Category Archives: Politics

By contemporary standards, this Obama TV ad is actually substantive, but it falls down a bit on the web backup. "Worried" – Obama for America TV Ad:

It also has a link to www.barackobma.com/plans where you are invited to go for more details. Although extant, they are rather scant:

FORWARD

• President Obama is calling on millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share, and believes no family earning less than $250,000 should face higher taxes
• President Obama has a plan to give tax cuts to companies that bring jobs back to the U.S.
• President Obama is taking a balanced approach to cutting the deficit without sacrificing investments needed to grow the economy and create jobs
• President Obama’s plan would help grow the economy for the long term by investing in education, small businesses, clean energy, and infrastructure
• President Obama responsibly ended the war in Iraq, is bringing our troops home from Afghanistan, and will use half the savings to reduce the deficit

NOT BACKWARD

• Mitt Romney wants to reward the wealthiest with even more tax breaks
• Mitt Romney would create new incentives for companies to ship jobs overseas
• Mitt Romney’s plan would add $5 trillion in tax cuts skewed to the rich, either increasing the deficit or requiring tax increases on the middle-class
• Mitt Romney supports a plan that would require slashing funding for investments in our future, Social Security, and Medicare
• Mitt Romney criticized the end of the Iraq war as “tragic,” and has offered no plan for Afghanistan except keeping troops there indefinitely

We could probably stand a few more details online, no?

Good thing for Romney that nobody reads Newsweek any more. The article isn’t available online (yet?), but I have to say judging just from the cover it looks like a cheap shot. In any case, I’d have said the problem was arrogance, not insecurity.

(Just to make things worse, my son, seeing this cover’s top tagline said, “I knew Romney was a job killer, but I didn’t realize he was a mass murderer.”)

Meanwhile, Romneyshambles Continues in Israel (per Kevin Drum).

Update (7/30): Here’s a taste of the article:

The Sun even went so far as to dub him “Mitt the Twit.”

It was an astonishing faux pas—one of many packed into his brief visit. And it makes one wonder: if elected, Romney is going to have to work hand-in-glove with Prime Minister David Cameron and other world leaders on the ongoing global financial crisis and other issues. What unintended offenses are going to tumble out of his mouth then, when he’s representing our nation on the world stage?

The episode highlights what’s really wrong with Romney. He’s kind of lame, and he’s really … annoying. He keeps saying these … things, these incredibly off-key things. Then he apologizes immediately—with all the sincerity of a hostage. Or maybe he doesn’t: sometimes he whines about the subsequent attacks on him. But the one thing he never does? Man up, double down, take his lumps.

In 1987, this magazine created a famous hubbub by labeling George H.W. Bush a “wimp” on its cover. “The Wimp Factor.” Huge stir. And not entirely fair—the guy had been an aviator in the war, the big war, the good war, and he was even shot down out over the Pacific, cockpit drenched in smoke and fumes, at an age (20) when in most states he couldn’t even legally drink a beer. In hindsight, Poppy looks like Dirty Harry Callahan compared with Romney, who spent his war (Vietnam) in—ready?—Paris. Where he learned … French. Up to his eyeballs in deferments. Where Reagan saddled up a horse with the masculine name of El Alamein, Mitt saddles up something called Rafalca—except that he doesn’t even really do that, his wife does (dressage). And speaking of Ann—did you notice that she was the one driving the Jet Ski on their recent vacation, while Mitt rode on the back, hanging on, as Paul Begala put it to me last week, “like a helpless papoose”?

Fresh from Romney’s gaffe-fest in London, we find Team Romney messed up his trip to Israel:

Mitt Romney is making a big push for the Jewish vote. In classic Romney (i.e., clueless) form, his campaign scheduled a trip to Israel on the Jewish fast day of Tisha B’Av.

Tisha B’Av, which primarily commemorates the destruction of the first and second Temples, both of which were destroyed on the ninth of Av, is probably the most important event on the Jewish Calendar that most non-Jews don’t know about. Purim they’ve heard of, at least vaguely.

(Creating a field day for numerologists, the Ninth of Av was also the day that the Jews were required to leave Spain in 1492.)