Democrats vs the GOP in the USA elections

[garfield]

I mean apart from the Giraffe and chips of course.

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I'm sure I faintly heard a flea fart.

In fact, I heard that faint farting sound twice since I last posted in this thread.

It was so insignificant, it would have to have come from a flea.

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From the Los Angeles Times....

Barack Obama takes command in second presidential debate

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM - Wednesday, October 17, 2012


Barack Obama takes command in second presidential debate. — Cartoon: David Horsey/Los Angeles Times/October 16, 2012.

IF THE Barak Obama who showed up for the second presidential debate had shown up for the first debate, there is a good chance Republicans would now be sullenly turning their thoughts to 2016 and arguing over how they got tricked into nominating a loser two elections in a row.

The Obama who did show up for that first debate breathed new life into Romney's candidacy by being lifeless himself. Tuesday night, though, the president was in command. He reinvigorated his own campaign by delivering the best debate performance of his political career.

Romney was still good, but, this time, he had a top-notch opponent to deal with and, at times, looked just a bit rattled. The fact that he brought up the 47% issue himself at the very end of the debate, thereby giving Obama a perfect setup to deliver a powerful final punch, suggests that Romney’s mental discipline was slipping. Why else would he have provided the president such a wide opening to attack on the very issue that has most damaged Romney’s fall campaign — his private diatribe against the half of Americans he thinks are societal leeches living off the federal government?

Some think Obama clearly won the debate — early polls by CNN and CBS gave Obama the edge — some call it a draw, but few people beyond the walls of the Fox News studio are contending that Romney was the winner. Thus, the third and final debate on Monday is now teed up as a grand finale to a very long campaign. It should be a heavyweight political showdown with both men in top form — two guys who do not seem especially fond of each other going for a knockout punch.

Post-debate, there was some speculation among the talking heads on cable TV that female voters may have been turned off by too much testosterone on display. Women want to see congenial candidates commiserating over common ground and consensus solutions, it was said. Really? Where is the evidence of that? Obama was quite congenial — almost deferential — in debate No.1 and he was seen by women, just like men, as a wimp who may not have the right stuff to be commander in chief.

What people say they want — bipartisanship with no negativity — is belied by how they vote. A forceful candidate who stands for something wins respect, and going on the attack usually is an effective tactic. That is because people who know what they believe want a leader to stand up for them and crush the other guy. It seems to be people who really do not have strong beliefs — those callow ranks of undecided voters who seem desperate to find that one last snippet of information that might finally end their vacillation — who object to the rough and tumble of politics.

The most dispiriting thing I saw on debate night was the MSNBC interview with a focus group of undecided voters. These people seemed to have no capacity for critical thinking and scant ability to discern fact from flimflam.

One woman who said she now was leaning toward Romney said it was because he had a strong record as governor of Massachusetts and a five-point plan to fix the economy. Oh, really? Why did she believe Romney was a good governor? Well, Romney said it, so it must be true. And did she know any details about the five-point “plan” beyond Romney’s own brief talking points? How could she? There is no plan; it is mere aspiration.

This is a battle that is very likely to go down to the last hour of election day. I hope the victor is chosen by the legions of committed voters who know where they stand. I hope it is won by whichever campaign has the energy to get the most voters to the polls. I hope such a monumental choice does not come down to the vague, unsettled and uninformed gut feelings of the undecideds.

We need voters as tough and smart as the candidates.

www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-obama-takes-command-20121016,0,7793992.story

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From the Los Angeles Times....

Right-wing lies about Obama are greeted by willing believers

By DAVID HORSEY | 10:39PM - Thursday, October 18, 2012


The flowing sewer of right-wing Internet scare stories. — Cartoon: David Horsey/Los Angeles Times/October 18, 2012.

IN ADDITION to the relentless onslaught of mostly negative ads from the Romney and Obama campaigns and their affiliated "super PACs," the good people of Ohio are finding themselves targeted by a right-wing conspiracy maven who is dispensing a DVD that pushes beyond the birthers into a new level of paranoid fantasy.

"Dreams From My Real Father" is being sent to 1 million Ohio voters. The DVD makes the claim that, rather than being the son of a student from Kenya, the president was sired by a communist from Chicago named Frank Marshall Davis. Tens of thousands of lucky citizens of Nevada and New Hampshire have also found the DVD in the mail, thanks to the film's director and producer, Joel Gilbert.

In an interview with BuzzFeed, Gilbert said his company, Highway 61 Entertainment, is making money from this film, even though he is giving so many copies away. He would not say who is paying for dissemination of all those free discs.

"We're a private media company, a journalistic company that's privately held and we don't disclose the nature or makeup of our finances," he told BuzzFeed.

Well, the claim to be a "journalistic" organization is about as dubious as the claim that Obama is the offspring of a commie. Still, if Gilbert were merely out to make money with this stuff, that at least would be an understandable explanation for why a person would peddle such a fabrication. But Gilbert seems to really believe it. A video on Gilbert’s website shows him talking to an unspecified group at the National Press Club and seeming very earnest about his contention that Obama was groomed from childhood as a revolutionary Marxist.

If Obama wins reelection, one would assume that, after he leaves office in January 2017 and the United States is still a free society with a capitalist economy, the conspiracy theorists will finally admit they were wrong — but I would not count on it. Conservative Christian groups that, four years ago, predicted Obama would have revealed himself as some version of the Antichrist by now have simply adjusted their schedule for the looming victory of Satan. In the same way, the paranoid imagineers of the right will come up with some creative explanation for why Obama, having achieved the nefarious goal for which he was secretly trained, ended up governing only slightly to the left of Bob Dole.

The list of nutty fabrications about Obama, his administration and Democrats is long. Here's a small sample from FactCheck.org:

• Obama intends to force a complete ban on all weapons for U.S. citizens through a United Nations treaty. Total paranoid fantasy — Obama has actually broadened the number of places where citizens can carry guns.

• Barack and Michelle Obama surrendered their law licenses to avoid ethics charges. Another big lie.

• This dictatorial president has issued 900 executive orders, some creating martial law. Wrong — he's signed 139 executive orders, none establishing extraordinary powers.

• The government bought 79% of the vehicles sold by General Motors in June. Nope, completely false.

• The Democratic National Convention hosted a Muslim prayer service while rejecting prayers from a Catholic cardinal. Another falsehood — the Muslim service took place in a park and the cardinal gave the convention’s final prayer.

• Obama plans to deny emergency brain surgery to patients over 70, do away with the National Day of Prayer and get rid of the White House Christmas tree. Once again, lie, lie, lie.

The list of fibs goes on and on and on. It is bad enough that somebody out there is busy whipping up this stream of mendacity to skew the political debate; it is worse that so many millions of Americans willingly believe this lunacy because they cannot accept that Obama is a legitimate, real American president. Worst of all are the many Republican Congress members and candidates who not only fail to speak out against this craziness from their supporters, but too often give legitimacy to the lies by eagerly repeating them.

www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-right-wing-lies-20121018,0,1316436.story

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From the Los Angeles Times....

Politics can be fun: Lindsay Lohan and ‘binders full of women’

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM - Monday, October 22, 2012



THE 2012 presidential campaign has largely been a nasty, uninspiring slog toward election day, but there have been moments of hilarity, wonderful absurdity and even a bit of hope – reminders that politics can be fun.

My cartoon today is in that spirit. When the starlet with the extra-messy life, Lindsay Lohan, announced she was likely voting for the ultra-straight-laced Mitt Romney, I just had to get the two together in a cartoon. And I could not resist tossing in a reference to women in binders. In the second presidential debate, Romney said that, in seeking more females for positions in his gubernatorial Cabinet in Massachusetts, he came up with “binders full of women.” It was the latest odd example of how the Republican nominee sometimes packages his thoughts, and it immediately went viral.

The funniest riffs on Romney’s comment came in a flurry of bogus product reviews on the Amazon Web page where binders and other office supplies are sold. Here is an excerpt from one: “Thank goodness for this binder. Now, each day when dinnertime rolls around, I’m able to select a stereotype-friendly woman from the binder to go home and cook. This leaves me free to fritter away the entire evening at work, while still collecting the full 72% paycheck. And my boss is none the wiser! Thanks to this binder, I’m on Easy Street!”

If Tuesday’s debate comment caused him some unintended grief, Romney was intentionally funny on Thursday at the Al Smith dinner in New York. It was a welcome respite from the brass-knuckled campaign. All the men were dressed in white tie and tails, and that was a relief for him, Romney said — after all the wardrobe changes required on the campaign trail, it was nice to “wear what Ann and I wear around the house.”

Earlier in the evening, President Obama had taped an appearance on Jon Stewart’s news satire program, "The Daily Show." With Stewart, he played it very straight and presidential. But when Obama took his turn at the microphone at the Al Smith event, he immediately went for the funny stuff, telling everyone to take their seats, “otherwise Clint Eastwood will yell at them.”

Alluding to his disparate performances in the two debates, Obama said the second go-round went much better because “I felt really well-rested after the nice long nap I had in the first debate.”

Romney took some funny jabs at the president, who was sitting just a seat away, separated only by the imposing figure of Catholic Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan. The GOP nominee said the grueling campaign would be even more difficult without having someone to rely on, someone without whom a candidate could not go on another day: “I have my wife, Ann; he has Bill Clinton.”

The same night the two candidates were doing stand-up comedy at the Waldorf Astoria, super-surrogate Clinton was sharing a stage at Cuyahoga Community College in Parma, Ohio, with Bruce Springsteen – and that had to have been fun.

Before introducing the working-class troubadour for a seven-song set, the ex-president told the crowd: “This is the first time in my life I ever got to be the warm-up act for Bruce Springsteen. I am qualified, because I was born in the USA and, unlike one of the candidates for president, I keep all my money here.”

Springsteen avoided comedy and mostly stuck with music. In brief remarks, though, he delivered a pointed, it’s-time-to-stop-whining-and-grow-up message to liberals and young people disappointed with Obama’s first term. He recalled election night 2008 as "an evening when you can feel the locked doors of the past finally being blown open to new possibilities. But then, then comes a hard daily struggle to make those possibilities real in a world that is brutally resistant to change.”

The Boss went on, saying, "I'm here today because I've lived long enough to know that despite those galvanizing moments in history, the future is rarely a tide rushing in. It's often a slow march, inch by inch, day after long day, and I believe we are in the midst of those long days right now. And I’m here today because I believe President Obama feels those days in his bones, for all the 100% of us."

No, politics does not have to be unrelentingly grim, though sometimes it takes a poet like Springsteen to provide a voice of inspiration.

www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-politics-can-be-fun-20121021,0,903473.story

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From the Los Angeles Times....

Presidential debate: Romney says ‘me too’ to Obama policies

By DAVID HORSEY | 11:42PM - Monday, October 22, 2012


Presidential debate 3; Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. — Cartoon: David Horsey/Los Angeles Times/October 22, 2012.

ANOTHER DEBATE brought out another version of Mitt Romney. This third time around, the chameleon candidate was not the hard-charging neo-con hawk of the primaries. Instead, he talked about peace, negotiations and using military power as a last resort.

He also was not the pushy CEO who commandeered the first debate or the combative sparring partner of Debate 2. From the first minute in this discussion of foreign policy, President Obama tried to pick a fight, but Romney was just ducking punches. Heck, after the Romney smack-down Jim Lehrer suffered back in the first debate, Bob Schieffer, Monday night’s moderator, was barely even badgered by this kinder and gentler Mitt.

Yes, Romney took shots at Obama's foreign policy, calling it weak and apologetic, but then he proceeded to agree with the nearly every aspect of what the president has done, from Libya to Iran. He abandoned his criticism of Obama's timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and said he would bring the soldiers home on the same schedule. He also eschewed past complaints that Obama had abandoned Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and indicated he too would have let Mubarak take the fall.

Romney's foreign policy as of Monday night seems to be "me too!"

Will this worry the hard-line Republican foreign policy cadre? No, why should it? Romney has proved time and again just how malleable he is on any and all issues. These tough guys who brought us the Iraq war know they will be back in charge at the Pentagon and at the State Department in a Romney administration. For now, they will give him a pass to do anything it takes to get elected.

In the eyes of voters, did meek equal weak? Probably not. Though there was general agreement among the punditocracy, including the fire-breathers at Fox News, that Obama won the debate, and though that view was backed up by all the instant polls, Romney walked away with no more than a scratch. His goals were to commit no gaffes, dispel fears that he is eager to rush into another war and sneak in one more recitation about his five-point plan for the economy. He achieved what he set out to do.

Sure, there were moments when Obama made Romney look like the naive new kid auditioning for a role on the international stage. Responding to Romney’s expression of concern that the Navy has fewer ships now than it did in 1916, the president sarcastically suggested that maybe Romney had failed to notice that the military also has fewer bayonets and horses these days and, oh, by the way, there are now these really big ships called aircraft carriers on which airplanes land.

Obama got in another dig when he recalled his trip to Israel during the 2008 campaign, which included a visit to families in a border town that had been decimated by Hamas missiles, and compared it with Romney's Israel tour earlier this year in which the centerpiece event was a big campaign fundraiser.

It all added up to a win for Obama, but not necessarily a loss for Romney. Today, Romney will be back to the core effort of the campaign's final two weeks: trying to change the electoral math by flipping Florida, North Carolina and Virginia his way and then moving on to the campaign's ground zero — Ohio, the place where just a handful of voters will decide who will run America’s foreign policy for the next four years.

www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-romney-says-me-too-20121022,0,3853891.story

[garfield]

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From the Los Angeles Times....

Campaign 2012: All voters matter, but Ohio voters matter the most

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM - Thursday, October 25, 2012



IF YOU live in Ohio, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are giving you a lot of love. But if you reside in California or Alabama, you may feel neglected and ignored by the candidates for president. Like parents in a big, noisy family, all their attention goes to the troublesome kids, not the compliant, quiet ones.

There has never been much doubt that states such as California, New York, Massachusetts and Washington would give their electoral votes to the president, and no doubt that Romney could depend on states such as Alabama, South Carolina, Texas and South Dakota to be solidly in his camp. All but about 10 states lined up months ago for one candidate or the other. Now it looks as if the number of states still up for grabs has dropped to seven.

As a result, there is really not a national campaign going on. All the effort and money for many weeks has been focused on voters in the swing states. Since, under the U.S. Constitution, the electoral vote, not the popular vote, determines who will sit in the Oval Office, and since the winner in each state takes all of that state’s electoral votes (with Nebraska and Maine being the two outliers where there is a possibility of splitting the vote), a presidential election really amounts to 50 distinct elections.

With as many as 43 of those 50 elections already decided, the real campaign is happening in just the remaining seven. That means any regional concerns folks in California or Alabama might have can be ignored by the contenders, who do all of their pandering in Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Iowa and the few other places that have the potential to pick the winner.

Some people blame the electoral college system for this imbalance, but there is more to it than that. The electoral college has been part of presidential politics as long as Americans have been choosing presidents, but only in much more recent times have candidates determined they can ignore most of the country and concentrate on just a few states. What has altered the dynamic is the vastly greater amount of information campaigns now have to work with.

It began in the 1930s, when the first serious polls were conducted. Until then, it was difficult to know with any great precision who was voting and why. In subsequent decades, polls became far more accurate and frequent. This has allowed campaigns to know with greater certainty how they are doing at any moment in a campaign and where their best opportunities for finding more votes may lie.

But even more than polls, the science of marketing has gotten so sophisticated that polls are sometimes not even necessary in the search for likely supporters. In the Internet Age, mountains of data are available about all of us and it can be sifted to pinpoint how any individual is going to vote.

If you are a single female, living in Pasadena, working at a university, driving a Prius, shopping at Whole Foods, watching "The Daily Show," reading books by Anne Tyler, listening to music by k.d. lang and vacationing in Rome, the Romney campaign does not need to waste time trying to get your vote. If you are a male, living in Tuscaloosa, managing an auto parts store, attending a Foursquare Gospel church twice a week and listening to Toby Keith in your Dodge Ram pickup as you drive into the countryside for a day of deer hunting, the Obama campaign is not likely to spend a cent on you.

It turns out most of us are the predictable sum of the things we do, drive, read, buy, eat and otherwise consume. Political marketers can fairly accurately say how we will vote because of that. And so the less predictable citizens among us in the least predictable states are seen as impact players, while the rest of us merely sit on the sidelines until we can cast our predictable votes.

www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-ohio-voters-20121024,0,2174229.story

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From the Los Angeles Times....

Mitt Romney chokes on Richard Mourdock's rape comment

By DAVID HORSEY | 11:31PM - Thursday, October 25, 2012



INDIANA Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, the tea party usurper who took down Sen. Richard Lugar in the Republican primary, created the biggest political buzz of the week by uttering the following sentence in a televised debate: “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, it is something that God intended to happen.”

In an exercise that is becoming repetitive this year, slightly more sane Republicans like Mitt Romney and John McCain were forced to disassociate themselves from the comments of one of their political compatriots — not that Romney put much distance between himself and Mourdock. Romney is maintaining his vigorous support of Mourdock, since keeping the Indiana seat in GOP hands is key to a Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate.

Besides, if he were to forsake Mourdock because the man does not favor an abortion exemption for women impregnated by rapists, he would also have to cut ties to as many as 11 other Republican Senate candidates who hold the same position. Among them is the rape-doubting Republican from Missouri, Senate hopeful Todd Akin, who famously offered the interesting idea that women cannot get pregnant if they are victims of “legitimate rape” because their bodies will just say no.

The fact is, in Republican circles, banning abortion in nearly all cases is no longer a radical position — it’s even part of the platform adopted at the national convention in Tampa — so Romney has stayed studiously vague on the issue. This, of course, is not the case with Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, who was one of the proud sponsors of an anti-abortion bill in the House that was so stringent it would also ban in vitro fertilization.

If asked about Ryan’s stance, Romney could simply repeat the statement his campaign sent out for him when asked about Mourdock: “I disagree with his views on rape and incest, but I still support him.”

Rape and incest, huh? It is hardly surprising that the man who might be president tolerates more than one view on those two issues. Romney has tried out multiple positions on everything else and, chances are, he will find himself agreeing with Mourdock in no time at all.

www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-mourdocks-rape-comment-20121025,0,1696827.story

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From the Los Angeles Times....

Romney victory would vindicate right-wing smears of Obama

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM - Tuesday, October 30, 2012



IT IS impossible to know if Mitt Romney would turn out to be a good, bad or a mediocre president, but one certain downside of a Romney victory is that it would reward the most venal forces in American politics.

It only starts with the kind of campaign Romney has run. He and his "super PAC" allies used a mountain of dollars to produce unending waves of attack ads that swamped the messages of his Republican primary rivals, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. In the general election, Romney cranked it up a notch. President Obama’s own money machine paid for a slew of hard-hitting attacks against Romney that employed exaggeration and selective facts, but none of the Obama ads reached the same low level of deception as those put up by Romney as he zeroed in on the president.

Of course, disgustingly misleading attack ads have become ubiquitous at all levels of politics this year. Whether Romney wins or loses, that is unlikely to change. Still, seeing a campaign for president propelled to victory on so many outright falsehoods cannot be good for the republic.

That would be the lesser of the ill effects of a Romney win, though. Much worse is that the right wing’s broader onslaught of derision and lies against the president that began even before he took office would have achieved its goal. Barack Obama may, or may not, deserve reelection. But no man with as much decency as Obama exhibits in both his private and public life deserves the contempt that has been dumped on him by arch-conservative ideologues, talk show ranters and Internet goons.

From Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Donald Trump to all the anonymous creators of the wild fabrications that churn out of websites and go viral in emails, the relentless vilification of Obama has been unprecedented. Sure, every president suffers unfair criticism. Many of our most effective presidents, from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, have been slandered and hounded by critics. But Obama’s detractors have plumbed new and revolting depths of mendacity.

Obama’s birthplace, his paternity, his religion, his academic attainments, his citizenship and his loyalty to the country have all been called into question by people who feel no moral qualms about spreading fabrications and untruths. Any unfair tactic, any lie is justified in order to “take back America” from someone they refuse to accept as a legitimate president, despite the indisputable reality that he was elected by a majority of American voters in a near-landslide of electoral votes.

It is a false equivalence to say the left has been guilty of similar smears during the administrations of Republican presidents. In those past instances, all but a few Democratic elected officials shunned such slanders. The same was true for all but the most rabid liberal commentators. But most of today’s Republican leaders stay silent in the face of the lies and many eagerly repeat them, while leading conservative pundits give the endless falsehoods credence, not an honest critique.

The right wing’s eagerness to engage in deceit has distorted credible conservatism and corrupted political discourse. It has turned the Grand Old Party into a rigid and narrow ideological club that tries to purge any Republican who displays even a hint of moderation or willingness to compromise.

The ever-waffling Romney is not their perfect candidate, but, for now, that does not matter. He offers their one and only chance to drive the usurper, Obama, from the White House. That has been the right wing’s objective every minute of every day for four years, and vindication of their dishonest, un-American crusade would be the worst result of Mitt Romney’s election.

www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-right-wing-smears-20121029,0,7336544.story

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JOE BENNETT: Musing on the Mitt Romney I know

Mitt Romney? That rich, white man running for president? Yes, I know him!

The Dominion Post | 5:00AM - Wednesday, 31 October 2012


WANNABE: Mitt Romney, following in his father's mighty footsteps.

MY many American friends keep pestering me. They want to know whether to vote for the black communist Muslim who doesn't have a birth certificate because he appeared fully formed in Chicago the day after the Roswell Incident, or for the rich white man with whom I roomed at Harvard Business School in the early 70s.

“Make up your own minds,” I tell them, but my friends take their democratic duty seriously and like to be informed. They bombard me with piercing political questions.

“Tell us about Romney,” they beg. “Is it true he had a breed of sheep named after him? At what age did he start tying dogs to the roofs of cars? What sort of dogs? What brand of car? How did he cope with convertibles? What was his highest tally on a single roof?”

I have never been one to tell tales out of school, but the truth never hurts. So, “yes”, I tell them respectively, “18, poodles, Cadillacs, with difficulty, and seven”. That's enough for most of them, as you'd expect. Off they toddle to make their mark for the Republican cause.

But others want more. They want to know his character.

“In every Harvard intake,” I tell them, “there are always a few, a very few, who bear the stamp of greatness. They may not in the end go on to great things — the booze may undo them, or the calumny of rivals, or a sense of the futility of striving, or just plain bad luck, but there is something about them that marks them out — an aura, a numinous and indefinable quality that charges the atmosphere of any room they enter. But perhaps you'd rather hear about Mitt.”

“Yes, yes,” they squeal, “tell us about Mitt.” And my mind goes back to one blistering June afternoon in 73. I was lying in bed, immersed in a thriller by Maynard Keynes when Mitt burst into the room, a poodle in one hand, a tie-down in the other.

“Let's go for a drive,” he said. That was so typical of Mitt — impulsive, excitable, different. Back then we may not have been as sophisticated as young people now, but we knew how to make our own fun.

Mitt pressed a button on the wall and within seconds the car elevator had delivered us a Cadillac. As we powered through the leafy lanes of Massachusetts, scattering like chaff the construction workers, schoolteachers and other layabouts who see themselves as victims, Mitt slid a cassette into the dashboard and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir drowned out the yelps of the poodle.

Oh, the heady days of youth, the idealism, the sense that all things were possible, especially in the 70s, the days of counterculture, of independence, where everything was up for questioning, where mere precedent meant nothing.

“Mitt,” I said, “that religion of yours.”

“You mean my beloved and enormously profitable church created by the convicted fraudster Joseph Smith,” asked Mitt, and you could hear the rigorous critical intelligence in his tone, “the rules of which were inscribed on golden tablets that only Joseph Smith ever saw, tablets handed down by the angel Moroni whom only Joseph Smith ever saw, the church whose first 12 apostles in 1835 included my great-great-grandfather Parley P Pratt, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints?”

“That's the one,” I said. “I've never quite understood the two ofs in the title.”

“Oh Joe,” said Mitt. “Who cares about a brace of confusing prepositions? We are young, free, inquisitive and about to change the world. I have a dream, Joe. It comes in the form of a five-point plan. First, I'm going to make vast wealth from business management.”

“Like your father did,” I said.

“Yes,” said Mitt. “Then I'm going to become a state governor.”

“Like your father did,” I said.

“Yes,” said Mitt. “Then when I turn 60 I shall make a run for president.”

“Like your father did,” I said.

“Yes,” said Mitt. “And I shall fail.”

“Like your father did,” I said.

“Yes,” said Mitt. “But unlike my father, I shall run again four years later and I shall shake babies and kiss hands and adopt any position required of me in order to become president and then the world will honour my iconoclasm and my independence of mind and my refusal to follow in the footsteps of others by naming a breed of sheep after me. Oh, and I'll nuke Iran. Daddy would like that.”

www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/joe-bennett/7883200/Musing-on-the-Mitt-Romney-I-know

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From the Los Angeles Times....

Will Obama and Romney see climate change in Hurricane Sandy?

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM - Wednesday, October 31, 2012


Obama and Romney ignore the challenge of climate change. — Cartoon: David Horsey/Los Angeles Times.

HURRICANE SANDY's devastating intrusion into the final days of the presidential race would have at least one positive result if it inspired President Obama and Mitt Romney to finally address a huge issue they have ignored throughout the long campaign: climate change.

After the firestorms that swept the West amid a merciless drought and the killer tornadoes and freak storms that battered the Midwest, South and East Coast, Sandy is just 2012's latest screaming reminder that our weather is becoming a much more destructive force. Sandy is an example of a weather phenomenon we have not seen before — a confluence of hurricane, cold air and an altered jet stream that created a monster storm stretching from the Caribbean to Canada and from the Atlantic to Chicago.

Until recently, climate scientists were careful not to attribute any single weather event to global climate change. But, in the last couple of days, a number of scientists have filed Twitter posts that essentially say, "We told you so." For years, they have described what the effects of global warming would look like; this year, many of them are saying, "This is it."

While the rest of the world long ago moved beyond asking if climate change is real to accepting it as a fact, the United States has stalled in a ridiculous debate. Romney leads a party in which a majority believes that climate change is a hoax and the rest — including Romney — avoid talking about the issue, lest they be seen as anti-capitalist, bug-loving granola eaters. Obama could speak to the issue if he wished, but he avoids it too, perhaps not wanting to give the right-wingers another reason to accuse him of plotting against America.

The issue cannot be skirted forever, though. Members of Congress can rant on about hoaxes and nefarious plots to destroy industry by curtailing CO2 emissions, but one day not too distant, even the science deniers will be unable to deny that a big bill is coming due. Rising sea levels, extended drought, raging wildfires and more frequent and more violent storms will have a huge economic cost.

Already, insurance companies are eyeing the exits, thinking that selling policies to cover natural disasters has become a very bad bet. When the insurance industry bails, government will have to pick up the expense of taking care of people who have been pummeled by weather and have lost homes, businesses and livelihoods as a result.

Cities and states face a big job ahead, dealing with floods, fires, shifting shorelines and paying for the manpower and infrastructure necessary to deal with those challenges. American agriculture will need to be revamped as farming and grazing land turns to dust in the heart of the country.

It is way past time for the federal government to develop a comprehensive plan for dealing with all of this. And it is truly unconscionable that our presidential candidates have ignored the issue, other than to spout a few gaseous sound bites about clean energy and green jobs.

To twist an old passage from the Bible, they that sow only hot air shall reap the whirlwind.

www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-hurricane-sandy-20121030,0,5019826.story

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From the Los Angeles Times....

Chris Christie and Hurricane Sandy give Obama a timely boost

By DAVID HORSEY | 11:50PM - Wednesday, October 31, 2012


Chris Christie's praise for Obama undercuts Romney. — Cartoon: David Horsey/Los Angeles Times.

ON HIS Comedy Central show Wednesday night, Stephen Colbert charged that hurricanes have a liberal bias — and who can disagree? Katrina sank President George W. Bush, Isaac knocked a day off the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, and now Sandy may be messing with Mitt.

Thanks to Hurricane Sandy, one of the Romney campaign's top surrogates has been standing before microphones and going on TV to rain praise on President Obama. Yes, Chris Christie, New Jersey's Republican governor, the guy who gave the keynote address in Tampa, has suddenly gotten all nonpartisan merely because his state has been devastated by a super storm. Where are his priorities?

Christie and the president toured the disaster scene together, looking and talking like a mutual admiration society and giving the distinct impression that they believe a national emergency is far more important than a presidential campaign. What’s a guy like Romney supposed to do with that with less than a week to go before election day?

What he did do was cancel a "victory rally" in Ohio — although it really was not canceled; it was just rebranded as a gathering to support the storm relief effort. Oddly enough, the event still featured a Romney campaign video from the GOP convention. Even more odd was the fact that Romney’s staff reportedly bought $5,000 worth of granola bars and canned goods at a nearby Wal-Mart, which they parceled out to attendees at the rally with instructions to hand the items to Romney as the TV cameras captured the moment.

Romney said the supplies would be trucked to someplace in New Jersey, even though the Red Cross says random shipments of food create a logistical headache for relief workers. Maybe they can dump them at Christie’s house after he is done hanging out with Obama.

In the course of this presidential campaign we have learned that Romney does one thing really well — he can debate like a champ. Beyond that, though, he is often the embodiment of awkward. Trying to disguise a campaign rally as a hurricane relief event is just a big reminder of pre-debate Romney, the fellow who nearly scuttled his own campaign in September with one misstep after another.

Meanwhile, Obama is getting the chance to appear compassionate, effective and, thanks to Christie, above politics. Looking presidential may only sway a few votes his way, but in a race that is going to the wire, just a few can make all the difference.

In every election, political junkies watch for an October surprise that might alter the dynamics of the election. This year, the surprise may have come in the form of a massively destructive storm. Pat Robertson and the religious right seem to find messages from God in every hurricane. If this one boosts Obama, they will have to do a serious reassessment of that idea. They may deduce that, like hurricanes, God has a liberal bias.

www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-chris-christie-boost-20121031,0,1044954.story

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One vexating issue that hasn't arisen in this debate...Calforniay's referendum at the election on wether to abolish the death penalty...so ok place your bets ladies and gents ...will they or won't they.

Since its an economic issue rather than moral conjercture I dare say they will ...

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Hmmmmm....I thought I had posted a thread about the topic of California and the death penalty at this group, but looking back through the forum I cannot find it, so perhaps I posted it at the former group which had the plug pulled on it.

I've got all of the relevant Los Angeles Times articles formatted on notepad documents parked in a USB memory stick so it would be a simple matter to simply post them to this group. I was actually reading an interesting article on the Los Angeles Times website when I got home from work in the wee hours of this morning and thinking I should post it to the thread I thought was at this group, but which was obviously at the former group.

[spindrift]

Didn't see it posted and thought it was worth mentioning..see you have started a thread on the subject will jump to there..

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From the Los Angeles Times....

Attack ads reach new lows in honesty and new highs in spending

By DAVID HORSEY | 2:29AM - Friday, November 02, 2012


Creators of political attack ads have sullied the 2012 presidential campaign. — Cartoon: David Horsey/Los Angeles Times/November 02, 2012.

TENS OF THOUSANDS of campaign ads have been purchased from television stations in the swing states this year. In Ohio, for the presidential race alone, spending on TV advertisements is at $181 million and mounting.

The majority of these ads are negative — and not just the mildly critical attacks of yore. Whoever is putting together political ads in 2012 has dispensed with any regard for decency, honesty or truth. For the voters who must suffer through them as the ads fill their television screens, the best rule of thumb is to assume they are all lies. It may not be the case in every instance, but accuracy is so rare that it is not worth the effort of trying to sift through the distortions and deceit to find the few nuggets of truth.

As the 2012 presidential race heads into its last weekend, it would be nice to discover that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on attack ads have been wasted — that voters simply shut them out or shut them off and find their information about the candidates from credible sources, such as professional news organizations.

If the hobgoblins of democracy who create these ads become convinced that they do not work, they might just stop and let us have our TVs back.

www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-attack-ads-20121102,0,5001427.story

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From the Los Angeles Times....

Tilted predictions point to an Obama victory — or not

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM - Tuesday, November 06, 2012



HERE'S A big announcement to kick off election day: President Obama is winning by a landslide in the David Horsey Totally Skewed Facebook Poll.

Monday night, I posted the following question on my Facebook page: “So, just for the heck of it, who wants to make a prediction on the presidential race?” The response was about 10 to 1 for Obama, which is no surprise since my extended circle of “friends” leans predominantly to the left. If my predecessors — Andy Malcom, the previous writer of the Top of the Ticket blog, and Michael Ramirez, The Times’ last editorial cartoonist — put out a similar question to their friends, there is no doubt Mitt Romney would be seen as inevitable. That is because I know who their friends are. Malcolm and Ramirez are two very talented guys, but they make Attila the Hun look like a community organizer.

Whatever the political stripes of the questioner or questionees, though, such a query posed to any group of voters can reveal the fears, anxieties and hopes that many Americans feel on election day. A woman named Ruth, for instance, posted this comment: “Oh God, I run in horror. Not sure I can even watch election night.” I can imagine both Obama lovers and Obama haters feeling the same way.

Ellen was worried about making any prediction at all — “What if we jinx it?” — while Heidi was more upbeat about prognosticating: “If I predict it, will it come true? Obama of course!”

John also is feeling a bit superstitious. “Much like a child waiting to see if that gift is under the tree on Christmas Day I am almost afraid to even think it, thinking somehow it may change if I want it so bad,” John wrote. “My desire is that all the polling is accurate and Obama gets his second term.”

Other folks were much more certain about how it would turn out. Ana Mari is calling it this way: “Obama, with tailwinds with Sandy.” Stacy agrees: “On Wednesday, we'll be saying Romney who?” But Bruce sees it completely differently: “Romney by a landslide.”

Then there is James, who wrote, “Obama should win, but I think FOX News already announced Romney won.”

Other predictions were prescriptive. “Obama will win electoral and popular vote with a modest margin,” Candace said. “Then, like George W, he should declare a mandate, as if he'd won by a landslide.” And some betrayed suspicions that the game is rigged. Fred is calling it for the challenger because Romney “and his son have invested in the company that supplies the voting machines to several key states.”

Like many pundits, several people fear a muddled outcome. My friend Sheila wrote from New York City to say, “I see another Florida-like debacle, with the alleged loser contesting the results. The in-person polls out here are a mess under the best of circumstances and circumstances after Sandy now are far from the best.”

John Stephen also predicts trouble: “I think Obama will likely either win both popular vote/electoral vote, or Romney will take popular vote while Obama takes electoral vote — and we'll have another Al Gore situation on our hands.”

A few respondents made specific predictions about how the electoral vote would split. Jerry took it even farther: “Incumbent wins, carries OH, get around 287 electoral votes. D's pick up one Senate seat, R's keep the House but with fewer solid votes. Insurgent doesn't concede for a couple of days while the stock markets dither …”

And then, there were the creative ones, like my cartooning colleague JP: “Obama will reveal he IS the alien lizard king when he unhinges his jaw and swallows Romney whole. While horrified, most people will admit Mitt had it coming.”

Kathleen expects the unexpected: “Michelle will wear faux fox; Romney's wife will bare her tattoo.”

The one person with the most irrefutable prediction was Joann. As she said, “Someone will lose, people will complain, other people will dance.”

I keep getting asked for my own prediction, as if I have some insider knowledge, when all I have to work with is the same conventional wisdom that everyone else draws from. Like my friend Mark, who calls himself “a data fan” and who believes the aggregate of the polls points to an Obama victory. I, too, think the numbers and the electoral map favor Obama — slightly. But I also think it is close enough that the ground game — the ability of each campaign to get their voters to the polls in the key states — may be decisive.

It is just possible that a small, unanticipated surge of voters for either Obama or Romney in the swing states could bring election night to a swift conclusion and give one or the other candidate something close to an electoral landslide. More likely, though, is a long, drawn-out squeaker of an election that is not decided for days or even weeks. If so, squadrons of lawyers will take over, recounts will ensue and Americans will become even more polarized, frustrated and angry.

Here is my only real prediction: Whatever happens on election day, we will muddle through, the republic will survive and the first aspirants for the 2016 presidential campaign will start wandering the back roads of Iowa and New Hampshire right after Groundhog Day.

www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-tilted-predictions-20121105,0,3686095.story

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From the Los Angeles Times....

Obama's victory is a harsh lesson for Republicans

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:02AM - Wednesday, November 07, 2012



THE PEOPLE have spoken. President Obama has won a chance to move beyond the stunted progress of his first term and, perhaps, become a historic president. On the losing side, the Republican Party remains shut out of the White House and has blown a chance to take over the U.S. Senate, largely because it catered to the narrow concerns of tea party zealots and social conservatives who imagined themselves as the only authentic Americans but who are, in fact, way out of step with most of the people in this country.

If Republicans fail to learn the lesson of this election they are fools. If they continue to let Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity set the angry, extreme tone for their philosophy; if they continue to let anti-science religious fundamentalists dictate their social agenda; and if they think Mitt Romney fell short because he was not conservative enough when, in fact, he only began to catch on with moderate voters when he suddenly veered from his self-proclaimed “severe conservatism” and transformed back into a Massachusetts moderate; then they are doomed to become a party of the past.

Obama was re-elected by a coalition representing what the United States is becoming. Sure, a lot of aging, parochial white people do not like it — they do not like gays getting married or Latinos getting a chance at citizenship or urban liberals telling them that we are not just a nation of self-reliant cowboys, but a diverse, multiracial society that needs to be more tolerant and economically egalitarian. But this was quite possibly the last election in which a party that seemed to represent only this traditional, white America had a shot at victory.

That does not mean a conservative cannot become president. A pragmatic fiscal conservative with an enlightened view of immigration and a tolerant attitude on social issues could do quite well. Romney could have run as just such a candidate. He certainly tried to pose as one in the final weeks of the campaign, but it was too late for him to take back all his primary campaign pandering to the right wing.

Speaker of the House John A. Boehner can take the first step in a new direction for the GOP as soon as Congress is back in session. Just because his party has gerrymandered its way into a fairly safe majority in the House does not mean he can continue to carry on as if this election did not happen. Boehner should make it clear the time has come for compromise and deal-making. He needs to tell the tea party purists in his caucus that they had their shot and it did not work. All the obstructionism and all the weird rhetoric about rape and birth control and birth certificates ultimately hurt the Republican cause.

The election was very close, but there is no disputing the outcome. President Obama won.

The country needs a fresh start. Obama needs to be magnanimous, but he deserves a new level of respect. No more unyielding opposition at every turn. No more credence given to paranoid slanders from right-wing loud mouths and Internet trolls. We have a lot of challenges to deal with, from renewing the struggling middle class to facing up to the looming perils of climate change. We need both parties engaged in finding sane, smart solutions.

Republicans say they love America. For their own sake, and for the sake of the country, they need to start showing a little love for the new USA — the USA that just gave President Obama four more years.

www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-obama-victory-20121106,0,2145466.story

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From the Los Angeles Times....

Democrats had a better grasp of political reality in 2012

By DAVID HORSEY | 4:41AM - Thursday, November 08, 2012



AS A candidate, Mitt Romney was his own worst enemy. He thought he could amass a majority saying things that would please the crowd in front of him and contradict himself with another crowd somewhere down the line without anyone taking notice. He thought he could offer vague platitudes about his programs and no one would push him for details. He thought he could tell wild fibs about his opponent and no one would check the facts. In the end, he merely fooled himself.

As comedians Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart gleefully point out with regularity, Republican candidates, campaign gurus and the conservative pundits who tout their causes have developed a habit of making up comforting memes disconnected with facts. They may see this as a way to shift reality — if you say something often enough, some people will, indeed, come to believe it — but, ultimately, if you play make-believe too much, sooner or later it catches up with you.

It caught up with the GOP on election night. As the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

In the final weeks of the election, Karl Rove and the conservative crew at Fox News had convinced themselves that the polls were lying about President Obama’s small but solid lead. They convinced themselves that there was an enthusiasm gap on the Democratic side and that young people, especially, would fail to vote. They apparently thought the Obama campaign’s claim to have developed the best ground game in the history of presidential politics was a bluff, just like all their own bluffs. And they could not imagine that Obama could rack up wins in nearly all of the swing states.

Of course, conservatives were not alone in their failure to perceive what was going on. Most of the mainstream news media was also mired in conventional wisdom about enthusiasm gaps and battlegrounds up for grabs.

Here is what the facts turned out to be:

• Romney predominated only among older white men; Obama won 55% of women, 93% of African Americans, 71% of Latinos and 60% of voters ages 18 to 29.

• Rather than there being an enthusiasm gap, Obama pretty much replicated his winning 2008 coalition.

• The Obama campaign gurus in Chicago were not lying; they had the money, time and energy to get all their voters to the polls.

• The “enthusiasm” of the tea party and the religious right proved to be a detriment to the Republican cause. Their wacky candidates, including Richard Mourdock in Indiana and Todd Akin in Missouri, were disasters and their demand for ideological purity turned the GOP primaries into a clown show and their eventual nominee into a pandering hypocrite.

• The Republicans’ silly scare stories about voter fraud were used to justify restrictions on voting that black Americans, in particular, perceived as a threat to their hard-won right to vote. As a result, those folks were willing to stand in long lines for hour after hour in states such as Ohio and Florida so that their voices could be heard. And what they said was “four more years for Barack Obama.”

Democrats do not have the only good ideas or all the brains in American politics, but in 2012, they had a far better grasp of reality.

www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-political-reality-20121107,0,3564229.story

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From the Los Angeles Times....

Billionaires wasted millions trying to buy the 2012 election

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM - Friday, November 09, 2012



NEVER HAS so much money been spent in an American political campaign with so little effect. Billionaires, both anonymous and named, threw hundreds of millions of dollars into the presidential race and several Senate contests, but failed to elect a Republican president or bring about a GOP takeover of the U.S. Senate.

Though they did somewhat better buying victories in races for the House of Representatives, the super rich fell far short of changing the balance of power in the nation’s capital. According to a study done by the Center for Public Integrity, companies and the billionaires who own them gave 85% of their donations to Republicans. Yet all this spending — unleashed by the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United ruling in 2010 — did not warp the political process as severely as many had feared it might.

The effect was blunted, in part, by the money-raising machine of the Obama campaign and strong fundraising efforts of Democratic Party groups that allowed them to stay in the game with GOP campaigns backed by money from rich guys and corporations. It seems, as well, that the colossal spending spree reached a saturation point at which voters simply could not absorb any more negative advertising. People tuned out, turned off or completely avoided the flood of expensive political messages — which means a whole lot of money was wasted.

One of the biggest flops was Karl Rove’s American Crossroads "super PAC." According to the Sunlight Foundation, a group that monitors political spending, Rove’s organization spent $104.7 million targeting Democrats. Besides Mitt Romney, Rove was trying to elect eight Republican Senate candidates. Only two of his favored ones came out on top on election day — Deb Fischer in Nebraska and Dean Heller in Nevada. That is not a very impressive showing for the guy everyone called a political genius back when he was managing George W. Bush’s political career.

Next time around will the billionaires shy away from investing in campaigns? Or will someone figure out how to use the money more effectively? A big factor — arguably the decisive one — in President Obama’s triumph was the vast get-out-the-vote operation his campaign began to build almost as soon as the inaugural ball ended in 2009. That took plenty of money and, clearly, it was money well spent.

Perhaps the lesson is that money used smartly can, indeed, win an election, but wholesale dumping of millions of dollars into any campaign only guarantees that TV station owners and political consultants will make out like bandits.

www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-billionaires-wasted-millions-20121108,0,5042382.story