The big news this afternoon is that Mittens admitted his effective tax rate is only about 15 percent, This is not a big surprise to those who’ve been paying attention. And that clacking sound you hear is coming from the rightie blogosphere furiously defending the right of the obscenely wealthy to hang on to their dough while benefiting from the taxes paid by the rest of us. Still, I doubt it will help Romney much.
GOP: Still Stuck in the (18)60s
So the GOP candidates stage a debate on Martin Luther King day, and the candidates and audience gang up on Juan Williams for bringing up, you know, the race thing. Newt wowed the crowd by implying that African Americans are parasites who need to learn how to work.
At Balloon Juice, Dennis G. responds with this:
Yeah, pretty much sums up how I feel. On the plus side, I do believe they all managed to refrain from telling watermelon jokes, at least on camera.
Gingrich made some remark about “Only elites despise earning money,†which I thought were brave words from someone who gets paid handsomely for being a phony intellectual blowhard. Nice work if you can get it.
Gingrich also scored with the crowd by attacking Ron Paul —
Newt Gingrich said that equating terrorist leaders to Chinese dissidents that might come to America – as Paul did to illustrate his point – was a false analogy. …
…”South Carolina in the Revolutionary War had a young 13-year old named Andrew Jackson who was sabered by a British officer and wore a scar his whole life. Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear cut about America’s enemies: kill them,” Gingrich said.
Let us pause to remember that Newt managed to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam era and has never served in the military.
Christian Conservative Dirty Tricks
You may have heard that over the weekend a group of more than 100 Christian conservatives met to discuss their choices for the Republican presidential nomination. And you may have heard that the group voted to endorse Rick Santorum.
Today some of the attendees say the ballots were rigged.
A civil war is breaking out among evangelical leaders over allegations of a rigged election and ballot stuffing at a Saturday gathering of religious and social conservatives. …
… in back-and-forth emails, Protestant fundamentalist leaders who attended – most of them backing former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to be the anti-Romney candidate — are accusing Catholic participants of conniving to rig the vote.
They said they were conned into leaving after the second ballot on Saturday. They said pro-Santorum participants held a third ballot which Mr. Santorum won with more than 70 percent of the vote — far higher than the nine-vote margin he won on the first ballot.
Steve Benen points out that both Gingrich and Santorum are Catholic (Newt being a convert). Still, it shows us that the Religious Right ain’t the political juggernaut it used to be.
It also shows us that the word “evangelical” is now being stretched to cover conservative Catholics as well as a subset of protestantism, which certainly didn’t use to be the case.
And WWJD? Live in Canada, one suspects.
The Long Game
I am no fan of Andrew Sullivan, but here I think he’s seeing something that seems to elude others:
… given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.
Sullivan argues that the President has a pattern:
To use the terms Obama first employed in his inaugural address: the president begins by extending a hand to his opponents; when they respond by raising a fist, he demonstrates that they are the source of the problem; then, finally, he moves to his preferred position of moderate liberalism and fights for it without being effectively tarred as an ideologue or a divider. This kind of strategy takes time. And it means there are long stretches when Obama seems incapable of defending himself, or willing to let others to define him, or simply weak. I remember those stretches during the campaign against Hillary Clinton. I also remember whose strategy won out in the end.
For example:
What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit for. And so I railed against him for the better part of two years for dragging his feet on gay issues. But what he was doing was getting his Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to move before he did. The man who made the case for repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell†was, in the end, Adm. Mike Mullen. This took time—as did his painstaking change in the rule barring HIV-positive immigrants and tourists—but the slow and deliberate and unprovocative manner in which it was accomplished made the changes more durable. Not for the first time, I realized that to understand Obama, you have to take the long view. Because he does.
It’s an interesting analysis, and I’d like to know what you think of it.
BTW, this piece apparently is being featured in the new issue of Newsweek and the cover blurb asks “Why are Obama’s critics so dumb?” This has drawn much ire from rightie bloggers, who assume “Obama’s critics” are all on the Right.
Even More Stuff to Read
Crow Snowboarding
More Stuff to Read
Krugman, Untruths, Wholly Untrue, And Nothing But Untruths
Here’s a happy story: Fire Survivor and a Possible Olympian: A Horse Named Neville
Stuff to Read
“Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity.” It’s so hard to keep up.
The American Right has been following Lenin’s playbook to destroy Social Security and Medicare.
I Hate the New Gmail
The new gmail interface makes New Coke seem brilliant.
Panties in Twists
The Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler wasted no time ripping up the “King of Bain” documentary and giving it Four Pinochios. The errors were pretty much the same ones picked out in Fortune yesterday. Kessler works real hard at pretending he’s not defending vulture capitalism.
Meanwhile, see Steve Benen:
As recently as two weeks ago, Romney had a fairly specific number in mind when it came to the jobs created by his vulture-capitalist firm.
“I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.â€
A few days ago, the total dropped.
“People here in the state know that in the work that I had, we started a number of businesses, invested in many others, and that over all created tens of thousands jobs.â€
This morning, the Romney campaign unveiled a new ad, which moved the goal post again. Greg Sargent picked up on the new message:
The ad claims Romney only created “thousands of jobs,†which is the latest shift in his campaign’s claims.
So, over the course of two weeks, Romney has gone from “over 100,000 jobs†to “tens of thousands†to “thousands.â€
By next week, he’ll be bragging about all the jobs he created by tearing down and rebuilding one of his homes.
Elsewhere — Tbogg is fact checking some of the fact checks. Mistermix says “Citizens United Is Kicking Romney’s Ass.” E.J. Dionne says a debate about capitalism is long overdue. Steve Kornacki writes about how not to sell a top 1 percent agenda. And not to be missed — the Brooks Versus Krugman smackdown, by Andrew Leonard.