From his Leno sit-down:
Though Mr. Romney has devoted much of his campaign to promising to get the federal budget in order, he dodged a question about whether he’ll name the federal agencies he’d like to cut. “Depends on whether I have that answer to that,” Mr. Romney said.
Huh?
I mean, I know that Romney is trying to do everything he can to avoid the career ending disaster of actually detailing the plans behind the impossible claims he’s made about the taxes, budget, and the stuff he’s going to cut that no one beyond the 27% wants to see drowned in the bathtub. But even with that goal, this with Leno is simply nonsense, vapor, word salad worthy of a Palin. “Depends on whether I have that answer to that” ! ?
Dude: you do have that answer. It’s your proposal. Your campaign. You can say it: you’re going to put most of us on the rack so that the Nascar owners and your Malibu neighbors can grab a bit more. Get it off your chest. You’ll feel so much better…
Instead we get an answer that is composed of equal parts contempt for his fellow citizens and a banality so deep it blows right past Arendt’s evil and catches up to the absurd well before the ringmaster calls the blow off.
This is the man that thinks he’s suited to the presidency. And in head to head polls dangerously more than 40% of American voters agree with him.
I’m bringing out the heavy artillery. Brandy till bedtime, my friends.*
*It’s all good news for John McCain.
Image: Henry Justice Ford, The Circus, 1904
[Cross posted at The Inverse Square Blog]
Martin
Sorry, the man currently starring as the serious conservative doesn’t see that in the script.
Comrade Mary
How about “Mitt Romney: Viscous, Yet Airy”?
lamh35
I completely forgot that Romney was on Leno tonight. I’m not surprised though Letterman would annihilate him.
I don’t supposed outside of reading the top 10 list (Romeny did that last campaign season right???), I bet Romney ain’t going near Dave.
BTW, I completely missed Laewrence O’Donnell tonight, but I hear from the twitterverse that O’Donnell, Charles Blow and Jonathan Capeheart(???) did a tag team on ole Joe Oliver (friend of Zimmerman) that he won’t soon forget. Did anyone see it?
Hill Dweller
Relative to the amount of readily available factual information, we have arguably the most ignorant electorate in human history.
Debbie(aussie)
VERY SCARY MAN!
ChrisNYC
We can’t even pin him down on being slippery because he’s switched to total incoherence. Just slamming words together in any old way. Smart politics!
Comrade Mary
@lamh35: You can find the videos and extra commentary at TLW blog here. It’s pretty intense.
(I cancelled cable a month ago and now get a handful of crisp HD channels over the air with a $15 antenna. I thought I’d miss MSNBC more, but this was the first time I felt compelled to dig up online video for a show. Freedom!)
lamh35
@Comrade Mary: I don’t think it’s up yet. I’m going to set my DVR for the repeat though.
David Koch
@Comrade Mary: you can always tune into MSNBC on a delayed basis here http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3096434/
KG
Everyone likes the idea of a balanced budget. Everyone likes government programs like social security, defense contracts, homeland security contracts, roads, and what not. Everyone take safe food, water, and air for granted. Everyone likes low taxes. Unfortunately, having all of those things are rather difficult
texascowgirl
Good Lord the moron actually makes the case for the mandate in the interview.
beltane
Mitt Romney truly is the nothingburger of presidential candidates.
gnomedad
Romney will get the nom and lose because he wasn’t conservative enough and zombie ACORN also, too. Second verse, same as the first.
Comrade Mary
@lamh35: Aw, sorry, I misread and thought you were talking about yesterday’s show. They do get the shows up the same night, though, so it might be on the web before the repeat.
@David Koch: Whoa. Thanks! I see Rachel talking about Gingrich cutting his campaign staff by a third. How delayed is that? Two hours from the 9 PM broadcast?
Jibeaux
Wait a minute. His previous answer was that he wasn’t going to tell us what he was going to cut, because he lost elections that way. Because voters unfairly assume that just because you want to eliminate the department of education, you have a problem with education. It was a bad policy-bad politics twofer. Has he just switched to nonsense now? Did someone maybe slip him a beer or something?
David Koch
Scalia (Mr. Judicial Restraint) says the key to reducing health care cost is
euthanizing, I meanliquidating, I mean eliminating those with pre-existing conditions:KG
@texascowgirl: Romney’s administration would consider an individual’s circumstances on pre-existing conditions? So, they are going to personally review every case? Seriously?
Jibeaux
Also too, I am remembering an old episode of MST 3k in which the guys said ” I’m sorry, no. I will not accept this as our hero.” If I were Republican, how could I not feel that way?
jwb
Slightly OT: Went to a Gooper meet and greet for candidates running for county commissioner tonight. The candidates, except one, were mostly sane, but the audience—the debate audiences were not anomalous: these people are freaking nuts!
S. cerevisiae
That painting gave me flashbacks of It
Like Pennywise, Romney can take on the shape of whatever scares his audience.
El Cid
Well, he has 3 departments he’s going to completely eliminate. One, well, uh, or something…
I forgot.
OOPS!
lamh35
@Comrade Mary: Mediaite has the video
Lawrence O’Donnell And Charles Blow Give George Zimmerman Pal Joe Oliver Epic Grilling
mai naem
I think the manadates gonna go down in the USSC and that’s okay. It ain’t gonna kill the rest of the legislation.
Also too, Letterman should have had Maddow on with the Mittster.
Also also too, Anne Laurie needs to do an update on the lexicon. Etch a Sketch anyone??? anyone???
Roger Moore
@KG:
Actually, having all those things is easy, just not for everyone. Romney wants to make sure that the rich people have low taxes, so if the rest of us want nice things we’ll have to pony up.
Jibeaux
Oh one more thing, sorry for the spamming. Going to bed soon. So I read the Leno thing where he plays a word association game with Romney…pollsters did that too, about Romney. One word, off the cuff, whatever comes to mind, go. The number one response was just “no.” So beautiful.
Roger Moore
@KG:
Sounds like a death panel to me.
lacp
@S. cerevisiae: “We all float down here.” – The 99%
Comrade Mary
@lamh35: Thanks! I’ll start watching it now.
__
It looks as if Oliver has more guts, if less sense, than Zimmerman’s lawyer:
BGinCHI
My guess he’s going to cut the regulations on car elevators. And I’m with him on that. The takers really need to back off the raising and lowering of collector cars. Otherwise we’ll never turn this economy around.
Satanicpanic
@BGinCHI: Those car elevators are the McCain houses of this election cycle.
Ira-NY
Romney simply does not have the skill sets necessary to be a national pol.
It is difficult for me to watch him. I find myself changing the channel when he appears on camera in order to avoid the discomfort associated with witnessing him thrash about.
Does anyone else do this?
Comrade Mary
OK, this Joe Oliver interview is a bit of a train wreck so far. O’Donnell and Blow have made some good points — Oliver’s “gut feelings”, his claims that Zimmerman has specific injuries that are based on Zimmerman’s claims but not his own viewing — but they are also being real dicks, talking over him and claiming that he says Zimmerman is a close friend. (He may have done this in other interviews, but not in this one, I think.)
Anyway, the “goons” claim now …
Hill Dweller
@mai naem: Without the mandate, and the preexisting condition ban still in place, premiums are going to explode. Once premiums skyrocket, less people will get insurance. Fewer customers means higher premiums for existing customers. Higher costs means less customers, etc. It’s called adverse selection/’death spiral’.
Insurance companies will be in court within days of the SC decision trying to get the preexisting condition ban lifted.
Yes, the mandate sucks, but it is there for a reason(increasing the risk pool). Without it, the whole thing is counter-productive, and ultimately falls apart.
ChrisNYC
OT – Good news. Jonah Goldberg is opining on the “black upper class.” What’s the basis of his knowledge, you ask? Why his own suppositions as to the lives, feelings and grave errors of reasoning of black political commentators and columnists, of course. The word “hunch” is used.
BGinCHI
@Comrade Mary: I hear you, but if a friend of yours kills a 17-year-old kid, would you go on national TV to defend him because you think he’s a good guy?
__
My blanket statement for these people is simple: it doesn’t matter if there was a fight, or if Trayvon Martin was sick of some white dude following him and punched him. Shooting him to death was not a defensible response.
__
Who are all these guys defending this sort of shit? Pants-pissers who act tough and carry guns in case anything happens. It’s pathetic.
__
Plus the racism this has brought out makes it clear that this country has a long way to go.
Mike in NC
@Ira-NY:
Yes. He’s Dubya without the recovering alcoholic issues: a rich bastard who never did an honest day’s work in his entire worthless fucking life, who cannot connect to anybody else who’s not a rich entitled pandering asshole like himself.
Comrade Mary
@BGinCHI: Now that I’ve seen the rest of the interview, I am still trying to figure out why Oliver jumped into the media, because, yeah, he may not have claimed in as many words that Zimmerman was a close friend, but it was certainly implied in his statements as a group — which he backed off from in the last part of the interview. Wow.
I still think the interview was a bit roughshod, but overall, O’Donnell, Blow and Capeheart yanked out some information few other people in the media went looking for.
Amir Khalid
You go on late-night TV, they only ask you softball questions. That wasn’t even a tough question from Leno. Romney is so easily thrown off-balance. Even if they don’t mind that he’s Mr Transparent Phony, or that he’s an adherent of some weird kind-of-Christian cult, people will want a president who won’t get flustered easily in a crisis, and Mitt hasn’t learned to look like that kind of guy.
BGinCHI
@Comrade Mary: And I’m afraid that’s the only way someone is going to commit an act of journalism.
__
Did you see last night’s show with that reporter from the Orlando Sentinel? Lawrence grilled her about how she could print a story where she accepted a number of things as “fact” that are anything but, and she had no answer. A reporter who is willing to take the police’s version and print it as fact is deciding the case before it gets to trial. And in this case, particularly, that is damaging, since at this rate it may never get to trial due to police incompetence.
__
These are the challenges that have to be made to upholders of the status quo (“journalists” and pundits).
Xenos
@Hill Dweller: This is the long-term advantage for the Democrats – even if the policy is questionable in some way, it is reasonably coherent, and it actually exists. You can’t fight something with nothing, and the GOP really has nothing. If they win this case in court, if they win in 2012, we will all wind up where we were in 2008. And nobody wants to be there.
The profound cynicism with which they stirred up the Tea Party has resulted in a short-term advantages, but in the long-term they can not deal with the contradictions.
danielx
At least some of you actually had the stomach to stay around and watch Leno lobbing softballs. I heard the introduction and saw that simulacrum of a human being come out on stage and could tolerate no more.
BGinCHI
@Amir Khalid: The right wing and the money boys want a guy who won’t get flustered when they tell him what to do.
__
They might be afraid he’ll be unwilling or unable to crush the little people under his heel.
texascowgirl
@Hill Dweller: Thank. Jesus, if only people understood risk pooling and adverse selection. People really think you can get all of the goodies and not pay for it. Including liberals apparently. Don’t people understand that they would have passed a bill with nothing, but goodies if they could have? The ACA doesn’t work without the mandate whether people like it or not.
El Cid
You all laughed at John McCain when he said that the big Arizona / Southwest wildfires were caused by the illegal Mezzkins.
Well, who’s laughing now?
Though the two were not illegal Mezzkins and look thoroughly white, it can’t be helped that (a) burned stuff is dark and (b) Mezzkins are dark, so, you know, duh!
El Cid
@ChrisNYC: A hunch is central to his point. His points are not one dimensional, but broad, such that they need centers. Presumably one does not wish to see the extremities of Jonah’s points.
Redshift
@BGinCHI:
FTFY
Martin
@El Cid: Conservatives always, always punch down.
BGinCHI
@El Cid: The only time Jonah Fatfuck Goldberg roots for a black man to succeed is when he’s watching a Knicks game.
Karen
@BGinCHI
The racism this has brought out, including the GOP’s response to Obama’s attempt to sympathize with the parents of Trayvon has made it clear to me that unless Romney fucks up bad enough to piss off the GOP (who are the only ones who will be motivated to vote since they hate the President) he will either squeak a win or will make it in a landslide. I see the Romney superpacs and the zillions of groups that will be funding his campaign playing back Obama’s words out of context and have Obama’s picture morph into Treyvon’s.
And hearing the Jay Leno audience clap wildly and whoop when Mitt Romney says he’ll repeal Obamacare doesn’t fill me with any more confidence.
Hill Dweller
@Xenos: Provided the soulless bastards on the SC don’t kill the entire law.
There is no severability clause(by design). If the mandate is unconstitutional, they can kill the whole thing.
mai naem
@Hill Dweller: I don’t think the mandate sucks but you aren’t going to get rid of the other stuff thats already in. Also, big business is counting on this. Its a better deal for them. Also too, what do the republicans have? What’s Romney’s alternative? Real death panels? We’ll see how that goes over with the American public.
Redshift
@Amir Khalid: The bizarre thing about Romney (and occasionally his campaign officials) is not that they try to duck questions, or plan to shift positions between the primaries and the general election (lots of campaigns do that), it’s that they can’t seem to stop talking about how they’re going to do it. It’s even more bizarre that it seems to be the only thing they tell the truth about.
Comrade Mary
@BGinCHI: Yeah, I saw that one, too. She was PISSED. I also noticed that the story was revised at some point just before or after the interview. Yesterday afternoon I saw some word for word quotes reflecting some of O’Donnell’s questions, such as stating Zimmerman’s claims without ascribing them to him, but the rewritten paragraph made it clear in every sentence that each claim was “according to” Zimmerman.
David Koch
@El Cid: Well, at least that time, McCain only blamed the mexicans and not the moooslims.
Hill Dweller
@Karen:
As I said earlier in the thread, we have the most ignorant electorate in human history.
Martin
Oh, and they’re lucky they got off with a year + 10 grand. Law is that you cover firefighting costs and are criminally responsible for any fatalities. I believe that fire killed 5 people. Not as lucky as shooting a black teen in Florida, just to watch him die – but pretty damn lucky.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Comrade Mary:
A couple of things from that interview with Joe Oliver stuck out:
1) LOD mentioned that Joe was a reporter for CNN, I do seem to remember him. He knew how these interviews are conducted, time constrained, and LOD knew he knew.
2) Oliver doesn’t know Zimmerman well, more of aquantance.
3) Zimmerman had gone through anger managment sessions after his arrest (court ordered?)
4) Oliver said that Zimmerman may have been drinking when he was arrested, but also said that he didn’t drink at family gatherings.
Redshift
@Karen:
And why do you think that would help him? He needs a lot more than the racist Republican base to even come close to winning. Do you really believe there’s a big pool of racists out there who aren’t in the Republican Party?
Karen
I know that I’ve been passionate about politics since I moved from NY to Maryland in 1988 but since 2008 I’ve really become emotionally invested. For this election, emotionally involved is an understatement. I’ve reached a point where if I hear a celebrity (a singer or an actor) are for Ron Paul or Mitt Romney or (G-d forbid) I want to boycott their movie, TV show or music. I don’t think I could be friends with someone anymore if they’re for the current GOP. I watch MSNBC all the time and when Rachel Maddow spoke about how it was against Florida law to register someone to vote, I was in tears. I’ve become so filled with rage that on other message boards – like Yahoo or Salon, the stuff I spew is horrible and I know that I shouldn’t.
Has anyone else reached this point either now or in the past and if so, how have they managed to untangle and unmesh themselves because seriously, all that hate isn’t good for me.
Comrade Mary
@BillinGlendaleCA: Oh, I missed that bit about CNN. Wow.
__
So maybe he fancies himself not just a journalist, but an iconoclast with special insights (or gut instincts), and he thinks the media just doesn’t get his work buddy the way he does. And getting back on air as an expert, and getting more and more attention, and picking more and more challenging venues, might be an adrenaline thing.
Narcissus
“I’m not going to answer that until I have an answer for that.”
David Koch
Elena Kagan was really impressive in today’s oral arguments. I looked up her wiki page and it turns out that she was the first ever female dean of harvard law and first ever female solicitor general. I did not know this. What stuns me is, given these achievements, how some online “liberals” smeared as unqualified to sit on the bench when she was nominated. Even the libural Rachel Maddow tried to smear, calling Kagan another Harriet Miers. how sad. Liberals can be their own worst enemies.
Hill Dweller
@mai naem: The insurance companies have no interest in insuring sick people(it lowers their profits), which is why they dreamed up using preexisting conditions to deny coverage.
Without the mandate, which increases their number of customers and compensates for their increase in costs, insurance companies will want the ban on preexisting conditions(and lifetime caps, etc.) lifted.
Again, forcing insurance companies to insure sick people without the mandate in place, costs are going to explode, which will lead to adverse selection/death spiral, and far less people being insured. Absent single-payer, the mandate is vital.
David Koch
@Hill Dweller: I wouldn’t be surprised if Mittens stacked the audience with supporters the way he did during the CNN debate before the florida primary.
The prophet Nostradumbass
re: the Individual Mandate, if that gets thrown out, how long until we get lawsuits claiming that forcing drivers to get auto insurance is unconstitutional?
Alison
@Karen: Trust me – you are not alone. I get so fucking worked up and pissed sometimes that I have to force myself to walk away from the laptop and go sit on the balcony or pet the cat or something.
The thing for me lately is that it’s not just about policy differences or whatever, it’s that the other side is just so blatantly cruel and hateful and vindictive, that they care not even one iota about anyone except themselves and their rich friends, that they have no compassion, no heart, no nothing, and they think it’s perfectly good to be that way. They want to make the rest of us live according to their Dickensian hellscape views. And along with all of that, they paint us as being the horrible ones – the “socialists”, the baby-killers, the nanny state, blah blah. They lie and deceive and laugh about it and they take so many people in that it makes you wonder if God decided back in the 50s to only give out brains to every fifth comer or something.
I can’t tell you how to handle it because I don’t handle it all that well myself. I think we just need to do what we do, support good candidates, try like hell to push back. I do think they are starting to do themselves in by going as insanely far to the right as they have, and I think we need to keep digging at that. But they always seem to find ways to work their bullshit anyway, don’t they?
Sigh. I probably just made you feel worse. Sorry.
BGinCHI
@David Koch: You know how you stack a Leno audience?
__
You just open the doors and let them sit down.
__
I don’t think hipsters in Brooklyn are planning their vacations around scoring tix to Leno. It’s the Lawrence Welk of talk shows.
BGinCHI
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Not a federal law. States have much more leniency to pass laws like that. This is the problem/crux of “enumerated powers” at the federal level.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Karen:
Screw the message boards and the rage, just get to work.
__
Since you’re in Maryland, best thing to do is to go up to PA and start working on helping people get the ID to register to vote. The sonsabitches just passed a “strict” voter ID law.
__
I’ve knocked on doors and worked the polls since 2004. Again, South PA (It’s Alabama up the middle!) could use your help.
Xenos
@The prophet Nostradumbass: The federal government can’t compel you to buy insurance (unless you live in DC), only the states can do that. That is at least the argument. Given the way the constitution works, it is not a bad argument.
If a state allowed insurance companies to sell useless policies to non-residents, with the result that lots of uninsured drivers were causing uncovered accidents around the country, then there would be a basis for Congress, under the Commerce Clause, to preempt state law by regulating the car insurance business. It would be quite a cut-and-dried analysis. As a fact pattern it is very close to what has happened to the health insurance business.
Redshift
@Karen: One thing I can suggest — a few years ago, when I was involved in political discussions on a lot of sites (and in person), I made the only New Year’s resolution I’ve ever kept, and it was a really good one. It was “don’t get into arguments with idiots.” What it really means is don’t jump into an argument with people you know you’re never going to convince, just because you can’t let it pass when you know how wrong they are.
The thing I discovered is that even if you intend to just leave that one comment laying out the facts, once you do, you’re involved, and it’s very hard not to look again, and then very hard to ever get out of your head what was said in response, so you have to respond again, and the cycle goes on. Let’s just say that there were some days when I didn’t get any work done because I was too caught up in arguing with idiots.
Most comment sections are sewers. Only participate in the ones where you either genuinely enjoy participating (which is why I’m here and not on most of the sites I used to go to), or ones that contribute to actually doing something about the things that enrage you. (Hopefully most of those will be enjoyable too, but sometimes work is work and not fun.)
And finally, put the rage to use offline. Other than fundraising and promoting candidates, there’s not much you can do online that actually helps stop the things that enrage you. Blowing off steam online is okay, but it’s like putting up yard signs — it can make you feel like you’ve done something when you haven’t really. Promoting this right-wing crap has been a long-term effort, and stopping it is going to be a long fight, too, but we can win and it will be worth it.
Karen
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
I have no car and don’t drive…along with having Rheumatoid arthritis. But if you pick me up, I can try to register people. I don’t know how well you know Maryland but I’m in Silver Spring.
Yutsano
I can’t even shake my head at Willard anymore. It’s like he genuinely has no clue how he’s supposed to act to appeal to a majority of people. In a way it’s comic, in another it’s just sad.
Cacti
@Ira-NY:
Romney is winning by virtue of being the best-funded and organized member of the Junior Varsity team.
ChrisNYC
@El Cid: Indeed!
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Karen:
ell, when it gets down to the wire, you’ll probably be able to join in, regardless of transportation hassles. In the 2004 election, the campaign organized buses from DC to York. I know, ’cause I filled up my car with volunteers and we all knocked on doors together. OFA should be able to hook you up.
__
Obama’s campaign was so organized in 2008 they had me knockin’ on farmhouse doors in Hopewell Township ’cause York was already covered.
__
In the meantime, Voter ID and registration is the immediate need. There’s a black fraternity/sorority organizing this nationwide, I think, but I can’t remember who.
Yutsano
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: There are the droids you’re looking for.
Catsy
@Karen: I completely, 100% grok where you’re coming from. I’m there myself. The contemporary Republican party is so invested with lies, hate, fearmongering and the celebration of ignorance and nihilism that I just can’t give anyone who still supports it the benefit of the doubt as a good person. Their party is on the brink of being overrun by what is literally a fascist movement and their silence is acquiescence.
David Koch
@Redshift: That happens here all the time. There’s a handful of green party types who pop in and say there’s no difference btwn Pelosi and Boehner because [insert the reason] and then well intentioned people waste their time trying to engage such nonsense (if not bait).
KG
@Cacti: That’s an insult to JV teams everywhere. Frosh-Soph is more apt
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Yutsano: Thanks
__
I tried 1909, I tried 1919, couldn’t find it. Gotta give these guys a call and see if they need an old bald fat white guy.
__
Fecking PA. Fecking Corbett. Fecking Santorum, sorry to have to say he’s from my fecking state. Oops, Commonwealth.
Now there’s a furrin soshalist term for ya!
Emerald
(A quibble: Romney doesn’t have Malibu neighbors. His house is in Del Mar, which is a good 150 miles south of Malibu, with most of L.A. County, all of Orange County, all of Camp Pendleton, and most of San Diego County in between. Unless he has another house in Malibu, of course, which sounds reasonable.)
Didn’t see Leno, but gad, I wish he’d asked him if the agencies Romney wanted to eliminate were the same as Rick Perry’s.
Xenos
Romney has a secret plan to end the deficit.
Groucho48
[blockquote]Though Mr. Romney has devoted much of his campaign to promising to get the federal budget in order, he dodged a question about whether he’ll name the federal agencies he’d like to cut. “Depends on whether I have that answer to that,” Mr. Romney said.
[/blockquote]
Raises the question. Is he the Etch-A-Sketch candidate or the Eight Ball candidate.
Answer is cloudy.
Calouste
@Xenos:
McCain had a secret plan to capture Bin Laden. Obama had a non-secret plan to capture Bin Laden. Obama’s plan worked.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
romney is just showing his severly conservative bonafides. why put out details to plans, or even elucidate solid consistent positions on issues. those things can be attacked and picked apart. their details can be parsed, consequences linked to correlations, causes mercilously bound to effects. no, conservatives know what everyone else already knows, exactly what they will do in a given situation. when you are severely conservative, you don’t even have to say it.
that is just giving the liberal media something to talk about.
Suffern ACE
@David Koch: Says the guy with guaranteed lifetime employment.
WereBear
We have a long term sad situation with one of my brothers. He always had temper issues; could hold a grudge forever; could perform like mad but the slightest bump in the road would send him into the ditch. He got out of the Marines despite being offered promotion into other careers… to live in the wilderness. We did everything we could to get him mental health help; which he refused.
__
So while living in the wilderness, he met and married a woman who is part of a band of con artists who get on disability and kite checks and go on and off parole and welfare. And they are all fervent Born Agains… at least in public. After ten years of this, he came to my first husband’s funeral, saying, “Wasn’t it nice of her to let me come?” We jumped in and got him into a new state, a new job, a new apartment… and he gave it all up to go back to her.
__
Now, she ironically came down with a brain abscess after years of telling people she had a “tumor” and couldn’t work. So now she thinks my brother is Satan and ran away and is threatening to shoot him… and the doctors are urging him to commit her for the public good… and he refuses, talks her into coming home with him, and there we are.
__
And I told this story to illustrate: this is the Republican party now, this is “conservatism.” As I explained to my mother, they are both dysfunctional. They know it. They will not live a functional life because they either can’t, or choose not to. This is why they chose each other.
__
This is how I handle people who cling to these same dysfunctions when it comes to political mindsets. People who are so hateful and spiteful and stupid have chosen to follow this hateful and spiteful and stupid political movement. This is why they chose each other.
Suffern ACE
@mai naem: Nah. The latest line is that restoring everything to the way it was is enough. There were no problems with health insurance. So there!
Privatize the Profits! Socialize the Costs!
Think R-Money actually meant, “Depends on whether I have to answer that.”
Xenos
@Calouste: And Nixon had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. Perhaps we can trace the moment this country was irrefudiatedly screwed to the moment in time when a candidate with a secret plan to end a war could be elected president.
Mino
Perhaps if the Supremes cancel ACA, they will drop the requirement that emergencies be treated and then we won’t have those free riders to raise everyone’s insurance costs, right?
bemused
@lamh35:
There’s something really off with this Joe Oliver. Who gives up a job, if that is the truth, to go to bat for a “friend” he seems to know only casually? He quotes a teenage daughter so he must have a family. If he is wealthy, maybe supporting a family isn’t a big concern. If he is not, where is he getting money to support himself and a family? The whole story is bizarre.
WereBear
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Perhaps this is his new “job.”
lacp
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Don’t forget that both Newtie and RonPaul are from PA, too.
SiubhanDuinne
@mai naem:
A never-ending supply of posthumous baptisms.
presquevu
Before Joe Oliver’s first couple of replies, he looks to his right. Later, when he answers questions that more credibly deal with remembered details, he looks to his left. I recall reading that, depending on right/left brained or handedness, upper left/right looks signal imagination and recall. The guy should work on his tells.
Tone In DC
@lacp:
Ummm…I thought the lizard was from Georgia.
Cervantes
Newts are amphibians whereas lizards are reptiles — and yes, while he did represent a Congressional district in Georgia, he is actually from Pennsylvania.
Will
Anyone else catch the part of the Leno interview where Romney actually said he would ban people from buying insurance if they wait too long?
He actually said “as long as they have been insured before they are going to be able to continue to have insurance. If they are 45 years old and they show up and say I want insurance because I have heart disease, it’s like ‘Hey guys, we can’t play the game like that.'”
Is the American voter aware of just how heartless this man is?
worn
@Tone In DC: Yup, though he was born in PA, Newt does have a strong connection with Georgia. His father was in the military, at one point stationed at Ft. Benning. He graduated high school down in Columbus the same year as my father. He also held a teaching position at West Georgia College for several years before being elected as a congressman multiple times in the district to the NW of Atlanta.
So it’s easy to see why most everyone associates him with the Peach State.
mainmati
@lamh35: Leno “annihilate Romney”? Huh? Leno is a long-time very conservative Republican. Ain’t gonna touch Mittens.