Chris Christie Is Not A Bully. Richard Nixon Was Not A Crook.


"Well, I'm not a crook," President Nixon declared (video below) in 1973.





"I'm not a witch," senatorial candidate Christine O'Donnell assured voters (video below)of Delaware in 2010.





O'Donnell was not a witch, though years earlier she had  "dabbled into witchcraft."  Richard Nixon, however, was a crook, having dabbled in obstruction of justice to cover up a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C.   Nixon had been elected twice as a chief executive (President) and Christopher J. Christie also was elected twice as a chief executive, as a governor.

But the similarity doesn't end there. Christie is not a crook (we think) but he is something he claimed at his news conference (transcript, here) on Thursday not to be.   Asked by the Bergen (N.J.) Record's Charlie Stiles about "suspicions that you fostered through your administration or your campaign that allowed people to think it was OK to intimidate or retaliate against people," the New Jersey governor responded

... And listen, it's easy for people to be characterized in public life based upon their personality, and I have a very direct, blunt personality. And I understand why some people would then characterize that, especially people who don't like you, as bullying, but it's not that...

When earlier NBC's Kelly O'Donnell had asked him whether he's a "political bully," Christie had replied

... Some people like that style, some people don't. And I've always -- I think you asked me the question day after the election, are you willing to change your style in order to appeal to a broader audience?

And I think I said no because I am who I am. But I am not a bully....


Here is video from summer 2012 on the New Jersey shore of Christie, flanked by his security detail from the New Jersey State Police, not being a bully:







And here (from a tweet by Slate's Dave Weigel) is Chris Christie, a few days before he was re-elected, not being a bully to a teacher who asked him a question at a football game:

It's not too difficult being a tough guy when you have State Police ready to strong-arm anyone who talks back to the Governor.  And in Washington, the press secretary to one of Chris Christie's best friends, President Obama, says "it all sounds like a state matter to me."   Of course.




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Not All The Same

Perhaps it was the opening of the marijuana dispensaries in Colorado, the second state to legalize the use of the drug for personal use by adults. Or maybe it was the column by David Brooks, a response to the occasion in Colorado, in which he tried to evoke memories of 'Nixon going to China,' in which we're to accept what the New York Times columnist wrote because (one supposes) "hey, I'm no stick in the mud, I've been there myself."  He wrote

For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships.

But then we all sort of moved away from it. I don’t remember any big group decision that we should give up weed. It just sort of petered out, and, before long, we were scarcely using it.

Brooks' posse stopped using marijuana "because we each had a few embarrassing incidents.. because one member of our clique became a full-on stoner (and because) most of us developed higher pleasures."

And, yes, he did write "stoner," a fine word if you're 60 years old and want to enhance your credibility by pretending you're 20.  Brooks argued

We now have a couple states — Colorado and Washington — that have gone into the business of effectively encouraging drug use. By making weed legal, they are creating a situation in which the price will drop substantially. One RAND study suggests that prices could plummet by up to 90 percent, before taxes and such. As prices drop and legal fears go away, usage is bound to increase. This is simple economics, and it is confirmed by much research. Colorado and Washington, in other words, are producing more users....

In legalizing weed, citizens of Colorado are, indeed, enhancing individual freedom. But they are also nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be.

If Brooks was a little smug (he is, after all, a columnist at the "paper of record," the most well-respected newspaper anywhere on the planet), he at least avoided two of the most disingenuous claims about marijuana.

Not so with one of the guests on Up with Steve Kornacki. Jeffrey Reynolds, executive director at the Long Island Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, commented

Look, as a treatment professional, we never advocated incarceration as the solution to what we now know is a brain disease. And clearly we have a long way to go. When it comes to marijuana, it is a tricky question, because there aren`t good service structures in place to educate people about marijuana use. So it`s almost like if you`re an Oxycontin or Vicodin user, you go to treatment and other than that, we leave you alone. We need something in the middle that says to the chronic marijuana user, who is 17, who is smoking every day, that person won`t necessarily qualify for treatment, but that person needs something. Without intervention, they`re going to run into problems.

I would say, you know, we should be reinvesting into the treatment system, take all the money we`re wasting on incarcerating young black men, and put that into the treatment system. That`s one of the things we all agree upon, to say look, the war on drugs has been a failure. The law enforcement response to a public health problem is inappropriate and wasteful. How at this point though do we begin to reprogram some of those dollars into a system that provides support and care for young people who are struggling.

A few moments earlier, Reynolds had claimed "Look, you know, I`m probably the sole guy here set out to defend the war on drugs. That`s crazy.  We all know that hasn't worked. But what I'd say is..." We know we're in trouble when a guy comes on and says "I'm here to defend the war on drugs, it hasn't worked, and I'm not going to say it has to stop."

And we don't know the war on drugs hasn't worked.   What we do know is that cocaine use in the U.S., as depicted in the graph (from alltreatment.com) below, has declined dramatically since 1988 (as has, not completely coincidentally, street crime).    There are probably several factors (among them education, aging of the population, removal of lead) contributing to the sharp drop and we cannot be confident that the war on drugs has played a role. But we clearly and certainly cannot be confident that it has not.

Reynolds is pleased that he can agree with the other panelists, who are critics of the drug war, by criticizing "the law enforcement response to a public health problem" and incarceration of "young black men."   But while opposing incarceration, he wants to keep marijuana legal- and, apparently, respond to its use by treatment.

But as Reynolds- who undoubtedly works with the criminal justice system- understands, leaving marijuana illegal does not eliminate incarceration.   Some people undoubtedly will resist treatment and/or the probation term which generally comes as an alternative to imprisonment... and then, what?  The user either is incarcerated or the behavior-which Reynolds believes should remain illegal-  is condoned, arguably encouraged.

Presumably, there are other treatment professionals, such as the misguided drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, who oppose both the drug war and legalization of marijuana. Of course they do; continuation of "the drug war" means incarceration of more users, whose opportunity for treatment is foreclosed or who accept treatment only under the threat of increased jail time.  That discomforts individuals such as Reynolds and Kerlikowske, who are unable to make a distinction between marijuana and far more deadly controlled dangerous substances.

As one would expect, Reynolds was discomfited by the comparison of marijuana and alcohol, the latter regulated in Washington State and Colorado similarly to the former."   Justifiably citing "health care costs, lost productivity, and treatment costs," he does not want to use alcoholism "as a model."

Leave it, though, to another of the guests, the brilliant John Fugelsang (a regular host on the late Current TV, sold to Al Jazeera America),  to nail David Brooks, who prefers societies in which "government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned."  "I think," Fugelsang quipped, "David would benefit from a quick junket and a stop- a junket to the Netherlands and a stop at a coffee shop and a Van Gogh museum, and see what he says afterwards."

And (with a reference to arrests of blacks and whites for marijuana possession) he nails President Obama:

no one is ever proud of anything they did on marijuana -- I think when McCartney hears "Sergeant Pepper," he feels some pride, quite frankly. But I think David Brooks doesn`t offer any other solutions. One of the greatest critiques of the Obama administration in the first term was that the single greatest broken promise was that they would not interfere with the California dispensaries, and of course we know the DOJ did exactly the opposite. So considering we haven't heard this president yet use the words, "prison industrial complex," I think the graphs like the one you just showed shows the inherent morality in not locking people up.

Social progress is, as Fugelsang inferred, stymied by a failure to admit.  Gay people now admit- or sometimes proudly proclaim- their sexual preference.  Women who have received abortions cannot, without fear of condemnation, reveal they have undergone the procedure.  And despite the lightheartedness sometimes surrounding admission of marijuana use, no one admits he or she is proud of anything done while using marijuana or that he/she did not suffer because of its use.

The folks condemning both marijuana and the drug war know that people will still be locked up if we ban the first and end the latter. The major difference would be what they get locked up for- a relatively harmless drug or far more serious drugs.



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As Unions Wither


David Atkins notes

Dealing with the long-term unemployed and the minimum wage only barely scratches the surface of the conversation on income inequality. It's a conversation to which the comfortable asset classes would like to limit the conversation, because it allows them to wedge the middle class against the poor, when the real divide is between the 1% and 99%.

There is probably no Senate Democrat who more clearly belongs to "the comfortable asset classes" than the darling of Wall Street, Chuck Schumer. Nonetheless, other neo-liberals and/or centrists, including Barack Obama, have joined the bandwagon to extend unemployment compensation and increase the minimum wage. They recognize the growing disaster of long-term unemployment as well as their party's ongoing commitment to helping the poor, the truly destitute. But Atkins realizes

The treatment of the poor and unemployed isn't where the economic progressive line is drawn. Ensuring that the most vulnerable are well taken care of in society is a bare minimum standard. The energy behind the cause of income inequality is about increasing the negotiating power of workers across the spectrum while disincentivizing the hollowing out and rent-seeking of the economy by the parasitic asset classes. Progressive action on income inequality is about expanding Social Security, reinvesting in pensions, eliminating student loan debt, raising the capital gains tax, instituting a financial transaction tax, reinstating Glass Steagall, expanding labor unions, enhancing worker protections, and a host of similar issues designed to maximize middle class negotiating power.

That about covers it, though Atkins, a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, hasn't noticed the impact of unrestricted illegal immigration in lowering the wage rate and undermining worker protections. (Immediately making illegal immigrants citizens upon legalization would reduce that effect. Don't hold your breath.)  The 7th and 8th factors cited by Atkins have been on display in Seattle, Washington- and not favorably.   The New Republic's Alec MacGillis writes

In November, by a 2-1 margin, unionized Boeing machinists in Washington state voted down a contract proposal from the company that included freezing their pensions in favor of less generous and riskier 401(k) plans, increasing their out-of-pocket health spending and limiting raises to just 4 percent over the contract's eight-year term. Boeing promptly threatened to move the assembly of its new 777X aircraft to a state with anti-union right-to-work laws, and received no shortage of offers of states eager to provide incentives and bargain-basement labor. Boeing offered the Puget Sound workers a slightly revised contract that reversed a proposed change in the length of time it would take workers to achieve the top wage, but kept the most objectionable elements, including the pension freeze. Boeing’s hard line could hardly be justified by hard times: it is enjoying huge profits and a record $400 billion backlog in orders and two weeks ago raised its dividend by some 50 percent and signed off on a $10 billion stock buyback. 

Local leaders of the International Association of Machinists recommended the 31,000 unionized employees reject membership the awful contract, while the union's national leadership  recommended approval because, MacGillis believes, it did not want to lose the $25 million in union dues.

The revised contract was very narrowly approved and MacGillis explained

So Boeing will put the 777X assembly in the Puget Sound, pocketing $8.7 billion in new tax incentives from Washington state, saving untold millions in labor costs as a result of the new deal and establishing yet another major marker on the graph that has seen workers’ share of corporate gains steadily eroding. Who’s to say what the right vote was for the workers and the Seattle area, given the company’s threats—the Seattle Times couldn’t even bring itself to make a judgment in its milquetoast editorial on the matter. But this chapter should serve as a wake-up call to Obama, Bill de Blasio and other Democrats intent on doing something to reverse rising inequality, stagnating wages and falling economic mobility. The speeches are fine and good, and some solutions are straightforward, such as pushing for a higher minimum wage.

But to really address the underlying trends will also mean taking on the more fundamental forces that lead to an outcome like we just saw in the Puget Sound: strengthening labor laws and unions in right-to-work states to weaken employers' race-to-the-bottom threats to move south; raising taxes on upper incomes and capital gains to slightly rebalance the equation between the McNernys of the world and their flush investors on the one hand and their overmatched workers on the other; and, perhaps most difficult of all, changing the norms for acceptable behavior by corporate titans, even if they've been named to the presidential exports council.

"Oh," MacGillis remarks, Boeings' "CEO Jim McNerny's total compensation is somewhere north of $20 million."

If you have a particularly good memory, that name might sound familiar.  On March 11, 2010 the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported

President Barack Obama Thursday named Boeing Chairman, President and Chief Executive Jim McNerney as chairman of the President’s Export Council.

Obama also named Xerox Corp. Chief Executive Ursula Burns as vice chairwoman of the council.

“Jim and Ursula are tremendously talented and experienced, and I am grateful that they have chosen to serve in these important roles as we work to strengthen our economy and create good jobs by boosting our exports,” Obama said in a news release. “I look forward to working with them in the weeks and months ahead.”

So one of Barack Obama's favorites, Jim McNerny, gets a 16% increase to nearly $23 million in gross compensation and threatens to move jobs out of state to coerce the union into accepting a contract substituting a defined contribution pension plan for a defined benefits plan and cutting workers' health benefits.

President Obama cannot by himself end the downslide of unions and workers- hence middle class incomes (graph, below) engineered over three decades by Ronald(6) Wilson(6) Reagan(6). But the federal government employs by far the greatest number of individuals earning under $24,000 per year (roughly 2,000,000) of whom 500,000 are contract employees. It's too much to expect this President to end this travesty through Executive Order. But it should not be too much for him to acknowledge, as Atkins notes

Obviously, raising the minimum wage and extending unemployment benefits are crucial not only to those affected but also to the broader economy. But even this misses the point. Income inequality isn't just about the poor and those who are most vulnerable. It's about the broad middle class, too, and the fact that the top 1% have hollowed it out.

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Beyond Marriage

There are both a good reason and a bad reason to live in Utah, and both are reflected in the website of  an organization called Equality Utah, which describes as its mission to "secure equal rights and protections for LGBT Utahns and their families."

How, precisely, does one pronounce "Utahns?"  It certainly doesn't have the same ring as "Minnesotans," "Vermonters," "Texans," or even the loathsome "Jerseyans."   (How about those Yorkers? Or those Hampshirers?)  But in what apparently builds on an ordinance passed in 2008, the county has adopted a registry "for adult residents of the County who share a primary residence and rely on one another as dependents. The measure would help many of our elderly residents, people with adult dependent children, as well as same-sex couples."  

This measure is different than, goes beyond, and is superior to adoption of same-sex marriage, though it is not binding on businesses.   Katie McDonough of Salon quotes Lisa Duggan, professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, maintaining

This is definitely an opening to raise a set of questions about how our personal relationships are recognized by the state.

We need some kinds of recognition for things like health proxies, childcare, child custody and jointly owned property. There are circumstances where we need to have these relationships recognized, but it doesn’t make any sense that rather than recognize the relationships we actually have — whatever they are — that the state only recognizes conjugal couples.

It is, in McDonough's words, "a radical legal alternative to marriage," which is supported by Troy Williams, whom she identifies as "a Salt Lake City-based LGBT activist."

The age of the civil union appears to have been short-lived, in part because it provided concrete (not psychic) benefits as gay activists turned their efforts to striking down DOMA and state laws which prohibit same-sex marriage.  Increasingly made is an argument premised on blind faith in the institution of marriage which by design follows the traditional and misguided notion that marriage is inevitable, inviolate, and the only legitimate principle around which to organize human relationships.

Erroneously, snark-prone supporters of same-sex marriage often have emphasized that gay marriage cannot harm traditional marriage, already accomplished by heterosexual couples (a point made in the cartoon below, from Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune).. Motivated by a desire for gays to participate in the august custom of marriage, they have implied that gay marriage will be more stable than traditional marriages and will manifest the stability the others haven't.  However, McDonough (a supporter of same-sex marriage but clearly not captive to political correctness) notes, "if we are going to push for a more expansive kind of legal recognition for families and households, we need to decenter marriage."

That would be a risky strategy for supporters of same-sex marriage, whose success in the court of public opinion lately has been advanced by the plea that they want gay couples to enjoy the same benefits (especially psychological) enjoyed by heterosexual couples. Still, it would be an honest one, wherein "cultivating those networks" in which "multiple kinds of people" play a major role in our lives "should be our goal," Williams recognizes. And Salt Lake County, Utah is pointing the way toward establishing laws and institutions which do little for marriage, but strengthen families and other vital social relationships.

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Con Job

It's a growing scam, one which increasingly defines the nation's economy, a cooperation between the public and the private sectors manifested in the growing trend of subcontracting services

While the minimum wage in the state of Washington is $9.19 per hour, it is $10.88 in SeaTac (a municipality of 27,000 residents south of Seattle), where voters in November approved a ballot measure raising it to $15.00 an hour.

Except that for now, it appears they didn't.   Wonkblog's Lydia DePillis explains that recently

in response to a lawsuit backed by the airlines and the restaurant industry, the King County Superior Court ruled that the measure could only apply to the 1,600 people who work at hotels and car services outside the airport. That cuts out 4,700 people who work within the airport itself, which is technically a separate jurisdiction belonging to the Port of Seattle -- not subject to the voters' desires.

The referendum probably would have been challenged in court even if the increase were much smaller than 38%.  A spokesperson for the measure's primary backer stated that the figure of $15 was chosen in part because it was the prevalent wage in 2005 before outsourcing became all the rage. DePillis writes

Working at Sea-Tac wasn't always quite such a hard way to make a living. Just ask Ahmed Jama, 26, who says he started in fast food restaurants there since he was 16.

Like most workers at the airport, he holds multiple jobs, since most employers don't give anybody full-time work (to say nothing of health benefits -- Jama says he declared bankruptcy when he was 20 years old because of medical bills for a heart condition). So for about 30 hours a week, he's a dispatcher for the aviation services firm Huntleigh USA, which means he coordinates dozens of wheelchair pushers who arrive to meet disabled people at their gates. After 10 years, he still makes $10.05 an hour, and feels like he's going backwards -- he wants to go to school to become a medical technician, but working 60 hours a week doesn't leave time for class.

Here's what happened to make planning for the future impossible: The airlines have contracted out more and more of the jobs for which they used to pay people decent salaries with benefits. While Alaska Airlines employees overall make an average of $73,500 per year, those of the airlines' contractors make an estimated $20,176.

"That's the new hustle, subcontract everything. Cut the salary, cut the benefits, and CEO pay goes up," Jama says, taking a break from his spreadsheets and walkie-talkie in SeaTac's airy welcome lobby. "And you see all these companies come underbid each other. So companies that used to pay vacation pay, or parking, a new company will come in and say 'we don't pay anybody anything, give me the contract.' And they'll get the contract, and it's a steep decline in working conditions and morale. Each company is just out doing the bare minimum."

The subcontracting hustle is, admittedly, only one factor driving down wages, though very likely a more significant one than, say, immigration.  But it has contributed markedly to the decline of the middle class, in which, the people at Wonkblog note, in the midst of "a vice of chronic unemployment and falling wages, real median household income (excluding capital gains and losses but including cash government benefits) has declined 4.4% since the "recovery" began in 2009."  The results are illustrated below in the following graph:

Although this merely continues a trend begun sometime in the 1970s, it reflects "the ineffectiveness of monetary policy to help (Americans) and the desperate need for fiscal leadership to generate real, sustainable growth."   But it points to something less obvious, but at least as critical, in sustaining an economic structure with a stable middle class.

Economists view joblessness as either cyclical, in which unemployment inevitably and periodically goes up and down, and structural, in which worker skills do not match employers' needs (a problem grossly exaggerated in the USA).  But there is a third, in which the quest for ever-growing profits precludes an economic structure which would preclude decent (not even "good"; let's not be greedy) jobs with a modicum of benefits. Privatization, outsourcing, and- as with SeaTac Airport, the subcontracting scam, a symptom of the New American Exceptionalism.



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No Victory To Declare


Steve M. recognizes that E.J. Dionne (as is his habit) only means well when he writes

... the new militancy on the Democratic left is a consequence of a slowly building backlash against the skewed nature of our politics. A dramatic manifestation of this sentiment wasNew York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's unabashed attack on inequality in his inaugural address Wednesday....

Discussions about entitlements have revolved almost exclusively around the question of how much to cut them. By contrast, progressives such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) say we must begin dealing with a coming retirement crisis fostered by the near disappearance of traditional private pensions....

More generally, the Democratic left is animated by the battle against growing inequality and declining social mobility -- the idea, as Warren has said repeatedly, that "the system is rigged for powerful interests and against working families." ...

Dionne foresees the "re-emergence of the Democratic left," but Steve-O's optimism is far more cautious as he notes

In Dionne's column, the focus is on pols. Last fall's lefty superstar pol, Elizabeth Warren, gets two mentions, and the new star is Bill de Blasio. Did I use the word "celebrity" above? It wasn't chosen idly:

I feel as if I'm living through the optimism -- and personality cult-ism -- of the early days of the Obama presidency, up to and including the transformation of family members into boldface names outside the realm of politics. (Chiara is de Blasio's daughter.) Yes, I know that the celebrification of the Obamas helped them maintain the public's goodwill, and thus helped keep the GOP out of the White House. But it also meant that progressives let their guard down and waited for the superstar pol in the White House to make everything all better. (He didn't, and couldn't have.)

Or perhaps he never wanted to.  The danger of placing faith in individual personalities has been demonstrated by the lackluster performance of President Obama. "Personality cult-ism" is never goodand looms as a major danger, if not quite  and is nearly as likely now as it was in 2008.

Elizabeth Warren, at a conference in Washington in November, stated "I’ve been in the Senate for nearly a year and believe as strongly as ever that the system is rigged for powerful interests and against working families."  Defending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau- to which she gave birth- she asked “You tell me: When was the last time you heard someone call for regulators to go easier on companies that want to use lead paint on our children’s toys or leave the safety switches off toasters?"

But Elizabeth Warren isn't running for president. Neither is Bill DeBlasio, overheard in his inauguration speech Wednesday declaring "When I said we would take dead aim at the Tale of Two Cities, I meant it. And we will do it," vowing ."New Yorkers (willl) see our city not as the exclusive domain of the One Percent."

Fortunately, if Politico's Ben White and Maggie Haberman have it right

The worry on Wall Street is about how far to the left Clinton might have to drift to appease what’s been proclaimed the “Warren wing of the Democratic Party”—the vocal populists buoyed by Elizabeth Warren’s tough critiques of Wall Street greed, as well as by the recent election of liberal Mayor Bill de Blasio on their New York home turf. 

Unfortunately, if they have it right

According to people in Clinton’s extended circle, John Podesta—the former White House chief of staff under her husband who this week joined the Obama White House for a year-long stint—was poised to work with Hillary Clinton on her messaging on income inequality, a role he seems less likely to fill while he's in government. Still, some say fears that Clinton will end up alienating financial sector donors the way Obama has, even if she tacks left, are overblown. “Wall Street folks are so happy about [having Clinton run] that they won’t care what she says,” says one well-placed Democrat.

And if the banking class is delighted with Clinton lately, the feeling appears mutual. In Manhattan last week, Clinton sat down with the Carlyle Group’s David Rubenstein for their second question-and-answer session in the last two months. Unlike the first one, held for his private equity firm’s investor conference, this was a more public appearance, part of a program honoring the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Clinton easily regaled the well-heeled crowd with stories from her past before Rubenstein ended their half-hour chat with a joke about her future: Would she be interested in joining a private equity firm?

“Is that an offer?” Clinton asked, laughing as the audience knowingly joined in. She may soon need many things from the titans of finance, but a job is probably not one of them.

And they will want much in return from her. White/Haberman remark also

These Wall Street types prize personal relationships and ego stroking as much as they do any laundry list of policy initiatives. When we sought answers about the rift with the White House, many New York sources circled back to this; leaders in the finance industry, as in so many others, want to know they have friends and influence in high places

Somehow- despite record profits amid job cuts- this is "a feeling that’s not been forthcoming from the Obama administration," as reflected in Toles' cartoon (though from four years ago) below:

Dionne notes the "resurgent populists," the economic populists in the Democratic Party, "are battling a double standard."  At some point, unless they're willing to lose their soul, they probably will have to battle the party's presumptive presidential nominee, also.



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Sarah Palin Response Rebutted


Sarah Palin does it again. That could mean virtually anything, of course, but in this instance, a case of over-reaction and exaggeration.   She placed on her Facebook page

Holy unbelievable. The hypocritical leftist lamestream media should be shamed by every caring, child-loving American. It has once again reached a new low. See the article linked below. One just can't win in their petty little games. Good thing most Americans don't play those little games! It's a beautiful thing the Romney family has done by embracing “the spirit of adoption.” What on earth is more beautiful? Shame on MSNBC for mocking this.

The LSM's pursuit of “shock ratings” is unreal. Governor Mitt Romney ran for higher office with what I believe is a servant's heart. He was saddled with some sup-par campaign tactics. That does not make him a bad person nor does it open his children or grandchildren to attacks over a year after the fact. This latest attack from the Left is despicable.

Leftist media hounds are not expressing an opinion with this attack; they are expressing a prejudice that would never be accepted if it came from anyone else but the lib media.

You really need a conscience, yellow journalists. May your 2014 New Year's Resolution be to find one.

Thank you, Romney family, for giving a child a family full of love.

The former vice-presidential nominee was exorcised by the portion of the December 22, 2013 portion of "Melissa-Harris Perry" (creative title, that) in which

Harris-Perry posted a photo of the extended Romney family, including newly adopted infant Kieran James Romney, who happens to be the only black person in the photo. She asked her panel of guests, including actress Pia Glenn and comedian Dean Obeidallah to come up with captions for the photo.
The panel made a series of jokes, all based around the fact that there was a single black baby in the photo. Harris-Perry speculated about a wedding between Romney's grandson and North West, the daughter of singer Kanye West and reality TV star Kim Kardashian.







While Palin had a conniption over a fairly innocuous discussion  (video below), her comments at least betrayed a slight connection to reality and suggested she saw the video or read excerpts from the offending segment. Not so Republican National Committee chairperson Reince Priebus, who tweeted "Disgusting: Harris-Perry should apologize immediately for mocking Romney's adopted grandchild."

This may be the apex (thus far) expression of the sense of victimization among Republicans, one in which "isn't he just the most gorgeous?" becomes "mocking."

Harris-Perry responded to GOP scorn by issuing on Tuesday, the 24th what (among others) Politico, the Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and one of Rupert Murdoch's right-wing rags, the New York Post, misunderstood as an "apology." In a series, MHP tweeted

I am sorry. Without reservation or qualification. I apologize to the Romney family. I work by guiding principle that those who offend do not have the right to tell those they hurt that they r wrong for hurting. Therefore, while I meant no offense, I want to immediately apologize to the Romney family for hurting them. As black child born into large white Mormon family I feel familiarity w/ Romney family pic & never meant to suggest otherwise. I apologize to all families built on loving transracial adoptions who feel I degraded their lives or choices.

Melissa Harris-Perry must have a great attorney... or is extraordinarily smart.  She checked off everything needed for her remarks to be labeled as an apology- "sorry;" "without reservations;" "I apologize."  But she did not state what she is, without reservations, sorry for.  Presumably, it is for "hurting them" rather than for actually doing (or saying) something inappropriate or unjustified.  The burden is subtly placed on the object of the remarks- they were hurt- rather than on Harris-Perry herself, who "meant no offense." It is akin to the standard line from a defense attorney, in which the latter states "We argue (or maintain)  that John Doe did not commit this offense," never contending that Doe did not do it, only that it's their story and they're sticking to it.

If a so-called apology includes an inference that the speaker could not possibly have meant any ill intent because he/or she has experienced a similar situation, all the better.  We've all heard it before, most often in the ludicrous notion that individuals using the "n word" could not possibly be doing anything wrong because they themselves are black.  In this case, the MSNBC host noted she was "a black child born into (a) large white Mormon family"- which, it turns out, is true.   Now a Unitarian-Universalist, Harris-Perry has argued for tolerance toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.   And responding on a website for a Mothers Day Special in (it appears) 2012, she wrote

My mother is the fourth of five children born into a working class family at the end of WWII. She is descended from Mormon pioneers who pushed handcarts across the American west. A white woman in a Mormon family, my mom was raised in the racially homogenous enclave of Spokane, Washington and in 1960 went off to college at Brigham Young University. People are typically incredulous when I share this part of my mother’s biography. After all, if they know me as an outspoken, progressive, feminist, black woman, it might be hard to believe that I am the daughter of someone with these beginnings.

But my mother, Diana Gray, possesses an unmatched commitment to fairness, an unflagging belief in hard work, and more than a casual relationship with profound personal transformations.

Mom left the Mormon Church after a failed first marriage left her a single mother and sole breadwinner. Mom moved to a city, enrolled in graduate school in sociology, and eventually met and fell in love with my dad, a black man who grew up in Jim Crow Virginia. 

None of this should bear on the criticism of opportunists such as Priebus or Palin. The latter, apparently reveling in her role as a gadfly, less than two months ago had remarked

Our free stuff today is being paid for today by taking money from our children and borrowing from China. When that money comes due and, this isn’t racist, so try it, try it anyway, this isn’t racist, but it’s going to be like slavery when that note is due. Right? We are going to be beholden to a foreign master.

Persons who equate the relationship of the United States to mainland China with slavery ought not be terribly critical about mere bad taste and failed attempt at humor.  Something about glass houses, as they used to say.




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