If [Romney] is not successful, holy Toledo, there will be hell to pay in this party. The right wing is going to drive further right,” said Gross, Romney’s former Iowa chairman. But that may happen even if he does win. For the Republican Party has decided that Mitt Romney is the means to an end. Which is exactly the point he has been making all along.
Category: blog
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Another joke, a bit more wistful and a bit closer to the bone, comes when people tell him that he would have governed differently than Mr. Bush. Mr. Gore usually replies, “You know what: I would have just made different mistakes.
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We’re going to touch this with our fingers. And we have invented a new technology called multi-touch, which is phenomenal. It works like magic. You don’t need a stylus. It’s far more accurate than any touch display that’s ever been shipped. It ignores unintended touches, it’s super-smart. You can do multi-finger gestures on it. And boy, have we patented it.
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Right off the bat, Romney hits us with some unscripted juice. “My, oh my, you guys are great to be out here with this rain,” he says. He has declined the use of an umbrella and is getting rained on with the rest of us. He grins, jaw like a crescent moon. “This guy here with the orange shirt—boy, that thing is turning a diff…a deeper color of orange here this morning.” The man’s shirt is turning a deeper color of orange due to moisture saturation, is the phenomenon that Mitt Romney is pointing out. Is there an emotional clue here? Not to his essential self, perhaps, but the remark does suggest a man who does not often behold damp textiles, who perhaps comes from a land where the laws of materiality and hydrology are different from our own.
Wells Tower: Does Mitt Romney Have a Soul? – GQI cannot begin to express how much I loved this piece.
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“What the Hell is a Simpson Bowl?”
Andrew Sullivan, whose writing I generally adore, is, I think, really wrong on an important aspect of horse-race analysis for the presidential election. His prescription for Obama at the Democratic Convention:… if I were to offer a single piece of advice to the campaign, it would be to use the convention to declare that he would sign Bowles-Simpson as written if it came to his desk. He’d instantly own the fiscal center, isolate the GOP’s extremism, and reaffirm his credibility on the deficit.
The paradigm can still be shifted.
… What matters is that Obama should declare his first priority on being re-elected would be a grand bargain on the lines of Bowles-Simpson. Force Romney to say no.
This is how Obama can win the Beltway pundit class, which is absurdly and needlessly obsessed with fantasies of utopian bipartisanship and centrism. David Brooks and Tom Friedman would enter a trance state of moderate-nirvana.
But the Gang of 500 doesn’t have the votes to put Obama over the top in Ohio. (Though perhaps if they all lived in Florida in 2000, but never mind that…)
The people Obama needs to reach are not “centrists” or budget wonks. What he needs to reach is a tiny sliver of the electorate, weirdly termed “independents,” which is distinguished mainly for being generally too ignorant about politics and policy (not necessarily through any fault of their own) to have made up their mind until the last minute.
Imagine you’re an underemployed blue collar worker in the Rust Belt, or a confused octogenarian retiree in Florida. If you see on your Yahoo News page, or hear on your 6 o’clock news that Obama has embraced something called “Simpson-Bowles,” the first thing you’ll wonder is whether those bowls feature Homer or Bart.
Okay, that’s not fair. But you get the point. The pundit class has this idea soaked into its collective conscience that those who decide elections are fixated on who has a better plan for the budget. Yes, these undecided voters do care about the state of their entitlement programs, about the security of our financial system, about their rate of taxation. But things like “the deficit” and “the budget” are abstract concepts that, if they stir emotions, do so because they’ve been stirred by ideological screamers whose audiences have already decided who they’re voting for, regardless of any understanding of why they’re angry.
Of course, the message can sink in that Obama is the guy who now says he’s going to take a serious approach to balancing the country’s checkbook. But Romney will say the same thing. No one on the sidelines is saying, “Well, clearly Simpson-Bowles is the superior plan, being centrist and all.” It’ll be a wash on the specifics, and, as usual, it will really come down to which guy the undecideds like more.
And that’s another reason why, ladies and gentlemen, Obama continues to, more or less, have it in the bag.
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Twisted Sister joined a list of other artists telling Romney/Ryan to stop using their music, but this is especially interesting to me, because how do Romney and Ryan not realize that they are, in fact, the “it” we’re no longer gonna take?
Jed Groettum
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I believe that it is possible to believe women and to support WikiLeaks at the same time without moral hypocrisy, and I believe that those across the left who seem to have a problem with holding those two simple ideas in their heads at the same time need to ask themselves what accountability actually means. Nobody should be forced to choose between defending investigative journalism and freedom of speech, and fighting for justice in the global war on women’s bodies. So please don’t ask if one alleged sex attacker out of hundreds of millions currently walking free and unpursued across three continents should be made to answer for his actions in a court of law when all that distinguishes him from the rest of the army of decent men doing despicable things to women without facing the consequences is the fact that he happens to have personally embarrassed several governments.
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Is fantasy intrinsically hostile to technology? That is, was Tolkien simply drawing out what is already there in the genre? Or has he limited it in unnecessary ways? What would a fantasy that embraces technology look like? Arthur Weasley’s fascination with Muggle tech in the Harry Potter books is simply comical — though a great source of fun in the books. I’d like to see a writer imagine what technologies would arise in a fictional world where magic rules but is not the only game in town. Is that too much to ask?
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Alexander Aan and Me, Ctd.
An update for my tens of readers. The White House petition for Alexander Aan pushed by my employing organization failed to achieve orbit. Ironically, that failure has arguably garnered more attention than the effort itself.
Anyway, I had some strong feelings about said failure, and wrote about it at Friendly Atheist in the form of an open letter to Aan. Then, it turns out, folks who read it had even stronger feelings about what I wrote, and I’ve been getting angry criticism and being trolled ever since, including calls for my resignation in the comments section. (There have also been many expressions of support and agreement, just so you don’t think I’m doing a lengthy tiny-violin solo.)
But the work continues.
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There are no rights in nature, only in a society with a legal system and a police force.
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My dear young friend,” said Mustapha Mond, “civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended—there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There’s no such thing as a divided allegiance; you’re so conditioned that you can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations to resist.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
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I don’t want good causes like secularism and skepticism to die because they’re infested with people who see issues of equality as mission drift. I want Deep Rifts. I want to be able to truthfully say that I feel safe in this movement. I want the misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and downright trolls out of the movement for the same reason I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner or to play Mario Kart: because they’re not good people. We throw up billboards claiming we’re Good Without God, but how are we proving that as a movement?
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You are Stuck with Joe Biden
So there is this small flurry of rumors fluttering about the murkier reaches of the Beltway media saying that President Obama has been courting Hillary Clinton to join him on the 2012 ticket in place of Joe Biden, and these rumors of course have nothing to do with the fact that Romney is not only touching politics’ third rail with his choice of Paul Ryan, but that he has gotten down on all fours and licked the third rail until it’s slippery.
I don’t even want to link to any of the stories because they don’t deserve page views. If you want to see them, go use the google.
Let me explain as clearly as I can why you should not believe these rumors, and that they are, in fact, an enormous, steaming pile of crap. And you don’t even have to get into the weeds of the Obama-Clinton soap operas that the press loves to doodle about in their notebooks, or think about who likes who or who wants who to run for president one day or anything. All you need to know are these two things.
1. Joe Biden is actually a huge asset to the president. Not only is he widely reported to be a close and valued counselor to the president, trusted with a sizable and extremely consequential governing portfolio, but he is also a key ambassador to white, middle-class voters in key swing states. Where Obama’s coolness or eloquence fail to connect, Biden’s down-to-Earth familiarity and jocularity ease doubts and forge bonds.
2. Obama gains nothing electorally from having Clinton instead of Biden on his ticket that he doesn’t already have locked up. Obama is trouncing Romney with women voters, and the notion that Hillary Clinton can help with rural voters in places like West Virginia is a load of nonsense, a relic of the Democratic primaries, where, when the electorate was entirely made up of people who were already Democrats, Clinton fared far better than Obama. She in no way would sway rural voters already inclined toward Romney in the other direction. I mean, just think about what a silly idea that is, that Hillary Clinton is somehow the key to winning over coal miners or something.
The Obama team would probably rather Joe Biden were a little more careful with his words sometimes, sure, but no one’s votes (or as Biden himself might say, “LITERALLY no one’s votes”) are being swayed by Biden saying something a little goofy now and then. They know that.
If nothing else, Obama suddenly replacing his vice-president on the ticket would be, perhaps, the ultimate sign of weakness and desperation. In this election, as I have spelled out, Obama is neither weak nor desperate. It is Romney who, in the midst of an election he at one point believed he could win by default, has decided to attempt the Hail Mary of choosing a running mate who exemplifies everything the Obama team already wants you to think about him: That he is going to heartlessly slash programs for the elderly and poor, while cutting the taxes of bazillionaires.
The right knows that it’s Romney who’s desperate, and they’d rather you thought the opposite was true. It’s kind of what they do. Don’t buy it.
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In the event, we have not only missed a chance to do some good for Alexander Aan (however remote that possibility was); we have made it look as if the secularist movement is a toothless tiger. If we can’t rally 25,000 people to sign a carefully drafted petition that contains no scary detail that ought to put anyone off … well, what can we do? How can we expect to have any political clout at all in these circumstances?
pav alexander 