If it’s Obama’s job to explain Bain, they can’t complain

I’ll start with what the Obama campaign looks like on the ground in Ohio today, on Bain:

President Obama’s re-election campaign pressed its attack on Mitt Romney as a cold-hearted capitalist Tuesday by saying that he helped drive into bankruptcy a chain of department stores that used to be located in 26 Ohio cities, including Bowling Green.State Democratic Chairman Chris Redfern and national Obama campaign co-chair Ted Strickland said that Bain Capital in the 1980s bought up small clothing stores and organized them into Stage Stores, expanded the company, borrowed heavily against it with junk bonds, and sold its remaining shares at a profit in 1997, three years before the company went bankrupt in 2000.More than 5,000 workers lost jobs.
“Mitt Romney’s business record isn’t one of growing companies and creating jobs. It’s one of broken promises and shattered dreams for thousands of hardworking Americans,” Mr. Strickland said in a telephone conference call with Mr. Redfern.

I assume the plan is to get specific like this in state after state and city after city, because Mitt Romney claims he created 100,000 jobs while at Bain, so the Obama surrogates are talking about (surprise!) jobs.

Here are the attacks on the Obama strategy, and some both sides do it analysis, from this week:

On “Morning Joe” today, former Obama “car czar” Steve Rattner denounced a new campaign ad that attacks Mitt Romney for business decisions he made during his tenure at Bain Capital.
Specifically, the ad targets Romney and Bain Capital for the private equity firm’s decision to acquire GST Steel and the jobs that were lost under their control.
Rattner called the ad “unfair” and defended Romney’s decision at Bain Capital. Rattner says Romney’s job was to make profits for the firm’s investors, not save jobs.
“I think the ad is unfair. Mitt Romney made a mistake ever talking about the fact that he created 100,000 jobs. Bain Capital’s responsibility was not to create 100,000 jobs or some other number. It was to create profits for his investors, most of whom were pension funds, endowments and foundations.

Really? Romney made a “mistake” claiming Bain was about job creation? That’s a big mistake for the person who was running the joint to make. Mitt Romney doesn’t know what they do at Bain? And, it’s Obama’s job to correct the record and explain what Bain does? Why? Why isn’t that Mitt Romney’s job?

Financial analysts might have been perplexed as to why Romney made that assertion. Private-equity firms aren’t intended to create jobs; their goal is to make money for investors. And Romney’s claim itself was dubious — the companies he pointed to that added thousands of jobs did so after he left the firm. His campaign today stands by taking credit for those jobs, even as it says Romney isn’t responsible for jobs that were lost after 1999, like those at the shuttered steel plant in Missouri that’s the focus of Obama’s new ad.
“During Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital, the firm invested in or helped start up over 100 companies,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in an email. “If you look at just four of the startups alone, they add up to more than 120,000 jobs – Bain’s help under Gov. Romney led to the existence of those companies and, thus, the jobs.”

Why wasn’t Romney called on the original lie? We all know why Mitt Romney didn’t explain private equity. Because it was better for Mitt Romney to breeze by the facts and claim he “created 100,000 jobs”. The Obama campaign are simply attacking on the grounds of the original Romney claim, which was jobs. Romney had months to tell the truth. He didn’t.

And look what’s happened! Romney is no longer claiming he created 100,000 jobs, and has seemingly dropped jobs and moved on to debt. Debt is something he might actually understand, due to his experience loading up companies with debt while at Bain.

Yesterday:

In its effort to sell Mitt Romney as someone who understands the economy and knows how to create jobs, one of his campaign’s early talking points was that he helped create 100,000 jobs during his tenure at Bain Capital.
Romney eventually stopped repeating the talking point, which advisers had difficulty defending under pressure, and now it seems Boston has completely Etch A Sketched the number and severely lowered the number of jobs Romney is supposed to have created at Bain.
BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller reports that, in the wake of the Obama campaign’s new ad attacking Romney’s record at Bain, the “new Romney jobs math” is significantly more modest than the old. This time, the campaign is asserting that Romney created a meager and vague “thousands of jobs” at Bain and “tens of thousands” of jobs as governor of Massachusetts.
This is nothing less than an admission from the Romney campaign that their 100,000 jobs claim was entirely bogus, and acceptance that Romney created vastly fewer jobs than he claimed he had just a few months ago.

The WaPo Is Shrill

I’m not sure how this made it into Fred Hiatt’s loss leader for Kaplan, but more power to them:

But for House Republicans, and for the Family Foundation, an anti-gay group that stirred up opposition to Mr. Thorne-Begland’s nomination, his sexual orientation trumped his copious professional qualifications. Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William), who last year expressed the view that gays are “intrinsically disordered,” denounced the nominee as “an aggressive activist for the pro-homosexual agenda.”

Mr. Marshall — known in Richmond as “Sideshow Bob” — said that, as a gay man living with a domestic partner, Mr. Thorne-Begland had a lifestyle that would impede him from upholding Virginia’s constitution, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. As if the nominee’s sexual orientation would cripple his ability to preside over traffic cases and misdemeanors.

Other GOP delegates impugned Mr. Thorne-Begland’s character by noting that he’d concealed his homosexuality when he enlisted in the Navy in the late 1980s. Never mind that the military’s own rules, reflecting America’s evolving views, have moved well beyond that debate.

No matter how they dressed it up, the Republicans’ opposition boiled down to old-fashioned prejudice. Even by voting at 1 a.m., they couldn’t hide the fact that bigotry and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is alive and well in the state of Virginia.

I agree with every piece of this editorial, with one minor quibble. This isn’t “old-fashioned prejudice” or “old-fashioned bigotry,” this is the new-fashioned bigotry that the Christianist and Bircher right have normalized for us all. In the old-fashioned kind of bigotry, you were at least embarrassed enough to hide behind a hood and robe as you sneaked around burning crosses in people’s front yards. In the new kind, you are accepted into polite society, allowed on television to every day spew your bile, and stand proudly in the well of your state house telling us that the baby Jesus demands that no gays adopt babies or become judges or are treated like human beings.

Never Do Anything

Congress passed its first substantive bill in 6 weeks on Tuesday. (via)

I was wondering what running against a “Do Nothing Congress” would sound like, and here’s one of Truman’s stump speeches:

Some people say I ought not to talk so much about the Republican 80th “do-nothing” Congress in this campaign. I will tell you why I will talk about it. If two-thirds of the people stay at home again on election day as they did in 1946, and if we get another Republican Congress like the 80th Congress, it will be controlled by the same men who controlled that 80th Congress—the Tabers and the Tafts, the Martins and the Hallecks—would be the bosses. The same men would be the bosses, the same as those who passed the Taft-Hartley Act, and passed the rich man’s tax bill, and took Social Security away from a million workers.
Do you want that kind of administration? I don’t believe you do—I don’t believe you do.
I don’t believe you would be out here, interested in listening to my outline of what the Republicans are trying to do to you, if you intended to put them back in there.
When a bunch of Republican reactionaries are in control of the Congress, then the people get reactionary laws. The only way you can get the kind of government you need is by going to the polls and voting the straight Democratic ticket on November 2. Then you will get a Democratic Congress, and I will get a Congress that will work with me. Then we will get good housing at prices we can afford to pay; and repeal of that vicious Taft-Hartley Act; and more Social Security coverage; and prices that will be fair to everybody; and we can go on and keep sixty-one million people at work; we can have an income of more than $217 billion, and that income will be distributed so that the farmer, the workingman, the white collar worker, and the businessman get their fair share of that income.
That is what I stand for.
That is what the Democratic party stands for.
Vote for that, and you will be safe.

Other than a few factual references, it still works. Also, too, if Obama started giving stump speeches as frank and forthright as that one, they’d have to spike the water with Xanax and install fainting couches on the press plane.

GM Takes the Red Pill

GM has dropped ads on Facebook, saying that they “had little impact” on consumers.

When’s the last time you clicked on an Internet ad? When’s the last time you bought something because it was advertised on the Internet?

I’ve been reading websites for at least an hour this morning and I’m so ad blind that I can’t remember a single ad that was pushed my way. It only took GM a little under 20 years to figure out what most of us knew already: banner ads on the Internet do not work. The kind of targeted advertising that Google does on search pages probably has a little more impact. Nevertheless, Facebook is about to have a multi-billion IPO based in part on the delusion that generic web ads are worth something.

Open Thread – Crazy, mixed up echidna

How many eggs does a mammal have to lay to get some attention around here?

Those damn platypodes always hog the puggle limelight. As commenter jl notes, someone needs to speak up for the echidna, the forgotten monotreme.

Farewell to the Gargoyle Feminist?

From Rebecca Traister’s word processor to the Goddess’ ears:

The image of the feminist as a mirthless, hirsute, sex-averse succubus is a friendly-fire casualty of the Republican “war on women.” It’s a grave loss to conservatives, who have used this faithful foot soldier as a comfortably grotesque stand-in for the real people whose liberties they have sought to conscribe: women….

Painting those with a commitment to gender equality as brutish killers of buzzes and babies has been a useful tactic, not only in distracting the public from anti-feminist policy, but in sending messages to young people. Generations of kids, including my own 1990s cohort, have prefaced feminist statements with, “I’m not a feminist, but . . .” Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played girl-power icon Buffy Summers, once told a reporter that she hated the word “feminist” because it “brings up such horrible connotations and makes you think of women who don’t shave their legs.”

In activism, an image problem becomes a structural problem: Twisted but resonant stereotypes make women hesitant to identify with the movement to expand their rights. And if women won’t organize and advocate on their own behalf, the work of anti-feminists is done.

But the recent Republican incursions against women’s rights have been extreme enough to make women finally see beyond the wraith, to recognize that this battle is in fact about them. As presidential candidates sparred over birth control and state legislatures enacted punishing restrictions on reproductive rights and opposed equal-pay protections, newly vocal feminists resisted publicly. By doing so, they transformed the stereotype, putting youth, sex and humor on the side of the long-denigrated women’s movement. Conservatives such as Limbaugh, Foster Friess and Rick Santorum, dealing in sexual censoriousness and musty utterances, suddenly looked like the sexless relics of a bygone era, while the women shouting back at them presented a new, cool model of feminism — young, funny, socially nimble and appealing….

I don’t grok all her examples, but then, as an Old Person (second wave feminists, represent!), I know that I am not her target audience, either. I just hope she’s right that the caricature has finally passed its sell-by date.

The Ugly Humorless Anti-Sex(Yet-Secretly-Sexually-Voracious) Suffragette has been a media trope since at least the 1850s, when that generation’s version of the Responsible Liberal used it as a political weapon to undercut the call for civil rights from both women and African-Americans by playing one group against the other. It’s popped up every time women seemed to be making progress—in the 1870s during ‘Reconstruction’, again in the ‘Progressive’ Era (those ‘mill girls’), during the 1920s (flappers vs. old-fashioned bluestockings), after WWII when Rosie the Riveter was supposed to turn herself into June Cleaver, and of course in the 1970s. If you read the WaPo’s “Top Comments”, those evergreen perennials “But what about individual rights, isn’t it also sexist to ignore the men?” and “Islamic women in the Middle East and victims of mass rape in the Congo have it really bad, therefore American women have no right to bitch about their little inconveniences” remain as popular as they were in the Stone/Stanton era, sad to say. You’d think the troglodytes would get tired of recycling the same tired whinges…

Open Thread, because Andrew Breitbart is still dead

But he is still with us, you know. Those who have touched us never really leave us. He was like a priest or a Boy Scout leader that way.

We’ll keep Yutsano in our thoughts for his surgery tomorrow, and congratulations to J.W. Hammer on the engagement!

And I just remembered my own news—I’m a finalist for a new position in the Regional Operations Center at work, that would be a grade increase to GS-12 and possibly a shift differential if I get selected for the night shift.  I’m getting a little old for the night shift, but it’s a 10% differential, and 4×10hr shifts with three days off per week, so I could live with it for a while anyway.

Golden Oldies

I can’t wait to go through this same tedious bullshit all over again:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wants Congress to raise the debt limit again later this year “without drama, pain and damage.”

House Speaker John Boehner has other ideas.

In remarks at the 2012 Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Boehner will erect the same requirements for raising the debt limit this coming winter that nearly led the country to default on its debt last August.

“We shouldn’t dread the debt limit. We should welcome it. It’s an action-forcing event in a town that has become infamous for inaction,” Boehner will say according to excerpts of prepared remarks provided by his office. “That night in New York City, I put forth the principle that we should not raise the debt ceiling without real spending cuts and reforms that exceed the amount of the debt limit increase…. When the time comes, I will again insist on my simple principle of cuts and reforms greater than the debt limit increase. This is the only avenue I see right now to force the elected leadership of this country to solve our structural fiscal imbalance. If that means we have to do a series of stop-gap measures, so be it – but that’s not the ideal. Let’s start solving the problem. We can make the bold cuts and reforms necessary to meet this principle, and we must.”

And, of course, tax increases are off the table. As well as cuts to the Pentagon.

Open Thread: The Denialist Bubble Is Shrinking

(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)

Dave Weigel at Slate brings news from the Heartland (Institute):

On Friday, the libertarian, Chicago-based Heartland Institute made a routine-sounding announcement. It would “spin off its insurance research project effective May 31.” The D.C.-based Center on Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate would break off; its director, Eli Lehrer, would found some new project…

Today, the spin-off—dubbed the R Street Institute—sent out a statement from its spokesman, R.J. Lehmann. Most of it was boilerplate about how the team of six Heartland refugees would keep working on “much the same portfolio of issues we already have been.” Oh, one caveat:

There is one thing that will certainly change from ending our association with Heartland: R Street will not promote climate change skepticism.

The backstory is explained here by Lucia Graves. Heartland has been a locus of climate change skepticism for some time. It had been shedding some corporate support since debuting a billboard with a picture of the Unabomber and the slogan “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” Next week, Heartland will host its 7th climate change conference—typically, a haven for skeptics.

“Our project has never been engaged in climate science, per se, and there are no plans to begin working on that issue now,” said Lehmann. “However, we do work on catastrophe risk issues, and to the extent that climate risk is relevant to that topic, our intent is to take scientific consensus seriously, in advocating for public policy issues that relate to climate risk.”

An example? “Global warming is relevant to the risk of catastrophic floods,” said Lehmann. “It is relevant to crop losses from drought, and we see scientific consensus as suggesting those concerns must be taken seriously as we evaluate federal subsidies for flood insurance and crop insurance.”

[My emphases.] Shorter R Street: Look, denying reality was fine as long as our funders were paying us more than we’d lose when the digestive byproduct hit the fan. But we can’t afford to base insurance calculations on wishful thinking—we’re operating as libertarians, for pete’s sake!

Apart from noting the gradual trickle towards the final stage of Gandhi’s Aphorism (First they ignore you; then they mock you; eventually they fight you; then you win), what’s on the agenda for the evening?

JaVale McGee, you’re speaking my language with your platypus shenanigans

Yesterday, JaVale McGee, decent center for the Denver Nuggets, punked the media. He claimed via Twitter that he had bought a pet platypus, then tweeted an image of two adorable little platypi.

The JaVale McGee-loving media ran with the story. Indeed, multiple news outlets and blogs represented his monotreme acquisition as true facts. But the joke was on them! McGee later tweeted that in fact it was all a ruse. He sensibly pointed out that, while he expected fans to fall for it, journalists should have known better. And as he said, it only would have taken pasting the image into Google Images to reveal the hoax.

Now, deliberate fraud involving Orinthorhynchidae is one thing. It’s a jest, as one might expect in the court of a king. But I think McGee has a serious point, or as serious as a point can be, when derived from larks about venomous beaked egg-laying mammals. Journalists probably should not be falling for this stuff. Not without a phone call to McGee or his representation, or the aforementioned “let’s see what Google Images reveals” maneuver, which takes all of 15 seconds.

Personally, I kind of think that, self-hagiography aside, the blogging revolution has essentially given us the worst of both worlds. Professional bloggers were right to point out that elite journalism is a hotbed of influence peddling, patronage, and petty corruption. Traditional journalists were right to point out that far too often, bloggers don’t bother to actually get out there and get the facts, content to take wild guesses from behind their Macbooks. We could potentially have gotten the best of each. I would contend we’ve gotten the worst: professional blogging now has social circle capture and petty corruption to put the world of traditional media to shame, and reporters constantly fail to do even minimal due diligence or fact gathering. And without a functioning media, there’s no functioning democracy.

Today in the Republican Assault on Gays

First, in Virginia, being gay apparently makes you unqualified to be a judge:

Virginia’s General Assembly rejected a gay man for a Richmond judgeship early Tuesday, after conservatives argued that his support for gay marriage and challenge to the military’s now-defunct “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy made him unfit for the bench.

The House of Delegates voted 33 to 31, with 10 abstentions, to make Richmond prosecutor Tracy Thorne-Begland a General District Court judge in Richmond. He had needed 51 votes in the 100-member chamber to win appointment.

“He holds himself out as being married,” said Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William), who is running for U.S. Senate. Noting that gay marriage is not legal in Virginia, he said that Thorne-Begland’s “life is a contradiction to the requirement of submission to the constitution.”

Next, in Colorado:

Gay couples who watched as Colorado lawmakers rejected a civil unions measure are taking comfort in the bill sponsor’s mantra: It’s not a matter of if, but a matter of when civil unions become law.

The most emotional issue — some call it divisive — at the Legislature came to an end late Monday in front of hundreds of observers at the Capitol. It was the second time within a week the bill failed. The first was after a Republican filibuster, the second during a special session.

Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper had said the second go-around was needed to address a “fundamental question of fairness and civil rights” on whether gay couples deserve rights similar to married couples.

The bill’s demise during special session was expected by Democrats, who have begun using the issue as a rallying cry to topple Republicans in the November elections. Republicans assigned the bill to the House State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee, which voted 5-4 along party lines to kill the measure.

“My family is the same as every one of yours,” said Rep. Mark Ferrandino, the Democrats’ leader in the House and a gay lawmaker who co-sponsored the civil unions bill, moments before it was defeated.

Though the ending came as no surprise, the lead-up was emotional. Two Democratic lawmakers choked up before their votes. In the audience, Marq Shafer, 31, put his hand on his partner Cody Shafer’s shoulder and nervously rubbed Cody’s wedding ring.

Republican Rep. Don Coram, whose son is gay, cited his reasons for voting against the measure while his wife, Dianna Coram, wiped away tears in the audience. Coram said civil unions are too similar to same-sex marriage, which Colorado voters banned in 2006. He blasted Democrats, accusing them of bringing up the issue to try to gain votes.

“The gay community is being used as a political pawn,” he said.

I especially love that last line- Yes, Rep. Coram, it’s the people trying to give equal rights to your son who are using gays as political pawns, not the people catering to bigots and religious nuts. I bet family gatherings are a real hoot in the Coram household.

Meanwhile, some minor blowback for the Republicans:

An openly gay supporter for Mitt Romney is asking the campaign for his money back now that President Barack Obama has endorsed marriage equality.

Bill White, the chairman and CEO of consulting firm Constellations Group and former president of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, sent a letter to the Romney campaign after Romney’s recent commencement address to Liberty University, reinforcing his position against marriage equality.

“I feel that I no longer wish to support your presidential campaign and ask that you please return the maximum contribution that I gave to you last year,” Bill White wrote in a letter obtained by CNN. He added, “You have chosen to be on the wrong side of history and I do not support your run for president any longer.”

All the Republicans have is hate and division.

Credibility? WTF IS THAT?

And the O’Keefe fail parade marches on, defiantly giving facts and reality the middle finger as he goose-steps through our public discourse:

Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe released a new video today supposedly exposing voter fraud in North Carolina by highlighting non-citizens like Zbigniew Gorzkowski who have voted in recent elections.

The problem: Gorzkowski is an American citizen.

From the grave, Breitbart keeps on giving with his clown car posse.

Going There

This pooped into my inbox a little while ago:

Eric Allie, who’s an unfunny and not very talented cartoonist, must need some hits, because he drew a cartoon titled “Deep Throat II”, which shows Obama (who’s beyond Allie’s limited ability to caricature, so he’s mainly recognizable because his skin is brown) sitting in the Oval Office. Another misshapen human-like caricature asks “I thought the Washington Post was here to discuss the campaign” and a bubble from under the desk says “Down here”.

I think I’d have to work to push out something this old and tired: a Watergate reference, the Washington Post as the exemplar of liberal media, and a Lewinski/blowjob joke. If I had to make my living as a cartoonist and this was the best I could do, I’d be sharpening my razor and drawing a hot bath.

Update: I thought this was Daryl Cagle’s work initially but I fixed the post to give credit/blame to the right asshole. BTW, Cagle is the cartoonist for the liberal MSNBC and syndicates Allie’s work.

Something different to fight about

I am tired of listening to the political peril angle on same sex marriage and I have never understood why every idiot in the world gets to weigh in on The Black Church and President Obama while Mormons and Mitt Romney are off-limits, so here’s Wonkette:

Get out your Purple Heart bandages, because it is once again time to remind the American people thatThe Troops are a bunch of lazy, cowardly, treasonous, unpatriotic, un-American, Kenyan-Socialist-Communist whiners.
If the election were held today, Obama would win the veteran vote by as much as seven points over Romney, higher than his margin in the general population.
The fuck you say! It is almost like soldiers are expressing anger at the toll of a decade of war, questioning the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion, and worrying that the surge in Afghanistan won’t make a difference in the long run! (And also: don’t really have a hard-on for #WARRING with Iran!)

Also, open thread

Dirty laundry is still dirty, even if no one sees it

Really depressing read, if you’re a person who may have a direct and personal interest in any of the huge questions that are before the Supreme Court:

Before retiring from the Supreme Court in 2009, liberal Justice David Souter penned a dissent so critical of the court’s conservative justices, Chief Justice John Roberts went to great lengths to prevent it from being published. That’s one of the clams from The New Yorker’s epic dissection of the 2010 Supreme Court Decision Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission. Taking us inside the legal wranglings of the high-profile case, staff writer Jeffrey Toobin describes a dissent Souter wrote at the end of his tenure at the Supreme Court. The argument, which remains unpublished, accused Roberts of engineering the outcome of the Citizens United case:
Souter wrote a dissent that aired some of the Court’s dirty laundry. By definition, dissents challenge the legal conclusions of the majority, but Souter accused the Chief Justice of violating the Court’s own procedures to engineer the result he wanted.
Roberts didn’t mind spirited disagreement on the merits of any case, but Souter’s attack—an extraordinary, bridge-burning farewell to the Court—could damage the Court’s credibility. So the Chief came up with a strategically ingenious maneuver.
Toobin goes on to explain that Roberts put Citizens United down for the process known as “reargument” on June 29, 2009, the last day of that year’s term, and the day that Souter retired. The maneuver set the trajectory of the case and ultimately prevented Souter’s dissent from being published. As U.C.–Irvine School of Law professor Rick Hasen notes on his blog, “thanks to the reargument … the criticism that the Court decided the issue without briefing was gone.”
If you’re interested in seeing Souter’s full dissent, so are we. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. As has been reported, Souter gave all “his papers to the New Hampshire Historical Society in Concord, where they will remain closed for 50 years.”

If Toobin’s account is accurate, I’m a little confused on the “damage the credibility of the Court” angle. If Souter believed that what he wrote was true, then perhaps the Court’s credibility should be damaged, or maybe we could read it and decide for ourselves. How far are we willing to go on “protecting credibility”? Doesn’t credibility have some connection to actions taken?