Super Tuesday Reads

Posted: March 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, birth control, Foreign Affairs, Israel, Mitt Romney, morning reads, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , | 59 Comments

Good Morning!!

Today is the day Willard Mitt Romney has been working toward since 1994 when he first ran for the Senate against Ted Kennedy. Think of the hundreds of millions of dollars he has poured into his dream of winning the presidency, only to end up on Super Tuesday 2012 with a 28% favorability rating according to the latest NBC-WSJ poll (h/t Dakinikat). Nevertheless, Romney could be the inevitable candidate after tonight–at least the Republican “establishment,” such as it is, hopes he will be.

As you can see in the image above, there are 437 delegates at stake today in the ten Super Tuesday states–that’s more than a third of the total delegates needed to win the Republican nomination.

My home state of Massachusetts holds its primary today, but I’ll be voting on the Democratic side for Elizabeth Warren for Senate. I’m actually getting a little worried about her now that Scott Brown has been leading in the polls for a couple of weeks now.

It looks like Romney will win easily here anyway. In fact, according the Washington Post, “Mass. Republicans hope a big Romney primary win Tuesday could put state into play in November”

Polls show Romney with a commanding lead among GOP primary voters here. His Republican challengers — Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich — have put little money or effort into the state.

But those same polls show Romney trailing President Barack Obama by double digits in a state that has traditionally shunned Republican presidential candidates.

Massachusetts Republicans are hoping that Romney will be able to buck that trend by reeling in voters in the state he governed for four years.

“He’ll put Massachusetts in play,” said state Republican Party Chairman Bob Maginn.

I sure hope not! Romney isn’t popular here, and he wasn’t popular as governor. But if the state ends up being competitive, I guess I’ll have to bite the bullet and vote for Obama.

Nate Silver was posting Super Tuesday updates all day yesterday, and his predictions are laid out in a sidebar at his blog. He is forecasting wins for Romney in Massachusetts, Ohio, and Virginia. He expects Santorum to win Wisconsin, Tennesee, Oklahoma, and Gingrich to win his home state of Georgia.

As for the caucus states of North Dakota, Vermont, Idaho, and Alaska, which account for 87 delegates Silver’s colleague Micah Cohen says anything could happen.  Personally, I think Romney should take Vermont, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Paul or Santorum take North Dakota.

Over at Real Clear Politics you can see a table showing all of the latest Super Tuesday polls.  Of course we’ll be live blogging the results tonight here at Sky Dancing, so please join us!

Soooo …. Here are a few headlines to get the big day started.

Howard Fineman says the Republican Party has become America’s First Religious Party

Whatever happens on Super Tuesday, the Republican primary season already has made history. The contest has confirmed the establishment of America’s first overtly religious major political party.

The signs are numerous, but it’s still easy to miss the big picture: that the GOP now is best understood as the American Faith Party (AFP) and its members as conservative Judeo-Christian-Mormon Republicans. The basement of St. Peter’s is just one clubhouse.

“There has never been anything like it in our history,” said Princeton historian Sean Wilentz. “‘God’s Own Party’ now really is just that.”

Fineman says most people don’t seem too thrilled by this idea. Duh!

The new GOP does not seem to be sitting well with the American people as a whole, or even with many traditional Republicans. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine is only the latest non-AFP-type Republican to decide to leave politics and/or the party. In the new ruling class, “revival tent” proponents are driving out the old “big tent” advocates. And a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that 40 percent of American adults think less of the party after watching its transformation this electoral season.

Will this spell the end of the GOP?

I happened to watch Hardball last night and to my horror, I saw Willard Mitt Romney in Tennessee reciting the words to an old song I recall from my childhood (but would have preferred to leave there), “Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier.”  It came from a Disney movie of the same name. Charlie Pierce hated it too.

Romney is the personification of the word “dork.”

It turns out Ann Romney may have the same problem as her husband. She can’t help making remarks about being rich. Yesterday she appeared on Fox News and claimed, “I don’t even consider myself wealthy.”

Yeah, that’s “an interesting thing.” I wish she’d send me some of the $21 million the Romneys took in last year. Ann Romney is beginning to remind me of Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom.

Just one more Romney link: Sam Stein found a debate from 2008 in which Romney said he likes health care insurance mandates. Romney’s spokesman said it’s not a flip flop. You be the judge. Frankly, I don’t see how Romney can recall which side of an issue he’s on from one minute to the next.

There’s an embarrassing story from Rick Santorum’s history at Huffpo by Jason Cherkis.

For a brief moment Monday afternoon, GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum jettisoned his conservative, culture-warrior talking points to make a down-to-earth connection with Ohio voters. He confessed that as a teenager, he used to cross the Ohio border to buy beer because the state’s legal drinking age was 18. “I used to enjoy going to Ohio,” he said.

That’s funny. We used to do that in Indiana too. Ohio’s drinking age for 3.2 beer was 16 in those days. It was pretty weak stuff but you could still get a buzz from it if you drank enough.

"Rooster" with his frat brothers

Before he lived in the fraternity house, Santorum lived in a dorm in the center of Penn State’s University Park campus. During his junior year, he roomed with John Koury. “We literally rolled kegs down the dormitory floor,” Koury recalled.

Their room became a party room. “On Fridays, when everyone got back from class, we’d go get a quarter-keg from the distributor,” Koury told HuffPost. “There’d be 20 or 30 of us in the room. We’d drink it and go down to the dining hall.”

Everybody called him “Rooster.” And Rooster liked to chug.

Moving on…. Yesterday must have been the day for wives to defend their husbands. Ann Romney gave an interview to Fox, and Karen Santorum defended her husband’s attitudes toward women for Tuesday’s CBS This Morning.

“They try to corner him and make it look like he doesn’t know anything else” other than conservative social values, Santorum told CBS News political correspondent Jan Crawford in an interview for “CBS This Morning.” “As a wife, mother, an educated woman, it frustrates me that they try to do that.”

She said it’s “unfortunate” that the media tries to “corner” her husband on issues like contraception.

Maybe if he didn’t keep ranting about it all the time, they’d stop asking him about it.

“My husband is brilliant, he knows so much about — you know, like I said — national security, jobs, the economy,” she told Crawford. “You know, every aspect of this race, any issue out there, he’s brilliant.”

Yeah, right. If her husband is “brilliant,” he sure does a good job of hiding it. She also complained about many people’s reaction to the couple’s decision to take their dead 20-month fetus home to show their children.

“We brought Gabriel home from the hospital to have a funeral mass and to bury him. And so they twist it and make it sound like it was some crazy thing,” she said. “We brought him home from the hospital to introduce him to our kids and place him, it was for the funeral mass and the burial. And what is so sad to me Jan is that no one can tell me how to grieve, and I’m not going to tell anyone else how to grieve. It’s not right.”

Well she might not tell anyone how to grieve, but she and her husband seem to wants to tell the rest of us we can’t use birth control or have access to abortion and that women should home school their children instead of working for a living. The Santorums both have martyr complexes. IMO, they should quit whining, live their lives they way they want to, and leave the rest of us alone.

Good old Ron Paul made a bit of news yesterday when he said victims of the recent tornadoes shouldn’t get any federal help.

As Midwestern states face the aftermath of last week’s severe tornado outbreak, Ron Paul said victims of the storms should not look to the federal government for help.

The Texas Republican has often criticized the Federal Emergency Management Agency, because, as he says, “they just get in the way.” He made this same argument Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley regarding the recent tornado-spawned devastation in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and several other states.

“To say that any accident that happens in the country, send in FEMA, send in the money, the government has all this money, it’s totally out of control and it’s not efficient,” he said.

Paul argued that the money FEMA spends for disaster relief is stolen from the states and tax payers and is ultimately wasteful.

What a nasty, mean old man! He’s building up some really bad karma.

I know I should have dug up some news about Newt Gingrich too, but I couldn’t find much. He’ll have a nice night in Georgia tonight I guess, and then probably will fade into the sunset.

Other than the primaries, the big story in the news is the conflict between Obama and Netanyahu over attacking Iran, which I find so depressing that I don’t even want to think about it. You can read about it at the link. And here’s a bonus. Mitt Romney has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post called “How I would check Iran’s nuclear ambition.”

So that’s it for me. What are you reading and blogging about today? And don’t forget to join us this evening as we discuss the results of the Super Tuesday contests!

Limbaugh’s Latest Lame Excuse: Liberals Made Him Do It!

Posted: March 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, Republican politics, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: , , , , , , | 42 Comments

So much has been happening with the Rush Limbaugh story today, that I thought I’d post an update.

Rush Limbaugh’s advertisers are dropping like flies. This morning the eighth and ninth sponsors–AOL and Tax Resolution Services Co.–withdrew their ads form his show. This afternoon, two more sponsors–Bonobos and Sears–pulled their ads. It’s practically a stampede! At least one radio station, KPUA in Hawaii, has also cancelled the program.

Even John McCain–the closest thing the Republican Party has to an elder statesman–has now called Limbaugh’s behavior “totally unacceptable.”

Speaking on CNN’s “Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien,” the Arizona lawmaker and 2008 GOP presidential nominee said Limbaugh was an “entertainer,” but that the remarks were “totally unacceptable, totally and completely unacceptable, and there’s no place for it.”

Fluke herself said today on The View that Rush’s faux apology “doesn’t change anything,” noting that Limbaugh hasn’t called to apologize to her personally and she really hopes he doesn’t!

Media Matters has catalogued some of Limbaugh’s greatest hits from his “decades of sexism and misogyny.”

But Rush still doesn’t get it. On his Monday show, Limbaugh once again pretended to apologize for his disgusting behavior, while claiming liberals made him do it. Eric Wemple summarizes Limbaugh’s latest lame effort:

“Give me 30 minutes — I want to explain why I apologized,” said Limbaugh just after noon.

The reason he apologized, he says, is that he descended to such a low, such a scummy, gutter-level depth . . . that he started to resemble liberals: ”I don’t expect morality, intellectual honesty from the left — they’ve demonstrated their willingness to say or do anything. This is the mistake I made: In fighting them . . . I became like them. Against my own instincts, against my own knowledge.”

Limbaugh further mentioned that he felt “very badly” because he’d “used those two words [slut and prostitute] to describe Sandra Fluke and I feel very badly about that. . . . I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for using those two words to describe her. The apology to her over the weekend was sincere. It was simply for using inappropriate words. . . . I ended up descending to their level. It’s important never to be like them.”

I can’t quite make sense of this, but it appears that Limbaugh is only sorry for the two words he used–slut and prostitute–but not for saying Fluke should post sex videos on the internet for him to watch or claiming that she “has so much sex” that she can’t afford all the pills she needs, or for claiming that she has boyfriends lined up around the block to have sex with her.

The show’s parent company Premiere Radio Networks also tried to explain away Limbaugh’s days of repulsive attacks on Sandra Fluke and the 99% of women who have used contraception:

Premiere Radio said in a statement Monday that it respects Limbaugh’s right to express his opinions, and said that “in an attempt at absurdist humor to illustrate his political point, Mr. Limbaugh used words that unfortunately distracted from the message he was trying to convey.”

The company said Limbaugh did the right thing by “expressing regret for his choice of words and offering his sincere and heartfelt apology to Ms. Fluke.”

I guess Premiere Networks and Clear Channel did not realize Limbaugh would spew out more personal attacks at Sandra Fluke today. It seems he is simply unable to control himself. From Think Progress:

LIMBAUGH: Her testimony was not that of an expert, it was just another expert person in this case, Sandra’s case. 30-year old activist after years of a career championing birth control issues. In fact, she told stories less about birth control as a social tool, which is of course the left’s true agenda, and more about birth control as a medication for treating other conditions, such as pregnancy. To the left, pregnancy is a disease. […]

Sandra Fluke gave vague examples based on unnamed friends, who she says couldn’t afford birth control to treat medical conditions they had, since Georgetown University wouldn’t pay for them. … Or so she says. We still don’t know who any of these friends of hers are, these other women, and we don’t know what happened to them. Her testimony was hearsay, and it was unprovable. […]

But the point here is that this was an issue that represents a tiny, tiny slice of what the Democrats really want here. They use Sandra Fluke to create a controversy. Sandra Fluke used them to advance her agenda, which is to force a religious institution to abandon their principles in order to meet hers.

So Fluke isn’t a “slut” anymore–she’s not only a dupe of the Democratic Party but also she’s duping the party into getting what she wants! WTF?! This incoherent moron is the spiritual voice of the Republican Party?

It appears that the suits in charge of Premiere Radio Networks and most likely Limbaugh’s lawyers are trying to get him to apologize, but he just can’t bring himself to do it. This mess has to be hurting the Republican Party, particularly on the eve of Super Tuesday, but it appears that most Republican leaders are still too afraid of this piggish, repulsive man to take any real action. You’d think at least Mitt and/or Ann Romney would speak up, since Bain Capital owns Clear Channel Communications.

I’ll update with any new developments in the comments to this post.

The Blow Back Cometh

Posted: March 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics | Tags: | 13 Comments

Homo-not-so-erectus republicanus

What do you get when you attack women who use birth control as baby killing sluts, announce that your goals include giving more tax breaks to the rich, rail against social security and medicare, bash teachers and state employees as lazy over paid good for nothings, and threaten to start yet another war in the Middle East?  If your answer is Republicans with falling poll numbers and increased negatives, DING DING DING!!!!

As another round of voting takes place this week in the Republican presidential race – with 11 states holding Super Tuesday contests – a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that the combative and heavily scrutinized primary season so far has damaged the party and its candidates.

Four in 10 of all adults say the GOP nominating process has given them a less favorable impression of the Republican Party, versus just slightly more than one in 10 with a more favorable opinion.

Additionally, when asked to describe the GOP nominating battle in a word or phrase, nearly 70 percent of respondents – including six in 10 independents and even more than half of Republicans – answered with a negative comment.

Some examples of these negative comments from Republicans: “Unenthusiastic,” “discouraged,” “lesser of two evils,” “painful,” “disappointed,” “poor choices,” “concerned,” “underwhelmed,” “uninspiring” and “depressed.”

The ever so noticeable march off the right bank of crazy river has driven women to Obama and made marginal front runner Romney’s image worse than Dole, McCain’s and Kerry’s at similar points in the race.

While the nomination battle has damaged the GOP and Romney, it has only helped President Obama’s political standing. In the poll, his approval rating stands at 50%-45%, his highest mark in the NBC/WSJ survey since Osama bin Laden’s death. What’s more, he leads Romney by six points, 50%-44%, winning independents (46%-39%), women (55%-37%), suburban women (46%-44%), and those in the Midwest (52%-42%). Obama enjoys bigger leads over Paul (50%-42%), Santorum (53%-39%), and Gingrich (54%-37%). Bolstering Obama’s standing is increased optimism about the state of the U.S. economy: 40% believe the economy will improve during the next year, and 57% say the worst is behind us (versus 36% who say the worst is still ahead). Peter Hart, the Democratic half of our NBC/WSJ survey, sums up the current poll’s outlook on the 2012 race: If it were a cocktail, it would be “one part Obama, one part the economy, and three parts the Republican Party’s destruction.”

I heard some interesting conversations over the weekend at the pundit tables.  One was about the possibility of Romney trying to move to the middle after charging hard right to capture the right and secure the nomination. The right wing has not been enthusiastic.  The damage with the middle is stunning.  Is there something called a triple flip flop?  Plus, if he does move to the middle, what does that do to the turn out for the flipped out right?  Do they stay home?  Will any one believe him at this point?  This poll indicates Romney is doing better with the TeaBots.  Seventy-two percent of all Republicans say they’re satisfied with a Mittens outcome.  Will they come out and vote for him on a cold, wet November day?

We’re going to be live blogging Super Tuesday tomorrow and BB’s got a morning thread for you that will have a lot of Super Tuesday information.  Will turn out be any better and will Romney get any where close to the 50% win mark in any state?  What will the eye of Newt do if all he gets is a Milquetoast win in Georgia?  Stay tuned, it’s getting brutal out there.

Rick Santorum and Women Voters

Posted: March 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 21 Comments

On February 28, the day after the Michigan primary, there were a number of news stories about Rick Santorum’s problem with women. In fact, Santorum lost the Michigan primary by 3 points and he lost women voters to Romney by 5 points. If he had done better with women, Santorum would have been the winner. Patricia Murphy at The Daily Beast wrote:

Female voters in Michigan spoke out Tuesday night, but they weren’t singing Rick Santorum’s tune. The former Pennsylvania senator lost the Michigan primary to Mitt Romney by 3 points due in large part to his weakness among Michigan women. Although Santorum lost among Michigan men by just 1 point, he lost the women’s vote by a full 6-point margin, leaving him well behind Romney and unable to close the gap with male voters in any way.

Not only did he lose among women voters, Santorum lost in every female demographic group.

Santorum lost every category of women polled Tuesday night, including working women, single women, and married women. He lost working women by 4 points, single women by 7 points, and married women by 3 points.

Of course it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that women are wary of Santorum. He has repeatedly talked about his opposition to abortion and birth control and his belief that feminists have fooled women into going to college and building careers instead of staying home and home-schooling the children who results from their many pregnancies.

Either Santorum spontaneously remembered that women can vote or his advisers reminded him before he gave his post-Michigan concession speech, because Santorum really laid it on thick about how much he respects women and how many “strong” women he has known and loved.

“I grew up with a very strong mom, someone who was a professional person who taught me a lot of things about [sic] how to balancing work and family, and doing it well, and doing it with a big heart and commitment,” he said. He also praised her for getting a college education in the 1930s and eventually a graduate degree in nursing.

“She worked all of my childhood years. She balanced time, as my dad did, working different schedules, and she was a very unusual person at that time,” Santorum said. “She was a professional who actually made more money than her husband.”

Clearly this was a deliberate change in strategy. Santorum’s advisers even spoke to the Washington Post about their plans to shift gears.

Rick Santorum does not plan to abandon the fiery Christian rhetoric or the shoestring campaign that got him to where he is today. But as a slate of high-stakes Republican presidential primaries approaches, he is being forced to shift his strategy to beat back perceptions that he is obsessed with controversial social issues and harbors outdated ideas about women.

The shift will test Santorum’s skills as a candidate as well as his bare-bones campaign operation, which is struggling to match his status as a top-tier candidate. The operation’s priority this week is to hold on to the candidate’s lead in polls in Ohio, which will vote on Tuesday.

Although Santorum sought to spin the Michigan results as a tie, it is clear that the contest revealed a significant challenge for him. He has been outspoken about contraception, abortion and his wife’s decision to leave her career as a lawyer to home-school their seven children….in at least three speeches in recent days, he has made appeals to women, recalling not only his wife’s career, but also that of his 93-year-old mother. On Wednesday, in Tennessee, he described his daughter Elizabeth as “one of the great women” in his life.

Santorum staffers also emphasized that there are women in senior positions in the campaign.

But as Rebecca Lawless, director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University told the Chicago Tribune, he “threw us a symbolic bone by saying, ‘Hey, I think my mom was great.'”

“It is one thing if it’s one statement, it’s another thing if it’s a broad range of statements that tap into the same problem and that’s where Rick Santorum finds himself,” Lawless says.

Not only is Santorum alienating women writ-large, she adds, but conservative women as well.

“In a lot of ways, the discussion about women’s roles and traditional family arrangements and the use of contraception have taken us back many, many decades,” Lawless says.

Despite his campaign’s recognition of the problem, it may not be possible to right the ship, she adds.

I honestly didn’t think Santorum could carry this off, because he just can’t seem to stop himself from lecturing us all about his 13th century ideas about women’s roles. And it looks like I was right. Santorum appeared on two of the Sunday morning shows and failed to steer the discussion away from social issues or reach out to women in any way.

On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Santorum about the defeat of the Blunt amendment, and the former senator actually used the words “grievous moral wrong” in reference to contraception.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says an amendment put forward by Senate Republicans that would have allowed any business to exclude contraceptives from health care plans was not really about birth control.

“The Blunt amendment was broader than that,” Santorum told Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday. “It was a conscience clause exception that existed prior to when President Obama decided that he could impose his values on people of faith, when people of faith believe that this is a grievous moral wrong.”

Wallace asked Santorum if he truly believed that 99% of American women have “done something wrong.”

“I’m reflecting the views of the Church that I believe in,” the former Pennsylvania senator replied. “We used to be tolerant of those beliefs. I guess now when you have beliefs that are consistent with the church, you are somehow out of touch with the mainstream. And that to me is a pretty sad situation when you can’t have personally-held beliefs.”

Although Santorum recently has been claiming that he doesn’t plan to impose his 19th century views on the rest of us, it’s important to keep in mind that he said in an October 2011 interview with a religious blog, Caffeinated Thoughts, that he would “repeal all federal funding for contraception.” In addition, he has repeatedly said that he does not believe in separation of church and state.

On Chris Matthews’ show Santorum apparently sidestepped a question about Rush Limbaugh and repeated much of what he had told Chris Wallace at Fox.

Right now, Santorum and Romney are “neck and neck” in Ohio. How will Ohio women vote after a couple more days of being preached at by true believer Rick Santorum? My guess is women’s votes will decide Ohio just as they did Michigan.

In The Land Of The Delusional

Posted: March 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Austerity, double-speak, Economy, income inequality, Mitt Romney, religious extremists, Republican presidential politics, the GOP, U.S. Economy, War on Women, Women's Healthcare | 16 Comments

In the Land of the Delusional the Koch brothers are principled citizens who merely disagree with Democratic policy stands and are aghast at the vindictive slurs leveled against them and all other sincere, freedom-loving Republicans.  In the Land of the Delusional, the hate and rage on review is a product of pink-bellied Lefties, Alinski acolytes, looking to take down American virtue and reduce the country’s might and glory.  In the Land of the Delusional bankrupt ideas, economic mayhem and privateering can be obscured by attacks on woman, gays and the down and outers.

March is living up to its reputation—coming in like snarling Lion.  Rush Limbaugh exposed a full Monty of misogyny, his comments on Sandra Fluke provoking even House Speaker Boehner to suggest the diatribe was ‘inappropriate.’  What inspired the outburst?  Several weeks of desperate frontal attacks on women’s healthcare issues, thinly veiled and wrapped beneath ‘religious liberty’ arguments.

Let’s not kid ourselves!  This is little more than shifting the conversation from discussion over economic issues, for which the Republican party has no credible position.  The US Budget Watch has reported that Republican plans to slash taxes on corporations and high-income earners would explode the national debt up to $3 trillion. And for all the ballyhoo by the Norquist group the Washington Post reported [as well as many other sources] that the country’s revenue-collection has eroded to a 60-year low.

From the WP report:

Polls show that a large majority of Americans blame wasteful or unnecessary federal programs for the nation’s budget problems. But routine increases in defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.

The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts. Together, the economy and the tax bills enacted under former president George W. Bush, and to a lesser extent by President Obama, wiped out $6.3 trillion in anticipated revenue. That’s nearly half of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt. Federal tax collections now stand at their lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years.

Trickle Down Economics in Nature

But why let facts stand in the way.  Paul Ryan, the Republican’s designated ‘serious thinker’ certainly doesn’t.

Ryan also complimented Romney’s economic plan. The congressman’s stamp of approval has been important for Republicans since he earned praise last year for his ambitious budget — which would dramatically change Medicare— from strong conservatives.

“Very credible. They are talking about entitlement reform. They are putting specifics on the table on Medicare and Social Security reform. The president, knowing that these are the big drivers of our debt, is ducking it,” Ryan said of Romney’s proposals.

Ah, yes.  The ideologically blind leading those blinded by ambition.  That certainly gives me confidence.

But as Paul Krugman suggested a mere 10 ten days ago, Mitt Romney let slip a truism in the swirl of Michigan campaigning when he said:

“If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting spending, as you cut spending you’ll slow down the economy.”

Over which the ideological purists set the dogs loose.  The Club for Growth immediately denounced the Romney slip, insisting that it was a clear indication that Mitt was an imposter, not a ‘true’ limited government conservative [translation: not willing to drown all government in that Norquist bathtub].

What’s a candidate to do?  Retreat, of course, in the same way Romney flipped on the Blunt Amendment, breaking all records, I would guess. In less than an hour, Candidate Romney twisted from ‘not going to go there’ to ‘of course, I support it.’  Enough to make your head spin.  This is a political party in the death throes.

So, what’s the best way to distract?

Let’s pillory the women, start calling them sluts or suggest they film sexual exploits for the sake of some overweight, mean-spirited shock jock.  Or let’s pretend that the perceived decline of the Nation rests squarely on the shoulders of the Gay Community and their screechy insistence that they too expect and deserve [can you believe the gall of these people] basic civil rights.  And don’t forget the statistics on the ever-expanding numbers of Americans slipping into poverty.  We tried calling them losers and moochers.  How about we deny they exist, the way a North Carolina legislator recently announced.  Yes sir, that’s the ticket!

In the Land of the Delusional schizophrenics rule the day, magical thinking replaces reason and bare-foot and pregnant is a very good thing.  In the Land of the Delusional all things are possible.

Except the truth.

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