Except, don't ask him about his religion. It turns out that Mitt Romney is not an ordinary Mormon: he was a bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who ran all the Mormon activities in the Boston area for about 15 years. He ran youth programs, missionary training and outreach programs to Hispanics, Portuguese and Southeast Asian teenagers. The New York Times, in the first link above, has a major front page story with all the details, some of them sorted, like the cult ritual of baptizing the dead, abandoned by the Catholic Church in the 4th Century. That should get the fundamentalist Christians going and raise a lot of suspicion among Independents. For those who say that religion should not be a ...
|
A note about Hurricane Irene and a new change on BestOfTheBlogs. I live in the Catskills, Ground Zero for hurricane Irene in New York State that stormed through this scenic area over a week ago. We've been without electricity and internet service for over a week: it was restored last night. We live just outside Woodstock. Over 80 local roads have been closed over the course of the past week with many looking like the scene above, just down from my road. With a week off, with Jerry Bowles keeping things going, we have decided to rain on the spammers who make their silly comments about our post and peddle their silly nonsense and clutter the reader experience for others. None of those comments are useful to you, the reader. So we ...
|
With the appointments to the "Deficit Dog Food Committee" completed, I'm reminded of the 1967 classic war movie, The Dirty Dozen starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown, Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland and others. The movie, like the deficit committee, has an identification act, a "recruiting" act, a training act, and finally the mission. It was fun to watch. There were some memorable performances, a lot of action and some betrayal as the suicide mission of taking out some Nazi high command meeting in a chateau in Brittany, France, goes wrong and what was left of the dirty dozen had to escape for their lives. Vanity Fair had this review about the movie, which is precedent for the deficit committee today: ...
|
Do your eyes glaze over when Boehner and the Boys kick the number trillion around like a tin can or when Obama floats it like a birthday balloon? A trillion dollars is a hard number to picture, at least it is for me. Rarely do we see it written this way: $1,000,000,000,000. Can't twitter that. And if you are like me you have to stop and count the zeros and make sure there are 12 and not 15. So we just see it written as $1 trillion, or in the case of the debt ceiling $3.2 trillion or $4 trillion. But what does a trillion dollars look like? Here is one way. If you could spend one dollar a second, it would take you 12 days to spend a million, 31.7 years to spend a billion and 31,7000 years to spend a trillion. And this Washington ...
|
As you know by now, Mitch (the Mouth) McConnell has proposed a break through on the debt ceiling debate, or so it seems. It's rather convoluted with the devil is in the details. His idea is that Obama would be given authority to raise the debt ceiling in three increments up to $2.5 trillion over the balance of his term, until the end of 2012. He would, however, need to have a corresponding offset of each increment in budget cuts. This lets Obama decide--solely--were the cuts come from. Medicare cuts, for example, would be safe. So far, so good. He would then have to tell Congress were the cuts will be made and Congress can agree or disagree. Here is where the mischief starts. If they disagree--and the Republicans will--they send ...
|
There are some potential sharks and whales out there, but there is safety in numbers. The president looks alone as he battles the Republican barracudas on all fronts, but he must be smiling at the report his campaign will make official this Friday on where he stands at this early stage of his reelection campaign. Since I'm on the Obama campaign email list, I learned this morning about the big numbers in the Obama's 2Q financial report that will become official on Friday. It is historic right from the start and it is reporting their dollar number in terms of the number of contributors and the size of the average contribution--something none of the Republicans are doing. Here are the numbers: 1. $86 million raised. (Romney raised ...
|
I wish I had thought of that, but Paul Krugman beat me to it in his op-ed piece today, "What Obama Wants". Krugman says: "Now, this might just be theater: Mr. Obama may be pulling an anti-Corleone, making Republicans an offer they can’t accept." Krugman doesn't like the reverse Godfather strategy and he thinks Obama believes in the offer he is making. He doesn't like the rationale for the offer and says Obama is drinking the Republican kool-aid (my characterization) and that worries him. But the flip-side is that the recently minted "Non-negotiator-in-Chief" may turn out to have out-foxed everyone. Now Boehner is saying the offer of cuts is "too big". When was the last time you hear a Republican say that a budget cut was too big? ...
|
There is an excellent op-ed over at the NYT, " Forgetting Why We Remember", the history of why there is a memorial day. The story surprised me: it was something I didn't know. It's all about the Civil War and how to honor the over 625,000 who made the ultimate sacrifice for this country. There is is note for perspective: "if the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, four million names would be on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, instead of 58,000." It's gone by other names. In a sentiment I like, it has been called “American All Saints Day,” likening it to the European Catholic tradition of whole towns marching to churchyards to honor dead loved ones. Something to think about over ...
|
Now that Obama's gamble on propping up GM and Chrysler has been hugely successful-- both companies have paid back most of their loans, saved jobs and created new jobs--Mitt, The Mouth, is claiming credit for the idea. Back in 2008, Mitt wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that said if Obama gets his way "you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye". Now that he is running for president on his flip-flopping platform he hopes we forgot about his op-ed and welcome is ass-kissing of his home state's core industry. ...
|
That didn't take long. What was a lead-follow-walk-away strategy in Libya has now turned into what everyone suspected. It is no longer just an enforcement of the UN-sanction enforcement of the no-fly zone. It is no longer a NATO is calling the shots strategy. Now Obama appears to have ordered covert help for the rebels. This is, after all is said and said, about regime change. Oh boy. This one better end well...soon. ...
|