Romney: the sour-grapes candidate

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There were many times during the 2012 election when Romney appeared to have lost the election. One of the most significant was the 47% video:

 

 

 

 

So, from this, we learn that Mitt Romney believes that almost half the American people are unrealistic, selfish, and greedy.  They can’t be enticed to vote for him, so he won’t bother talking to them.

 

 

Whether because of this video, or for many other reasons, he lost the election.

 

 

Most Presidential candidates shut up promptly after losing the election. The exceptions are interesting. Nixon complained in 1961 that Kennedy had stolen the election. Nixon then roared back in 1968 (and six years later resigned the Presidency in disgrace, having committed most or all of the crimes he’d accused Kennedy of in 1960). Al Gore didn’t shut up after 2000, with good reason; he’d won the popular vote, and the electoral vote depended on Florida, which was (effectively) decided by the right-leaning US Supreme Court.

 

 

But Mitt Romney won’t shut up.

 

 

He said, shortly after the election, that Obama won because he promised “gifts” to his followers. Please follow this link to hear that the Salt Lake Tribune had to say about that.

 

 

A MSNBC commentator made a very sensible point about this recently: of course Presidential candidates offer us “gifts”! They’re called campaign promises! If I’m presented with two candidates, and one of them promises to end legalized abortion, eliminate “unnecessary” programs in the arts and sciences and education, and opposes gay rights – I will tell him that these are not the “gifts” I require.

 

 

Most lately, Romney’s son Tagg (I love that name!) has stated that his father didn’t want to be President in any case. As follows:

 

 

“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to . . . run,” Tagg Romney told the (Boston) Globe. “If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside.”

The Globe article also noted that “Tagg … worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency.”

 

 

 

So what’s all this about? Did Mitt want the Presidency or not?

 

 

 

Perhaps, as the New Yorker recently remarked, the GOP really ought to have run someone for President who really wanted to be President.

 

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Sesame Street, Elmo, and Kevin Clash

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Over the past few weeks, a mini-drama has been growing over Kevin Clash, who voices Elmo, the little red Sesame Street monster.

 

 

First there was a man who claimed that Clash had relations with him while he was under 18; then he recanted his claim. Since then, however, two other men have come forward with the same story.

 

 

Oh dear.

 

 

I love Sesame Street, and the Muppets. During this past Presidential election, Mitt Romney said he was ready to end funding of PBS and CTW, the homeland of Sesame Street, and there was a backlash: people claimed (very fairly) that Mitt Romney wanted to kill Big Bird, inspiring images like this:

 

 

Well, Obama won the election.

 

 

And now it turns out that the voice of Elmo is a child molester.

 

 

Awful? Of course. But oddly timed. I can’t help wondering if this is Republican reprisal for the election, to weaken PBS as a whole. I wonder if they’ve been digging for dirt on PBS, and finally found some.

 

 

Clash, if guilty, should be punished. But PBS should not be punished.

 

 

The mission of PBS is to make America a little smarter. It made me smarter, back in the 1970s. As for expense: they (together with NPR) receive one one-hundredth of one percent of the Federal budget, for God’s sake!

 

 

If we have to jettison Kevin Clash, fine.

 

 

But let’s not jettison PBS.

 

 

Let your representatives and senators know how you feel about this.

 

 

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The 2012 Presidential election: why the Republicans lost

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Sometimes, when good things happen – as with the reelection of Barack Obama – I begin to reassure himself that things in general are getting better.

 

 

And, I suppose, they are.

 

 

But some things don’t change.

 

 

I had hoped that the GOP would understand, after four years, that Obama is not a fluke or a trickster. I had hoped they would stop pretending that he was the lovechild of Kwame Nkrumah and Lenin. I had hoped also that they would acknowledge that, Obama having won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, that he definitely possesses a mandate from the American people.

 

 

I was wrong.

 

 

Their party line, after two weeks, is still crystallizing. Given that they can’t admit that they were well and fairly beaten at the polls, they have come up with some (moderately ridiculous, and mutually contradictory) reasons for their loss.

 

 

(Naturally they didn’t lose because of their message, or their candidate, or their poor organization, or their alienation of large chunks of the electorate.)

 

 

Here are some of their rationalizations:

 

 

1)    We were outnumbered! (This is from Rush Limbaugh. I let this one speak for itself. Imagine being outnumbered in a democracy!)

2)    Voter fraud was rampant! (See this ridiculous Wisconsin senator’s statement that, if voter ID were universal, we wouldn’t have any more of these silly Democratic victories.)

3)    Obama voters were bribed with “gifts”! (Romney himself said this recently.)

4)    Poor beautiful Paul Ryan – he of the big luminous eyes – recently commented that he and Mitt lost because of the “urban vote.” What do you think that means? Why, minorities, of course. Minority voters kept Obama in, and Romney out, of the White House. How uppity of them!

 

 

I recently found a wonderful graphic showing minority representation in the House and Senate (including women, who are certainly not a minority of the US population). Here it is:

 

 

 

 

Please examine it and tell me how many Republicans you find.

 

 

Now tell me what conclusions you draw.

 

 

Here’s to another combative – but, I hope, constructive – four years.

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Voting cute

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There is an old truism that the handsomer presidential candidate usually wins. Sometimes it’s true: Warren Harding was very distinguished-looking, and Kennedy was certainly better-looking than Nixon.

 

 

I voted for Barack Obama last week (of course I did!), but I have to admit, to my shame, that I don’t think he was the handsomer of the two candidates. Mitt Romney, for all his wishy-washy political loathsomeness, is very good-looking, and Paul Ryan is perfectly dreamy.

 

 

Somehow, however, I managed to vote with my brain, not my hormones.

 

 

Does this really work? One wonders whether McCain’s advisors thought Sarah Palin added sex appeal to the campaign. (I honestly wonder if Romney’s advisors thought the same about Ryan.) John Kerry (who’s merely acceptable-looking) chose the soap-opera handsome John Edwards as VP in 2004. (It was only later that we discovered what a scuzzball Edwards really was. OMG! Fox News was actually right about something!) Clinton was certainly a more attractive man than either George H. W. Bush or Bob Dole.

 

 

And so on, and so on.

 

 

Does it really make a difference?

 

 

Sometimes.

 

 

In 1972 I managed to get my mother to register to vote, so that she could vote for George McGovern. (Dad registered too, and I’m certain he voted for Nixon, not that it did the country much good.) Mom got a little nostalgic. “This is only the second time I’ve voted,” she told me. “The first time was in 1948, and I voted for Tom Dewey, because he was so cute. I loved his mustache.”

 

 

So there you have it.

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Lessons from the 2012 Presidential campaign

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It has taken me a little while to compose myself after Election Night 2012.  Now that I’ve stopped screaming with joy, however, I’ve jotted down a few things I’ve learned over the past few weeks and months.

 

 

As follows:

 

 

Probably you shouldn’t try to redefine the word “rape.” It doesn’t make you many friends. (Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock: hear me?)

 

 

Money doesn’t necessarily win elections.  When it’s quite evident that you’re trying to buy a House/Senate seat (McMahon in Connecticut, Hinckley in Rhode Island), you will probably lose. And Donald Trump publicly mocked Karl Rove for wasting millions of dollars of PAC money on candidates who lost. (As a Tumblr commentator said: Who knows more than Donald Trump about wasting money?)

 

 

Lying is very traditional in American presidential elections, but it’s getting easier and easier to disprove a lie. Probably people should try to lie less (or at least more cleverly). And they should not openly flout the fact-checkers.

 

 

In a state where people traditionally hate and fear state troopers (like Rhode Island, for example), the opposition party shouldn’t nominate a state trooper as their candidate. (Bye-bye, Brendan Doherty.)

 

 

Don’t make fun of your opponent. It makes you look small. (This one goes out to former Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who insisted on belittling his opponent Elizabeth Warren as a liar, as ugly, as untrustworthy, as a “college professor.” It didn’t work, did it, Scotty?)

 

 

Do not, in your concession speech, imply that God made your opponent win in order to make the Apocalypse happen sooner. (Okay, Mr. God-be-the-glory Todd Akin?)

 

 

Don’t assume that gay marriage is a passing fad. Before Tuesday, every popular referendum on gay marriage had failed, and the Republicans / social conservatives were convinced they had a failsafe way to defeat gay marriage: bring it to a popular vote. Well, on Tuesday, four states voted, and three (Washington, Maine, and Maryland) upheld gay marriage. You can be sure the GOP will be less confident in future about this particular strategy. (So Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee can take their Chick-fil-A sandwiches and jam them up one another’s asses. And they can make sure those sandwiches are up there real tight, too.)

 

 

And finally:

 

 

The country is changing. We are more diverse, and more tolerant, as a whole. (A commentator in 2008, shortly after Obama’s first election, said that bigotry and intolerance in the USA would decrease over time, but (like seawater evaporating) they would become more concentrated and intense. I remember thinking this was a very wise thing to say. Now, after four years of concentrated intense vicious hatred of Obama and the liberal agenda, I see how prescient he was.) But we are not Sarah Palin’s America, and we are not Mitt Romney’s America (whatever the hell that was supposed to be about). We are a multicolored America. We do not care to be ruled by Christian law, or Sharia law, or any kind of religious law for that matter. We like our marijuana. We like being married to our common-law partners. We like Planned Parenthood. We like knowing that, if we become ill, we will not go into bankruptcy if we go to the doctor. We have no problem with electing women, and gays, and differently-abled people; in fact, we’re proud to be represented by them.

 

 

Let the right-wing nuts shriek about socialism and the Death of America, kids. They’ll tucker themselves out in a while, and we can have some peace, maybe even through Inauguration Day.

 

 

And I’m sure the 2016 campaign won’t begin before June or July of 2013.

 

 

(I plan to vote for Hillary. How about you?)

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For Election Day 2012: Homer Simpson votes Republican!

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I learned a lot from this clip. I already knew that Romney invented Obamacare. However: did you know that the government actually paid Romney taxes for five years? And that Romney has six wives, all named Ann?

 

 

Enjoy.

 

 

And vote, for God’s sake.

 

 

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Living under an enemy administration

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On Election Night 1980, I was in the Graduate Center Bar at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, watching the election returns. The media declared Reagan the winner over Carter fairly early, as I recall. I was standing next to a short fat guy, who muttered: “Now it’s our turn.”

 

 

I got the creeps all over as he said it.

 

 

As it turned out, I had the creeps for another twelve years.

 

 

I have lived under a Republican Presidency for most of my life, as I calculate it: 1957-1960 (three years of Eisenhower, which I barely remember, as I was a toddler); 1969-1976 (seven years of Nixon/Ford, which was intermittently disastrous, but not entirely catastrophic); 1980-1992 (eight years of Ronald Reagan, tragedy/comedy, and four years of G. H. W. Bush, mostly comedy, with the terrifying exception of Operation Desert Storm); and eight years of George W. Bush (pure disaster).

 

 

So that’s thirty years of my life under a Republican administration. And I am still alive.

 

 

To be sure, Eisenhower was not out to kill or disenfranchise me. Nixon, much as he was a rascal, did not try to do so either. Gerald Ford, God bless him, was not the kind of person to do harm to a little periwinkle like me. G. H. W. Bush was a quasi-jerk, but not as extreme as his son. G. W. Bush was a total jerk, and eight years of him was agony.

 

 

Mitt Romney has declared himself against gay marriage, abortion, Affordable Care, etc. He says he wants to “take back America.” From whom? I don’t have it at the moment; I feel, in fact, that I am not so much in control of anything in America. So who’s he taking it back from?

 

 

Mitt Romney is the total anti-package. He is what I do not want.

 

 

I do not want to find myself on election night in November 2012, with a sweaty little fat man standing next to me, watching Romney being declared winner, and hearing him say: “Now it’s our turn.”

 

 

Once is enough.

 

 

Kids: you know what you have to do.

 

 

Vote, please. Vote your hearts. And make sure your friends and family vote. (And if you’re unlucky enough to have family in a Republican-controlled state, help them get their ID cards.)

 

 

Keep climbing.

 

 

We can do this.

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Ann Coulter and civil rights

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Time for civics class!

 

 

Please read these excerpts from a recent article in the Chicago Examiner.  I’ve added some essay-type questions, at the end. Please feel free to write on both sides of the paper, if necessary.

 

 

At a round table discussion on "This Week with George Stephanapoulos," Ann Coulter, conservative commentator, made the provocative claim, "Democrats are dropping the blacks and moving on to the Hispanics," and added that immigration rights are not civil rights.

Univision anchor, Jorge Ramos criticized President Obama for not aggressively pursuing immigration reform and said that "if Republicans don't do something with immigration . . . they're going to lose not only this election, they might lose the White House for a generation."

This is when Coulter interjected, "That's why the Democrats are dropping the blacks and moving on to the Hispanics." She was saying that Democrats are aggressively pursuing the Latino vote more aggressively than the African America vote, which polls show is definitely behind President Obama.

Coulter added, "I think what - the way liberals have treated blacks like children and many of their policies have been harmful to blacks, at least they got the beneficiary group right . . . there is the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws. We don't owe the homeless. We don't owe feminists. We don't owe women who are desirous of having abortions, but that's - or - or gays who want to get married to one another. That's what civil rights has become for much of the left."

When questioned as to whether immigration rights were not civil rights, Coulter responded, "No. I think civil rights are for blacks . . . What have we done to the immigrants? We owe black people something. We have a legacy of slavery. Immigrants haven't even been in this country."

 

Questions:

 

 

1)  Ann Coulter seems to regard “civil rights” as something earned. Do you feel that you have civil rights? If so, at what point did you earn them?

2)  As a member of the United Nations (which Ann Coulter abominates), the United States acknowledges that everyone partakes of something called “human rights.” Do you agree with this? Shouldn’t people earn their rights?

3)  According to Ann Coulter, an aggrieved group (like post-slavery black Americans) can be given “civil rights.” These “civil rights” are presumably given to them by some central authority. Some groups (like feminists and gay activists), however, don’t deserve “civil rights.” Question: What the hell is Ann Coulter talking about here? Please tell me, because frankly I have no idea.

4)  According to Ann Coulter, immigrants either aren’t here legally, or haven’t been here for very long. Therefore, they haven’t earned their rights. Ergo: civil rights accrue over time. Question: my father’s family came to America in the 1600s, but my mother’s family didn’t arrive until the turn of the 20^th century. Did my mother have less civil rights than my father? And what about me? Discuss.

5)  Ann Coulter implies that helping disadvantaged people makes them dependent and helpless. In Ann Coulter’s world, it’s every man for himself, and government shouldn’t be helping people, because it just creates a lot of whiny needy people. (Actually, this is kind of what Mitt Romney said in that pesky video). How do you feel about that? Did you ever need help? If so, where did you turn? Be honest.

6)  Who paid for your education?

7)  Did you know that Ann Coulter thinks that Joseph McCarthy is a misunderstood man, and a forgotten American hero? Isn’t that nice? Doesn’t it make you feel better about Ann Coulter?

 

 

And finally:

 

 

 

8)  Don’t you wish the election were today?

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The Romney campaign, as seen on Fox News

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Sometimes it’s a good idea to sneak over into the enemy camp and hear what they’re plotting. It’s dangerous, of course; if they catch you, they will kill you.

 

 

So, on Sunday night, while on the treadmill, I tuned into Fox News for about ten minutes. The danger, in this case, was that I might lose my temper and my grip, and go flying backward off the machine.

 

 

But I survived.

 

 

And oh the things I heard!

 

 

It was a little panel discussion – Chris Wallace, Brit Hume, Juan Williams, Bill Kristol, and a couple of others I didn’t recognize – talking about the Romney campaign, and the recently-released Romney video.  A gloomier bunch of mopes you have never seen. Chris Wallace turned somberly to Hume and asked: “Was this video fatal to the Romney campaign?”

 

 

Hume looked sour (well, sourer than usual). “Not fatal. But it sure wasn’t good.”

 

 

This, from the loathsome Bill Kristol: “I’ve been working for twenty-five or thirty years to put forward conservative ideas, and then something like this happens, and it completely muddles the message we’re trying to put forward.”

 

 

(Translation: “For thirty years I’ve been putting forward a strategy to put our people into power, and then this idiot goes and actually spills the beans in front of a camera!”)

 

 

Slowly, and with great schadenfreude, I realized that I was hearing the formulation of Plan B: what to do if the GOP loses the election. If the Republicans go down to defeat, you can be sure that it will be entirely and completely credited to Mitt Romney’s weakness as a candidate, and his terrible campaign.

 

 

Well, all kinds of things can happen between now and November.

 

 

And, as Ann Romney whined the other day: “This is hard!”

 

 

(Not nearly so hard as listening to Chris Wallace and Brit Hume and Bill Kristol, though.)

 

 

And now, drag queen Mimi Imfurst doing a dramatic interpretation of Ann Romney’s statement:

 

 

 

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The Mitt Romney video

 

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Pretty much everyone in the universe has seen or heard of Mitt Romney’s magic video by now. I’m not a pundit, but, as Chris Matthews said on Tuesday evening, I find the whole thing “delicious,” and just want to underline the following points:

 

 

1.     Mitt was comfortable with his audience. One of his sticking points throughout this campaign, and his abortive 2008 campaign, has been his awkwardness with audiences. Well, now we know why: he hasn’t felt comfortable. The video was taken at a $50K/plate dinner, and Mitt was in his element, and speaking to his peers.

2.     Explaining the video later, he said something like he hadn’t expressed himself elegantly. I disagree. He was very elegant. He believes, very frankly, that many poor Americans are moochers, and said so straightforwardly.

3.     Mitt has not been very forthcoming about his plan to shrink the government budget. From this video, I think we can extrapolate some of the areas he’d shrink: anything benefiting the less affluent classes. They really need to work harder, don’t they? We don’t want to empower them. They need to be put in their place.

4.     Mitt said that he didn’t rise from privilege, he didn’t inherit money, he earned everything he has. Is he deluded, or is he just telling the same lie that all wealthy heirs tell themselves? Of course he inherited money from his CEO/governor father. He’s turned it into billions, of course, and good for him. But, Mitt, don’t tell us that you were born in a log cabin, okay?

5.     There was some garbled nonsense about being born a Mexican. I will leave that alone. He said he was joking, but then again, he took it back and said (very seriously) he’d have a better chance for the Presidency if he were Latino. Meaning: “Stupid people just love voting for those damned minorities.”

6.     I haven’t even read the whole transcript yet. (I can’t stand to watch the video; his voice is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.) It is, however, the gift that keeps on giving. Today it was noticed that he said (a few months ago) that, if there were any foreign-policy difficulties overseas, he’d try to capitalize on the opportunity. Remember last week, when he ranted about how the Obama administration “sympathized with the attackers” rather than condemning the attacks in Egypt and Libya? Huh.

7.     Rarely have I seen such cynicism freely expressed. The whole video boils down to Mitt saying to his wealthy audience: “Between you and me, I’ll say and do whatever I have to say and do to get elected. And once I’m in there, I’ll do what’s necessary to advance our agenda.”

8.     Vote for Obama.

9.     Vote for Obama.

10.   Vote for Obama.

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Mitt Romney and his tax returns

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I hate the last two months of a presidential election.

 

 

The ads are everywhere. I only thank Ganesha that I live in a non-swing state, where they’re not spending tons of money on ads. In Ohio and Florida, people must be committing suicide because of the political ads on TV.

 

 

Naturally the Romney ads, and statements, drive me bonkers. Only the other evening, on “Hardball,” I saw a Romney ad showing a white middle-class couple clucking in disapproval over Obama’s support of gay marriage. “That’s not the kind of change I had in mind,” they said, judgmentally.

 

 

Well, go f*** yourselves, imaginary political-ad married couple.

 

 

And then, the other day, Romney said, in advance of the debates, that Obama will lie. Isn’t it lovely to call your opponent a liar in advance of anything he’s said?

 

 

(Also – just a word about Paul Ryan. He is the male Sarah Palin, isn’t he? A younger, cuter Mitt Romney. His ideas amount to approximately nada; economists – real economists, that is – have looked at his “budget plan” and shown it to be completely unrealistic and naïve. We’re supposed to take him seriously? Check out Paul Krugman – a Nobel Prize-winning economist – on the subject.)

 

 

(But I digress.)

 

 

Let’s talk about Mitt Romney, the business candidate.

 

 

Where I work, we do background checks on prospective employees. The higher-level they are, the more we want to know. If they’re being hired into positions with financial authority, we want to know as much as possible about their background, and often run a credit check.

 

 

(Did Mitt Romney’s various companies do the same? I will wager that they did. It’s silly not to, isn’t it?)

 

 

But Mitt Romney won’t release his tax returns, because the Obama campaign might use them against him. 

 

 

Well, not if they’re honest. Because, if they’re honest, how could they be a problem?

 

 

Unless there are some problems. Or inconsistencies. Or . . .

 

 

Hm.

 

 

Oh Mitt Mitt Mitt.

 

 

Vote Obama, kids.

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Taking back America

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I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to last week’s Republican convention. It wasn’t really my thing, if you see what I mean. I have to say, though, that as political conventions go, it did not seem to be a five-star success. First there was Hurricane Isaac, which put a little dent in their schedule; then there were the little incidents, like the attendee who threw a handful of nuts at an African-American camerawoman on the convention floor and yelled, “This is how we treat animals!”, and the Ron Paul almost-floorfight. Also there was the highly peculiar Clint Eastwood speech, which got far more coverage than Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech. 

 

 

All these things, though, seem pale when put beside one throwaway line used by Romney in many of his speeches lately: “We’re going to take back America.”

 

 

I confess I didn’t react to it right away. Partner pointed it out to me, and the more I thought about it, the worse it got, and the angrier it made me.

 

 

First of all, three questions:

 

 

-         Who’s this “we”?

-         What exactly does he mean by “America”?

-         From whom does he intend to take it back?

 

 

I suppose the GOP party-line answer would be: “We (the right-thinking conservatives and hard-working honest real patriots of the United States) are going to take back America (which is a great, open-hearted network of small towns and hard-working honest real patriots, who only ask to be left alone in their daily lives and earn their honest livings) from the special interests that have hijacked “America” (fringe groups, government bureaucrats, etc.).”

 

 

But, as with so many other political statements, there’s some slippage of meaning here.

 

 

“We,” delivered by a man as white as Romney to an overwhelmingly white audience, can also be understood to mean “we white people.” When delivered by an aw-shucks Mormon to a mostly-Christian audience, it can be understood to mean “we Christians.” I could keep the list going, but you can do that yourself.

 

 

Now, “America.” I read that as “a mythical country, part Dodge City and part Camelot, where every man can do whatever the hell he wants to do.” Regulations? Fooey. They keep “honest businessmen” from making money. Who needs ‘em? (We do.  Go read “The Jungle” for a picture of an unregulated food industry. And that was not so very long ago.) Gun control is unnecessary; what we need are more guns on the streets. Then – you’ll see – you’ll see a lot less violence.

 

 

 

 

And this is the one that pains and angers and hurts me the most: Who are Mitt and friends taking America back from?

 

 

Why, me, of course: poor deluded gay liberal taxpayer me, who hopes to receive Social Security and Medicare someday, and who relies on “America” to help protect me, and educate the young, and take care of the disadvantaged and elderly and sick, and protect the rights of people who are not in the majority.

 

 

I do not have America in my back pocket. My piece of America is very small: it’s pretty much the patch of ground I cover when I stand on my two feet. But Mitt wants it back.  I have no right to my little patch of ground: no right to marry Partner, no right to a social safety net, no right to health care. The straight white Christian faction will take their own country back, and it will be 1830 again, and Andrew Jackson will be President.

 

 

And then everything will be fine.

 

 

I know who I’m voting for.

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Sally Ride, gay marriage, the Muppets, and Chick-fil-A

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I was saddened when I read that Sally Ride, first American woman in space, passed away a few days ago. She was a role model, certainly; back in 1983, science and engineering were still distinctly woman-unfriendly disciplines. (The Russians had Valentina Tereshkova all those decades ago, but never really closed the gender gap.)

 

 

Astronauts were never really my heroes. They were too bland. When I was a kid in the 1960s, I used to be irritated when all those Gemini missions kept preempting my favorite programs. And then – these guys went into space, and came back, and never had anything interesting to say!

 

 

Then, the other day, I learned that Sally was in a relationship with a woman, Tam O’Shaughnessy, for the last 27 years of her life.

 

 

Now I’m interested.

 

 

The astronaut business was intensely macho. The original astronauts – Mercury, Gemini, Apollo – were mostly test pilots and Air Force hotshots, and most of them were insufferable boors. (My favorite reference text on this subject is Michael Collins’s lovely book “Carrying the Fire,” about his own time as an astronaut. He was the guy who circled the moon back in 1969 while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were traipsing around in the Sea of Tranquility.  He describes the psychological tests, and the physical training, and the sometimes-not-very-friendly sparring between the astronauts.)

 

 

 

Now: imagine being Sally Ride, competing in that macho environment.

 

 

I would have wilted in five seconds under that pressure. In the words of Tony Kushner, daisies would have sprouted out of my ears.

 

 

But Sally made it. She even married (for a few years in the 1980s) one of the other astronauts, Steve Hawley, who seems nice enough.

 

 

But she ended up with Tam O’Shaughnessy, who lived with her for over two decades, and worked with her, and co-authored several books with her, and was with her through her final illness

 

.

Bravo to her.

 

 

And what does Tam get?

 

 

Why, nothing! No death benefits. The U. S. Gummint don’t recognize non-traditional relationships.

 

 

(Mitt Romney recently posted a fatuous/obvious comment on Twitter about Sally being a “pioneer.” Here’s how that went:)

 

 

 

Which brings me to Chick-fil-A.

 

 

We don’t have this particular chain in Rhode Island, thank goodness. I say “thank goodness” because Dan Cathy, the company’s CEO, recently made a large donation to an anti-gay-marriage cause, and made some nasty comments to accompany his contribution.

 

 

The Jim Henson Company, which made toys for Chick-fil-A’s kids’ meals, broke with them over this. They made a wonderful statement about it, and they gave the money they’d earned from Chick-fil-A to GLAAD, a gay organization.

 

 

Tee hee!

 

 

And here’s a pictorial version of the victory:

 

 

 

 

All of this means we still have a very long way to go.

 

 

But there’s light on the horizon.

 

 

Maybe.

 

 

(Rest in peace, Sally. Tam: best wishes, and stay strong. Lisa Henson: you go, girl. Dan Cathy of Chick-fil-A: go to hell, rapidly, now.)

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The Presidential campaign: an update

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I don’t write about politics very often. It doesn’t win me many friends. The people who agree with me still agree with me, and the people who disagree – well, they can just shut their pieholes.

 

 

But I cannot resist commenting on the past week’s Presidential-campaign events, which have been truly delicious.

 

 

The overture was Mitt Romney’s speech to the NAACP. “ROMNEY IN THE LION’S DEN!” trumpeted any number of commentators. See? Mitt is the prophet Daniel, and the NAACP were the lions, or the Persians, or the Assyrians, or something. Anyway, it didn’t take long to see that Mitt was using this as an opportunity to show his (white) supporters that he isn’t going to take any backtalk from any (nonwhite) minority groups when he becomes President. It reminded me of those wonderful moments in professional wrestling when the villain grabs the microphone from the scrawny announcer and begins to berate the audience. He knows they hate him. That’s what it’s all about.

 

 

This is an interesting campaign strategy, trying to win the Presidency with not a single minority vote. (Mitt might still pick a ringer for VP, like Marco Rubio, but I doubt it; it’ll be a whitey like him and me, like Pawlenty or Ryan (well, Ryan sounds Irish, so I don’t know), or that guy from Ohio that no one’s ever heard of. Absolutely not a woman. Not Sarah Palin, and not Condi Rice. She’s pro-choice! She’s been on “30 Rock”! She’s black!)

 

 

Then there was the call for Mitt to release his tax returns. He will not, will not, do it. (Do you wonder what’s in them? So do I. I’m not normally eager to read other people’s tax returns, but these I’ll take a glance at.) Speculation is running wild. Were there years in which he paid no tax at all? Quite possible. Would the itemizations yield up interesting facts about the Romney fortune? Also quite possible.

 

 

There was a day or two of Mitt looking strangled and hopeless over this issue. Then the GOP figured out its riposte: OBAMA ISN’T AN AMERICAN!

 

 

Yes, you heard me.

 

 

Mitt called his policies “foreign” in a speech a day or two ago. John Sununu said that he wished “Obama would learn how to be an American.” (John Sununu, by the way, is an Arab-American. You would think – wouldn’t you? – that an Arab-American would realize that this kind of rhetoric can be inflammatory.  Apparently not.) Sununu said lots of other unkind things. Obama’s team are “liars” (because the Obama campaign has said – with perfect reasonableness, and in the absence of any extenuating evidence – that, if Romney lied about his status at Bain on his tax returns, it might have been a felony. Naturally this can be disproven if Romney were to release his returns.). Also: Obama has “demonized success.” (Not at all. Would that we could all be as wealthy as Mitt Romney! Of course, he inherited part of his fortune, and his handsome sons will inherit even more, from all those fat Swiss / Cayman bank accounts.)

 

 

Most deliciously: Rush Limbaugh has decried the new Batman movie, because the villain’s name is Bane. Obviously this is a reference to Bain Capital. (One Tumblr wit pointed out that, since the Batman villain Bane is a fat drug user who was popular in the 1990s, you’d think that Rush would like him.)

 

 

Oh, it’s all pretty funny.

 

 

So why am I not laughing?

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The Supreme Court’s health care decision

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Yesterday morning I was at the office, crawling under a desk to connect a telephone wire, when Partner called me. “The Supreme Court upheld health care!” he crowed. “Roberts voted with the liberals!”

 

 

I was so excited that I got up too quickly and bumped my head.

 

 

Seriously: I’m delighted. Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act was a landmark piece of legislation, which finally put health care into the same category as education: everyone should have access to it, in the same way. No more marching poor people off to emergency rooms, where they can wait patiently like the paupers they are. No more hospitals amortizing the money they lose on emergency-room care by charging more for standard services. No more insurance companies charging inflated premiums because hospitals charge inflated rates.

 

 

Well, maybe not all at once. But a huge step in the right direction: the biggest step since Medicare.

 

 

The Right’s attempt to overturn the health care act was, for me, sick-making. They couched it as a moral and political issue: how dare the government tell us what to do?

 

 

Honey, they do it all the time: law enforcement, income tax. Get used to it. And this is for something good and well-intentioned.

 

I have seen, just last evening online, images of Obama burning the Constution. I also read online that a number of angry conservatives are Tweeting about moving to Canada, to escape the communist tyrant Obama. (Canada, get it? That place with free health care?) When it was pointed out to them that this made no sense, they claimed it was a joke. Really?  “I’m moving to Canada” means, to me, “I like the idea of free health care.” One said: “At least in Canada they’re openly socialist, unlike Obama who pretends to be a democratic leader.”

 

 

Yikes yikes yikes.

 

 

And here’s the best part: even if the Mayans are right and Romney becomes President, he will have a hell of a time overturning Obama’s legislation; he will never have a supermajority in either house, and Democrats will filibuster him to death on the issue.

 

 

And the American people, in the meantime, will discover that it’s nice to have health care, and the polls will turn in favor of health care.

 

 

And you know how Mitt Romney feels about polls, and about agreeing with the majority.

 

 

I got up yesterday morning thinking it was going to be a sucky day. And it turned out to be a great day for America.

 

 

Who knew?

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Mitt Romney, high-school bully

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First, allow me to give you the following charming news story, in its (mostly) entirety, from the Washington Post:

 

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenage son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

 

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be identified. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.

 

“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”

 

“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”

 

“He was just easy pickin’s,” said Friedemann, then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall, expressing remorse about his failure to stop it.

 

The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall.

 

Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

 

Romney is now the presumed Republican presidential nominee. His campaign spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, said in a statement that “anyone who knows Mitt Romney knows that he doesn’t have a mean-spirited bone in his body. The stories of fifty years ago seem exaggerated and off base and Governor Romney has no memory of participating in these incidents.”

 

Some essay questions:

·       Do you believe Mitt Romney when he says he doesn’t remember this incident?

·       Do you think it matters?

·       If he does remember it, and is lying about it, do you think it matters even more ?

·       Do you remember your high-school years?

·       In particular, do you remember what you did in your senior year?

·       Again: do you believe Mitt Romney when he says he doesn’t remember this?

·       Are you as repulsed as I am when his spokesperson says “these stories seem exaggerated,” when they’re corroborated by five different people, some of whom have apologized to the victim?

·       For whom are you voting in November?

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Gay marriage, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney

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So many thoughts swirling round in my head right now on this topic. Let me see if I can cough up some bullet points:

 

 

-        Good for Joe Biden, and President Obama, for speaking up on the subject of gay marriage. It’s about time. But they were brave enough to say the right thing. All the pundits (including Chris Matthews on “Hardball” the other night) were saying: oh, Joe, you blew it. Let Obama get elected, and then let him bring up the issue in 2013. Well, Chris, you know what? Phffft.

-        You know another thing? Obama may lose the election on this issue. But (if I were him) I’d rather take a stand on an important issue, so long as I know I’m right, even if it means I’m going to lose. Because it means I’m going to win in the long run.

-        Some other Democratic politicians are following the President. Stalwart Jack Reed, our senior Rhode Island senator, came out immediately after the President’s statement to voice his agreement. God bless you, Jack; you can count on my vote next time you’re up for election.

-        Even some Republicans are warning that declaring war on this subject may be a non-starter. Republicans run a very real risk of being painted as dinosaurs and bigots, behind the curve.

-        (No, Partner and I are not getting married anytime soon. But it’s nice to know we could get married if we wanted to. I hate thinking of the nightmare scenarios: being forbidden hospital visits, things like that. This is an important issue.)

 

 

And then there’s Mitt Romney.

 

 

Mitt Romney has spent the last couple of days squealing and quacking about gay marriage, and civil unions in general. They’re just un-American. Households are just one man and one woman! And I love the way he expressed this: "I have the same view I've had since, well, running for office."

 

 

Now, just for a little spice, please look at this link from a 1994 issue of the New England gay newspaper Bay Windows, headlined: “Romney: I'll be better than Ted [Kennedy] for gay rights”!

 

 

Is the top of your head steaming right now? Mine is.

 

 

Let’s continue, shall we? Mitt Romney is a Mormon. He has stated unequivocally (to Piers Morgan!) that he is not a spokesman for the Mormon church, and I accept that. However: can you think of any unusual stances on marriage that the Mormon church has taken over the past hundred years? Well, for one thing, Mitt’s great-grandfather had five wives.

 

 

Mitt has (magnanimously) stated that his Mormonism is not that of his ancestors. Certainly he has had fewer wives than his recent political rivals (Gingrich, for example, who has been married three times – serially, of course – although his sexual relationships with partners #1, #2, and #3 appear to have run concurrently in some cases).

 

 

I don’t know. Maybe we need a new definition of “marriage”: two adults who agree to set up a household partnership with each other, sharing all assets, etc. No mention of gender. (I know, this allows incest. I’m not sure how much of an issue this might be, as I have never once wanted to marry any of my relatives, and I don’t know many people who like their relatives well enough to marry them. Naturally there will be exceptions to this rule. We’ll have to work on that.)

 

 

This is a work in progress, kids. Stay tuned.

 

 

And vote Obama.

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Ann Romney, the average American housewife

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Here is a brief excerpt from a presentation given by Ann Romney a few days ago in Stamford, Connecticut:

 

 

Romney also recalled raising her boys solo until the birth of her fifth son.

 

 

“I didn’t have help for many many years. As a matter of fact I didn’t have help at all until the fifth baby was born and I had emergency surgery when he was four months old,” Mrs. Romney said. “And I was in bed and realized I couldn’t take care of five boys with Mitt working so hard and needed a little extra help. “

 

 

She offered more detail than usual about her life at home.

 

 

“I know what’s like to finish the laundry and to look in the basket five minutes later and it’s full again. I know what’s like to pull all the groceries in and see the teenagers run through and all of a sudden all the groceries you just bought are gone,” Romney said to the crowd. “And I know what’s like to get up early in the morning and to get them off to school. And I know what’s like to get up in the middle of the night when they’re sick. And I know what’s like to struggle and to have those concerns that all mothers have.”

 

 

Romney alluded to the fact that not all women can stay at home saying, “I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids. Thank goodness that we value those people too. And sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us.”

 

 

Did you get that?

 

 

Ann loves the fact that some of us don’t have a choice, and can’t hire outside help – even after our fifth child! – because we don’t have enough money.  (Why exactly she loves that is a little beyond me. She loves the fact that people struggle?)

 

 

The husband was pulling in mucho cash, and we are told to believe that Ann was worried about grocery money, and exhausted from doing so much laundry.

 

 

Give. Us. A. Break.

 

 

How much household help do you have, reader?  (Partner and I have only stuffed animals, who are utterly useless when it comes to household chores.)

 

We Democrats are hoping Mitt brings Ann out a lot more often on the campaign trail.  She really speaks to women.

 

In all the wrong ways.

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Toucan Sam and the military-industrial complex

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I recently read that Kellogg's, the cereal giant, is suing a group called the Maya Archaeology Initiative, because the MAI is using a toucan as part of its logo.

 

 

No lie.

 

 

The MAI is fighting back very shrewdly. They point out that the toucan in their logo (see the image at the head of this column) is modeled on a real toucan, whereas Toucan Sam is, well, a cartoon character.

 

 

Also, there is this charmingly insensitive commercial, using vaguely Mesoamerican tropes like step pyramids and feather-wearing witch doctors with high shrieky voices.

 

 

I point this out to Partner, and he grunts. “Corporations are the new nations,” he said. “Haven't you noticed? They'll probably win their lawsuit. They can get whatever they want.”

 

 

“Like 'Rollerball,'” I said, catching on.

 

 

“Exactly,” he said.

 

 

I have been musing on this ever since. The other evening I was catching up on back issues of the Financial Times when I came across, on one single page, companies called Rotork, Spectris, Petrofac, Essar, and (best of all) Astorg.

 

 

What are they, daleks?

 

 

I am not frightened of corporations in general, any more than I'm frightened of nations in general. They're abstractions, run by groups of rather silly people, no more intelligent than you or me.

 

 

But I think Partner is right. Nations are beginning to seem a little – hm – twentieth-century. Look at Libya! Look at Afghanistan! Borders are really meaningless. All that matters – from a global point of view, anyway – is what can be gotten out of a given geographical area: natural resources, manpower, strategic advantage. And corporations – oil companies, drug companies, mining companies, agricultural companies – can extract these things easily.

 

 

Mitt Romney, you may know, recently told someone at one of his campaign appearances that “corporations are people too, my friend.”

 

 

No, Mitt, they are not. They are legal entities created by people, for the benefit of a few people – owners, shareholders – through the employment of the labor of some other people. All the nice folks at Hewlett-Packard don't get together at the end of the day and roll around in the vault; only a few people at the top get to do that. The rest of us – well, read this little tract by my friends Karl and Friedrich, if you haven't already. Almost 200 years later, I still find it refreshing.

 

 

From Robert Bly's “Those Being Eaten By America”:

 

 

The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved

 

 

Soon, I hope. Soon.

 

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