Recall all the guff Democrats take for being snobs, for not embracing stock car racking with enough fervor, for being prissy and fussy, like the hated French or all those fags in England. It’s a class thing, showing a lack of authenticity. They, we, are not salt of the earth.
And Mitt Romney’s family ‘sport’ is something the average Tea Party voter could easily watch on the giant flatscreen while crushing an emptied Budweiser can in his right hand.
GLADSTONE, N.J. — Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, who plan to attend the opening of the Olympic Games in London this summer, now have a personal rooting interest in the event.
Jan Ebeling, Mrs. Romney’s longtime riding tutor, and his horse Rafalca, co-owned by Mrs. Romney, earned a berth on the United States Olympic dressage team on Saturday.
Mr. Ebeling, 53, who has spent a decade knocking on the door of top international competition, made his first Olympic team with a third-place finish here at the United States Equestrian Team Foundation headquarters, a century-old stable built by the financier James Cox Brady to adjoin his 64-room mansion.
While Mr. Romney was barnstorming on a bus tour of swing states, Mrs. Romney watched from a V.I.P. tent as Mr. Ebeling executed a smooth “test??? of flying changes, in which Rafalca seemed to skip down the arena, and piaffes, an in-place trot …
As millions tune in to the Olympics in prime time this summer, just before Mr. Romney will be reintroducing himself to the nation at the Republican convention, viewers are likely to see “up close and personal??? segments on NBC about the Romneys and dressage, a sport of six-figure horses and $1,000 saddles. The Romneys declared a loss of $77,000 on their 2010 tax returns for the share in the care and feeding of Rafalca, which Mrs. Romney owns with Mr. Ebeling’s wife, Amy, and a family friend, Beth Meyers.
Remember, ithe horse does not share the nature of its owners. A horse does not choose for whom he trots. I like horses.
Yes, yes, you’re right. A lot of this is about class warfare and hating on the wealthy. Gotta problem with it? What’re you, some kinda commie-loving Euro-homo? I bet you don’t like pig’s feet or blind robbins.
Romney can’t even be mean with any honesty. Even when he’s pandering to viciousness, ignorance and racism, it comes across like a scaly calculation. A guy who feels like he has to take a dump on the N.A.A.C.P. in Houston in order to connect with frustrated white yahoos everywhere else is a guy who has absolutely no social instincts at all. Someone like Jesse Helms at least had a genuine emotional connection with his crazy-mean-stupid audiences …
[Mitt Romney] doesn’t buzz with anything. His vision of humanity is just a million tons of meat floating around in a sea of base calculations. He’s like a teenager who stays up all night thinking of a way to impress the prom queen, and what he comes up with is kicking a kid in a wheelchair. Instincts like those are probably what made him a great leveraged buyout specialist, but in a public figure? Man, is he a disaster. It’s really incredible theater, watching the Republicans talk themselves into this guy.
We got outraised last month, and not by a little bit.
Part Two of getting outraised is getting outspent. That translates into a potentially devastating sweep of negative, misleading messaging that’s going to flood the airwaves in swing states — over and over and over — until November 6th. It’s already started, and it’s only July.
Will you make a donation of $4 or more to help close this gap?
How this election plays out will define our democracy: Can super PACs and hundreds of millions of dollars from Republicans and the Romney campaign — through the brute force of negative advertising alone — drown out millions of voices?
Or can the politics of inclusivity [sic] — asking supporters to chip in $5, $10, $25 at a time — keep the margin close enough to win?
Please donate $4 or more today to close the gap:
https://donate.barackobama.com/Outraised
Thanks,
Julianna Smoot
Deputy Campaign Manager
Obama for America
Julianna Skinner Smoot and Lon Barton Johnson were married Saturday in Northport, Mich. The Rev. Thomas H. John Sr. performed the ceremony at the Northport Indian Mission United Methodist Church, where he is pastor.
The bride, 44, is keeping her name. She works in Chicago as a deputy manager for President Obama’s re-election campaign. Until March, she was the White House social secretary. She graduated from Smith. She is a daughter of Edward B. Smoot and Julia L. Smoot of Willow Springs, N.C.
The bridegroom, 40, is a partner in TVV Capital, a private fund in Nashville that invests in small and midsize manufacturers and other companies, chiefly in the Southeast …
The canvas e-mails from the swells shown in the pages of the New York Times’ wedding section is so not cool.
The husband of the fund-raiser is a partner in a junior league Bain.
Could the machine choose people who aren’t just more shoeshiners for the 0.1 percent and the forces of national entropy?
From images of corporate raiding, to luxury speedboats, to offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, to mega-mansions in the Hamptons, this week’s stories suggest that the candidacy of Mitt Romney – poster-boy for the symbiotic relationship between big money and the modern Republican party – is in serious trouble …
Last weekend’s photos of the Romney clan on a luxury speedboat cruising around a lake in New Hampshire, where their multimillion-dollar compound sits, were startling in their tone-deafness.
What is so very puzzling about the whole episode is the sheer in-your-face-ness of it.
Yet, perhaps that is the point. As a very perceptive article in the New York Magazine, Lisa Miller describes how new psychological research indicates that wealth erodes empathy with others. In the “Money-Empathy Gap”, Miller cites one researcher who says that:
“The rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”
I changed the thumbnail photo on Mean Future, canceling out the “I Love Capitalism” Tea Party man. It’s too disturbed, like watching someone you’re sure has slipped from their prescription drug straight jacket.
I was on Lake Winnipesaukee once, as a child. I accidentally threw a neighbor’s fishing rod overboard with a bungled cast. It was never recovered.
Hank Williams, Jr. has put his new album of mostly Tea Party-themed I-Hate-the-President music, Old School New Rules, on YouTube. You may not be able to get through it. But I listened for you.
Readers may or may not remember Hank lost one of his big money gigs last year, getting tossed as the opening theme to Monday Night Football, for comparing the President to Hitler. Country music did not rally to his cause.
And it won’t this time. Because while the genre and fans won’t tolerate the Dixie Chicks, and even went out of their way to ruin them, they also won’t publicly indulge anything like him.
Darryl Worley found it out with Keep the Change, an anti-Obama single he peddled to the Tea Party, hoping grass roots interest would force country music radio and television to play it. (If Worley made a penny of business value for every play on the fan-made video for it, he’s grossed about 2300 dollars. Boosted to a dime per play it’s still a sub-poverty wage for one office worker with a family. So while the numbers superficially looked like support from the standpoint of a major label artist who had previously had a hit single, they meant nothing.)
The best Darryl Worley could manage was an appearance on Huckabee. His record, promised after the release of the “Keep the Change” single never materialized. Instead, his company went out of business.
Like with Worley, Hank’s dilemma is that country music is emotionally embalmed. (He has also stupidly put his old anti-Obama tune with the exact same title, “Keep the Change,” on the new LP. It smells strongly of desperation.)
It’s classic rock refugee music for white people desperate to hold onto the delusion that if they’re just good enough, family-loving, God worshiping, hard workers, everything will turn out right in the end.
And what strikes fear in them is the wisp of any idea that this isn’t the way things are, that the country they think they live in hasn’t been the way they thought for a long time. Reality, looming over everyone like an unstoppable slow motion avalanche, threatens everything they believe in.
The music must therefore remain cheesy comfort.
Hank Williams Jr. is cheesy but not a comfort. And if there are songs that blame the President for everything, tunes that vow vengeance at the voting booth — well, the audience might find it agreeable privately but they won’t buy it and country music radio won’t play it. All the buxom young cut-off wearing girls on the summer tour circuit will find the mood harshed by Hank’s clumsy song to the small businessman, “Who’s Lookin’ Out for Number One.”
Counry music fans just don’t, don’t, don’t want trouble.
And Hank’s music is angry and a bit psychologically troubling but also not that great, expertly played by ringers and sung in two ways, either as a smooth ham or a mild boor tilting at the government.
In other words, if you want to have a genuine shit fit maybe you should really have one, instead of a big Nashville-session-man-and-buddies-middle-of-the-road imitation of it.
“I want to dedicate this song to every working man and woman in this country and everyone trying to run a business constantly punished, taxed and regulated by the federal government,” declares Hank Jr on the previously mentioned small businessman’s anthem.
“Our glorious leader just got back from China and Japan where he gave away our jobs, put us down and sold out our plans,” he sings. “We don’t need to be givin’ all that money away to other folks.”
It just doesn’t work as catchy music.
The first tune, “Takin’ Back the Country,” features his dead dad, autotuned. One presumes a few people in the studio thought this a bad idea but declined to say anything on the matter.
Hank Williams, Jr would desperately love Cow Turd Blues, from his new album, to be a Tea Party anthem.
This week, we learned that Mitt Romney and the Republican Party outraised us for the second month in a row. This time, it was by more than $35 million.
Now, we don’t need to win the fundraising race to beat Mitt Romney. But the gap is growing at an alarming rate, and if we don’t start closing that gap right now, it will be too late.
It’s up to you.
President Obama and Democrats across the country are counting on our grassroots operation. Please donate $3 or more today.
In 2008, we showed that elections can be waged, and won, based on the idea that many voices could overpower those of a few.
And it worked.
This year, we need to prove it in the face of unprecedented spending from super PACs and outside groups. We need to show that ordinary people can still control the outcome of an election.
I hope you’re ready to fight — one supporter, one dollar at a time.
Let’s show what we’re made of. Pitch in whatever you can to help close the fundraising gap today:
Hildy Kuryk, the daughter of Judith Frisch Kuryk and David Kuryk, both of New York, is to be married this evening to Jarrod Neal Bernstein, a son of Roberta and Edward Bernstein of Merrick, N.Y. Rabbi Joseph Menashe is to officiate at Sky Studios, a loft in New York.
The bride, 29, is a political fund-raiser in New York. She is the senior New York finance consultant for Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. She graduated from Vanderbilt.
Her father is the director of editorial services at Barnes & Noble in New York, where he writes documents for the corporate communications department. Her mother retired as a creative director at Grey Advertising in New York.
Every other day, the Daily Dun depreciates a little more, the salami sliced a little thinner. From $5, now to $3.
The misconduct of the financial industry no longer surprises most Americans. Only about one in five has much trust in banks, according to Gallup polls, about half the level in 2007. And it’s not just banks that are frowned upon. Trust in big business overall is declining. Sixty-two percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread across corporate America. According to Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, nearly three in four Americans believe that corruption has increased over the last three years.
We should be alarmed that corporate wrongdoing has come to be seen as such a routine occurrence. Capitalism cannot function without trust. As the Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow observed, “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust.???
The parade of financiers accused of misdeeds, booted from the executive suite and even occasionally jailed, is undermining this essential element. Have corporations lost whatever ethical compass they once had? Or does it just look that way because we are paying more attention than we used to?
The story is not the best the Times could have done.
The truth is more complicated. In anonymous polls, and to friends at home, a majority of Americans may say they don’t trust corporate America. However, in public it’s another matter.
My frequent impression is that, no matter how poorly they have been treated by a rigged economic system, many resent being told it is that way because of moral failure in big business.
Pity the Billionaire portrays it well. When many people were the most riled up about the economic collapse, they were told a fabulist’s story on how it was big government’s fault. And that if big government hadn’t been so corrupt and tyrannical, the banks would have never had to give all those loans to people who didn’t deserve them.
Pure unfettered capitalism is the answer and the economic collapse occurred because we no longer had it.
If, indeed, Americans distrust corporate America, why is it so easy to find examples like the pugnacious-looking fellow in Mean Future, marching along with his absurd “I Love Capitalism” sign?
“It’s hard to fathom the broader social implications of corporate wrongdoing,” reads the chin-scratcher at the Times. “But its most long-lasting impact may be on Americans’ trust in the institutions that underpin the nation’s liberal market democracy.”
Even the journalist, given an opportunity to state the obvious, hedges his bets. Working and playing in Wall Street’s backyard, he has too much to lose.
“This is stewpit blah blah blah,” wrote a 61 year-old white guy before I sent him to the trash can.
We’re getting outraised — a first for a sitting president, if this continues. Not just by the super PACs and outside groups that are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into misleading ads, but by our opponent and the Republican Party, which just outraised us for the second month in a row.
We can win a race in which the other side spends more than we do. But not this much more.
So I need your help. If you believe that regular people should decide elections, then please chip in $4 or more today.
This isn’t about me or the outcome of one election.
This election will be a test of the model that got us here. We’ll learn whether it’s still true that a grassroots campaign can elect a president — whether ordinary Americans are in control of our democracy in the face of massive spending.
I believe we can do this. When all of us chip in what we can, when we can, we are the most powerful force in politics.
But today is the day to prove it. Donate now:
https://donate.barackobama.com/Outraised
Thank you — for everything you’ve done before and everything you’re doing now. It matters.
Barack
Mr. President, can’t help. Broke and strapped in the economy that makes and does nothing except sell apps, smartphones, financial services, arms and artisan goods for the wealthy.
But you’re on the right track. Be more populist, I know it’s hard. Play the class warfare hand for everything. It may not be too late.
Mitt Romney should have been an easy mark but you tried to work with the enemy and they tied you up and imposed their will on the country through paralysis, sabotaging the economy and you.
Now you must spend all your time pointing out the obvious, that Mitt Romney is as odious an example of great wealth and indifference toward everyone else in 2012 America as there is.
That might win it. But I won’t be part of the crowd-sourced money thing anymore. I don’t have the juice to fight Citizens United and crazy right-wing sugar daddies, not even close. And if I’m going to be another grain of sand on the beach at least it will be with another four dollars in my pocket. No more celebrity lottery tickets. I don’t believe in them anymore than I believe that if I drop a few extra at the liquor store on a state-issued piece of paper it might pay off.
In fact, that’s what the automated Daily Dun means to me. Another day at the liquor store watching someone else stupidly purchase a Five Dollar Scratcher. I’ll keep that cash money and buy something cheap and intoxicating at Trader Joe’s instead.
I know I am setting a bad example but in this way I do my part to help the economy keep limping along.
And I’ve given you this funny little story and a song.
David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, his account of the policy-makers in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the nature of the Vietnam disaster, is a classic on the delusions of American power. Everything Halberstam described then is present today. Only conditions and decision-making at the highest level are more deteriorated.
This voluminous book maps the roots of the war in post WWII decision making and American dealings in China as the communist insurgency battled with an American client named Chiang Kai Shek, a man who’d been an ally against the Japanese.
Th Americans on the ground in China, diplomats and old soldiers like Joe Stilwell, knew the Chinese detested Chiang, a descendant of mandarins, and that there was no popular support for him. China was going to crumble, the communists were going to win and take power. Despite having people who knew the score the US government backed the wrong horse.
Truman became known as the President who lost China to communism.
The McCarthy era was ushered in and everyone who had a rational idea about what to do in southeast Asia was either tarred or banished in the hysteria over alleged communist infiltration of US government.
As a result, America’s leaders, including those in the Eisenhoiwer and Kennedy administrations, refused to view the Vietnam insurgency, first with the Vietminh against France and later the Vietcong in the south, as an anti-colonial struggle deeply rooted in the people of that country.
Only the views that Communism was monolithic, that every Communist country was exactly the same as Joe Stalin’s Soviet Union, were allowed to prevail.
Thus was born the Domino Theory, as countries — one after another, tipping into each other — would be said to fall if the Communists were not stopped in one poor small nation which had waged an endless war to free itself from western colonialism.
Anyone with dissenting views was purged or learned to be silent. The role of the State Department became virtually non-existent, except as an adjunct to the Pentagon.
The decision-makers held the beliefs, common now, that American technological supremacy and military might were the only answers. The government became obsessed with quantifying the unquantifiable, believing that if enough bodies were amassed (today, it’s the tabulation of al Qaeda and Taliban leaders killed in drone strikes, always advertised as a new kind of war), enough tonnage in bombs dropped, the Vietcong would be beaten.
Reports from the field that programs like the making of “strategic hamlets” in the Mekong Delta were a complete failure, that the Vietcong were much better than the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, that the enemy controlled most of the places continuously claimed to be pacified by the US military, that the natives — as with the Chiang government in China, despised the Diem government in Saigon, were either sanitized or completely suppressed. Critics were silenced. If you were right, you were fired. If you were wrong you were promoted.
Today there is no David Halberstam, or Neil Sheehan or Malcolm Browne to make news reports and books that would expose such matters.
Still, news can be gleaned of the same fossilized strategy at the top, the poisoning of critical thinking so that nothing is allowed to get in the way of the prosecution of war.
The US isn’t fighting communism and it is not in a country struggling to rid itself of foreign interference. Vietnam deeply damaged faith in the US military as an institution. It had cost 60,000 lives. Today, American faith in the military remains high, one assumes at least part due to the fact that almost all of us have not had to go to war. In the Sixties many Americans could name General William Westmoreland and Secretary of Defense Bob McNamara. Today nobody knows the names of American fighting generals. And only perhaps slightly over half of the educated could probably name the fellow who is the definition of the
civilian functionary, the Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta.
But al Qaeda has been substituted for communism and the endless battleground has become the failed states of the Middle East, Asia and Africa
In these places, the war can never end because all insurgencies and very little wars between bad people are viewed through a dark lens created on 9/11, one that colors the world much as the old Cold Warriors saw communism, a monolithic threat that can only be smashed by the immediate application of military power before it poses a threat to the homeland.
With such thinking ascendant every failed country becomes a place where the line must be held.
[The] crash in Mali has revealed some details of the commandos’ clandestine activities that apparently had little to do with counterterrorism. The women killed in the wreck were identified as Moroccan prostitutes who had been riding with the soldiers, according to a senior Army official and a U.S. counterterrorism consultant briefed on the incident, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
U.S. counterterrorism officials have long worried about Mali, a weakly governed country of 14.5 million people that has served as a refuge for Islamist militants allied with al-Qaeda.
With only 6,000 poorly equipped troops, the Malian armed forces have always struggled to maintain control of their territory, about twice the size of Texas …
About six years ago, the Pentagon began bolstering its overt aid and training programs in Mali, as well as its clandestine operations …
In what would have represented a significant escalation of U.S. military involvement in Mali, the Pentagon also considered a secret plan in 2009 to embed American commandos with Malian ground troops, diplomatic cables show.
Under that program, code-named Oasis Enabler, U.S. military advisers would conduct anti-terrorism operations alongside elite, American-trained Malian units. But the idea was rejected by Gillian A. Milovanovic, the ambassador to Mali at the time.
In an October 2009 meeting in Bamako with Vice Adm. Robert T. Moeller, deputy chief of the Africa Command, the ambassador called the plan “extremely problematic,??? adding that it could create a popular backlash and “risk infuriating??? neighbors such as Algeria.
It might as well be taken from the pages of The Best and the Brightest in its disregard of the State Department in favor of whatever the US military wishes to do.
Once again, the military, which runs our wars, as decades ago, brooks no interference. The security bureaucracy wants someone from the State Department ousted. After more than a decade of war, the US military and national security leadership are now as rotted as they were during Vietnam.
Paradoxically, it’s Richard Holbrooke who the military core of Obama’s advisory group wanted deposed. Holbrooke was actually a young man at the Paris peace talks which were the beginning of the end of the US involvement in Vietnam. Only intervention by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, momentarily saved his job, according to the Post’s reporter. Eventually the military’s problem was solved: Holbrooke died two years ago.
As in Vietnam, where the people loathed the government propped up by American forces, the Afghan people — logically — despise the American toady in Kabul, Hamid Karzai. If there was any goodwill after the Taliban were overthrown, it was lost many years ago:
In Afghanistan, the military surge, argues Chandrasekaran, was a mistake.
“What we fail to understand was that the Afghan people largely wanted to be left alone and they hate their government, in many cases, as much as they hate the insurgents. And when we went to them and said, ‘Ah, we’re coming here to help bring your government to you.’ They said, ‘Whoa we don’t want our government!’
It’s presented as diverting froth from the war on terror, something to be clucked over on the evening news for a few minutes. And so it will be taken.
This morning it was Anne Marie Habershaw, asking for four bucks. This afternoon, it’s Patrick Gaspard of the DNC, depreciating the request to three dollars, perhaps detecting a loss of enthusiasm among the crowd-sourced:
George —
Our fundraising numbers from June are in. Along with President Obama’s campaign, we raised $71 million, making this month our biggest yet. That’s something to be proud of.
But we still got beat. Mitt Romney and the Republican Party raised more than $106 million — making it the second month in a row that they outraised us, this time by $35 million.
That’s a big gap. And if we don’t do everything we can to close it now, we risk losing more than just a fundraising race in November.
Donate $3 or more today to close the gap.
We’ve got to do everything we can to put a stop to the Republican momentum — so donate $3 or whatever you can to close the gap. It can’t wait another day …
Another day, another robotic minion to send the plea:
George —
Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.
Good news first: June was our best fundraising month yet. We exceeded expectations — more than 706,000 people like you stepped up and pitched in for a grand total of $71 million raised for this campaign and the Democratic Party.
Bravo. That’s seriously impressive.
Bad news? We still got beat. Handily. Romney and the RNC pulled in a whopping $106 million.
So, to recap: We had our best fundraising month yet, and we still fell about $35 million short. We can win while being outspent — but we need to keep it close.
You know what that means. We’ve got some work to do.
Pitch in $4 or more right now to start closing the gap.
This is no joke. If we can’t keep the money race close, it becomes that much harder to win in November.
But this election isn’t about how much money our campaigns can raise — none of us would be fighting this hard just to win a money war. We’re here because we believe in something bigger — because none of us wants to see this country go back to the policies that drove our economy into a ditch, which is exactly what the other side wants to do.
Whatever it is that brings you to this fight, what happens next is up to you. Donate today:
EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. – As protesters assembled on a beach in advance of Mitt Romney’s evening event at the home of conservative billionaire David Koch, the candidate slipped to East Hampton for his first of three fundraisers on this tony stretch of Long Island.
The line of Range Rovers, BMWs, Porsche roadsters and one gleaming cherry red Ferrari began queuing outside of Revlon Chairman Ronald Perelman’s estate off Montauk Highway long before Romney arrived, as campaign aides and staffers in white polo shirts emblazoned with the logo of Perelman’s property — the Creeks — checked off names under tight security.
They came with high hopes for the presumed Republican nominee, who is locked in a tight race with President Obama. And some were eager to give the candidate some advice about the next four months …
A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. “I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.
“We’ve got the message,” she added. “But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact …”
“It’s not helping the economy to pit the people who are the engine of the economy against the people who rely on that engine,” Michael Zambrelli said as the couple waited in their SUV for clearance into the Creeks shortly after the candidate’s motorcade flew by and entered the pine-tree lined estate. “He’s basically been biting the hand that fed him in ’08. … I would bet 25% of the people here were supporters of Obama in ’08. And they’re here now.”
I’m all for total class warfare but I’m not interested in a crowd-sourced competition with these people.
The Comedian, in Watchmen, right before he shoots someone with a tear gas round: “What happened to the American Dream? It came true. You’re lookin’ at it.”
