Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went after Mitt Romney today, following the Republican presidential nominee’s decision to travel to Louisiana to tour the damage caused by Hurricane Issac. In a statement, Reid said it is hypocritical for Romney and his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) to show sympathy for victims of Hurricane Issac because a House Republican plan would have gutted disaster relief. 

“It is the height of hypocrisy for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan to make a pretense of showing sympathy for the victims of Hurricane Isaac when their policies would leave those affected by this disaster stranded and on their own,” Reid said.

“If Paul Ryan and his fellow House Republicans had succeeded in blocking disaster relief last fall, there would have been no aid for the victims of Isaac today. And Paul Ryan’s budget would gut disaster funding, making it much harder to get aid to our fellow Americans in their time of need,” he added.

Ryan campaign spokesman Brendan Buck responded: “Paul Ryan believes providing aid to victims of natural disasters is a critical obligation and should be treated as a high priority within a fiscally responsible budget.  It’s sad that some see these heartbreaking events as opportunities to distort his record and play politics.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/08/31/harry-reid-romneys-attention-to-storm-relief-the-height-of-hyprocrisy/?print=1

Gus:

Dear Senator Harry Reid...

You've got it all wrong... The Republican plan for disaster relief is solely based on CHARITY, not on Governmental Disaster Relief which smells of SOCIALISM... Good Christian CHARITY coming from TAX-DEDUCTIBLE CHARITABLE EVENTS, such as lavish diner-functions, and some charity coming from the pockets of the struggling poor who don't give enough dosh individually to be tax-deductible, is the Republican way to go...

The GOP’s dangerous animals

TAMPA

At this week’s Republican National Convention, a pair of attendees found a novel game to play: They threw nuts at a black camera operator for CNN and told her, “This is how we feed animals.”

Convention officials evicted the tossers, who, like almost all of the delegates in the Tampa Bay Times Forum, were white. The Romney campaign condemned the antics as “deplorable” and “reprehensible.”

It’s good to know that some behavior on the far right exceeds Mitt Romney’s tolerance, but this episode of “animal” feeding was, well, peanuts compared with the broader issues restraining racial politics in the party. In his acceptance speech Thursday night, Romney became more than the Republican Party’s nominee for president; he became its zookeeper. To win the presidency and to become successful in the Oval Office, Romney must keep the animals in his own party in their enclosures — and that’s no easy task.

Hours before Romney’s speech, about 100 GOP delegates from the Western states assembled for a “special reception with elephants” at Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo, hosted by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and the state GOP. There, in the faux-adobe Safari Lodge, delegates mingled with Chanel the East African crowned crane, Pita the South American porcupine, Bo the African martial eagle — and Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz.

Arpaio, you’ll recall, is the guy who claims that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery, who calls for the arrest and deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, who is being sued for racial profiling, and who has been an outspoken champion of the Arizona immigration crackdown largely invalidated by the Supreme Court.

At the zoo, Arpaio argued that there is no daylight between him and Romney. “The governor’s stance corresponds with my stance,” the sheriff said. “Everything he says, I agree with him.” He further boasted that he was Romney’s “campaign guy in Arizona” in 2008 and that he conferred with Romney during this year’s debates, during which Romney buried other opponents for being insufficiently tough on immigration.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-the-gops-dangerous-animals/2012/08/31/0cb34f9a-f389-11e1-adc6-87dfa8eff430_print.html

The brazen lies of the Romney/Ryan campaign — on full display in Paul Ryan’s spectacularly dishonest speech at the Republican National Convention — have political pundits at a loss. Here’s Kevin Drum:

I struggle to describe [the attack on Obama's selectively edited quote "you didn't build that"]. It’s not worse than past attacks, but it is different. In the past, you felt that maybe campaigns were at least a little bit embarrassed about this kind of thing. They’d blame it on someone else. They’d try to produce some lame defense. They’d haul out some fake white paper to give themselves cover. They’d dosomething. The Romney campaign just doesn’t seem to care. If it works, they use it. It’s like the campaign is being run by cyborgs.

I dunno. What’s the right word to describe this?

Ooh, ooh, call on me!

The right term is “post-truth politics.” What Kevin is struggling to describe is that Romney’s campaign is not contesting the truth value of its assertions so much as contesting whether truth value itself is relevant.

One effect of the radicalization of the right over the last few decades has been the discovery of just how much our politics is held together by norms rather than rules. There’s no rule you can’t filibuster every bill in the Senate by default; there’s no rule you can’t interrupt a president’s State of the Union; there’s no rule you can’t hold the routine debt-ceiling vote hostage. It simply wasn’t done. But if you shrug off the norm and do it anyway, there’s nothing to stop you.

http://grist.org/politics/as-romney-and-ryan-lie-with-abandon-how-should-journalists-navigate-post-truth-politics/

By John Barron

After two decades seeking various public offices and only achieving it once, Mitt Romney is the Republican Party's presidential nominee, and within striking distance of winning the White House this November.

Like his father George Romney, Mitt has combined a successful business career with a stint as governor and a run at the presidency.

But unlike the elder Romney, who as a moderate favoured civil rights and opposed the Vietnam War and found himself out of step with the Goldwater-era GOP of the mid-1960s, his son has taken the helm of the Republican Party - for the next 66 days at least.

During the first two days of the Republican National Convention (RNC) there was a concerted attempt to breath some humanity into Romney's robotic, patrician image; Ann Romney's engaging speech on the first night of the storm-shortened shindig will help on that front if anything can.

ABC journalist John Barron has been covering US presidential elections for 20 years. He's a research associate at the United States Studies Centre and author of the book Vote For Me about the historic 2008 campaign. He presents the weekly program Inside America on ABC Newsradio on Sundays at midday AEST and will soon anchor Planet America on ABC News 24.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/john-barron/167134

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There you have it... "our" (their) ABC is endorsing Romney with a glowing report card from its "journalist" John Barron...

It's most likely that John Barron was listening to a different speech that the one I heard... or caught the Romney virus... One of the main problem is that Romney is promising the moon while cutting revenue... He's promising to do this and that with no other plan than to stop Obama being re-elected... Meanwhile, one can accuse his GOP party from being obstructionist to what Obama has tried to improve... On top of this, apart from a sluggish economic growth, it was Romney's mate, Dubya, who plunged the US and the world into the catastrophic GFC with a re-flux... ROMNEY IS PROMISING TO DO EXACTLY WHAT BUSH JUNIOR DID...

On top of this, Romney's environment credentials are zilch, nada, zero and he promises to do every thing he can to stop the EPA "interfering with progress"... This is pure madness... Romney is mad... Cleverly mad, but mad nonetheless.

see toon at top for the translation...

Democrats, unsurprisingly, were not so enthusiastic. James Carville, the man who helped steer Bill Clinton to the White House, dismissed Romney’s speech as "Bush’s economic policy, Cheney’s foreign policy and Rick Santorum’s social policy".

Romney now hits the campaign trail again to sell what he’s been saying.  He’ll be hoping for a bump in the polls.  Anything less than three points, in what is a tight race, would be a huge disappointment. 

The voter map, and America’s own electoral college system of counting the votes, means that Mitt Romney still faces a huge task to win the White House.

But the economy remains a dangerous area for Barack Obama.  Unless people see an improvement, or more importantly, feel an improvement, it might not matter that in Tampa, Mitt’s message was "mediocre".

http://blogs.aljazeera.com/blog/americas/romney-fails-truly-stand-out-rnc

Cruel Conservatives Throw a Masquerade Ball

TAMPA, Fla.

MESSAGE: They care.

Republicans care deeply. They really do.

They care deeply about making us think that they care deeply.

That’s why they knocked themselves out producing a convention that was a colossal hoax.

They did that for us. Because they care. With exquisite timing, they started caring last Tuesday at 7 p.m., when suddenly the party was chockablock with tender souls in rainbow colors, with strong-minded women and softhearted men, with sentimental rags-to-riches immigrant sagas.

We all know Republicans prefer riches-to-riches sagas and rounding up immigrants, if the parasitic scofflaws aren’t sensitive enough to self-deport.

That’s why my heart swells to think of the herculean effort the G.O.P. put into pretending its heart bleeds.

Even if it’s been bleeding for only five days. Better never than late.

It was remarkable to watch Mitt Romney ignore the empty seats and airless mood and reach deep inside himself to give a speech in which he appeared genuine. It was also remarkable to see that even when he looks genuine, he still seems fake. And despite the soft quiver in his voice, and Ann’s nonstop transfusions of emotion and wrenching testimonials from Mormons forced to publicly relive family tragedies simply to give Mitt a personality, the terribly erect candidate still seemed as remote as Jupiter.

It was truly thrilling to watch the blindingly white older male delegates greet their young, blue-eyed future: Paul Ryan, the 42-year-old Wisconsin congressman who turns out to be more talented than anyone had anticipated — a prodigy of prestidigitation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/opinion/sunday/dowd-cruel-conservative...      

Tampa, Florida - Tom Gaulrapp is counting down the days he has left as a working man. The 54-year-old is - for now, at least - an employee of Sensata Technologies. For 33 years, Gaulrapp has worked on the factory floor in Freeport, Illinois, assembling sensors and control systems for vehicle gearboxes.

But in early 2011, the plant, owned by Honeywell, was bought out by Sensata Technologies - which announced it would be cutting all 165 jobs at the factory by the end of 2012. The jobs are being sent to China. In fact, after Gaulrapp and his colleagues refused to go to China to train their replacements, the Chinese engineers turned up in Illinois to learn how to do their jobs. 

"They were here six weeks," he told Al Jazeera. "We've been building this particular generation of product for seven years. And they weren't really paying attention while they were here, and they're not going to see the equipment until December. So they're not going to have a clue as to what they’re doing." 

Romney's role? 

So why was Gaulrapp and a host of his colleagues in Tampa this weekend? Well, Sensata is owned by none other than Bain Capital, the multi-billion dollar venture capital firm started by Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate. 

"We passed an open letter round the plant and got the employees to sign it, a letter to Mitt Romney, urging him to come to Freeport and try to help us save our jobs. We sent that to Romney's campaign headquarters, but they denied any knowledge of receiving it." 

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/09/201291171719350659.html

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It's quite amazing that one has to go to Al Jazeera to get the "real" news... the truth beyond the fake glorious words used by the Republicans...

From Noah Millman (American Conservative)

Maybe I am getting older and crankier, but that struck me as an exceptionally infantilizing speech that Mitt Romney just gave, politically speaking.

There were good bits in it, particularly in the soft-focus autobiographical stuff. He actually sounded like he choked up talking about missing the days when they’d wake up to find a pile of kids in their bedroom. He got a genuine laugh from a genuine joke. I’ve never cared much whether Romney seems “authentic” or “genuine” because those qualities in a politician are faked – what you’re seeing is the ability to seem genuine, seem authentic. If Romney lacks those qualities, they have practical consequences – people will be less-likely to believe him when he speaks in public – but they aren’t indications of character. But nonetheless, it’s nice to see that he can play this game a little, since he’d be expected to play it if he became President.

But the rest of the speech was pretty dreadful, and particularly this section:

Every small business wanted these to be their best years ever, when they could hire more, do more for those who had stuck with them through the hard times, open a new store or sponsor that Little League team. Every new college graduate thought they’d have a good job by now, a place of their own, and that they could start paying back some of their loans and build for the future. This is when our nation was supposed to start paying down the national debt and rolling back those massive deficits. This was the hope and change America voted for.

I don’t have the transcript yet (the above is from the pre-released excerpts), but the next line is something like, “That’s what Americans deserve.”

Think about that: immediately after the biggest economic crisis since the great depression, Americans deserved to have “the best years ever.”

I guess that’s what makes America special, what makes us an exceptional nation. This is the only place where nothing bad is ever allowed to happen, where you are entitled to the “best year ever” because you want it.

That was one half of the infantilizing message. The other half: the “trust me” presentation of his “plan” to revitalize the American economy.

...

Personally, I like Mitt Romney. He was a decent governor. By all reports, he’s been a wonderful husband, father and grandfather. He reminds me of some of the people I worked with on Wall Street whom I liked best – the people who were stand-up guys who you’d feel confident doing business with, not the raging egotists that you too often find in that business. But even if he were running on policies I support, which he isn’t (and which is the main reason I’m opposed to him), I’d call this speech a lousy one. He’s condescending, flattering and generally treating the American people like children. And I don’t think the American people should take kindly to that

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/millman/an-infantilizing-speech/

For many years I thought most of the American people were children — spoilt brats actually... But this is a subjective view point from an old rabbit who has been chased by the fox too many times... and who hopes the fox is getting older as well...

CHARLOTTE, NC — The Democratic convention got off to an embarrassing start for President Obama yesterday when the nation’s debt hit an astronomical $16 trillion — a staggering $135,578 for every...  Read Full Story

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Of course, while the rest of the world press reports on the democratic convention with some cautious praise, the Merde-och press goes both feet into the crap... It does not mention, of course,  that 99 per cent of that debt was inherited from previous administration including a cool 7 trillion or more from the fav George W Bush... who went to war under false pretences, of course supported by the Merde-och machine...