It's The Visuals, Stupid

The people running Willard's campaign have to be some of the least adept political operatives ever.  You have to know that Romney's little stunt in Ohio - the one that wasn't a campaign rally at all cuz it was really a food drive event(?) was another stab at making Willard not look like The Rich Guy With No Fuckin' Clue.  Oops.

From Kay Coppins at BuzzFeed, via AmericaBlog:

But the last-minute nature of the call for donations left some in the campaign concerned that they would end up with an empty truck. So the night before the event, campaign aides went to a local Wal Mart and spent $5,000 on granola bars, canned food, and diapers to put on display while they waited for donations to come in, according to one staffer. (The campaign confirmed that it “did donate supplies to the relief effort,” but would not specify how much it spent.)

Empty-handed supporters pled for entrance, with one woman asking, “What if we dropped off our donations up front?”The volunteer gestured toward a pile of groceries conveniently stacked near the candidate. “Just grab something,” he said.

Two teenage boys retrieved a jar of peanut butter each, and got in line. When it was their turn, they handed their “donations” to Romney. He took them, smiled, and offered an earnest “Thank you.”

If you took maybe three minutes to go the the Red Cross website on your iPhone, you'd know what was going to go wrong with your attempt to look helpful.  Three lousy minutes, and you might've learned something, and you wouldn't leave yourself open to the massive ridicule being dumped on your over-gelled head.  You wanted a good photo op?  You just gave everybody a good look at just how out of touch you are.

And I get it - I really do - you know you get slammed for being a rich-boy jag-off who never thinks about anything but his money and what his money can buy, but this was the one chance you'd get where throwing money at the problem is the right thing to do; and what did you do?  What the fuck did you do, Willard?  You did exactly the opposite of what was needed.  And that kinda sums it all up, doesn't it?

Gettin' It Done - 5

Nothing saves money like not wasting lives.  We have a better chance to accomplish our Foreign Policy goals (in practically every case) when we don't have our uniformed military in a country killing their people and blowin' their shit up.

5. Began Drawdown of War in Afghanistan: From a peak of 101,000 troops in June 2011, U.S. forces are now down to 91,000, with 23,000 slated to leave by the end of summer 2012. According to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the combat mission there will be over by next year.

Today's Pix

Doonesbury

Aircraft Carriers

China recently unveiled its brand new toy - which it bought (as surplus) from Ukraine - and which BTW, has yet to be fitted out to make it capable of launching and landing AIRPLANES.

Correct - China has an aircraft carrier that can't carry aircraft.  I feel so threatened.

Your Civics Homework

We might get around to fixing this one of these days - but I'm not holding my breath.

Oh, Willard

Willard's team decided they'd try to make it look like they had any fuckin' clue on what to do about the problems thrown at us by Superstorm Sandy, so they dressed up a campaign rally to look like they give a rat's ass about anything but themselves.

Too typical.  But it points up (again) the simple fact that the Repubs are always trying to substitute these empty gestures and photo ops for real policy and helpful action.

Balloon Juice takes 'em down.

But Romney is shameless. He wants to use Sandy’s destruction as a media hook, so he re-branded his rally for the stupid and gullible members of the press as a “storm relief’ effort. To underscore the stupid deception, Mitt asked attendees to bring can goods to the rally, as if random truckloads of unsorted can goods flooding a disaster area are useful. The Red Cross is pretty specific that these kinds of efforts produce piles of supplies that cannot be used and cause real problems for relief efforts:

Does the American Red Cross accept donated goods?

Unfortunately, due to logistical constraints the Red Cross does not accept or solicit individual donations or collections of items. Items such as collected food, used clothing and shoes must be sorted, cleaned, repackaged and transported which impedes the valuable resources of money, time, and personnel.

Something else it points up - Romney is another silver-spoon legacy puke who doesn't know the first fuckin' thing about the lives or the problems of real people, and apparently he knows even less about any of the mechanisms in place that actually work to help real people when they need it.

Unconfirmed

..but of course, we can run with it because of the rule: "Significant If True".

So eat it, Repubs.  You wanna make shit up about Obama, then you can bloody well expect to get it back.

Gettin' It Done - 6

It's not a good idea to celebrate the violent destruction of a fellow human being, and it's not in keeping with the high concept of Due Process just to hunt a guy down and kill him, but if there's ever a good reason to make exceptions, Osama bin Laden was it.

6. Eliminated Osama bin laden: In 2011, ordered special forces raid of secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which the terrorist leader was killed and a trove of al-Qaeda documents was discovered.

Sandy The Keynesian Hurricane

Wanna see straight up Keynesian Economics at work?  Take a good look at what happens when FEMA and other Federal Assistance is administered properly over the next few months.

We had a little peek at it after Irene, but now we're gonna see it all happen center stage.

From Crooks & Liars:

Now, don't get me wrong. There's no way in hell I'm happy about this storm (in fact, I'd like to send an invoice to oil lobbyists and tell them to split the bill) and after it's done, there will be people who died (sixteen on the East Coast, 69 in the Caribbean as of this writing), and countless others left homeless, but there is a small silver lining in all those clouds.

Because the construction industry has been moribund for a while. Now it will explode, and a lot of people who didn't have jobs will have them.

And those people who have those new jobs will spend money, and that will create more jobs. How many? That depends on how much money the feds put into the recovery. (Don't forget, Wall Street brokers live in these affected areas, too.)

And, oh yeah, let's see what we can learn from comparing Obama's FEMA with Jr Bush's FEMA, and then take a good look at what Willard's been saying about how he thinks FEMA should be scrapped so we can privatize those functions and make Halliburton even fatter and richer - which he then Etch-A-Sketched later.

Lyin' sack o' shit.

Wouldn't It Be Nice?

Yeah - they're prob'ly not really able to do it - pretty cool if they could tho'.  And that's how it starts.

During A National Emergency

...what does leadership look like?  Let's see:

Today's Krugman

He's been on a bit of a hot streak lately - except maybe for his choice in music.

He makes a great point in this post, not only about Nate Silver's 538 thing, but about the GOP's  Bubble of Alternative Reality.

This is really scary. It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.

From the comments:

And:

Gettin' It Done - 7

"Saved the US car business" may be overblown hyperbole and graceful understatement all at once.  Government shouldn't be in the business of propping up failing enterprises.  There is such a thing as a life cycle, and it applies to companies and to whole industry sectors as well as to people (also to countries, but that's a different post).  So I'm always worried that throwing tax dollars at a business problem is just postponing the inevitable.  It's a really tough call, but sometimes you have to pull the plug.  All that said, if you don't have the capability to produce stuff that you can sell, then you don't have an economy.  Lose your manufacturing base and you're on your way to losing it all.  Not understanding that concept was one of the hugest mistakes we made in the 80s and 90s.

I'll admit right now that I was all for Free Trade agreements like NAFTA,et al - thinking it'd be good for us if American businesses had to compete just like everybody else; if we couldn't build better refrigerators than the Japanese, then we should get our butts kicked - damned unions blah blah blah.

I was wrong.  Not so much wrong about Free Trade - if you do it right, then the whole free trade thing really is a good idea.  But that's just it: "if you do it right".  About all we've managed to accomplish is to turn Ross Perot into a prophetic messenger - and you start to get an idea of the monumental-ness of your fuck up when that happens.

So the very stark difference in the basic instincts of Obama vs Romney when it came to making a decision on what to do about Detroit tells me most of what I need to know about these guys.  Obama sees what's happened and understands that we have to do some things aimed at leveling the field so we're not always playing up hill.  Romney sounds like he's stuck in 1989, still thinking (like I did) it doesn't matter if we don't make anything here anymore, because the workforce will just retrain itself and become managers; or everybody'll borrow some money and go back to school; or they'll finally open that shoe store their mom always wanted them to try.

7. Turned Around U.S. Auto Industry: In 2009, injected $62 billion in federal money (on top of $13.4 billion in loans from the Bush administration) into ailing GM and Chrysler in return for equity stakes and agreements for massive restructuring. Since bottoming out in 2009, the auto industry has added more than 100,000 jobs. In 2011, the Big Three automakers all gained market share for the first time in two decades. The government expects to lose $16 billion of its investment, less if the price of the GM stock it still owns increases.

I still don't like bailouts, but you have to know how to make the better choice from a very short list of shitty options.

The Mustache Of Understanding

Tom Friedman used to be a pretty decent writer who had decent ideas and a decent regard for what goes in the world.  The only decent thing about him these days is that he's still a decent writer - or more accurately: he can put words together in a way that makes a point and makes it fairly easy to understand the point.

Here he is trying desperately to keep us from realizing how culpable he is for having contributed mightily to the steaming pile of crap that is Centrism, while not working nearly hard enough to keep the Repubs from losing their minds completely.

HARD-LINE conservatives have gone to new extremes lately in opposing abortion. Last week, Richard Mourdock, the Tea Party-backed Republican Senate candidate in Indiana, declared during a debate that he was against abortion even in the event of rape because after much thought he “came to realize that life is that gift from God. And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” That came on the heels of the Tea Party-backed Republican Representative Joe Walsh of Illinois saying after a recent debate that he opposed abortion even in cases where the life of the mother is in danger, because “with modern technology and science, you can’t find one instance” in which a woman would not survive without an abortion. “Health of the mother has become a tool for abortions anytime, for any reason,” Walsh said.

He goes on with some pretty cookie-cutter verbiage (that most middle schoolers could come up with), pointing out that wearing the "pro-life" badge is inconsistent with a position that isn't also in favor of gun control (eg), etc.

So it's nice to see Friedman with his head somewhere other than up his own ass for a change, but I have to wonder why he waited until now to start writing about the extreme positions being staked out by an increasing number of Repubs.

Maybe he finally senses a certain change in how most Americans think about such things. Or maybe he senses a certain change in how more and more of his readers are getting hip to the fact that he's a billionaire know-nothing who tripped and fell into a river of cash, and who now needs us to forget he's actually a douche bag shill for Corporate Media.

I dunno - but he's doing nothing so much as he's playing the very old game of "discovering" an issue and standing in front of it, hoping we'll be fooled into thinking he's leading us in some way.

Fuck him - don't get stupid and hit him; and don't throw shit at his head, but if you see this dick in a bar somewhere, do us all a solid and spit in his drink.