2016 - Worst Presidential Election [Ever?] - Still Only One Choice We Can Live with as a Nation

"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." ~ Douglas Adams

What follows is an expansion of my penultimate Facebook post before I deactivated my page last week. Some of the comments to the original post were disturbingly blind to what I was trying to say. So I am saying it again, here, with more words and (hopefully) greater depth and span.

Here is the original post:

I used to believe that political differences should not be a reason to unfollow or unfriend someone. I am questioning that perspective.

This feels like one of those times in history where people will look back and ask where you stood when hatred and ignorance were chosen to lead the nation, when a ruler was chosen who brings division and destruction, bigotry and violence.

This is truly a "lesser of two evils" choice. One choice is evil as usual. The other choice is evil on a scale that we have not seen since the first half of the 20th Century.

To be clear:

Clinton is corrupt, greedy, and dishonest. She is politics as usual.

Trump is racist, sexist, hateful, narcissistic, greedy, and quite possibly a sociopath. Electing Trump is on par with the elections of Hitler and Mussolini, both of whom promised to make their respective nations great again.

What these two dictators from the 20th Century share with Trump is hatred -- of the "other." Oh, and they all three share many traits of the sociopath/psychopath.

Says Tony Schwartz, who was the "ghost writer" on their joint book (they split the advance and the royalties, nearly unheard of for a ghost writer), The Art of the Deal, the 1987 book that made Trump famous:

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.” 

If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.” [The New Yorker, June 25, 2016]

Emphasis added.

Respected Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner considers Trump a "textbook" narcissist, one of the primary traits of the sociopath.

According to a number of top U.S. psychologists, like Harvard professor and researcher Howard Gardner, Donald Trump is a “textbook” narcissist. In fact, he fits the profile so well that clinical psychologist George Simon told Vanity Fair, “He’s so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops.” This puts Trump in the same category as a number of infamous dictators like Muammar Gaddafi, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Saddam Hussein. [Raw Story, January 12, 2016]

Trump is very clearly a narcissist, and his behavior, lifestyle, and collection of ever-younger wives shows this in stark, very public detail.

But is Trump a sociopath or a psychopath?

Sociopaths tend to be nervous and easily agitated. They are volatile and prone to emotional outbursts, including fits of rage. They are likely to be uneducated and live on the fringes of society, unable to hold down a steady job or stay in one place for very long. It is difficult but not impossible for sociopaths to form attachments with others. Many sociopaths are able to form an attachment to a particular individual or group, although they have no regard for society in general or its rules. In the eyes of others, sociopaths will appear to be very disturbed. Any crimes committed by a sociopath, including murder, will tend to be haphazard, disorganized and spontaneous rather than planned. 

Psychopaths, on the other hand, are unable to form emotional attachments or feel real empathy with others, although they often have disarming or even charming personalities. Psychopaths are very manipulative and can easily gain people’s trust. They learn to mimic emotions, despite their inability to actually feel them, and will appear normal to unsuspecting people. Psychopaths are often well educated and hold steady jobs. Some are so good at manipulation and mimicry that they have families and other long-term relationships without those around them ever suspecting their true nature.

So, based on this, he is a little of both--impulsive and reactive, but also able to charm and manipulate. This makes Trump a frightening prospect as president of the most powerful military on the planet.

And, no doubt, the anti-Clinton folks have dozens of examples of how corrupt she is, how she stole the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders (I believe she did), and how horrible she would be as president. Sure, I don't like her, either.

As I said, lesser of two evils.

Given the two options, I have more faith (belief without proof) that Clinton actually does care about some of the social causes she has taken up over the years (women's rights, children, families).

While, in my mind, there is no doubt Trump cares about no one and nothing but himself--his actions and words have proven it repeatedly over the last several decades.

Electing Trump may be looked back on one day as the moment America picked up a gun, stuck the gun in its mouth, and pulled the trigger. Let's not go there.

A Progressive Agenda for the Supreme Court - Why the Next President Must Be a Democrat

If there is any hope of undoing the recent decisions by the Roberts' Court, we must elect a Democratic president. As much as it pains me to say this, we have to do so even if the Democratic candidate is Hillary Clinton (shudder).

There are potentially three Justices who can retire in the next term (unless Ginsburg steps down while Obama is still president). The two oldest are Kennedy and Scalia - the first to retire will likely be Kennedy (Scalia is just too mean to retire - he'll probably live to be 100 or something, just out of spite for the rest of us).

Replacing Kennedy, now considered the swing vote on many cases, with a liberal or progressive justice could swing the balance of power to the point that the "progressive agenda" outlined below might actually be possible.

Fantasy or Forecast? A Progressive Agenda for the Supreme Court

Peter Dreier - E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental College
Posted: 07/04/2014


"It's always darkest before the dawn" sang Pete Seeger. "And that's what keeps me moving on."

The recent spate of reactionary decisions by the Roberts Supreme Court -- including this week's outrageous Hobby Lobby ruling -- triggers thoughts of a better day, when the right wingers on the court will have retired or died, replaced by thoughtful liberals who will restore some semblance of fairness and democracy to this great country. On this July 4th, let's consider what it would be like if our nation's highest court was actually committed to the notion of "liberty and justice for all."

Doing so requires making a few leaps of faith, but none of them are far fetched. It depends on the outcome of the next few election cycles.

If the Democrats retain a majority in the Senate after this November, the feisty, brilliant Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now 81 years old, should retire so Obama can appoint another (younger) liberal member who will have a long tenure on the court. That won't shift the current 5-4 conservative majority, but it will guarantee that Ginsburg won't be replaced by conservative.

It would great if one or both of the older conservatives -- Antonin Scalia (now 78) or Anthony Kennedy (78 later this month) -- would retire, too, so Obama could appoint their successors. But they'll probably try to hang on until a Republican president enters the White House. Let's pray (and organize) so that doesn't happen.

Best-case scenario: A Democrat becomes president in 2016, the Democrats keep control of the Senate, and Scalia and/or Kennedy are so enfeebled by then that they have to quit. At that point, a Democratic president can replace one or both with a liberal justice.

It has become a no-no in American politics for candidates for president or Senate to discuss the characteristics they'd like to see in new Supreme Court justices, except in the vaguest, general terms. They are not supposed to have a "litmus test" for justices. Everyone knows this is bogus. Presidents generally appoint justices who agree with their political views -- compromising only enough to get their nominations confirmed by the Senate or to avoid a huge controversy.

Occasionally presidents miscalculate -- or, more accurately, their nominees change their views -- and upset the ideological applecart. The most famous example is President Dwight Eisenhower's appointment of California Gov. Earl Warren as Chief Justice in 1953. Eisenhower thought he was appointing a conservative Republican. Warren turned out to be (or became as a result of changing social and political conditions) a liberal and turned the Warren Court into one of the most liberal in history. Another turncoat was David Souter, who turned out to be more liberal - or at least centrist -- than George H.W. Bush had anticipated. Among other things, Souter dissented in Bush v Gore, but his side was outvoted 5-4, handing the presidency to GHWB's son. "Poppy" Bush wouldn't make that mistake again. His next, and last, Supreme Court appointment was Clarence Thomas.

So don't expect Hillary Clinton (or any other Democratic candidates for president) to discuss her thoughts about what kind of person she'd appoint to the Supreme Court. She won't want to get boxed in by any dreaded "litmus test," which the Republicans would use against her. But if she (or another Democrat ) wins the White House in 2016, and has a Democratic majority, liberals and progressives should push her (and the Senate Dems, especially those on the Judiciary Committee) to make appointments that will dramatically change the court's direction. Under that scenario, liberals could have a 5-4, perhaps even a 6-3, majority on the court for the next 20, 30, or even 40 years.

What would that mean in terms of public policy? A liberal majority on the Supreme Court could, and should, address the following issues:

• Campaign Finance: Overturn Citizens United and McCutcheon rulings in order to allow real campaign finance reform that eliminates our current system of corporate-dominated legalized bribery. As David Gans recently wrote in the New Republic: "The Roberts Court is leading a free speech revolution of its own, but this time for the benefit of corporations and the wealthy." Citizens United (2010) equated "free speech" with money, giving corporations a stranglehold on elections. The McCutcheon (April 2014) ruling eliminated dollar limits for super-rich donors like the Koch brothers. Both have been boondoggles for the super-rich, big business, and the right, undermining democracy and tilting the political playing field in the wrong direction.
• Workers Rights: Reverse the Robert Court's anti-union rulings, including last week's Harris v Quinn decision. This was yet another decision in which, by a 5-4 majority, the court sided with wealthy special interests to weaken worker protections and undermine workers' right to organize. It should come as no surprise that the right-wing National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation -- funded by the Koch and Walton families and other corporate groups - was responsible for filing the Harris v. Quinn suit against SEIU. The Court ruled that workers who benefit from a union contract (with higher pay, health benefits, paid vacations, etc) don't have to pay union dues. They can be "free riders." Here again, the Court equates money with free speech. In this case, workers can exercise their "free speech" to avoid supporting the union, even if their lives are significantly improved by a collective bargaining contract negotiated by the union in their workplace. The Court decided that the "free speech" interests of those who object to paying for representation outweigh the right of the democratically elected majority that formed the union. Unions are the strongest bulwark to strengthen the middle class, challenge widening inequalities, and lift hardworking Americans out of poverty. The U.S. has the weakest workers' rights laws of any democratic country, which accounts in part for the decline of union membership and big business' ability to violate existing labor laws (such as firing workers who support union organizing efforts in their workplace) without suffering serious consequences. The Roberts court has piled on, siding at every turn with employers over workers.
• Same-Sex Marriage: Make same-sex marriage a federal right and not leave it up to the states. As I've written elsewhere, the Roberts Court's June 2013 rulings on same-sex marriage favored states rights over equal rights. In its two decisions (on the Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 8), the Court stopped short of proclaiming same-sex marriage a basic right. It left it to the states to determine whether gay Americans have the same right to marry as their straight counterparts. As a result, same-sex marriage advocates have to mobilize and litigate to overturn bans on same-sex marriage in those states that have them. That could take five, 10, 20, or more years, and some states may resist legalizing same-sex marriage forever. In 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court knocked down all state anti-miscegenation laws that banned inter-racial marriage. It did not leave it up to the states to decide for themselves. That was a bold move, way ahead of public opinion. The Roberts Court was far more cautious. A liberal Supreme Court should apply the same logic to same-sex marriage as the Warren Court applied in Loving to inter-racial marriage. It is a basic right for all Americans, regardless of where they live.
• Women's Rights: Overturn Hobby Lobby. This decision, rendered last week, is yet another ruling that treats corporations like "citizens" with rights -- in this case, endowing a corporation the "right" of "religious freedom." Under this outrageous ruling, corporate owners who object to birth control don't have to provide contraceptives and other forms of birth control to employees if it violates the owners' religious beliefs. This is little different from saying that a segregationist restaurant owner can avoid serving black customers if it violates his belief in white supremacy. The Hobby Lobby ruling favors corporations' so-called "religious" freedoms over women's right to control their bodies. Did anyone notice that, by the accident of history, the five conservatives on the current Supreme Court who voted in favor of Hobby Lobby, each appointed by Republican presidents, all happen to be Catholic men? They are Samuel Alito, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy. The three women justices -- Ginsburg (Jewish), Elena Kagan (Jewish) and Sonia Sotomayor (Latina Catholic) -- plus Stephen Breyer (Jewish) dissented in the Hobby Lobby case. This isn't meant to stereotype all Catholic men. One of the greatest liberals and civil libertarians in the Supreme Court's history -- William Brennan -- was male and Catholic. He was a staunch supporter of abortion rights and joined the pro-choice majority in Roe v Wade. But it is clear that at least one or more of the five justices who supported Hobby Lobby (certainly Scalia) were guided by religious beliefs over constitutional logic. When and if a Democrat gets to appoint the next one, two or three justices, the choices should be based on the nominees' judicial views, not their religion, but if their previous judicial decisions or writing reveal that their religious views (strict Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, fundamentalist Protestantism, traditional Islam) lead them to reject basic rights for women, gays, people of color, or other groups, they shouldn't be appointed to any federal court, much less the Supreme Court.
• Voting Rights: Strengthen enforcement of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), thus reversing the Robert Court's Shelby v Holder (June 2013) ruling that allows voter suppression under the guise of states rights. The 1965 act, which outlawed literacy tests and other obstacles to voting, was an important tool for civil rights activists to challenge other barriers to black political participation, such as gerrymandering of city council, state legislature, and congressional districts in order to dilute black voting strength. It had huge consequences. In 1970 there were only 1,469 black elected officials in the entire country. By 2000, that number had reached 9,040. Today, the figure is close to 11,000. In 1965, only 6.7 percent of Mississippi's black citizens were registered to vote. But four years later the number had jumped to 66.5 percent. By 2000, Mississippi had 897 black elected officials in local and state offices, plus Congress--the largest number of any state in the country. Roberts had been trying to weaken the 1965 Voting Rights Act ever since he was a young lawyer in Ronald Reagan's Justice Department. He finally got his way last year when his court, by a 5-4 margin, ruled that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. That's the provision that requires states with the worst history of voting discrimination have to get Justice Department approval before they can revise their voting laws. Roberts said that blatant racial discrimination in voting no longer exists, so Section 5 isn't needed. As Cong. John Lewis, a veteran civil rights activist, said about the Supreme Court ruling: "There are more black elected officials in Mississippi today not because attempts to discriminate against voters ceased but because the Voting Rights Act kept those attempts from becoming law." In recent years, Republican politicians and operatives, including Karl Rove, have sought to restrict voting rights to keep people of color, young people, and poor people from voting. The Roberts Court's Shelby ruling gave them permission to declare war on voting rights. As soon as the Court made its ruling, a host of states (mostly but not entirely Southern states) began adopting laws to suppress voting rights -- such as requiring IDs in order to vote and setting the stage to gerrymander political districts to weaken black and Latino voting strength.
• Education Funding: Mandate sufficient funding for all public K-12 schools as a basic right of all students regardless of the tax base of the surrounding community or the political/spending priorities of the states. The famous unanimous 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling stated that "separate but equal" schools were inherently unequal. The justices were writing about racial segregation and later mandated that states and localities desegregate their schools "with all deliberate speed." Today, America's public schools are segregated by race and income, as Jonathan Kozol reported in his book Savage Inequalities, as UCLA professor Gary Orfield and his colleagues have documented in recent reports, and as many other studies have revealed by examining per-student spending in different school districts. As many scholars and journalists have observed, our public schools are beset with outrageously unequal funding. Students from well-off families generally go to public schools with much higher per-student spending levels than students from less affluent families. The solution is not busing or charter schools but adequate funding for all students and all schools, regardless of the size of a community's tax base. Since the 1970s, an increasing number of state courts have sought to address these disparities by requiring state legislatures to spend more money on education and/or to distribute those funds more equally. Although these rulings have made some difference, huge disparities persist. This is true within metro areas and states, but also true between states. In 2012, New Jersey spent $18,485 per student while Oklahoma spent only $8,285 per student. Differences in the cost of living do not account for these differences; it is not more than twice as expensive to live in New Jersey than in Oklahoma. And within each state, there are huge disparities. In Illinois a few years ago, New Trier Township High School District (in an affluent Chicago suburb) spent $19,927 per student while the Farmington Central Community Unit School District (a rural area in central Illinois) spent only $6,548 per student. Across the country, the accident of geography determines the quality of education that students get. We need a Supreme Court that will rule that a decent K-12 education is a basic right and that the federal government needs to enforce this right by taking over responsibility for funding public education, or requiring states not only to provide "equal" funding (per student) for every school district but also to provide "equal opportunity" for all students, which would mean spending more money in schools and school districts with a higher percentage of disadvantaged students.

Progressives can surely add to this list of issues that a Supreme Court with a liberal majority should address. Unfortunately, presidential candidates won't directly address these issues or the views of candidates they would appoint to the Supreme Court when vacancies arise. But as we watch the Roberts Court eviscerate our democracy, and protest its outrageous (usually 5-4) rulings, we should also recognize that part of why we want liberal Democrats in the White House and Congress is to make sure that the third branch of government reflects what's best about country's values -- fairness, equality, civil liberties, and civil rights.

Peter Dreier teaches Politics and chairs the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books, 2012).

Follow Peter Dreier on Twitter: www.twitter.com/peterdreier

Academic ‘Dream Team’ Helped Obama Get Re-Elected

It seems Obama was a man with a plan this time around - and he hired some of the smartest people in the country to help shape his message, train his field workers, and advise him on how to respond to the lies and misrepresentations the GOP and its wealthy backers threw at him. It seems to have worked - and I am surprised this is not already old hat in politics, although I'm sure the political consultants didn't want to cede any power to the behavioral scientists.

Academic ‘Dream Team’ Helped Obama’s Effort

DOOR TO DOOR Ricky Hall, an Obama volunteer, in Charlotte, N.C., last week. (Chris Keane/Reuters)

By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: November 12, 2012

Late last year Matthew Barzun, an official with the Obama campaign, called Craig Fox, a psychologist in Los Angeles, and invited him to a political planning meeting in Chicago, according to two people who attended the session.

“He said, ‘Bring the whole group; let’s hear what you have to say,’ ” recalled Dr. Fox, a behavioral economist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

So began an effort by a team of social scientists to help their favored candidate in the 2012 presidential election. Some members of the team had consulted with the Obama campaign in the 2008 cycle, but the meeting in January signaled a different direction.

“The culture of the campaign had changed,” Dr. Fox said. “Before then I felt like we had to sell ourselves; this time there was a real hunger for our ideas.”

This election season the Obama campaign won a reputation for drawing on the tools of social science. The book “Victory Lab,” by Sasha Issenberg, and news reports have portrayed an operation that ran its own experiment and, among other efforts, consulted with the Analyst Institute, a Washington voter research group established in 2007 by union officials and their allies to help Democratic candidates.

Less well known is that the Obama campaign also had a panel of unpaid academic advisers. The group — which calls itself the “consortium of behavioral scientists,” or COBS — provided ideas on how to counter false rumors, like one that President Obama is a Muslim. It suggested how to characterize the Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, in advertisements. It also delivered research-based advice on how to mobilize voters.

“In the way it used research, this was a campaign like no other,” said Todd Rogers, a psychologist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a former director of the Analyst Institute. “It’s a big change for a culture that historically has relied on consultants, experts and gurulike intuition.”

When asked about the outside psychologists, the Obama campaign would neither confirm nor deny a relationship with them. “This campaign was built on the energy, enthusiasm and ingenuity of thousands of grass-roots supporters and our staff in the states and in Chicago,” said Adam Fetcher, a campaign spokesman. “Throughout the campaign we saw an outpouring of individuals across the country who lent a wide variety of ideas and input to our efforts to get the president re-elected.”

For their part, consortium members said they did nothing more than pass on research-based ideas, in e-mails and conference calls. They said they could talk only in general terms about the research, because they had signed nondisclosure agreements with the campaign.

In addition to Dr. Fox, the consortium included Susan T. Fiske of Princeton University; Samuel L. Popkin of the University of California, San Diego; Robert Cialdini, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University; Richard H. Thaler, a professor of behavioral science and economics at the University of Chicago’s business school; and Michael Morris, a psychologist at Columbia.

“A kind of dream team, in my opinion,” Dr. Fox said.

He said that the ideas the team proposed were “little things that can make a difference” in people’s behavior.

For example, Dr. Fiske’s research has shown that when deciding on a candidate, people generally focus on two elements: competence and warmth. “A candidate wants to make sure to score high on both dimensions,” Dr. Fiske said in an interview. “You can’t just run on the idea that everyone wants to have a beer with you; some people care a whole lot about competence.”

Mr. Romney was recognized as a competent businessman, polling found. But he was often portrayed in opposition ads as distant, unable to relate to the problems of ordinary people.

When it comes to countering rumors, psychologists have found that the best strategy is not to deny the charge (“I am not a flip-flopper”) but to affirm a competing notion. “The denial works in the short term; but in the long term people remember only the association, like ‘Obama and Muslim,’ ” said Dr. Fox, of the persistent false rumor.

The president’s team affirmed that he is a Christian.

At least some of the consortium’s proposals seemed to have found their way into daily operations. Campaign volunteers who knocked on doors last week in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada did not merely remind people to vote and arrange for rides to the polls. Rather, they worked from a script, using subtle motivational techniques that research has shown can prompt people to take action.

“We used the scripts more as a guide,” said Sarah Weinstein, 18, a Columbia freshman who traveled with a group to Cleveland the weekend before the election. “The actual language we used was invested in the individual person.”

Simply identifying a person as a voter, as many volunteers did — “Mr. Jones, we know you have voted in the past” — acts as a subtle prompt to future voting, said Dr. Cialdini, a foundational figure in the science of persuasion. “People want to be congruent with what they have committed to in the past, especially if that commitment is public,” he said.

Many volunteers also asked would-be voters if they would sign an informal commitment to vote, a card with the president’s picture on it. This small, voluntary agreement amplifies the likelihood that the person will follow through, research has found.

In a now classic experiment, a pair of Stanford psychologists asked people if they would display in a home window a small card proclaiming the importance of safe driving. Those who agreed to this small favor were later much more likely to agree to a much larger favor, to post a large “Drive Carefully” sign on their lawn — “something no one would agree to do otherwise,” Dr. Cialdini said.

Obama volunteers also asked people if they had a plan to vote and if not, to make one, specifying a time, according to Stephen Shaw, a retired cancer researcher who knocked on doors in Nevada and Virginia in the days before the election. “One thing we’d say is that we know that when people have a plan, voting goes more smoothly,” he said.

Recent research has shown that making even a simple plan increases the likelihood that a person will follow through, Dr. Rogers, of Harvard, said.

Another technique some volunteers said they used was to inform supporters that others in their neighborhood were planning to vote. Again, recent research shows that this kind of message is much more likely to prompt people to vote than traditional campaign literature that emphasizes the negative — that many neighbors did not vote and thus lost an opportunity to make a difference.

This kind of approach trades on a human instinct to conform to social norms, psychologists say. In another well-known experiment, Dr. Cialdini and two colleagues tested how effective different messages were in getting hotel guests to reuse towels. The message “the majority of guests reuse their towels” prompted a 29 percent increase in reuse, compared with the usual message about helping the environment. The message “the majority of guests in this room reuse their towels” resulted in a 41 percent increase, he said.

Salespeople have known the value of such approaches for a generation, and political campaigns have also used them before this election. Social scientists began offering their services to Democrats back in 2004, when President George W. Bush’s campaign was attacking the Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry, as a flip-flopper and making the label stick.

Dr. Fox and others got an audience with someone in the Kerry campaign, but the meeting didn’t lead to any active consulting, he said. The group circulated a paper outlining its members’ expertise and proposals and in 2006 got a meeting with some senators, including Hillary Rodham Clinton and Harry M. Reid.

Consortium members said they knew of no such informal advisory panel on the Republican side. Efforts to contact the Romney campaign were unsuccessful.

The researchers said they weren’t told which of their ideas were put to use, or how. But sometimes they got hints. Dr. Fiske, the Princeton psychologist, said she received a generic, mass-market e-mail from the Obama campaign before the election. 

“It said, ‘People do things when they make plans to do them; what’s your plan?’ ” Dr. Fiske said. “How about that?”

A version of this article appeared in print on November 13, 2012, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Academic ‘Dream Team’ Helped Obama’s Effort.

The Onion's Voters Guide to Romney and Obama

The Onion has released these two videos to help you make an informed decision when you place your meaningless vote for the next corporate shill to run the country into the ground.

The Onion Voter's Guide To Mitt Romney

Your pathetic, statistically meaningless vote is more important than ever this year. To help you make the right choice, we present The Onion's guide to GOP candidate Mitt Romney.

* * * * * * *

The Onion Voter's Guide To Barack Obama

Election Day is fast approaching. To help you prepare, here now is The Onion's in-depth voter's guide to Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

Parsing the 2012 Presidential Race - The Most Pivotal Election of Our Time and the Role of Progressives

Here are two video talks on the 2012 election, one from Jonathan Alter on the critical importance of the 2012 presidential election, and a panel discussion of authors from The Nation on the role of progressives in this election cycle.

This is interesting and important stuff. I agree with Alter that this presidential election will determine where we head as a nation for the next couple of decades - the renegotiation of the American Social Contract.

Jonathan Alter - Why the 2012 Election Is the Most Pivotal of Our Lifetime

Author and columnist Jonathan Alter argues that the question in the 2012 presidential election is whether the country will stay on a centrist course with Obama or make a sharp turn to the right with Romney. He says that because few votes may be won by discussing the poor, the American social contract is rarely discussed but he feels it is on the line. Series: "Walter H. Capps Center Series" [10/2012]

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The Nation at The New School: Progressives and Election 2012

A conversation about the role of progressives in the next election. How do we balance support for the Democrats with the need to mobilize grassroots support for social and economic causes? How do we determine priorities for strained resources? What should we be seeking from a second term Obama administration? Audience questions to follow conversation.

Featuring Nation contributors:

• Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor, publisher, The Nation
• John Nichols, Washington correspondent, The Nation
• Chris Hayes, MSNBC host
• Ilyse Hogue, political strategist
• Patricia J. Williams, Professor of Law, Columbia University

Moderated by Richard Kim, Executive Editor, The Nation

THE NEW SCHOOL FOR PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

Sponsored by The New School and The Nation.

Location: Tishman Auditorium, Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 7:00 p.m.

Paul Ryan: The Flesh-and-Blood Embodiment of Political Deception and Media Obfuscation

David Sirota and In These Times looks at Paul Ryan, the man versus the myth created by the GOP and the media. The image perpetrated by the media and political establishments have very little to do with the reality of Ryan and his agenda.

Who Is Paul Ryan?

The media’s image of Romney’s running mate doesn’t mesh with reality

BY David Sirota

The GOP's presumptive vice presidential nominee is the 21st century's flesh-and-blood embodiment of political deception and media obfuscation.

Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan admires Ayn Rand, and if you believe Republican Party mythology, Ryan is a messianic John Galt who will save America from a secret socialist conspiracy. Thus, in Rand fashion, it's worth asking: Who Is Paul Ryan?

The answer is simple: the GOP's presumptive vice presidential nominee is the 21st century's flesh-and-blood embodiment of political deception and media obfuscation.

Purporting to be a small-government budget hawk, Ryan publicly decries corporate welfare and says he wants “to get Washington out of the business of picking winners and losers.” This has generated press coverage promoting Ryan as a great fiscal conservative. Yet, written out of the story is the fact that Ryan is a Huge Government Republican who voted for–and in some cases, still defends–the biggest examples of corporate welfare in American history.

Ryan, you see, was the Huge Government Republican who backed this era's massive corporate bailouts–the one that picked politically connected companies as winners and taxpayers as losers. He was the Huge Government Republican who regularly voted for profligate war spending bills–the ones that blew a gaping hole in the federal budget. And he is the Huge Government Republican now using his committee chairmanship to oppose serious cuts to the deficit-exploding corporate welfare still embedded in the bloated Pentagon budget.

Similarly, Ryan claims to be, and is billed in the press as, a libertarian-inspired acolyte of Rand–a man who supposedly values freedom and limited government. But as a Huge Government Republican, he has consistently voted to expand the surveillance state, endorse warrantless wiretapping and permit indefinite detention. Oh, and in contradiction to Rand's writings, he has also pushed to use the power of Huge Government to end a woman's right to choose an abortion.

Like so many Republicans, Ryan genuflects to the private sector and insinuates that the government is not a job creator. It's funny coming from a guy who has spent most of his adult life as a federal employee and whose family's construction company brags of building its fortune off government highway contracts.

Ryan labels himself an opponent of “crony capitalism” and is often promoted by reporters as someone who can help Mitt Romney thwart the Washington insiders who corrupt our politics. Somehow, we are expected to ignore the fact that Ryan has spent the vast majority of his adult life in Washington; that his wife served as a top pharmaceutical and oil lobbyist in Washington; and that, as Newsweek reported in 2011, he tried to insert special provisions into federal law that would boost his personal oil investment portfolio.

Then there are Ryan's budget proposals, whose central premises are that Medicare must be gutted and Social Security must be turned over to Wall Street because we allegedly don't have enough revenue to fund them. In response, the press often credits Ryan's blueprint for being courageous and honest. Yet, in the very same plans, Ryan proposes to severely deplete public revenues by eliminating all taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends, meaning that, according to The Atlantic magazine, Mitt Romney would pay a 0.82 percent tax rate on his $21 million annual earnings.

Republican powerbrokers, of course, hope you never learn any of this. They hope you and an obsequious press don't bother to review Ryan's congressional votes or his legislative history. They are hoping, in other words, that when you see Ryan's boyish Midwestern visage, you won't see the real Ryan–and you won't see what his ascent to vice president might mean for the future of America.

ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

David Sirota, an In These Times senior editor and syndicated columnist, is a bestselling author whose book Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now—Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything was released in 2011. Sirota, whose previous books include The Uprising and Hostile Takeover, co-hosts "The Rundown" on AM630 KHOW in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

Romney Chooses Ryan - Ends All Pretense of Empthy for the Not Wealthy

Mitt Romney's biggest challenge in the presidential campaign for so far has been likeability - he comes across as cold, insincere (look at the fake smile above), and disconnected from the harsh reality with which most Americans live. Many commentators have referred to it as the empathy gap.

With his announcement Friday night of congressman Paul Ryan (WI) as his Vice-Presidential running mate, Romney has given up on empathy it would seem, preferring instead to gamble that his wealthy backers will support his choice with enough Super PAC money to generate a barrage of misinformation that will scare Americans into fearing Obama enough to choose the white capitalists over the black "socialist."

As a progressive who values compassion as a political stance (and I am not a Democrat), I see this is almost the perfect pick to guarantee Obama's re-election. I have a lot of issues with Obama (his health care plan sold out the middle class to provide coverage to the poorest Americans; his use of drone attacks is not only illegal but morally problematic; his leadership style is to focused on consensus and not enough on getting the best legislation; the list could go on and on), but his understanding of how most of America is struggling is not one of those problems.

Obama's work as a community organizer put him at the center of poverty in large cities, giving him an understanding that Romney lacks completely. Obama values the one-on-one connection with individuals that seems to make Romney uncomfortable.

So what does Romney do to combat these challenges? He chooses Paul Ryan, the most divisive high-profile Republican congressman in the country, a man who is beloved by the racist Tea Party crowd, who is owned by Big Oil, who is vehemently opposed to gay marriage (or even gay rights), who is a virulent denier of climate science (and all other forms of science), who has one of the worst environmental voting records in the House, and worst of all, is pushing a budget plan that escalates tax cuts for the wealthy whilemassively cutting government programs such as social security, medicare, medicaid, food stamps, student loans and other social programs.

Response from the Left has been what one would expect:

Think Progress: Meet Paul Ryan: Climate Denier, Conspiracy Theorist, Koch Acolyte
Mother Jones: With Paul Ryan, Romney Makes the VP Pick Obama Wanted
The Daily Beast: Romney-Ryan: The Rich Voter's Dream Ticket
Daily Kos: Introducing the Committee to End Medicare: Romney-Ryan 2012


The Right seems to be pleased to have a man Romney describes as a “person of great steadiness” and someone who “combines a profound sense of responsibility…with unbounded optimism,” and as the “intellectual leader of the Republican party.”

Obama's campaign team must be doing the "Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy" Dance.