Perhaps Mitt is looking past the primaries and ahead to the general election, when being the NewsMax/Fox News/Weekly Standard candidate is just maybe not as great an asset as they think it is.
February 16th, 2012 at 07:31am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Elections,Media,Politics,Republicans,RomneyWell, this should certainly help Mitt with his image as an uncaring 1% patrician…
“I’m in this race because I care about Americans,” Romney told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien this morning after his resounding victory in Florida on Tuesday. “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.”
“I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I’ll continue to take that message across the nation.”
It’s kinda hard to believe that he has any intention of fixing the poor’s safety net if he’s not concerned about them. Not to mention the fact that he is, well, a Republican, and cutting up the safety net is kind of what they do.
Also apparently the very poor are not the heart of America, and are not struggling. (True, he says the very rich aren’t the heart of America either, but unlike the poor they have our entire political system at their beck and call, so I think they’ll be okay.)
February 2nd, 2012 at 07:26am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Economy,Politics,Republicans,Romney,WankersFrom a HuffPo story about how the peculiar Mormon practice of retroactively “baptizing” dead people (often Jews) as Mormons might affect the Florida GOP primary:
Any Mormon may baptize any person posthumously. Church members have performed the ritual on Buddha, Catholic popes, 9/11 hijackers, William Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, Elvis Presley, President Obama’s mother and even reportedly Jesus Christ.
So… That means that it was Mormons who attacked the United States on 9/11. I can only assume Dubya didn’t know about this, otherwise he might have tried to invade Catholicism.
1 comment January 26th, 2012 at 07:19am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Bush,Iraq,Religion,Romney,Terrorism,WeirdnessMitt Romney’s response to a guy who went bust on real estate investments and is considering leaving the country so he can afford his retirement:
Yeah. It’s just tragic, isn’t it? Just tragic, just tragic. We’re just so overleveraged, so much debt in our society, and some of the institutions that hold it aren’t willing to write it off and say they made a mistake, they loaned too much, we’re overextended, write those down and start over. They keep on trying to harangue and pretend what they have on their books is still what it’s worth.
(…)
The banks are scared to death, of course, because they think they’re going to go out of business. They’re afraid that if they write all these loans off, they’re going to go broke. And so they’re feeling the same thing you’re feeling. They just want to pretend all of this is going to get paid someday so they don’t have to write it off and potentially go out of business themselves.
It’s probably not a great idea to pivot your expression of sympathy to those poor terrified banks. Not if you actually want to get elected. I’m just sayin’.
January 24th, 2012 at 07:33am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Economy,Elections,Politics,Republicans,Romney,Wankers
I guess Mitt is running away with the tone-deaf primary now…
To hear Mitt Romney tell it, his two and a half years as a Mormon missionary in France in the late 1960s were tough times. The places he was staying often had no working toilet, and certainly no baths or showers, he said just this past Sunday (in an effort to divert attention from the $10,000 bet he made Rick Perry). He lived, he said, just like lower-middle income Frenchmen lived.
Turns out he was living in basically a palace, with servants, a chef, and multiple showers and bathrooms. But I guess maybe it was poor compared to his accustomed standard of living.
December 16th, 2011 at 07:38am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Elections,Politics,Republicans,Romney,WankersYes, Obama’s plan is actually to paint Romney as a phony insincere corporate shill who reverses his position on every issue.
His team really has been studying Karl Rove’s gameplan of attacking opponents with your candidate’s own weaknesses…
August 10th, 2011 at 07:25am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Elections,Obama,Politics,Romney,WankersI think Brad DeLong is mostly right that President Obama hasn’t really been all that different from Hypothetical President Romney, although I’m skeptical that Romney would have bothered with sweeping (but crappy) healthcare reform. The more interesting part of his thesis is that Republicans and the media would be praising the exact same policies as Pragmatic Bipartisan Compromise instead of Liberofascist Socialist Overreach. Which is probably mostly true, especially for the media, but I think DeLong underestimates the right’s loyalty to Romney and willingness to mindlessly carry water for him.
Still, the broader points are worth remembering:
1) Party affiliation is more important than actual policy. Most Republicans will defend any other mainstream or conservative Republican’s policy and attack any mainstream or progressive Democrat’s, while most Democrats will (very timidly) do the same for mainstream and conservative Democrats and against Republicans. Which is why Democrats would fight to the death to defend Social Security from a Republican president, but will roll over and play dead when Obama goes after it in the name of deficit reduction and fiscal “seriousness”, and why Republicans suddenly care about the Constitution and deficits after 8 years of looking the other way for Dubya.
2) The media is far more likely to approve of Republican actions and disapprove of Democratic actions than vice versa. Because America is a center-right nation that doesn’t approve of any Democratic or progressive policies at all. And Republicans are oh so serious and responsible, and so much stronger than Democrats on family values and economics and security and foreign policy.
January 27th, 2011 at 07:30am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Democrats,Obama,Politics,Republicans,RomneySo that’s why health insurance is so expensive!
Reform of our health care system can be accomplished by strengthening the private insurance system, as we did in Massachusetts when I was Governor. Strip away burdensome regulations to get the cost of insurance policies down.
Because if there’s one thing wrong with the insurance industry, it’s that it’s too heavily regulated.
2 comments July 15th, 2009 at 03:53pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Healthcare,Politics,Republicans,Romney“Some of my best friends are American cars!”
Wanker.
November 19th, 2008 at 01:31pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Economy,Politics,Republicans,Romney,WankersIt’s kind of a shame that the Republicans didn’t end up with a Romney/Palin ticket, if for no other reason than that it would tickle me to have Track, Trig, and Tagg all on the same stage together.
August 31st, 2008 at 04:20pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Elections,Palin,RomneyVery poor choice of analogy, but I agree with his basic premise:
In his remarks, Romney dismissed those who counsel diplomacy in the region — specifically the Baker-Hamilton Commission — as naively thinking “everything would be fine in the Middle East” if “we could just settle things between the Palestinians and the Israelis”:
“The consequences of that accommodation of his [Hitler’s] press releases was devastating to the entire world, and most devastating to millions of Jews,” Romney said to about 200 people at a Republican Jewish Coalition of Florida function. “Today we have individuals who believe that the cause of the challenges in the Middle East is the conflict in Israel with the Palestinians, and that if somehow we could just have the Baker-Hamilton Commission imposed and we could just settle things between the Palestinians and the Israelis, why everything would be fine in the Middle East.”
Comparing attempts to broker peace between Israel and Palestine to the appeasement of Hitler is simply ridiculous. But so is believing that such a peace would somehow magically fix the rest of the Middle East. I think it’s the right thing to do for its own sake, and for the good of both the Palestinians and the Israelis, but I don’t think it would change anything else – it certainly wouldn’t have the slightest bit of impact on Iraq, Iran, or al Qaeda.
1 comment January 23rd, 2008 at 07:52am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Politics,Republicans,Romney,WarYes, Mitt Romney actually brags that his counterterrorism adviser is one of the masterminds behind Operation Ignore:
J. COFER BLACK is GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s chief weapon against Islamo-fascism. The former CIA official chairs Romney’s Counterterrorism Policy Advisory Group. Also, the 9/11 Commission, the Congressional Joint Inquiry on 9/11 and the CIA’s inspector general all condemn him for dropping the ball before Sept. 11, 2001. Black’s spot in Romney’s brain trust raises grave doubts about the former Massachusetts governor’s national-security judgment.
At CNN/YouTube’s Nov. 28 debate, Romney said that when pondering terrorist interrogation, “I get that advice from Cofer Black, who is a person who was responsible for counterterrorism in the CIA for some 35 years.” Actually, this is false. Black served the CIA for 28 years and directed its Counterterrorist Center (CTC) for less than three — from June 1999 to May 2002.
In January 2000, Black’s CTC briefed top CIA, FBI and White House officials on a 9/11 planning summit in Kuala Lumpur. Hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar attended. Alas, these two left Malaysia, then vanished in Bangkok.
But in early March 2000, the CIA learned that Hazmi had flown to Los Angeles that Jan. 15, as did Mihdhar.
“No one outside of the Counterterrorist Center was told any of this,” the 9/11 Commission Report states (page 181). “The CIA did not try to register Mihdhar or Hazmi with the State Department’s TIPOFF watchlist…”
In January 2001, the CIA tied Mihdhar to “Khallad,” an al-Qaida agent who bombed the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000. “Yet we found no effort by the CIA to renew the long-abandoned search for Mihdhar or his travel companions,” the 9/11 Commission concluded (page 266). It added that then-CIA Director George “Tenet and Cofer Black testified before Congress’s Joint Inquiry into 9/11 that the FBI had access to this identification from the beginning. But drawing on an extensive record … we conclude this was not the case.”
Were Mihdhar “watchlisted,” he could have been arrested when he returned from Mecca on July 4, 2001. Instead, he resumed his mass-murder plans.
These botched opportunities also prevented the FBI from activating a California source who knew Hazmi and Mihdhar. “The informant’s contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized upon, would have given the San Diego FBI field office perhaps the Intelligence Community’s best chance to unravel the Sept. 11 plot,” the Congressional Joint Inquiry’s declassified December 2002 report heartbreakingly observes. “Given the CIA’s failure to disseminate, in a timely manner, intelligence information on the significance and location of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, that chance, unfortunately, never materialized.”
(…)
On Aug. 25, 2005, the Associated Press’ Katherine Shrader revealed that CIA Inspector General John Helgerson’s then-classified report “recommended disciplinary reviews” for Black, Tenet and former clandestine-service head Jim Pavett. “The former officials are likely candidates for proceedings before an accountability board,” Shrader wrote. Tenet’s successor, Porter Goss, took no disciplinary action.
(…)
Romney elevated Black to run his counterterrorism advisory board. Despite deep, declassified dismay with Black’s pre-Sept. 11 tenure, it’s been onward and upward for Black on Team Romney.
Few heads rolled after 9/11, despite the incompetence that allowed al-Qaida to massacre 2,978 human beings. Cofer Black kept his head, and now uses it to advise someone who promoted him in September, and praised him on CNN in late November.
This news should keep Republican primary voters wide awake at night.
Sure looks like Mitt is pulling out all the stops to live up to Dubya’s legacy of incompetence and failure.
(h/t dakine)
January 6th, 2008 at 04:24pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Bush,Elections,Republicans,Romney,TerrorismOkay, so…� Remember that negative anti-Romney ad Huckabee made a big show of not airing?� The one that his campaign had in Total Security Lockdown so that copies of it wouldn’t leak out?
Well, we didn’t run the ad, Sean. What we did–we pulled it. I knew that if we said we had made one and didn’t reveal that it existed there would have been the cynicism of the reporters that had said “Oh, you really didn’t have one”, but we did. And I don’t know how you obtained that copy because we didn’t give it to anybody. We had a box of CD’s of em, we gave then to no one. We showed it in that room, for those reporters and the only way they could have gotten it would be to tape it—I guess off a camera from the screen…
The ad Huckabee said he decided not to run has now appeared at least three times in Iowa anyway. It accuses Romney of being “dishonest” but shades the facts in the process.
(…)
According to the Campaign Media Analysis Group of TNS Media intelligence, the ad appeared Dec. 31 on WHBF-TV and KLJB-TV in Davenport and on KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids. The ad ran once on each station. We will update this count as data for later dates becomes available. When we contacted the Huckabee campaign for an explanation, a representative expressed surprise to hear the ad had been on the air. We’ll update this with any explanation we receive from the campaign.
Well, since the Huckabee campaign has kept those CDs Under Total Security Lockdown and hasn’t given them out to anybody, there’s only one possible explanation: Those TV stations must have obtained bootleg copies from cameramen who filmed the ad when it was screened at Huckabee’s press conference, and then they went ahead and aired the bootlegs on their own initiative and at their own expense.
Yeah. That’s probably it.
(h/t dakine)
January 3rd, 2008 at 09:48pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Elections,Huckabee,Politics,Republicans,Romney,WankersMitt Romney actually managed to flip-flop in the middle of a speech:
Incidentally, during the speech he lauded Bush for getting us off oil, and then lamented that oil hit $100 a barrel today and that we buy 60% of our energy and that energy independence is a major challenge. But his cadence made it all seem fine, so it was! Or maybe straightshooter Joe Klein will call it a gaffe, as he was there.
Brilliant! He was for Dubya’s energy policy before he was against it.
January 2nd, 2008 at 08:03pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Energy,Politics,Republicans,RomneySurprising turn of events in the Republican primary race:
Mike Huckabee went on Hannity & Colmes to try and beat down the alleged controversy he caused by showing a group of reporters an attack ad on Romney that he had made but then decided not to run because he’s so pure—though he played it for them anyway—so he could say he didn’t—
“If a man’s this dishonest to obtain a job—then he’ll be dishonest on the job,” Mike Huckabee from the ad that never ran.
Huckabee: Well, we didn’t run the ad, Sean. What we did–we pulled it. I knew that if we said we had made one and didn’t reveal that it existed there would have been the cynicism of the reporters that had said “Oh, you really didn’t have one”, but we did. And I don’t know how you obtained that copy because we didn’t give it to anybody. We had a box of CD’s of em, we gave then to no one. We showed it in that room, for those reporters and the only way they could have gotten it would be to tape it—I guess off a camera from the screen…
(…)
Colmes: I want to know if you stand by the words of that ad? Do you stand by the words in the ad?
Huckabee: I never retracted the words, but I pulled the ad because I felt like that it is the tone and the spirit of the ad that we need…. I made it very clear that when you say things about an opponent’s record that aren’t true or say things about your own record which aren’t true, I don’t know how else you call that…dishonest…
Back to you, Mitt. Huckabee just called you a liar and unfit for office to your face. The copy on H&C just fell from the sky….He actually has the nerve to say that if he didn’t show the attack ad then he would have been attacked for hiding it. I mean, how many Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s should he be required to say as penance for this nonsense?
And it’s a nasty ad for sure. Listen, you only get criticized for your actions—not something you produced but then didn’t run. If his conscience was bothering him so much then all he had to do was shelve it in silence. If any reporter got wind of it, just admit it existed and be done with it. The Preacher is probably trying to get as much publicity on the ad as possible because then he doesn’t have to shell out the Romney bucks to air it.
Wow, I was not aware that dishonesty was now a disqualifier for a Republican presidential candidate; hell, I thought it was a prerequisite.
You have to love how Huck wants to have it both ways, propagating a hit piece on Romney as a way of showing off how not-negative he is. This is just the kind of unapologetic, in-your-face up-is-downism that the GOP just loves.
Maybe Mitt’s problem isn’t that he’s dishonest, but rather that he’s just not as slick at it as Huckabee. (“I have no idea how every media outlet in the country obtained a copy of this ad that was so terrible that I didn’t want anyone to see it – I’ll get my security team on that right away, and I promise to fire whoever is responsible. And by “fire,” of course I mean “promote.”)
I apologize, I just realized that the tone of this post is awfully negative, so please just forget you ever read it. And be sure to tell your friends about all the mean things I said, so that they’ll know to avoid it.
UPDATE: About that ad being pulled? Well, um… not so much.
2 comments January 2nd, 2008 at 05:52pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Elections,Huckabee,Media,Politics,Republicans,Romney,WankersIf you liked Bush & Cheney, you’ll love Rudy!
And Mitt!
(h/t Julia)
December 24th, 2007 at 11:18am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Bush,Constitution,Corruption/Cronyism,Elections,Politics,Republicans,Romney,RudyFor those of you who just can’t get enough Romney, WaPo had an online chat with his son Tagg, who is every bit as delightful as you might expect. Observe:
Dallas: Why, to this date in the 21st century, do elected officials feel the need to place their voice into other people’s private lives and say that we the people can’t live that way or be that way?
Tagg Romney: Interesting question. I think a lot of us are frustrated by those who are attempting to expand the role and size of government. Did you see Hillary Clinton’s latest ad? She was wrapping Christmas gifts for the American people–universal pre-K, universal health care, etc. She was right when she said she had a million ideas, America just can’t afford them all. My Dad believes that the greatness of the America comes from the American people–not the government.
Ooo, nice. Tagg gets a question that sounds like it’s about social conservatives trying to legislate morality, and he turns it into a spiel about tax-and-spend big-government liberals like Hillary. Well played, Tagg old bean. Well played. Let’s see how he handles something a little tougher:
Dunn Loring, Va.: Let’s see if you’ll answer this one: If the “war against Islamofacism” is the greatest struggle of our time, as your party puts it, why won’t you or one of your four healthy brothers volunteer to serve in either the military or the reserve military? Particularly as the military has problems recruiting top-notch people and has relaxed the admission standards?
Tagg Romney: Happy to answer it, thanks for the question. At the time I would have joined the military, we weren’t fighting a war and the military was being downsized by Bill Clinton (I think he referred to it as a peace dividend). I decided to go into business and have been actively pursuing that career ever since. I have extraordinary respect for those who voluntarily decide to serve in the military, they are true heroes and deserve to be treated as such.
“At the time I would have joined the military…” Interesting. So, apparently – and I was not aware of this – there’s a very specific and narrow time window during which you can enlist. And if your services are not required at that time, well, that’s it for you, your chance to enlist is gone forever. Frankly, I’m a little surprised that none of the other young Republicans who didn’t serve have ever brought this fact up.
Really, it’s a damn shame (and a remarkable coincidence) that not only Tagg, but all four of his brothers had unfortunately timed enlistment windows, and thus forever missed their chances to defend their country against Scary Islamofascism. That must eat away at them every day. “If only I had known,” they cry. “If only I had known.”
Dammit, now I’m too broken up by this terrible family tragedy to continue. But I think you get the general idea.
1 comment December 20th, 2007 at 09:18pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Elections,Politics,Republicans,Romney,WankersOr “saw.” Or “march.” Or possibly “my.”
Mitt Romney will stop at nothing to score political points. Even if it means lying outright about his father.
I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.
Uh huh.
He made a similar statement Sunday during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He said, “You can see what I believed and what my family believed by looking at our lives. My dad marched with Martin Luther King. My mom was a tireless crusader for civil rights.”
Right. Got it — dad marched with MLK. Even David Broder says so, and supplies some corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative….
As Mitt Romney recalled in his address, his father was able to remind people that he had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. (through upscale Grosse Pointe, Mich., in support of open-housing legislation).
Problem is, it’s not true. None of it. As the Phoenix’s David Bernstein reveals (see also update here) in some superb digging, George Romney never marched “with” — i.e., in the presence of, at the same place at the same time — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Here’s Bernstein, who in addition to calling out Romney, calls out Broder:
[W]hile the late George W. Romney, a four-term governor of Michigan, can lay claim to a strong record on civil rights, the Phoenix can find no evidence that the senior Romney actually marched with King, nor anything in the public record suggesting that he ever claimed to do so. Nor did Mitt Romney ever previously claim that this took place, until long after his father passed away in 1995 – not even when defending accusations of the Mormon church’s discriminatory past during his 1994 Senate campaign.Asked about the specifics of George Romney’s march with MLK, Mitt Romney’s campaign told the Phoenix that it took place in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. That jibes with the description proffered by David S. Broder in a Washington Post column written days after Mitt’s College Station speech.
(…)
But that account is incorrect. King never marched in Grosse Pointe, according to the Grosse Pointe Historical Society, and had not appeared in the town at all at the time the Broder book was published. “I’m quite certain of that,” says Suzy Berschback, curator of the Grosse Pointe Historical Society….
Faced with the unfortunate reality that Mitt was making things up, his campaign has retreated into a hilarious Humpty-Dumptyism about what it means to “march with” someone. You see, it doesn’t mean that you were actually there. It means that, well, you participated in a march about a related topic on a different day, and maybe you thought about the guy while you were doing it.
Mitt, in other words, was “speaking figuratively, not literally.”
I am not making this up. Apparently, it’s all about what the meaning of “with” is. Can you believe that, after Bill Clinton’s debacle over the meaning of the word “is,” another political figure would try something like that?
Ah, but it gets even worse, if you can imagine that:
Romney: “My own eyes? You know, I speak in the sense of I saw my dad become president of American Motors. I wasn’t actually there when he became president of American Motors, but I saw him in the figurative sense of he marched with Martin Luther King. My brother also remembers him marching with Martin Luther King and so in that sense I saw him march with Martin Luther King.”
(…)
He added, “You know, I’m an English literature major as well. When we say, I saw the Patriots win the World Series, it doesn’t necessarily mean you were there – excuse me, the Super Bowl. I saw my dad become president of American Motors. Did that mean you were there for the ceremony? No, it’s a figure of speech.”
I weep for the state of English literature. And New English sports fandom.
December 20th, 2007 at 07:00pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Elections,Republicans,RomneyI saw a couple of items in the past couple of days that, shall we say, gave me pause. The first one was about Romney ramping up attack ads against Huckabee (and what an ugly sectarian grudge match that’s shaping up to be), but no mention of Wayne Dumond. I kinda thought that the Republican presidential candidates would be falling all over themselves to “Willie Horton” Huckabee, especially now that he’s looking like more and more of a threat, but it just hasn’t happened.
Which makes me wonder: Is it because Huckabee wrangling the parole of a serial rapist over the objections of his victims and their families just isn’t that big a deal to the supposedly law-and-order Republican base? Is it because Dumond is white and therefore not Scary Boogeyman material? Is it because Dumond raped a Clinton relative, meaning that he was only in prison as part of the Vast Insidious Clinton Conspiracy? Or even if he really was guilty and even if he did rape and kill at least one woman and probably another, it was still a good thing because it was a poke in the Clenis’s eye?
Admittedly, I’m speculating. But after the smears and dirty tricks Dubya’s primary campaign used against McCain in 2000, and Huckabee’s question about whether Mormons think Satan is Jesus’ brother, it’s hard for me to believe that Republicans have any sense of restraint when it comes to primary contests. Which is why I think Romney has calculated that Republican voters wouldn’t consider Huckabee’s role in Dumond’s parole to be a bad thing.
The second item is about the wingnut reaction to the Crazy Minuteman Guy’s endorsement of Huckabee:
Malkin is gob-smacked. Larison is slack-jawed:
I can’t express to you all how little sense this makes. It’s baffling, like so much else associated with Mike Huckabee lately. The only thing more bizarre would have been if Gilchrist had endorsed McCain. How does the founder of the Minutemen endorse Huckabee? What parallel universe have we fallen into that this is happening? I mean, Gilchrist essentially has to ignore everything that the man said or did regarding immigration for the last decade. Apparently the take-away lesson is that shameless pandering works. Before much longer maybe Huckabee will land Tancredo’s endorsement.
So think about that for a moment. Huckabee picks up an endorsement from a right-wing racist nutcase, and the wingnutosphere reaction is not, “OMG, what is Huckabee thinking, getting an endorsement from such a repulsive kook?”, but rather, “OMG, what is Gilchrist thinking? Huckabee is totally unworthy of his valuable endorsement!”
To riff on Bill O’Reilly’s idea, it’s as if Rudy got an endorsement from the ghost of Jeffrey Dahmer, and the wingnuts went ballistic that Dahmer would endorse someone who kills and eats people so infrequently.
So yeah, I think their values system might be just a teensy bit messed up.
(h/t Julia and Blue Texan)
December 12th, 2007 at 11:47pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Elections,Huckabee,Immigration,Politics,Racism,Republicans,RomneyHowie Klein suggests that Norman Hsu might be less of a concern than the Mormon’s dude:
I bet you never heard of Robert Lichfield though, right? He wasn’t just a random donor to Republicans. He was a member of the Mitt Romney campaign, charged with bringing in money to the biggest spending campaign. But, besides sucking up cash for Full of Mitt, Lichfield was also involved with child abuse. He quietly slinked away from the campaign but… not much has been heard about this in all the yelling and screaming over Hsu even though he’s been bringing in far more money for Flip Flop than Hsu has brought in for Democrats.
Lichfield is named in a federal lawsuit charging that students of the “behavior modification” schools with ties to WWASPS [Worldwide Association of Specialty Schools, founded by Lichfield] were subjected to “physical abuse, emotional abuse and sexual abuse.”
…The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Utah, alleges brazen acts of child abuse, including that students of the various programs had been forced to eat their own vomit, clean toilets with a toothbrush and brush their teeth afterward, were chained or locked in dog cages, kicked, beaten, thrown and slammed to the ground and forced into sexual acts.
Lichfield and his wife have donated thousands of dollars to Romney and other right-wing candidates for various offices, as well as to right-wing groups. In fact they seem to have donated well over the legal limit for wingnuts like Utah Senators Robert Bennett and Orrin Hatch, and North Carolina Senator Richard Burr. I know Democrats who were recipients of Hsu’s money have donated it to charity. Will Hatch, Bennett, the GOP and Full of Mitt return the hundreds of thousands of dollars given to them directly by Lichfield? Not likely.
Jebus, what the hell is wrong with these people??? The correlation between “Republican” and sadistic/crazy/corrupt/sleazy is really alarmingly high.
September 7th, 2007 at 08:34pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Corruption/Cronyism,Republicans,Romney,WankersKrugman is full of sweetness and light today, as usual:
So now Mitt Romney is trying to Willie Hortonize Rudy Giuliani. And thereby hangs a tale — the tale, in fact, of American politics past and future, and the ultimate reason Karl Rove’s vision of a permanent Republican majority was a foolish fantasy.
(…)
[S]ome Republicans are trying to make similar use of the recent murder of three college students in Newark, a crime in which two of the suspects are Hispanic illegal immigrants. Tom Tancredo flew into Newark to accuse the city’s leaders of inviting the crime by failing to enforce immigration laws, while Newt Gingrich declared that the “war here at home” against illegal immigrants is “even more deadly than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
And Mr. Romney, who pretends to be whatever he thinks the G.O.P. base wants him to be, is running a radio ad denouncing New York as a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants, an implicit attack on Mr. Giuliani.
Strangely, nobody seems to be trying to make a national political issue out of other horrifying crimes, like the Connecticut home invasion in which two paroled convicts, both white, are accused of killing a mother and her two daughters. Oh, and by the way: over all, Hispanic immigrants appear to commit relatively few crimes — in fact, their incarceration rate is actually lower than that of native-born non-Hispanic whites.
To appreciate what’s going on here you need to understand the difference between the goals of the modern Republican Party and the strategy it uses to win elections.
The people who run the G.O.P. are concerned, above all, with making America safe for the rich. Their ultimate goal, as Grover Norquist once put it, is to get America back to the way it was “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over,” getting rid of “the income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that.”
But right-wing economic ideology has never been a vote-winner. Instead, the party’s electoral strategy has depended largely on exploiting racial fear and animosity.
Ronald Reagan didn’t become governor of California by preaching the wonders of free enterprise; he did it by attacking the state’s fair housing law, denouncing welfare cheats and associating liberals with urban riots. Reagan didn’t begin his 1980 campaign with a speech on supply-side economics, he began it — at the urging of a young Trent Lott — with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.
And if you look at the political successes of the G.O.P. since it was taken over by movement conservatives, they had very little to do with public opposition to taxes, moral values, perceived strength on national security, or any of the other explanations usually offered. To an almost embarrassing extent, they all come down to just five words: southern whites starting voting Republican.
(…)
But Republicans have a problem: demographic changes are making their race-based electoral strategy decreasingly effective. Quite simply, America is becoming less white, mainly because of immigration. Hispanic and Asian voters were only 4 percent of the electorate in 1980, but they were 11 percent of voters in 2004 — and that number will keep rising for the foreseeable future.
Those numbers are the reason Karl Rove was so eager to reach out to Hispanic voters. But the whites the G.O.P. has counted on to vote their color, not their economic interests, are having none of it. From their point of view, it’s us versus them — and everyone who looks different is one of them.
So now we have the spectacle of Republicans competing over who can be most convincingly anti-Hispanic. I know, officially they’re not hostile to Hispanics in general, only to illegal immigrants, but that’s a distinction neither the G.O.P. base nor Hispanic voters takes seriously.
Today’s G.O.P., in short, is trapped by its history of cynicism. For decades it has exploited racial animosity to win over white voters — and now, when Republican politicians need to reach out to an increasingly diverse country, the base won’t let them.
Well, there’s a happy ending, at least. But how sad is it that racism (and sexism, and homophobia) are the sugarcoating to make the Republican agenda more appealing? I’m picturing something like this:
PROSPECTIVE REPUBLICAN VOTER: I don’t see how any of these tax cuts benefit me – I don’t make that kind of money. And it looks like you’re always taking my employer’s side instead of mine.
REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: We hate blacks, Mexicans, women, and gays.
PROSPECTIVE REPUBLICAN VOTER: Okay, I’m in.
(Also, you will be relieved to know that Rudy is not taking this threat lying down. He’s hired Scott Howell & Company to do his media – they’re the folks responsible for the racist “Harold, call me” ad in Tennessee.)
6 comments August 24th, 2007 at 07:58pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Immigration,Politics,Racism,Republicans,Romney,Rudy,Sexism,Teh GayHowie Klein catches this juicy little tidmitt, er, tidbit:
As we’ve mentioned before, Mormon Mitt and his flock have all managed to evade serving in the military– and are very touchy and aggressive when anyone wants to know why. They never say that military service is for poor people not for multimillionaire Mormons like themselves, but that’s what they mean.
Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Wednesday defended his five sons’ decision not to enlist in the military, saying they’re showing their support for the country by “helping me get elected.”
Romney, who did not serve in Vietnam due to his Mormon missionary work and a high draft lottery number, was posed the question by an anti-war activist after a speech in which he called for “a surge of support” for U.S. forces in Iraq.
(…)
“My sons are all adults and they’ve made decisions about their careers and they’ve chosen not to serve in the military and active duty and I respect their decision in that regard.”
He added: “One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I’d be a great president.”
Aww. Isn’t that sweet. Now, you’d think that equating military service with helping out dear old Dad’s campaign would be a huge turnoff to all those Republican voters who are oh-so-adamant about supporting our troops (often going to the extraordinary lengths of sticking a yellow ribbon logo on their vehicles!) would be appalled. But you’d be wrong.
Republican voters (or at least the diehard Kool-Aid drinkers) have thoroughly internalized the notion that Howie identifies: Powerful, important people start and prolong wars; little people and suckers fight them. Viewed from that perspective, the Romney family’s avoidance of military service is a status symbol, a demonstration of just how powerful and important they are. Why, they have not one, not two, but five sons who support the war but aren’t fighting in it! They must all be born Leaders! And they’re certainly prosperous enough that they would never have to enlist because it was the only way they could get a college degree.
This same thinking is the basis of the typical Young Republican response when asked why they’re not Over There – it’s usually something along the lines of how much more valuable to the war they are here. The unspoken message is, of course, that the dumb grunts in Iraq and Afghanistan have nothing to offer beyond their lives, their limbs, and their mental health. But again, none of this is a problem, because Republicans understand that this is what Leaders do, and it would be the height of foolishness to risk such valuable human assets in a war zone.
This point of view also explains why Republican voters were not at all bothered by Dubya’s dodgy dodging of Vietnam, and why Republican politicians’ actual concern for the troops appears to be roughly on par with their concern for Katrina victims (unless they’re Trent Lott, that poor porchless man). Because Dubya is Important, and soldiers and poor people are… not.
Sure, most Republican voters are not powerful or important, but they admire and identify with those who are. If Dubya has the juice to get out of the Vietnam draft, then more power to him. Yay, team!
(Cross-posted at Greatscat!)
August 8th, 2007 at 06:56pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Iraq,Republicans,Romney,Wankers,WarMitt Romney explains why Hillary is Teh Dangerous Marxist:
Specifically, he attacked Clinton for seeking to move the nation toward what Romney called a “shared-responsibility, we’re-all-in it-together society.”
“That’s sort of an out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx kind of philosophy,” Romney said. “This is a country which has been successful in part because we believe in individual initiative, and individual incentives.”
Yes, a shared responsibility, we’re-all-in-it-together society would be AWFUL, just like the Soviet Union.
Of course, Romney is talking about the right-wing caricature of Hillary, the one that’s to the left of Fidel Castro…
July 21st, 2007 at 10:20pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Clinton,Politics,Republicans,Romney,Wankers
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