Leadership

Yeah, OK - Obama has an unfair advantage because he's the Prez and Willard's a silver-spoon legacy puke who apparently doesn't recognize canned food when he sees it, or can't imagine people actually eating that stuff - "why don't they just take a little vacation for a week or so while the service people clean up?"

Leadership

Jag off douchery

Pulling Back The Veil

Maybe Sandy will provide a small glimmer of hope that more of us will see the GOP's rhetoric for the bullshit it is.

From a post on Matt Taibbi's blog at Rolling Stone yesterday.

But everyone lives off the government teat to some degree – even (one might even say especially) the very rich who have been the core supporters of both the Bush presidency and Romney's campaign. Many are industrial leaders who would revolt tomorrow if their giant free R&D program known as the federal military budget were to be scaled back even a few percentage points. Mitt's buddies on Wall Street would cry without their bailouts and dozens of lucrative little-known subsidies (like the preposterous ability of certain banks to act as middlemen in transactions when the government lends money to itself).

Today's Pix

That Tax Cut Thing

Don't like the message?  Make it disappear and then slam the messenger.

Addicting Info:

On September 14th, the Congressional Research Service published their long anticipated study on the correlation between the tax rates and economic growth from 1945 to today. If you go to their website today, however, the report is mysteriously missing.

Before it vanished, the New York Times downloaded a copy, which they now offer on their website. When you read the report, the reason for the pull might be as simple as what the report discovered.

It Keeps Me Awake

If it's a clean process, Obama wins in a possibly epic landslide (on the electoral side anyway), but the pretext is being put in place now that makes it "feasible" for Willard to "pull the upset".

Wonkette:

As Doktor Zoom explainered with an assist from Harper’s, the GOPpies are ready and able to steal every precinct that doesn’t count paper ballots by hand. As Your Editrix explained a week or whatever ago, one of only six voting machine vendors is owned by former Bain employees. (The others, per Dok’s Harper’s article, are pretty much all owned by the Koch Brothers and run by actual felons, except for the ones that are owned by Tagg Romney.) And as some former NSA analyst explained (but we didn’t post on it, because “depressed”), the way they steal your votes is by siphoning them from the largest precincts.

I hate this shit.

Gettin' It Done - 4

I seem to remember something coming from the pie holes of the NeoCons about how the US military leaving Iraq would mean the whole place turns into a giant puddle of shit - as if it wasn't a giant puddle of shit because we were there in the first fuckin' place, but hey, what's a giant puddle of shit between friends?  We are friends again, right?

4. Ended the War in Iraq: Ordered all U.S. military forces out of the country. Last troops left on December 18, 2011.

Evolutionary Quickie

I wish this guy's presentation was a bit more engaging, but at least his explanations are (almost) always easy to follow.

Interesting

Ok - it's Bloomberg and all, but there's a lot of "bidness guys" who understand the basics of the science and they know it's real etc, but who still feel trapped in the closet.  Maybe this gives them a way out.  It's a start anyway.

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.