Tag Archives: Mitt Romney

OrmayberomneyDOEScare.

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Who knows?

Just last Sunday, Mitt Romney was touting the benefits of Universal Emergency Room Healthcare.   Yesterday, he apparently decided that sounded too crass, not to mention thoroughly ineffective.  Via Risking Conservative Ire, Romney Touts Romneycare | TPM2012.

“[D]on’t forget — I got everybody in my state insured,” Romney told NBC. “One hundred percent of the kids in our state had health insurance. I don’t think there’s anything that shows more empathy and care about the people of this country than that kind of record.”

In other words, “message:  I care,” . . . every third day until November 6.

Romneydoesntcare

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I’m sure this has been covered more thoroughly, eloquently, and learnedly elsewhere, but how the hell can Romney say this with a straight face:

In the 60 Minutes interview, Romney protested the idea that government doesn’t already provide health care to the uninsured: “Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance,” he said. “If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”

So no mammograms, but once the cancer has metastasized to your lungs and you stop breathing, an ambulance will take you to the emergency room.

No dialysis, but when your kidneys fail, an ambulance will take you to the emergency room.

No annual physical, but when you have a heart attack, the ambulance is ready!

This isn’t about those grabby poor people Romney has clearly written off.  It’s about people who are too rich for Medicaid but too poor to buy their own health insurance.   And THAT category includes many hourly workers, independent contractors, and people who are starting their own businesses.  Future job creators rather than current job destroyers.

And how on earth is his plan pro-life?  Seriously — you can defend this approach on doctrinaire libertarian grounds, but how can you square it with the position that life is sacred and that the government has a legitimate role in protecting it?

 

Mutt Mitt

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Hey!  I didn’t invent the product or the packaging — I just added my 8th grade sense of humor.  And a product endorsement:  nothing beats the Mitt for scooping poop!

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MX880 series

Yes, I put the poop scoop bag bag on the scanner.  Yes I did.

“Fail.” You keep using that word . . .

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Since my brother and I appear to be communicating by blog these days (::waving::  Hi, Bruce!), I’d like to respond to this post* by paraphrasing my second favorite movie line:**  “‘Fail.’  You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Republicans are fond of saying that Obama is a failed president, that his policies have failed, and that there’s just a whole lot of fail going on.  The only possible definition they could have in mind for the word “fail” is “not doing what Republicans would like a president to do.”  Because by any reasonable, apolitical, measure Obama is a resounding success.  I’d really like to know how the definition of “fail” accounts for:

  1. Killing bin Laden.
  2. Saving the US auto industry.
  3. Repealing “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” ending defense of DOMA in court, and supporting marriage equality.
  4. Supporting the overthrow of Gaddafi.
  5. Signing the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
  6. Getting us out of an expensive and destructive war we should never have started.
  7. Appointing two righteous women to the Supreme Court.
  8. Passing Obamacare.
  9. Passing the Stimulus.
  10. Passing Wall Street Reform — not enough, but it’s better than nothing.

This is just sort of Amy’s top ten; there are a number of websites devoted to listing the President’s accomplishments, including

There are, in fact, several very business-oriented metrics that suggest President Obama is a success.  For example, the Dow was at about 8,000 when Bush left office; it closed at 12,820 on Friday.  (This continues the general trend that the Dow likes Democratic presidents much more than Republicans.) And Corporate profits are way up under Obama.   So, um, “socialist” doesn’t mean what they think it means either.

I think that leaves for the definition of “failed” when used as an adjective in the Republican mantra “failed president” such things as

  • Failing to cut taxes for millionaires.
  • Failing to appoint Federalist Society members to the Supreme Court.
  • Failing to leave the health of our citizens to the mercies of the perverse incentives of the insurance industry.
  • Failing to continue the war in Iraq.
  • Failing to not be concerned about bin Laden.

Ultimately, it is perfectly reasonable for Republicans like my brother to disagree with Obama.  But calling his administration “failed” seems like a weirdly transparent but ultimately content-free branding campaign.

*************

* The upshot of Bruce’s post is that all teen-age boys do cruel things, so we should not judge Mitt Romney by his decision to assault a classmate to cut off his hair or physically trick a blind teacher into walking into a door.   I don’t think any of my brother’s escapades (he takes the fifth but I’m aware of at least some small percentage of them) rise to the level of cruelty the Washington Post article describes of Romney.  But if in fact all boys do these things, perhaps it’s time to elect a girl to the presidency.

** My favorite is “Sometimes I sing and dance around the house in my underwear. Doesn’t make me Madonna.  Never will.”  Don’t ask me why.  I have actually used this quote on opposing counsel, though not to his face.  We have an opposing counsel who has, on his voice mail, a pompous quote-of-the-day, which you have to listen to, all the way through, before leaving him a voicemail.  It’s generally something from Gandhi, or the Buddha, or a Hallmark card, and it’s often very long, with no option to push # and just skip it.  After several years of superhuman effort exerted toward not saying, “Dude, you are working your ass off to deny the civil rights of people with disabilities; stop it with the quotes, already,” I finally left him two quotes of my own.  The first was this one; the second was “I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused.”   No reaction to either one from him, but I cracked myself up!

Romney’s disability bullying

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Anyone who has made his or her way to this backwater in the blogosphere must have seen the Washington Post article on Mitt Romney’s history of cruelty and bullying at his prep school.  The event that has gotten the most attention is Romney’s bullying of a nonconformist classmate — a kid with dyed blond hair — that had overtones of gay bashing and homophobia.  But what about this incident:

One venerable English teacher, Carl G. Wonn­berger, nicknamed “the Bat” for his diminished eyesight, was known to walk into the trophy case and apologize, step into wastepaper baskets and stare blindly as students slipped out the back of the room to smoke by the open windows. Once, several students remembered the time pranksters propped up the back axle of Wonnberger’s Volkswagen Beetle with two-by-fours and watched, laughing from the windows, as the unwitting teacher slammed the gas pedal with his wheels spinning in the air.

As an underclassman, Romney accompanied Wonnberger and Pierce Getsinger, another student, from the second floor of the main academic building to the library to retrieve a book the two boys needed. According to Getsinger, Romney opened a first set of doors for Wonnberger, but then at the next set, with other students around, he swept his hand forward, bidding the teacher into a closed door. Wonnberger walked right into it and Getsinger said Romney giggled hysterically as the teacher shrugged it off as another of life’s indignities.

How does this speak to Romney’s views on people with disabilities?   There are many measures of how far the Republican party has sunk — from William F. Buckley to Sarah Palin, say — but in my neck of the woods, it couldn’t be sharper than the contrast between the man who signed the ADA and someone with so little respect for people with disabilities that he would humiliate his own blind teacher.

Would any of us be elected if judged by our adolescences?  Perhaps not, though mostly due to lingering squeamishness with recreational drug and alcohol use.  I cannot think of any friends or classmates who did anything close to the cruelty of assaulting a fellow student to cut his hair simply because he was different or physically ridiculing a disabled teacher.

Two other things strike me.  First of all, of course, the homophobic bullying has received far more attention than the disabiliphobic bullying.  Part of that has to do with the fact that the article was published within a day of both North Carolina’s shameful vote enshrining marriage discrimination in its constitution and President Obama’s declaration of his support for marriage equality.  But I’m concerned that that casual tone of the quote above indicates a greater societal acceptance of disability-related “pranks” than homophobic “bullying.”

I’m also struck by just how uncivilized Romney’s behavior was.  And not just once, but apparently over and over.   We Democrats are supposed to be the party of the uncouth, unwashed hippies, and the GOP the party of Brooks Brothers, using the proper wine glass, and not wearing white after Labor Day.  But the behavior described in this article is deeply uncivilized, and the fact that it was laughed off at an elite prep school speaks volumes.

How on earth could we trust this man to run our country?

Yes, we have a voting problem.

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Republicans spend a lot of time these days trying to protect the vote against nonexistent threats and potential non-Republican voters, like students and poor people.  But if you gave Michael Moore psychedelic drugs he couldn’t have parodied the GOP’s voting problems better than they have on their own.

For example, you thought Romney won Iowa, right? At least that’s what Fox News announced the next day.

Hold on!

The certified numbers: 29,839 for Santorum and 29,805 for Romney.

Oh, then Santorum won by 34 votes, right?   Um . . .

THE RESULTS: Santorum finished ahead by 34 votes
MISSING DATA: 8 precincts’ numbers will never be certified
PARTY VERDICT: GOP official says, ‘It’s a split decision’

Except the 8 precincts’ votes that the GOP regards as “missing” are online for non-Republicans with ordinary math skills to analyze.

If those results are added to the certified results, Santorum’s 29,839 votes would become 29,920, and Romney’ 29,805 would become 29,851 — for a “final” result of Santorum winning the caucuses, by a margin of 69 votes.

And then there’s the very democratic process by which a bunch of evangelicals got together and decided to endorse Santorum.

It was not until the third ballot, after some of Gingrich’s supporters left, that Santorum cleared the three-quarters threshold, receiving 85 votes, to Gingrich’s 29.   . . . [A]ll the participants had been bound by an agreement not to speak for 24 hours.  . . . “It wasn’t a consensus and it wasn’t an endorsement,” added former representative J.C. Watts (R-Okla.), who was also at the session and also expressed concern at how the outcome was being portrayed.

And these guys are asking us to trust them to run the country?