Mitty Mitt Mitt. What's to be done with you? The day after you win the Florida GOP Presidential Primary, you remind everybody why you should never be allowed in the Oval Office:
“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there,” Romney told CNN. “If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”
Host Soledad O’Brien pointed out that the very poor are probably struggling too.
“The challenge right now — we will hear from the Democrat party the plight of the poor,” Romney responded, after repeating that he would fix any holes in the safety net. “And there’s no question it’s not good being poor and we have a safety net to help those that are very poor . . . My focus is on middle income Americans ... we have a very ample safety net and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it. but we have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor.”
I love Soledad's incredulity bordering on outright contempt, if not for his callousness then for his impolitic messaging. While I agree that it is unfair to take the quote out of context -- although it is something the Romney campaign does to President Obama unapologetically in ads itself -- the actual context is pretty dreadful, tin-eared and reveals a candidate without the Big Picture of American society today.
On one hand, it's easy to take as Freudian slip that Romney doesn't care about the "very poor," but is he essentially saying there's always going to be a permanent underclass in this country that will never move out of social welfare programs?
Or is he even aware what it means to be "very poor" and how many families in America are below or near the poverty line -- per Wikipedia, "Most Americans (58.5%) will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75."
Or is he making a false distinction, since employment uncertainty has grown among those "middle income Americans" thanks to layoffs like those experienced by Bain Capital-managed companies?
And where does he get the 90-95% for those "middle income Americans?" Is that what he believes, or just a pander since his wealthy, almost all now from investments, has branded him Mr. 1%?
And where does he get off even citing class differences when he's ready to excoriate Obama for "class warfare" every time the President suggests that millionaires and billionaires should pay more than a 15% capital gains tax? Class division works when you need to pander, right Mitt?
And that pander, is it actually an attempt to separate out the "middle income Americans" from the "very poor" since he's given up in trying to get votes from the "very poor" and, in fact, may benefit from his Republican Party's work suppressing those votes?
And is there some sort of missing class here? I don't mean "the very rich," I wonder about the just plain "poor." Is that a different category than the "very poor?"
And why is the GOP always trying to cut programs for the "very poor" if Mitt says it's important not only that we have safety net (Ronald Reagan's term, originally, as he cut it), but that he'll vaguely "fix it" where it isn't working?
And, finally, did he just admit that the Democratic Party actually does care about the poor, f'real?
To the three remaining GOP Presidential wannabes: Stay in the race. This runner stumbles. Badly and often enough and egregiously enough that his Party is questioning his ability to take on President Obama in the Fall. Some are even saying this Election Cycle is a wash, time to start strategizing for 2016.
Per the TPM video below...the concession stand is having trouble keeping enough popcorn in stock to enjoy the GOP 2012 Presidential Election show.
But this isn’t just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.
Now, in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that’s happened, after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that have stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for too many years. Their philosophy is simple: we are better off when everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.
Well, I’m here to say they are wrong. I’m here to reaffirm my deep conviction that we are greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values; 1% values or 99% values. They’re American values, and we have to reclaim them.
Meanwhile, the GOP continues to openly take their orders from unelected tax-pledge king, Grover Norquist while a desperate Texas mom who's been denied food stamps for months shot herself and her children.
This Assad was supposedly the good-guy doctor trained in the West, not his brutal old man. Well, unless he's a puppet, he's still in charge, and he now deserves the meathook for his deeds.
On top of all the slaughter of protesting civilians, this boy, Hamza al-Khateeb, is now a cause. Stupid, evil dictators. I guess I haven't paid all that much attention due to my feelings about Syria in relation to Israel as well as its collaboration with the current Iranian regime. But these are the people speaking, Arab Spring, repressive edition.
Fascism means deputizing the most sadistic and base to strike terror into the populace. It never lasts forever, but it can be on so many lifetimes, taken.
Haiti was already the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, having suffered for what seems like forever under hideously corrupt rule, the worst kind of sexual tourism, lack of any crucial resource or export...in essence, a kind of inverse infrastructure that leads to shoddy homes and other buildings erected by and for the poor, the kind of no-code structures that multiply the number of casualties in an earthquake compared to wealthier countries with engineering rules. Just watch the buildings in the background of this video from the earthquake:
What has happened in Haiti and the aftermath is horrific. Not only are there potentially over 100,000 people killed, injuries will be sky high, disease will spread from the unburied bodies and loss of hospitals, not to mention ruined communications and transportation channels. Worst of all, for the living, may be the widespread homelessness from the destruction.
Will this focus worldwide attention on the poverty of Haiti in any lasting, meaningful way? Can it ultimately lead to any kind of improvement through tragedy?
The class will be taught by sociology professor William J. Wilson, one of the best-known African American history professors in the country, who has made no secret of the fact that he is a huge fan of the show.
"I do not hesitate to say that it has done more to enhance our understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality, more than any other media event or scholarly publication," Wilson told the audience before poking fun at himself, "including studies by social scientitsts."
Nothin' new, though, per Associate Professor Jason Mittell at Middlebury College:
Mittell treats The Wireas he should, in the same league as the novels of Dostoevsky or drama of Shakespeare, at five episodes a week. And there's word of a similar course at Dartmouth.
Yep, best show cop show ever.
And arguably the finest fictional television series yet produced.
Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director, explains in the most upfront manner possible, that this is not going to be a passive White House, thank the good Lord. She does it in this interview with the sometimes disingenuous Howie Kurtz of CNN, with the focus of the first 2/3 on why Fox News is not a news network like any other, but rather what we all know it to be (in so many words): a propaganda unit:
"The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. And it is not ideological... what I think is fair to say about Fox, and the way we view it, is that it is more of a wing of the Republican Party."
"Obviously [the President] will go on Fox because he engages with ideological opponents. He has done that before and he will do it again... when he goes on Fox he understands he is not going on it as a news network at this point. He is going on it to debate the opposition."
"[Fox is] widely viewed as a part of the Republican Party: take their talking points and put them on the air, take their opposition research and put it on the air. And that's fine. But let's not pretend they're a news organization like CNN is."
This is exactly the tone that every single Democrat needs to take with Fox News, and in the long run it will help the other (actual) cable news networks with their own identities, assuming they are finally over being the "me, too!" network to Fox. You can't beat FNC in the cable news ratings because it isn't news, it's reality TV with its own orbit of stars, or rather it's alternative reality, with assumed values of a fictionalized works and soap opera-long plotlines.
In any case, it's nice to have Dems with cajones and like Rep. Alan Grayson (R-FL), Ms. Dunn has them:
Now let's see if FNC fairly covers the real story happening right now in our America.
It's easy to mistake the shocking new Italian movie about organized crime in Naples for simply a crime film or a gangster picture. While it fits under those genres it surpasses them, because despite the scams and hold-ups and buy-offs and killings, Gomorrah is essentially a film about the corrosive effect of unchecked poverty, fully drinking of the Luis Buniel Los Olvidados tradition as much as the post-WWII Italian Neorealist lineage. It's just supercharged without losing any grit, a world where dread is a birthright and life struggles to grow corrupted through the cracks.
When the picture started I thought maybe I'd have seen it all before, but it's an original, large-scale organized crime completely stripped of glamor, making The Sopranos seem as opulent as The Godfather. The tapestry is different than we've come to expect -- five stories that virtually never connect save being in the same geographic criminal economy. There's no causality between plotlines, which works here to make the movie seem larger, more universal, even as it bores down into the deadly and deadened world of the projects, the sweatshops, the illegal dumping grounds. It's a vicious world of pollution, and you can't take your eyes off the screen.
Director Matteo Garrone went deep into the locale and culture illuminated by author/reporter Roberto Saviano in his non-fiction international bestseller, so close that some actors playing themselves have even ended up arrested. But trouble is no stranger to the creative endeavor, as Saviano has had to flee the country under syndicate death threats.
There are characters -- the 13 year-old boy who gets his initiation, the teenage would-be Scarface duo, the young fixer aiding the suave middle-aged businessman, the tailor who seeks respect, the old bagman who's in too deep. But it moves faster than you can blink filled with thumbnail portraits right and left, and the violence is abrupt, short and brutish, like real life. And I think some of them get off lighter than I expected -- crushed is sometimes the best fate you can pray for.
I'm embedding the Italian trailer below because I think the American trailer has too big a spoiler, so avoid that one if you can, until after you see the movie. I went in knowing very little, having seen even less, and while I wasn't sure I loved the movie when it ended, I couldn't deny it was about something, that it was disturbing but for good and pressing reason:
And now I think it's the new benchmark that will take many years to beat, because it easily transcends the gangster genre into the anthropological realm with more immediacy than even Scorsese (and Marty is presenting the movie in the U.S.). On one hand, like the unjust violence of poverty in Slumdog Millionaire, it asks how can we allow such a state to persist in our modern world. On the other, it makes us complicit, as if our own moral paucity is on the line.
After all, isn't someone always paying up to somebody else?
I don't want to drop any spoilers for Slumdog Millionaire, but since seeing it last night there's a scene I can't shake that I think gives the movie it's ultimate street cred. This is essentially a very modern Frank Capra movie set in the Mumbai section of Bombay, India, and it's amazing that the movie has come out almost simultaneously with the coordinated assault that killed so many people there last week. The main characters in the movie are, as young children, victims of anti-Muslim violence which leads to their harrowing lives on the streets. Not incidentally, the terrorists who attacked last week claimed to be doing so in retaliation for the pain inflicted by the Hindu majority on their people.
Capra gets a bit maligned for being "corny" but it's his imitators more than the man himself who have tarnished his reputation by not earning their sentiment. There's an argument to be made of a certain commercial calculation in Slumdog Millionaire, but I think the powerful depiction of poverty and indictment of those who inflict cruelty on those less powerful more than balances any of the uplift. And the movie is colorful, jammed full of youthful energy, and musically propulsive, with the best end credit sequence in memory.
This is director Danny Boyle's masterpiece (yes, better even than Trainspotting), from a script by Simon Beaufoy (who wrote The Full Monty) this from an Indian novel source. It's using a certain amount of audience pleasing storytelling to bring the more desperate, urgent vision to our multiplexes.
The National Board of Review just named it their best picture of the year. Looks like the one to beat for the big Oscar at the end of the line.
Two big things changed today for Barack Obama in his quest for the Presidency. He received the endorsements of both NARAL Pro-Choice America and former Senator John Edwards.
One can argue that NARAL could have timed it better -- i.e. after Oregon, a little less gender-traitorish -- but they probably wanted to get the news acknowledgment while it still matters. Obama is a staunch supporter of reproductive rights, so it's not a bad decision. And while the story got somewhat buried by the sudden, West Virginia-erasing Edwards endorsement, one could argue that NARAL supports a right often made necessary by bad timing itself.
The timing and staging of the Edwards announcement is extremely intriguing. One wonders when the plan was set in motion but in classic Obama fashion, it was unheralded for what it did most -- move the campaign past the nomination to the general election by dramatically uniting a key party faction, potentially supplying Obama with a one-stop 18-delegate boost essentially slipping the knife into the Clinton campaign for the final arterial opening.
It was significant that it took place in Grand Rapids, and speaks to another potentially subtle but firmly planned and executing Obama strategy: the settling of the Florida and Michigan convention seatings.
Edwards (who I supported before Iowa) got that huge burst of being in a room endorsing Obama (as Richardson did, as various top-level state officials have), but most importantly he got Obama to promise to combat poverty as President, gets to be there to keep him honest, maybe a cabinet position.
Most of all, they united messages -- Edwards on his Two Americas coming together under Obama's One America, hopefully for real by the end of President Barack Obama's second term.
I started the year as a John Edwards supporter and moved to Barack Obama when I watched his victory speech in Iowa, because he moved me. And also because I don't want a Clinton Dynasty on the heels of a Bush Dynasty, and I realized Obama was right from the start of his campaign -- he's the only one short of a de-politicized Al Gore who can save the Democratic Party from defeat at her hands in November.
It's not just the lack of a stirring speachifying style, the embarrassment of a husband or her lack of clarity on where she stands. It's the fact that Democrats always lose when they run as "Best Manager." We don't want managers for President (Stevenson, Humphrey, Mondale, Dukakis, Mondale, Kerry), we want leaders, i.e. with a vision of our country. All of it.
But Edwards had my heart at first, because he was the one who moved the debate where it needed to go: U.S. poverty, Presidential abuse of power, and honest regret that he, like so many honorable Americans, allowed themselves to be bamboozled into a ruinous war.
Although his campaign never caught fire in the actual voting, it was still a bit of a surprise when he announced his decision to leave the race today, what after having sworn in more than one concession speech to go all the way to the Democratic Convention, perhaps just as a kingmaker with his cache of delegates. Maybe he did the math (15% viability rule that would have made the kingmaker plan futile) or maybe he ran out of money.
My bigger fear is that his awesome wife, Elizabeth, may not be doing so well in her battle against cancer. Winning might have buoyed her, but a protracted losing battle would simply be wearing, maybe life-threateningly so.
In any case, he picked a great time to go out -- blunting Hillary's phantom Florida play, and stepping on Rudy's McCain endorsement. In fact, Edwards did not endorse a candidate on the way out, smart for a number of reasons.
While Rudy looks small for fighting so wussily and falling into John McCain's strong white-furred arms the very first day out, in essence negating himself, Edwards ran a real campaign of social justice, a tough love message, but one firmly siding with the working middle class of America and our poorest. The so-called Liberal Mainstream Media slaughtered him, the only big name threat of any real menace to the corporate uberlords, the guy with the hair no matter that he's telling the truth. He's angry, they emphasized, but Edwards is a happy warrior, who loves and doesn't shy away from people. And who hasn't been angry for extended periods these past seven years at this Cheney/Bush/GOP hegemonic disaster.
Johnny went out in class, exiting from New Orleans just as he had when announcing he was running, the only candidate amongst either party to put that striken American city and people front and center, so it might get help.
I began my presidential campaign here to remind the country that we, as citizens and as a government, have a moral responsibility to each other, and what we do together matters. We must do better, if we want to live up to the great promise of this country that we all love so much.
It is appropriate that I come here today. It's time for me to step aside so that history can blaze its path. We do not know who will take the final steps to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but what we do know is that our Democratic Party will make history. We will be strong, we will be unified, and with our convictions and a little backbone we will take back the White House in November and we'll create hope and opportunity for this country.
If he chooses to make an endorsement, and I'd be disappointed if it is for Hillary over Barack, I hope it's in a timely enough manner should it be necessary to take Obama over the top.
So far a couple of white Southern guys are my favorites to become our next U.S. President. One is actually running for the Democratic Party nomination, the other is not announced and maybe never announcing.
I find something to like in all of the Democratic candidates, and will vote for any of them over any of the Republican candidates, all of whom I find odious and repellent, with the exception of the very honest and (although I disagree with so many of his Libertarian positions) Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), someone I agree with wholeheartedly on the egregious folly of this Iraq War and all of the Patriot Act type civil liberty usurpations they snuck through with it.
While he continues to place #3 in the national polls, John Edwards has an edge in the early Iowa caucus. There are a number of things I like about Edwards. He's the only candidate consistently talking about poverty and what it's doing to our nationhood. As a thinking, acting individual, there is no doubt that he has grown these past four years, and I think he's still growing. And he's got the best wife of all the candidates, long may she live.
So what are his actual odds? Who knows -- Hillary has the national poll numbers, Obama has the star power. As to Edwards' strategy, The New York Times piece from Monday morning is a pretty good picture as far as I've come to understand it:
Mr. Edwards has shown a new eagerness to draw contrasts with his opponents on issues like the war in Iraq and health care, in no small part motivated by his struggle not to get lost in a field of big names. And he has gone from the boyish, easygoing one-time senator from North Carolina to a candidate displaying an urgently engaging manner as likely to seize as to charm an audience, an approach that appears to be particularly effective in the close-quarter meetings that fill his days here.
I don't find it a valid criticism that Sen. Edwards made his money as a trial lawyer. Even Republicans call up a trial lawyer the minute they feel they've been wronged by a major corporation. We've had an actor President, a profession where the main task is to make people believe the story being told, and a whole lot of people hold him in high esteem.
(Personally, I commend President Ronald Reagan for having ignored Rep. Richard Cheney and his band of moron ideologues and chosen to deal with Russian Premier Gorbachev during those fragile early days of glasnost and perestroika. Actual statesmanship.)
Edwards in his positions is fighting the power for national health insurance and impressing regular folks with his live appearances, going to small towns usually ignored by Democrats. He's not some trumped up phony, although he certainly will be selling between now and either his eventual win or elimination. I don't begrudge him that, either.
Mr. Gore is scheduled to address the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival as part of the windup leading to the Live Earth concerts on July 7, which are intended to raise awareness of the issue of climate change.
You might think that Mr. Gore and his campaign against global warming would find few friends in Cannes. The production, transport, sale and consumption of goods and services add a few sizes to anyone’s carbon footprint.
Yet Mr. Gore is being accorded rock star status at the festival, an event that in the past has been headlined by industry insiders. The embrace of Mr. Gore shows how “green” advertising has galvanized the marketing community.
It turns out the ultimate salesman is the former Vice President and 2000 Presidential popular vote winner, wildly successful in selling the very real threat of global warming to the populace of the world. It's all consumer driven sentiment -- we do want to save our world! -- so advertisers are responding. Of course, we'll see if they're really serious about being good corporate citizens in the long run, but there is no one but Al who made this happen.
Other politicians and nations can pressure and preach - but top-down decision-making starts in the Oval Office.
Is that possible when climate change is just one "normal" issue among many, to be ceremonially weighed against US jobs or gas prices or Chinese imports? It's not. But that, with inevitable shades of emphasis, is where every extant presidential candidate stands. Too timid, too slow. Global warming is an utterly abnormal issue that needs a leader all of its own. Gore has fashioned himself as that leader. He can't just sit there and pontificate. He has to run. And, when he does, the rest of us have to put inconvenient illusions aside and listen.
The bloke's got a point.
And when I look at this, I get happy chills of projection...
