“Everyday Mitt”: A Few Of Mitt Romney’s Favorite Things
Mitt Romney Visits Michigan
“I love this state. It seems right here. The trees are the right height. I like seeing the lakes. I love the lakes. There’s something very special here. The Great Lakes, but also all the little inland lakes that dot the parts of Michigan. I love cars. I dunno, I mean, I grew up totally in love with cars.”
—Mitt Romney, February 16, 2012
Mitt Romney Visits Arizona
“I love this state, too. It seems right here. Even more right than Michigan. The heat is the right temperature. The spines on the cacti are just the right sharpness. I like drought. I enjoy canyons. I grew up totally in love with canyons. There were pictures of canyons on my bedroom wall. I also love mountains.”
Mitt Romney Visits the Dentist
“I love this place. I love drills and fillings. I love plaque, and also the removal of plaque. I like teeth that are inside the mouth, but I also like teeth that are outside the mouth. I grew up totally in love with novocaine. I’m addicted to novocaine. I wish I could go to the dentist every day, and get a shot of novocaine. My dentist is just the right height. He’s also approximately the right width.”
Mitt Romney Visits the Bathroom in the Coach Section of a Commercial Airplane
“I am absolutely in love with this place. The toilet is just the right size. I love cramped spaces that smell like human waste. I’m totally in love with used paper towels. I like it when other passengers flush the toilet, but I also like it when they don’t.”
Mitt Romney Visits a Department of Motor Vehicles
“I love this place, so much. The lines are just the right length. Not too short. I hate short lines. I love how this place hearkens back to a simpler time in our history, before we knew how to efficiently process people through a system that could very easily be automated. I grew up in love with civil servants struggling to perform simple tasks. There’s something very special in here. The eye charts. I love eye charts.”
Mitt Romney Visits Rick Santorum’s House
“I really love this place. I love tiny houses that only cost one or two million dollars. I grew up in a bedroom about the size of three of these houses. I love the domestic staff that works inside a house, but also the staff that works outside a house. Where is all the staff? I don’t see them. I think this house is terrific, especially given the size of Rick Santorum. I think he is the perfect depth.”
By: Jeremy Blackman, The New Republic, February 24, 2012
Clarence Thomas Mentee: “No One Would Notice If Roe V. Wade Were Overturned”
Wendy Long, a conservative judicial activist challenging Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said yesterday that no one would miss Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized abortion, if it were overturned. Long clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and served as a counsel for the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network, but is perhaps best known for spearheading several inaccurate race baiting attacksagainst Justice Sonia Sotomayor during her confirmation process.
Long made the abortion comment to Capital New York’s Reid Pillfant at the Manhattan GOP’s annual Lincoln Day Dinner last night:
“I think there is a universal understanding among the legal community that Roe v. Wade was a very flawed legal decision,” she said. “It’s a horrible decision from a constitutional law standpoint, and even liberal law professors will tell you that.
“I believe that the issue of abortion should be left to the people to decide. The Constitution doesn’t mention the word abortion. So I think that’s what it’s really all about. And if Roe v. Wade were overturned tomorrow, nobody would even notice, because the states are legislating their own laws about abortion, completely independent.”
Republican-controlled legislatures are attempting to restrict women’s access to abortion services, but Roe is preventing them from outlawing abortion entirely. Should the precedent be overturned, a lot of women would almost certainly notice as plenty of states would criminalize the procedure.
By: Alex Seitz-Ward, Think Progress, February 24, 2012
“Son Of Detroit”: Mitt Romney Overplayed His Hand In Michigan
In the campaign world, it’s almost a cardinal rule: Undersell your chances, then overdeliver at the ballot box. Former Gov. Mitt Romney never got the memo on this, and he might well pay a severe price for this misstep in next week’s Michigan primary.
After squeaking by in the disputed Maine nominating contest and getting clocked by Santorum in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado before that, Romney’s veneer of invincibility was gone and his campaign was left to deal with a harder question: Could he lose his home state of Michigan?
True, Romney was born in Michigan, where his father was a prominent auto executive and later governor. But Mitt Romney is more identified with Massachusetts, where he served as governor, or even with Mormon (like him) Utah, where he rescued the 2002 Winter Olympics.
He could’ve had it both ways. He could’ve acknowledged his family’s deep connection to Michigan without declaring himself “a son of Detroit.” Expectations would’ve been lower, and the connection—for any benefit it may hold next Tuesday—would’ve been solidified.
But he used those exact words—son of Detroit—to describe himself in a widely circulated op-ed in The Detroit News.
This went over about as well as could be expected for the campaign that can’t seem to shoot straight in recent weeks. Poll numbers barely budged. Talk of losing the home state intensified—one Republican U.S. senator said, “If Romney cannot win Michigan, we need a new candidate.” And the campaign had to pull out the checkbook and again try to buy a primary by carpet-bombing the opponents with negative ads.
Then, in hardscrabble Michigan—home to shuttered factories, high unemployment, and one of the weakest state economies in the nation—Romney decided to unleash his secret weapon—Donald Trump. The Donald, who endorsed Romney after his own campaign flamed out, toured the state stumping for Romney and, no doubt, making deep connections with working-class or wish-they-were-working-class voters in the Wolverine State.
At that point, the Obama campaign no longer could resist joining in the fun. A super PAC associated with the president made its own huge ad buy to thwart Romney’s plan for a happy homecoming. It’s like the Fourth of July in Michigan right now—negative ad bombs going off in every direction.
And because Romney could not leave well enough alone, could not underpromise and overdeliver, and could not resist calling himself “a son of Detroit,” his campaign has spent the last two weeks trying to douse the political equivalent of a five-alarm fire.
Romney should’ve focused on Arizona all along. Its primary—the same day as Michigan’s—yields 29 delegates in a winner-take-all format. Michigan’s yields 30, awarded proportionally. If Romney hadn’t spent a dime on Michigan, he probably would’ve ended up with more delegates on the day than his current chief rival, former Sen. Rick Santorum. Santorum lags in the polls in Arizona and didn’t help himself with a poor debate performance in the state on Wednesday night.
Ironically, as we inch closer to the two primaries next Tuesday, Team Romney has begun to lower expectations in Michigan—to say the state is not, in fact, a must-win for his campaign. No kidding.
But the Romney camp could’ve saved itself a lot of money and a giant headache if it had started off trying to shape the narrative rather than becoming beholden to it.
By: Fred O’Connell, U. S. News and World report, February 24, 2012
“The Poor Are Too Rich”: Kansas Republicans Working Hard To Stick It To The Poor
Kansas Republicans, under the leadership of “compassionate conservative” Sam Brownback, are working hard to stick it to the poor:
A Kansas House tax committee passed a bill in which anyone making less than $25,000 a year — roughly half a million of the state’s 2.9 million residents — will pay an average of $72 more in taxes, while those making more than $250,000 — about 21,000 people — will see a $1,500 cut, according to Kansas Department of Revenue estimates cited by the Kansas City Star.
The hike would come from the elimination of tax credits typically benefiting the poor.
I can’t help but see this as a continuation of the conservative meme that its the poor who don’t pay their “fair share.” Last fall, as the Occupy movement gained steam, it became common for conservatives to complain about the 47 percent of Americans who “don’t pay taxes.” Presidential candidates like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry complained about it in speeches and debate performances, while conservative activists (Redstate’s Erick Erickson comes to mind) touted it in response to the Occupy movement.
Of course, the claim was misleading to the extreme; all Americans pay something to the government—sales taxes, payroll taxes, and various state taxes—but only some make enough money to owe federal income taxes. Those that don’t, as Annie Lowrey explained for Slate, are either poor, or benefit from a variety of tax deductions:
About half of households within that 47 percent do not end up paying federal income tax because they qualify for enough breaks to cancel their tax obligations out. Of that group, 44 percent are claiming tax benefits for the elderly, like an exemption for Social Security payments. And 30.4 percent are claiming credits for “children and the working poor,” like the child-care tax credit. The remainder get breaks for investment income, spending on education, itemized deductions, and a mish-mash of other things. When combined, it’s all enough to cancel out their income tax requirements.
Because of facts like this, and the declining visibility of the Occupy movement, conservatives began to back off on the rhetoric of tax increases for low-income Americans and others who benefit from social services. That said, both policies have always been part of conservative proposals for reform—see Paul Ryan’s roadmap, for example—and in states like Kansas, Republicans are actively working to increase the burden on the least well-off.
One last thing: Kansas Republicans say that this proposal is to make the state more competitive. “Our goal is for our economy to look more like Texas, and a lot less like California,” said Brownback. If that’s the case, then the Kansas GOP should spend less time trying to raise taxes on poor people, and more time trying to encourage immigration. More than anything, Texas has been a beneficiary of the fact that people want to live there. As it stands, however, conservatives in Kansas would rather joke about shooting immigrants than work to bring them to the state.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, February 24
“Humanae Vitae”: Birth Control, Bishops And Religious Authority
The Obama administration’s ruling requiring certain Catholic institutions like hospitals and universities to offer health insurance covering birth control prompted a furious response from the Catholic bishops. The bishops argued that this was a violation of conscience since birth control is contrary to teachings of the Catholic Church, as expressed in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae.”
What interests me as a philosopher — and a Catholic — is that virtually all parties to this often acrimonious debate have assumed that the bishops are right about this, that birth control is contrary to “the teachings of the Catholic Church.” The only issue is how, if at all, the government should “respect” this teaching.
As critics repeatedly point out, 98 percent of sexually active American Catholic women practice birth control, and 78 percent of Catholics think a “good Catholic” can reject the bishops’ teaching on birth control. The response from the church, however, has been that, regardless of what the majority of Catholics do and think, the church’s teaching is that birth control is morally wrong. The church, in the inevitable phrase, “is not a democracy.” What the church teaches is what the bishops (and, ultimately, the pope, as head of the bishops) say it does.
But is this true? The answer requires some thought about the nature and basis of religious authority. Ultimately the claim is that this authority derives from God. But since we live in a human world in which God does not directly speak to us, we need to ask, Who decides that God has given, say, the Catholic bishops his authority?
It makes no sense to say that the bishops themselves can decide this, that we should accept their religious authority because they say God has given it to them. If this were so, anyone proclaiming himself a religious authority would have to be recognized as one. From where, then, in our democratic, secular society does such recognition properly come? It could, in principle, come from some other authority, like the secular government. But we have long given up the idea (“cujus regio, ejus religio”) that our government can legitimately designate the religious authority in its domain. But if the government cannot determine religious authority, surely no lesser secular power could. Theological experts could tell us what the bishops have taught over the centuries, but this does not tell us whether these teachings have divine authority.
In our democratic society the ultimate arbiter of religious authority is the conscience of the individual believer. It follows that there is no alternative to accepting the members of a religious group as themselves the only legitimate source of the decision to accept their leaders as authorized by God. They may be wrong, but their judgment is answerable to no one but God. In this sense, even the Catholic Church is a democracy.
But, even so, haven’t the members of the Catholic Church recognized their bishops as having full and sole authority to determine the teachings of the Church? By no means. There was, perhaps, a time when the vast majority of Catholics accepted the bishops as having an absolute right to define theological and ethical doctrines. Those days, if they ever existed, are long gone. Most Catholics — meaning, to be more precise, people who were raised Catholic or converted as adults and continue to take church teachings and practices seriously — now reserve the right to reject doctrines insisted on by their bishops and to interpret in their own way the doctrines that they do accept. This is above all true in matters of sexual morality, especially birth control, where the majority of Catholics have concluded that the teachings of the bishops do not apply to them. Such “reservations” are an essential constraint on the authority of the bishops.
The bishops and the minority of Catholics who support their full authority have tried to marginalize Catholics who do not accept the bishops as absolute arbiters of doctrine. They speak of “cafeteria Catholics” or merely “cultural Catholics,” and imply that the only “real Catholics” are those who accept their teachings entirely. But this marginalization begs the question I’m raising about the proper source of the judgment that the bishops have divine authority. Since, as I’ve argued, members of the church are themselves this source, it is not for the bishops but for the faithful to decide the nature and extent of episcopal authority. The bishops truly are, as they so often say, “servants of the servants of the Lord.”
It may be objected that, regardless of what individual Catholics think, the bishops in fact exercise effective control over the church. This is true in many respects, but only to the extent that members of the church accept their authority. Stalin’s alleged query about papal authority (“How many divisions does the Pope have?”) expresses more than just cynical realpolitik. The authority of the Catholic bishops is enforceable morally but not militarily or politically. It resides entirely in the fact that people freely accept it.
The mistake of the Obama administration — and of almost everyone debating its decision — was to accept the bishops’ claim that their position on birth control expresses an authoritative “teaching of the church.” (Of course, the administration may be right in thinking that the bishops need placating because they can cause them considerable political trouble.) The bishops’ claim to authority in this matter has been undermined because Catholics have decisively rejected it. The immorality of birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church. Pope Paul VI meant his 1968 encyclical, “Humanae Vitae,” to settle the issue in the manner of the famous tag, “Roma locuta est, causa finita est.” In fact the issue has been settled by the voice of the Catholic people.
By: Gary Gutting, The New York Times Opinion Pages, February 15, 2012
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