I totally agree Newch91 and Catefrances. Marriage is about two people loving each other and wanting to be together. Some of the happiest, most well adjusted wonderful couples I know are gay couples. The people I'm referring to live in my current home town, a fairly conservative town for California. Tolerance seems to be growing even here. I hope the same is happening elsewhere.
Anyone notice Romney's foreign policy advisers? 17/24 of them are from the Bush administration and we all saw how that went.
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"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
We're already outspending China 5-1 on military spending. Romney is already proposing a huge tax cut that makes Bush's tax cuts look like child's play compared to his, now he wants to jack up our military spending even more. This man would destroy America if he became President.
Romney Will Increase Military Spending by $2.1 Trillion With No Plan to Pay for It
Mitt Romney is campaigning for president on fiscal responsibility. “The mission to restore America begins with getting our fiscal house in order,” he says. At the same time, the presumptive GOP nominee says he wants to increase military spending. His campaign website claims that a President Romney will peg the Pentagon’s budget to Gross Domestic Product “at a floor of 4 percent of GDP.” What will that mean in dollars? CNNMoney reports that under Romney’s plan, “the additional spending really piles up in future years”:
With the Pentagon’s base budget — which does not include war costs — forecast to hit 3.5% of GDP in 2013, a jump to 4% would mean an increase of around $100 billion dollars in defense spending in 2013. [...]
Compared to the Pentagon’s current budget, Romney’s plan would lead to $2.1 trillion in additional spending over the next ten years, according to an analysis conducted for CNNMoney by Travis Sharp, a budget expert at the Center for a New American Security.
And that number assumes a gradual increase to 4% of GDP. The additional spending would hit $2.3 trillion over a decade if the Pentagon’s budget were to immediately jump to 4% of GDP.
And Romney has not said how he’d pay for it. CNN notes that the “lack of detail means that Romney’s claim of moving toward a balanced budget requires a great deal of trust.” On top of increased military spending, Romney plans on expanding on the Bush tax cuts but has also not said how he would pay for them.
Budget experts criticized Romney’s defense plan. Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the plan for additional spending does not “reflect fiscal reality,” while Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said “spending should be determined by the security environment — not the size of your economy.”
“Romney’s plan might reduce military risk in some areas,” Sharp said. “But you can never eliminate all the risk — no matter how much you spend.”
Perhaps Romney will take cues from his friends on the House Republican caucus, who want to cut programs that help the poor to prevent necessary reductions in military spending.
Updated this post with the picture from the link.
Post edited by Newch91 on
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"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
i want to see romney frame the gay marriage debate.
obama is for it, romney is not.
how does romney dress up his position and make it attractive to the people that favor civil rights and gay rights? he is going to need these votes to compete with obama.
if this was the 60s george wallace is shouting "segregation now, segregation forever!!". just like romney is going to have to say "no gay marriage now, no gay marriage ever!!!"
we are at one of those moments in our history right now.
get on the bus or get run over.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.- Hemingway
Judging on the subject matter of the four most active threads today on AMT, everyone must be feeling very merry.
You have a great day.
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"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Romney Adviser: Mitt ‘Doesn’t Want To Really Engage’ On Foreign Policy Issues Until He’s President
The New York Times published two articles this weekend highlighting the disarray that is Mitt Romney’s foreign policy positions. Romney not only appears “out of touch,” for example, on his Russia policy and “all over the map” on the war in Afghanistan, but also, the former Massachusetts governor has demonstrated a “perplexing pattern,” the Times reported, of being at odds with many of his own foreign policy advisers.
Moreover, seeming to concede President Obama’s dominance of national security issues this campaign season, a Romney adviser told the Times that Romney isn’t interested in talking about foreign policy. “Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office,” the adviser said.
And there’s good reason. Romney’s inexperience on foreign policy and national security issues has dogged his campaign with confusion, ignorance and private and public disagreements among Romney’s campaign advisers and surrogates:
AFGHANISTAN
Romney has been “all over the map” on Afghanistan. As the Washington Post reported late last year, Romney “has not explained what he thinks the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is at this point and what would constitute success.” And keeping with his adviser’s above statement, Romney said in a major foreign policy speech that he’d wait until becomes president to “order a full review of our transition to the Afghan military.”
Romney also says that the U.S. should not be negotiating with the Taliban, a position that puts him at odds with his top national security campaign surrogate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), his own advisers and even former top Bush administration officials. “Romney’s supporters and foreign policy advisers argue that after a decade at war, the only option is a political settlement,” the Times noted.
IRAN
Romney said that if Obama is re-elected, Iran will get a nuclear weapon. “If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” he said. That line “caused some of his advisers to cringe” the Times reported this weekend. But overall, again, Romney has no real policy on Iran that differs much from the current administration’s approach. Romney has proposed much of what Obama is already doing. The Times noted that “when pressed on how, exactly, his strategy would differ from Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Romney had a hard time responding.”
But Romney does occasionally ramp up bellicose rhetoric on Iran which prompted a former Israeli Mossad director to say the former Massachusetts governor “is making the situation worse” with Iran. Romney has ignored what the IAEA, U.S. and Israeli intelligence think about Iran’s nuclear program and his campaign advisers even attacked the Obama administration for public discussion of the consequences of attacking Iran.
RUSSIA
Russia “is without question, our number one geopolitical foe,” Romney said in March. The Washington Post called the remark “a bit puzzling,” given Russia’s post-Cold War global standing and less adversarial relationship with the United States. Even McCain seemed a bit wary of endorsing that point of view.
And the co-chairman of the Romney campaign’s working group Russia, Leon Aron, disagrees with Romney’s contention that, as the Times put it, “natural resources could vault Russia to a position of global influence rivaling any nation by midcentury.” Aron wrote last month that “Russia’s most serious risk stems from a near-fatal dependence on the price of oil.”
CHINA
Romney’s regularly hypes the Chinese military threat and ignores the need for engaging China diplomatically and economically. In fact, former GOP presidential candidate and U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, who declared himself a Romney supporter, said that Romney’s China policy is “wrongheaded.” Even one of Romney’s top foreign policy advisers praised President Obama on China. “I think he has a good policy in Asia, particularly in dealing with China,” said Robert Kagan.
ISRAEL/PALESTINE/MIDDLE EAST
While Romney often throws out the baseless attack line that Obama has thrown Israel “under the bus,” the presumptive GOP nominee has offered no real plan to achieve peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In fact, Romney has said that the U.S. “should not play the role of leader” in the Middle East peace process. “My inclination is to follow the guidance of our ally Israel,” he said last October.
Romney criticized Newt Gingrich for saying Palestinians aren’t people, but again, he said he’d ask the Israelis what his position would be. “Before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say: ‘Would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do?’” Former U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration Martin Indyk said that statement implied that he would “subcontract Middle East policy to Israel.”
VETERANS
The Romney campaign has attacked President Obama for not doing enough for the nation’s veterans, yet Romney has no plan to address various issues affecting the U.S. military — for example, veterans’ health care and unemployment or servicemembers’ education.
TERRORISM
In 2007 and 2008, Romney based his national security policy during his failed presidential bid on the need to fight “radical jihad” and the threat from those wanting to unite the world “under a single Islamic caliphate.” During that campaign, Romney also said he does “not concur” with then Sen. Obama’s plan to go after “high-value intelligence targets” in Pakistan with or without permission. And referring to Osama bin Laden, Romney said, “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”
But now, Romney barely mentions terrorism, jihadists or an Islamic caliphate and claims that “of course” he would have done what Obama did and ordered the raid that killed the al Qaeda leader last year. “Any thinking American” would have ordered the raid, Romney said. Apparently “any thinking American” does not include Vice President Biden and Robert Gates, who was Defense Secretary at the time of the raid.
The Times also reported this weekend that Romney’s foreign policy advisers — many of whom helped push for the Iraq war and are now doing the same with Iran — are themselves divided. “There are two very different worldviews in this campaign,” on adviser said. Some of the more mainstream views within the campaign have resulted from “the scar tissue they developed in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Bush-era experiments in the exercise of American power.” But there also remains the more hawkish “Bolton faction,” referring to former Bush administration ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton.
So it’s clear why Romney doesn’t want to engage on foreign policy and national security issues in this year’s presidential campaign: his advisers don’t agree with him or each other. And Romney either doesn’t have any national security policies, they aren’t different from President Obama’s, or as recent polling has suggested, they aren’t very popular.
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"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Simple answer: no. He already has 17 people who worked on the Bush administration as his foreign policy advisers, so he'll probably just use Bush's strategy: strike first, ask questions later.
DURING the Republican primary debates in January, when Mitt Romney was still trying to outmaneuver the challengers who were questioning his conservative bona fides, he made a declaration about Afghanistan that led a faction of his foreign policy advisers to shake their heads in wonderment.
“We should not negotiate with the Taliban,” the former Massachusetts governor declared, just as diplomats dispatched by the president were in Qatar trying to get those negotiations going. “We should defeat the Taliban.” In case anyone missed his meaning, he drove home the point, saying the best strategy was, “We go anywhere they are and we kill them.”
Set aside for the moment that many of Mr. Romney’s supporters and foreign policy advisers argue that after a decade at war, the only option is a political settlement, which means talking to some elements of the Taliban. Stephen Hadley, the former national security adviser to George W. Bush, has argued this “would not — as some have suggested — constitute ‘surrender’ to America’s enemies.” A co-chairman of Mr. Romney’s working group on Afghanistan and Pakistan, James Shinn, who also served Mr. Bush, was co-author of perhaps the best single unclassified document on the complexities of those negotiations, entitled “Afghan Peace Talks: A Primer.” It argued that a negotiated deal would “obviously be desirable” if elements of the Taliban could be persuaded to renounce violence and take “some role in Afghan governance short of total control.”
It was just one example of what Mr. Romney’s advisers call a perplexing pattern: Dozens of subtle position papers flow through the candidate’s policy shop and yet seem to have little influence on Mr. Romney’s hawkish-sounding pronouncements, on everything from war to nuclear proliferation to the trade-offs in dealing with China. In the Afghanistan case, “none of us could quite figure out what he was advocating,” one of Mr. Romney’s advisers said. He insisted on anonymity — as did a half-dozen others interviewed over the past two weeks — because the Romney campaign has banned any discussion of the process by which the candidate formulates his positions.
“It begged the obvious question,” the adviser added. “Do we stay another decade? How many forces, and how long, does that take? Do we really want to go into the general election telling Americans that we should stay a few more years to eradicate the whole Taliban movement?” In phase one of a long presidential campaign, Mr. Romney could duck those questions: the spotlight moved to the wisdom of the economic stimulus and the auto-industry bailout, contraception and, now, same-sex marriage and high school bullying.
But in the long stretch before the Republican convention in August, the battle for Mr. Romney’s mind on the key foreign policy questions that have defined the past few decades will have to be joined: When is a threat to America so urgent that the United States should intervene unilaterally? Is it worth the cost and casualties to rebuild broken societies? Should America feel it must always be in the lead — as Mr. Romney seems to argue — or let other powers play that role when their interests are more directly affected?
On these questions, Mr. Romney’s own advisers, judging by their public writing and comments, possess widely differing views — often a result of the scar tissue they developed in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Bush-era experiments in the exercise of American power. But what has struck both his advisers and outside Republicans is that in his effort to secure the nomination, Mr. Romney’s public comments have usually rejected mainstream Republican orthodoxy. They sound more like the talking points of the neoconservatives — the “Bolton faction,” as insiders call the group led by John Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations. In a stormy tenure in the Bush administration, Mr. Bolton was often arguing that international institutions, the United Nations included, should be routed around because they so often frustrate American interests.
Curiously for a Republican candidate with virtually no foreign policy record, Mr. Romney has made little effort to court the old-timers of Republican internationalism, from the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft to the former secretaries of state James A. Baker III, George P. Shultz and even the grandmaster of realism, Henry A. Kissinger. And in seeking to define himself in opposition to President Obama, Mr. Romney has openly rejected positions that George W. Bush came around to in his humbler second term.
This may change as the arrival of the general election requires Mr. Romney to grapple with the question of how to attack a Democratic president whose affection for unilateral use of force — from drones over Pakistan and Yemen to a far greater role for the Special Operations command — has immunized him a bit from the traditional claim that Democrats can’t stand the sight of hard power. So far Mr. Romney’s most nuanced line of attack was laid out in the introduction to a campaign white paper last fall written by Eliot Cohen, a historian and security expert who worked for Condoleezza Rice in the State Department, that the “high council of the Obama administration” views the “United States as a power in decline,” a “condition that can and should be managed for the global good rather than reversed.” It also alleged a “torrent of criticism, unprecedented for an American president, that Barack Obama has directed at his own country.”
Iran may be a first test. Mr. Romney put it pretty bluntly, in another line that caused some of his advisers to cringe and others to celebrate, when he declared late in 2011: “If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.”
BUT when pressed on how, exactly, his strategy would differ from Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Romney had a hard time responding. The economic sanctions Mr. Obama has imposed have been far more crippling to the Iranian economy than anything President Bush did between the public revelation of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities in 2003 and the end of Mr. Bush’s term in early 2009. Covert action has been stepped up, too. Mr. Bolton has called efforts to negotiate with Iran “delusional,” but other advisers — mostly those who dealt with the issue during the Bush administration — say they are a critical step in holding together the European allies and, if conflict looms, proving to Russia and China that every effort was made to come to a peaceful resolution. Several e-mails to the campaign asking for Mr. Romney’s position on the talks yielded no response.
“There are two very different worldviews in this campaign,” said one adviser who aligns more often with Mr. Bolton. “But as in any campaign, there are outer circles, inner circles and inner-inner circles, and I’m not sure that anyone knows if the candidate has a strong view of his own on this.” Another adviser, saying he would be “cashiered” if the campaign caught him talking to a reporter without approval, said the real answer was that “Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office” and for now was “just happy to leave the impression that when Obama says he’ll stop an Iranian bomb he doesn’t mean it, and Mitt does.”
On some issues, Mr. Romney clearly does have his own views: He drafted an op-ed opposing the ratification of the New Start treaty with Russia, which cut in half the two countries’ nuclear launchers but left huge stockpiles of non-deployed nuclear weapons largely untouched — without much input from his staff. In recent days, Mr. Romney’s advisers argued that the candidate’s declaration that Russia is “our No. 1 geopolitical foe” looks less out of touch now that President Vladimir V. Putin reclaimed his office with a brutal crackdown on dissent. Mr. Romney’s best line: He will “reset the reset.”
More complicated for Mr. Romney, given his business credentials, is his position on China. He argues for more arms to Taiwan and much tougher use of trade sanctions to respond to China’s currency and market manipulations.
In the past, such actions have frozen Chinese cooperation with the United States, but, the white paper insists, “Romney will work to persuade China to commit to North Korea’s disarmament,” as if the last three presidents have not.
Such trade-offs are, of course, a bit too subtle for any presidential campaign. Yet so far this year Mr. Romney has spent little time on foreign policy, understandable given the length of the primary battles. The Romney strategy for now may simply be to portray Mr. Obama as a weak apologizer and figure out the details later.
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"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
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"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Believe me, when I was growin up, I thought the worst thing you could turn out to be was normal, So I say freaks in the most complementary way. Here's a song by a fellow freak - E.V
It has taken months of bad news, but Democrats increasingly believe that President Obama might just lose his re-election bid.
The latest wake-up call comes in the form of a New York Times/CBS poll showing Republican Mitt Romney in the lead not just among registered voters overall, but with women and independents.
You need money to win Ohio, but it may not be worth the price of all this gay pride to get it. As the Times poll showed,a huge majority believe Obama’s rhetorical reversion was about politics, not a personal moral journey.-
The Times/CBS survey is unique in that the pollsters called back the same phone numbers they had a month before. In April, Obama and Romney were dead even. Now, Romney leads by 3 points overall. That’s still within the margin of error -- a statistical tie.
But the shifts with women, moderates and independents are all statistically significant. Obama lost 5 points with each of those demographics.
Team Obama has for months been warning Democrats not to be overconfident and warning of a close election, with the president increasingly sounding the alarm for donors and activists in recent campaign appearances.
Since the general election season kicked off in earnest in the last week of March, Obama has had an almost unbroken string of losing weeks, starting with his overheard conversation with former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
There was the back-and-forth with the Supreme Court over his health law, the attack by one of Obama’s advisers on Ann Romney, the GSA Vegas scandal, the hookers in Cartagena and then the baffling case of the gay marriage half-reversion.
Some of the problems were just bad luck (hookers), some were just blunders (hot mic) but much of the rest has been about Obama trying to galvanize his base coalition and secure the massive donations he needs to finance the most expensive campaign in history.
His trip to New York on Monday was the best example yet. Obama delivered a groaner of a speech at Barnard College in which he did everything but shout “girl power” at the end.
And then in an appearance on a left-leaning ladies chat show, ABC’s “The View,” Obama rhapsodized about his partial reversion to previous support for gay marriage in advance of attending a fundraiser with his party’s fundraising shop for “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender” Democrats that featured Ricky Martin, he of Menudo, bikini briefs and “She Bangs.”
You need money to win Ohio, but it may not be worth the price of all this gay pride to get it. As the Times poll showed, a huge majority believe Obama’s rhetorical reversion was about politics, not a personal moral journey. Even those who are fine with gay marriage, may find it unseemly to see Obama waving the rainbow flag so vigorously in pursuit of cash
While Obama was in New York, he also stopped by to scoop up some money from Wall Streeters, including some private equity folks -- an industry his campaign was simultaneously describing as parasites and vampires.
If you wonder why Obama felt the need to single out JP Morgan Chase and its CEO for praise despite a $2 billion shellacking the firm took on its own investments, fundraisers like these are a big part of the answer.
All of this pandering may be necessary to keep Obama’s campaign dreadnaught moving ahead, but it comes at a cost, especially when so much of it is contradictory or confusing.
Obama believes marriage is a human right regardless of the gender of one’s preferred spouse, but thinks states out to be able to suppress that human right. Okay.
Obama thinks Romney is a vampire, but is happy to take the money of his rival’s fellow bloodsuckers? Gotcha.
David Brooks, a New York Times columnist who is quite taken with Obama, writes in today’s paper that while Americans think Obama is doing a bad job on the economy and that the country is off track, Obama stands a good chance of being re-elected because of his demeanor: an “ESPN” brand of post-modern machismo cool.
When Obama supporters like Brooks make argument like these, they are engaged in willful self-deception.
There has been nothing very cool about the past 7 weeks for Obama. The president has twisted himself into a policy and rhetorical pretzel to win the support and money he needs from the members of the Democratic coalition.
The Times poll tells the tale: Obama’s nuzzling of the base, beseeching of donors and policy contortions have given Romney the chance to start winning over the narrow band of undecided persuadable voters.
If Democrats don’t want to see Obama defeated, they had better suck it up. Obama is not the superman they believe him to be, nor is his campaign the masterwork they have been led to believe.
The president knows how tight a spot he is in. His supporters are just now realizing it.
That's sure going to fire up voters to vote for Romney. :roll:
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"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in a speech in Iowa scheduled for later today, will take aim at President Obama's economic stimulus, calling it a "fire on the prairie."
"President Obama started his days in office with the trillion-dollar stimulus package - the biggest, most careless onetime expenditure by the federal government in history," according to excerpts from Romney's prepared remarks. "And remember this: The stimulus wasn't just wasted - it was borrowed and wasted. We still owe the money, we're still paying interest on it, and it'll be that way long after this presidency ends in January."
In the speech, Romney says that the federal debt is "not a Democratic or Republican problem," although he places the blame for it squarely on Obama, signaling that the stimulus will be a central theme of his campaign going forward.
"We can't spend another four years talking about solving a problem that we only make worse every day," Romney is quoted as saying. "When the men and women who settled the Iowa prairie saw a fire in the distance, they didn't look around for someone else to save them or go back to sleep hoping the wind might blow another direction. They knew their fate was in their hands. And so it is today. A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation, and every day we fail to act, we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve."
Romney To Decry ‘Prairie Fire Of Debt’ While Ignoring That His Plan Makes It Worse
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney will return to Iowa today for the first time since the state’s January caucuses, where he will highlight the national debt and target President Obama for “add[ing] more than $5 trillion to it” — ignoring that the majority of the added debt since Obama took office is the result of Bush-era policies.
According to excerpts of his speech, Romney will lay out America’s responsibility to address the “prairie fire of debt” that “threatens what it means to be an American”:
Today America faces a financial crisis of debt and spending that threatens what it means to be an American. Here in the heartland you know in your hearts that it’s wrong. We can’t spend another four years talking about solving a problem that we only make worse every day. [...]
A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation and every day we fail to act we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve. This is not a Democratic or Republican problem. That fire could care less if you have a donkey or an elephant in your front lawn, it’s still coming for your house. There’s plenty of blame to go around for both parties. But in my years leading businesses, an Olympics and a state, I’ve learned one simple principle of leadership that never falters: Leaders lead. I will lead us out of this debt and spending crisis.
There’s one major problem with Romney’s rhetoric: his economic plan makes the debt worse. Romney’s tax plan gives a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut to all Americans and repeals the Alternative Minimum Tax, costing $10.7 trillion over the next decade and reducing federal revenues to just 15 percent of GDP, according to Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden. Romney hasn’t offered a plan to pay for those cuts, instead simply asserting that he will balance the budget.
But balancing the budget under those terms would be next to impossible. Even if Romney limits tax deductions for the richest Americans as he says he would, he would need 6.5 percent economic growth for the next five years to keep his plan from adding to the deficit. To put that in perspective, the best five-year period of growth since World War II was from 1961 to 1966, when the economy grew at 5.8 percent per year.
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"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Romney To Decry ‘Prairie Fire Of Debt’ While Ignoring That His Plan Makes It Worse
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney will return to Iowa today for the first time since the state’s January caucuses, where he will highlight the national debt and target President Obama for “add[ing] more than $5 trillion to it” — ignoring that the majority of the added debt since Obama took office is the result of Bush-era policies.
According to excerpts of his speech, Romney will lay out America’s responsibility to address the “prairie fire of debt” that “threatens what it means to be an American”:
Today America faces a financial crisis of debt and spending that threatens what it means to be an American. Here in the heartland you know in your hearts that it’s wrong. We can’t spend another four years talking about solving a problem that we only make worse every day. [...]
A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation and every day we fail to act we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve. This is not a Democratic or Republican problem. That fire could care less if you have a donkey or an elephant in your front lawn, it’s still coming for your house. There’s plenty of blame to go around for both parties. But in my years leading businesses, an Olympics and a state, I’ve learned one simple principle of leadership that never falters: Leaders lead. I will lead us out of this debt and spending crisis.
There’s one major problem with Romney’s rhetoric: his economic plan makes the debt worse. Romney’s tax plan gives a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut to all Americans and repeals the Alternative Minimum Tax, costing $10.7 trillion over the next decade and reducing federal revenues to just 15 percent of GDP, according to Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden. Romney hasn’t offered a plan to pay for those cuts, instead simply asserting that he will balance the budget.
But balancing the budget under those terms would be next to impossible. Even if Romney limits tax deductions for the richest Americans as he says he would, he would need 6.5 percent economic growth for the next five years to keep his plan from adding to the deficit. To put that in perspective, the best five-year period of growth since World War II was from 1961 to 1966, when the economy grew at 5.8 percent per year.
Comments
I've seen that... He's a well spoken young gentleman.
Woot
This thread is like Comedy central.
"He(BO) said he was going to spend $150 billion on green energy and create 5 million jobs," Romney said. "I have a hard time seeing all those jobs."
So what happened to all the jobs the GOP promised when they won all those seats in 2010 ...
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Taxes are too high on the job creators. Duh!!!!! :fp:
http://aneconomicsense.com/2012/04/22/t ... -nor-jobs/
http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=c ... you-and-me
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Romney Will Increase Military Spending by $2.1 Trillion With No Plan to Pay for It
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/ ... -trillion/
Mitt Romney is campaigning for president on fiscal responsibility. “The mission to restore America begins with getting our fiscal house in order,” he says. At the same time, the presumptive GOP nominee says he wants to increase military spending. His campaign website claims that a President Romney will peg the Pentagon’s budget to Gross Domestic Product “at a floor of 4 percent of GDP.” What will that mean in dollars? CNNMoney reports that under Romney’s plan, “the additional spending really piles up in future years”:
And Romney has not said how he’d pay for it. CNN notes that the “lack of detail means that Romney’s claim of moving toward a balanced budget requires a great deal of trust.” On top of increased military spending, Romney plans on expanding on the Bush tax cuts but has also not said how he would pay for them.
Budget experts criticized Romney’s defense plan. Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the plan for additional spending does not “reflect fiscal reality,” while Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said “spending should be determined by the security environment — not the size of your economy.”
“Romney’s plan might reduce military risk in some areas,” Sharp said. “But you can never eliminate all the risk — no matter how much you spend.”
Perhaps Romney will take cues from his friends on the House Republican caucus, who want to cut programs that help the poor to prevent necessary reductions in military spending.
Updated this post with the picture from the link.
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
obama is for it, romney is not.
how does romney dress up his position and make it attractive to the people that favor civil rights and gay rights? he is going to need these votes to compete with obama.
if this was the 60s george wallace is shouting "segregation now, segregation forever!!". just like romney is going to have to say "no gay marriage now, no gay marriage ever!!!"
we are at one of those moments in our history right now.
get on the bus or get run over.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/ ... gn-policy/
Romney Adviser: Mitt ‘Doesn’t Want To Really Engage’ On Foreign Policy Issues Until He’s President
The New York Times published two articles this weekend highlighting the disarray that is Mitt Romney’s foreign policy positions. Romney not only appears “out of touch,” for example, on his Russia policy and “all over the map” on the war in Afghanistan, but also, the former Massachusetts governor has demonstrated a “perplexing pattern,” the Times reported, of being at odds with many of his own foreign policy advisers.
Moreover, seeming to concede President Obama’s dominance of national security issues this campaign season, a Romney adviser told the Times that Romney isn’t interested in talking about foreign policy. “Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office,” the adviser said.
And there’s good reason. Romney’s inexperience on foreign policy and national security issues has dogged his campaign with confusion, ignorance and private and public disagreements among Romney’s campaign advisers and surrogates:
AFGHANISTAN
Romney has been “all over the map” on Afghanistan. As the Washington Post reported late last year, Romney “has not explained what he thinks the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is at this point and what would constitute success.” And keeping with his adviser’s above statement, Romney said in a major foreign policy speech that he’d wait until becomes president to “order a full review of our transition to the Afghan military.”
Romney also says that the U.S. should not be negotiating with the Taliban, a position that puts him at odds with his top national security campaign surrogate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), his own advisers and even former top Bush administration officials. “Romney’s supporters and foreign policy advisers argue that after a decade at war, the only option is a political settlement,” the Times noted.
IRAN
Romney said that if Obama is re-elected, Iran will get a nuclear weapon. “If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” he said. That line “caused some of his advisers to cringe” the Times reported this weekend. But overall, again, Romney has no real policy on Iran that differs much from the current administration’s approach. Romney has proposed much of what Obama is already doing. The Times noted that “when pressed on how, exactly, his strategy would differ from Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Romney had a hard time responding.”
But Romney does occasionally ramp up bellicose rhetoric on Iran which prompted a former Israeli Mossad director to say the former Massachusetts governor “is making the situation worse” with Iran. Romney has ignored what the IAEA, U.S. and Israeli intelligence think about Iran’s nuclear program and his campaign advisers even attacked the Obama administration for public discussion of the consequences of attacking Iran.
RUSSIA
Russia “is without question, our number one geopolitical foe,” Romney said in March. The Washington Post called the remark “a bit puzzling,” given Russia’s post-Cold War global standing and less adversarial relationship with the United States. Even McCain seemed a bit wary of endorsing that point of view.
And the co-chairman of the Romney campaign’s working group Russia, Leon Aron, disagrees with Romney’s contention that, as the Times put it, “natural resources could vault Russia to a position of global influence rivaling any nation by midcentury.” Aron wrote last month that “Russia’s most serious risk stems from a near-fatal dependence on the price of oil.”
CHINA
Romney’s regularly hypes the Chinese military threat and ignores the need for engaging China diplomatically and economically. In fact, former GOP presidential candidate and U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, who declared himself a Romney supporter, said that Romney’s China policy is “wrongheaded.” Even one of Romney’s top foreign policy advisers praised President Obama on China. “I think he has a good policy in Asia, particularly in dealing with China,” said Robert Kagan.
ISRAEL/PALESTINE/MIDDLE EAST
While Romney often throws out the baseless attack line that Obama has thrown Israel “under the bus,” the presumptive GOP nominee has offered no real plan to achieve peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In fact, Romney has said that the U.S. “should not play the role of leader” in the Middle East peace process. “My inclination is to follow the guidance of our ally Israel,” he said last October.
Romney criticized Newt Gingrich for saying Palestinians aren’t people, but again, he said he’d ask the Israelis what his position would be. “Before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say: ‘Would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do?’” Former U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration Martin Indyk said that statement implied that he would “subcontract Middle East policy to Israel.”
VETERANS
The Romney campaign has attacked President Obama for not doing enough for the nation’s veterans, yet Romney has no plan to address various issues affecting the U.S. military — for example, veterans’ health care and unemployment or servicemembers’ education.
TERRORISM
In 2007 and 2008, Romney based his national security policy during his failed presidential bid on the need to fight “radical jihad” and the threat from those wanting to unite the world “under a single Islamic caliphate.” During that campaign, Romney also said he does “not concur” with then Sen. Obama’s plan to go after “high-value intelligence targets” in Pakistan with or without permission. And referring to Osama bin Laden, Romney said, “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”
But now, Romney barely mentions terrorism, jihadists or an Islamic caliphate and claims that “of course” he would have done what Obama did and ordered the raid that killed the al Qaeda leader last year. “Any thinking American” would have ordered the raid, Romney said. Apparently “any thinking American” does not include Vice President Biden and Robert Gates, who was Defense Secretary at the time of the raid.
The Times also reported this weekend that Romney’s foreign policy advisers — many of whom helped push for the Iraq war and are now doing the same with Iran — are themselves divided. “There are two very different worldviews in this campaign,” on adviser said. Some of the more mainstream views within the campaign have resulted from “the scar tissue they developed in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Bush-era experiments in the exercise of American power.” But there also remains the more hawkish “Bolton faction,” referring to former Bush administration ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton.
So it’s clear why Romney doesn’t want to engage on foreign policy and national security issues in this year’s presidential campaign: his advisers don’t agree with him or each other. And Romney either doesn’t have any national security policies, they aren’t different from President Obama’s, or as recent polling has suggested, they aren’t very popular.
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/sunda ... ted=1&_r=3
Is There a Romney Doctrine?
DURING the Republican primary debates in January, when Mitt Romney was still trying to outmaneuver the challengers who were questioning his conservative bona fides, he made a declaration about Afghanistan that led a faction of his foreign policy advisers to shake their heads in wonderment.
“We should not negotiate with the Taliban,” the former Massachusetts governor declared, just as diplomats dispatched by the president were in Qatar trying to get those negotiations going. “We should defeat the Taliban.” In case anyone missed his meaning, he drove home the point, saying the best strategy was, “We go anywhere they are and we kill them.”
Set aside for the moment that many of Mr. Romney’s supporters and foreign policy advisers argue that after a decade at war, the only option is a political settlement, which means talking to some elements of the Taliban. Stephen Hadley, the former national security adviser to George W. Bush, has argued this “would not — as some have suggested — constitute ‘surrender’ to America’s enemies.” A co-chairman of Mr. Romney’s working group on Afghanistan and Pakistan, James Shinn, who also served Mr. Bush, was co-author of perhaps the best single unclassified document on the complexities of those negotiations, entitled “Afghan Peace Talks: A Primer.” It argued that a negotiated deal would “obviously be desirable” if elements of the Taliban could be persuaded to renounce violence and take “some role in Afghan governance short of total control.”
It was just one example of what Mr. Romney’s advisers call a perplexing pattern: Dozens of subtle position papers flow through the candidate’s policy shop and yet seem to have little influence on Mr. Romney’s hawkish-sounding pronouncements, on everything from war to nuclear proliferation to the trade-offs in dealing with China. In the Afghanistan case, “none of us could quite figure out what he was advocating,” one of Mr. Romney’s advisers said. He insisted on anonymity — as did a half-dozen others interviewed over the past two weeks — because the Romney campaign has banned any discussion of the process by which the candidate formulates his positions.
“It begged the obvious question,” the adviser added. “Do we stay another decade? How many forces, and how long, does that take? Do we really want to go into the general election telling Americans that we should stay a few more years to eradicate the whole Taliban movement?” In phase one of a long presidential campaign, Mr. Romney could duck those questions: the spotlight moved to the wisdom of the economic stimulus and the auto-industry bailout, contraception and, now, same-sex marriage and high school bullying.
But in the long stretch before the Republican convention in August, the battle for Mr. Romney’s mind on the key foreign policy questions that have defined the past few decades will have to be joined: When is a threat to America so urgent that the United States should intervene unilaterally? Is it worth the cost and casualties to rebuild broken societies? Should America feel it must always be in the lead — as Mr. Romney seems to argue — or let other powers play that role when their interests are more directly affected?
On these questions, Mr. Romney’s own advisers, judging by their public writing and comments, possess widely differing views — often a result of the scar tissue they developed in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Bush-era experiments in the exercise of American power. But what has struck both his advisers and outside Republicans is that in his effort to secure the nomination, Mr. Romney’s public comments have usually rejected mainstream Republican orthodoxy. They sound more like the talking points of the neoconservatives — the “Bolton faction,” as insiders call the group led by John Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations. In a stormy tenure in the Bush administration, Mr. Bolton was often arguing that international institutions, the United Nations included, should be routed around because they so often frustrate American interests.
Curiously for a Republican candidate with virtually no foreign policy record, Mr. Romney has made little effort to court the old-timers of Republican internationalism, from the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft to the former secretaries of state James A. Baker III, George P. Shultz and even the grandmaster of realism, Henry A. Kissinger. And in seeking to define himself in opposition to President Obama, Mr. Romney has openly rejected positions that George W. Bush came around to in his humbler second term.
This may change as the arrival of the general election requires Mr. Romney to grapple with the question of how to attack a Democratic president whose affection for unilateral use of force — from drones over Pakistan and Yemen to a far greater role for the Special Operations command — has immunized him a bit from the traditional claim that Democrats can’t stand the sight of hard power. So far Mr. Romney’s most nuanced line of attack was laid out in the introduction to a campaign white paper last fall written by Eliot Cohen, a historian and security expert who worked for Condoleezza Rice in the State Department, that the “high council of the Obama administration” views the “United States as a power in decline,” a “condition that can and should be managed for the global good rather than reversed.” It also alleged a “torrent of criticism, unprecedented for an American president, that Barack Obama has directed at his own country.”
Iran may be a first test. Mr. Romney put it pretty bluntly, in another line that caused some of his advisers to cringe and others to celebrate, when he declared late in 2011: “If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.”
BUT when pressed on how, exactly, his strategy would differ from Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Romney had a hard time responding. The economic sanctions Mr. Obama has imposed have been far more crippling to the Iranian economy than anything President Bush did between the public revelation of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities in 2003 and the end of Mr. Bush’s term in early 2009. Covert action has been stepped up, too. Mr. Bolton has called efforts to negotiate with Iran “delusional,” but other advisers — mostly those who dealt with the issue during the Bush administration — say they are a critical step in holding together the European allies and, if conflict looms, proving to Russia and China that every effort was made to come to a peaceful resolution. Several e-mails to the campaign asking for Mr. Romney’s position on the talks yielded no response.
“There are two very different worldviews in this campaign,” said one adviser who aligns more often with Mr. Bolton. “But as in any campaign, there are outer circles, inner circles and inner-inner circles, and I’m not sure that anyone knows if the candidate has a strong view of his own on this.” Another adviser, saying he would be “cashiered” if the campaign caught him talking to a reporter without approval, said the real answer was that “Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office” and for now was “just happy to leave the impression that when Obama says he’ll stop an Iranian bomb he doesn’t mean it, and Mitt does.”
On some issues, Mr. Romney clearly does have his own views: He drafted an op-ed opposing the ratification of the New Start treaty with Russia, which cut in half the two countries’ nuclear launchers but left huge stockpiles of non-deployed nuclear weapons largely untouched — without much input from his staff. In recent days, Mr. Romney’s advisers argued that the candidate’s declaration that Russia is “our No. 1 geopolitical foe” looks less out of touch now that President Vladimir V. Putin reclaimed his office with a brutal crackdown on dissent. Mr. Romney’s best line: He will “reset the reset.”
More complicated for Mr. Romney, given his business credentials, is his position on China. He argues for more arms to Taiwan and much tougher use of trade sanctions to respond to China’s currency and market manipulations.
In the past, such actions have frozen Chinese cooperation with the United States, but, the white paper insists, “Romney will work to persuade China to commit to North Korea’s disarmament,” as if the last three presidents have not.
Such trade-offs are, of course, a bit too subtle for any presidential campaign. Yet so far this year Mr. Romney has spent little time on foreign policy, understandable given the length of the primary battles. The Romney strategy for now may simply be to portray Mr. Obama as a weak apologizer and figure out the details later.
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
DOUBLE WOOT!!
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
George W Bush
It has taken months of bad news, but Democrats increasingly believe that President Obama might just lose his re-election bid.
The latest wake-up call comes in the form of a New York Times/CBS poll showing Republican Mitt Romney in the lead not just among registered voters overall, but with women and independents.
You need money to win Ohio, but it may not be worth the price of all this gay pride to get it.
The Times/CBS survey is unique in that the pollsters called back the same phone numbers they had a month before. In April, Obama and Romney were dead even. Now, Romney leads by 3 points overall. That’s still within the margin of error -- a statistical tie.
But the shifts with women, moderates and independents are all statistically significant. Obama lost 5 points with each of those demographics.
Team Obama has for months been warning Democrats not to be overconfident and warning of a close election, with the president increasingly sounding the alarm for donors and activists in recent campaign appearances.
Since the general election season kicked off in earnest in the last week of March, Obama has had an almost unbroken string of losing weeks, starting with his overheard conversation with former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
There was the back-and-forth with the Supreme Court over his health law, the attack by one of Obama’s advisers on Ann Romney, the GSA Vegas scandal, the hookers in Cartagena and then the baffling case of the gay marriage half-reversion.
Some of the problems were just bad luck (hookers), some were just blunders (hot mic) but much of the rest has been about Obama trying to galvanize his base coalition and secure the massive donations he needs to finance the most expensive campaign in history.
His trip to New York on Monday was the best example yet. Obama delivered a groaner of a speech at Barnard College in which he did everything but shout “girl power” at the end.
And then in an appearance on a left-leaning ladies chat show, ABC’s “The View,” Obama rhapsodized about his partial reversion to previous support for gay marriage in advance of attending a fundraiser with his party’s fundraising shop for “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender” Democrats that featured Ricky Martin, he of Menudo, bikini briefs and “She Bangs.”
You need money to win Ohio, but it may not be worth the price of all this gay pride to get it. As the Times poll showed, a huge majority believe Obama’s rhetorical reversion was about politics, not a personal moral journey. Even those who are fine with gay marriage, may find it unseemly to see Obama waving the rainbow flag so vigorously in pursuit of cash
While Obama was in New York, he also stopped by to scoop up some money from Wall Streeters, including some private equity folks -- an industry his campaign was simultaneously describing as parasites and vampires.
If you wonder why Obama felt the need to single out JP Morgan Chase and its CEO for praise despite a $2 billion shellacking the firm took on its own investments, fundraisers like these are a big part of the answer.
All of this pandering may be necessary to keep Obama’s campaign dreadnaught moving ahead, but it comes at a cost, especially when so much of it is contradictory or confusing.
Obama believes marriage is a human right regardless of the gender of one’s preferred spouse, but thinks states out to be able to suppress that human right. Okay.
Obama thinks Romney is a vampire, but is happy to take the money of his rival’s fellow bloodsuckers? Gotcha.
David Brooks, a New York Times columnist who is quite taken with Obama, writes in today’s paper that while Americans think Obama is doing a bad job on the economy and that the country is off track, Obama stands a good chance of being re-elected because of his demeanor: an “ESPN” brand of post-modern machismo cool.
When Obama supporters like Brooks make argument like these, they are engaged in willful self-deception.
There has been nothing very cool about the past 7 weeks for Obama. The president has twisted himself into a policy and rhetorical pretzel to win the support and money he needs from the members of the Democratic coalition.
The Times poll tells the tale: Obama’s nuzzling of the base, beseeching of donors and policy contortions have given Romney the chance to start winning over the narrow band of undecided persuadable voters.
If Democrats don’t want to see Obama defeated, they had better suck it up. Obama is not the superman they believe him to be, nor is his campaign the masterwork they have been led to believe.
The president knows how tight a spot he is in. His supporters are just now realizing it.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05 ... s-chances/
Believe in America!
WOOT!
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in a speech in Iowa scheduled for later today, will take aim at President Obama's economic stimulus, calling it a "fire on the prairie."
"President Obama started his days in office with the trillion-dollar stimulus package - the biggest, most careless onetime expenditure by the federal government in history," according to excerpts from Romney's prepared remarks. "And remember this: The stimulus wasn't just wasted - it was borrowed and wasted. We still owe the money, we're still paying interest on it, and it'll be that way long after this presidency ends in January."
In the speech, Romney says that the federal debt is "not a Democratic or Republican problem," although he places the blame for it squarely on Obama, signaling that the stimulus will be a central theme of his campaign going forward.
"We can't spend another four years talking about solving a problem that we only make worse every day," Romney is quoted as saying. "When the men and women who settled the Iowa prairie saw a fire in the distance, they didn't look around for someone else to save them or go back to sleep hoping the wind might blow another direction. They knew their fate was in their hands. And so it is today. A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation, and every day we fail to act, we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve."
Believe in America.
Woot!
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/0 ... h-prairie/
Romney To Decry ‘Prairie Fire Of Debt’ While Ignoring That His Plan Makes It Worse
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney will return to Iowa today for the first time since the state’s January caucuses, where he will highlight the national debt and target President Obama for “add[ing] more than $5 trillion to it” — ignoring that the majority of the added debt since Obama took office is the result of Bush-era policies.
According to excerpts of his speech, Romney will lay out America’s responsibility to address the “prairie fire of debt” that “threatens what it means to be an American”:
There’s one major problem with Romney’s rhetoric: his economic plan makes the debt worse. Romney’s tax plan gives a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut to all Americans and repeals the Alternative Minimum Tax, costing $10.7 trillion over the next decade and reducing federal revenues to just 15 percent of GDP, according to Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden. Romney hasn’t offered a plan to pay for those cuts, instead simply asserting that he will balance the budget.
But balancing the budget under those terms would be next to impossible. Even if Romney limits tax deductions for the richest Americans as he says he would, he would need 6.5 percent economic growth for the next five years to keep his plan from adding to the deficit. To put that in perspective, the best five-year period of growth since World War II was from 1961 to 1966, when the economy grew at 5.8 percent per year.
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Woot
but
but....
i thought the wars were obama's fault??
he started them from what my short term memory recalls...
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."