Putin Us On

Just before the start of the war in Ukraine, Donald Trump, a longtime friend, confidante and sucker of Vladimir Putin, said that Putin's effort to impose a pax Russiana on Ukraine by amassing troops along Ukraine's borders with Russia and Belarus was an act of "genius."  When the fighting broke out and numerous cities were mercilessly bombed by the Russian army, Trump spoke with a great deal of rue, saying that Putin had "changed."  In fact, he hadn't.

In fairness to Trump (I . . . can't believe I just wrote that!), he's not the only one to realize that Putin is not the nice guy he was once thought to be.  When Putin was democratically elected to succeed Boris Yeltsin as president of post-Soviet Russia in 2000, he came across as a young, dynamic, Westernized leader who would bring Russia into the twenty-first century.  He welcomed free-market capitalism and Western popular culture.  And he put on quite a charm offensive.  He took George Walker Bush for a ride in his classic Volga sedan when our forty-third President held a summit with him, and Bush later said he believe he "saw his soul" by looking into his eyes.  At a concert, Putin took to the stage and sang "Blueberry Hill" - in English - to the delight of an audience that included Western movie stars such as Gerard Depardieu, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.  He even got to meet Paul McCartney (below) when the former Beatle played Red Square in Moscow in May 2003.  He told Macca that he enjoyed listening to the Beatles because their music "was very popular, like a breath of fresh air, a window into the outside world."  At the concert, Putin took his seat just like any other Beatles fan.

Yes, many Westerners actually liked this guy.

He fooled everyone.  Everyone, that is, except Balts, Poles, Baltic-Americans, Polish-Americans, and Mitt Romney.  It was Romney, after all, who said back in 2012 that Putin was the greatest threat to world peace while running or President against incumbent Barack Obama.  Democrats laughed - just as they laughed at Ronald Reagan's Russophobic statements in the early eighties (except for Democrats with last names like Jonaitis or Malinowski).  Who has the last laugh now?  Well, Romney, who's suddenly being talked about as a 2024 Republican presidential candidate if the GOP comes to its senses and stops waiting for Trump.  Romney is also one of President Biden's strongest supporters on the Ukraine crisis from the Republican side of the aisle in the Senate.

Putin proved that P.T. Barnum was right, but if Trump ends up still supporting Putin after all of this, he'll only prove that, once in awhile you'll get a sucker dumb enough to fall for the same scam a second time.  Ironically, Trump is counting on his supporters to be stupid enough to fall for his scam . . . a third time.

And as to how Paul McCartney could have fallen for Putin's shtick . . . well, Macca was married to Heather Mills at the time, so you have to take that into account. 

Exits

Two exits made the news. The first was that Rick Santorum ended is candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, effectively conceding the prize to Mitt Romney, who only has Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul left to ignore. With polls showing him losing in the presidential primary in his home state of Pennsylvania, Santorum decided to get out now and preserve his prospects for a future run in 2016 or 2020 rather than risk a repeat of the repudiation Pennsylvania voters gave him when he lost his Senate seat to Robert Casey, Jr. in 2006 by an eighteen-point margin. With Romney now the de facto Republican nominee, President Obama can now focus on how to, as Democrats always do, lose to most losable candidate the Republicans can possibly put up. No, I'm not confident in an Obama victory, largely because the economy hasn't fully rebounded, the European debt crisis could still affect us, and Romney likely has an array of slogans and sound bites to distract voters from the issues.

In fact, Republican economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin is convinced that Obama's endorsement of an unpassable bill to tax millionaires and billionaires at the same rate their own employees pay - the so-called "Buffett rule," after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who's appalled that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary - is politically motivated. (Really, Doug?) Holtz-Eakin is also certain that the Buffett rule wouldn't even make a dent in helping to balance the budget. He even thinks Obama's support of it will even hurt Obama in the election - because despite Obama's characterization of the Buffett rule as an act of fairness, Holtz-Eakin says independent voters are interested in jobs . . . and are not interested in fairness.

There's your take-away: Douglas Holtz-Eakin (who has opposed each and every one of Obama's economic initiatives) thinks independent voters are self-interested heartless bastards.

Meanwhile, George Zimmerman, the likely killer of Florida teen Trayvon Martin, has made an exit of his own even as his legal team made an exit from defending him. After Zimmerman contacted the special prosecutor in the case - something he ought not to have done - he pretty much disappeared, causing his lawyers to resign from the case in part because of their inability to communicate with him. Never arrested, he's now likely anywhere but Florida, laying low out of fear.

Zimmerman's ability to avoid arrest by claiming self-defense under Florida's "stand your ground law" - one of thirty such state laws in the nation and the kind of bill pushed nationwide in state legislatures by the reactionary American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) - may be the reason why so many major corporations are deserting ALEC. They got in bed with that right-wing group to promote their business-friendly agenda, and they're dissociating themselves from ALEC now that it's become apparent that ALEC's support of "stand your ground" gun laws like the one in Florida presents a public relations problem.

Marching To Pretoria

The country moved a little bit closer to apartheid-era South African-style fascism with Rick Santorum's twin primary victories in Alabama and Mississippi, forcing Mitt Romney - who still leads in the delegate count for the GOP presidential nomination - to become more reactionary in his sociopolitical views. The former supporter of Planned Parenthood now thinks we should stop supporting it. To respond to the inevitable insistence that a President Romney would moderate his views and go back to where he was as governor of Massachusetts once he's in the White House, it should be remembered that the senior George Bush held on to his adopted ultraconservative social views once he was elected President in 1988 . . . because he still had to please the right in 1992.

Liberals and moderate Democrats may be eagerly awaiting the prospect of President Obama facing either Romney or Santorum will full confidence in his ability to clean either of their clocks, but they should check Obama's own timepiece first. It turns out that Obama's approval rating is down to 41 percent in one poll taken this month, and he's only four points ahead of Santorum - yes, Santorum - in a hypothetical matchup, just outside the margin of error. Obama is getting blame for the high gas prices - which Republicans are helping to cause by talking about war with Iran, spooking commodity speculators - that even recent good news about the job market can't seem to neutralize. In an ideal world - France - people would be driving smaller cars and have plausible mass transit options, so maybe gasoline prices wouldn't be such a big deal. Or, at least people would be smart enough to understand that high gas prices are not Obama's fault.

Because of all that - and because of the fact that Republicans hold 29 state governorships, hold the most state legislature majorities since 1928, and are working to make sure fewer Democratic Party-friendly demographic groups vote in November - the sun may be setting on American progressivism (what there is of it) for years, maybe even decades. The GOP has the mechanism and the money to see to that.

And even though female voters in the Democratic party may be energized by the Republican war or women, the battle over contraception has energized Republican women like TV actress Patricia Heaton. By now you may know about her nasty, snide Twitter comments about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke's testimony on birth control coverage. Referring to Fluke as "G-Town Gal" and addressing her in the second person, Heaton wrote comments on her Twitter page like: "Hey G-Town Gal: If your parents have to pay for your birth control, maybe they should get a say in who [sic] you sleep with! Instant birth control!"

How many of you who remember Heaton's performance as the caustic Debra on "Everybody Loves Raymond" got the feeling that she wasn't acting?

Though Heaton apologized for her tone, she's been known to offer nasty right-wing comments for years. She once declared Obama to be "completely wrong" for the Presidency and said she wanted a Republican presidential debate that would include Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved asking "tough and intelligent" questions. The pro-life Heaton also insisted that women who may seek an abortion should give birth instead, regardless, commenting: "A woman experiencing an unplanned pregnancy also deserves to experience unplanned joy."

And yet, in spite of all this, no one has called for a boycott of her current ABC sitcom "The Middle." I myself watched it last week after having heard of Heaton's comments about Ms. Fluke, even though that particular episode was a rerun. But then everyone knows that there's a difference between Limbaugh and Patricia Heaton.

Heaton is just an entertainer.

The Elephants In the Room

What, the Republican presidential nomination contest still isn't over?

When it became apparent that Mitt Romney was going to have a good night on Super Tuesday, I pretty much expected the aura of inevitability to finally shine on him. But Rick Santorum came within a whisker of wining the Ohio primary, and he was also able to claim wins in North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee - highlighting Romney's problems in the South and the Plains states and revealing a remarkable acceptance these rednecks and yokels have for Italian-American Catholics like Santorum. Romney, going into upcoming contests in Mississippi and Alabama as well as Kansas, admitted he's going into "foreign territory." Conservative voters just aren't warming up to him - there'll be another Ice Age before they do.

That said, President Obama isn't out of the woods yet. He'll have to face negative ads from numerous right-wing super-PACs in the fall, plus a virulent Tea Party ready to turn out for the Republican presidential nominee even if it's a cow. Righties will gladly overlook the flaws of the eventual nominee (Romney) to get Obama out of office. The fact that Obama's poll numbers have improved is irrelevant, especially considering how marginal these improved ratings really are.

Meanwhile, the Republican power grab plot is in full force. A redistricting of U.S. House seats in Ohio, done by Republicans in Columbus with the blessing of Speaker John Boehner (who represents a suburban Cincinnati district) after Ohio lost one seat, forced liberal Democratic incumbent representatives Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur in a primary contest for the same seat, even though the distances between their respective home bases of Cleveland and Toledo are 120 miles apart. (Their new district snakes along the shore of Lake Erie.)  Kaptur won, ending Kucinich's political career - to the delight of Republicans who were sick and tired of his progressive policy initiatives and to the dismay of Republicans who will no longer have him to kick around anymore. But more Republicans are delighted than dismayed. Kucinich's forced retirement is the latest in a series of GOP efforts to establish a permanent majority in the House of Representatives by eliminating Democratic districts in states currently under Republican control that lost House seats as a result of the 2010 census even as Republican states in the Sun Belt are gaining seats.

Many of these states losing House seats have more Democrats than Republicans, so Democratic votes in Democratic states will be neutralized. In New Jersey, the Eleventh U.S. House District, where I live, was redrawn to include a good part of the liberal Essex County town of Montclair (which was divided between two Democratic districts), but the Eleventh District remains heavily centered in Republican Morris County. Starting in January, the Democratic voters in Montclair who now find themselves in Republican Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen's district can now look forward to a decade of having their positions and concerns underrepresented - or not represented at all.  

The era of Democratic dominance James Carville predicted back in 2008 ended before it even began, and the demise of the Democratic party can't be far behind. Even if Obama wins re-election, the Democrats can't possibly overcome in 2016 the built-in advantages Republicans are creating for themselves in terms of reapportionment and super-PAC money.

The Campaign Continues . . .

Oh, is the Republican presidential nomination campaign still on?

This protracted race is probably the best argument for replacing the constitutional system in America with a parliamentary system that guarantees shorter election campaigns - or at least overturning Citizens United. All eyes are on tomorrow's Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, especially Ohio, where Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are in a dead heat. Santorum was a huge favorite in Ohio until he said John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech on separation of church and state made him want to throw up and suggested that a President who wanted people to go to college was a snob.

Yeah, about that latter issue . . .. Santorum apparently misunderstood President Obama's comments on education. Obama believes that anyone who may not be an appropriate fit for college ought to go to a trade school, which, ironically, was the same point Santorum was trying to make in his wrongly worded remarks. And that would be a reasonable argument, which Santorum could have made if he had spent time in his own undergraduate studies learning how to debate.

But - and here's another important point no one seems to be making - wouldn't it be a good idea if some trade school students went to college as well, if they have the intellectual capability for it, so they could enjoy high art and literature in addition to learning how to work in a specific vocation? And it would also be beneficial to require some intellectual rigor in the engineers who build our dams and bridges so they could have minds flexible enough to consider possible effects of their work and imagine the implications of it. If engineers are smart enough to ponder the long-term effect of infrastructural systems and how they could fail, for example, they can design infrastructure with such ramifications in mind. Then we could build bridges that don't collapse.

As someone who merely observes the debate over education in America and is not an expert on it, I don't know how we can get the best bang for a buck and produce, as former Vice President Dan Quayle advocated, "the best educated American people in the world." All I know is that the current system ain't working. Look at Dan Quayle.

Santorum Rising

Is Rick Santorum for real? I think he is.

Ricko the Sicko has statistically insignificant leads over Mitt Romney in national polls for the Republican presidential nomination, but the fact that they're leads just the same has given Mitt Romney cause for concern. Romney is coming off as more of a phony as he tries to tighten what had once been thought to be a secure grip on the nomination, all the while coming across as an out-of-touch spoiled rich kid who doesn't seem angry about the perceived decline of the American middle class. Rick Santorum seems more authentic as an angry working-class-rooted conservative warrior going against the powerful economic elites, despite the unpleasant truth that the policies he espouses - which would make such economic interests more powerful and elitist - aren't that different from the ones Romney supports. But he has an obvious appeal to blue-collar "Reagan Democrats" who are inclined to vote Republican in presidential elections on cultural issues.

It is for that reason alone that Santorum should be no less underestimated than Newt Gingrich has been. (We can't rule out Newt yet either.) President Obama is presiding over an economy that seems to be on the mend, but we could reach a particular threshold, at which the economy has improved to the point where it's good enough to let people focus more on social issues (the kind of social issues that were resolved decades, if not centuries, ago in other Western countries) but not good enough to be neutralized as an issue in and of itself. A condition like that could make a Republican presidential candidate like Santorum very attractive.

Do not imagine for one moment that a rabidly conservative and intellectually bankrupt politician like Santorum could never make it to the White House. I've said it before and I'll say it again (an annoying habit on this blog, I know, but what the heck, history has been repeating itself a lot lately): Back in the 1990s, everyone knew that the idea of "President George Walker Bush" was ridiculous.

To The Moon?

The Florida Republican presidential primary is today, and I'll be glad when it's over. Not because it'll bring an end to the sniping and snarling from Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich for awhile - that's going to resume in time for Saturday's Nevada caucuses - but because after Florida, it'll be the last we hear of Newt Gingrich's cockamamie scheme to colonize the moon in eight years' time. He only proposed it in Florida because of all of the jobs there connected to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and even after that, he's still behind in the polls.

Gingrich's 2020 vision of a permanent lunar base is a relic from a time when Americans thought that they could accomplish anything if they banded together (and we did make it to the moon, of course), and when space exploration hinted at a future dramatically different from what existed in the 1950s and the 1960s. It was expected that one day we'd be driving around in flying cars, vacationing on Mars, and eating capsules instead of real food. The only thing that came true is that we don't eat real food anymore.

A permanent lunar base, once entertained by both the Americans and the Soviet-era Russians, is a spectacularly bad idea, because it diverts resources toward establishing an unnecessary habitation project and away from doing things like trying to house people and fight poverty here on earth. I understand that Gingrich is suggesting a scientific base like the one at the South Pole, not a Tomorrowland-style city, but if the goal is to expand knowledge of the sciences, we can do it more efficiently with robotic vehicles on the moon, like the ones we sent to Mars in the nineties.

It's easy to understand Gingrich's obsession with a lunar base, since his politics and policy proposals border on megalomania. Harder to understand is Neil deGrasse Tyson's interest in the proposal. Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, and he's actually enthusiastic about the idea. His objection to Gingrich's proposal is not to the idea itself but to Gingrich's failure to explain how to do it or why to do it. But Tyson thinks it would be wonderful if we had such an ambitious project like a lunar base that would encourage young people to engage in and study the sciences (and a lunar base would necessitate study of biology, chemistry, physics - pretty much the complete works).  Never mind that it's impractical. He laments that we haven't done anything like that in nearly forty years.

Hmm . . . forty years . . . the early seventies. So, what happened in the early seventies that changed our big-picture outlook? How about the Arab oil embargo? The sudden shortage of oil that resulted from American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War reminded us that limits exist not only in the mind but in the real world. Once we had trouble running our tech-happy civilization on earth, colonizing the moon or Mars and trying to begin a new civilization elsewhere seemed pretty silly. True, we did get some amazing technological breakthroughs from NASA's space exploration programs, such as the Internet and ready-mix foodstuffs, and I am grateful for a computer network that has allowed me to write this blog, but why should I care about Tang?

Besides, the space race with the now-defunct Soviet Union was an extension of the lamebrained Cold War psychosis that led both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to spend lots of money to demonstrate whose economic system was better. When the Cold War ended, it turned out that neither side won. Both the U.S. and post-Soviet Russia were flat broke.

If we're going to have a massive technological project to expand our capabilities and grow our economy, I'd obviously prefer that we focus on something that can give us real value. I'd prefer we focus on building a national high-speed rail network - and build one that's accessible to everyone by 2020, not build one that's accessible to four out of five Americans by 2035, as President Obama's pathetic piecemeal approach would do. The only problem is that even Obama's modest plan has been repeatedly attacked as a government boondoggle (and Florida's own attempts to build high-speed rail lines keep getting canceled by Republican governors), so if Obama proposed something bolder and more dramatic, opposition to such a program might be even more hostile. And no one seems to be interpreting Newt's moon plans as anything other than the boondoggle it is. Romney has said if he ran a company that did business with NASA and someone came to him with that idea, he'd fire him. Good for him.

But Romney - no big thinker - would as President probably fire a Transportation Secretary who proposed a national high-speed rail network as well.

Countdown To Exiting

It's about a year from Inauguration Day. Could this be Barack Obama's last year in office?

The campaign for the South Carolina Republican presidential primary, taking place today, has taken numerous twists and turns. Newt Gingrich had turned the tide against Mitt Romney only to face new questions about his fidelity in his previous marriage - and then turned it into an asset by throwing the issue back at CNN's John King during a debate after King brought it up. Mitt Romney still won't release his tax returns, thinking that Republican voters don't care about how much money he makes and confusing that with their interest in how much money he pays. President Obama must be watching this with glee, hoping that the Republicans protract their nomination fight to the point where the eventual nominee is so weakened and bloodied, it will be an easy victory for the Democrats in November.

No, it won't. And the Democrats could still lose. Some pundits have noted that the eventual winner of the Republican presidential nomination could be toughened up enough to take the fight to Obama hard, just as Obama was toughened up by his long fight against Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. A more apt comparison might be the internecine warfare between Walter Mondale and Gary Hart in the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination contest that eventually weakened Mondale in his campaign against President Reagan that fall, as both Mondale did and the eventual 2012 Republican presidential nominee will go against an incumbent. But even that comparison has problems. Reagan was overseeing an improvement in the economy and renewed faith in the country's standing in 1984. Obama is currently overseeing little of either, and his mealy-mouthed campaign commercial touting his clean energy initiatives in response to a Koch brothers-funded onslaught is the textbook example of starting off on the wrong foot.

One year from now, the winner of the November election will be sworn in, and don't be surprised if Obama is an outgoing President swearing under his breath. His approval rating is at 44 percent, the economy isn't growing fast enough in 2012, like it was in 1984, the chances of Democrats regaining the House and holding onto the Senate are statistically difficult, and one of these Republican candidates could indeed very well be in a strong position going into the fall campaign. The clearest evidence that Obama could (will?) still lose is that his opponents obviously want to get rid of him more than his supporters (just as obviously) want to keep him.

Adventures In Capitalism

You know the appeal of venture capitalism is losing its bite in America when even Republicans doubt it.

Mitt Romney used his New Hampshire primary win to denigrate the opposition for playing politics with the American capitalist system - not just President Obama but fellow Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry. Romney says that both presdiential candidates focus more on the resentment of those who geet laid off in a bad economy rather than come up with a more positive economic message like his own - about how how government can help people become wealthy.  Both Gingrich and Perry have attacked Romney for how he made money in his job at Bain Capital - buying companies and firing a lot of people to make them more "competitive." Rather than explain how a venture capital firm works and explain to voters why this is a preferred method for resuscitating companies, Romney instead re-iterated his desire to help everyone become rich and accused his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination of giving the Democrats fodder for the fall campaign while accusing President Obama of wanting to transform America into a European-style social welfare state.

With Romney having moved to the right in his party, Obama is now obliged to defend his own turn from the center of American politics and explain how his leftward drift on economic issues - taxation, health care - is meant to benefit everyone. For the President, the 2012 campaign will be an effort to present the case for more government intervention in the economy even as Romney is already making his case (again, the old adage that our system allows people to work hard and hopefully become wealthy) against it.  But fewer people are buying that Horatio Alger message these days. Expect Obama's talking points to reflect the economic speech he gave in Kansas in December.

Obama doesn't have to worry about being called a socialist - he's not even that much of a liberal. But he can point to how he's created more jobs than Mitt Romney. General Motors has been hiring lately. Chrysler's sales were up 26 percent in 2011. Bailing out auto companies with government money did more for capitalism than taking over companies and firing people - or just letting them go bankrupt and possibly out of business, as Romney advocated in his opposition to the auto company bailouts.

Solid As Granite

Mitt Romney's commanding victory in yesterday's New Hampshire primary - winning 39 percent of the vote - makes him the one to beat . . . for President Obama. It's become obvious that there really is no conservative alternative to a "moderate" Romney; Romney is the conservative alternative to the centrist incumbent President. Romney is opposed to an agenda that would impose a European-style social democratic system on America, but then, so is Obama.

With libertarian Ron Paul finishing a distant second in New Hampshire with 23 percent of the vote, mainstream arch-conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum hope instead to make inroads in South Carolina, where the unemployment rate and the intolerance for gays are both higher than in New Hampshire. Jon Huntsman's respectable third-place showing at 17 percent gives him reason to carry on. But Romney's ability to do better than expected in the Granite State- even after all of his recent gaffes marking him as a clueless CEO type - puts him on a clear path to the Republican presidential nomination and gives him more of an opportunity to hit the President south of the suspenders.

Romney can thank Florida for this victory, as Florida voted to have its primary on January 31, before the Iowa and New Hampshire contests scheduled for February - forcing both states to move their contests up to early January. Florida thus spared Romney of spending more time campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire and possibly seeing his numbers go down more over a longer period. Now he can spend more time than ever before focusing squarely on Obama and swat away the GOP also-rans like so many mosquitoes.

My advice to the Obama team: Start working on your Romney counterpunch.

Hiring, Firing and Quitting

Mitt Romney is so convinced that he is going to be the Republican presidential nominee when all is said and done that he's already acting like a general election candidate, taking pot shots at President Obama and striking a more moderate tone in his discourse. Except his efforts to relate to ordinary people haven't helped him; indeed, they've hurt him. Trying to empathize with laid off workers, the noted corporate downsizer for hire said today that, like any worker, he too has had a fear of getting laid off. It is true that investment capitalists like Romney could easily be fired by the boards of their firms for not making enough money, but executives in Romney's position often get golden parachutes with their pink slips. They never have to worry about paying the mortgage on their mansions because they paid for it up front long ago in cash.

But what really got people's ears pricked up was Romney's insistence that health care should remain privatized because of the incentive for health insurance companies to provide quality services. It wasn't because of his failure to understand that many people in high-risk brackets have been unable to get health insurance for so long, at least until the Obama health care law was passed. It was because of his wording of how, under his version of health care, you can dump one insurance company for another: "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me if someone doesn't give me the service I need."

Okay, so maybe Romney was merely expressing a desire to being competition to health insurance. But it sure didn't sound like it. His perceived insensitivity to workers has gotten so obvious that even Rick Perry and  Newt Gingrich have assailed him for his remarks, as well as his fellow Latter-Day Saint Jon Huntsman. "What's clear is he likes firing people," Huntsman said. "I like creating jobs."

Tellingly, Rick Santorum - a presidential candidate whose economic policy is pretty much an endorsement of serfdom - didn't take part in the Romney-bashing.

The Romney campaign is trying to present a kinder, gentler Mitt - a "New Romney." Right. New Romney is an English village in Kent.

Meanwhile, President Obama, on the side of the Democrats, has given me another reason to wish for a third presidential candidate to vote for in November rather than hire the President for another four years.  On December 31, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law, which allows the indefinite military detention of American citizens without trial - a clear violation of the Bill Rights and the an assault to our liberties right up (or down) there with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 at a time of possible war with Napoleonic France and Franklin Roosevelt's order to round up Japanese-Americans after the Pearl Harbor attack. "Under separate government powers expanded by the PATRIOT Act," Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Committee, writes, "non-violent dissent is increasingly classified as terrorism." Though President Obama issued a signing statement saying he would neither use nor recognize the bill's detention powers, any future president, Buttar adds, could "use the NDAA’s detention powers as a tool of political repression."

And what about that signing statement? Obama signed a bill with an unconstitutional provision, but then he violated his constitutional obligation to enforce a law that he signed? When you sign a bill as President., it's all or nothing. If Obama objected to the detention clause, as well he should have, he should have sent it back to Congress.

Perhaps that's why William Daley, the President's chief of staff, quit today; he couldn't stand living in the Carrollian Wonderland that is Washington these days. Reports out of Washington suggest that Daley hasn't been able to bring the order and sense of functionality to the White House that he was supposed to being when he arrived at the West Wing a year ago, although he claimed that he wanted to spend more time with his family. President Obama hopes to move forward and present a clear case for his re-election, though I'm increasingly having a hard time figuring out what it is.

Single Digits

So let me get this straight . . ..  Out of sixty thousand votes cast between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum at the Iowa caucuses yesterday, Romney won by eight.  I'm sure Romney would have preferred to win by more than eight thousand votes.  But when I say eight, I don't mean eight thousand.  I mean . . . eight.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . eight.

Romney won 30,015 votes in Iowa last night.  He would have had to win 36,000 votes to get at least 30 percent and pull out of the 25 percent bracket he'd been in through various opinion polls for months.  As it was, he couldn't win 36,000 votes.  In fact, compared to his 2008 total in Iowa, Romney was off by six.  

Not six thousand.  Six.  One, two, three, four, five . . . six.

That's right, Romney won six fewer votes in Iowa in 2012 than the 30,021 votes he won in 2008.

So, not only did 75 percent of all Iowa Republicans vote against Romney, those that did vote for him gave him a Pyrrhic victory with a margin in single digits over Santorum.  And after all the time and money he spent in Iowa, his vote total was smaller than when he lost the Iowa contest to Mike Huckabee in 2008 - by single digits.  

Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann - a woman whose intelligence quotient is likely measured in single digits - dropped out of the race.  The number of people who will miss her can be counted with a single digit - 0. 

Pardon My French

Mitt Romney recently tried to compare President Obama to Marie Antoinette in a pathetic attempt to make the President look elitist. The multimillionaire said of Obama, "When the president's characterization of our economy was, 'It could be worse,' it reminded me of Marie Antoinette: 'Let them eat cake.'"

Yeah, well, when we cried for jobs, Mitt Romney's fellow Republicans in Congress let us have anti-abortion legislation. And when autoworkers cried to have their jobs saved, Romney himself pretty much said, "Let GM and Chrysler go bankrupt."

But that's not why I bring this up. I bring this up because Romney, like most Republicans these days, not only tries to avoid putting on airs to avoid looking elitist himself, he even tries to avoid looking educated - especially when it comes to his bilingualism. When Chris Matthews of MSNBC asked Romney if he could say "Let them eat cake" in French, Romney replied by saying, "I can, but I won't."

Jeez, even George Walker Bush spoke conversational Spanish in public.

Romney not only has to appeal to Republicans who are undereducated - i.e. most of them - he's trying to downplay his experiences in France as a Mormon missionary to appeal to Republicans who are Francophobic - i.e., all of them. I don't get the Republican hatred for all things French. Just what don't they like about the French, the people who invented photography and milk purification? Is it that they dress too prettily? Or maybe, oh, I don't know, enough Republicans bought Renaults and got stuck with a lemon? Is it the fact that the French think a lot? Did all of these Republicans like Catherine Deneuve in those Chanel ads until they found out she was a serious actress who had a brain? Did they go to one of her movies and, I don't know, have trouble reading the subtitles? Or maybe had a hard time wrapping their tiny little minds around the philosophical ramifications of the plot?

By the way, Mitt, you looked silly distancing yourself from all things French while campaigning in a state whose capital and largest city is called "Des Moines."

Ha Ha Herman!

That Herman Cain - what a sense of humor.  He somehow managed to become the rarest of birds - a black front runner for the Republican presidential nomination - and now he's joking about putting up an electric fence on the Mexican border to discourage and possibly electrocute illegal immigrants.  Here's a man whose father who worked at three jobs to own his own house and whose mother was a cleaning woman, and he's telling the unemployed and underemployed Wall Street occupiers that it's their fault, not the fault of greedy banks, if they're not well-off or gainfully employed.  Even Ron Paul was aghast at Cain's remarks. (Cain is a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Missouri, something you don't hear about because the media keep playing up the fact that he was the chairman of a pizza parlor chain.)

Cain has shot up to the top of the Republican field for the same reason Michele Bachmann  and Rick Perry did - he's seen as a "conservative" alternative to the likely nominee, Mitt Romney, who's seen as more "moderate" (until you look at his record).  His "9-9-9 plan" - a nine percent national sales tax, a nine percent flat tax, and a nine percent business flat tax - seems reasonable enough until you realize that it will raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans making an average of 35,000 a year while lowering taxes on those with an a average annual income of $350,000.

But he's sure to do some damage to the body politic while he's around.  Cain is getting the bulk of his economic ideas from the greedy Koch brothers, who hope to turn America into one big strip mine, and his effect could force Romney, as the nominee, to move so far to the right that the Tea Party will be able to write the entire 2012 Republican platform.

Oh yeah, I didn't want to bring it up, but Cain was instrumental in sabotaging President Bill Clinton's 1993 health care reform plan when he challenged the President at a town hall meeting in Kansas City.  Cain told Clinton that a proposed employer mandate would hurt small businesses, and that subsidies to help such businesses guarantee health insurance to workers were inaccurately calculated.  Cain, according to Bob Cohn of Newsweek, "transformed the debate" on health care reform, which went down in flames for Clinton in 1994 and was never revisited in the remainder of his Presidency.

So how much do Republican voters like Cain? They love him.  At a Republican debate, they applauded his assertion that the unemployed have only themselves to blame for their plight, just as they cheered Rick Perry's executions in Texas and booed at a gay soldier in earlier debates.             

Mitt Is It?

As Sarah Palin, a plain rash if there ever was one, irritates people along the East Coast with her non-campaign tour, titillating her rabid fans as if she were Lady Gaga, Mitt Romney has officially entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

The differences between the two politicians could not be any clearer. Palin seeks to appeal to the basest instincts of the American voter, plastering excerpts from the Pledge of Allegiance on her tour bus to, as author James Kunstler says, appeal to voters who are proud to have made it as far as first grade. Romney is a grownup. He plans to talk about the economy - the one issue on which President Obama remains vulnerable - more than on ideology - and he has the bona fides to back himself up, as a successful venture capitalist, the rescuer of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, and governor of Massachusetts.

Romney's biggest liability with the libertarians who now control the Republican party is the health care reform legislation he sired in Massachusetts, because of the mandate that all Massachusetts residents buy health insurance. Except that it's working to bring down health care costs, and Romney has said that, while he opposes doing anything similar on the federal level, each state should do as it sees fit to reform health care on its own - and that his approach happened to be compatible with his state. He won't renounce the Massachusetts health care plan. His Mormon faith may remain a sore spot among the evangelical Protestant voters who dominate the Republican primaries and caucuses. But I don't think many other voters, Republican or otherwise, will fear that a President Romney will take orders from the Mormon Church.

Unfortunately for Romney, one advantage Sarah Palin has over Romney is her ability to generate buzz. He announced his presidential candidacy in New Hampshire at the same time she was in the state, and so she bumped him off the front page of the Manchester Union-Leader. Romney should be glad the Internet's killing print media. He probably isn't thankful, though, that anyone can search the Internet and find video clips of his TV interviews demonstrating that he can't get his position on the auto company bailout straight.

Nevertheless, Romney, like Obama, has the substance. If he's the 2012 nominee, the debate between Romney and Obama on the economy will be most substantial debate on the topic in years - maybe even decades.