A Gentleman’s view.

The dirty game of politics played by gangsters with degrees cloaked in Brooks Brothers proper!

Robbing The Poor To Give To The Rich!

February 2nd, 2012 in Abuse, America, Leadership, Politics | No Comments »

The Republicans Who Would Be President By 

 

The Republican debates have becomes a showcase for the insanity of a slate of candidates who have shown no regard for the truth or for the wishes of the majority of the American people.

Newt Gingrich would have us repeal child labor laws in order to save on those egregious janitor salaries that are decimating our economy.

Mitt Romney thinks we’re all jealous of him because he grew rich exporting American jobs overseas. He says he knows how to fix the economy and Obama has never run anything in his life. Of course, the past three years keeping a listing Ship of State from sinking that was run onto the rocks by a Republican administration run amok doesn’t count for anything.

Rick Santorum says children would be better off with parents in prison than having a loving gay couple nurture and care for them.

Ron Paul believes we should get rid of the IRS, allow business owners to discriminate on the basis of anything they please and pretty much leave all of us to fend for ourselves.

All of the candidates scream about “big government” and how it should get out of our lives but to a man, they want to tell you who you can and cannot love, who will be allowed to serve our country and who has a say over the bodies of women. Hint: It isn’t the women.

The way I see it, if Republicans were allowed to do everything they want to do, we would live in a country where the rich paid zero taxes but the poor (and that’s all that would be left because the middle class would disappear) would bear the burden of paying for everything. The burden would be lightened significantly, however, because there would be no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, EPA, Department of Education, Department of Consumer Affairs – well, I could go on but the only thing remaining would be the Department of Defense, which I’m certain would grow to even more megalomaniacal proportions than it already has. Disclaimer: The Department of Defense under Ron Paul would no longer exist.

When questioned about things like illness in a family or hard times caused by circumstances out of one’s control, the candidates like to point out that there are “agencies” one can go to get help. They fail to realize that those “agencies” are almost always state or municipal entities that are dependent upon taxpayer money to keep their doors open. The candidates also like to point to churches and community groups and then wax rhapsodic, recalling the old days when people helped their neighbors. How a charity is supposed to cover the outrageous cost of vital, but expensive, medical care is never made clear.

I’ve got a news flash for them. We’re not living in a Little House on the Prairie world anymore. The ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913 recognized the very real fact that our country had grown to an extent where we needed a centralized method to collect money to distribute to insure the public good. Over the ensuing years, we’ve created agencies like FEMA to step in and provide the help needed when disaster strikes. It’s the same thing as having a barn raising when the windstorm took out the barn except we now do it on a national scale rather than a local one.

Sit down and talk to a right wing person and if you can get them to stop screaming in your face, you’ll find out that they don’t want Social Security to go away. Not theirs anyway. They don’t want Medicare to be dismantled. Not theirs anyway. They want good roads and want to feel safe when they board an airplane. They just don’t want to pay for it. But you can be sure if the bridge collapses while one of their family members is on it, they’ll sue the hell out of the Federal Government for not making sure the bridge was safe!

The whole idea of the United States of America is people pulling together to make something of themselves and of the country in which they live. That’s the promise of this country. If you work hard and do your part, you have a shot at the dream. That dream is different for each of us and not everyone wants to accumulate gobs of riches. What we all want, in one way or another, is the chance to make a decent living, take a nice vacation every year, enjoy our friends and families, educate our children, put something aside for our golden years and know that if trouble finds us, we have a system in place that will help us through.

We don’t envy the rich, although some of us aspire to be rich. Aspirations and envy are not the same thing. What we don’t want is for the wealthy to continually take what little we have and then accuse us of waging class warfare against them. We want a fair playing field and that is something none of the Republican candidates is willing to give. The Republicans all seem to want us to be like the orphaned child Oliver, begging with our hands out and saying, “Please, Sir, may I have some more?”

It’s going to be a long and interesting year.

 

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Wall Street’s Accomplices

February 2nd, 2012 in Abuse, America, Leadership, Politics | No Comments »

The Democrats Who Unleashed Wall Street and Got Away With It

By Robert Scheer

That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.

Yet, there they go again. Clinton is presented, in a fawning cover story in the current edition of Esquire magazine, as “Someone we can all agree on. … Even his staunchest enemies now regard his presidency as the good old days.” In a softball interview, Clinton is once again allowed to pass himself off as a job creator without noting the subsequent loss of jobs resulting from the collapse of the housing derivatives bubble that his financial deregulatory policies promoted.

At least Summers, in a testier interview by British journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News, was asked some tough questions about his responsibility as Clinton’s treasury secretary for the financial collapse that occurred some years later. He, like Clinton, still defends the reversal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a 1999 repeal that destroyed the wall between investment and commercial banking put into place by Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression.

“I think the evidence is that I am right about that. If you look at the big players, Lehman and Bear Stearns were both standalone investment banks,” Summers replied, referring to two investment banks allowed to fold. Summers is very good at obscuring the obvious truth—that the too-big-to-fail banks, made legal by Clinton-era deregulation, required taxpayer bailouts.

The point of Glass-Steagall was to prevent jeopardizing commercial banks holding the savings of average citizens. Summers knows full well that the passage of the repeal of Glass-Steagall was pushed initially by Citigroup, a mammoth merger of investment and commercial banking that create the largest financial institution in the world, an institution that eventually had to be bailed out with taxpayer funds to avoid economic disaster for millions of ordinary Americans. He also knows that Citigroup—where Robert Rubin, who preceded Summers as Clinton’s treasury secretary, played leading roles during a critical time—specialized in precisely the mortgage and other debt packages and insurance scams that were the source of America’s economic crisis.

 

Even Clinton, in a rare moment of honest appraisal of his record, conceded that his signing of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), legalizing those credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, was based on bad advice. That advice would have had to come from Summers, his point man pushing the CFMA legislation, which Clinton signed into law during his lame-duck days.

 

When the British interviewer reminded him of Clinton’s comment, Summers, as is his style, simply bristled: “Again, you make everything so simple, when in fact it’s complicated. Would it have been better if the whole financial reform legislation had passed in 1999, or 1998, or 1992? Yes, of course it would have been better. But … at the time Bill Clinton was president, there essentially were no credit default swaps. So the issue that became a serious problem really wasn’t an issue that was on the horizon.”

That is a lie. Credit default swaps had been sold at least since 1991, and collateralized debt obligations of all sorts quickly became the rage during the Clinton years. Summers surely remembers that Brooksley Born, the legal expert on such matters that Clinton appointed to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), warned about the ballooning danger of those unregulated derivatives. Born, who served with Summers as one of four members of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, tried repeatedly and in vain to get her colleagues to act. When her pleas fell on deaf ears she issued a “concept release” calling attention to an unregulated derivatives market that was even then spiraling out of control.

The CFMA legislation that Summers pushed and Clinton signed was a specific rebuke to Born’s efforts. As Summers testified at the time before a Senate committee: “As you know, Mr. Chairman, the CFTC’s recent concept release has been a matter of great concern, not merely to Treasury, but to all those with an interest in the OTC [over-the-counter] derivatives market. In our view, the Release has cast the shadow of regulatory uncertainty over an otherwise thriving market—raising risks for stability and competitiveness of American derivative trading. We believe it quite important that the doubts be eliminated.”

Those doubts were eliminated by the new law exempting all of that troubling OTC derivatives trading from all existing regulations and regulatory agencies. Summers argued in his congressional testimony that there was no reason for any government regulation of what turned out to be tens of trillions of dollars in toxic assets:

“First, the parties to these kinds of contracts are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies and most of which are already subject to basic safety and soundness regulation under existing banking and securities law.

“Second, given the nature of the underlying assets involved—namely supplies of financial exchange and other financial instruments—there would seem to be little scope for market manipulation of the kind seen in traditional agricultural commodities, the supply of which is inherently limited and changeable.”

Has any economist ever gotten it so wrong?

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GOP: Constitutional Passion Is Just A Front!

February 2nd, 2012 in Abuse, America, Leadership, Politics | 2 Comments »

Senator Mike Lee: Constitutional Charlatan

In justifying his threat to obstruct the confirmation of every single Obama judicial nominee in response to the President’s recess appointment of Richard Cordray to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) had the chutzpah this weekend to lecture President Obama about the fact that the “Constitution is not a partisan document.” That’s rich, coming from a tea party hero whose very career has been built by weaponizing the Constitution for political purposes.

Indeed, Senator Lee has established a Political Action Committee called the Constitutional Conservatives Fund, with the purpose of “finding, funding, and supporting conservative candidates who are committed to the cause of restoring constitutionally limited government.” That’s right, the guy who has established a Political Action Committee for the purpose of politicizing the Constitution is arguing that the President is politicizing the Constitution. Please.

What’s worse is that Lee’s “constitutional conservative” pledge – the centerpiece of his PAC — amounts to nothing more than wrapping paper for his partisan policy agenda. Indeed, the most striking thing about Senator Lee’s “constitutional conservative” pledge is how little attempt is made to justify its provisions with the text of the Constitution itself. Of the fourteen provisions in the pledge, nearly half are vague calls for policy changes such as “reform entitlements,” “reform the tax code,” and “oppose nation building.” Unless Senator Lee has specific constitutional arguments to make about these policy issues — and it’s hard to imagine any such arguments that would pass the laugh test — such statements have no place in a pledge about the Constitution.

In the few provisions of the pledge that do directly address the Constitution, Senator Lee picks and chooses the parts of constitutional text and history he likes and ignores those he doesn’t. For example, Lee attempts to lay the groundwork for his conservative agenda by compelling signers to “agree” that federal powers are “few and defined.” In other places, Lee has suggested that those “few and defined” powers do not give the federal government the power to pass laws protecting retirement security, securing disaster relief, and regulating child labor, positions that put him on the far fringe of the constitutional debate. While it is true that the federal government possesses only a limited set of enumerated powers, Lee fails to acknowledge that some of these powers are quite broad, and that the Founders drafted the Constitution in order to strengthen the federal government after the Articles of Confederation had failed to provide the federal government with the substantial powers it needs to address national concerns. Lee compounds this sin of omission by failing to recognize that “We the People” have further expanded the enumerated powers of the federal government in eight separate Amendments.

Senator Lee’s selective view of the Constitution is also reflected in another aspect of his treatment of the Amendments. While these Amendments profoundly changed the Constitution in many important ways, guaranteeing liberty and equality, ending slavery, expanding the right to vote, increasing the power of the federal government, applying the limits of the Bill of Rights to the actions of the states, Lee mentions precisely only one Amendment, calling upon signers to “protect Second Amendment rights.” No disrespect to the Second Amendment, but it is one of 27 Amendments, and the love affair for that Amendment on the political right does not allow an elected official such as Senator Lee, who takes an oath of office to support the Constitution — all of it — to elevate that right over all others.

To amplify his ability to use his PAC to politicize the Constitution, Senator Lee also tried to magnify the constitutional damage done by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC. Last December, Leerequested permission from the Federal Election Commission to operate a Super PAC that would have been allowed to accept unlimited contributions from corporations, unions, and individuals. The move would have made Lee the first elected politician to operate his own Super PAC and essentially eliminated limits on contributions to candidates. Fortunately, even the perpetually gridlocked FEC — which has 3 Republican and 3 Democratic members who seem never to agree on anything — recognized that this went far beyond what Citizens United mandated, and it unanimously denied Senator Lee’s request.

Finally, even narrowly focusing on the Cordray appointment and the confirmation process, it is Senator Lee who is most clearly violating the letter and spirit of the Constitution and playing partisan games. Senator Lee made it absolutely clear that he would not comply with his constitutionally-mandated responsibility to give his “advice and consent” on the Cordray nomination. In an official Senate release in December, he stated that he had no objection to Richard Cordray himself, but that he felt it was his “duty to oppose his confirmation as part of [his] opposition to the creation of CFPB itself.”

Actually, according to the Constitution, it’s Senator Lee’s duty to vote “no” on legislation he opposes, such as the law that set up the CFPB, and to provide “advice and consent” on the president’s nominees, judicial or otherwise. Senator Lee’s statement is an abdication of his constitutional duty, and it is that hard-line position taken by the President’s opponents, coupled with the trick of “pro-forma” Senate sessions designed specifically to prevent the President from exercising his constitutional authority to make recess appointments, that led to President Obama’s action on the Cordray appointment.

President Obama’s decision to employ the Recess Appointment power to install Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was an aggressive use of his constitutional powers, coming during a period when the Senate itself takes the position that it was not technically in recess. Everyone from Senator Lee, to President Obama, to Mr. Cordray should appropriately regret that partisan dysfunction in the Senate has advanced to the point that such a step was necessary to ensure the functioning of a government agency created by the Congress in a law passed only eighteen months ago. Courts may well have to sort this mess out, though as I argue here, it seems likely they will uphold the President’s actions.

But Senator Lee is demonstrating contempt for the document he purports to revere by reacting to this sorry state of affairs by (1) ignoring his complicity in the problem, (2) lecturing the President for politicizing the Constitution — something Senator Lee has turned into an art form — and (3) taking out his anger with the President by compounding the Senate’s partisan dysfunction and punishing the third branch of government. With friends like Senator Mike Lee, the Constitution needs no enemies.

(This article was written with assistance from Doug Pennington and Ryan Woo, and is cross-posted onText and History.)

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GOP: First Amendment Be Damned!

February 1st, 2012 in Abuse, America, Leadership, Politics | 2 Comments »

BREAKING NEWS:

‘Gasland’ Journalists Arrested At Hearing By Order Of House Republicans (UPDATES)

WASHINGTON — In a stunning break with First Amendment policy on Capitol Hill, House Republicans directed Capitol Hill police to detain a highly regarded documentary crew that was attempting to film a Wednesday hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice. Republicans also denied the entrance of a credentialed ABC News news team that was attempting to film the event.

Josh Fox, director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary “Gasland” was taken into custody by Capitol Hill police this morning, along with his crew, after Republicans objected to their presence, according to Democratic sources present at the hearing. The meeting of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment had been taking place in room 2318 of the Rayburn building. Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, is currently seeking to secure a procedural maneuver that would allow the detained film crew to re-enter the hearing, which is open to the public. Miller’s motion is not expected to succeed.

Approximately 16 officers entered the hearing room and handcuffed Fox amid audible discussions of “disorderly conduct” charges, according to Democratic sources present at the arrest.

“Gasland” received strong critical acclaim and takes a critical eye toward the practice of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a process in which several tons of highly pressurized water and chemicals are injected into the ground, allowing valuable natural gas to escape. The practice is decried by ecological experts for destroying ecosystems and polluting groundwater. The energy industry keeps the actual content of fracking chemicals secret.

Fox had hoped to film Wednesday’s hearing for a follow-up to “Gasland.” A colleague of Fox’s at his production company was unable to comment on the morning’s events, but HuffPost expects a statement soon and will update this story accordingly.

Fox did not have formal Capitol Hill credentials, but such formalities are rarely enforced against high-profile journalists. Temporary passes are easy to obtain, and if Republicans had objected on procedural grounds, they could have simply sent the the crew to the front desk, rather than ordering police to arrest journalists. The right to a free press is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Documentary crews are almost never denied access to public meetings of elected government officials.

A separate ABC News crew, which did have official Capitol Hill credentials, was also denied access to the public hearing.

UPDATE: 12:09 p.m. – Capitol Police public information officer Seargant Kimberly Schneider provided the following statement to HuffPost on the morning’s events:

“At approximately 10:30 a.m. today, United States Capitol Police arrested Joshua Fox of Milanville, Pa. in room 2318 of the Rayburn House office building. He is charged with unlawful entry, and he is currently being processed at United States Capitol Police headquarters.”

This is a developing story. Check back with HuffPost for more.

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America: May We Present Your Next President

February 1st, 2012 in America, Leadership, Politics | 1 Comment »

1. “Corporations are people, my friend… of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets. Human beings, my friend.” —Mitt Romney to a heckler at the Iowa State Fair who suggested that taxes should be raised on corporations as part of balancing the budget (August 2011)

2. “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” –Mitt Romney, using an unfortunate choice of words while advocating for consumer choice in health insurance plans (January 2012)

3. “I’ll tell you what, ten-thousand bucks? $10,000 bet?” –Mitt Romney, attempting to make a wager with Rick Perry during a Republican presidential debate to settle a disagreement about health care (December 2011)

4. “I should tell my story. I’m also unemployed.” —Mitt Romney, speaking in 2011 to unemployed people in Florida. Romney’s net worth is over $200 million.

5. “PETA is not happy that my dog likes fresh air.” —Mitt Romney in 2007, responding to criticism from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals following revelations that he had once put the family dog in a carrier and strapped it to the roof of his car during a 12-hour road trip

6. “There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip” –Mitt Romney, attempting to identify with the problems of average folk (January 2012)

7. “I’m running for office for Pete’s sake, we can’t have illegals” –Mitt Romney, recalling his reaction when he learned that there were illegal aliens working the ground on his property, employed by a firm that he subsequently fired (October 2011)

8. “I purchased a gun when I was a young man. I’ve been a hunter pretty much all my life.” –Mitt Romney (April 2007)
“I’m not a big-game hunter. I’ve made that very clear. I’ve always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will.” –Mitt Romney, clarifying things a few days later after his hunting credentials were questioned (April 2007)

9. “[Obama's stimulus program is] one of the biggest peacetime spending binges in American history.” —Mitt Romney in April 2011, while U.S. troops were fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and involved in airstrikes against Libya

10. “I’m Wolf Blitzer and yes, that’s my real name.” —CNN’s Wolf Blitzer at the beginning of a November 2011 Republican presidential debate
“I’m Mitt Romney—and yes Wolf, that’s also my first name.” —Mitt Romney, getting his own name wrong (his first name is “Willard,” and his middle name is “Mitt”)

 

PS:

Mitt Romney Quote: I believe in a America where millions of Americans believe in a America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. THATS the America I love!

“I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.” (Romney’s campaign later admitted that they didn’t march on the same day, or in the same city)

“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. 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.”

“You sit down with your attorneys and tell you what you have to do, but obviously the president of the United States has to do what’s in the best interest of the United States against a potential threat.” –on whether he would consult Congress about invading Iran

“I purchased a gun when I was a young man. I’ve been a hunter pretty much all my life.” (Romney’s campaign later said he’d been hunting twice, once when he was 15, and once in 2006 at a Republican fundraiser

“Hugo Chavez has tried to steal an inspiring phrase ‘Patria o muerte, venceremos.’ It does not belong to him. It belongs to a free Cuba.” –invoking a phrase that translates to “Fatherland or death, we shall overcome,” which Fidel Castro has used to close his speeches for years, and which is associated with Cuban oppression

“Well, the question is kind of a non sequitur, if you will. And what I mean by that — or a null set.” –after being asked during a Republican debate whether is was a mistake to invade Iraq

“We should double Guantanamo!”

“I’m happy to learn that after I speak you’re going to hear from Ann Coulter. That’s a good thing. I think it’s important to get the views of moderates.” –right before Coulter called John Edwards a “faggot”

“I’m not concerned about the very poor… We have a safety net’ for them”.

 

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Frontrunner: To Be Or Not To Be

February 1st, 2012 in America, Leadership, Politics | 1 Comment »

Below are POLITICO’s five takeaways:

1. Mitt Romney is once again running two campaigns

Romney’s election night speech, in which he mentioned Newt Gingrich only to congratulate him, left no doubt that Team Mitt is now heading into general election mode after a commanding victory in Florida.

The focus was almost entirely on President Barack Obama, whom Romney excoriated repeatedly.

It marked a major shift from Romney’s South Carolina election night speech, in which he addressed his lopsided loss by giving Gingrich a tongue-lashing, albeit without naming him.

This time, Romney gave a forward-looking speech that talked about the party uniting after a bitter primary, in a tone similar to his words after his New Hampshire victory.

To be sure, Romney’s team will not be lifting the collective boot from Gingrich’s neck — unlike after New Hampshire, when they let their focus drift to the general election and allowed the former House Speaker to get up off the mat. And therein lies a real conundrum for Romney, who has become so immersed in the negative attacks — and has seemed to enjoy them on the trail — that he has not been putting out a positive message of his own for voters.

Does Romney himself stop going quite so hard negative now that he’s won Florida? Or do voters like the feistier Mitt?

Either way, unlike four years ago, when Florida marked the end of Romney’s campaign, the state breathed fresh life into his campaign on Tuesday night. He heads into February with a massive warchest, two wins in four contests and an establishment that is hoping to bring the battle to a close.

2. February is uncharted territory

Newt Gingrich is not giving up. Neither is Rick Santorum. And Ron Paul is continuing with his delegate slog.

Yes, we have written some version of that after some of the past contests. But it remains true.

Gingrich, in the clearest and, despite his loss, strongest election night speech he has given, has demonstrated he is serious about marching forward, no matter that the odds get longer after Florida.

And February will be the first month since voting started without a glut of debates. There isn’t one scheduled until Feb. 22, and before then come some caucus campaigns that Gingrich is largely bypassing (he is heading to Nevada ostensibly for the caucuses, but just as likely to meet with Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate and Gingrich benefactor).

It’s still not clear precisely what map Gingrich and Santorum will follow in the coming weeks, or how they will keep their names in the mix. Paul’s path is far clearer, as he makes bids in caucuses for which he’s spent months organizing.

Also unclear is how Gingrich will sustain the media coverage that has been the lifeblood of his underfunded effort after Romney’s lopsided victory.

In the meantime, Romney will continue with fundraisers and staged events, looking to outshine his underfunded competitors.

Gingrich needs a very solid showing in the Southern states that hold primaries on Super Tuesday. But how all this plays out until then — and how Romney addresses advertising in the Super Tuesday states — is an open question.

3. Conservatives are still resisting Romney

No matter how heavily he won certain portions of Florida, the restored front-runner is still unable to lock down certain swaths of the GOP electorate.

Until he does, questions will remain about his ability to be the standard-bearer for a party that has roiled with populist rage for much of the past three years.

According to exit poll data, Romney lost “very conservative voters” — who made up 33 percent of the Florida voters — to Gingrich, 43 percent to 29 percent. While Romney won 51 percent to 32 percent among “somewhat conservative” voters, he lost evangelical voters to Gingrich, albeit by a small margin, 39 percent to 36 percent.

And 41 percent of those polled said Romney isn’t conservative enough.

This is why Gingrich has an opening to keep going, and why Santorum is hanging on in case the former House speaker blows himself up again.

But Gingrich, who came in second in Florida and has been able to raise more money than Santorum, now has a few weeks to regroup and see if he can find a consistent message that will resonate with the base that vaulted him to first place in South Carolina.

Given the proportional delegate rules, roughly 95 percent of delegates are still to be allocated in upcoming races — which could mean, as Gingrich has vowed, a long spring.

4. Hispanic voters gave Romney a boost

Despite Gingrich’s potential appeal among Florida’s Hispanic immigrants, it was Romney who won more than half of the crucial voting bloc’s support.

Romney’s strong showing came despite a somewhat cool initial reception at the Hispanic Leadership Network in Florida last week and his language against “amnesty” during the Iowa caucuses.

Florida’s Hispanic community, dominated by Cubans and Puerto Ricans, tends to vote on specific issues that don’t always resonate widely outside Florida. But the vote tally is one that Romney’s camp will take heart from, given the role that Hispanic voters will play as a swing bloc in a general election.

5. There is no ‘new normal’ for campaigns

Gingrich has focused on running a nontraditional campaign, as he has put it, but certain time-honored rules still apply.

Which rules? Negative campaigning works. Ground games are important. And so is money.

Despite some public boasting by Team Romney about how it beat back Gingrich after South Carolina, the reality is that the tactics the campaign employed weren’t particularly novel — it aired a barrage of negative ads, trotted out surrogates to make its case and rattle Gingrich, and looked up opposition research on its rival.

All of those things require organization, and Romney is the only candidate who has one besides Paul, whose aims and campaign style are different. It’s also why Romney was able to bank a huge early vote lead in Florida, where the turnout in this primary declined by more than 200,000 votes from last time.

 

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Syracuse: Keeping It In The Family

January 31st, 2012 in Abuse, America, Leadership, Politics, Sports | No Comments »

Bernie Fine Scandal: Fine’s Wife’s Sexual Encounter with Victim Adds Wild Twist

It’s no surprise that police searched Syracuse basketball assistant Bernie Fine’s house, but a recorded phone call between Fine’s wife, Laurie Fine, and one of Fine’s alleged child sex abuse victims has produced a bizarre twist that is almost too wild to fathom.

ESPN.com’s Outside the Lines broke the story and aired parts of the legally recorded phone call. During the call, a woman whose voice matches Fine’s wife, according to a voice-recognition expert hired by ESPN, alludes to something inappropriate happening between her and the alleged victim, Bobby Davis.

In the video report by OTL featured above the ESPN.com story, Davis confirms that the two had sexual intercourse when he was 18, so while the alleged act would have been legal, the rest of the phone call points to just how inappropriate it was.

While we don’t hear Fine’s wife come right out and say it, the writing is on the wall in the interview. It’s not clear what happened based on that phone call, but Davis saying the two had sex does not seem out of the question when you hear the audio of the call.

“The issue at hand is that he had no business doing what he did to you,” Laurie Fine allegedly said in the call. “You know what? And neither did I, because I really helped screw you up a little more, too.”

Earlier this month, Davis and stepbrother Mike Lang told ESPN they were each molested by Bernie Fine when they were Syracuse ball boys over 25 years ago.

So just how much did Fine’s wife know about the alleged abuse?

“I know everything that went on, you know,” she said, according to ESPN. “I know everything that went on with him. … Bernie has issues, maybe that he’s not aware of, but he has issues. … And you trusted somebody you shouldn’t have trusted.”

The entire exchange is sickening. Those who were outraged by the indifference put on display in the Penn State scandal have to be equally outraged by this phone call.

The woman alleged to be Laurie Fine shed some light on why she didn’t intervene, saying in the call, “If it was another girl like I told you, it would be easy to step in because you know what you’re up against. … (When) it’s another guy, you can’t compete with that. It’s just wrong, and you were a kid. You’re a man now, but you were a kid then.”

It’s tough to comprehend how she could possibly know about the abuse in her own home and not do anything about it, but her sleeping with the victim when it became legal to do so, if this is all true, makes this case even stranger.

She should be charged with endangering the welfare of a child, failure to report a crime. How could she blame the victim by saying that he trusted someone he shouldn’t have? She is just as guilty as he is. If he’s guilty of the 2 boys, he’s probably guilty of many more.

Strange stuff. I really have no idea as to what the truth is. But the details that are being revealed are quite disturbing.

boeheim’s hard stance on this is going to cost him. really dumb move. reminds me of all those politicians who say they never had an affair but then you immediately see something on voice mail or email.

 

 

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Bare Knuckles Don’t Go On Wall Street

January 31st, 2012 in Politics | No Comments »

Romney Can’t Rumble By CHARLES M. BLOW

 

Mitt Romney just doesn’t know how to rumble. It comes across as more of a fumble. Sometimes a mumble. And ultimately a stumble.

The man is terrible when he’s on the attack. He looked utterly uncomfortable with confrontation, like someone running into a machete melee brandishing a paté knife.

Monday night, Romney needed to take Gingrich down a peg or two and remind the Republican voters of Florida and the rest of America that he is their best chance of being competitive with Barack Obama. He failed. He just doesn’t have it in him.

But that didn’t stop him from trying. Romney opened the debate doing his best. For one, he attacked Gingrich for his role as an “influence peddler” for Freddie Mac. The message could have worked, were it not for the messenger. Romney simply couldn’t deliver the lines in a way that felt natural.

Gingrich, anticipating an attack, shifted his persona from the heinous Mr. Hyde to a somewhat jocular Dr. Jekyll. Gingrich actually managed a degree of front-runner’s magnanimity. He is a chameleon. This only made Romney’s feeble attacks appear all the more feeble.

And Gingrich knows Romney’s weakness. He squirms like a worm on a hook whenever someone points out his wealth.

In the middle of Romney’s attack, Gingrich went right for it:

Gingrich: What’s the gross revenue of Bain in the years you were associated with it? What’s the gross revenue?

Romney, stammering a bit: Very substantial. But I think it’s irrelevant compared with the fact you were working for Freddie Mac.

Gingrich, to audible chuckles from the otherwise quiet crowd: Wait a minute. Very substantial?

“Very substantial” is just the kind of non-answer answer that makes people suspicious. It’s not that he doesn’t know, but that he doesn’t want to tell. In the same vein, Romney is constantly “not apologizing” for getting filthy rich by buying companies and putting them through a wood chipper. His non-apologies reek of guilt and shame, which in turn puts people’s antenna up. Something is amiss.

When Brian Williams, the debate’s moderator, asked Romney if there would be any surprises in his tax returns Romney said:

But I paid all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more. I don’t think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes.… You’ll see my income, how much taxes I’ve paid, how much I’ve paid to charity. You’ll see how complicated taxes can be. And will there will discussion? Sure. Will it be an article? Yeah. But is it entirely legal and fair? Absolutely. I’m proud of the fact that I pay a lot of taxes.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds to me like an awful lot of foot shuffling for an answer to such a simple question. Romney’s awkward answers about his money are invariably more damaging than the question would have suggested.

Very late Monday night Romney released his tax returns for 2010 and his estimated tax returns for 2011 — all 550 pages of them. That’s an entire ream of paper, plus some. According to The Times, Romney had a total income of $45 million for the two years, and, according to The Washington Post, his effective taxes rates were nearly 14 percent and 15.4 percent in 2010 and 2011, respectively.

So: Romney can’t attack and can’t defend. That could prove his undoing.

Romney has all the advantages – the money, the organization, the backing of most of the Republican establishment – but none of the grit. And that’s what he needs and must muster. He already has a huge hurdle with many conservatives who view him with distrust, if not outright disgust, and who have spent the entire campaign season searching for his replacement.

Since South Carolina, they are taking a shine to Gingrich, again. According to a Monday report from Gallup:

Newt Gingrich has all but erased Mitt Romney’s 23-percentage-point lead of a week ago among Republican voters nationally, and the two candidates are now essentially tied, at 29% for Romney and 28% for Gingrich.

If Gingrich maintains his momentum — Newtmentum as it has come to be called online — and wins the Florida primary, it will be hard for Romney to continue to make the case to his own supporters, let alone the rest of Republican America, that he should be their David to the Obama campaign Goliath.

Romney’s strongest selling point had been that he was the most electable, that he was the Republican candidate who would be most able to attract the moderate, independent voters that it would take to win in November. But that argument falls apart if you can’t even attract your own party’s voters.

Mr. Milquetoast and his waffles don’t appeal to red-meat Republicans. They want a fighter, not a fumbler.

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