Nationally Lampooned Vacations

Conservatives continue to attack Michelle Obama as proxy to her husband, this time over the idea that in a bad economy, the Obama family shouldn’t dare go anywhere lest they draw the ire of swing state voters in Republican focus groups.

“They view everything through their own personal situation and if they can’t afford to do it, they can’t enjoy it, they don’t like Obama using their tax dollars to benefit himself,” said pollster John McLaughlin. “In this case, they see him as out of touch. While they are struggling he’s not sharing in that struggle and he’s basically doing what they can’t do on their tax dollars,” added the GOP pollster.

He and several other top-tier Republican pollsters, organized by Resurgent Republic, traveled to 11 battleground states to host focus groups of independent and swing voters, mostly Democrats, who voted for President Obama in 2008 but who are now on the fence.

McLaughlin handled blue collar and Catholic voters in Pittsburgh on April 3 and Cleveland on March 20. He found that they are very depressed about the economy and feel that their tax dollars are being sucked up by both the rich and those living on government assistance.

During the focus group discussions about debt and spending cuts, many in his group volunteered criticism of the presidential vacations as something that should be cut. Among the lines McLaughlin wrote down was one from a Democratic woman who said, “Michelle Obama spends $1 million to take the kids to Hawaii,” and another who said, “President Obama was the only president to take so many trips.”

The theme, said McLaughlin, is that the first family “is out of touch” with working class voters.

What the focus groups are really proving is that the FOX News style propaganda attacks on our “uppity” First Family who should “know their place” and not be so “lazy” and “go on vacation so much” are working with the intended target, at least to some extent.  The First Lady in particular has been savaged for spending “millions” on pricey vacations and top-shelf fashions, all supposedly on the taxpayer dime.

There are two things wrong with it.  One, the costs include security for the First Family, and given the unalloyed hatred these assholes have for the Obamas, I’d say that security is pretty necessary, possibly more necessary that with any other residents of the White House before them.  Second of all, President Obama and Michelle Obama have still taken far less vacations than the Bush family preceding them.  Laura Bush took yearly trips to Yosemite National Park with family friends and Secret Service protection.  The total cost of just the White House trips to the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas?  Some $20 million for just the plane costs.

President Bush took 149 trips to Camp David, 77 visits to his Crawford ranch, and 11 trips to his father’s Kennebunkport mansion. Since Air Force One reportedly cost $56,800 per hour to operate in 2004 (which Bush used to get to Crawford), and the plane can travel up to 630 miles per hour, it cost at least $259,657 to get the 2,880 miles to Crawford and back, each time Bush went, or roughly $20 million dollars just for taking the plane on the Crawford trips alone. Add in the cost of putting up Secret Service and other staff for the ranch trips, as well as the Kennebunkport and Camp David trips, and you get, well, a lot.

That’s okay, because it’s not like Bush crashed our economy or anything while he was busy clearing brush.  There’s one big difference in Presidential history when it comes to the Obama family, and that’s what these Republican pollsters are pushing among working-class Democrats, trying to get them to abandon the President for being too “elitist” and instead vote for the guy worth a quarter-billion dollars with the multiple vacation homes and cars…or not vote at all.

But don’t you dare bring the issue of race into it.

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Krugthulhu’s Fractured Fairy Tales

The Great Shrill One rises from the depths of reason to infect the Austerians with his beard-tentacles of sanity and common sense and tells a little bedtime story about a fairy (rent asunder by his self-same beard-tentacles, no doubt.)

Critics warned from the beginning that austerity in the face of depression would only make that depression worse. But the “austerians” insisted that the reverse would happen. Why? Confidence! “Confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet, the former president of the European Central Bank — a claim echoed by Republicans in Congress here. Or as I put it way back when, the idea was that the confidence fairy would come in and reward policy makers for their fiscal virtue.

The good news is that many influential people are finally admitting that the confidence fairy was a myth. The bad news is that despite this admission there seems to be little prospect of a near-term course change either in Europe or here in America, where we never fully embraced the doctrine, but have, nonetheless, had de facto austerity in the form of huge spending and employment cuts at the state and local level.

So, about that doctrine: appeals to the wonders of confidence are something Herbert Hoover would have found completely familiar — and faith in the confidence fairy has worked out about as well for modern Europe as it did for Hoover’s America. All around Europe’s periphery, from Spain to Latvia, austerity policies have produced Depression-level slumps and Depression-level unemployment; the confidence fairy is nowhere to be seen, not even in Britain, whose turn to austerity two years ago was greeted with loud hosannas by policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

And with Spain and now Britain’s Q1 GDP numbers showing big fat recession signs (and a healthy chunk of the Eurozone following suit at this point) the notion that “austerity is the answer because it creates certainty and confidence!” is about as dead now as Sarkozy’s chances in France’s upcoming elections.  Poor little Confidence Fairy didn’t have a chance, you know.  You didn’t clap loudly enough, Europe.  (Austerity can only be failed…)

Never forget of course that for the last several years, the “serious” people have been telling us that we had to follow suit or face economic ruin.  US GDP numbers for Q1 came out this morning at 2.2% growth, and while that’s down from 4Q 2011’s 3.0%, it’s still better than what Europe’s austerity cultists are feeding upon right now.  Our own zombie-eyed granny starvers (thanks, Chuck) have told us for years now that this was necessary if not vital to our survival, and failure to do so would mean another financial crash.  Meanwhile, the actual application of throttling the spender of last resort in several European countries has—surprise!—led to a double-dip recession with no end in sight and even more cuts called for.  We need more of the same stuff that not only isn’t working, it’s causing more problems.  That never happens with conservatives and economics.

Yet, we face the same exact calls here from Republicans and more than a few Democrats.  They’re hoping you don’t pay any attention to the fact that what they’ve said we have to do has been tried and is currently failing miserably in Europe.  Mighty Krugthulhu has of course been saying this for a while now, and all but ignored in the halls of power.  It’s looking like that particular era may be coming to an end and none too soon.  Maybe those steely gray beard-tentacles of his can latch on to a few heads and extract the Stupid while he’s at it.

What a fairy tale that would make.  Ia! Ia!

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The Barackness Monster Drops The Mic On ‘Em

With President Obama slow jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon yesterday, he deftly ensures that his stance on keeping student loan interest rates low will be completely opposed by the GOP in a self-destructive orgy of Obama Derangement Syndrome that will go the way of the payroll tax cut fight as Greg Sargent points out:

Consider the parallels. Just as in the payroll tax cut battle, there’s a looming deadline: On July 1st, interest rates on federally funded student loans is set to double. Barack Obama and Democrats, confident that the politics are on their side, are signaling that they intend to remain on offense on the issue.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney and other Republican leaders, apparently sensing that this a losing issue for them, have voiced varying degrees of support for extending the low rates. And just as in the payroll tax fight, they insist their only issue is about how to pay for the extension. Yet they won’t say what spending cuts they would favor to offset it.

This well-worn ground look familiar?  It should.

Meanwhile, House conservatives — just as during the payroll battle — are beginning to signal that they oppose the extension, period, full stop. Check out this quote from GOP Rep. Todd Akin, who is running in a GOP primary for the right to take on Dem Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri:

 

Akin said the government should be out of the student loan market altogether. “America has got the equivalent of the stage three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in,” he said.

For Akin, federal help with student loan debt is an ideological nonstarter. If we start seeing more of this kind of thing from House conservatives, it could limit the maneuvering room GOP leaders need to reach a deal with Dems on how to pay for the extension they say they favor, in order to resolve this issue and put it behind them.

And this college tour and Fallon performance all but seal the deal on this.  The dopes, they are getting their ropes completely a-doped by POTUS once again.  They can’t help themselves and have to mash on the A NEW POUTRAGE HAS APPEARED! button like a guinea pig getting a crack pellet.  If this plays out like the payroll tax cut issue (and there’s every indication that it will so far) then the GOP will shoot themselves in the foot with yet another group of voters who will learn there’s no percentage in voting GOP unless you’re the one percent.

[UPDATE]  The Breitbart crew at Big Roflcopter’s expert legal opinion:  Obama on Fallon may be impeachable or something, and NBC should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, possibly by forcing them to give Dana Loesch her own show or something equally horrific.

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Something About These Guys I Don’t Trust

The latest round of Americans Elect nonsense is at CNN.com this weekend as a technocrat appeals to the iGeneration about voting, the Sensible Centrist Austerity way.  Now with technology!

This digital revolution is more than just innovating for convenience. Something deeper and more significant is at stake: the integrity of our consent, the underpinning of our government’s legitimacy and authority.

“Consent of the governed” only exists if it can be expressed, and that is an increasingly difficult task. When we vote for president, we don’t simply vote for the best candidate; we vote for the best candidate who has previously been ratified by one of two political parties.

This creates a philosophical “blackout” space in which no candidate, because of his or her beliefs, will ever be elected president (see Jon Huntsman). This blackout space should concern all of us, because of its appeal to the general electorate, who will never get that option. What’s worse is that this space is growing with each cycle. It’s not clear that either Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton would get through their primaries today.

That’s why the Americans Elect innovation is so exciting—because it relieves us of anachronistic structures that harm our political system. It’s the iTunes of politics.

Status quo apologists and those who benefit from partisan gridlock might pooh-pooh this idea, particularly if the candidate doesn’t get to Ross Perot levels in November. But these critics miss the point. Americans Elect is not just about running for the White House in 2012. It’s about electing our leaders in a new way so that the governed are truly consenting.

Right, because removing the political party middlemen from the traditional process of the rich buying our elections makes it that much better solely on the purity factor, except for the fact that they are lying about doing it.  Primaries are for suckers, now engage in our primary!

That particular cargo shipload of manure up there was written by Nathan Daschle.  You know, son of former Dem Senate Leader Tom Daschle.  Just a reminder that it’s not just wealthy, obnoxiously centrist Republicans flogging the Throw Your Vote Away movement here in an attempt to make the “reasonable” case for crushing austerity amid tax cuts for the one percent because it’s our duty, being good serfs, to pay for our lords.  It’s feel-good political euthanasia, designed solely to put down resistance to the status quo of “We’re your betters, now here’s what you need to do for us.”  To help you remain tranquil in the face of almost certain electoral death, smooth jazz will be deployed in 3…2…1…

Daniel Larison nails these guys to the wall:

There is a powerful case to be made that a two-party system that operates within the very narrow confines of bipartisan consensus on many major policies is harmful to the country. Americans Elect isn’t making that case or anything like it. What the Americans Elect project represents is an effort to produce the distilled essence of everything that is wrong with the current two-party system and then pretend that it is an exciting, new alternative.

S’truth right there, folks.  By comparison, Paul Ryan is at least somewhat honest about his plans to Soylent Green us all.  And let’s remember that there’s nothing Centrist about the GOP.

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Wednesday Night Open Thread: Ever the Victims

Dave Weigel at Slate follows these guys around so we don’t have to:

PRWatch took notes on this week’s Heritage Blogger’s Briefing, a storied weekly tradition that only just partered up with Breitbart.com. Rep. Jeff Landry of Louisiana was the guest, playing the air-punching freshman role that Rep. Joe Walsh and Allen West have demo’d in the past. But the star, as far as the left was concerned, was Caitlyn Korb—holder of a once-boring, now-exciting job of flacking for ALEC…

Korb was up. The left, she said, had “been doing everything in their power to shut us down.” It had made “ridiculous accusations, such as we killed Trayvon Martin.” ALEC’s allies needed to “call out these people that are attacking us.” Starting this week, at some point, a website called IStandWithALEC would go up to collect solidarinosc statements.

She was pushing on an open door. Today, the National Taxpayers Union’s Andrew Moylan published a long piece on the unfairness of ALEC attacks. “Liberal activist groups hate the limited government principles of ALEC and other organizations like it and they are intent on stamping them out of existence,” he said. (Moylan didn’t attend the Briefing himself.) The rally around ALEC has taken longer than the rally around the Kochs—who, remember, were the original targets of anti-ALEC campaigns—but the D.C. conservative culture is generally a little friendlier to ALEC, a little more surprised at the anti- campaign…

Yeah, because the ALEC lobbyists wear nice suits and won’t embarrass their tablemates when it’s time to choose the right $400 bottle of wine. But when the lights come on and the cockroaches scuttle for cover, they won’t be too proud to hide under the Breitbrat appliance. Worth reading the PRWatch link—ALEC Sends Out an SOS to Breitbart Bloggers.

Apart from rightwing serial criminals whining about being “victimised”, what’s on the agenda tonight?

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Sense of Doom

Not sure why, but I’ve been very pessimistic the last few days about the November election. Every time I read the news, I just read such blatant bullshit that I simply don’t know how the Obama team can pull it out again. The nonsense just never stops. The latest for me is hearings over 1 million spent by some jackass in the GSA on a convention.

The American military spends a million bucks in Afghanistan every time a soldier farts. Yet we’re going to spend months hearing about this GSA idiot. He’s been fired, and if there are charges to be brought, bring them. That should be the end of it. But nooooo. We’ll have Issa and the other idiots grandstanding on this issue for months because they are “fiscal conservatives,” and we’ll just ignore the 5 trillion Romney plans to shower on Richie Rich and his friends.

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Fiscal Frauds

Of course he is just making shit up:

A big mystery of Romney’s tax pledge — to “cut tax rates across the board by 20 percent” and reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent — is what tax loopholes he’ll close to pay for the cost.

Romney’s tax cuts are projected to cost the federal government $5 trillion over 10 years, on top of the $4 trillion 10-year cost of making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Existing deductions and exemptions in the tax code, all together, reduce receipts by about $1 trillion per year, according to estimates.

Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said all the deductions Romney proposed to scrap “would pay for less than 20 percent” of the $5 trillion cost of his tax plan. “The deductions he unveiled would raise less than $1 trillion,” he said.

Romney’s mortgage interest proposal would yield “probably less than 1 percent of the total cost” of his tax cuts, Marr said, while axing the state and local deduction for everyone, which would be very difficult to enact politically, would yield about $800 billion to $900 billion over 10 years. “So that’d be a major step but still pay for a small share of his tax cuts,” Marr said.

It’s unclear whether Romney would eliminate these expenditures entirely or simply cap them, to limit the extent to which they benefit high-income earners.

The deductibility of home mortgage interest and the tax exemption for employer-provided health care eat up a big chunk of the $1 trillion in revenue the government loses annually because of tax expenditures. Both are very popular politically, and they’ve become fundamental to the country’s housing and health care policy. Other perks, like the low capital gains rate and oil and gas subsidies, are backed by powerful constituencies that both parties, but particularly Republicans, are at pains to scale back.

The Romney campaign backed away from the remarks Monday morning, suggesting they’re aware the bad math could become a political liability. “He was just discussing ideas that came up on the campaign trail,” Romney surrogate Jim Talent told reporters on a conference call Monday. “He wasn’t announcing a policy yesterday. We don’t have any plans now to announce new policies.”

It’s not a big mystery at all. He’s lying.

How many more decades do we have to pretend the Republicans are fiscally responsible?

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“Pro-Life” Community Very Upset More Women Will Not Be Collateral Damage in Their Religious Jihad Against Abortion

Responding to this WaPo piece that Komen is funding breast cancer screening at Planned Parenthood, LifeNews has a sad and breaks out some major-league bullshit:

Komen for the Cure has officially buckled to pressure from Planned Parenthood and 17 affiliates of the national breast cancer charity will provide grants for the abortion business this calendar year.

Komen had long been a subject of national controversy in which pro-life advocates initially boycotted Komen and then celebrated earlier this year as it appeared the breast cancer charity had made the decision to revoke funding for the abortion business. After massive public pressure, media attacks and lobbying from Planned Parenthood, Komen indicates the abortion business would be eligible for funding but did to say whether funding would be continued.

Leading pro-life groups had hoped Komen would keep their de-funding decision in place via a change in grant-making criteria making it so organizations like Planned Parenthood that do not do mammograms would no longer be eligible for so-called pass-through grants in which they merely provide referrals to legitimate medical centers and physicians who do.

If they are so convinced they are right on the issue, why must they LIE about EVERYTHING? The money is not going to fund abortions. It’s almost like we need a commandment against lying for these fundamentalist evangelical lunatics. Wait, what?

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Another Rising Republican Star with a Truth Deficit

Liar, liar:

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey exaggerated when he declared that unforeseen costs to the state were forcing him to cancel the new train tunnel planned to relieve congested routes across the Hudson River, according to a long-awaited report by independent Congressional investigators.

The report by the Government Accountability Office, to be released this week, found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.

Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs.

Canceling the tunnel, then the largest public works project in the nation, helped shape Mr. Christie’s profile as a rising Republican star, an enforcer of fiscal discipline in a country drunk on debt. But the report is likely to revive criticism that his decision, which he said was about “hard choices” in tough economic times, was more about avoiding the need to raise the state’s gasoline tax, which would have violated a campaign promise. The governor subsequently steered $4 billion earmarked for the tunnel to the state’s near-bankrupt transportation trust fund, traditionally financed by the gasoline tax.

On Tuesday, in a speech at a conference on taxes and the economy in Manhattan, Mr. Christie did not mention the report, but defended his decision to cancel the project, saying, “I refuse to compromise my principles.”

Clearly, honesty is not one of his principles. Kthug puts this into perspective:

But one thing to emphasize here is that this turns Christie’s whole narrative on its head. He poses as the tough guy willing to make hard choices to secure his state’s future. Instead, he turns out to be a guy willing to eat the state’s seed corn — as one of the critics quoted in the article says, to “cannibalize” a project essential to the state’s future — so as to secure a short-term political advantage.

This fits a broader pattern: in general, the politicians who make the loudest noise about taking care of future generations, taking the long view, etc., are the ones who are in fact most irresponsible about public investments, both in infrastructure and in human issues like child health and nutrition.

He’s right.

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Working As Intended, Folks

This Easter Sunday, the NY Times has this Jason DeParle story on red states shredding welfare safety nets and the people who keep falling through them.

Faced with flat federal financing and rising need, Arizona is one of 16 states that have cut their welfare caseloads further since the start of the recession — in its case, by half. Even as it turned away the needy, Arizona spent most of its federal welfare dollars on other programs, using permissive rules to plug state budget gaps.

The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow.

Esmeralda Murillo, a 21-year-old mother of two, lost her welfare check, landed in a shelter and then returned to a boyfriend whose violent temper had driven her away. “You don’t know who to turn to,” she said.

Maria Thomas, 29, with four daughters, helps friends sell piles of brand-name clothes, taking pains not to ask if they are stolen. “I don’t know where they come from,” she said. “I’m just helping get rid of them.”

To keep her lights on, Rosa Pena, 24, sold the groceries she bought with food stamps and then kept her children fed with school lunches and help from neighbors. Her post-welfare credo is widely shared: “I’ll do what I have to do.”

And as any conservative can tell you, this is working 100% as intended.  If those on welfare turn to crime, then it’s clearly permissible to cut welfare even further to stop coddling these criminals, and then of course pass those savings through tax cuts on to the Almighty Job Creators, who will then certainly create more jobs and uplift these broken souls back into society.  Any time now, those jobs will be just pouring out.  Yep.

Of course without that vital last part, it becomes and endless conveyor belt to transfer wealth to the wealthy and drive the poor into other states (preferably blue ones) where they become somebody else’s problem.  Meanwhile, red states like Arizona get to claim they’ve cut welfare rolls and that the rest of America needs to follow their success.

Meanwhile, the expensive private prison conglomerates designed to incarcerate the increasingly desperate among us costing taxpayers far more per person than the welfare did in the first place is beside the point, that money’s well spent because we’re tough on crime.  Certainly the GOP is licking their chops at the latest iteration of the House GOP budget, turning safety net programs into block grants they can raid for even more tax cuts and wealth transfer.  And if the GOP gets control, guess what’s happening to these programs in the future?

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the top House Republican on budget issues, calls the current welfare program “an unprecedented success.” Mitt Romney, who leads the race for the Republican presidential nomination, has said he would place similar restrictions on “all these federal programs.” One of his rivals, Rick Santorum, calls the welfare law a source of spiritual rejuvenation.

“It didn’t just cut the rolls, but it saved lives,” Mr. Santorum said, giving the poor “something dependency doesn’t give: hope.”

As in “hope God chose you to be rich, because otherwise you’re screwed.”  Happy Easter Hunger Games from the GOP.  Don’t worry, when you die, your suffering will be rewarded in the next life.  Oh wait, it won’t because you were poor and wasted your life so you obviously sinned, so it’s okay if we kick your face in a few more times.

Like I said, working as intended.

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Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Is it irresponsible to speculate if President Obama threatened Chelsea Clinton’s life in order to win the 2008 primary, like FOX News anchor Heather Childers does?

 

It’s irresponsible not to, of course.  But the whole “Bush fee-fees were impugned” happened, so all’s fair cause politics ain’t beanbag.

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Beats working

Young, well-funded conservative activists hard at work, pretending they are decent people:

Young, bearded, a bit scruffy, a young man walked into a community organizing office in East Harlem, lugging a heavy bag. A little nervous, he said that his name was Melvin Howting, and that he worked for an environmental company in New Jersey and had a few questions about how to organize a union.
He wanted to know how to get higher wages. And, oh yes, he had another question: If he formed a union, could his fellow workers join with the employer to shake down politicians for more money?
At this point, Rhea Byer-Ettinger, an organizer for Manhattan Together, felt her internal baloney detector go on red alert. “Beep, beep, beep,” she said. “I said to him: ‘Well, that’s not how we work. Tell me, why are you asking me about that?’ ”

For several years, young conservatives have made a cottage industry of going undercover and trying to goad people working at perceived liberal institutions — like Acorn, NPR and Planned Parenthood — into saying something stupid. Trained by well-financed foundations, these dirty tricksters pose as pimps, sex traffickers and Muslim activists and record conversations surreptitiously. Then they release videos that have often been heavily edited. Of late, conservatives have set their sights on the Industrial Areas Foundation, a national organizing group founded by a hard-bitten, inventive organizer named Saul Alinsky. He campaigned to clean up the slums around the Chicago meatpacking district and fought segregation and abuses by banks. He has been dead and buried for 40 years, but mention of his name — Alinsky! Alinsky! Alinsky! — sets conservative Republican activists and presidential candidates to twitching.

So. That’s what conservative activists are up to. Bothering liberal organizers who are actually working. Following the organizers around, lying incessantly and transparently, making nuisances of themselves.

On that note, I thought I’d bring you up to speed on voter protection efforts in Ohio. I got the first voter protection organizer contact of the 2012 election today, recruiting volunteer “election protection” lawyers for 2012.

I’m pleased the people who are doing all the work coordinating this are on it so early because I have the feeling 2012 is going to be a very difficult year for democracy enthusiasts in Ohio. I suppose they could be following conservative activists around, surreptitiously recording them and then editing the tape and feeding that deliberately misleading and edited tape to child-like, credulous national media outlets rather than working, but they’re not.

I actually sat down and read Saul Alinsky this past year, because noted conservative intellectual Professor Newt Gingrich recommended I do so (or that’s what I thought he said: it was hard to hear what with all the screaming at those debates) and I really enjoyed Alinsky’s book. I still have no earthly idea why young conservatives are so terrified of community organizers. They’re just not a scary group of people, in my experience.

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Okay, Now You’re Just Making This Up, Politico

Yeah, I call shenanigans on this Politico article this morning:

Ann Romney is the Romney Democrats fear most

No, seriously.  When the hell did Ann Romney even become a factor in this race, let alone become a source of “fear” for the Obama campaign and Democrats in general?

Ann Romney’s unexpected rock star status has the political arena buzzing about how her husband’s campaign will leverage her popularity in an election in which Michelle Obama — one of the most admired first ladies in history — will have an outsized and substantive portfolio.

Indeed, this 62-year-old grandmother’s contribution to Mitt Romney’s campaign could amount to the most relevant role a wife has ever played in a presidential effort — softening the edges of a flawed and awkward candidate who struggles to connect with voters.

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Dazed And Confused

Greg Sargent asks why Mitt Romney is embracing the Paul Ryan Jump Off The Cliff economic plan so tightly.

Ryan fires up the base on both sides like nothing else, which is why Republicans like Romney want him in the role of hero, and Dems want him in the role of villain. But what about swing voters? Dems seem confident that the Ryan vision is absolutely toxic among them. And yet, as Jed Lewison notes, Republicans seem equally confident that Ryan’s radical vision — or “bold,” if you prefer — is a political winner this fall.

Nonpartisan observers say Ryan’s plans amount to a huge giveaway to the rich at the expense of exploding the deficit. Polls suggest that huge majorities favor preserving Medicare’s traditional function, and reject Ryan’s reforms. And yet the amount of influence Republicans have accorded to Ryan over the GOP’s fiscal policies, worldview, ideology, vision, priorities and direction is really kind of extraordinary. They’re going for it.

They’re going for it Greg because they’re counting on your employers at Kaplan, Inc. and the other Village media outlets to sell the Ryan Plan as not only morally desirable but absolutely necessary economically over the next several months and well beyond.  It worked for the Bush tax cuts and Medicare drug benefit giveaway.  It worked for Afghanistan and especially Iraq.  Those cost us trillions but were sold as the right thing to do.

The Ryan/Romney Austerity Plan will be no different.  It will be the reason why, should the GOP gain control of the Senate, that the filibuster will be done away with and the President will get a nice shiny austerity budget.  Selling that Romney will sign such a budget into law will be the big talking point.

Meanwhile, austerity is destroying the EU and UK right now.  All indications are they are back into a recession with no real hope of getting out.  These guys want to make sure we’re next.

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Totally Called It

And it seems the unofficial and unconfirmed winner of the Ni-CLANG Sweepstakes is Rick Santorum, folks!

Speaking to a group of voters in Janesville, Wisconsin on Wednesday, the candidate seemed to catch himself before using a word that sounds like “n*gger” to describe the president. (The original video of the speech is available here. The remarks in question take place at about 34:50.)

“We know the candidate Barack Obama, what he was like – the anti-war government nig… America was a source for division around the world, that what we were doing was wrong,” Santorum said.

“Oh, come on!” Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley told Raw Story when asked for comment. “Give me a break. That’s unbelievable. What does it say about those that are running with this story that that’s where their mind goes. You know, I’m not going to dignify that with [a response].”

“That is absolutely ridiculous.”

Right.  He meant to say “the anti-war government blah person.”

It’s probably ridiculous.  Santorum, speaking for 30 plus minutes, might have gotten tongue tied.  The video’s inconclusive at best as far as I can tell.  But you know what?  It’s end of March, coming up on April.  We’ve got seven months to go still and we’re reasonably close to having one of the major GOP candidates go there.  Slick Rick here may have reasonable doubt in this instance.  Sometime before November, it’s going to happen.  Santorum wasn’t exactly singing the President’s praises in the speech.

But hey, Santorum’s campaign and at times Santorum himself accused POTUS of promoting infanticide, promoting eugenics, of having radical Islamic policies and of being a bigot towards Santorum’s anti-gay bigot buddies.  These are things Santorum and his people have gone on record of having said, so frankly dropping the n-word really can’t make him much more of an odious, self-righteous jagoff.

Santorum crossed that line long ago.

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