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.

Partisan Rules and the Agonizing Death of a Functional Republic

Posted: April 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, Republican politics, right wing hate grouups | 10 Comments

My very Republican father and I were talking about the high levels of unemployment and the impact that was having on the deficit and the current problems with Social Security and Medicare.  He was trying to reconcile how long this thing has drug on and why he wasn’t seeing any efforts being made that were similar to what happened during the Great Depression.  He’s no FDR fan either.  Even he had the sense that there were forces that were at work that were preventing a recovery.  I muttered something about partisan politics and he had to agree.  It’s gotten so that beating your opponent takes precedence over what you’re supposed to do once elected. We’re electing people that don’t want our government to work.  They only want to win and spin.

You’ll undoubtedly hear a lot in the upcoming days about Robert Draper’s new book ‘Do Not Ask What Good We Do.’  It’s a book about the Republicans in Congress and their political agenda.  There’s a focus on Tea Party politicians as well as the gang of stubborn white patriarchs.  We knew from the very beginning–as announced almost immediately by Mitch McConnell–that the Republicans were intent on making Obama a one term president.  The book details some very ugly things about the effort. It also details how elected Republican pols have begin to act like an angry mob at times because many have come with their own brand of “kill the beast” that is our Constitutional Republic.  Still, the Draper book does not appear to be about one vast monolithic,  stereotypical Republican right winger as it profiles some of the most controversial members. The anger binds them and divides them in intriguing ways.

At what point does ugly partisanship and sour grapes become such an issue that voters will wake up and vote their own interests for a change?  Why are we such a nation of Angry Birds these days?

As President Barack Obama was celebrating his inauguration at various balls, top Republican lawmakers and strategists were conjuring up ways to submarine his presidency at a private dinner in Washington.

The event — which provides a telling revelation for how quickly the post-election climate soured — serves as the prologue of Robert Draper’s much-discussed and heavily-reported new book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.”

According to Draper, the guest list that night (which was just over 15 people in total) included Republican Reps. Eric Cantor (Va.), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Paul Ryan (Wis.), Pete Sessions (Texas), Jeb Hensarling (Texas), Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) and Dan Lungren (Calif.), along with Republican Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), John Ensign (Nev.) and Bob Corker (Tenn.). The non-lawmakers present included Newt Gingrich, several years removed from his presidential campaign, and Frank Luntz, the long-time Republican wordsmith. Notably absent were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) — who, Draper writes, had an acrimonious relationship with Luntz.

For several hours in the Caucus Room (a high-end D.C. establishment), the book says they plotted out ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama’s legislative platform.

“If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” Draper quotes McCarthy as saying. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”

The conversation got only more specific from there, Draper reports. Kyl suggested going after incoming Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for failing to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes while at the International Monetary Fund. Gingrich noted that House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) had a similar tax problem. McCarthy chimed in to declare “there’s a web” before arguing that Republicans could put pressure on any Democrat who accepted campaign money from Rangel to give it back.

As most of you know, I was not a supporter of candidate Obama.  However, there are no words to express how I feel about the idea of a group of elected officials planning a political coup during some of the worst days of our Republic over what seems like a bunch of partisan sour grapes.  In this tale, there is little care or thought given to the suffering of the country in the grips of a recession and endless, worthless wars.  There is only plotting for personal power.  There are a lot of details about how the election of the Tea Party candidates has led to more problems that make our country look ungovernable and our differences irreconcilable.  In some ways, the Republican take over of the House sandbagged the very people that plotted to make it so.

The anti-big-government zealotry that swept the Republicans into power turned out to be a major obstacle in the debt-ceiling negotiations with the White House. As Eric Cantor told Joe Biden in the talks, the best compromise House Republicans could offer was “giving you a vote on the debt ceiling. You may not think that’s a big deal. But you’ve got to understand, I’ve got a lot of guys that think that not raising the debt ceiling may not be such a bad thing—that in fact it may be just what we need.” Cantor then added wistfully “We’re working hard to educate our guys.”

The House Majority Leader didn’t want to wind up suffering the same fate during the debt ceiling negotiations as the No. 2 House Republican, Roy Blunt, who became a pariah among conservatives for his role in negotiating the details of TARP in 2008. When Cantor saw that he couldn’t bridge the differences between the Republicans and the White House on revenue increases, he backed out of the talks. To avoid blame, Cantor claimed that the Democrats were intending to do the same and he just wanted to preempt them. This “had no basis in fact,” Draper wrote.

Draper profiles many of the strongest Republican Tea Party characters in the book.  This includes Allen West who appears to be completely out of touch with any form of reality as we know it.

Draper profiles firebrands like Florida’s Allen West, a former Army lieutenant colonel who attempts to induce his draconian brand of military discipline on America’s finances and security apparatus. West is also the only Republican member of the Congressional Black Caucus. West comes across as someone whose mouth gets him in trouble (he recently nabbed coverage for labeling 81 of his House colleagues communists, and then got more coverage for refusing to back down from the accusation); his hand-wringing paranoia would have more bite if it weren’t so nostalgic. But in Draper’s reporting, he becomes a surprisingly nuanced person who isn’t afraid to defy the more conservative elements of his base (including a vote clearing the way for that Republican whipping-horse, the Environmental Protection Agency, to clean Florida’s waterways after farmers in his district encouraged him to vote that way).

This may not be one of those books that stands the test of time.  But, we need this kind of hand book right now.  Here’s a headline that will give you some pause: “Dick Lugar trails by 5, poll says”.

Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar has fallen behind state Treasurer Richard Mourdock by five points, according to a new poll released Thursday.
The survey, taken Tuesday and Wednesday by Wenzel Strategies on behalf of Citizens United, places Mourdock at 44 percent and Lugar at 39 percent. Nearly 17 percent remain undecided with just 12 days to go until the Indiana Senate primary.

Citizens United is backing Mourdock in the May 8 contest.

Wenzel found that Mourdock’s lead is powered by self-described tea party conservatives, who comprise 36 percent of the GOP electorate.

Among that group of voters, Mourdock holds a commanding 63 percent to 24 percent lead. Lugar’s ability to keep the race close is due to moderates and traditional conservatives, which both favor the incumbent, according to Wenzel.

It seems like we had the birth of our nation in the Age of Reason and we may experience our death throes in the Age of the Angry Mob.

Thursday Reads

Posted: April 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, Mitt Romney, morning reads, religion, Republican presidential politics, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Violence against women | Tags: , , , , , , | 72 Comments

North Dakota Badlands--where I'd like to be this morning

Good Morning!!

Like JJ, I’m a little sick of the political news these days. Plus I’m a little under the weather with a cold, so please be patient if I don’t make a whole lot of sense today.

I heard a little of Mitt Romney’s victory speech on Tuesday night, and when I got up yesterday I decided to read the transcript. The speech was every bit as vapid as I remembered.

There is not one specific policy mentioned in the speech, just attacks on Obama and promises that no one could fulfill. Romney begins by playing to the people he has been disrespecting throughout the primaries:

For every single mom who feels heartbroken when she has to explain to her kids that she needs to take a second job … for grandparents who can’t afford the gas to visit their grandchildren … for the mom and dad who never thought they’d be on food stamps … for the small business owner desperately cutting back just to keep the doors open one more month – to all of the thousands of good and decent Americans I’ve met who want nothing more than a better chance, a fighting chance, to all of you, I have a simple message: Hold on a little longer. A better America begins tonight.

Really? A better America with no employer-provided health care, no Social Security, no Medicare, no Planned Parenthood? Romney claims that his “success in business” has taught him how to create jobs and build a booming economy (Even though his business was buying up successful companies and bleeding them dry. And even though he didn’t do those things when he was Governor of Massachusetts.)

…you might have heard that I was successful in business. And that rumor is true. But you might not have heard that I became successful by helping start a business that grew from 10 people to hundreds of people. You might not have heard that our business helped start other businesses, like Staples and Sports Authority and a new steel mill and a learning center called Bright Horizons. And I’d tell you that not every business made it and there were good days and bad days, but every day was a lesson. And after 25 years, I know how to lead us out of this stagnant Obama economy and into a job-creating recovery!

Really? The only thing I’ve heard him recommend is tax cuts for rich people and more austerity for the rest of us. What am I missing? Then he asks the Reagan question–are you better off now than you were back in 2008?

what do we have to show for three and a half years of President Obama?

Is it easier to make ends meet? Is it easier to sell your home or buy a new one? Have you saved what you needed for retirement? Are you making more in your job? Do you have a better chance to get a better job? Do you pay less at the pump?

If the answer were “yes” to those questions, then President Obama would be running for re-election based on his achievements…and rightly so. But because he has failed, he will run a campaign of diversions, distractions, and distortions. That kind of campaign may have worked at another place and in a different time. But not here and not now. It’s still about the economy …and we’re not stupid.

At least Romney seems to have found a better speechwriter, but as Ezra Klein points out:

Three and a half years ago…Barack Obama wasn’t yet president. The date was Oct. 25, 2008, and Obama hadn’t even won the election yet, much less taken office.

The National Bureau of Economic Research says the recession officially began in December 2007. The worst of it came in the fourth quarter of 2008. Obama was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009. The time frame Romney chose, in other words, thrusts the very worst of the recession into Obama’s lap despite the fact that he wasn’t even president yet. It’s like blaming a fireman for the damage the blaze did before he arrived.

As Klein says, the real question should be “are you better off now than you would have been had Mitt Romney been president?” Romney claims Obama wants the government to control our lives.

This President is putting us on a path where our lives will be ruled by bureaucrats and boards, commissions and czars. He’s asking us to accept that Washington knows best – and can provide all.

We’ve already seen where this path leads. It erodes freedom. It deadens the entrepreneurial spirit. And it hurts the very people it’s supposed to help. Those who promise to spread the wealth around only ever succeed in spreading poverty. Other nations have chosen that path. It leads to chronic high unemployment, crushing debt, and stagnant wages.

I have a very different vision for America, and of our future. It is an America driven by freedom, where free people, pursuing happiness in their own unique ways, create free enterprises that employ more and more Americans. Because there are so many enterprises that are succeeding, the competition for hard-working, educated and skilled employees is intense, and so wages and salaries rise.

I see an America with a growing middle class, with rising standards of living. I see children even more successful than their parents – some successful even beyond their wildest dreams – and others congratulating them for their achievement, not attacking them for it.

That last part is what Romney seems to really need–adoration for his achievement of getting rich at the expense of all the little people who were driven out of work and into bankruptcy while Romney headed Bain Capital. Other than that, it sounds like he’s talking about the Eisenhower-Kennedy years–except in that economy the wealthy and corporations paid their fair share of taxes.

I don’t think Romney has made his case to be President, unless people just want to vote for him because he “loves America.”

The Romney campaign is synchronizing it’s work with the Republican National Committee, so I wonder if this idea came from the campaign or the RNC: Republican National Committee Files Complaint Over Obama Travel

The Republican National Committee has filed an official complaint with the Government Accountability Office over President Barack Obama’s use of official resources for campaign travel.

In a letter to the watchdog agency, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus writes to call attention “to a case of misuse of government funds benefitting “Obama for America” (OFA), otherwise known as the president’s reelection campaign.”

Priebus pointed to Obama’s current trip to North Carolina, Colorado, and Iowa — three battleground states — to discuss extending lower interest rates on student loans as examples of this tax-payer funded campaign travel.

“One might imagine that if this were genuinely a government event he might have stopped in a non-battleground state like Texas or Vermont,” Priebus said.

“This President and Air Force One seem to have a magic magnet that only seem to land in battleground states in this country,” Priebus told reporters earlier Wednesday before the complaint was drafted.

And so on… The GAO replied to a request from Buzzfeed:

GAO Spokesman Charles Young told BuzzFeed that the watchdog agency has yet to receive the RNC letter. “But we conduct our work at the request of the Congress.”

That was a pretty good slapdown. I seem to recall George W. Bush making a lot of speeches in swing states back in 2004. I wonder if Priebus was upset about that too? Geeze.

Vanity Fair has posted video of a memorial service held for Christopher Hitchens on April 20th. Hitchens died on December 15, 2011. In his honor, I’d like to quote from one of his Slate pieces that is very relevant to the 2012 presidential race: Mitt Romney and the weird and sinister beliefs of Mormonism.

The founder of the church, one Joseph Smith, was a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities of upstate New York. He claimed to have been shown some gold plates on which a new revelation was inscribed in no known language. He then qualified as the sole translator of this language. (The entire story is related in Fawn Brodie’s biography, No Man Knows My History.* It seems that we can add, to sausages and laws, churches as a phenomenon that is not pleasant to watch at the manufacturing stage. Edmund Wilson wrote that it was powerfully shocking to see Brodie as she exposed a religion that was a whole-cloth fabrication.) On his later forays into the chartless wilderness, there to play the role of Moses to his followers (who were permitted and even encouraged in plural marriage, so as to go forth and mass-produce little Mormons), Smith also announced that he wanted to be known as the Prophet Muhammad of North America, with the fearsome slogan: “Either al-Koran or the Sword.” He levied war against his fellow citizens, and against the federal government. One might have thought that this alone would raise some eyebrows down at the local Baptist Church.

Saddling itself with some pro-slavery views at the time of the Civil War, and also with a “bible” of its own that referred to black people as a special but inferior creation, the Mormon Church did not admit black Americans to the priesthood until 1978, which is late enough—in point of the sincerity of the “revelation” they had to undergo—to cast serious doubt on the sincerity of their change of heart.

Read the rest at the link and see if you think Romney’s religion is relevant. Ross Douthat is concerned about it.

I’m going to wrap this up, because I’m really not feeling well, but I want to share a story with you from Boston. It’s a week or so old, but still worth highlighting: ‘She-Hulk’ collars alleged T creep after lewd act. It’s a about a young woman (who didn’t want her name used) riding the MBTA, minding her own business and then suddenly finding herself the object of–to put it mildly–unwanted attention.

“This guy was just being a real creeper,” she said. As she shuffled along the train, he followed her. She zoned out, listening to music, only to look up and see him standing over her.

“I looked up and felt awkward, so I looked down,” she said. She said the man was exposing and touching himself, but tried to cover himself with his shirt.

The woman — not someone to meekly let an alleged creep get away with it — shouted out what he was doing, but no one stepped in to help. She said one male passenger even shrugged. So, she said, she went into “She-Hulk” mode, lunging as the man tried to bolt at Packard’s Corner in Brighton.

She said she held the man with one hand and “berated” him while she waited for the cops to arrive. She said he looked frightened.

“He kept saying sorry, but he was just sorry for himself,” she said.

The Boston Globe had an account of the arrest of the perp, Michael Galvin, 37, of Hudson St. in Somerville.

Officers found Galvin being dragged by his apparent victim, who grabbed him by his sweatshirt as he attempted to leave the train at the stop….When she caught up to him, he allegedly said, “I think I need help, I think something is wrong with me.” The woman held him until police arrived, according to an MBTA Transit Police report released by the agency.

Police arrived and spoke to Galvin, who said his shorts fell down accidentally on the packed and jostling train, the report said.

But the woman told a different story. Galvin allegedly approached her slowly on the crowded train. She told officers that she “got a weird vibe from the guy and tried to move away but couldn’t because the trolley was so packed.”

When Galvin was near her and she looked down, she said she saw that his shorts were pulled down “just enough to have his penis exposed, and he was stroking it.”

It’s just one small win for women, but a very satisfying one, IMHO.

So what are you reading and blogging about today?

Tuesday Night with Ann and Mitt

Posted: April 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, Republican presidential politics, U.S. Politics, Voter Ignorance | Tags: , , , , , | 17 Comments

Good Evening everyone!

Tonight’s post is dedicated to Ann and Mitt Romney. I have some more background on Ann Romney’s “struggles,” as a follow up to Dakinikat’s earlier post. And, since Mitt Romney will essentially wrap up the Republican presidential nomination tonight, I’ve collected some advice for Mitt Romney from various sources.

As everyone knows by now, Ann Romney is a stay-at-home mom. And she has lots of homes to stay at home in. But Ann is more than a mom. She has a hobby that is very important to her. A very expensive hobby. Her passion is collecting and riding dressage horses.

Now I don’t want to be cruel about Ann’s expensive hobby, because she says it has helped her to deal with her multiple sclerosis; but, let’s face it, very few multiple sclerosis sufferers can afford the Ann Romney cure.

After the notorious Hilary Rosen remark about Ann Romney not working a day in her life, Dave Weigel wrote a piece called The Ann Romney Wars, in which he linked to some articles about Ann’s hobby. I hadn’t heard about it before.

First up, a NYT piece by Jodi Kantor from 2007: The Stay-at-Home Woman Travels Well. Kantor writes about Ann’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis in 1998 and her efforts to treat the disease.

Though she used steroids to combat her initial attack, today Mrs. Romney takes no medicine for her disease, instead relying on alternative therapies such as horseback riding — she calls it “joy therapy”— to keep herself well. But doctors say that only medication, which patients often resist because of unpleasant side effects, slows the long-term progress of the disease.

Ann had ridden horses as a child–like her husband, she comes from a wealthy family.

During her rehabilitation from her initial attack, she took up dressage, going from a novice so weak that she could barely sit in the saddle to a winner of top amateur medals. She sometimes enters professional-level contests, against the advice of her trainer, Jan Ebeling. “She wants to measure herself against the best,” he said.

Dressage is a sport of seven-figure horses and four-figure saddles. The monthly boarding costs are more than most people’s rent. Asked how many dressage horses she owns, Mrs. Romney laughed. “Mitt doesn’t even know the answer to that,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you!”

Ann Romney in 2008

For more detail on Ann’s dressage career, read this article from 2008: Dressage Makes Ann Romney’s Soul Sing. And here’s a more recent article from March, 2012: For Ann Romney, Horses are a Lifeline.

She has competed in amateur rounds of major dressage tournaments. She has funded dressage horses and riders of Olympic caliber. She and her husband, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, have at least part-ownership of four warmbloods (as the kind of horse often used for dressage is known), according to a campaign spokeswoman.

“My horses rejuvenate me like you can’t believe” she told Fox News last week. “They give me balance. They give me energy. I think it’s because I love them so much.”

How nice for her.

Dressage demands agility and finesse — and money….Dressage, whose roots date to ancient Greece, got its name (and its pronunciation, dress-AHGE) from a French term that means “training.” According to the U.S. Dressage Federation, “its purpose is to develop the horse’s natural athletic ability and willingness to work making him calm, supple and attentive to his rider.” Unlike other types of holdings, dressage horses are living investments whose value can tumble with the wrong turn of a hoof.

The Romneys, through a campaign aide, declined to tally how much they spend on dressage, saying, “We are not required to disclose this information.” But some of their animals cost more than $100,000, and the Romneys continue to sink tens of thousands of dollars into year-round training and feeding, plus veterinary bills.

Ann learned how to use horseback riding for healing at a very exclusive clinic

run by an accomplished trainer and German emigre named Jan Ebeling, owner of state-of-the-art stables north of Simi Valley at a ranch known as the Acres. Ebeling and his wife, Amy, hosted Romney often. “I would probably come out once a month to once every six weeks for about a week,” Romney recalled.

The Acres is home to a 40-stall barn, indoor arena, dressage ring and obstacle courses. There are steep and dusty trails on the state-owned acreage nearby. Trusted James Herriot-type veterinarians and farriers and a young German assistant tend to the animals and take them through their paces; other horses, nursing injuries or strains, are pampered in the barn.

On Ann’s birthday, Donald Trump threw a party for her and provided a cake that celebrated her love of horses and dressage.

The cake, created by celebrity chef Buddy Valastro, of the TV show “Cake Boss,” is topped with a sugar-coated Romney riding atop a horse standing in a field of green frosting. Romney is an avid horseback rider and often goes riding to soothe the symptoms of her multiple sclerosis.

These two people really are not like you and me. Is it so cruel to point that out? I really do have a hard time feeling sorry for Ann. She and Mitt desperately need to learn how to deal with the wealth issue. At HuffPo, English professor Mark Cassello offered some free advice:

It is not Romney’s wealth that makes him unable to relate. It is his incapacity to acknowledge the privileged position from which he began. It is admirable that he worked his way up from being an “entry level” consultant to an executive in the Boston Consulting Group. Unfortunately, this achievement will not resonate with the real grinders who build, fuel, and deliver America. For them, being a consultant is as foreign an experience as choosing a car elevator for a new house in La Jolla.

If the question about being too rich to relate is asked again (and it will be), Romney should answer this way: “I understand why people might feel that way about me. Most Americans do not have parents who are governors or corporate executives. I was born in a very fortunate financial situation. But the more important, and more American, story is how my family labored for generations to provide me with the opportunities that have blessed my life. As president, I want to bring opportunity to a new generation of Americans, so they will feel empowered to pursue the dreams they have for their families and for their communities.”

It’s good advice, but somehow, I just can’t imagine Romney having the humility to say something like that.

Charles Pierce, who knows the Romneys better than most journalists, offered some suggestions for Romney on his path to dumping the Tea Partiers and tacking away from the far right agenda he’s been pushing during the primaries. Unfortunately, I can’t quote the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

God, you people are saps. You didn’t see this coming? I pandered and I pandered, and then, every night, I went back to my hotel room, stuck my fingers down my throat, and then had a good laugh. You think that whole “Etch-a-Sketch” thing was a staff blunder? Honkies, please. Could I have signaled more clearly that your audience with me was over? Smedley? Show these lovely people waving their Bibles and their rubber fetuses the door, will you? Lovely to have met you. Really. We must do this again some time. Say, if we’re all really lucky, and I’ve always been luckier than you poor deluded hayshakers, maybe the summer of 2015? It’s a date. We have a lovely parting gift for you.

Me.

Haven’t you goobers caught on yet? I am running for president because I am supposed to be president. That is the essence of my political philosophy. That is the basic tenet of my fundamental ideology. I should be president because I am rich and handsome and my great-granchildren are already financially bulletproof to the point where, if my pals in the financial-services “industry” crash the economy completely, and animal hides become the medium of exchange again, my great-grandchildren will have more pelts than anyone else, and they will rule the world. I should be president because I should be president. And because…

I’m Mitt Romney, bitches, and I’m all you got left.

Now that’s more like it! There’s lots more at the link.

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