Will Sandy's ferocity wake us up before we drown?

The NYT lead editorial from Monday, "Big Storm Requires Big Government," cites the evidence for the irreplaceable role of federal resources and management to respond to massive disasters like Sandy.  In making the case, the editorial examines the sickness of willful blindness beclouding the minds of America's right wingers. The key symptom is unshakable faith-based belief that it is always, per Romney's response in a GOP primary debate, "better to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states... And if you... send it back to the private sector, that’s even better."

That almost half of the country throws in their lot with the "you're-on-your-own" ideology of indifference -- and I hope and pray with all fervor that the "almost" is borne out by results in six days -- makes my stomach turn with literal, physical nausea. It's like the feeling I get if I am subjected to a video clip of a sadistic, savage beating of a homeless man.  The editorial writer characterizes the GOP as preferring blaming victims to helping them; Repubicans -- at least the elected ones -- would walk on by that man with contempt for his vulnerability.  

Beyond the obvious immediate advantages of federal emergency management over uncoordinated state-by-state efforts, there is the economic idiocy of having every state be responsible for duplicating the reserves and resources to provide effective emergency disaster response.  And better we should also cut out the expensive federal weather research and monitoring functions like NOAA and the National Storm Center.

Hey, Mr. Big-Gummint Man, you want to know what the weather is going to be? Look out the f&#<in' window!  It worked for the Founding Fathers, didn'it?

The Romney campaign ultimately had to deal with the absurdity of Romney's position when a global-warming-incubated reality storm broadsided it, swamped it and left it exposed like a fishing boat illegally parked on A.C.'s Atlantic Ave. NOW, they say, despite the states' being better positioned to do disaster relief, Romney would not abolish FEMA, as if he'd never said otherwise. 

If you buy that about-face BS, Al Sharpton has a bridge to sell you -- it takes people from Brooklyn to Manhattan when the streets are not covered by ocean or river. If W downgraded and underfunded FEMA, and ideological crusader-plutocrats like Eric Cantor are in place in the House beyond this year, there is no reasonable doubt that Romney will go further than W did in slashing funds and channelling them to private corporate allies.

Americans will either wake up to the massive dual threat of global warming and the radical right, or they/we will soon wake up to a shore line that makes New Jersey the first underwater state and New York City the world's next great SCUBA-diving destination. 

And just maybe the storm has splashed virtual cold water in the faces of some of those undecideds across the swing state electorates.  Quoth Nate Silver, "Mr. Obama made gains in the FiveThirtyEight forecast on Tuesday, with his chances of winning the Electoral College increasing to 77.4 percent." 

I am circumspect at ever drawing a silver lining from a disaster like this -- at least 50 people have died, and damage may rise above $50 billion, which is a ridiculously callous distillation of the cumulative human suffering and loss represented by all that damage.  One factor freeing me up to welcome the possibility that the storm's thumb is resting on Obama's side of the electoral scale is that there is human culpability here that needs to be accounted for in understanding what happened and in deciding for whom to vote.  Denial of global warming is now a clear and present danger to all humans, and, to borrow from Mitt F. Romney the very term he used to describe the expenditure of federal funds on emergency response, it is "immoral".   

The election is blowin' in the wind

OK, as of late Sunday night Nate Silver on his FiveThirtyEight blog had the numbers running like this:

1) Obama's probability of winning Electoral College: 74.6%

2) Number of Electoral votes Obama would win today: 296.6

3) Obama's probability of winning Ohio: 75%

PERSPECTIVE:

Nate's predictive model had Obama's winning probability at a pre-Denver peak of 87% and a post-Denver trough of 61.1% on October 12.  So at 74.6% Obama is halfway back up to where he was at the peak.  The persistent trend since October 12 has been an upward ziggie-zag, with two and-a-half weeks of cycles of two clicks up and one back.

However, leavening progressives’ levity is the closeness of the national popular vote, which Nate has pegged at 50.4% to 48.7% in Obama's favor. That is thin. And digging into the numbers, we see that even the Ohio projection of 75% stands on a an cross-poll average difference of 2 points.

Silver sifts these thin leads through the filter of his model, accounting for all the elements that have proven relevant over the historic span of intensely polled election campaigns. He says the stability of Obama's swing-state edges over a period of months, despite their small magnitude, undergirds their significance so as to make Obama's odds of winning at this point as strong as 3 out of 4.

Now, even one out of four is still scarily high.  The realization of that one-in-four chance would mean our turning away from the positive direction we’re headed now and turning toward a revival of "the policies that got us into this mess".  We know too well that Romney/Ryan would mean not merely a revival, their election would mean an intensification and acceleration, with consequences that would be horrific for 99% of us.

That is a point on which we do need to drill down – i.e., the concrete consequences of failing to re-elect President Obama.  That drill-down will be the focus of my next post, to come later on, as Sandy's eye passes to the south.  We're still holding our breath and hoping that losses from the storm will be on the light side.   

Speaking of which (and getting back to Nate Silver and polling), I may not need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows today in SE PA, but it was very helpful to have had one yesterday to prompt me to get off my tush and clear out my rain gutters that were overflowing with leaves and decomposed muck. (I am thankful that Ms. Sandy will have come and gone before we vote in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. This will allow about a week for electricity to be restored where necessary; I hope that will be enough to avoid any disruptions in voting.)

So, pivoting back to the election, are we better off for our obsession with the polls and for having Weatherman Nate Silver there to stoke -- and satisfy -- the obsession ?  

To the extent that his sort of information has the delicately balanced dual effect of heightening both our motivation to make a personal difference and our belief in the prospect that our efforts will yield the outcome we want, then yes, Nate's numbers do serve a purpose beyond providing a twisted form of amusement for neurotic Nellies (like me).

Also, while I criticize the media pre-occupation with the horse race aspect of elections at the expense of deepening understanding of policy differences and their implications for the country's future direction, at least Silver models a more sophisticated, non-partisan framing of the horse race than the mainstream media.  The latter consider it their goal to make the race look as close and suspenseful as possible, and in lieu of objectivity they put a microphone in front of rabid partisans from each side and try not to be referees in the debate.  Even when they do "fact-checking" -- which they do in response to the public critiques of their erstwhile hands-off approach to partisan claims -- the practice still is to make sure to balance the debunking and treat each lie or exaggeration as being of equal weight and importance.

There are exceptions to the horse-race coverage, and I don't mean PBS or even NPR.  The most sophisticated discussion of policy that I've come across on television is Chris Hayes's weekend morning panel-style talk show "Up!" from 8am to 10am.  Melissa Harris Perry's show from 10am to noon is a close second.

Yes, they are liberals, but their practice is to have a person from the right on every panel. I always learn something from these shows and highly recommend them. I do love the evening MSNBC shows as well, and I do learn from them too, but in all honesty I acknowledge that Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell are more intent on making points and reporting facts that resonate with the progressive perspective. Hayes and Perry (a Tulane University political science professor) conduct graduate seminars.

EIGHT DAYS TO GO.

EIGHT DAYS TO GOTV!

WHO threw Israel under the bus?!

The segment of the American population that cares deeply about the security and well-being of Israel gets far more courting by the national candidates than our numbers alone would imply. I can't say I mind that, because if that were not the case it is likely that Israel would exist only in history books by now.

What I do mind is the petty bullflop and distortions that pass through the thin, sneering lips of the GOP* when their turn comes to make the pitch:  Repubicans are the true friends of Israel, while President Obama has thrown Israel under the bus -- and it's not even an Egged bus!   They vehemently rage that Obama did not visit Israel after his inauguration when he went to the Middle East on his putative "apology tour" (he had visited during the 2008 campaign, sans Jewish donor tag-alongs with billion-dollar egos to puff up, and also sans tarring Palestinian culture), and he eschewed a meet with Bibi in New York when they were both there to address the UN. Such a scandal!

Compared to a mere missile defense system (Iron Dome) and massive joint military exercises and record-high financial assistance, these perceived social slights are the real story of Obama and Israel.  Obama's so-called social snubs have GOP Jews' knickers forming deep-seated wedgies.

I don't think Romney is going to get traction with this, because in this segment he is not dealing as often with the low-information voters that are so prized by the Fox/RNC/GOP/Tea-Pee propaganda pushers. My best guess is that Romney may do a few points better than McCain for the same reasons that the race will be closer altogether -- first of all, Sarah Palin is not running; second, many people want to blame someone for their continuing economic challenges.  

When I imply that a well-informed pro-Israel voter will be immune to the hyperbolic verbal sniping at Obama, I am talking about the voter's familiarity with the kinds of historical facts that the former ten-year director of Mossad Ephraim Halevy lays out in his NYT op-ed that is pasted in full below. 

Turns out that this mythical meme of GOP-good-for-Israel is one more lie in a bookshelf of such lies that we've heard for decades.  For example, contrary to the myth, GOP presidents have consistently added far more to the national debt than Dems. Business has done better under Dems than Repubicans. Dems have been true to taking care of veterans while Repubicans fight against spending for veterans.

However, all this only goes to demonstrate at the end of the day that Repubicans are indeed better -- i.e., at bullsh*tting the American public.  So, with a tip o' the cap to Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers, I declare that this country will continue to be in deep trouble unless and until we Democrats can finally overcome... The Bullsh*t Gap.  (See George Lakoff for special tips on effective framing.)

Who threw Israel under the bus?

by Ephraim Halevy

ON Monday, in their final debate, Mitt Romney denounced President Obama for creating “tension” and “turmoil” with Israel and chided him for having “skipped Israel” during his travels in the Middle East. Throughout the campaign, Mr. Romney has repeatedly accused Mr. Obama of having “thrown allies like Israel under the bus.”

But history tells a different story. Indeed, whenever the United States has put serious, sustained pressure on Israel’s leaders — from the 1950s on — it has come from Republican presidents, not Democratic ones. This was particularly true under Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush.

Just one week before the Iraq war began in March 2003, Mr. Bush was still struggling to form a broad international coalition to oust Saddam Hussein. Unlike in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, Russia, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, decided to opt out, meaning that the United Nations could not provide formal legitimacy for a war against Mr. Hussein. Britain was almost alone in aligning itself with America, and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s support was deemed crucial in Washington.

Just as the British Parliament was about to approve the joint venture, a group of Mr. Blair’s Labour Party colleagues threatened to revolt, demanding Israeli concessions to the Palestinians in exchange for their support for the Iraq invasion. This demand could have scuttled the war effort, and there was only one way that British support could be maintained: Mr. Bush would have to declare that the “road map” for Middle East peace, a proposal drafted early in his administration, was the formal policy of the United States.

Israel’s prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, had been vehemently opposed to the road map, which contained several “red lines” that he refused to accept, including a stipulation that the future status of Jerusalem would be determined by “a negotiated resolution” taking into account “the political and religious concerns of both sides.” This wording implied a possible end to Israel’s sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, which has been under Israeli control since 1967.

On March 13, 2003, senior Israeli officials were summarily informed that the United States would publicly adopt the draft road map as its policy. Washington made it clear to us that on the eve of a war, Israel was expected to refrain from criticizing the American policy and also to ensure that its sympathizers got the message.

The United States insisted that the road map be approved without any changes, saying Israel’s concerns would be addressed later. At a long and tense cabinet debate I attended in May 2003, Mr. Sharon reluctantly asked his ministers to accept Washington’s demand. Benjamin Netanyahu, then the finance minister, disagreed, and he abstained during the vote on the cabinet resolution, which eventually passed.

From that point on, the road map, including the language on Jerusalem, became the policy bible for America, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations. Not only was Israel strong-armed by a Republican president, but it was also compelled to simply acquiesce and swallow the bitterest of pills.

Three years later, the Bush administration again pressured Israel into supporting a policy that ran counter to its interests. In early 2006, the terrorist group Hamas ran candidates in the Palestinian legislative elections. Israel had been adamant that no leader could campaign with a gun in his belt; the Palestinian party Fatah opposed Hamas’s participation, too. But the White House would have none of this; it pushed Fatah to allow Hamas candidates to run, and pressured Israel into allowing voting for Hamas — even in parts of East Jerusalem.

After Hamas won a clear majority, Washington sought to train Fatah forces to crush it militarily in the Gaza Strip. But Hamas pre-empted this scheme by taking control of Gaza in 2007, and the Palestinians have been ideologically and territorially divided ever since.

Despite the Republican Party’s shrill campaign rhetoric on Israel, no Democratic president has ever strong-armed Israel on any key national security issue. In the 1956 Suez Crisis, it was a Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who joined the Soviet Union in forcing Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula after a joint Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt.

In 1991, when Iraqi Scud missiles rained down on Tel Aviv, the administration of the first President Bush urged Israel not to strike back so as to preserve the coalition of Arab states fighting Iraq. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir resisted his security chiefs’ recommendation to retaliate and bowed to American demands as his citizens reached for their gas masks.

After the war, Mr. Shamir agreed to go to Madrid for a Middle East peace conference set up by Secretary of State James A. Baker III. Fearful that Mr. Shamir would be intransigent at the negotiating table, the White House pressured him by withholding $10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel, causing us serious economic problems. The eventual result was Mr. Shamir’s political downfall. The man who had saved Mr. Bush’s grand coalition against Saddam Hussein in 1991 was “thrown under the bus.”

In all of these instances, a Republican White House acted in a cold and determined manner, with no regard for Israel’s national pride, strategic interests or sensitivities. That’s food for thought in October 2012.

 

Efraim Halevy was the director of the Mossad from 1998 to 2002 and the national security adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, from October 2002 to June 2003. \

* Personal footnote on tenuously related topic of thin, sneering lips:

This morning I was juggling my attention among my getting-up routine, watching Morning Joe, listening to WIP sports talk radio, and flipping on and off the TODAY Show (for my health and beauty tips). As has been the case in the last few weeks with all the MSNBC contributors who are ex-GOP politicians, officials and operatives (e.g., Steve Schmidt [famed as stand-in for Woody Harrelson in the original version of HBO's Game Change] and Michael Steele [the previous Reince Preibus -- which sounds more like a minor intestinal conduit than a person, imho]), former R-FL Rep. Joe Scarborough has flipped the switch from pundit/host to full-blown campaign tool. Case in point this morning: they air a vid of Obama's Romnesia riff to a crowd of 11,000 cheering maniacs, in which Bar reels off the policy 180's and 360's the other guy has executed in the months-weeks-days past. Cut to Joe Scar-butt, his face looking like the breakfast sausage he'd had was not sitting at all well with him. After dramatic face and pause, he allows as to how "disappointed" he is that President Obama, after all the personal sacrifices he'd made to become President Obama, was reduced to making a speech like that.

Really? Well, after a speech from a TV talk show host like that one, I've got a nausea face for Joe Scar-schmo, and I've got three little words in response to a GOPer whose contempt and disdain appear outstripped only by his arrogance, stupidity and dearth of appreciation for the power and charm of humor:

You disappoint me!  

Update on Romney family's Ohio voting machines

In fact, MSNBC's Ed Schultz did address the reports referenced in this afternoon's post that the Romney family is closely connected with ownership of voting machines, some of which will be used in Ohio on November 6th.  Schultz brought it up while interviewing a strongly progressive Ohio State Senator, Nina Turner.   

Responding to Schultz's question about the report, Turner said she thought the Romney connection to the machines was tenuous and  circuitous, and to her mind it is not a worrisome threat.  She said she trusts the ability of the bipartisan board overseeing the machines to make sure the machines work properly.  

Given the still-unanswered questions about Ohio vote-counting in 2004, I thought that she sounded overly confident.  However, this African-American senator has been a fireball on the subject of voter suppression and the legal battle over early voting, so she's not naive about the Repubicans' intention to stage anything but a fair fight in November. 

Senator Turner is infinitely better versed in matters of election administration in Ohio than I am, that I know for certain.  At the same time, while I found her lack of unease reassuring, we can also be certain that there will be close monitoring to see that there are not once again the kind of extraordinary divergences between exit poll data and vote tabs in Ohio Ohio Ohio that were the hallmark of Florida Florida Florida.  

More than 100,000 people died in Iraq because of one questionable vote count in one state.  After that, I will not regret taking the risk of overstating a threat to the integrity of this coming election.  Whether I actually did so still remains to be seen.  Not that I hope for problems; I hope that we all have full confidence in the accuracy of the count come November 7th. 

In other words, the best outcome for democracy itself is that Obama wins Ohio so we can move forward as a nation that need not be haunted by this question!   

Guess who bought Ohio voting machines

So the debates are behind us, thank God.  We now humbly approach our collective opportunity to fulfill again the painstakingly forged democratic vision of the framers of the Constitution.  We know that we hold in a dynamic balance, as the framers did, the tension between pragmatism and utopianism.  This sacred quadrennial ritual is known to the great majority of us, the fortunate inheritors of American citizenship, as the Presidential election.  

Alternatively, this revered ritual is known to a small subset of us as prime time to steal the so-called election, to snatch away the choice to fill highest seat of power from the hands of the people, and to make the world safe once and for all for bottomless-pit plutocrats.  

What makes me inject such a cynical nasty note into the conversation the day after the people got to tune into Round Three of democracy in action?  It is an article summarizing investigative reports on just such activities published on the All Voices website; it has an eye-catching title: "Romney family buys voting machines through Bain Capital investment".

Holy Hannah, you say!  I know I do.  This is not a joke.  It is not from The Onion, and the article references other quite credible sources also reporting details of this incredibly disturbing, unfathomably contemptuous and far-over-the-line behavior. 

Here is a sampling of the report:

Tagg Romney, the son of Republican presidential candidate Mitt RomneyMitt Romney, has purchased electronic voting machines that will be used in the 2012 elections in Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, Washington and Colorado.

"Late last month, Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis at FreePress.org broke the story of the Mitt Romney/Bain Capital investment team involved in H.I.G. Capital which, in July of 2011, completed a "strategic investment" to take over a fair share of the Austin-based e-voting machine company Hart Intercivic," according to independent journalist Brad Friedman.
. . .

Truth out reports:
"Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son and brother are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 7. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the United States.

In other words, a candidate for the presidency of the United States, and his brother, wife and son, have a straight-line financial interest in the voting machines that could decide this fall's election. These machines cannot be monitored by the public. But they will help decide who "owns" the White House."

Both The Nation and New York Times confirm the connection between the Romney family, Solamere and the Bain Capital investment in the voting machine company, Hart Intercivic, whose board of directors serve H.I.G. Capital.
. . .

What it all says is that Mitt Romney, with the help of his family and Bain Capital connections, is more than willing to try to take the White House through illegitimate and highly unethical, if not specifically illegal means.
. . .

The nagging question is why, if Mr. Romney truly has the qualities that American voters want in their president, does he have to go to such great and questionable lengths to try to win the election.

That "nagging question" is a rhetorical one, of course.  It is a truism among those of us who do not live in the RNC/Fox News alternative universe that the GOP, its ship having been pirated by the Tea Party, Grover Norquist, theocrats, evangelicals, and other extreme-right elements, must, in order to attract votes, obfuscate their intention to steer the country over the edge of the flat earth they inhabit.  If they tell the truth, they expect to lose.  

Nevertheless, that might not be enough.  With so much at stake and -- fortunately for them -- so little concern for the petty rules that lesser men fret about, they must make sure the election isn't left in the hands of the little people.  The voters may see through Romney's late-in-the-game renunciations of hard-right policies concerning women's rights, and taxes, and safety net programs, and defense spending, ...   

So, we'll bar the voters and/or deter them from voting with ID laws and billboards and truth squads and purges. 

And if some get through anyway, baboom, we'll just buy the voting machines -- they can be so unreliable -- and "count the votes" creatively!

It's scary that I have seen not a whiff of this in print or on TV.  That had better change, and I'm hoping it will, at least on MSNBC, tonight -- assuming the story is true, of course.  While it is not out of "character", it still seems incredibly impolitic for them to have done this.  So I would not rule out the possibility that the report isn't completely true or that our inferences may be different from their intentions...

If it is true, though, and if it does come out in the media places where America's reality TV watchers fear not to go, it could turn off some of the still undecided voters that the exalted imperial Romneys would think it's okay to violate the law, to buy an illegal and unethical edge, and to thwart the will of the voters.

The far and away most important question this raises for me is whether there is a way of detecting any manipulation of the way the machines register and/or count up votes, should there be a federal investigation before, during or after the vote.

As a former poll official for four years, I have participated in the close-of-day printing out of results from our machines (electronic machines, votes cast by pressing the buttons next to the names, with detachable data cassettes) and the hand recording of results from the printouts on duplicate forms. One copy is posted at the polling place and the other is delivered by the judge of elections with the data cartridges to the designated collection point for the township.

Not all machines in different states work this same way in terms of how votes are input and how the results are taken out of the machine. Some still use optical scanning to input, I believe.  Some are all-electronic and communicate by a direct electronic link to central computers. I do not know whether each precinct also records and posts results when they use that type of equipment. It ought to be and probably is standard practice in all precincts across the country that the tallies in each precinct are made public at the precinct level.

So, if all that is accurate, a recount or investigation could revert back to the precinct level count, so any hanky-panky that would have a chance of flying under the radar of a careful recount would have to take place before the point in the process of aggregating precinct tallies.

All of which suggests that something would have to be programmed into the machine software that registered votes differently from the way they were cast by the voters and/or totalled them internally differently from the actual totals.  But it would have to be done sparingly, selectively so as not to be so out of whack with the precinct's registration numbers that it looked prima facie questionable. In my precinct, for example, the high ratio of Democrats to Repubicans means that a tally of less than 55-60% for Obama would look fishy.  On the other hand, one could in theory be more "liberal" with Romney-padding in strongly Repubican precincts.

Then the question would be, could this be done in such a way that a technically sophisticated investigator could look into the machine's code and not be able to find the smoking gun?

THAT -- not the slings and arrows, the being and the not being -- IS THE QUESTION!

Will women be in a bind or bound for glory?

Today my friend Kathe added to a post-debate e-mail thread on the binding effects that Mitt Romney’s policies might have on women’s workplace equality.  Kathe pointed out that all one need do is “look at the woman Obama married vs. the one Romney married, and that's all you need to know.” 

Actually, as I replied to Kathe, Ann Romney would make a pitch-perfect First Lady for America.  That is, she would if this were America in the year 1952.  That America is mentally still inhabited by the Fox News bouffant-blond not-so-demure debutante demagogues and the good ol' boys around them.  They long for the days when a First Lady appeared on TV as White House tour guide, preferably wearing white gloves. 

Yes, I so agree with Kathe that the two wives quintessentially embody the attitudes of the candidates toward women.  Obama grew up -- as I did, in full disclosure -- with a mother and grandmother who were the breadwinners and had to make their way in a world of work that was much more binding in terms of career choices.  I can vouch for the validity of the implied message of his story, that a man borne of that background has developed a visceral identification with the rights of women to actualize all of their potentials.  His answer to the young woman's question on equal pay began with his having signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act and went on to ensuring access to educational and employment opportunities.   

Meanwhile, Mitt is trying his damnedest – I use the word advisedly – to convince women that they should hitch their wagons to him and his policies because he knows how to create jobs and thus create opportunities for them.  Some women are finding that a credible pitch, but most are not, because most see him for what he is: a private equity, Swiss-bank-account plutocrat who wants to raze Planned Parenthood from the face of the earth and overturn Roe v. Wade and who has refused to take a position on the Lilly Ledbetter Act and famously sidestepped like a matador Tuesday’s debate question on equal pay for women.  (His history of disrespect for women's autonomy and subjectivity is far worse than that, as recounted in Geoffrey Dunn's investigative report summarized and referenced in my October 12 post below.) 

Seriously, it appears now that Mitt may have concocted this whole scenario of a Pennsylvania woman pathetically tugging on his sleeve to ask for help getting a job.  Alfred Lubrano wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer today (“Who is the job-seeking woman Romney mentioned?) that reporters have been looking high and low at all the venues on which Romney lighted in Pennsylvania on the day in question and have come up empty. 

Even if the incident happened, it would go like this: when Mitt asks her “What can I do to help?” the woman could make but one request that Romney actually would help with: “Please, please, please, would you lower my bosses’ taxes?”    

I hope and pray -- and I will keep knocking on doors each weekend to make it more likely – that we can re-elect Obama.  Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight Blog Rube Goldberg mathematical model has O's percentage probability of winning the Electoral College back up to 65.7% as of last night -- it had gone from 61.1% Friday to 66.0% on Monday to 64.8% Tuesday.

The uptick to 65.7%, better than a down tick but long-term not yet statistically stable or decisive, still does not tap into debate impact. Who the heck knows how this population will respond -- especially the flotsam-and-jetsam sub-population of ill-informed and disengaged waverers and undecideds whose wavering and indecision presumably account for most of the volatility?

And especially when the versions of reality that they are served up can stand in such sharp contrast with each other depending on their sources of news and commentary. Fox News -- whose logo was graphically paired with Mitt's puddingy punim last night on Colbert's show as Colbert referred to "Romney and his running mate" -- is still selling as absolute gospel that Obama did not say the Benghazi consulate attack was an act of terrorism. Limbaugh still says that Candy would have committed "career suicide" with her brazen partisan real-time fact-checking of Romney, if only we had any journalistic standards left in this country (if you are puking up at the thought of Limbaugh's journalistic standards, you are among co-puking friends).

In contrast, MSNBC hosts (and guests other than Michael Steele) are equally resolute that as a moderator, Candy was way dandy. Fox was all-angry-all-day, MSNBC all smiles. Loved it, but Ed Schultz et al will not be seen by most of those people who are floating loose like seaweed or jellyfish in the ocean -- in the middle of Iowa yet!

So who ya gonna believe? Rather, whom are the jellyfish going to believe, since they apparently don't trust themselves to rely on their own devices.

Meanwhile, there are pull-lenty of Americans who actually take it all in and think for themselves a little bit. Which brings me to what I'll cleverly call "Today's Moment of Ama-Zen": in the form of Amazon Reader Reviews of Avery Durable Binders available on the site. Shows that Americans are not lacking for creativity, wit and a fine appreciation for the smoldering pile of hypocritical stench that is Governor Romney. (For best viewing and the most fun, see the original page on Amazon.)  Thanks to Mia Rose Diamond Dansky Blitstein for the link -- thanks to her and her mother I get to share in the cornucopia of the social network.

One last post-debate reflection (for this post, I mean!), and it's from James Lipton of the Actor's Studio.  He was one of those guests on MSNBC last night, on Hardball with Chris Matthews. As noted on Joy Reid's website in the heading over the video clip, Lipton framed this election in a way that is brilliantly insightful and ought to resonate with anyone who is not already in the clutches of Romney's binder.  In a phrase that ought to become THE sound-bite of the last three weeks of the campaign, he boils down the campaign to a simple but all-important choice: a President versus a Boss.  Watch it and share it far and wide.

Customer Reviews

Avery Durable View Binder with 2 Inch EZ-Turn Ring, White, 1 Binder (17032)

5,015 of 5,183 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars A presidential candidate's choice is the choice for me, October 17, 2012 Bazinga - As a woman, I'm not adept at making decisions that concern me. So when I need the right choice, I turn to the presidential candidate that KNOWS. One with prideful experience in this department. I don't want to be filed away in an inferior & confusing electronic doohickey that I couldn't possibly understand. Or heaven forbid, have a man ask for & listen to my ideas! I'd much rather rely on this top of the line, 1980s style, Avery Durable binder. It's the choice America can trust. My education, my ideas, my opinions, my choices, please PLEASE keep them safely stored away here and far away from the men that might fear them (I mean, want to use them to hire me somedaynever). I'd write more about this most useful product, but it's time I hurry home to make dinner.   2,229 of 2,323 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars Wow, I feel secure!, October 17, 2012 LeeBo (Raleigh, NC)   As a wife and mother, I LOVE this binder. It keeps me in my place, allows me to get dinner ready on time, AND only costs 72% of the more masculine version. Some people might think it's sexist, but sheesh, I'm not binding my feet, just my brain. Extra bonus, if you sit on it just right, it can act as an effective method of birth control! Full disclosure: I submitted this under my husband's account, with his full permission. He is the head of our household, and the owner of the binder.   228 of 235 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars Now I know how I got my job!!! My boss has Mitt's binder, too!!!, October 18, 2012 Go Flash Go! I watched the Presidential debate on Tuesday. I didn't understand most of it, but I loved what Mitt Romney said about his binders full of women. I work for an asset management firm which tends to be a male-dominated industry. I have long wondered, as a woman, how I managed to get hired at my firm when there were surely many more qualified men. Could my boss have a binder, too? On Wednesday, my boss called me and said, "Hun, would you come down to my office?" "Yes, sir!" I eagerly rushed down. Sitting on top of his desk, next to a box of golf balls and his "World's Greatest Boss" figurine (here's a little secret - we girls think he bought it for himself! Teehee!), was this beautiful Avery Durable View binder. You can see in the product photo that there is that dumb-looking piece of paper stuck underneath the front cover. Boring! My boss removed that, and replaced it with a pink piece of paper that said "Greg's Girls." It was so pretty! The letters were in cursive, written with a fuchsia marker. There were stickers of flowers and hearts on it, too. He saw me gazing at it with wonder, and he said with a shy smile, "My secretary designed the cover." I was so happy to finally have all my questions answered, right in this wondrous binder. "Can I touch it?" I whispered. "Yes, and if there is anything you don't understand, just ask, sweetheart." I held my breath as I flipped through the pages, until I found a tab with my name. The first page was a photo of me taken from my Facebook profile. Beside it, someone wrote a couple of notes: "Looks pleasant enough." "Would she consider losing 10 pounds?" Now I understand why my boss always asks me to get coffee from the place 5 blocks away, rather than from the one in our building. He's so funny!   494 of 517 people found the following review helpful 4.0 out of 5 stars Makes me seem productive! (Don't tell my boss!), October 18, 2012 uebergeek (San Diego, CA USA) - As a woman who doesn't leave work early to cook dinner, I struggled to prove to my employer that I'm worth the full 72% of a man's pay. How could I, working 16-hour shifts, ever be seen as pulling my weight, when other women were heading home to do their domestic duty? Thank goodness for this binder. Now, each day when dinner time rolls around, I'm able to select a stereotype-friendly woman from the binder to go home and cook. This leaves me free to fritter away the entire evening at work, while still collecting the full 72% paycheck. And my boss is none the wiser! Thanks to this binder, I'm on Easy Street!

Silver says: Biden's Band-Aid; Obama's Opportunity

In my last post, "Pivoting from debacle to debating The Real Romney" **, I wrote that Joe Biden's piece of work on October 11th did succeed, as I'd hoped, in stopping the bleeding. 

To wit: 

"However, the one result I do feel confident about sustaining is that the prevailing winds of Romney momentum from the first debate has officially become yesterday's news."  [Ital. added]

Leaving aside the egregious subject-verb conflict, I felt that Biden had, by dint of personality and a cascade of facts upon facts, imposed a new set of images on the media campaign coverage.  The liberal-leaning commentators focused on Biden's hammering home the facts that Obama had disdained to mention, and the right-siders focused on Joe's historically, monumentally white teeth.  

In fact, Fox News and the other Repubican spokesplatforms were forced to sidestep recall of the Obama-Romney debate in order to press the indictment of Biden for behaving the same aggressive way as Obama supporters perceived Romney to have acted -- sans the grin, yes, but Romney was no less "rude".  

So, did independent polling feedback reflect that Biden's performance had stanched the loss of blood?  Nate Silver wrote this in his Monday column:

"National polls showed a modestly favorable trend for President Obama, allowing him to gain slightly in our forecast. (Mr. Obama’s chances of winning the Electoral College are now 66.0 percent, according to the FiveThirtyEight model, up from 63.4 percent on Sunday.)"

This is potentially a critical reversal of public opinion.  In his blog on Friday, Silver had written that Romney's broaching the 40% probability level would mean that the race was a "toss-up".  Romney had gotten to 38.9% on Friday -- 1.1% from toss-up city! -- which was well-nigh apocalyptic given that Silver's model had accorded Obama an 85% likelihood of winning the Electoral College eight days earlier.   

So what all this means is that the Silver model's predictive percentage for a Romney win has receded, increment by increment each day since Friday, from that 38.9% high water mark.  By Monday it was back down to 34.0%.

This turnaround trend is consistent with the Biden-to-the-rescue hypothesis. 

However, it's still a 20-point percentage drop for Obama, and the race still hangs in a delicate balance.  Indeed, that's precisely what Silver concludes.  After the quote I pasted above, he cautions the reader not to see the Obama recovery as a robust trend.  Biden's bump was really just a Band-Aid, not a cure.

Silver goes on from that caution to render a peek into the mind of an obsessive but very intellectually honest and ethical nerd. The rest of the column is not about the election but rather about the ethics of how one goes about doing poll meta-analysis and interpretation. Which is what Silver does, of course -- he is not a pollster.

In a post-truth, all-spin-all-the-time Orwellian political world where people make livings trying to tell others what is real (I try, but I no get paid), and in which too many of them are selling lies as reality, Silver is one of the last bastions of disinterested objectivity. He is a lighthouse in the dark of night.

Which is all well and good, but in the end we just want to see our stinkin' numbers going up and the other side's going down!

And that is where tonight comes in. 

Obama's chances of consolidating this fledgling recovery and getting a bit of daylight back between himself and the conviction-free, heartless, soulless cadaver -- i.e., the esteemed Governor Romney -- depend on Obama's showing up very PRESIDENTIAL-like at the debate on Long Island. 

Now, based on my unscientific chats with people as I canvassed for the Obama campaign in my neighborhood, I suspect that the majority of Obama's sharp sag in the polls was due to his own poor performance more than it was due to Mitt's good one.  The main person Obama has to "beat" tonight, then, is not Mitt as much as it's the first debate Obama.  The bar is low for him, but so are the expectations that can shape perceptions.

And finally, dipping into the FiveThirtyEight Blog well one last time, I looked to see today's updated percentages before posting.  It was not out yet, but in today's post he offers a classically Nate Silveresque labyrinthine historical review of presidential debate data to assess Obama's statistical chances of a second-debate bounce back.  After hiking us up a data trail with more back-and-forth switchbacks than Walter's Wiggles itself (on the way up to Angels Landing in Zion NP), Silver favors the bounce back by a hair's-width preponderance of the statistical trends. 

Hoping for the best.

** If you didn't read the L&LO October 12 post-Biden-Ryan post, "Pivoting from debacle to debating The Real Romney", please take a moment if you can to check it out.  It recounts an investigative report on Romney's imperious bullying of pregnant women as a Mormon church leader in the 80's. The report reveals the character of the Real Romney as candidly as the Boca Raton video revealed his social-economic world-view.

 

Pivoting from debacle to debating The Real Romney

In yesterday's NY Times op-ed, Charles Blow urged us progressive-minded Americans to stem the hysteria and come in off the ledge. His reasoning was reassuring enough, I guess, citing structural and stable political keys that continued to favor Obama/Biden over Romney/Ryan despite national polls showing that the challengers had closed the gap.  But every time I tuned into the flow of media and online commentary on how things were "trending", I got that queasy feeling again.  I kept feeling waves of nausea pass through me every time I was unable to suppress a vision of Mitt Romney's face behind the Presidential podium.

That was yesterday.  A day later, we are now starting to come in off the ledge.  At least I am.

In interviews today, I was seeing in President Obama's demeanor a clear determination to fight and win.  He acknowledged the debacle for which he was responsible last week rather than denying it, which made credible his calm pledge to produce a different outcome in his next at-bat.  That comes next Tuesday night on Long Island.

More importantly for the mood of us Obama campers, Joe Biden came out debating his tuchus off tonight against Paul Ryan and made the points that had been left so disappointingly unmade last week. The GOP spin machine are doing their damnedest to convince the public that Biden was too smirky, too rude and arrogant, and therefore we should see Ryan as "the winner".  They are spinning their wheels hard trying to convince voters that on their TV's they saw Rep. Ryan beat the "too-hot" Joe.  Only problem is that the very nature of their attack, focused on style elements, reveals that they think Biden won the debate on substance.

Voters will crystallize their reaction to the debate over the next few days.  Early surveys support the sense that Biden impressed viewers as “more presidential" and "stronger" as well as having made more compelling arguments on the issues.  We'll see.

However, the one result I do feel confident about sustaining is that the prevailing winds of Romney momentum from the first debate has officially become yesterday's news.  The spin wars over Biden-Ryan will certainly persist on MSNBC and Fox, in the Times and the Standard, but that only reinforces the retirement of Obama's anything-but-excellent somnambulent adventure from the foreground.
As pissed off, embarrassed, disappointed and nervous as we have been this last week, I do think one compensation may have been the electric angst of feeling the all-too-real possibility of the deeply dreaded President Romney.  That angst may have provided the wake-up call to get us moving that a viral Samuel L. Jackson by himself could not.  I'm moving.  On Saturday afternoon at one o'clock I will go get my list from Obama campaign HQ, and I'll spend the day knocking on Democratic doors to get out the vote.

This past week I have been forced to imagine what I did not want to imagine: a future with a heartless, soulless automated cadaver in the White House, a man who will be pulling out all the stops to bend all knees to the plutocracy he cherishes.  A President Romney would certainly mean that we're headed for that cataclysmic collapse that karmically must happen when a world-view based on lies and denial is empowered and inevitably crashes into undeniable reality.  

 

How can I make such a dramatic, hyperbolic characterization?  With all of Mitt Romney's slippery flop-flippery so well documented on issues such as women's autonomy and reproductive rights, taxes, health care, social safety nets like Medicare and Social Security and defense spending (e.g., Ryan just tonight claimed that Romney/Ryan would not increase defense spending!), how can one claim to know The Real Romney with enough confidence to predict anything about a prospective Romney administration? 

 

So who is this Governor Romney, really? 

 

With regard to the first of the listed issues, women's rights, I will put into evidence now a damning investigative report by Geoffrey Dunn posted today on The Huffington Post, "Horror Stories: Mitt Romney's Shameful Record with Mormon Women" (excerpted from Metro Silicon Valley).  The report is based on accumulated interviews with a number of women and men who knew Romney when he was a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) bishop and "stake president" -- regional leader -- in Massachusetts, outside of Boston. 

 

The single most horrifying story was related by a woman named Carrel Hilton Sheldon.  In 1983 she was a pregnant mother of four children in her late 30's who was hospitalized in the second month of the pregnancy for treatment of a "life-threatening blood clot".  Long story short, her physician told her her life was at risk if she did not have an abortion.  The then-LDS stake president, Dr. Gordon Williams counseled her.  A Harvard-trained medical doctor himself, he concurred with her physician that she should have the abortion.

 

The Huffington Post excerpt picks up the narrative:

According to an account later written anonymously by Sheldon for the LDS women's journal, Exponent II, it was after receiving this counsel from Williams supporting the potentially life-saving procedure that she experienced an uninvited visit in her hospital room from her Mormon bishop at the time, 36-year-old Mitt Romney, who adamantly opposed the abortion.


"He regaled me with stories of his sister and her retarded child and what a blessing the child had been to the family," Sheldon wrote of the incident. "He told me that 'as your bishop, my concern is with the child.'"
...

There was no empathy forthcoming from Romney, according to Sheldon, no warmth or sympathy. Moreover, Sheldon contends, Romney cast doubt on her story about the stake president's approval. He simply didn't believe her. He threatened to call him and track him down. "At a time when I would have appreciated nurturing and support from spiritual leaders and friends," Sheldon wrote, "I got judgment, criticism, prejudicial advice, and rejection."

Indeed, Romney was so agitated about the matter that he confronted Sheldon's parents about her decision as well. According to R. B. Scott, author of the insightful Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and His Politics, Romney's only concern was for the unborn fetus. Last year, Scott, who is also a Mormon, interviewed Sheldon's 90-year-old father, Phil Hilton, who remembered the incident quite vividly. "I have never been so upset about anything in my life," he told Scott. "[Romney] is an authoritative type fellow who thinks he is in charge of the world."

Back at the hospital, a distraught Carrel Hilton Sheldon assented to her doctor's advice and terminated her life-threatening pregnancy. She recovered from her medical crisis, moved to the West Coast, and continued to raise her four children.

"He can seem very distant, unattached at times, almost heartless," says Judith Dushku, a lifelong Mormon and an associate professor of government at Suffolk University in Boston. Vivacious and energetic, with a wide range of intellectual interests, Dushku has known Mitt Romney since the early 1970s, when they were both active in the LDS. Romney later served as her ward bishop, from 1981 to 1986, and as her stake president from 1986 until 1994, when he ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate against Edward M. Kennedy.

[The narrative relates another woman's encounter with the imperious Romney.  She was single and gave birth to a boy.  Romney essentially ordered her to give the child up for adoption by an LDS family or risk excommunication.  She refused, and she describes her now-grown son as a wonderful young man with whom she has a great bond that does not include the LDS.  The Dunn narrative concludes (highlighting added):]

These stories involving Mormon women of different age and different status in the church community--and all taking place when Romney was in a hierarchical (and, indeed, patriarchal) position of power over them--form an alarming, composite pattern of Romney's leadership career for more than a decade in the LDS Church. Dushku dubbed them "horror stories."

"Romney just doesn't have any sensitivity to women's issues in general," says Dushku. "But even more than that, he genuinely believes he's always right, that he's never made a mistake. He can never say, 'I might have made a mistake, I didn't understand that.' In Mitt's view, no one else has anything else to offer. He's always right."

When Romney uttered his now-immortal comments at a Republican fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida, about 47 percent of Americans being "victims" who think "that government has the responsibility to care for them," Dushku says that we were seeing the "real Romney." [bold added]

"He sees other people in need as lazy and slackers," Dushku notes. "He doesn't acknowledge that the path he took was a privileged path, from his parents, that gave him distinct advantages."

Last week, as Dushku watched the first of the presidential debates, she saw a competent, even "slick" politician sparring with President Obama, but she also witnessed someone who is a political chameleon.

"He's not a man who has anything like a moral core," she says. "He's very loyal to the Mormon church, pays his tithing, is faithful to his wife, and so on, but he doesn't have a set of core values you can count on. I've known him for nearly 40 years. He may have a different suit on, but he hasn't changed. His experience hasn't changed. His performance was very consistent with the Mitt I knew back then. He can't relate to average working women--teachers and nurses and care givers. He's still coming from a place of privilege and entitlement."

Peggie Hayes--who doesn't know Dushku--concurs with her assessment. The prospect of Romney becoming president, she says, "is a horrible idea. It would be terrible." She says Romney's recent positioning as a moderate "is a mask."

"I've known him since I was 13," she says. The Mormon leader who tried to impose church doctrine on her when she was experiencing some difficult challenges in her life hasn't changed. "Not a bit. That's exactly who he was," she declared. "And that's exactly who he is."


The full-length version of this article, "The Book of Romney: The Republican Presidential Candidate's Problem with Women," can be found online at Metro Silicon Valley.

 

This history is important.  It is not suitable for use by the Obama Campaign, but it is relevant to assessing the character and policies this man would bring into office.  President Obama must at least use the next debate opportunity to delineate Mitt Romney's public record of treating women's rights as nothing more than convenient campaign slogans, tailored to the constituency of the moment.  When confronted with his contradictions and hypocrisies on women's reproductive rights -- as he does with all the other issues we listed -- he denies and denies, as if he has, well, "Romnesia" * ...

 

  

Obama ought to go ahead and recite this chameleon's litany of moral hollowness and show Romney's essential contempt for women as being nothing but pawns in his game. 

 

For The Real Romney, there is no doubt that we would all be but pawns in his game.

 

 

* Thanks to Dr. Sam Gould for the Romnesia graphic.

Silver's red flags and Silver linings

Courtesy of Daily Funnies from Keystone Progress, we administer two daily doses of Progressive Humor, a Ben Sargent toon here, and at the end of the post a real-time Daily Doonesbury by Gary Trudeau.

























Ben Sargent graphically illustrates the 21st Century Fox alternative-universe propaganda strategy: Ex-CEO of GE Jack Welch says the Obama campaign made up Friday's jobs report numbers, and Fox News features him and his conjecture as the dominant meme of the day.  They push it to the hilt despite Welch's widely replayed admission that he had "no evidence" whatsoever, and he certainly had no explanation for how this or any administration possibly could secretly dictate or change the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly jobs report. 

The Repubican Party operates in a post-truth alternative universe, but the sad and scary truth is that voters can be won over by lies as well as facts. At least that's the case when the urgency of being informed seems so widely absent among voters, who settle for the nightly news sound bites if they bother at all.  The GOP is out to win votes; if that effort wreaks disabling collateral damage to our Western epistemological traditions, rooted in the Age of Reason and nurtured for centuries in our universities, well... all the better!  

The GOP now actively seeks to destroy public faith the fundamental process of testing evidence to arrive at a consensual base of knowledge.  Whom are you going to believe, your lying eyes or the GOP?  Pay no attention to those droughts, those record high temps, those storms; global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the same people who brought you evolution and the Big Bang.  Science, schmience! 

The Daily Funnies are supposed to make progressives laugh.  That is quite a challenge, as over the last week the humor has felt hollower with each successive poll result reflecting the soft-headed boobery of the American electorate that went all chameleon-like after one 90-minute TV show.

Never mind that we've seen one of these guys operating in the White House for three and-a-half years and the other one out there running for national office for six years!  No, we will toss all that and stake the national future on a 90-minute debate.   

Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight Blog model today has Obama's chances of winning the Electoral College at 71.2%, DOWN from 85% a week ago.  That essentially wipes out the entire Democratic convention bump.  It could be, and possibly will be, worse, says Silver. Depending on the way people respond over the next few days, we could see the percentages move closer than they are now.    

That so many respondents to these polls apparently were persuaded by the display of Romney's scripted, superficial facsimiles of "leadership" -- yet were unimpressed by his numerous, broadly exposed and documented, bare, bold lies -- is daunting and depressing. We have to share a country and a government with people who, according to pundits, have only now awakened to the imminence of a national election. 

On the other hand, this may not be a one-dimensional shift, and some of it may reflect a momentary reaction from supporters.  Some of the poll fluctuations, I believe, have to reflect anger and disappointment experienced by pro-Obama folks who felt betrayed by the president's douchey, distracted, dessicated debate debut.

Now, because we have had such vast opportunity to learn about these two men, I have little regard for people who are seriously persuaded by a debate.  Furthermore, I absolutely do believe that debates are a ridiculously misguided and misguiding model for assessing the relative merits of presidential candidates.

Why are debates a bad way to go? 

First, I am straining my memory to recall one instance over the past five decades in which the POTUS stood on a stage and debated with anyone in the performance of his presidential duties. That is, as an audition for the job, debating is predictive of nothing the candidate will ever do in office.

Secondly, if a staged debate were an effective format to determine the best candidate for a job whose duties involved no such debating, why is it that employers don't use this as the standard approach in evaluating multiple applicants? 

However, despite all my fabulous reasoning, the reality is that we are stuck with the debate format unless and until we develop a better way of publicly interviewing candidates. We can’t reason or wish away the effects of Obama’s debate presence – which was a lot more like an absence. He was at best the absent-minded professor, at worst indifferent and tired.  It pissed off millions of Obama supporters that he appeared not to be fighting as hard for us -- and for himself! -- as we have been fighting for him. 

How can all that pissed-off-ness not be a factor in the newly tightened polling results?

So what silver lining might there be here?   First, that the numbers may reflect but a temporary negative reaction of Obama supporters.  Let me project for a second through sports fan lenses...  once in a while I get very angry at the mistakes my team makes, and I have been known to turn off the TV in disgust.  Give me five minutes, and I invariably come back and start rooting and ranting all over again.  What am I gonna do, give up football?  Root for another team?  Nah.    

Another silver lining is that whatever narrative can be crystallized for so-called swing voters by a 90-minute chief executive flop may be overwritten by subsequent debate showings, starting with Joe Biden’s tomorrow night.  Biden will be standing with Paul Ryan, but he will aim most of his punches at Romney. If Joe carries out his assignment for the team well – an assignment for which he was in part drafted by Team Obama in the first place, it is said – then tens of millions of people will re-see Romney once again, this time as the guy who has no convictions but the will to win at all costs, a man who has said and will say whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear. 

That’s the Essential Romney, the Real Romney, the Romney that Trudeau lampoons in today’s Doonesbury:

Ya get it?  In the last frame he poofs into Opposite-man.  

Many right-wingers detest Mitt Romney for his slippery flop-flippery and his many betrayals of sacred anti-government principles.  But really, when you look at the Real Mitt Romney, he is the perfect fit for the Post-Truth Party.  He perfectly reflects the party whose single enduring ethic is, to invoke the famous one-word mantra of Charlie Sheen on his international tour of manic self-destruction, the ethic of "winning!"

Mitt Romney is precisely what the Repubicans have become. Evidence-free, fact-free, totally devoid of intellectual integrity. If the GOP wins this election, God forbid, then he epitomizes what this country will have become.