Changes coming to the Pentagon

Posted: January 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Team Obama | 9 Comments

Obama had a presser today announcing a pared down role and size for the US Military.  Panetta followed with some details.  The budget implications will be announced in a few weeks.  I’m sure this will be discussed a lot in the coming weeks.  Here’s some information and links on what’s out so far.

WAPO: Obama announces new, leaner military approach

The Obama administration on Thursday unveiled a new military strategy that shifts the Pentagon’s focus towards Asia and says the country’s dire budget problems necessitate a more restrained use of military force and more modest foreign policy goals.
The strategy will almost certainly mean a smaller Army and Marine Corps as well as new investments in long-range stealth bombers and anti-missile systems that are designed primarily to counter China’s military buildup. It explicitly states that America can make due with a smaller nuclear force.

“Our nation is in a moment of transition,” President Obama wrote in an introduction to the document outlining the new strategy. “As we end today’s wars, we will focus on a broader range of challenges and opportunities, including the security and prosperity of the Asia Pacific.”

A major thrust of the new approach is its insistence on more modest goals for the military, which has spent years fighting difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aimed at ousting brutal, anti-U.S. rulers and rebuilding fractured societies .

The strategy explicitly rejects the notion that the U.S. military should be structured to fight such wars on a regular basis. In many ways, the new approach can be seen as a rejection of the Bush administration’s ambitious foreign policy goals of the last decade.

BBC: Obama unveils new strategy for ‘leaner’ US military

Mr Obama said during a speech in Australia in November that the Asia Pacific was now a top priority for the US, in what was seen as a challenge to the rising regional power of China.

Joined by Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, President Obama stressed that the defence budget would still grow, but at a slower pace.

He said the US was “turning the page on a decade of war” and faced a “moment of transition”.

“Even as our troops continue to fight in Afghanistan, the tide of war is receding,” he said.

Oddly enough, this strategy sounds awfully familiar to the Rumsfeld Doctrine of blow them up and forgot about the aftermath.  But, that’s just my first gut take on the announcement.

Thursday Reads: Mostly Mitt

Posted: January 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, morning reads, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 21 Comments

Good Morning!!

A few months ago, there was quite a bit of talk about a BBC story on Alessio Rastani, a self-described “independent trader,” who indicated he couldn’t care less what the European financial crisis did to people’s lives. For him it was all about making money and another recession would enable him to make plenty. Andrew Leonard of Salon tied the story together with and article in Der Spiegel on a Swiss study of traders. The results showed that these people

behaved more egotistically and were more willing to take risks than a group of psychopaths who took the same test.”

Particularly shocking for [Thomas] Noll [researcher] was the fact that the bankers weren’t aiming for higher winnings than their comparison group. Instead they were more interested in achieving a competitive advantage. Instead of taking a sober and businesslike approach to reaching the highest profit, “it was most important to the traders to get more than their opponents,” Noll explained. “And they spent a lot of energy trying to damage their opponents.”

Using a metaphor to describe the behavior, Noll said the stockbrokers behaved as though their neighbor had the same car, “and they took after it with a baseball bat so they could look better themselves.”

The researchers were unable to explain this penchant for destruction, they said.

Yesterday, Dakinikat sent me a Bloomberg article by William D. Cohan about a British academic’s “theory” on the causes of the financial crisis: Did Psychopaths Take Over Wall Street Asylum?

It took a relatively obscure former British academic to propagate a theory of the financial crisis that would confirm what many people suspected all along: The “corporate psychopaths” at the helm of our financial institutions are to blame.

Clive R. Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry” lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people.”

As a result, Boddy argues in a recent issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, such people are “extraordinarily cold, much more calculating and ruthless towards others than most people are and therefore a menace to the companies they work for and to society.”

Of course this isn’t a scientific study, but it certainly makes intuitive sense. Boddy blames changes in corporate culture for the problem.

Until the last third of the 20th century, he writes, companies were mostly stable and slow to change. Lifetime employment was a reasonable expectation and people rose through the ranks.

This stable environment meant corporate psychopaths “would be noticeable and identifiable as undesirable managers because of their selfish egotistical personalities and other ethical defects.”

For Wall Street — a rapidly changing and highly dynamic corporate environment if there ever was one, especially when the firms transformed themselves from private partnerships into public companies with quarterly reporting requirements — the trouble started when these charmers made their way to corner offices of important financial institutions.

There they supposedly changed many of the moral and ethical values that previously had guided businesspeople. This theory seems somewhat flawed, since it doesn’t explain how these men differed from the 19th century robber barons. But I haven’t read Roddy’s original articles. Perhaps he explains this inconsistency in his argument. I would argue that these kinds of people have always been involved in business and probably in politics too.

Case in point: Mitt Romney. I urge you to read the new article about Romney in Vanity Fair: The Meaning of Mitt: The Dark Side of Mitt Romney. The article is based on a new book about Romney by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, The Real Romney. There’s no way I can briefly summarize the piece or excerpt all the important parts. The article focuses on Romney’s attitudes toward family, his deep involvement with his Mormon religion, and his business career. If you read it, you’ll recognize characteristic signs of the psychopath–coldness, calculation, lack of empathy for others, self-involvement. The only thing missing is the charisma that these people often have.

There are multiple examples of Romney’s insensitivity toward women and women’s autonomy in the article, and his career as a corporate raider and junk bond pusher are described in detail. I’ll give you just one shocking example of Romney’s attitude toward women’s rights in his role as “spiritual leader.”

Peggie Hayes had joined the church as a teenager along with her mother and siblings. They’d had a difficult life. Mormonism offered the serenity and stability her mother craved. “It was,” Hayes said, “the answer to everything.” Her family, though poorer than many of the well-off members, felt accepted within the faith. Everyone was so nice. The church provided emotional and, at times, financial support. As a teenager, Hayes babysat for Mitt and Ann Romney and other couples in the ward. Then Hayes’s mother abruptly moved the family to Salt Lake City for Hayes’s senior year of high school. Restless and unhappy, Hayes moved to Los Angeles once she turned 18. She got married, had a daughter, and then got divorced shortly after. But she remained part of the church.

By 1983, Hayes was 23 and back in the Boston area, raising a 3-year-old daughter on her own and working as a nurse’s aide. Then she got pregnant again. Single motherhood was no picnic, but Hayes said she had wanted a second child and wasn’t upset at the news. “I kind of felt like I could do it,” she said. “And I wanted to.” By that point Mitt Romney, the man whose kids Hayes used to watch, was, as bishop of her ward, her church leader. But it didn’t feel so formal at first. She earned some money while she was pregnant organizing the Romneys’ basement. The Romneys also arranged for her to do odd jobs for other church members, who knew she needed the cash. “Mitt was really good to us. He did a lot for us,” Hayes said. Then Romney called Hayes one winter day and said he wanted to come over and talk. He arrived at her apartment in Somerville, a dense, largely working-class city just north of Boston. They chitchatted for a few minutes. Then Romney said something about the church’s adoption agency. Hayes initially thought she must have misunderstood. But Romney’s intent became apparent: he was urging her to give up her soon-to-be-born son for adoption, saying that was what the church wanted. Indeed, the church encourages adoption in cases where “a successful marriage is unlikely.”

Hayes was deeply insulted. She told him she would never surrender her child. Sure, her life wasn’t exactly the picture of Rockwellian harmony, but she felt she was on a path to stability. In that moment, she also felt intimidated. Here was Romney, who held great power as her church leader and was the head of a wealthy, prominent Belmont family, sitting in her gritty apartment making grave demands. “And then he says, ‘Well, this is what the church wants you to do, and if you don’t, then you could be excommunicated for failing to follow the leadership of the church,’ ” Hayes recalled. It was a serious threat. At that point Hayes still valued her place within the Mormon Church. “This is not playing around,” she said. “This is not like ‘You don’t get to take Communion.’ This is like ‘You will not be saved. You will never see the face of God.’ ” Romney would later deny that he had threatened Hayes with excommunication, but Hayes said his message was crystal clear: “Give up your son or give up your God.”

Not long after, Hayes gave birth to a son. She named him Dane. At nine months old, Dane needed serious, and risky, surgery. The bones in his head were fused together, restricting the growth of his brain, and would need to be separated. Hayes was scared. She sought emotional and spiritual support from the church once again. Looking past their uncomfortable conversation before Dane’s birth, she called Romney and asked him to come to the hospital to confer a blessing on her baby. Hayes was expecting him. Instead, two people she didn’t know showed up. She was crushed. “I needed him,” she said. “It was very significant that he didn’t come.” Sitting there in the hospital, Hayes decided she was finished with the Mormon Church. The decision was easy, yet she made it with a heavy heart. To this day, she remains grateful to Romney and others in the church for all they did for her family. But she shudders at what they were asking her to do in return, especially when she pulls out pictures of Dane, now a 27-year-old electrician in Salt Lake City. “There’s my baby,” she said.

The information the authors provide about Romney’s career at Bain Capital is just as revealing of Mitt’s insensitivity and lack of empathy. Here’s just a brief quote about Romney’s attitudes toward capitalism.

Romney described himself as driven by a core economic credo, that capitalism is a form of “creative destruction.” This theory, espoused in the 1940s by the economist Joseph Schumpeter and later touted by former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, holds that business must exist in a state of ceaseless revolution. A thriving economy changes from within, Schumpeter wrote in his landmark book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, “incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” But as even the theory’s proponents acknowledged, such destruction could bankrupt companies, upending lives and communities, and raise questions about society’s role in softening some of the harsher consequences.

Romney, for his part, contrasted the capitalistic benefits of creative destruction with what happened in controlled economies, in which jobs might be protected but productivity and competitiveness falters. Far better, Romney wrote in his book No Apology, “for governments to stand aside and allow the creative destruction inherent in a free economy.” He acknowledged that it is “unquestionably stressful—on workers, managers, owners, bankers, suppliers, customers, and the communities that surround the affected businesses.” But it was necessary to rebuild a moribund company and economy. It was a point of view he would stick with in years ahead. Indeed, he wrote a 2008 op-ed piece for The New York Times opposing a federal bailout for automakers that the newspaper headlined, let detroit go bankrupt. His advice went unheeded, and his prediction that “you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye” if it got a bailout has not come true.

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Anyone who still sees Romney as the “reasonable” Republican candidate needs to read this article. I knew that Romney had been involved in Mormon Church leadership, but I had no idea how deeply he was involved and how committed to his religion he is. And yet, he’s probably going to be the Republican nominee, facing a weak, unpopular Obama. We’ve heard about a meeting of Conservatives to discuss possible alternatives, but Politico reports that GOP elites are saying Romney probably can’t be stopped.

We’ll see. There’s nothing more dangerous than a Newt scorned, and South Carolina looks to be unfriendly to Mitt. But the next challenge for Romney is New Hampshire, where he leads by double digits. Can Santorum and Gingrich knock him down a peg? Only time will tell.

So….. What are you reading and blogging about today? Please share.

Eyes on 2012 And Political Acts

Posted: January 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Congress, House of Representatives, Senate, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , | 7 Comments

After last night’s Ugly Contest in Iowa and all the post-op analysis today, one might easily believe that the 2012 election season is simply a Republican Mummer’s strut [costuming optional] to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Au Contraire!  But for Democrats Wandering the Wilderness like myself, the on-going contest is an exercise in few choices to no choice at all.  At least at the presidential level. There are, however, alternate choices out there.  Rocky Anderson, a former Democrat and mayor of Salt Lake City, is running under the Justice Party.  And Buddy Roemer, a Republican [though you’d be hard pressed to find him on the official roster of candidates] is also running.

Both these men offer fresh voices and counter the establishment view, whether you be liberal or conservative.  They could, in fact, change the monotonous conversation of the legacy parties.

But unlike Michelle Bachmann, I’m not waiting for miracles.

Which is why I’d suggest we turn our attention to the 2012 House and Senate candidates, individuals who deserve a look, who have a track record to examine and who ultimately, if elected could work to change the frustrating, even dangerous defense of the status quo.

Earlier, I’ve written [and will no doubt continue to write] about the Massachusetts Senate race between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown.  This is a contest that should be interesting to watch and has to date given Warren a 14 pt. jump in the polls, a result that produced Brown’s public whine–the press is giving Warren the ‘kid glove’ treatment.  Poor baby!  Tea Party love appears to be on the wane.

But as the GOP primary has clearly shown, polls are fickle.  A favored candidate can go from flavor of the week to yesterday’s news in an eye blink.  Which is why–once we find a candidate we respect, someone we believe will serve the public’s needs over the plutocracy—keeping abreast of these candidates and offering support, in any way we can, is important.  Some voters may be able to throw a few dollars to a candidate.  Others may write and hope their words are read. We can inform [or at least try to inform] our family and friends. Still others may lend campaign support—make calls, knock on doors, distribute campaign material–in their respective states and districts.

Political action comes in many forms.  For the polar bears with hearts aflame the choice might be throwing on sweaters and warm socks and joining the up-coming Occupy Congress action in DC on January 17.

Whatever we do, regardless of how small, can make a difference because small things add up.  Think of the Wisconsin pushback, the fight for worker’s rights, the amazing recall effort now underway against Scott Walker. Or the pushback against legislation [HR 326 Stop Online Piracy] that could easily curtail the Internet as we know it, giving business and government the ability to automatically shutdown websites without appeal or due process [although under the guise of copyright infringement].  This legislation was halted.  Or the fight to remove the immunity sought by TBTFs and supported by the Administration from proper investigation and possible prosecution. Or even the most recent decision handed down by the Montana Supreme Court, rejecting the Citizen United debacle. This is an ongoing fight.  But with public support and public servants willing to pickup the ball and run the distance, we have the opportunity to change the game on the ground.

So, to start the New Year off, here are some names to consider or reconsider:

Two women I suggested earlier are Tammy Baldwin [D. WI] and Winona Baldenegro [D. AZ].

Tammy Baldwin, presently a member of the House, is running for the US Senate.  She has a strong record in women’s issues and has recently backed a resolution to remove any and all immunity from the banks and mortgage institutions involved the 2007-2008 meltdown.  Frankly, the public deserves its Pecora moment if we’re ever to reclaim faith in our financial system.  Baldwin’s official site is here.

Winona Benally Baldenegro is a new but promising face running for the first Congressional district in Arizona.  Her voice is fresh and decidedly progressive.  I’d suggest checking in with updated materials here.

She has an impressive list of credentials and an interesting story.  Someone to watch.

Alan Grayson will never be confused with a diplomat but has on a myriad of occasions spoken truth to power.  Grayson lost his House seat in the 2010 Tea Party blowout but will be running again for Florida’s 8th District in 2012.  Without overstating the evident, the GOP hates Grayson for his less than polite critiques of Republican policy stands.  For example, his infamous statement–“If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly.”

No, the man will not receive the Nobel Peace Prize.  But he will fight for the public’s interest, and he has not given President Obama’s failures a free ride either.  From my point of view, that makes him a worthy candidate.  You can find background info, videos, policy statements here.

But you can easily Google Grayson and find a wealth of detail on what the man stood for his first time out and what we can expect in the future.  He’s no shrinking violet.

An interesting if not problematic development of redistricting, is in Ohio’s primary where Democratic candidates Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur will face off to represent the state’s 9th District.  In my mind, this is a crazy wealth of riches and sadly, one of these long-time Congressional Reps will end up defeated, stepping out of the public arena in which both have served with distinction.  Only last week, Kucinich made a short but pointed statement about the NDAA and America’s war without end.

On the other hand Marcy Kaptur introduced legislation to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act and was the first voice I recall standing on the House floor, defending the rights of and railing against the abuses inflicted on foreclosed homeowners. I’d be hard pressed if I were a resident of Ohio.

The good news?  Both candidates are solid and worthy.

Mazie Hirono [D HI] represents the Hawaii’s 2nd district but is now running for her state’s open US Senate seat due to Daniel Akaka’s scheduled retirement.  Her primary challenger will be Ed Case, a former Democratic Congressman who would run to Congresswoman Hirono’s political right .  Hirono has a strong record in supporting legislation to advance and protect women’s rights, has been a vocal advocate for funding pre-K education, opposed the Iraq War as well as the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.  She would come to the Senate as an experienced legislator, not only with her current House position but as a state representative for 14 years and service as Hawaii’s Lieutenant Governor from 1994-2002.  Early December polls indicated Hirono with an 18 pt lead for the primary run off.

Additional information on Hirono’s background can be found here.

As we move through the primary and GE season, I’ll be updating these candidates and mentioning others.  If we want to make a difference, produce real change–tangible, visible change people are so hungry for–then staying plugged into the cast of candidates, their message, credentials and track record is important.As is working at our local levels.

I listened to a several-hour interview with Chris Hedges this past weekend on Book TV.  One call-in viewer, a disabled grandmother, asked Hedges what she could do to change the political and social landscape with her physical and financial limitations.  Hedges answer was simple but eloquent.  He reminded the woman that we each give and do what we can.  We all have limitations, he reminded her, but that reaching out to a neighbor, a friend, even a stranger in need and/or crisis in these trouble times is, in fact, a political act.

I approve of that message.  Keep your eyes on 2012; we’re living in extraordinary times.

They are Shocked, Shocked I tell you!

Posted: January 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: John Birch Society in Charge, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd | Tags: , | 51 Comments

I’ve written a lot about my experience watching the Republican party gut support for the ERA, women’s reproductive rights, and eventually mainstream economics, science and rational thought. I became an unintentional activist in the 1980s when the Nebraska State Chair of the Democratic Party signed me up for a Republican county convention and told me to go fight to keep women’s rights in the Republican Party Platform.  Starry-eyed kid that I was, I said that I’d give it a try even though I really wanted to just work on the issues I cared about like the ERA.  Every time I wanted to give up, she sent me back in to try again.  She told me that nothing good would ever come to the country if both parties weren’t filled with reasonable people.

What I witnessed in the 1980s in Omaha, Nebraska was a series of elections where storefront churches sent women and men into Republican conventions and organizations with little white cards that basically had marching orders and talking points.  The women had long, straight, lifeless hair and faces.  The wore empire waist, gingham, home made dresses.  I came in with my dress for success power suit and my newly minted economics MS.  I was no match for what I discovered was Eric Hoffer’s True Believer in the flesh.  I’d read that book for a  High School English class and thought it only explained Nazis.  The fembots read their objections to the ERA and to birth control and abortion access from their cards written by their male pastors with their nodding, smiling husbands at their side.  I never considered sisterhood to be universal after that.

By about my second convention, I was being shouted down and called names that I won’t mention here.  The Party establishment–mostly members of the Omaha Country Club–represented the city’s business interests, lawyers and doctors.  They were completely unprepared for the ruckus.  The meme for the decade was that platforms don’t matter.  Let them put in whatever they want.  They needed the votes for their own agendas.  It was implied that all of this was lip service.  I left the party quite a few years before Pat Robertson won Iowa but let me tell you I wasn’t surprised.  My own run for the unicameral was an eye-opening experience.  You’ve never experienced fascism in quite a personal way until you have a campaign run against you from the pulpits of catholic and evangelical churches.  Those folks will do and say anything, literally. Forget Stalin, christofascists believe their ends justify the use of any means necessary, and the scary thing is that their neighbors will believe them.  It’s nothing less than a crusade of lies, anger and mean.

I’ve been reading The Politics Blog written by Charles P. Pierce at Esquire Magazine with encouragement from SkyDancing reader Ralph.  He’s got a great piece up today on how the chickens are coming home to roost for those country club Republicans that really, really want Mitt Romney or some other country club Republican to be likable enough to beat Barack Obama.  The powers that be want to gut Frank-Dodd and ensure that we can drill relentlessly in whatever garden of Eden they choose. They are fully aware that independents like me will run from the likes of Santorum and Perry.  Rove and his cronies are salivating over the vulnerability of the president.  They are also savvy enough to know they are riding in a clown car that they bought and paid for with funds and fundie ass-kissing.  They should’ve thought a bit more about the ride before they gave the keys to insane people.

Precisely how many times are we going to be treated to public expressions of mock horror from Important Conservatives that 40 years of allying themselves with nativist hooligans, anti-intellectual crackpots, Christomaniacs, and the sad detritus of American apartheid finally has produced a field of presidential candidates that these same Important Conservatives find less than adequate? Once again, the whole exercise requires both the writer and the reader to ignore the obvious consequences of four decades of political history and conclude that the Republican party has lost its mind only recently. And it requires both the writer and reader to convince themselves that out there, somewhere, is a superior candidate to the ones presently available, and to ignore the obvious conclusion that titans like Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush, and Paul Ryan chose not to run because they suspected they might get beaten like gongs, if not by President Obama, then by the wholly unacceptable Willard Romney.

And Bobby Jindal? Just stop, okay? You’re killing me.

(By the way, Politico? Quoting Fred Barnes on anything is the recognized international I Got Nothin’ signal. Quoting Fred Barnes on American politics is the functional equivalent of asking a fruit bat what it thinks about the trade deficit.)

Yes, the stern father is trying to get the keys to the clown car back from people completely dedicated to a crusade to turn the US into something completely disdained by the founders; a theocracy. The delightful Pierce read is a response to this “think” piece at Politico on the batch of wackos and the dull ideal-less Willard that have gone in and come out of Iowa. Not one of them is wholly acceptable to the mishmash of sociopaths associated with today’ Republican party.  Some are anathema to the Tea Party.  Santorum and Gingrich are the ultimate corrupt, lobbying insiders.  Others are not trusted by the christofascist crusaders.  The two sane candidates on deck are Mormons and way too reasonable–in the manner of reason that only today’s Republican faithful can define–and way too attached to reality to be acceptable to a group of people who reject modern civilization. Huntsman and Romney can’t be enthusiastically elected in today’s pared down Republican party which requires a pathological detachment from reality. Examine the evidence of Eric Cantor, who went into a state of apoplexy on 60 minutes last week when being told that Ronald Reagan raised taxes 12 times and compromised with Democrats many more times than that.

This is what happens when you sell your souls for votes and unfettered greed.  We’re in about the 7th ring of a Republican-made hell right now and the country club dudes want out of their Faustian bargain so they can stay there.  Their compadres at the wheel want to go straight to ring 10.  We’re living their Divine Comedy with the rich grabbing everything, endless unemployment driving wages down, and absolute lax enforcement of the remaining Nixonian regulation. Yet, they could capture both the Senate and the White House.

Republicans this year find themselves in something of generational slackwater in this election cycle.

There are younger, talented Republicans, such as Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who judged themselves not ready to run for president this time.

There were also a number of potentially formidable Republican governors — Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels — of an older generation who chose for various reasons not to run.

This left Romney not competing against the most promising presidential-level talent this time.

“It’s not like the old days of Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan,” said Washington Examiner columnist Michael Barone. “They were all pretty well-known candidates. It’s just sort of a weak field.”

Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes went a step further, asking: “Would Romney be odds-on to win the nomination if Mitch Daniels or Chris Christie or Paul Ryan or Jeb Bush were in the race?

Not likely.”

That doesn’t mean, Barnes and others argued, that Romney couldn’t grow into a more forceful standard-bearer for his party in the process of campaigning against President Barack Obama.

Whoever wrote this piece has never spent any serious time researching Bobby “the exorcist” Jindal who has absolutely gutted our state’s universities and hospitals so that he can say he didn’t increase the number of people on the state’s payroll.  They haven’t checked the state’s unemployment rate which has doubled under his watch.  They certainly haven’t listened to him speak.  You have to be a speed listener to do that.  It takes special powers  Then, there is Paul Ryan that’s as big of a crank as any one I’ve seen in public office recently.  Even Newt Gingrich recognized his entitlement reforms as right wing engineering before he was called out by the other cranks.

This is the problem.  The Republican Party has spent 40 years purging their ranks.  There is nothing left but candidates so flexible with their positions they’ve been on every side of every issue or people so frightening that you wouldn’t want them near your children.  Consider Senator David Vitter whose record is simply impeccable for every one in the clown car.  Ask people if they’d want to spend time with him and every one runs for the door and hides their daughters.  Consider the number of Republicans from which you’d hide your young sons.  You name any Republican these days and you can point to either the freewheeling old school hypocrisy or the creepy “I don’t believe in science, math, history, and reality” factor.  They elect soci0paths in safe districts because they are reliable voters for the party’s special interests.

Consider Bachmann’s insistence today–as she headed for the hatchback door–that Obama is a socialist as best represented by Obamacare. It seems her evangelical fundie friends just couldn’t do it for a woman. She hit the eject button.  But, she’s still doling out the crazy.  Consider that Obamacare with its individual mandate is the Heritage Foundation/Republican Senate Health care response to Hillary Clinton’s health care study.  Republicans got a Republican plan that both Romney and Gingrich supported in the 1990s because it was the Republican plan and came from the Heritage Foundation.  Some how they’ve pinned it on Obama and deemed it socialist.  How can any one reconcile this with out some part of their brain imploding?  The individual mandate was the hallmark of the Republican plan.  All you have to do is check the Legislative record or the press articles of the day.  It was one of the things Obama supposedly opposed when he ran as a Democrat.  How can any Republican candidate that’s had enough experience to be the president run away from former Republican policy initiatives and conveniently forget that Obama opposed it before he loved it?

The concept of the individual health insurance mandate originated in 1989 at the conservative Heritage Foundation. In 1993, Republicans twice introduced health care bills that contained an individual health insurance mandate. Advocates for those bills included prominent Republicans who today oppose the mandate including Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Robert Bennett (R-UT), and Christopher Bond (R-MO). In 2007, Democrats and Republicans introduced a bi-partisan bill containing the mandate.

In 2008, then presidential candidate Barack Obama was opposed to the individual mandate. He stated the following in a Feb. 28, 2008 interview on the Ellen DeGeneres show about his divergent views with Hillary Clinton:

“Both of us want to provide health care to all Americans. There’s a slight difference, and her plan is a good one. But, she mandates that everybody buy health care. She’d have the government force every individual to buy insurance and I don’t have such a mandate because I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want health insurance, it’s that they can’t afford it. So, I focus more on lowering costs. This is a modest difference. But, it’s one that she’s tried to elevate, arguing that because I don’t force people to buy health care that I’m not insuring everybody. Well, if things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn’t.”

The Republican clowncar ride these days enforces a strict policy of historical amnesia.  Pierce sees the contortionist sideshow that’s become the Romney candidacy.  Romney’s put himself into a denial pretzel to runaway from Republican past.

It is at moments like this in which I feel just the faintest twinge of sympathy for our man Willard. I mean, what more does the poor sap have to do? He’s walked back his previous ironclad commitments and then he walked back many of his own walk-backs. He has abased himself before all the steaming iron gods of modern conservatism. He’s grabbed control of the wild-west landscape produced by the Citizens United decision and demonstrated that he has absolutely no conscience regarding using anonymous corporate button men on the opposition while pretending all the while that he’s Michael Corleone at his nephew’s christening. And still he’s got people sniping at him, and dreaming their dreamy dreams about thuggish governors of New Jersey, diminutive governors of Indiana, and zombie-eyed granny-starvers from Wisconsin. It can’t be easy being the cousin that every Important Conservative winds up having to take to the prom.

Willard, if you want to play up to today’s Republicans, you’re going to have to literally have a come to Jesus moment.  Like Bobby Jindal, you’re going to have to give up the religion of your family and force your wife and kids to convert.  You’re going to have to say you were deceived by Satan and that explains the entire Massachusetts Governor thing.  It almost worked for Newt right?  The best deal is that you can contort yourself into the new Willard and Newt will forever be Newt.

I have no intention of ever voting Republican again.  That does not mean, however, that the Democratic Party gets my vote by default as I think Obama and others are expecting.  I am clearly looking for something else.  I do not intend to sell out all of my education and principles to settle for the anti-war but otherwise incredibly cracked crackpot Ron Paul who is a throwback to the confederacy. There is no way Donald Trump’s narcissism and hype traps me into forgetting how he took all that parental money and government money and parlayed it into bankruptcy.  He is not the greatest showman on earth.  Nader pretty much encompasses all of those complaints and more.  Bloomberg?  Forget about it!  This could very well be the first major election that I will give a resounding pass.  In that case, consider Mary Landrieu a lost cause.  She’ll never squeak through in today’s Louisiana where the electorate was changed by a Rovian exodus.  The only thing that could drive me to the polls is fear of Mitch McConnell as majority leader.  Is this what the democratic experience has come to?

This maybe the worst election year ever.

Late Night Breaking: Romney takes Iowa by 8 votes

Posted: January 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign | 5 Comments

Matt Strawn, Iowa Republican Party Chairman, confirming that Romney has taken Iowa by 8 votes…

I got these numbers live, no link yet:

Romney    30,015

Santorum   30,007

The earliest link I can find documenting Matt Strawn’s press briefing is this USA Today live blog link with this update:

2:34 a.m. ET

Iowa Republican Party Chairman Matt Strawn says Mitt Romney wins the Iowa caucuses by eight votes.

There was lots of confusion and this was perhaps ‘the closest election in American political primaries and caucuses’ (source the Very Serious David Gergen on CNN)….  some of us live-blogged the madness late into the night in the comments of BB’s Live Blog–for anyone who went to sleep before the results came in and wants to try to understand how it unfolded real time. (Warning: after about midnight or so, mostly it’s just me talking to myself…)

The mainstream punditry takeaway at this late hour is that this was a technical win for Romney but Santorum is the big star of the night, with Newt Gingrich on a personal mission to get Romney back for his attack ads against him (h/t Taylor Marsh).

Best line of the night goes to the Ragin Cajun:

James Carville: “There is one screaming, huge story here tonight and that is these Republicans just don’t want to vote for Mitt Romney. I mean it’s like you’re trying to give a dog a pill. They keep spitting it up. Now, they’re going to eat the pill, ’cause Romney’s going to eventually be the nominee, but…

And it’s the same thing he had before and he’s got a weaker field. It just don’t matter where he comes in, they don’t want to vote for him.”

See video clip of Carville’s commentary at Crooks and Liars.

I’m going to leave you with some Late Night Political Insomniac Jukebox…

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