A Waste Of Valuable Time



Reacting after the second presidential debate, Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution tweeted "We've had 4 hrs of debates and criminal justice & prison reform hasn't been mentioned once.  Think that says a lot abt our nat'l debate."

Yes, it does, as well as about the insufficiency of six hours of debates among the presidential and vice-presidential nominees.   But this from Barack Obama says more about our national debate:

The most important thing we can do is to make sure we control our own energy. So here’s what I’ve done since I’ve been president. We have increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years.

Natural gas production is the highest it’s been in decades. We have seen increases in coal production and coal employment. But what I’ve also said is we can’t just produce traditional source of energy. We’ve also got to look to the future. That’s why we doubled fuel efficiency standards on cars. That means that in the middle of the next decade, any car you buy, you’re going to end up going twice as far on a gallon of gas. That’s why we doubled clean — clean energy production like wind and solar and biofuels.

And all these things have contributed to us lowering our oil imports to the lowest levels in 16 years. Now, I want to build on that. And that means, yes, we still continue to open up new areas for drilling. We continue to make it a priority for us to go after natural gas. We’ve got potentially 600,000 jobs and 100 years worth of energy right beneath our feet with natural gas...

The President, at least, gave a nod to "environmentally sound" policies and reducing demand.  Mitt Romney, informed that fossil fuel production has been rising, wasn't satisfied that the pace of global warming has been sufficiently rapid:

Well, let’s look at the president’s policies, all right, as opposed to the rhetoric, because we’ve had four years of policies being played out. And the president’s right in terms of the additional oil production, but none of it came on federal land. As a matter of fact, oil production is down 14 percent this year on federal land, and gas production was down 9 percent. Why? Because the president cut in half the number of licenses and permits for drilling on federal lands, and in federal waters.

So where’d the increase come from? Well a lot of it came from the Bakken Range in North Dakota. What was his participation there? The administration brought a criminal action against the people drilling up there for oil, this massive new resource we have. And what was the cost? 20 or 25 birds were killed and brought out a migratory bird act to go after them on a criminal basis.

Look, I want to make sure we use our oil, our coal, our gas, our nuclear, our renewables. I believe very much in our renewable capabilities; ethanol, wind, solar will be an important part of our energy mix.

But what we don’t need is to have the president keeping us from taking advantage of oil, coal and gas. This has not been Mr. Oil, or Mr. Gas, or Mr. Coal. Talk to the people that are working in those industries. I was in coal country. People grabbed my arms and said, “Please save my job.” The head of the EPA said, “You can’t build a coal plant. You’ll virtually — it’s virtually impossible given our regulations.” When the president ran for office, he said if you build a coal plant, you can go ahead, but you’ll go bankrupt. That’s not the right course for America.

Let’s take advantage of the energy resources we have, as well as the energy sources for the future. And if we do that, if we do what I’m planning on doing, which is getting us energy independent, North America energy independence within eight years, you’re going to see manufacturing jobs come back. Because our energy is low cost, that are already beginning to come back because of our abundant energy. I’ll get America and North America energy independent. I’ll do it by more drilling, more permits and licenses.

We’re going to bring that pipeline in from Canada. How in the world the president said no to that pipeline? I will never know...

Perhaps because tar sands oil is particularly destructive to the environment, the pipeline would eliminate more jobs in tourism, ranching and agriculture than it would create in construction, the pipeline probably will raise oil prices in the Midwest, and most of the oil is slated to go to the same mainland China Romney gets so hot and bothered about otherwise.

No matter.   Even as the two candidates vie to outduel each other to prove he can make the bigger carbon footprint, one can only imagine how they would have handled prison reform.The American people- in the abstract- want all criminals put, as the late George Wallace put it, "under the jail."   No penalty can be so severe, in the collective mind of voters, and many (mistakenly) believe prisoners enjoy all manner of luxuries.   Overlay that with an economic slump and any discussion of criminal justice would be punctuated by weeping and gnashing of teeth over criminals having it so easy while unemployment is so high (as is true) and the budget deficit is crushing the nation (which is not true).

Criminal justice and prison reform?   No presidential or vice-presidential nominee, nor any candidate from either major political party for either position with a credible chance of being nominated, ever has advocated the end of the drug war, the legalization of marijuana, or even decriminalization of marijuana possession.    And a candidate who has never mentioned "inner city" or "poverty" and one who believes workers who earn a meager salary are freeloaders dependent on government who don't take responsibility for their lives will have anything sensible to say about convicted criminals?
  
Sure they would, and tomorrow it will snow in Miami.



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The Pro-Crime NRA On Board With Romney


There are few issues- maybe one or two, maybe not- which more clearly demonstrate the extremist nature of the modern Republican Party than gun control.

A right-wing blogger  at the Washington Examiner writes that National Rifle Association president David

Keene said that Obama's statement was a "strategic error on his part" because it blew up the president's pro-Second Amendment rhetoric. "He knows it's politically dangerous to take on the Second Amendment," said Keene.

"We have credibility when we say that Barack Obama is a threat to your rights. But that credibility is obviously enhanced 10-fold when Barack Obama, in a moment of weakness, says, 'Yeah, as a matter of fact I am.' And that's what he did," said Keene. "This is going to help us."

The NRA is blanketing Ohio, Virginia, Florida and Wisconsin with advocacy mailings and ads, hopeful of persuading the vast majority of pro-gun, non-NRA members to vote for Romney. They made a similar effort during the recent Wisconsin gubernatorial recall effort and several analysts credited the NRA with helping to save Gov. Scott Walker.

Evidently, Barack Obama had brazenly torched the United States Constitution and threatened the very foundations of the Republic when at the second presidential debate he stated

But there have been too many instances during the course of my presidency, where I’ve had to comfort families who have lost somebody. Most recently out in Aurora. You know, just a couple of weeks ago, actually, probably about a month, I saw a mother, who I had met at the bedside of her son, who had been shot in that theater.

And her son had been shot through the head. And we spent some time, and we said a prayer and, remarkably, about two months later, this young man and his mom showed up, and he looked unbelievable, good as new.

But there were a lot of families who didn’t have that good fortune and whose sons or daughters or husbands didn’t survive.

So my belief is that, (A), we have to enforce the laws we’ve already got, make sure that we’re keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill. We’ve done a much better job in terms of background checks, but we’ve got more to do when it comes to enforcement

But I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don’t belong on our streets. And so what I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced. But part of it is also looking at other sources of the violence. Because frankly, in my home town of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap hand guns.

And so what can we do to intervene, to make sure that young people have opportunity; that our schools are working; that if there’s violence on the streets, that working with faith groups and law enforcement, we can catch it before it gets out of control.

And so what I want is a — is a comprehensive strategy. Part of it is seeing if we can get automatic weapons that kill folks in amazing numbers out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. But part of it is also going deeper and seeing if we can get into these communities and making sure we catch violent impulses before they occur.

The NRA is not newly panicked at the President's rhetoric.  Rather, in ads and mailings to pro-gun voters, Keene says, "the president has ratified what we have been saying... see, he peeked out and finally said what he wants."

An impertinent Barack Obama wants "to enforce the laws we've already got, make sure that we're keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill" and better enforce mandatory background checks.

Oh, the humanity of it all!  The President of the United States doesn't want criminals and mentally ill individuals to possess firearms, nor anyone to possess cheap handguns, hardly the weapon of choice for the hunters the NRA claims to advocate for. Moreover, President Obama had begun his statement maintaining "We’re a nation that believes in the Second Amendment, and I believe in the Second Amendment. We've got a long tradition of hunting and sportsmen and people who want to make sure they can protect themselves."    Obama thus implied that the Second Amendment assures an individual right to bear firearms, a widely held position of persons poorly versed in English grammar, but a view he had affirmed in April of 2008.   He expressed support for not only hunters and sportsmen, but also "people who want to make sure they can protect themselves."

Nonetheless, the NRA is hot on the trail of Barack Obama and determined to elect Mitt Romney, with Keene boasting "we can move the race a couple of points."   Their newest heartthrob should be asked why he specifically opposes reimposing the ban on weapons with high-capacity amunition magazines, such as the one which killed six individuals in a Tucson, Arizona parking lot two years ago.  Or why he opposes the effort of many of the survivors of that incident to close the "gun show loophole."
  
Mitt Romney has staked out a radical position on gun control or, as the pro-crime community terms it, "gun rights,"  and so has gained powerful support from the National Rifle Association, whose members know whom to vote for.   Getting a free ride, the GOP candidate is garnering from the nation's most powerful merchant of death active support largely hidden from voters unaware that he is being embraced by the nation's most powerful merchant of death.


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No Rules



Here is the money quote:

And — and so we — we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.

I went to a number of women’s groups and said, “Can you help us find folks,” and they brought us whole binders full of women.

I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my Cabinet and my senior staff, that the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states, and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America.

Here is Atrios' response:

Jokes aside, the binders of women comment was basically the core of all of the mostly mythical affirmative action in this country. It's about recognizing that if you're a product of a good old white boy network, it's a good idea to make the effort to read those binders, to make the extra effort to look at qualified women and minorities.

This isn't a comment on what actually happened when Mitt was in office, just pointing out that if you embrace that story you embrace affirmative action, because aside from a teeny bit of minority business contracting and civil service hiring provisions, that's what affirmative action actually means in this country.

And here, after approvingly quoting the above passage from Atrios, is Digby:

Romney made a great case for affirmative action, something his party adamantly opposes. But it's so common sense that he could say it in the debate and nobody even noticed. Not even Fox.

Maybe it's because I'm a white male and, unlike the crew at GOP TV, not a corporate flunky,  but I noticed.   And I noticed that it came from a guy who couldn't even concede in a nationwide, widely watched debate, that he supports a requirement of equal pay for equal work.
 
Despite appearances, this is no contradiction.  Mitt Romney had no problem hiring qualified women because it is the thing that is done in a modern society- and, well, this was Massachusetts, after all. As a corporation in a suit, Romney has no problem with businesses, small or large, hiring women as well as men. Nor would he object to those enterprises paying women as much as men- or less, or twice as much.  He simply doesn't want them to be required to do so, or to do anything they don't want to do.

This applies to all businesses from the "mom 'n pop" the wealthy typically laud (but rarely patronize- except in the sense of condescending toward) to Exxon Mobil, for which the GOP toils.  Not surprisingly, even Eschaton and Digby apparently didn't notice

Now one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort. But number two, because I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school.

She said, I can’t be here until 7 or 8 o’clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o’clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine. Let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.

Here, Romney inadvertently, casually and without notice, distinguishes between those mom 'n pop stores and Exxon Mobil.   It is primarily the latter which are capable of altering the workplace to accommodate employees with special needs.   Small businesses will do so when pressed against the wall, when they have an employee essential to the success of the outfit.  They are displeased but have no choice because survival of the business may be at stake.

Large corporations have the capability of surviving fairly large numbers of employees whom they accommodate.  They may even have a division assigned to work out arrangements for their workers.   They have a luxury small employers do not.  And if it means giving the employee "a flexible schedule," they may be able to squeeze more hours of work or lower pay from that worker. It's a corporate victory, one many progressives find exquisitely progressive.

So don't get too excited about the Republican nominee's nod to affirmative action. Obviously, he is sufficiently condescending that he believes he he has to go out of his way to find qualified women.  But he knows also that any modern executive, private sector or public sector, can't automatically exclude 50% of the population from consideration, and that there are enough right-wing women devoted to the cause of the 1% to stock a Romney administration.



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Unforced Error



It has been over a week- a week!- since I last used my favorite word, "ironic."

It has been long enough, and so it was ironic that both Mitt Romney's most effective statement and biggest unforced error came in response to the worst question at Tuesday night's clash in Hempstead, NY.  

We shouldn't have been surprised.   Closing statements, a waste of valuable time, have become almost mandatory.   There were two-minute closing statements in this year's first presidential debate, hosted by Jim Lehrer, and a closing statement in the vice-presidential debate.

Last night, there was no closing statement- technically.   There was, in fact, a call by Candy Crowley for closing statements, though not acknowledged as such by the moderator.   Crowley chose the questions- and order of the questions- from among those submitted by allegedly undecided voters.   And the last one was nearly predictable.   "What do you believe," a guy named Barry Green asked, "is the biggest misperception "that the American people have about you as a man and a candidate? Using specific examples, can you take this opportunity to debunk that misperception and set us straight?"

When a politician hears a vague question about feelings or what people think of him or her, it looks like a big, fat fastball over the heart of the plate.    And when the questioner asks to be "set straight," that fastball is coming over at about 80-85 miles per hour.  (Sports analogies are so tedious, aren't they?)   It is a request for a closing statement by any other name.

In part, Romney didn't disappoint, claiming, in the manner of a closing argument to a campaign

I understand that I can get this country on track again. We don’t have to settle for what we’re going through. We don’t have to settle for gasoline at four bucks. We don’t have to settle for unemployment at a chronically high level. We don’t have to settle for 47 million people on food stamps. We don’t have to settle for 50 percent of kids coming out of college not able to get work. We don’t have to settle for 23 million people struggling to find a good job.

Sure, a President has virtually no effect on the price of gasoline in the short-term (which was the issue in play here); unemployment is coming down and is .4% higher than when incumbent President Ronald Reagan ran on the highly successful "Morning in America" theme; food stamp rolls are very high because of the economic slump Barack Obama inherited and liberalization of eligibility rules enacted under President Bush; and Romney wants to raise the eligibility age for both Medicare and Social Security, which would deter elderly people from retiring, hence foreclosing those positions from young people looking for a job.

Still, those comments from the challenger would have been effective- had they not been overshadowed, justifiably, by a comment Romney made earlier in the same response:  "I care about 100 percent of the American people. I want 100 percent of the American people to have a bright and prosperous future. "

Uh, no.  No, he doesn't.   Mitt Romney does not care about 100 percent of the American people, nor does he particularly want 100 percent of the American people to have a bright and prosperous future.   He hardly is rooting for individuals "who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it."  He believes "they will vote for the president no matter what" and that he will "never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

Let's go over it:  in the formulation of the ex-governor, 47% of Americans are crybabies, leach off the (federal income tax) taxpayers, and will vote for his opponent, anyway.   But he cares about them and wants them "to have a bright and prosperous future."

Resisting the temptation explicitly to accuse his opponent of "chutzpah," Barack Obama nevertheless pounced, asserting, in part

I believe Governor Romney is a good man. Loves his family, cares about his faith. But I also believe that when he said behind closed doors that 47 percent of the country considered themselves victims who refuse personal responsibility, think about who he was talking about

Folks on Social Security who’ve worked all their lives. Veterans who’ve sacrificed for this country. Students who are out there trying to hopefully advance their own dreams, but also this country’s dreams. Soldiers who are overseas fighting for us right now. People who are working hard every day, paying payroll tax, gas taxes, but don’t make enough income.

And I want to fight for them. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last four years. Because if they succeed, I believe the country succeeds.

By bringing up "100%," Romney obviously laid the predicate for Obama's remark.   The President ought to spend the remaining three weeks of the campaign reminding voters that his opponent dismisses both soldiers and the elderly, and is targeting the latter with his plans for Medicare and Social Security (not primarily individuals already elderly, but it is a status almost all of us aspire to).  In his response to an audience member who wanted him to "debunk" a "misperception" and "set us straight," Romney could have helped Obama more only if he had quipped "Barry, I didn't realize you needed to be set straight."



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The Answer Is Obvious, Megyn


According to the Center for American Progress, 32 seconds after last night's presidential debate ended, GOP TV's Megyn Kelly maintained

And the questions! 11 questions asked in all, and some of which will certainly be discussed tomorrow. Topics that we haven’t heard at all in this campaign — equal pay for women, in fact there were a lot of women’s issues discussed…abortion, contraception, women’s pay as I mentioned. Some might argue it was obvious pandering to women because the female vote is so important in this election. Apart from equal pay for women, we heard a discussion about assault weapons ban, a question to Mitt Romney about how are you different from President Bush, and then a question to President Obama, what have you done to earn my vote? The one question on foreign policy by my count was about Libya, and seemed to cover ground that we already knew the answer to: it was who denied the request for increased security. Well, we heard great testimony about that last week, there were State department officials who answered that question. So there will be some questions about those selections, Bret.

CAP's Zake Beauchamp interprets this as "spinning the debate as biased as a consequence of the questions asked by the undecided voters."  There is an element of that, certainly, as one would expect of Fox News.  When Kelly argues "we already knew the answer to (sic): it was who denied the request for increased security," she simplifies a complex situation, one which includes the GOP House's decision to cut security funding requested by the Administration.

But Fox News is not only slanted as the communications arm of the Republican Party; it is ill-informed. If the remarks by Kelly- who refers to "the one question on foreign policy"- weren't taken out of context, she was perturbed that foreign policy was de-emphasized.

Gee, why might that have been?  What might the sole topic of the upcoming, third and final, debate?

Monday October 22, 2012

Topic: Foreign policy Air Time: 9:00-10:30 p.m. Eastern Time Location: Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida (Tickets) Sponsor: Commission on Presidential Debates Participants: President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney Moderator: Bob Schieffer (Host of Face the Nation on CBS) The format for the debate will be identical to the first presidential debate and will focus on foreign policy.

When considering GOP spin, sometimes it just gets too difficult to differentiate between bad ideology and basic ignorance.

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Advantage, Obama



One of the most effective moments for President Obama in Tuesday's debate (transcript, here) at Hofstra University came after Candy Crowley elicited a response from Mitt Romney on "pay equity, Governor."  Following the ex-governor's uninspiring response, Crowley asked Obama to "get in on this quickly, please."   The President referred to his support for the Lilly Ledbetter bill, then continued

Now, there are some other issues that have a bearing on how women succeed in the workplace: for example, their health care. (Inaudible) — a major difference in this campaign is that Governor Romney feels comfortable having politicians in Washington decide the health care choices that women are making. I think that's a mistake. In my health care bill, I said insurance companies need to provide contraceptive coverage to everybody who is insured, because this is not just a — a health issue; it's an economic issue for women. It makes a difference. This is money out of that family's pocket.

Governor Romney not only opposed it; he suggested that, in fact, employers should be able to make the decision as to whether or not a woman gets contraception through her insurance coverage. That's not the kind of advocacy that women need. When Governor Romney says that we should eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, there are millions of women all across the country who rely on Planned Parenthood for not just contraceptive care. They rely on it for mammograms, for cervical cancer screenings. That's a pocketbook issue for women and families all across the country.

Eliminating federal funding for Planned Parenthood is truly a radical idea, and it is one unabashedly advocated by Mitt Romney.      He claimed "I don't believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care or not," but supports the Blunt Amendment, which would allow employers to opt out of the requirement that they provide employees with contraceptive coverage if it violates their "religious beliefs or moral convictions," a loophole the size of the Grand Canyon.  

Following the debate, Chris Matthews asked Eugene Robinson and Joan Walsh why Romney "can't bring himself" to say simply that women deserve equal pay as men.   Romney has no problem with employers deciding to pay women the same as men.  Or more.  Or less.  Or perhaps nothing at all.  In Mitt's world, employers should not be forced to do anything they don't want to do.  They shouldn't be coerced into even hiring qualified women.  Rather, there are going to be so many jobs in a Romney administration, "employers in the new economy.... are going to be so anxious to get good workers they're going to be anxious to hire women," perhaps from those "binders full of women" Mitt had in Massachusetts.    Presumably, if jobs aren't plentiful, those employers can choose to shut women out of consideration entirely.

Obama could have improved on his answer by adding that his support for widespread access to birth control is the is the best deterrent to unwanted pregnancies.  But quibbling would be unfair; it was a good answer, and a good night on Long Island.




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Indirect, But Obvious


A Tea Party Victory Fund ad (video immediately below) asks "Have Barack Obama's policies empowered or enslaved Americans?"








Lee Atwater, this Wikipedia entry reminds us, was the GOP strategist who in 1981 explained

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can't say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.

Digby thus argues "Lee Atwater would be scratching his head over this.  He thought they'd have to be much subtler by this time."

But Lee Atwater was prescient.  Consider the model of obfuscation and prevarication, the ex-governor of Massachusetts himself:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. And he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that's what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like. I mean, when you ask those people…we do all these polls—I find it amazing—we poll all these people, see where you stand on the polls, but 45 percent of the people will go with a Republican, and 48 or 4…

FactCheck.org sets out the history of the current program, SafeLink, which has its origins in The Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which created the Universal Service Administrative Trade Company, an independent not-for-profit corporation set up by the FCC.   The specific, demonized program, which in no way involves President Obama, was created under President George W. Bush with grants from the USAC, which is sustained by funding from telecommunications companies.  It is operated by TracFone Wireless of Tampa, Florida, a subsidiary of America Movil.

Whether by Tea Party extremists, the GOP apparatus, or the Romney campaign, the effort surely is to divide Americans from each other.  Tonight, President Obama needs to drive home that message. Mitt Romney may be ready for an attack from Obama for the infamous remarks at a Boca Raton fund-raiser.  But he would have a hard time explaining to the American people why he believes Social Security recipients and soldiers in combat should have to pay federal income taxes and don't "take personal responsibility and care for their lives."     It presents a clear opening for the President, as do Mitt Romney's offshore accounts, apparent GOP plans to balance the federal budget by eliminating the mortgage interest tax deduction, and the Republican ticket's hostility to women's health care.



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