each case, as follows:

1.      It takes longer to read a full newspaper online.

It takes a long time to do all that clicking back and forth, from the home or section page to the article to the second part of the article back to the home/section page and on to another article. I have a pretty new computer, but sometimes there is still a 5 or 10 second delay before the copy appears on the screen.  Reading the hard copy is much faster.

2.      An online newspaper makes it easier for people to avoid the news they don’t want to read.

When I leaf through a hard copy of the newspaper, I see everything that the editors want me to see on every page, what the Times calls “All the news that’s fit to print.”  I might only want to read the headline, but it’s pretty hard to avoid the first sentence, photograph and large pull-out quotes. Thus by leafing through the paper, you get the world, albeit the world according to one view. By contrast, once you get past the home page, it’s much easier to skip articles or even whole sections of most online versions of the newspaper. It would be impossible to have it any other way unless the screen were as big as a two-page spread of a daily newspaper.

3.      A sense of time is lost online

The hard copy newspaper represents a point in time that is repeated every 24 hours. On the Internet, stories are constantly updated, so it’s easy to lose sense of the chronology of the news unfolding after the events occur. The constant updating also can lead to errors as media outlets compete with each other to be the first to bring the news to the public’s attention. More problematic is the ease at which stories can hang around, especially at news aggregators that decide what to post based on the popularity of articles.  Often you see a story that looks new, but it’s really days and sometimes even weeks old. This loss of a sense of time distorts the long-term significance of news stories.

I’m not condemning online news.  I routinely follow stories during the day online, and peruse all the news via Google News and Yahoo! twice a day (but only after I have read the Times).  I do think, however, that the gradual replacement of the hard copy of the daily newspaper represents a decline on the quality of life and is leading to an electorate that has lost some of its ability to sort out the chronology of events.

I want to close with another of my occasional news story comparisons. It’s sad to consider what the following comparison says about our society, the level of public discourse and the collective wisdom of our editors in prioritizing information.

Here are the two sets of information I fed into the Google News search box over the weekend. In each case, I used the minimum number of words I thought it would take to produce a result:

Story: Some photographer took photos of the wife of the grandson of the Queen of England while she was topless on a beach.

Key words used: Kate topless
New stories: 4,314

Story: A team from Stanford and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory found that if we harnessed all the wind energy on Earth to produce electricity it would produce 100 times the current global use and the wind turbines would affect temperatures by a mere .2 degrees Fahrenheit and add one inch to the annual rain total worldwide. The team also proposed a conceptual plan for making the wind energy dream come true.

Key words used:  wind energy Stanford Livermore
New stories: 211

News editors think we should care more about the boobs of a mildly attractive mediocrity than the fact that a team of researchers have proof that we can engineer our way out of the climate change crisis and our coming shortages of carbon-based fuels.  The significance of this preference is, as the Latins would say, res ipsa loquitor – a thing that proves itself.

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.