Tuesday Reads

Posted: May 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , | 37 Comments

Good Morning!!

I have a mix of news for you today. Let’s start with the “serious” stuff. Supposedly the CIA has thwarted another potential terrorist attack, conveniently revealed at the end of a week of discussion of Osama bin Laden’s life and death. There have been so many of these–please forgive me for my cynical attitude. The Boston Globe reports:

WASHINGTON—The CIA thwarted an ambitious plot by al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, U.S. officials said Monday.

The plot involved an upgrade of the underwear bomb that failed to detonate aboard a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas 2009. This new bomb was also designed to be used in a passenger’s underwear, but this time al-Qaida developed a more refined detonation system, U.S. officials said.

The FBI is examining the latest bomb to see whether it could have passed through airport security and brought down an airplane, officials said. They said the device did not contain metal, meaning it probably could have passed through an airport metal detector. But it was not clear whether new body scanners used in many airports would have detected it.

Maybe this is the preamble to a rollout of even more ghastly TSA practices–or perhaps more invasive machines?

Few people are paying attention to the primaries anymore, now that Republicans have grudgingly begun to accept Mitt Romney as their standard bearer. But there is a big primary tomorrow in Indiana that could have a big impact on which party controls the Senate next year. Sen. Richard Lugar is facing an ultra-conservative Tea Party challenger with lots of superpac support, and it looks like the six-term Senator could lose tomorrow, and that could possibly mean a Democrat will win Lugar’s seat.

Lugar, 80, will face Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, a career politician whose staunch conservatism could make him a more beatable opponent for the presumptive Democratic nominee, Rep. Joe Donnelly.

An independent bipartisan poll, conducted late last week, gave Mourdock a 10-point edge heading into the final days before the primary, and many insiders think that Lugar’s only chance for survival is by generating a large turnout of independent and Democratic voters in the Hoosier State’s open contest.

Mourdock has been painting Lugar as a Washngton insider who is sometimes polite to Democrats and didn’t always vote the party line.

In Indiana, the campaign has turned into a referendum on Lugar’s career as a bipartisan lawmaker at the top of the Foreign Relations and Agriculture committees. His opponent has focused, in part, on trips to overseas hot spots with Barack Obama when he was still in the Senate and served on the committee with Lugar.

“It’s time to retire Richard Lugar,” says the narrator of a Mourdock ad, which ends with a picture of Obama and Lugar acting chummy together at a Senate hearing, with the former fake punching the latter.

For the past few weeks Joe Donnelly has been directing his efforts toward Mourdock, assuming the challenger will win the Republican primary.

You may have heard about this one already: Romney Silent As Woman Says Obama Should Be Tried For Treason. Romney called on a woman at a Euclid, Ohio town hall meeting who

expressed dismay that Obama was “operating outside the Constitution,” then said Obama should be tried for treason for violating separation of powers.

“I do believe he should be tried for treason,” she said to applause from the audience.

Romney responded with some pious remarks about the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence being “inspired.” He didn’t say who or what inspired them.

He then allowed her to clarify what specifically she thought Obama had violated, and the woman proceeded to spout references to Executive Orders, including one that she said involved the Secret Service restricting the rights of citizens to protest.

Romney, who is protected by a detail of Secret Service agents, said “I will be happy to look at what he has done about the Secret Service with respect to protests.”

Romney’s failure to say that the President shouldn’t be tried for treason resulted in a barrage of attacks from Obama and his supporters as well as questions from the media and discussions on nightly talk shows. Romney later admitted that he doesn’t think Obama should be tried for treason, but he once again showed himself to be living in cowering fear of the the Republican base. At HuffPo, Mitchell Bard wrote that Romney “blew his chance at a ‘no ma’am moment” like McCain’s in 2008.

On October 10, 2008, less than a month before the presidential election, and with his standing falling in the polls in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, John McCain fielded a question at a town hall meeting in Minnesota from a woman who said, “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him and he’s not, he’s not uh — he’s an Arab.”

McCain didn’t hesitate. He politely but firmly took the microphone from the woman and said, shaking his head, “No, ma’am. No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have
disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign’s all about.”

At that same town hall meeting, another audience member asked him why he pays taxes to foreign governments.

“I don’t think I paid any foreign income taxes, but I’ll look at it,” Romney replied over the boos of the audience for the hostile questioner.

But in fact, Romney has paid over $1.2 million in foreign taxes for “passive category income” since 2000, according to his 2010 income tax return.

Additionally he has paid over $800,000 in foreign taxes for “general category income” according to the same filing.

The income was probably from foreign investments. You’d think Romney would have at least read the tax returns he released!

Buzzfeed had another funny Romney story yesterday–they discovered he had been arrested for disorderly conduct back in 1981.

According to what Romney told the Boston Globe in 1994, he had taken his family off to Wayland, Mass.’s Lake Cochituate, about an hour outside Boston, for a summer excursion. As Romney prepared to put his family boat into the water, a park officer told Romney not to launch because his license appeared to have been painted over. The officer told Romney if he put his boat into the water he would face a $50 fine.

Romney felt that his license was still visible and decided to ignore the order from the officer and pay the fine.

“I figured I was at the state park with my kids. My five kids were in the car wondering why we weren’t going out in the boat, so I said I’d launch and pay the fine,” Romney said in 1994.

So he went ahead and launched the boat, and the cop handcuffed him and took him into town. Book ’em, Dano! Romney appeared before a judge in a bathing suit and was released on his own recognizance. When he later went to court to defend himself, he threatened the cop with a lawsuit, and the charges were dropped. This guy thinks he can buy his way out of anything, and he probably can.

Yes, Romney’s a cowardly con-man, but according to Bloomberg, senior citizens love him even though he wants to give their Social Security funds to Wall Street.

The master-gardener meeting, the bridge tournament, and a heated match of seven-card draw poker leave little time for politics at the Via Linda senior citizens’ center in Scottsdale, Arizona. Yet ask about President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and it doesn’t take long to determine the preferred candidate.

“He has some very socialistic leanings and believes in big government,” Lu Ittner, 86, a retired surgical nurse, said of Obama. “He is destroying our economy with his policies.”

While Obama so far dominates Romney among many demographic groups — women, younger voters, middle-aged voters, blacks and Hispanics — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has a solid lead among the nation’s senior citizens. Some of the most reliable voters, those 65 and older represented 16 percent of the electorate in the 2008 election, exit polls show.

A CNN/ORC International poll taken April 13-15 showed Romney led Obama, 54 percent to 39 percent, with seniors. Among those supporting Romney, 58 percent said their vote would be more against Obama than for Romney.

Well, I will officially be a senior on Dec. 1, and I do not like Romney. Not all seniors are stupid or rich and greedy.

Just a couple more links. Actor John Travolta is being sued for sexual battery by a masseur.

According to court documents, the events in question unfolded on Jan. 16, when Travolta allegedly asked the masseur to meet him on a street corner and then fetched Doe in a black SUV. Condoms, as well as scattered chocolate cake wrappers, were said to have littered the car’s center console and floor.

It was back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, to a private bungalow, where Travolta stripped immediately and was “semi-erect,” the suit claims, and Travolta then proceeded to suggestively remove a towel covering his buttocks, touched the masseur’s genitals repeatedly and tried to coax John Doe into a reverse massage. he does not expected that because the massage must be just a massage just like at TranquilMe Website where they offer different kinds of massages and totaly will help your blood flow and relax you mind and body.

Then, according to John Doe’s recollection (TMZ has the full suit here (PDF)), when Travolta got the message that no mutual play would go down, he became erratic and verbally abusive, calling Doe a “loser.”

The most troubling nugget in Doe’s account claims that Travolta went on a rant that “Hollywood is controlled by homosexual Jewish men who expect favors in return for sexual activity” and that his habit of making such trades began in his “Welcome Back Kotter” days.

Of course Travolta denies everything and says he out of the state that day. If so, he probably has proof–like plane tickets or hotel receipts–and the suit will be thrown out. Or maybe all those rumors about Travolta were true. The part about being abused when he was younger, I can believe (not the antisemitic part though).

The Daily Beast has the “13 naughtiest bits from the Masseur Lawsuit Against John Travolta.” I couldn’t bring myself to read it yet–maybe later.

HuffPo has a huge collection of supermoon photos from the weekend. They are gorgeous.

How would you like to live in the “house that Ruth built?” No, not the old Yankee Stadium. The house the Babe lived in when he played for the Red Sox.

Known as “Home Plate Farm,” the spacious antique colonial located at 558 Dutton Road was occupied by famed Boston Red Sox [team stats] and New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth from 1922 to 1926.

The asking price for the property that’s going, going, soon-to-be gone — $1.65 million.

Is that all?

Along with boasting 5,124 square feet on more than two acres of land, five bedrooms and three-and-a-half bathrooms, the property also has a 5,000-square-foot barn zoned for residential and commercial use with horse stables, sub-divided office space, working garage bays, and a top-floor apartment with skylights, and full kitchen, bathroom and bedroom….

Though the home has been “meticulously renovated throughout,” Adamson said, touches of the Sultan of Swat can still be found, including burn marks from Ruth’s cigar ashes in the wooden floor of the living room, and a third-floor memorabilia room containing several photographs of the Hall of Fame slugger who played 22 seasons in the Major Leagues.

It probably won’t be on the market long with that history.

Brian Fischer Mocks Mitt Romney over Richard Grenell Resignation

Posted: May 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, open thread, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , | 20 Comments

This is hilarious.

Two weeks ago, Mitt Romney former Bush administration official Richard Grenell as foreign policy spokesman for the Romney campaign. By the next day, anti-gay radio host Brian Fischer was attacking the move along with several other right wingers.

The day after Mr. Grenell was hired, Bryan Fischer, a Romney critic with the American Family Association, told nearly 1,400 followers on Twitter: “If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.” The next day, the conservative Daily Caller published an online column that summed up the anger of the Christian right, linking Mr. Grenell’s hiring to the appointment of gay judges to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

The Romney campaign was spooked. Campaign spokesperson Andrea Saul released a half-hearted defense:

Andrea Saul, a campaign spokeswoman, issued a statement of support for Mr. Grenell on April 24. But it made no mention of the attacks on his sexuality: “We hired Ric Grenell because he was the best qualified person for the job and has extensive experience representing the U.S. Mission to the U.N.”

But at the same time Grenell was repeatedly told not to say anything publicly for the campaign. Grenell finally read the writing on the wall after he organized a major media conference call on foreign policy.

It was the biggest moment yet for Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team: a conference call last Thursday, dialed into by dozens of news outlets from around the globe, to dissect and denounce President Obama’s record on national security.

But Richard Grenell, the political strategist who helped organize the call and was specifically hired to oversee such communications, was conspicuously absent, or so everyone thought.

It turned out he was at home in Los Angeles, listening in, but stone silent and seething. A few minutes earlier, a senior Romney aide had delivered an unexpected directive, according to several people involved in the call.

“Ric,” said Alex Wong, a policy aide, “the campaign has requested that you not speak on this call.” Mr. Wong added, “It’s best to lay low for now.”

That’s when Grenell decided to step down after only two weeks. Brian Fischer celebrated on his radio talk show, calling it a “huge win.”

Yesterday, Romney was running around telling people that he had wanted Grenell to stay with the campaign; yet Romney was stone cold silent for the entire two weeks of the controversy!

Then yesterday, Fischer made fun of Romney for caving to “a yokel like me.”

Fischer: Let me ask you this question, people have raised this question, if Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, coopted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin? How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me? I don’t think Romney is realizing the doubts that this begins to raise about his leadership. I don’t think for one minute that Mitt Romney did not want this guy gone; he wanted this guy gone because there was not one word of defense, not a peep, from the Romney camp to defend him. They just went absolutely stone cold silent, they put a bag over Grenell’s head, they even asked him to organize this phone conference and they didn’t even let him speak at the conference that he organized.

The quoted part begins around 4:00, but the whole thing is pretty entertaining, especially the part where Fischer talks about Romney’s “triple etch-a-sketch” and how Romney “went Saul Alinsky on me.”

Creating False Equivalencies and other Nasty Campaign Tricks

Posted: May 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, Voter Ignorance | Tags: | 18 Comments

Politics has always been an ugly business in America.  All you have to do is follow the lives of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, or Andrew Jackson to get some idea of how the personal can be turned into the ugly political.  Rumor becomes fact.  Innuendo becomes headlines. Character assassination becomes de rigueur.  It’s hard to know exactly when modern politics went over the edge.  I would definitely have to point to folks like Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Frank Luntz.  Although, Donald Segretti comes to mind too.  The age of social media and blogs has created a sleaze industry.  Andrew Breithbart was the sheistermeister of the internet and his site and sites like Red State continue the tradition of creating tropes, memes and canards to sucker an uninformed electorate.  AM radio and Fox News certainly don’t raise the standard either. Sleazy politics is on steroids these days.

The funny thing is that some things do speak of character and other things appear to be manufactured to create faux outrage.  I frankly believe that strapping your sick dog on the roof of your car for a long trip says something about your decision making and your humanity.  I don’t think a small child in a third world country eating dog meat because that’s what he’s been given to eat by his parents to be an equivalent morality play.

We are clearly in the swift boat age.  Right after the attack on 9-11 the politicizing of the event took off.  It was bound to happen.  I used to keep track of the number of times that Dubya used the term  “lessons of 9/11” to justify torture, invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the attack on 9/11, and signing into law severe restrictions on our civil liberties and personal privacy.  Every single SOTU address and re-election stump speech always contained the phrase “lessons of 9/11”.  I’m actually pretty outraged that the Romney and some elected officials think they’re innocent of trumping up the “lessons of 9/11” while accusing the President of Politicizing the Bin Laden killing.  Meanwhile, they’re politicizing the situation with a Chinese dissident while the Secretary of State is in active negotiations with the Chinese Government on the status of the dissident and his family.

All of this just drives me nuts.

The newest of these trumped up faux outrage moments is now called “Elizabeth Warren’s Birther Movement”.

If you are 1/32 Cherokee and your grandfather has high cheekbones, does that make you Native American? It depends. Last Friday, Republicans in Massachusetts questioned the racial ancestry of Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senate candidate. Her opponent, Senator Scott Brown, has accused her of using minority status as an American Indian to advance her career as a law professor at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas. The Brown campaign calls her ties to the Cherokee and Delaware nations a “hypocritical sham.”

In a press conference on Wednesday, Warren defended herself, saying, “Native American has been a part of my story, I guess since the day I was born, I don’t know any other way to describe it.” Despite her personal belief in her origins, her opponents have seized this moment in an unnecessary fire drill that guarantees media attention and forestalls real debate.

This tactic is straight from the Republican cookbook of fake controversy. First, you need a rarefied elected office typically occupied by a certain breed of privileged men. Both the Presidency and the Senate fit this bill. Second, add a bit of interracial intrigue. It could be Kenyan economists eloping with Midwestern anthropologists, or white frontiersmen pairing with indigenous women. Third, throw in some suspicion about their qualifications and ambitions. Last but not least, demand documentation of ancestry and be dissatisfied upon its receipt. Voila! You have a genuine birther movement.

The Republican approach to race is to feign that it is irrelevant — until it becomes politically advantageous to bring it up. Birthers question Obama’s state of origin (and implicitly his multiracial heritage) in efforts to disqualify him from the presidency. They characterize him as “other.” For Warren, Massachusetts Republicans place doubts on her racial claims to portray her as an opportunistic academic seeking special treatment. In both birther camps, opponents look to ancestral origins as the smoking gun, and ride the ambiguity for the duration.

My children are 1/4 Japanese.  My youngest daughter has absolutely no physical traits that would lead you to believe she has a Japanese Grandmother.  My oldest daughter definitely has the mixed race look.  But that’s not the point.  Neither is the actual fraction or what’s historically been called the number of ‘drops of blood’.

Both of my children have a mixed identity because we fully embraced my husband’s mixed ancestry.  We eat Japanese food.  The kids went to Japan school for a period of time and can speak and write a bit of Japanese.  My mother-in-law lived with us and our home was filled with her cooking, her language, and her upbringing.  The girls also know about their family history from Japan and they’ve explored its culture.  We also talk about a lot of different things including  that my uncle was very responsible for the argument on the Japanese Internment policy to the Supreme Court for the Roosevelt Administration and that another uncle by marriage on my father’s side lost a cousin to the Baatan Death March.  His aunt was appalling rude to my husband every time we went to family reunions.  Both  heritages are a party of our family story and our family traditions. We discuss the anti-Japanese hysteria of the World War 2 period, the Japanese War atrocities, and the H Bombs that ended the war as well as my mother-in-law’s experience as a starving teenager in Kyoto who had to smuggle rice in her kimono.  All of this is a part of our heritage as melting pot Americans.  When I first walked to the counter of the Japanese Grocery store here in New Orleans with my items I was told “You shop like Japanese housewife.”  I am genetically as WASPY as they come. That’s what comes from being brought into a culture as a teen and surrounded by it for 20 years. There’s a very real part of me that IS Japanese now.  I am a New Orleanian after 16 years living in the inner city of New Orleans and being surrounded by all if its rich heritage and neighborhoods. These identities will stay with me no matter where I go.

That’s the deal to me.  If Elizabeth Warren feels connections to her Native American Ancestry and if its part of her family story and tradition, do we really need to question if her ‘drops of blood’ justify her connection and her identity?

Discussing real issues and real moral character is difficult in this age of swift boating, contrived outrage, and false equivalencies.  It’s especially difficult because so many groups can get access to money and the media and push through some pretty outrageous tropes.   Unfortunately, most of these tropes are head line grabbers and the customer-hungry media will jump on it and ride it as long as possible.  It is really shameful that the noble pursuit of maintaining a healthy democracy seems to include such manufactured tit-for-tat.  US voters deserve better.

And that’s the way it was …

Posted: May 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics | Tags: , , , , | 5 Comments

Some times I just have to wonder how a news anchor can keep a straight face when covering specific news stories.  It seems Shep Smith went rogue while covering Newt Gingrich’s campaign suspension.  C&L’s Karoli captures the absurdity of the moment well.  Minx covered this in her late night news thread but I really thought I’d give the Karoli bit a shout out because of the You Tube below. It comes from the Obama-Biden campaign.  You have to know more of these are coming. You also need to go see Minx’s post because the Luckovich cartoon take off of Porky’s ending to Loony Tunes will give you a big ol’ smile.

After a rambling and nearly-incoherent speech, Newt Gingrich finally dropped his bid for the Republican nomination and Mitt Romney’s campaign issued a predictably benign and “hugs all around” statement about it, saying:

“Newt Gingrich has brought creativity and intellectual vitality to American political life. During the course of this campaign, Newt demonstrated both eloquence and fearlessness in advancing conservative ideas. Although he long ago created an enduring place for himself in American history, I am confident that he will continue to make important contributions to our party and to the life of the nation. Ann and I are proud to call Newt and Callista friends and we look forward to working with them in the months and years ahead as we fight to restore America’s promise.”

This would not be news except that Shepard Smith’s reaction to that statement was just classic and delicious. I think he should not be working for a channel who is almost always “weird and creepy,” but since he is, I’ve got to say that this should go down in the annals of classic news anchor reactions:

Politics is weird. And creepy. And now, I know, lacks even the loosest attachment to anything like reality.

The facial expressions are as wonderful as the words. While Newt didn’t really sing a full-throated praise of Mittens, he did manage to choke out words to the effect that Mitt was still better than President Obama. Of course, the reason Shep was so taken aback was because of statements during the campaign like these:

If you have a bitterly fought primary–which is an honest appraisal of the 2012 Republican primaries–then you’re going to have lots of Kafkaesque Kumbya moments when all the bitter rivals have to make nice with the winner.  That can never been an easy thing to do.  However, we have these SuperPacs that are bringing negative campaigning to new lows.  We’ve also seen a series of debates with endless harangues.  How on earth is the kiss and make up moment supposed to go under that circumstance?

Here’s another story today on Bachmann’s luke warm “endorsement” of Romney.

Michele Bachmann has finally decided to endorse Mitt Romney – 119 days after she dropped out of the race.

The endorsement will come at a joint Romney-Bachmann appearance on Thursday.  No doubt Bachmann will talk about the importance of beating Barack Obama and how Mitt Romney is the one to do it. She’ll almost certainly say that conservatives must unite behind Romney because of the importance of beating Obama.

But here’s the thing: Shortly before she dropped out, Bachmann told me – point blank – that there was  no way Romney could beat Obama.

“He cannot beat Obama,” Bachmann said. “It’s not going to happen.”

Wow, with endorsements like these, who needs opposition research?  Anyway, Karoli has the video of Smith’s moment of Zen. It’s worth tripping over to C&L just to see the look on his face.  Meanwhile, so long Newt, we knew you FAR TOO WELL.

Thursday Reads

Posted: May 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, China, Foreign Affairs, Hillary Clinton, just because, Mitt Romney, morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: , , , , , , | 61 Comments

Good Morning!!

Last night JJ posted about the sale of Edvard Munch’s The Scream for nearly $120 million. Even Mitt Romney probably couldn’t have afforded it! Somehow I don’t see him as much of an art lover though…

I’ve always been fascinated by the connections between creativity and mental illness. When I took Cognitive Psychology as an undergraduate my professor talked about Munch, saying that the artist felt his mental illness was the source of his creativity and so never wanted to be treated for it. The professor said that once Munch was treated, he did lose much of his creative gift. After seeing the Munch painting in the news last night, I decided to find out a little about Munch’s life.

It turns out my professor’s story was a bit of an oversimplification. Munch did link his artistic talent to his emotional problems, but I’m not sure that he ever really overcame his illness. This fascinating 2006 article from Smithsonian Magazine gives a brief account of Munch’s life and sufferings. The source of Munch’s most famous painting, The Scream, was a hallucination he experienced while walking with some friends.

Munch’s The Scream is an icon of modern art, a Mona Lisa for our time. As Leonardo da Vinci evoked a Renaissance ideal of serenity and self-control, Munch defined how we see our own age—wracked with anxiety and uncertainty. His painting of a sexless, twisted, fetal-faced creature, with mouth and eyes open wide in a shriek of horror, re-created a vision that had seized him as he walked one evening in his youth with two friends at sunset. As he later described it, the “air turned to blood” and the “faces of my comrades became a garish yellow-white.” Vibrating in his ears he heard “a huge endless scream course through nature.”

Munch was a

restless innovator whose personal tragedies, sicknesses and failures fed his creative work. “My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness,” he once wrote. “Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder….My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art.” Munch believed that a painter mustn’t merely transcribe external reality but should record the impact a remembered scene had on his own sensibility.

That much of what my professor said was correct. He did make an explicit connection between creativity and his emotional demons. And Munch did suffer. His mother died of Tuberculosis when he was only 5 years old. He adored his sister Sophie who was a year older than he was, and she too died of TB at age 15. Munch’s father was much older then his wife and sounds very authoritarian and forbidding. He was “a doctor imbued with a religiosity that often darkened into gloomy fanaticism.” Munch also had a sister who spent most of her life in a mental institution and a brother who died suddenly when he was only 30.

Munch once wrote in his journal: “I inherited two of mankind’s most frightful enemies—the heritage of consumption and insanity—illness and madness and death were the black angels that stood at my cradle,” It’s easy to see where that iconic scream painting came from.

As a young man, Munch had a love affair with a dominating older woman, whom he depicted in his painting Vampire

After his father died of a stroke, Munch’s mental illness seems to have grown worse; but in the next few years he produced some of his best work. During this time, he got involved in another difficult romantic relationship with a woman who pursued him relentlessly while he relentlessly resisted.

Munch had been drinking heavily for years and eventually he became an alcoholic. He was most likely trying to self-medicate with alcohol, since he seems to have experienced auditory and visual hallucinations throughout his life. Finally he entered a sanitarium, where he cut back on his drinking and began to feel more mentally stable. This was in 1909. When he was released, he was about 40 years old and would live for 40 more years–he died in 1944.

Munch continued to paint and produced a great deal of work, but critics agree that his best work had been produced prior to his treatment. I’m not sure you could say that his mental illness was cured, though. It seems that he just dealt with it differently. In his later years he isolated himself in his home and avoided going out in public and being part of “the dance of life,” in his words.

And now, moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, let’s look at some current news.

Bloomberg evaluates Mitt Romney’s tax plan and finds it wanting:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax plan rests on a set of principles that, taken together, are difficult to reconcile.

Romney wants to reduce individual income tax rates by 20 percent, keep preferential rates for capital gains and dividends, broaden the tax base to limit revenue loss, and retain the tax-burden distribution across income groups.

Those goals are in conflict and will require that Romney consider limiting or eliminating the tax breaks for charitable deductions and home mortgage interest, said Martin Sullivan, contributing editor at Tax Analysts in Falls Church, Virginia.

“As soon as he gets in, he’s going to have to start backpedaling big-time on all of his promises,” Sullivan said. “It’s just not doable under any conceivable, realistic scenario.”

Well, Romney has a lot of experience with backpedaling, so that shouldn’t be a problem for him. It’s a lengthy article and you may feel like Munch’s The Scream while reading it. I hope no one experiences visual or auditory hallucinations, but Romney’s ideas may have the potential to trigger them in vulnerable people.

Bloomberg also finds Romney is deficient at evocative storytelling, and says this deficiency could explain why the Romney bot can’t seem to connect that well with normal humans. Here’s a “story” Romney tried to tell in Wisconsin:

“I met a guy who worked for the city and he was working, I think, in the landscape division for the city,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said at an April 2 town-hall meeting at an oil company in Milwaukee.

Romney never did get around to giving the name of the man or mention what city he had worked for, or identify the company he said the man founded after leaving his municipal job or say how much gasoline his trucks were burning.

“In today’s politics, it’s all about the narrative,” said Tobe Berkovitz, a communications professor and longtime Romney watcher at Boston University. “This has never been part of Romney’s wheelhouse. It’s just not his style.”

Story-telling is an age-old technique in politics. The two modern presidential candidates best-known for mastering the art tailored it to their political times and defeated incumbents. Ronald Reagan, a onetime movie actor, invoked a sense of patriotism and heroism amid economic distress and the Iranian hostage crisis, while Bill Clinton used personal narrative from his modest Arkansas upbringing to show empathy for Americans recovering from the recession of the early 1990s.

Unlike Edvard Munch, Romney lacks both imagination and creativity, and for those reasons, he probably could never even develop a mental illness.

Yesterday a Missouri legislator suddenly came out to his colleagues and begged them to withdraw the “don’t say gay” bill.

A Republican lawmaker in Missouri on Wednesday announced that he was gay and called on his colleagues to revoke their support for a “horrible” bill that would prevent the discussion of homosexuality in schools.

“I will not lie to myself anymore about my own sexuality,” state Rep. Zachary Wyatt said during a press conference at the State Capitol. “It has probably been the hardest thing to come to terms with. I have always ignored it, didn’t even think about it or want to talk about it. I’ve not been immune to it. I hear the comments — usually snide ones — about me.”

“I’m not the first or last Republican to come out. I’ve just gotten tired of the bigotry being shown from both sides of the aisle on gay issues. Being gay has never been a Republican or Democrat issue.”

Wyatt warned that Missouri’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill would make it impossible for LGBT students to speak with teachers and counselors when they were being bullied.

Someone needs to do a psychological study on why there are so many gay Republicans (like Richard Grenell, who just had to resign from the Romney campaign) and at the same time so many Republicans who hate homosexuals.

Maybe this could shed a little light on the problem: A recent study suggested that people who are homophobic are more likely to be repressing attraction to the same sex and to have grown up in authoritarian homes.

Study subjects — four groups of about 160 college students each, in the USA and Germany — also rated the attractiveness of people in same-sex or opposite-sex photos and answered questions about the type of parenting they experienced growing up, from authoritarian to democratic, as well as homophobia at home.

Researchers also measured homophobia — both overt, as expressed in questionnaires on social policy and beliefs, and unconscious, as revealed in word-completion tasks.

The findings suggest participants with accepting parents were more in touch with their innate sexual orientation. But, Ryan says, “if you come from a controlling home where your parents do have negative attitudes toward gays and lesbians, you’re even more likely to suppress same-sex attraction and more likely to have this discrepancy that leads to having homophobia and feeling threatened.”

Ryan says the study may help explain the personal dynamics behind some bullying and hate crimes directed at gays and sheds light on high-profile cases in which public figures who have expressed anti-gay views have been caught engaging in same-sex sexual acts.

In other words these people may be using the defense mechanism Freud called reaction formation, which I’ve written about previously in a post about Michelle Bachmann.

Freud theorized that the ego unconsciously uses defense mechanisms to protect itself from being overwhelmed by anxiety-producing thoughts, feelings, and situations. This is one of Freud’s ideas that has been supported by extensive empirical research.

Reaction formation is a highly neurotic defense mechanism in which a person appears to others to be “protesting too much”–for example, exaggerating how much she loves or hates something to the point that observers wonder if this behavior is a cover for the opposite feeling.

This isn’t the first study that has found a correlation between homophobia and homosexual attraction. In a previous study, some researchers actually measured arousal in homophobic and non-homophobic men.

The men viewed homosexual and heterosexual soft core porn videos and their level of arousal was measured by means of a device attached to their penises. Interviews and psychological tests were used to identify homophobic and non-homophobic men.

Results showed that men who scored as homophobic on the tests and also admitted to having negative feelings toward homosexuals were more likely to be aroused by homosexual stimuli. Not only that, the men rated their own arousal levels as low when they watched homosexual videos. They were denying their own arousal levels. From the abstract:

These data are consistent with response discordance where verbal judgments are not consistent with physiological reactivity, as in the case of homophobic individuals viewing homosexual stimuli. Lang (1994) has noted that the most dramatic response discordance occurs with reports of feeling and physiologic responses. Another possible explanation is found in various psychoanalytic theories, which have generally explained homophobia as a threat to an individual’s own homosexual impulses causing repression, denial, or reaction formation (or all three; West, 1977 ).

That’s got to be a big part of what’s happening with Republicans. Now someone needs to study their woman-hating. It probably has something to do with how they feel about their mothers as well as the kinds of behaviors they observed between their parents.

I’m rambling today, aren’t I? I’d better wrap this up. Just a few more links.

Bill Clinton reviewed the new Robert Caro book on LBJ for the NYT Book Review.

Vanity Fair has an excerpt from a new biography of Barack Obama by David Maraniss (who also wrote a biography of Bill Clinton).

Finally, here are two stories about Hillary’s ongoing adventures in China. I sure hope she can work things out. Right now it doesn’t look good.

From the WaPo: Chinese activist Chen leaves U.S. Embassy for hospital, is surrounded by police

From the NYT: Chinese Dissident Is Released From Embassy, Causing Turmoil for U.S.

What’s on your reading list today?

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