Tuesday Reads: “Winds of Fanaticism”

Posted: August 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, racism, Romney-Ryan Budget Plan, Social Security, the GOP, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , | 71 Comments

Good Morning!!

I’m writing this on Monday night, but I’ll update in the morning if there is breaking news about either Isaac or Mitt and the gang. The Republicans appear ready to loose the hounds of hell in the next few days. We can only hope they will decide to cancel the rest of the hatefest if the hurricane does a lot of damage. For now, liberal writers are suggesting this could be the most racist convention in history and conservative writers are pretending liberals are imagining things.

There was much talk yesterday about Chris Matthews’ outburst at RNC Chair Reince Priebus on the Morning Joe Show, with liberals cheering him on and Conservatives terribly shocked by his supposed rudeness. I don’t usually like to link to right wing blogs, but I’m going to do it just this once. The National Review reported on Priebus’ reaction:

“When someone wants to grab the flag and try to be the biggest jerk in the room, sometimes you just let them go,” the chairman said with a laugh.

“We shook hands, but I will tell ya that someone from MSNBC, I don’t know if it’s a producer or somebody, has been trying to call us all day — I’m sure it’s to make amends, but there’s nothing to make amends [about]. When somebody wants to take the prize of being the biggest jerk in the room . . . I mean, he made the case for us. This is the Barack Obama surrogate of 2012. This is what they’re all about. They’re going to be about division, they’re going to be about distraction. And I’ve got to tell you, the brand of Barack Obama, hope and change and bringing us all together, it’s completely broken. When people come to realize that you’re not real anymore, you’re not who you said you were, that’s a big problem for Barack Obama.”

Sorry, Reince. The only reason you weren’t the biggest jerk in the room is that Joe Scarborough was there.

Here are three good reads on the Republican race-baiting issue.

David Corn at Mother Jones, Mitt Romney and GOP in Tampa: How Low Will They Go? It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s the conclusion:

Romney, who once upon a time based his successful political career on a claim to be a no-nonsense, get-things-done businessman, this week officially takes the reins of a party that has embraced an assortment of alternative realities. (Obama is an incompetent naïf but one possessing an intricate and sophisticated plan to fool the American public and remake the United States into a Europeanized secular-socialist state with a mad-with-power government crushing individual liberty; global warming does not exist; rape cannot cause pregnancy.) As a onetime middle-of-the-road governor who had succeeded wildly in the private sector, Romney has always had a compelling case to present in this campaign: Obama has not done enough to repair the economy; I can do better. And there are enough honest policy differences between Romney and Obama—on tax rates, government spending, foreign policy, abortion, gay rights, and more—to fuel a sharp, feisty, and fundamental debate based on a contest of ideas, not a clash of charges.

Yet Romney’s party did not want such a fight. They craved a mudfest, and Romney, a patrician quarter-billionaire, has obliged. So there’s really not much mystery in Florida. The Tampa convention will be a continuation of this cavalcade of sleaze. You dance to the tune that brought you. And not even a driving storm can wash Mitt Romney and his campaign clean.

Elspeth Reeve at the Atlantic: Race Takes Over the Race. Reeve provides a very interesting analysis of Romney’s several welfare ads and how they convey a racial message.

John Judis at CBS News: How Mitt Romney’s campaign strategy could set Republicans back for a decade. Judis compares Romney’s strategy of trying to get as many white people to the polls as possible while ignoring African Americans and Hispanics with George W. Bush’s approach in 2000.

Mitt Romney could not only lose the election, but set back any attempt by the Republicans to re-position themselves as a majority party. Romney has abandoned Bush and Rove’s strategy. He has taken a hard line against illegal immigration, backing measures in Arizona and other states that would stigmatize Latinos; desperate to defeat Texas Gov. Rick Perry, he even opposed Perry’s attempt to provide tuition for the children of illegal immigrants. Little that Romney can do at the Republican convention will erase an impression of hard intolerance toward Hispanics. Romney will be lucky if he wins 30 percent of the Latino vote.

Bush and Rove understood that majority coalitions have never been built on strict consensus. Instead, successful coalitions are heterogeneouos. They include groups (such as Southern whites and Northern blacks during the New Deal) that don’t get along with each other, but still prefer the one party coalition to the other. And a successful candidate will offend one part of the coalition (with the expectation they’ll still vote for him) in order to reach out to parts of the opposing coalition. Bush could support immigration reform and pick off Hispanic votes with the expectation that he would still win white working class votes. But Romney, perhaps because he is not really a Republican conservative, has sought to be all things to all parts of the Republican base — from the Tea Party opponents of any social spending to the nativists worried about a Mexican takeover of America to religious conservatives wanting to ban all abortions. As a result, Romney has closed off opportunities to pick off parts of the Democratic coalition.

Instead of trying to appeal to minority voters, Republicans are doing their best to keep them from voting at all with voter ID laws, efforts to purge voters from the rolls, and reducing the times available for voting.

As of late Monday night, it appears that the convention will go forward tomorrow. Mitt and Ann are going down to Tampa and, according to The New York Times, the roll call vote will go ahead Tuesday night just in case the rest of the convention has to be cancelled. Meanwhile, there was apparently a lot of intra-party bickering during the Monday downtime.

With the vacuum created by the postponement, “everybody who has a reason to be upset about something has time to talk about it,” said Drew McKissick, a South Carolina delegate. And, as seen Monday, to try to do something about it.

Mr. McKissick was busy rallying support to fight Mr. Romney’s legal team over new party rules that he said would hinder the kind of insurgent challenges that Mr. Romney has faced this year — a clash that appeared to have been resolved enough to prevent it from spilling onto the convention floor Tuesday.

A day of closed-door talks between Romney aides and conservative activists ended with a compromise that one person involved said would “result in what we think is a very warm and fuzzy convention.” Some activists announced that they had succeeded in preventing what they called a power grab by the party establishment.

But supporters of Representative Ron Paul of Texas expressed frustration over what they said were efforts by Mr. Romney’s aides and supporters to silence their voices in the convention hall. They were goaded along by Mr. Paul, who has declined a speaking slot, accusing the Romney campaign of trying to control his message.

And supporters of Representative Todd Akin, the Missouri Senate candidate who lost much of the party’s support after his comments on “legitimate” rape and pregnancy, revived Tea Party-infused arguments against the “establishment” wing of the party, saying Mr. Romney and “party bosses” had abandoned him after his remarks.

I strongly suggest reading this article by Jon Ward at Huffpo: The One-Termer? Ward managed to get some really interesting information and quotes from Romney campaign insiders. The gist of the article is that Romney may be hoping to do a repeat of what he did in Massachusetts. The model for Romney’s presidency, according to campaign manager Matt Rhoades is President James Polk.

Rhoades and the rest of the members of Romney’s inner circle think a Romney presidency could look much like the White House tenure of the 11th U.S. president.

Polk, who served from 1845 to 1849, presided over the expansion of the U.S. into a coast-to-coast nation, annexing Texas and winning the Mexican-American war for territories that also included New Mexico and California. He reduced trade barriers and strengthened the Treasury system.

And he was a one-term president.

Polk is an allegory for Rhoades: He did great things, and then exited the scene, and few remember him. That, Rhoades suggested, could be Romney’s legacy as well.

Basically, Romney wants to enact the Ryan budget, after which he will be wildly unpopular. But once he gets Congress to eliminate the capital gains and inheritance taxes, Romney will have achieved his goal of paying nothing in federal income taxes and made it likely that his children won’t have to pay taxes on the Romney fortune after he dies.

Multiple senior Romney advisers assured me that they had had conversations with the candidate in which he conveyed a depth of conviction about the need to try to enact something like Ryan’s controversial budget and entitlement reforms. Romney, they said, was willing to count the cost politically in order to achieve it.

“I think he is looking to get in there and fix some things and get out. I don’t think he cares,” one senior Romney adviser, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told me at the time.

I’ll end with this little tidbit, in case you didn’t hear it on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show last night or read it in the {gag!} New York Post. According to the Post, Ryan wasn’t Romney’s first choice for VP–Christie turned it down because he believes Romney will lose.

Romney’s top aides had demanded Christie step down as the state’s chief executive because if he didn’t, strict pay-to-play laws would have restricted the nation’s largest banks from donating to the campaign — since those banks do business with New Jersey.
But Christie adamantly refused to sacrifice his post, believing that being Romney’s running mate wasn’t worth the gamble….

The tough-talking governor believed Romney severely damaged his campaign by releasing only limited tax returns and committing several gaffes during his international tour in July.
Certain Romney was doomed, Christie stuck to his guns — even as some of his own aides pushed him to run, another source said.

Bwwwaaaaahahahahahahahaha! And Christie is the keynote speaker!! Hahahahahahahahaha!!

OK, I’m going to end there. I promise to update with any breaking stories in the morning. Now what are you reading and blogging about today?

Brace Yourselves: This Is a Campaign About Race Now

Posted: August 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, racism, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , | 48 Comments

dog whistle

It has been an ugly campaign so far, but I have a feeling it’s about to get a lot uglier. Mitt Romney gave an interview to USA Today yesterday. The article is mostly focused on Romney’s complaints about Obama’s supposedly negative campaign against him and how he intends to fight back.

Naturally Romney included another dog whistle (or as Charles Pierce more appropriately calls them, “obvious racial air-raid sirens”).

“There are plenty of weaknesses that I have, and I acknowledge that,” Romney says. “But the attacks that have come have been so misguided, have been so far off target, have been so dishonest, that they surprised me. I thought they might go after me on things that were accurate that I’ve done wrong, instead of absurd things.”

He ticks off the examples he has in mind. “The Harry Reid attack, ‘Oh, he hasn’t paid taxes in 10 years.’ Ridiculous,” he says of an allegation that the Democratic Senate majority leader attributed to an unnamed friend. “The attack about how Romney’s responsible for this woman who died … and the vice president’s comments about ‘chains.’ Really? The White House just keeps stepping lower and lower and lower, and the people of America know this is an important election and they deserve better than they’ve seen.”

As if the small percentage of his income that Romney pays in taxes and the multiple tax havens he uses to keep his taxes low aren’t issues. But here comes the “obvious air raid siren.” Actually, it’s a twofer. The interviewer asks Romney about the utterly false claims he has been making that Obama “gutted” the welfare work requirement and about his recent “joke” about Obama’s birth certificate.

Romney defends the welfare ads as accurate, accusing Obama of offering state waivers as a political calculation designed to “shore up his base” for the election. He denies he was trying to stoke discredited questions about Obama’s birthplace when he said at a Detroit rally Friday that no one had ever asked him for his Michigan birth certificate.

“I understand some people don’t think we should ever joke,” Romney says, saying he was just being “human” and “spontaneous.” He argues that his attacks have been based on policy while Obama has attacked him on more personal fronts. The president’s team has tried “to minimize me as an individual, to make me a bad person, an unacceptable person,” he says.

Obama’s “base” presumably being poor black welfare recipients? And we’re supposed to believe that Romney couldn’t talk about being born and raised in Michigan without also talking about his birth certificate? Please. This is the kind of crap we’re going to be hearing from now on unless polls demonstrate it isn’t working. It’s jarring to it coming from the nominee himself instead of the VP candidate or a surrogate, but Romney clearly has no shame at all.

I know most of you have already seen this, but I’m going to post Chris Matthews’ rant about Romney’s race baiting from today’s Morning Joe show.

Matthews is absolutely right on, but notice how the rest of the talking heads patronize him and minimize the reality of what the Romney campaign is doing. Here’s what Pierce had to say about it:

If you can tear yourself away from the attempts of the hosts to tut-tut-my-good-man the whole thing to death — and poor Tom Brokaw, who freaking covered the civil-rights movement and knows good and well which party latched on to the wrong side of those events and rode them to glory, looks as though he might have a stroke — listen carefully to what Matthews says. He links the birther joke to the welfare commercials, which any thinking analyst would do, since they came hard, one upon the other, and since that was the only hymn in the modern Republican hymnal Romney had not yet sung to the approval of the choir — he’d warmed up on the melody when he was ripping up Rick Perry on the issue of immigration — his campaign was bound to get around to it eventually. Priebus dismisses the birther comment as “an attempt at levity,” and chides Matthews for failing to have a sense of humor….
“We’ve gotten to a point in politics where any moment of levity is frowned upon by guys like you…It’s a moment of levity. Everybody gets it.”

Somehow, the truthless welfare commercials, which are the really deafening sirens in the current moment, disappeared from the dialogue and never come up again. There was yet another blow-up later when Priebus smirked about the president’s alleged “European” policies, and Matthews went up the wall again, calling what Priebus said “insane,” while Mika Brzezinski suggested that everyone “work on tone.” She has her work cut out for her down here, I’ll tell you that.

Pierce thinks Matthews will be “disciplined” for his outburst. I not so sure. Matthews has been talking about the race baiting for awhile now. But most of the corporate media outlets are not going to deal with the race issue in an honest and up-front way. They’re even having trouble calling Romney out on his bald-faced lies.

Monday Reads

Posted: August 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Mitt Romney, morning reads, New Orleans | Tags: , , , , | 55 Comments

Good Morning!

Well, TS/Hurricane Isaac is drenching Florida and headed towards the North Gulf.  The weather forecasters appear to be confused by its signals because their models have yet to indicate a consistent target.  It appears to be Bay St Louis at the moment.  Anyway, it’s a wide enough system that New Orleans is in the warning band and folks around here are nervous.  It will make landfall 7 years to the day that Hurricane Katrina changed everything here.  Folks have run a lot of gas stations out of gas and markets out of the usual hurricane supplies like ice, batteries, and strawberry poptarts (ugh!). I think the media is hoping they get a story out of us, frankly.  The mayor is asking us to shelter in place.  However, the weather channel sent us Jim Cantore.  That’s never a good sign. Hopefully, he’ll head towards Mobile some time on Tuesday.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans on Aug 29, 2005.  It is estimated that the total economic impact in Louisiana and Mississippi exceeded $110 billion, earning the title of the most expensive hurricane ever in US history.

As Katrina moved through the heart of the Gulf of Mexico offshore oil and natural gas production area, it negatively impacted nearly 20% of US oil production. Hurricane Katrina, followed by Hurricane Rita in September, destroyed 113 offshore oil and gas platforms and damaged 457 oil and gas pipelines. Oil, gasoline, and natural gas futures prices on the NYMEX soared as damage assessments were reported.

The hurricane damage inflicted by Katrina caused oil prices to increase from the mid-$60s per barrel to over $70/bbl and gasoline prices at the pump rocketed to near $5 a gallon in some areas of the US. The US government released oil from its stockpile in the Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) to offset price rises. In the natural gas market, prices were trading in the $9 to $10/MMBtu range at the time, but spiked to over $15/MMBtu as the full extent of the damage became apparent.

Additionally, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) was closed on August 27, 2005, reducing production by over 400,000 barrels per day.  LOOP handles 13% of the nation’s foreign oil, about 1.2 million barrels a day, and connects by pipeline to 50% of the U.S. refining capability. The port was undamaged by the storm and resumed operation within hours of electricity coming back online.

Gulf of Mexico oil production was reduced by about 1.4 million barrels per day as a result of Hurricane Katrina, equivalent to about 91% of daily Gulf of Mexico oil production. Additionally, over 8 billion cubic feet (Bcf) per day of natural gas production was shut in, equivalent to 83% of daily Gulf of Mexico natural gas production.

Seven years later as what will be Hurricane Isaac bears down on the Gulf Coast, the Gulf of Mexico currently accounts for about 23% of oil production and 7% of natural gas output according to the US Department of Energy. Furthermore, roughly 30% of natural gas processing plant capacity and 44% of US refining capacity is located along the US Gulf Coast.

According to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEMRE), 8.6% of the Gulf’s daily oil output and 1.6% of daily natural gas production was shut down as a result of Isaac approaching the Gulf of Mexico. Closing prices as of Friday, Aug 24, 2012 of NYMEX October WTI futures settled at $96.15/bbl, while September natural gas settled at $2.70/MMBtu.

When it comes to offshore oil and gas rig infrastructure in 2012 versus 2005, the biggest difference is that the rigs placed into the Gulf of Mexico in the last several years have been hardened to resist Category 4 or 5 hurricanes. However, up until now, other than Hurricane’s Gustav and Ike in 2008, there has been no real test of the endurance of newer ‘hurricane resistant’ infrastructure that has replaced much of the aging platforms in 2005.  Isaac may very well be the storm to test the fortitude of the newer offshore hardware.

It could also stir up all the BP muck on the bottom of the Gulf.

I’ve been reading through the Gawker documents and have really been struck by the amount of management fees and legal fees that Romney appears to tolerate just to avoid paying federal income taxes.  It actually seems a bit sick or compulsive or obsessive to me.  Some tax attorneys have suggested that some of his tricks are actually illegal or at least highly questionable.  I have no idea since I just know the finance end of these deals.  The legal and tax implications of these thing are not my bailiwick.  It just seems like if you’re that rich and your time is that valuable that it could be spent on more useful activities than finding aggressive tax dodges.  I wonder if the savings actually justified all the fees.  But then, I discovered that the partners actually finagled the fees to avoid taxes.

 The documents reveal another tactic used by Bain and other buyout firms to achieve the lower rate for other compensation as well, a practice known as management-fee conversions or fee waivers.

Here’s more examples from the Buzzfeed link.

Bain Capital Fund VII LP disclosed in a 2009 report that the general partner in the fund had in the past waived management fees and converted those fees into an interest in the fund called a “priority profit share.” That had the effect of turning fees that would be taxed at ordinary income rates, as high as 35 percent, into capital gains, taxed at a rate of 15 percent.

By deferring the receipt of that cash they get a second benefit by deferring the tax. While the partners are well- positioned to know what investments may be winners, the waiver is irrevocable, meaning the fees disappear if the deals don’t generate profit.

“The documents confirm that Bain Capital converted some of its management fees into carried interest; there’s no reason they would do this other than to convert high-tax ordinary income into low-taxed capital gain,” said Victor Fleischer, a tax law professor at the University of Colorado. “It’s a strategy that is aggressive, and, while common in the industry, is difficult to justify as an appropriate reporting of tax obligation.”

According to the financial disclosure form Romney filed in June, Ann Romney’s blind trust owns more than $1 million in the Bain Capital Fund VII, and between $100,000 and $250,000 in the co-investment fund. The Romneys received between $200,000 and $2 million in income from those two funds in 2011. The documents published by Gawker don’t show whether the Romneys benefited from the fee waivers.

The documents also show how deeply embedded Bain has become in the offshore tax-haven world, with funds organized in the Cayman Islands. Private-equity firms organize funds in tax havens to prevent foreign investors — and non-taxable U.S. investors, like university endowments — from getting hit with U.S. income tax bills from the profits generated by their underlying portfolio companies. That provides an economic benefit to the funds and to the private-equity managers because it means that, by avoiding U.S. tax, the investors have more to invest.

What does it say about a person that seems to be obsessed with making sure they search every nook, crack, and cranny for a way to avoid paying money to their own government.  You know, the one they actually are running to lead?

Ron Paul isn’t playing nice with Mittens.  He’s not “wholeheartedly endorsing him” and it appears that “the Romney Campaign Radically Changes GOP Nominating Process After Ron Paul Takeovers”.

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, led by top Romney lawyer Ben Ginsberg, forced through a major change the GOP nominating process on Friday in response to Ron Paul supporters’ efforts to win delegates to the Republican National Committee..

The Republican National Convention Committee voted 56-40 to make it impossible for supporters of one presidential candidate to override the will of voters at a state convention, as Ron Paul supporters did in Iowa and Nevada.

The purpose of the change, Ginsberg said, was “to correct what we saw as a damaging flaw in the presidential election process in 2012.”

The rule forces statewide presidential primaries or caucuses to determine the ultimate allocation of delegates, preventing takeovers like Paul executed in Iowa by eliminating unbound delegates in statewide contests. States would be allowed to decide whether to give all their delegates to the winner of the primary or caucus, or distribute them proportionally according to the results.

“Iowa will have to change the way they do it,” said a GOP official.

A second component of the amendment would require delegates to be approved by presidential candidates, lessening the chances of technically pledged delegates voting for a different candidate.

The original amendment would have removed the carve-out for Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, but Ginsberg later clarified that was an error, after sparking a panic among early states.

Virginia delegate Morton Blackwell objected that the rule would have a “damaging effect on our presidential candidate Mitt Romney.”

“There are very large numbers of people who supported other candidates, in particular Ron Paul, who will see this as an attack on their behavior,” he said, warning that they could vote for the Libertarian party.

I guess the new way to get elected is to make sure the rules let you win.  No wonder Ron Paul is acting so pissy.

“Today I was very excited call from the RNC,” Paul said “They said they changed their mind. They’re going to give me a whole hour and I can say whatever I want – tomorrow night!” (Tomorrow being Monday, the day that the RNC has no events due to Tropical Storm Isaac).

“Just kidding,” Paul concluded.

Paul directly referenced the rules change that may keep similarly insurgent delegates from succeeding in future elections. He seemed stung by the disappointments, after the concerted effort his campaign made to compromise with the Romney campaign and to keep their delegates under control.

The RNC “learned how to bend rules, break rules, and now they want to rewrite the rules,” Paul said.

“That’s what we have to stop.”

He also nodded to the view, common among Paul supporters, that votes had been miscounted or improperly counted in primary states.

“Ultimately numbers do count,” he said. “And numbers do count even when they don’t count all the votes as well. Because we do have the numbers!”

Paul may be angry that after years of effort and a number of compromises, the insiders are not letting him in. But he’s also now able to talk about the lists of topics he cares about without a second thought; it no longer matters if the Romney people think he’s too far out. He took full advantage on Sunday, filling his 67 minutes with a laundry list of historical references, bits of his stump speech, and nostalgic philosophizing.

Paul also wandered into territory that makes it clear why the Romney campaign, known for trying to control the message as much as possible, would be wary of having him speak unscripted.

Bradley Manning, Paul said, “is in the military so there are probably some debates on exactly how and what to do, but let me tell you: Bradley Manning didn’t kill anybody, Bradley Manning hasn’t caused the death of anybody, and what he has exposed, he is the equivalent to Daniel Ellsberg, who told us the truth about Vietnam.”

And: “I’m afraid that if we took a poll across the country and said ‘Should we try Assange for treason?’ that most Americans would say oh yes he’s a bad guy, he’s telling us all these secrets. But guess what, he’s an Australian citizen.”

What’s on your reading and Blogging list today?  And, if I disappear some time on Tuesday or Wednesday, UPS me a boat please.

Mitt Romney, Sex Symbol?

Posted: August 23, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Mitt Romney, psychology, The Media SUCKS, The Right Wing, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 44 Comments

Is this guy sexy?

I was going to include this in my morning post, but I forgot. The National Review’s latest cover story is a bizarre homoerotic tribute to Mitt Romney’s sexual prowess in which Kevin Williamson makes a simple-minded evolutionary argument that women should adore the Republican candidate for president.

What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women’s pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse. The Demi Moore–Ashton Kutcher model is an exception — the only 40-year-old woman Jack Nicholson has ever seen naked is Kathy Bates in that horrific hot-tub scene. Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a college bar, and the fact that she is the chairman and CEO of Dupont isn’t going to change that.

It’s a good thing Mitt Romney doesn’t hang out in college bars.

I happen to have actually studied some evolutionary psychology, and it’s true there is some evidence that males and females select mates based on different reproductive goals. Females are more likely than males to choose good providers–men with college degrees, and good future prospects. Males are more likely than females to choose females who are young, healthy, and physically attractive and thus more likely to be fertile. However research on college students also shows that, for both males and females, the most valued characteristics in mate selection are attributes like kindness, good personality, and sense of humor. The sex-differentiated characteristics are less important–at least for college kids.

But Williamson is just using something he heard about evolutionary theories on mate selection to excuse his masturbatory fantasies about a man he clearly finds extremely attractive. And since Williamson has a huge man crush on Mitt, we women should feel the same way.

From an evolutionary point of view, Mitt Romney should get 100 percent of the female vote. All of it. He should get Michelle Obama’s vote. You can insert your own Mormon polygamy joke here, but the ladies do tend to flock to successful executives and entrepreneurs. Saleh al-Rajhi, billionaire banker, left behind 61 children when he cashed out last year. We don’t do harems here, of course, but Romney is exactly the kind of guy who in another time and place would have the option of maintaining one. He’s a boss. Given that we are no longer roaming the veldt for the most part, money is a reasonable stand-in for social status. Romney’s net worth is more than that of the last eight U.S. presidents combined. He set up a trust for his grandkids and kicked in about seven times Barack Obama’s net worth, which at $11.8 million is not inconsiderable but probably less than Romney’s tax bill in a good year.

Williamson latched onto a biological mating theory also, the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, to claim that Romney’s reproductive history–he’s the father of five sons–proves he’s a much more manly man than wimpy Barack Obama, who just has two measly daughters.

It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap. The offspring of rich families are statistically biased in favor of sons — the children of the general population are 51 percent male and 49 percent female, but the children of the Forbes billionaire list are 60 percent male. Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.

Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.

I guess Williamson has forgotten that George W. Bush also had two daughters and no sons. How does that fit into his evolutionary argument?

Anyway, if Williamson is right, women should be falling all over themselves to vote for Romney, right? So why aren’t they? Williamson thinks that Mitt just needs to stop worrying about being ostentatious and embrace his inner rich guy. He should take lessons from another former Massachusetts Governor, William Weld, who flaunted his old money with “panache.” The problem with that is that Romney isn’t old money and he’s been disgustingly ostentatious about his wealth (which Romney equates with “success”) throughout the 2012 campaign. And quite a few voters are pretty repulsed by that.

But really, Williamson is just working his way up to his own climax:

Reassuring arch-patriarch — maybe one with enough sons and grandsons to form a pillaging band of marauders? Hillary Rodham Clinton told us that it takes a village, and Mitt Romney showed us how to populate a village with thriving offspring. Newsweek, which as of this writing is still in business, recently ran a cover photo of Romney with the headline: “The Wimp Factor: Is He Just Too Insecure to Be President?” Look at his fat stacks. Look at that mess of sons and grandchildren. Look at a picture of Ann Romney on her wedding day and that cocky smirk on his face. What exactly has Mitt Romney got to be insecure about? That he’s not as prodigious a patriarch as Ramses II or as rich as >Lakshmi Mittal? I bet he sleeps at night and never worries about that. He has done everything right in life, and he should own it.

Stomach-churning, isn’t it? Is this how most conservative men think? And I’ve just given you the gist of the piece. There are three pages of this nauseating verbiage.

Look, I don’t think most voters–at least women voters–don’t look to their presidential candidates to fulfill their sexual fantasies. Maybe women are actually smart enough to vote based on issues that are important to them. Mitt Romney is not going to turn on the average college woman. He’s a dork, and so is Barack Obama for that matter. He looks like what he is–an arrogant, shallow, emptyheaded former CEO with an exaggerated estimation of his own importance. He’s also a liar and a bully. What’s attractive about that? Amanda Marcotte has some good points about all this about this in a post at The American Prospect:

The delusion that regular Americans look to politicians and see Sexy persists in East Coast media circles, despite its evident ludicrousness and a number of debunkings. It leads me to believe that the problem stems from the bubble mentality that prevents pundits from remembering the world outside theirs, if only for the sake of comparison. In the media circle around D.C. (one that sadly extends to New York), President Obama is “cool,” Paul Ryan is “hip,” and Sarah Palin is scorchingly hot. These myths persist, even though the flag-waving, apple-pie-eating persona that politicians must adopt to survive precludes any realistic hope of being an actual sex symbol like George Clooney and Angelina Jolie.

Recently, in an otherwise excellent piece in The New York Times, Maureen Dowd demonstrating exactly this sort of bizarro-world thinking, described Paul Ryan as looking “young and hip and new generation, with his iPod full of heavy metal jams and his cute kids.” By “heavy metal jams,” Dowd presumably meant Ryan’s beloved Rage Against the Machine, a band that was relevant two decades ago and only sounds “heavy metal” to people who think all rock music released after 1967 is a wall of undistinguished noise. Ryan wears khaki pants with checkered shirts! He sounds like a 16-year-old virgin imagining what sex must be like when he talks about reproductive rights! You can only consider him hip and sexy if your only point of comparison are the residents of a nursing home. And yet Dowd didn’t come up with this assessment all on her own; she got the strange notion that Ryan is hip from the Beltway discourse, where it’s assumed he’s dreamy because he has blue eyes and works out.

I don’t read the right wing media much, and after reading Williamson’s embarrassing ode to Willard and realizing that the National Review thinks it’s worthy of a cover story, I don’t think I’ll be going back for more very soon.

Afternoon Open Thread: Romney Calls on Akin to Withdraw from Missouri Senate Race

Posted: August 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Mitt Romney, open thread, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , | 50 Comments

Here’s a first.

Mitt Romney has finally screwed up his courage and taken a stand on something. With only about two hours to go until the deadline for Todd Akin to withdraw from the Missouri Senate race, Mitt Romney’s campaign has sent out a press release calling on Akin to quit. I guess the courage to appear in person and make the statement was beyond Romney’s ability. Here’s the statement:

“As I said yesterday, Todd Akin’s comments were offensive and wrong and he should very seriously consider what course would be in the best interest of our country. Today, his fellow Missourians urged him to step aside, and I think he should accept their counsel and exit the Senate race.”

Early this afternoon Akin said on the Mike Huckabee radio show that he is staying in the race.

“I said one word in one sentence on one day, and everything changed,” Akin said today. “I believe the defense of the unborn and a deep respect for life. … They are not things to run away from.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is threatening to withhold financial support from Akin.

NRSC Communications Director Brian Walsh said in a statement that the campaign committee will continue to withhold its “support and resources” if Akin presses on with a “misguided campaign.”

“The stakes in this election are far bigger than any one individual. By staying in this race, Congressman Akin is putting at great risk many of the issues that he and others in the Republican Party are fighting for, including the repeal of ObamaCare,” Walsh said.

But Akin isn’t listening.

Akin reiterated his vow to stay in the race in a separate interview with conservative radio host Dana Loesch. “Let me just make it clear … that we are not getting out of this race. We are in this race for the long haul and we are going to win it,” he said.

Asked why he would stay in the race when prominent members of the GOP want him out, Akin explained to Huckabee that he believes he can continue to be a powerful voice for the sanctity of human life. Among those calling for Akin to step aside today: Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt and several former senators, including John Ashcroft and Jim Talent.

The WaPo has a longer piece: Todd Akin should drop out of Senate race, Romney says. According to the article, Akin told Mike Huckabee:

“I’ve had a chance now to have run through a primary, and the party people said when you win the primary then we’ll be with you. Well, they were with us. Then I said one word and one sentence on one day, and everything changed,” Akin told Huckabee, an early supporter. “I haven’t done anything morally or ethically wrong. It does seem like a little bit of an overreaction.”

He then went on to liken his decision to a type of crusade. “We believe taking this stand is going to strengthen our country — going to strengthen, ultimately, the Republican Party,” he said. “What we’re doing here is standing on a principle of what America is.”

Akin said that his supporters and “good friends, closer than brothers,” had asked him to stick it out. He added that he has received “continuing calls from other congressmen” expressing their support. (He did not name any of these congressmen.)

A few more interesting reads to get the discussion started:

Greg Sargent: Get ready for Todd Akin Unbound.

Time will tell whether the GOP establishment will stick with its refusal to support him if he stays in. But either way, we’re now about to get Todd Akin Unbound. He no longer has to play nice, as the powers that be in the GOP define it; he’ s been cut loose by the GOP establishment, and he’s now on a crusade that seems to be taking on an element of religious fervor.

“We believe taking this stand is going to strengthen our country — going to strengthen, ultimately, the Republican Party,” he said today. “I believe there is a cause here.”

And if an unconstrained Akin does remain in the race, just imagine the implications for the presidential race. It was revealed today that the GOP platform ratifies a Constitutional ban on abortion that makes no exceptions for rape or incest. This might not have attracted much attention if it weren’t for Akin’s comments, which elevated the debate over abortion — and the rape exception — into a major national story. Now the GOP position on abortion is the Akin position. Indeed, Dem operatives are gleefully describing that platform provision as the “Akin plank.”

Meanwhile, national news organizations are highlighting Paul Ryan’s co-sponsorship, along with Akin, of various draconian anti-abortion measures, in the process tying Ryan — and the GOP’s stance on abortion — directly to Akin’s extremism.

Michael Tomasky: The Only Big Idea Coming Out of the Romney-Ryan Camp Is the Big Lie. Romney and Ryan are opening up new frontiers in propaganda–pushing big lies with not even a grain of truth in them.

These guys may not be able to count, but they can read polls, and so they know very well that if they gave the county the honest debate we were told we were going to have about Medicare, and for that matter about taxation, they’d wake up Nov. 7 with about 120 electoral votes in their pockets and conservatism in tatters.

They know this. They know that the truth would crush them electorally. And so it follows that they know they must lie. They must lie about their Medicare plans. They must lie about the effects of their tax plans on average people and rich people. And they must tell a number of lies about Obama, all the better if they involve race, as the welfare lie does.

So this will be the entire point of the Romney-Ryan campaign. Lie lie lie. Muddy the waters. Turn day to night, fire to water, champagne to piss. Peddle themselves as the precise opposite of what they actually are. That is clearly the m.o….

The Democrats’ job, of course, is to expose this charade for what it is and make Romney and Ryan defend their actual positions. The Obama campaign was a little slow to respond on Medicare, and even then the ad wasn’t as forceful as it might have been. It’s probably true that there’s a reservoir of good faith there—that is, most people simply aren’t going to believe that the Democrats want to harm Medicare. That should work to the Democrats’ advantage, but still, the Obama campaign and the Democrats generally have to nail these guys to the wall on what their actual positions are and what the impacts of their policies will be. Romney and Ryan are terrified of a real Big Debate. Obama and Biden need to drag them into one.

Boston Globe: Republican Party approves strict anti-abortion platform.

So why are they objecting to Akin’s position? Oh, right, because they hope the American people won’t find out they all agree with him.

Politico: Scott Brown objects to GOP platform language on abortion.

Brown says the GOP should be a “big tent” party. Hahahahahahahahahha! That ship has sailed!

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