Midday open thread

post from Daily Kos on 28 April 2012 03:00:04 PM. © Daily Kos

A thread, Frodo Baggins, is never late. Nor is it early. It arrives right when it means to. At midday.

The California Democratic Party is electing its delegates to the DNC convention in Charlotte this weekend. Find your caucus and roster of qualified candidates at the link above. And yes, they're all pledged to Barack Obama.
At digby's place, David Atkins gives a fantastic takedown of the "both sides do it" bipartisanship fetish that pervades the media establishment:
It would seem that the last three years should be all the political evidence one needs that the forbearance approach of the center-left doesn't work. Forget whether the policies are good or not for a moment: politically speaking, if forbearance and reasonableness were virtues in politics, President Obama would be a saint. He's bent farther over backwards to compromise with these people than Gumbi. The result was an even more extremist right wing, an historic devastation for his party in the 2010 midterms, an intransigentlly conservative Supreme Court, and an apoplectic 2012 campaign. Forbearance hasn't worked--and that's just the politics of it.
On the policy, the results are awful. It's not just that extreme conservative policy is bad. Centrist policy is bad, too. The authors speak fondly of the Democrats for compromising with George W. Bush to pass his tax cuts for the rich and No Child Left Behind. They also forget the bipartisan eagerness to invade Iraq. These were bad policies, policies that the American people would have been much better served by Democrats opposing en masse. Back in the Clinton years Democrats and Republicans joined forces to pass NAFTA, banking deregulation, and "end welfare as we know it." Those were also terrible, misguided policies.
Yes, there is such as thing as a 1-bedroom apartment for $22 million. It's a bit out of my price range, but what the hell.
Yesterday, Mitt Romney offered the helpful suggestion that enterprising students looking for startup capital could just borrow money from their parents:
If you?re young and you want to start your own business, Mitt Romney?s has some advice from you: Borrow money from your parents. At a ?lecture? for students at Otterbein University in Ohio today, Mitt Romney told students that, his friend, Jimmy John, started a business by borrowing $20,000 from his parents at a low interest rate. Romney suggested anyone in the audience could do the same.
If there were a dictionary entry for the term "out of touch," you can bet it would have a picture of Mitt Romney, front and center.
Opponents of Amendment One in North Carolina are gaining momentum as voters in the state find out just how far-reaching the ramifications of the amendment are.
The same students Mitt Romney admonished to borrow $20,000 from their parents were also bored to tears the entire time. It isn't hard to see why:
The central theme Romney drove home was the fact that ?sometimes appearances do not conform with the facts or reality,? and he applied it to such topics as the office supply industry, the intricacies of tax filing law and Dodd-Frank financial legislation.
?I have several examples of disparity between appearance and reality,? Romney said, launching into a lengthy monologue about his time as a private equity investor, when he discovered ? to his critics? chagrin! ? that potential annual savings on office supplies were significant enough to justify an investment in bigger stores that could make their profits on higher sales volume rather than bigger mark-ups.
?What we found was they were spending a lot more than that I thought on copy paper and toner and supplies and software and so forth,? said. ?So we decided we would invest in this office superstore. It?s called Staples and now employs many tens of thousands.?
Fired up, ready to buy copy paper?