Folks, As we await, how do you do.....and how ya'll doing......??? Rachel Maddow - Political observers lose patience with Romney vacillations Published on Oct 10, 2012 by Licentiathe8th Oct 10, 2012
Steve Kornacki, co-host of MSNBC's "The Cycle" and senior writer for Salon, talks with Rachel Maddow about Mitt Romney's strategy of denying his own record to say what's popular and political observers aren't letting him get away with it with his latest maneuverings on the issue of abortion. Agreed, though i think he should do both... just hard to draw a line vs a habitual liar who seems to have no definitive stance on any position and is obsurdily vague. What I wonder is if this Lie-and-retrack is a specific strategy by the campaign, hopefully trying to bank that less people will pay attention to the followup story? And how the hell people dont just lose it... it makes me want to scream every time I see this stuff. Slowclapforjusticein reply to tknick9012 minutes ago Rachel I didn't hear you mention that Romney signed an agreement that allowed abortion to take place if his son or his son's surrogate participant chooses that option during the arrangement of his son and sons wife having a child via a surrogate mother. Assuming Romney was paying for it which explains both he and his son's signature. Ravenda Dallah7 hours ago Romney should be asked if his wife became pregnant from rape, would he insist that she be forced to bear the pregancy to term in accordance to radicalized GOP ideology. It´s certainly a valid question since some 30,000 raped women are put in that situation every year. Frankly we wouldn´t even hear about it if it happened. Given Romney´s proclivity to hide everything the whole matter would be shrouded in denials and distractions while surreptitiously dispatched with an abortion under wraps. townsendjean10 hours ago Obama needs to change the narrative. His side is the one with facts and principle, his opponents will say whatever they need to in the moment and are untethered from objective reality. Romney is a chameleon and will change his policy based on Obama's accusations. Obama needs to attack Romney's deceptive strategy, rather than drawing a line on policy; because Romney will blur that line every time. tknick9011 hours ago Martin Bashir - Why Obama must turn debunker-in-chief to beat Romney Published on Oct 9, 2012 by Licentiathe8th Oct 9, 2012
The Hill's Karen Tumulty, Mother Jones' David Corn and MSNBC.com's Richard Wolffe debate how President Obama must discuss Mitt Romney's flip-flops on things like tax cuts and foreign policy to show that the "new" moderate Mitt Romney is no different than the old "severely conservative" one. Rachel Maddow - Romney foreign policy ideas ill conceived Published on Oct 8, 2012 by Licentiathe8th Oct 8, 2012
Michele Flournoy, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Obama administration and current Obama campaign foreign policy advisor, talks with Rachel Maddow about U.S. military engagements and whether Mitt Romney's defense policy proposals have any basis in reality Most disconcerting is that Romney has assembled a foreign policy advisory team populated by the neo-cons (Bolton, Senor, etc) who counseled George Bush with horrific consequences from which the nation has not entirely recovered. And in this, his first foray into the international arena, it shows. townsendjean2 days ago Martin Bashir - Romney master and commander-in-chief on foreign policy? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnnZixeq8As Published on Oct 8, 2012 by Licentiathe8th Oct 8, 2012
Brookings' Michael O'Hanlon and The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson debate whether Mitt Romney's latest "major speech" on foreign affairs is really that different from the President's policy, and whether Romney even realizes that. The joke's on us: how Joe Biden became America's favorite punch line1 hr 35 mins ago Virginia Heffernan is the national correspondent for Yahoo! News, covering culture and politics from a digital perspective. She wrote extensively on Internet culture during her eight years as a staff writer for The New York Times, and she has also worked at Harper's, the New Yorker and Slate. Her new book, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet, will be published in early 2013. More Machine Politics Among the four candidates on the top ballot line for the two major parties this year, only one man has never shifted roles, through five decades in politics: Joe Biden. The vice president has always been a punch line.
It's the joke that keeps changing.
These days, on "Saturday Night Live," in "The Onion," and as @VeepJoeBiden on Twitter, Biden is represented as boneheaded and vain. A Vinny Barbarino figure. A dimwit with an eye on the mirror, squaring his jaw and checking his hairline. And nonsensically orating.
This version of Biden—let's call him New Parody Biden—is also charming. That's what's most striking about it. He's emotional and vain and likes attention, but he's childish and thus not very scheming. He seems to be trivial and light and silly, which makes him decidedly unscary. He's basically Dick Cheney's opposite.
The idea that Biden is cool and dumb has occasioned a whole new set of jokes about him, ones that are actually better for the vice president's image than previous parodies were.
Once, long ago, Parody Biden was a plagiarist. The Biden jokes of 25 years ago portrayed the presidential also-ran as a parrot.
"And so the rabbi says, 'Goodbye, Bupkis!' and Joe Biden says, 'Goodbye, Bupkis!'"* (*Not a real Biden joke.)
In law school in the'60s, where he graduated near the bottom of his class, Biden indeed plagiarized a law review article for a class paper. In the '80s, he stole other politicians' work for political speeches. When he was caught, he played dumb about the mechanics of citation—classic plagiarist move.
Decades later, the plagiarism scandals forgotten, Biden was instead lampooned as a gaffe machine—a Tourettesy type short on self-control. Jimmy Fallon riffed on this iteration of Old Parody Biden: "Joe Biden accidentally revealed the location of the Vice President's top secret bunker. The guy can't help it. But he did apologize. He said: 'I am so sorry for the mistake. The launch code is 85334. It will never happen again. It will never happen again. My Gmail password is robot23. What am I doing? The house key is under the plant near the doorstep.'"
This line of jokes came after Biden, during the beginning of his presidential campaign in 2007, unselfconsciously called Barack Obama "the first mainstream African American"—presidential candidate, presumably—"who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."
Calling a black person "articulate" was memorably identified as weird and racist by Chris Rock in 1996. The "bright and clean" stuff was even more disturbing. And Biden—not Parody Biden—once told an Indian American, with a straight face, "You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent." He added, "I'm not joking."
This version of Biden recently re-emerged when he told supporters in Virginia, some of them black, that Mitt Romney "is going to put y'all back in chains." The "y'all" was disgraceful, as far as this listener is concerned. After this tweaked-out racism, Matt Latimer wrote in The Daily Beast that Biden should step down as vice president—and that he absolutely would be forced to, were he a Republican.
But somehow even Real Biden's tweaked-out racism has become bundled into the New Parody Biden's erratic "charm." Sometimes, as in this collector's-item "Onion" piece from 2009, New Parody Biden—shown shirtless and tattooed, cleaning condom wrappers out of his 1981 Trans Am—lands on the goofball ladies-man end of things.
Maybe he reminds us of our dads. Joe Biden is 69, but the idea that he's an out-of-it charmer—all hair-band '80s heart with no indie-rock 2012 brains—seems to endear him to a Gen-X audience. New Parody Biden might even help the ticket. Politico praised Biden's charisma not long ago, going so far as to say that the balding, error-prone septuagenarian is "bringing sexy back."
Biden's impolitic spiels recall two lovable racist-sexists: David Brent in the original British "Office" and Nigel Tufnel in "Spinal Tap." ("What's wrong with being sexy?" "Sexist." "Oh.") You get the sense that these older—albeit fictional—white guys are trying extremely hard to tow a politically correct line that they can't entirely see. The repressed returns with loony force.
In the real world, I'm not sure if that's charming or scary. But it's certainly familiar to anyone who's been around white men of Biden's age.
So which parody of Biden hits closest to home? Is he a plagiarist, a gaffe machine, or a blowhard greaser with a Trans Am? I'm going to take a stab at a diagnosis. Biden is a plagiarist. And a poor student. He doesn't hear tone, and he snatches material away from better minds, stripping it of context and proper attribution.
Biden absorbs broadly disseminated gags from popular culture—from Chris Rock standup, from "The Simpsons"—and then unironically regurgitates them as empirical observations. Thus, he makes gaffes.
And yet, there's something about posing, vain, cheat-on-the-test bozos trying to seem serious and grown-up that is funny-cool. Especially when they're not in charge. Now that he's not president, George W. Bush is funny-cool in that same way.
At almost 70 and consigned to a role without much real power, Biden has come into his funny-cool thing. Man, does he pose a lot. And there's nothing funnier than posing. Romney chips away at Obama's lead, but electoral math still favors president Economist The Signal – 21 hrs ago Last week's debate between President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney has inflicted severe turmoil on Obama's standing in the polls, breathing new life and energy into Romney's bid. If the United States elected its presidents by popular vote, the way sane electoral systems operate, Obama's odds of re-election would have plummeted in tandem. Unfortunately for the Romney campaign, it will take more than one good night to overcome the steep uphill climb it faces in the Electoral College this year. The first debate between Obama and Romney radically altered the dynamic of the 2012 election, but it did not change the math. It has been clear at least since February that Romney has to win Florida, Ohio and Virginia to have a viable shot at victory. This troika, along with the states safely in the Republican column, would bring Romney to 266 electoral votes. From there, he would need just one more state—say, New Hampshire—to push him over the 270 mark. All three states have moved in his favor over the past two weeks.  Sources: Betfair, Intrade, HuffPost's Pollster, RealClearPolitics. The overall odds for Obama remain well above 60 percent for one simple reason: Romney needs all three swing states to win, while Obama needs only to deny him one of them. Right now, that rearguard action is occurring in Ohio, where Obama is maintaining his lead in the aftermath of the debate. As the graph clearly shows, right now the states are correlated: They all move up or down in basic tandem in response to national events. By Election Day, after all the speeches have been given, all the debates played out and all the commercials aired, this will no longer be the case. The states will become individual coin tosses. If they are still in toss-up territory, it will mean Romney will need to flip heads three times in a row, while Obama will need to flip tails only once. Follow the state-by-state and overall presidential predictions in real time with PredictWise.com. David Rothschild has a Ph.D. in applied economics from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Follow him on Twitter @DavMicRot China banks pull out of IMF Tokyo meet amid island row: WSJReuters – Tue, Oct 2, 2012 TOKYO (Reuters) - Several major Chinese banks have canceled participation in the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank to be held in Tokyo next week, the Wall Street Journal said on Wednesday, the latest sign that a territorial row is starting to hurt broader ties between Asia's two biggest economies. Chinese lenders that have pulled out of International Monetary Fund-related events include Agricultural Bank of China <601288.SS> and Bank of Communications <601328.SS>, while Bank of China <3988.HK> officials have yet to decide whether to attend the meetings, the newspaper said. "Quite frankly, it's Japan-China relations," the paper quoted an official at the Tokyo branch of Agricultural Bank of China in explaining why the bank was pulling out. Japan is scheduled to host the IMF and World Bank annual meetings for the first time in nearly half a century. About 20,000 people are expected to attend the event, making it one of the world's largest international conferences. Sino-Japanese relations deteriorated sharply after Japan in September bought the East China Sea islets that both Tokyo and Beijing claim, sparking anti-Japan protests across the country. Japanese automakers such as Toyota Motor Corp <7203.T> and Nissan Motor Co <7201.T> are cutting back production in China following the anti-Japan protests that shuttered dealerships and darkened their sales outlook in the world's biggest car market. The disputed group of islands, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, are located near rich fishing grounds and potentially huge oil and gas reserves. Taiwan also asserts its own sovereignty over the islets. China has sent its patrol ships into what Japan considers its territorial waters near the islands in recent weeks, prompting Japan to lodge protests against China. (Reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka; Editing by Michael Perry) (This story has been refiled to fix a typo in the headline) |
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