Wednesday Stuff

post from The Liberal Doomsayer on 24 October 2012 11:31:00 PM. © The Liberal Doomsayer

(I also posted here.)

The Repugs keep pulling garbage like this, so I guess I have to respond somehow (Any actual grownups in that party? Show of hands?)?

"Legitimate Rape" Pharmaceutical Ad (TW) - watch more funny videos
?and I give you the following baseball commentary based on this (and I?m rooting for the Tigers, even if Prince Fielder does need his own area code ? sad face).

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Open Thread

post from Crooks and Liars on 24 October 2012 11:30:06 PM. © Crooks and Liars

enlarge Credit: Twitter @KalPenn

Open Thread below...

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Open thread for night owls: The generic candidate

post from Daily Kos on 24 October 2012 11:30:05 PM. © Daily Kos

There is now less than two weeks to go before this election season is, at long last, over. Regardless of the outcome, however, at least one thing has now been conclusively proven: post-truth politics works. It may or may not win elections, but it has been granted credibility by the press, and by the pundits, and by the electorate. That is not particularly shocking, mind you; we've been merrily skipping along this path for a good long time now, and were bound to get here eventually, but thanks to truly massive amounts of cash and insincerity, we made damn good time. We are less than two weeks before the election, and even if you had a gun to my head I could not tell you what one of the two candidates for leadership of this nation (1) has as his core, avowed principles, (2) is proposing as actual legitimately credible path forward, economically or in any other realm, or (3) would really do if elected, regardless of whatever he and his campaign was saying about (1) or (2).

What does Mitt Romney stand for? What are his core beliefs? Why does this man want to be president? Does he merely like the shape of the room?

We often have elections in which candidates bend their personal beliefs or past history in order to appear more palatable to a wider electorate, but I cannot remember one that featured a candidate so apparently devoid of those beliefs. If Mitt Romney has a position on various social issues, there is precious little evidence of what it might be. If he has any actual plan for the nation other than a few entirely self-serving planks about his own taxes and how to regulate his own and allied industries, he has yet to give credible voice to it. Mitt Romney may be, if his own campaign is to be believed, the most generic person to have ever lived. There is apparently not a damn thing that he might have believed ten years ago that he feels the same way about today?and that includes his own signature accomplishments, by the way. Here is Mitt Romney, of RomneyCare, now the standard bearer against ObamaCare. Here is Mitt Romney the moderate, now Mitt Romney the "severe" conservative, now Mitt Romney the cipher. Here is the man who spent an entire summer campaigning on a twenty percent tax cut, only to toss it all away as soon as the debate season has started, claiming it is a tax cut that will not actually be a tax cut because it will just be a shifting of taxes that has no actual tax impact, which leads to the obvious question of why even bother with the thing, much less hold it up as your signature campaign theme only weeks earlier. He surrounded himself with the most neo of neoconservative foreign policy advisers, ultra-hawks who have continued to grace American op-ed pages with all the various reasons why America needs three wars instead of two, etc,. etc?and upon reaching the foreign policy debate, promptly flushed it all down the campaign toilet, apparently unable or unwilling to describe any foreign policy approach other than the bold and mostly inexplicable we should spend more money on boats plank.

There has not been a single case where, when Mitt Romney was pressed on a past inconvenient action, or belief, or issue, the Etch a Sketch did not simply shake off all the old assertions in favor of some new ones. Problem solved.

There are two separate issues here. First is the obviousness of the lies. The you didn't build that campaign continues to be the crowning, Orwellian achievement there?a swiftboat-styled editing of something that happened not decades ago, but something that happened right before our very eyes, with no shame whatsoever on the part of the liars. That is post-truth politics, summed up. The second issue is the politics of Ultimate Vapidity, the push to so empty the candidate of values and beliefs that he stands for literally nothing, a campaign heralding an expensive suit on a translucent man. You might presume that the pick of Paul Ryan for the vice presidency might signal an appreciation for Ryan's remarkably brutal cull-the-herd approach to the social safety net; you would be equally correct to presume it to be nothing more than the latest empty pander to the groups that need pandering to. There is no way to tell. It is at least telling, however, that after that selection Mitt Romney did not suddenly start promoting the ideas of Paul Ryan; instead, Paul Ryan began to be studiously genericized, like Mitt Romney.

I do not believe Mitt Romney is an ultraconservative. I do not for a minute think Mitt Romney has put enough thought into his own political beliefs to even have an opinion on them. His knowledge of every business he has ever run has, apparently, been reduced to how much money can be extracted from them (or, in the case of the Olympics, how much money he can extract from others for them.) I do not think he knows anything more about how to run the presidency than he does about how to run an office supply chain, or a factory, or a fetus disposal service. He is, as they say, a numbers man.

I am, however, quite convinced that Mitt Romney would govern as a weathervane. He will find, after the election, that his core convictions have suddenly returned, and that his core convictions are whatever he needs them to be in order to gain the support of his party in each circumstance, or to look credible in the eyes of that party, or in the eyes of the lobbyists that walk their aisles, or the industries that support them, and him. That is how these things tend to work, after all.

When Mitt Romney abandoned nearly every premise of his neoconservative advisers, few conservatives said a word. When your candidate is a liar, you learn to take lying in the spirit it is intended. Surely, though?what a place we find ourselves in. The scars of the Great Recession still very much unhealed, America is locked in serious debate over whether to appoint a Wall Street financier, an outsourcer, a cash-hoarder, a true vulture capitalist as our king. As long, that is, as he does not say too much, or have too many opinions on things.

Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006?PA-Sen: Santorum is off the air:

After blowing through $9 million in this election, Santorum trails in the polls badly. And now, two weeks out from the election, the incumbent Republican has gone dark. From a DSCC email:

According to publicly available reports, Rick Santorum is now 100% dark in Pennsylvania, having paid for no campaign ads today. Santorum has spent more than $9 million on ads so far, but his latest media buy ended last night. Since national Republicans aren't airing independent ads in Pennsylvania, that means nobody will be on the air on Santorum's behalf until Santorum himself pays to go back on. So far, Santorum has yet to reserve ad time for the final two weeks of the campaign.

Tweet of the Day:

Paul Ryan: To Help The Poor, Cut Programs For The Poor http://t.co/...
? @paeznyc via popurls sharing

On today's Kagro in the Morning show: ABC News writes the dumbest possible bayonet story. Our regular regimen of poll watching with Greg Dworkin. Armando joined us to interview author Chuck Thompson about his controversial book. And a sneak preview of an upcoming issue: the new Washington consensus against automatic, across-the-board budget solutions. Don't forget to vote for us for "Best New Show" in the Stitcher Awards!

High Impact Posts. Top Comments.

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-owls-The-generic-candidate

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Late Night: Matrix Director Lana Wachowskis
Speech on Coming Out as Transgender

post from Firedoglake on 24 October 2012 11:01:26 PM. © Firedoglake

The Wachowski's haven't done press or made public appearances in 12 years, but in August Lana decided to break her silence and acknowledge her gender evolution (she does not like the word "transition" she says "because of its complicity in a binary[...]

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C&L's Late Night Music Club With The Dictators

post from Crooks and Liars on 24 October 2012 11:00:00 PM. © Crooks and Liars

Title: (I Live For) Cars And GirlsArtist: The Dictators

Got a favorite about cars and girls?

Go Girl Crazy

Artist: Dictators Price: $8.95 (As of 10/24/12 06:10 pm details)

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Texas Attorney General Abbott Threatens To Arrest
United Nations Election Observers In TexasIll Buy Any U.N. Elections Observers In Houston A Glass Of Texas Wine

post from Texas Liberal on 24 October 2012 10:31:12 PM. © Texas Liberal

United Nations observers will be in the United States to monitor our upcoming elections. ( Above–The United Nations General Assembly Hall. After all the ballots are cast in Texas, they will be flown to New York to be counted by the U.N. The election will be official when U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declares the [...]

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Texas Attorney General Abbott Threatens To Arrest
United Nations Election Observers In TexasIll Buy Any U.N. Election Observers In Houston A Glass Of Texas Wine

post from Texas Liberal on 24 October 2012 10:31:12 PM. © Texas Liberal

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Neoliberalism Kills: Part Two

With increasingly grave warnings of doom they try to make us believe that we are facing a national crisis that must be met with a bipartisan solution that will be impervious to the inevitable protests that will arise from most people when their solution[...]

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McCain Dumps Mourdock

On Anderson Cooper, John McCain appears to say he's withdrawing his endorsement of Richard Mourdock until Mourdock apologizes for his rape comments. Video after the jump ...[...]

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urdock.php

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Ad-Happy Political Non-Profit Misled IRS To Get
Tax-Exempt Status

PBS Frontline: Big Sky, Big Money preview

Click here to view this media

[Via PBS]

Of course, we're surprised. After all, we know these shadowy organizations would never, ever lie about their real agenda, especially when they're aiming for a legal precedent that will make it easier to reach their political goals. Too bad we don't have the kind of IRS that will actually enforce the legal distinctions between these groups:

A western nonprofit that played a key role in freeing corporate spending on elections nationwide appears to have misled the IRS when it applied for the tax-exempt status that shields its donors from being publicly disclosed.
Documents obtained by ProPublica and Frontline show that Western Tradition Partnership, now known as American Tradition Partnership, said it would not attempt to sway elections when it asked the IRS to recognize it as a tax-exempt social welfare organization in late 2008.
Shortly before submitting the application, however, Western Tradition Partnership, which bills itself as a "grassroots lobbying" organization dedicated to fighting radical environmentalists, and a related political committee sent out fliers weighing in on candidates for Montana state office. The mailers blitzed districts in Montana days before the Republican primary.
Donny Ferguson, listed as the national director of media of American Tradition Partnership on the group's website, did not return a call or an email for comment.
Social welfare nonprofits ? also called dark money groups because they are not required to identify their donors ? have poured tens of millions of dollars into state and federal elections in recent years.
As spelled out in the tax code, the primary purpose of such groups is not supposed to be political. Yet a ProPublica story published in August showed that dozens of social welfare nonprofits, some formed in the run-up to the 2010 election, had underreported the extent of their political spending and activities to the IRS.
Western Tradition Partnership, though little-known outside Montana and Colorado, is not just any social welfare nonprofit.
Its lawsuit challenging Montana's ban on corporations buying independent political ads led to a ruling this June by the U.S. Supreme Court that effectively extended the court's 2010 Citizens United decision to all states.
For the last two years, Western Tradition Partnership has been locked in a dispute with Montana authorities over whether it should be subject to the state's rules for political committees.
After its mailings before the 2008 primary, the group and its political committee, the Coalition for Energy and the Environment, which uses the same federal employer identification number, sent out more fliers criticizing or praising candidates in the general election.
The group engaged in similar activities before state elections in 2010 in both Montana and Colorado. One of its fliers featured the face of Colorado state Sen. Gail Schwartz, a Democrat, grafted onto Donald Trump's body, with the tagline, "You're Fired!"
In October 2010, Montana's Commissioner on Political Practices issued a report finding that the group's purpose was "to directly influence candidate elections through surreptitious means." The commissioner determined that the group should have registered as a political committee and reported its donors and should be fined.
Western Tradition Partnership has sued the state over the ruling. The case is set for a hearing in March.
When it applied for IRS recognition in the latter half of 2008, Western Tradition Partnership explicitly said it would not be involved in elections.