Quote of the day

“He is unquestionably mentally unstable, and he is racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic, vulgar and prone to violence. There is simply no rational argument that could lead me to vote for someone with those characteristics.”

-Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) in a 2016 email to Chris Christie following Christie's endorsement of Donald Trump

Dear Senator Romney

I didn't vote for you in 2012. I was wrong and I apologize.

Election Eve Polls

It's going to be a nail biter. Almost all of the polls show both candidates within 1% of each other with Obama holding a razor thin advantage in enough of the swing states to give him the 270 electoral votes he needs to serve another four years. But every reputable poll I have seen is deep within the margin of error.  Bottom line: It's a statistical tie with a very unreliable nod in Obama's direction.

A couple of interesting demonstrations of how close this is going to be might be amusing. Both sides have mobilized their own army of lawyers who are ready to fly into any state where there is the slightest question about the vote counting. And if you really want to sample some craziness, the loons on both the left and the right are whispering about the "nuclear option" in Ohio. That being where the vote is so close  that it is being contested in court and threatening the ability of the state to certify it's electors in time to meet in Washington on the real election day. In this apocalyptic scenario some on the far left and right are noting that both chambers of Ohio's legislature are majority Republican and they could, quite legally, ignore the popular vote and appoint the state's electors on their own authority. Presumably they would be directed to vote for Romney.

Risk of Obama - Romney Splitting Popular and Electoral Votes High

Most polls at this moment suggest GOP nominee Mitt Romney is in the lead nationally, but surveys in the nine or so swing states are registering a narrow advantage for President Obama.

So here’s a prospect worth contemplating: What if Romney carries the popular vote, but Obama regains the presidency by winning 270 votes or more in the electoral college?

Read the rest here.

Romney gains in the polls

Former Governor Mitt Romney got more good news from some daily tracking polls today. The Rasmussen poll showed him up by 2 points over Obama and the daily tracking poll from Gallup showed him up by a whopping 7 points. That indicates a Romney lead that is outside the margin of error. It is looking like this is going to be a much tighter election than many people thought.

How Romney Hijacked 4 Ron Paul Delegations in Tampa

If you want a lesson in dirty politics this is a good primer.
HT: Molonlabe70

Polls: Romney closes the gap

In a major development polls taken since last week's presidential debate are showing that President Obama and former Governor Romney are now in a statistical tie. One, the Pew Research Poll, shows Romney taking a decisive lead (see here). Prior to the debate Obama lead Romney in virtually all national polls including in the decisive swing states. While I am still not planning to vote for either of these men, as a spectator I have to admit that the election just got interesting.

Romney Dominates First Debate

The usual disclaimer; I have no dog in this fight as I'm not voting for either one.

OK this was pretty close to a must win for Romney and he delivered a very solid performance. No, I don't think he hit a grand slam or delivered the proverbial knock out punch. But he came into this behind in the polls and he urgently needed to put a check in the win column. And that he did. I think he won on points. But he really looked better prepared than the President.

Good grief! What's going on with the Republicans?

Caveat: I was not, and am not, planning on voting for Romney or any other Republicans for national office this year. Ditto Obama and the Democrats.

With that out of the way, am I the only one who thinks the GOP is blowing what should have been a golden opportunity to seize the White House from a weak incumbent and a narrowly divided Senate? It seems like the last six months have been one long string of political gaffs by big time candidates who should know better.  That and the ever more dramatic ideological tone of the GOP reflected in the nomination of candidates who while pleasing to the far right are in some cases probably unelectable. A hard right Tea Party neo-con is likely to play well in Texas. I have doubts about places like Ohio and some other states where congressional seats are being contested by uber-right candidates. And we can just throw out the Senate race in Missouri which was a Republican lock until they nominated Archie Bunker.

Now we have the already gaffe prone Mitt Romney announcing that 47% of Americans are losers who pay no taxes, think they are victims and that he will never be able to convince to take responsibility for their own lives! Never mind that there is an element of truth to what he said. It's political suicide to say it. And a man who wants to be President of the United States should demonstrate greater care with his words. Forget my political disagreements with the man. I am seriously starting to wonder if he has the temperament for the job.

I don't know if this is a death blow to his campaign. But I am pretty sure it is the most spectacular case of foot in mouth disease that I can remember from a presidential nominee in my lifetime. If it isn't a fatal wound (and it might be) it is certainly devastating. He seriously comes across sounding like a snobbish jackass. Worse is that he doesn't have a lot of time to recover. This isn't June. It's late September. Early voting is about to begin in some states and the general election is less than two months away. Time and opportunity needed to bounce back from mistakes are fast disappearing.

Leaked video puts Romney campaign on defensive

COSTA MESA, Calif. — With just seven weeks left in the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney’s efforts to recast his campaign in response to critics and a drop in polls have been derailed by new criticism of a leaked video that shows him dismissing President Obama’s supporters as people who take no responsibility for their livelihoods and who think they are entitled to government handouts.

In the video, published by Mother Jones magazine, the Republican presidential nominee tells a private audience of campaign donors that Obama backers will vote for the president “no matter what.” Romney said that they account for “47 percent” of voters and he does not “worry about those people.”

Read the rest here.

Romney Accepts GOP Nomination

TAMPA, Fla. – Accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney vowed to move America past what he called the “disappointments” of President Barack Obama’s four years in office if elected to the White House in November.

In a speech that hearkened back to an America typified by Romney’s upbringing “in the middle of the century in the middle of the country,” the nominee argued he was the candidate best suited to rejuvenate a flagging economy.

Read the rest here.

Ron Paul gains convention delegates in deal with Romney

GOP officials and the Mitt Romney campaign have cut a deal with Texas Rep. Ron Paul's campaign to allow some — though not all — of Paul's delegates from Louisiana and Massachusetts to be seated at the Republican National Convention. The status of Maine's delegates remains unsettled.

The compromise would appear to avert a potential public clash with Paul supporters during the convention's opening day Monday.

Read the rest here.

Romney Gets A Boost

A new Gallup poll shows Mitt Romney has narrowed the race after picking Paul Ryan for VP. The poll indicates a statistical tie between the two candidates. Several other polls taken just before the VP pick was announced had shown Obama with a wide lead. It will be interesting to see polling data from other sources and if the bounce has any staying power. More significantly is that there has been a large uptick in enthusiasm from the party base. Romney reported raising almost $10 million last week.

Reagan's Budget Director Annihilates Paul Ryan's Budget Plan (Must Read)

Greenwich, Conn. PAUL D. RYAN is the most articulate and intellectually imposing Republican of the moment, but that doesn’t alter the fact that this earnest congressman from Wisconsin is preaching the same empty conservative sermon.

Thirty years of Republican apostasy — a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state — have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt. Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.

Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion “defense” budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.

Read the rest here.

It gets even better. I don't know what his positions are on all of the various issues of the day. But Stockman is speaking my language in this op-ed piece. If he ever ran for public office I'd have to give serious thought to voting for him.

Romney And Obama Are Ideological Twins

100 Ways Mitt Romney Is Just Like Barack Obama.
HT: The Orthodox Caveman

Romney Names Paul Ryan For VP

NORFOLK — Mitt Romney has selected Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his vice presidential running mate, introducing the seven-term congressman and architect of Republicans’ budget-cutting plans at a spirited rally on the deck of a battleship here Saturday morning.

In shirt sleeves and tie, Romney promised that he and Ryan would restore the American economy by cutting deficits and growing jobs. He called Ryan a man of integrity and character rooted in his middle-class Midwestern upbringing and said he had chosen a candidate with a vision for addressing the nation’s fiscal problems.

Read the rest here.

An interesting move. This will be very popular with the Tea Party and right wing Republicans. It remains to be seen how it will play with moderates and independents with whom Romney and the GOP have been having a lot of trouble garnering support.

Romney to announce VP pick tomorrow.

Breaking news on NBC. My money is on Paul Ryan.

New Polls: Obama's lead is widening

The Olympics are wrapping up and, at the end of July, when the Olympics began, we wrote that we were basically at halftime of the general election -- and Obama had a narrow lead. Well, it’s a little bigger than that now. (People may want to quibble, but you can’t dismiss every poll on sampling.) There’s clearly movement toward the president and clearly problems for Romney personally. We had found it in our polling for the last month and it hadn’t shown up everywhere yet. Now it has. The latest evidence: three new polls out today – from CNN, Fox, and Reuters/Ipsos – all showing President Obama leading Romney by seven points or more and at or near 50%. (CNN 52-45%, Fox 49-40%, Reuters/Ipsos 49-42%). What’s more, Romney continues to have an image problem. In CNN, Obama’s fav/unfav is +14, Romney’s -1. And in Fox, Obama’s +12, Romney’s +1. (Ipsos didn’t ask fav/unfav.)

Read the rest here.

There is going to be some variation in poll numbers and usually one candidate will have a lead. But these numbers coming from several different sources suggest Romney is in trouble. It's not Spring anymore. It's August now and this is a wide gap to overcome in not quite three months.

There are still the giant infomercials we used to call conventions coming up and Romney has yet to announce his VP choice. But time and opportunities to reverse the pro-Obama trends are starting to run thin. Money is not a major issue. Romney and the GOP have been out-raising Obama and the Democrats by a wide margin. But their huge financial advantages don't seem to be translating into a pro-Romney shift in the polling numbers. On the contrary, the trend for months has been for Obama and it seems to be picking up steam. If this gap is not narrowed significantly then we could see Obama reelected in a landslide.

Romney gets a chilly reception from the NAACP

HOUSTON — Less than four years after President Obama swept into the White House with the overwhelming support of the black community, Mitt Romney appeared on Wednesday before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People with a bold claim: “If you want a president who will make things better in the African-American community, you are looking at him,” Mr. Romney said.

His assertion was met with cackles and boos — as well as some tepid applause — and was emblematic of his entire speech, in which he tried to appeal to the African-American community, while still offering some tough medicine and policy prescriptions unpopular with the group.

Read the rest here.

Not going to vote for the man, but I give him credit for showing up. He must have been tempted to pass on the speech. After George Bush was roundly booed he never went back. But being honest the NAACP is pretty much just the African American Caucus of the Democratic National Committee.

Romney Hijacks Massachusetts Delegation

It looks like Mitt Romney wins elections the old fashioned way... he steals them. Here in brief is the story on the Mass delegation. Ron Paul supporters read the rule book (something Romney's people apparently didn't bother with) and made sure they had enough people elected to the state convention to take it over. Once in control of the state convention (legally) they packed the state delegation to the national convention in Tampa with Ron Paul supporters.

Not surprisingly Romney's people cried foul. They pointed out, fairly enough, that he won the popular vote in the Bay State's primary. But what they failed to grasp is that state conventions are often the last word in party rules and the assigning of delegates. Embarrassed to have lost his home state to a cleverly organized coup de main he promptly set about figuring out how to retake the state delegation. Except that he couldn't, at least not legally.

So Romney being Romney, he simply ordered it to be done and so it has been. A Republican committee assigned to oversee things like delegate selection disqualified 17 Ron Paul delegates from the Bay State. Their rational; the delegates had failed to deliver in a timely manner a sworn affidavit, signed under penalty of perjury, promising to vote for Romney. The only problem being that nowhere is there any rule requiring such an affidavit. Nor has such an affidavit ever been required in the past.

The GOP chair would not explain why affidavits were required this year. He also declined attempts by the Boston Globe to interview him. But according to the Globe the chairman sent out an email saying that Governor Romney had the right to reject delegates for "just cause."

Oh really? Where is that right found in the GOP's bylaws and rules?

Giving credit where it is due, Romney has reversed Ron Paul's brilliant (and legal) take over of a large part of the Massachusetts delegation. My only quibble is that he did it using the playbook straight from Tammany Hall.

"It doesn't matter how many votes you win. What matters is who counts the votes."
-Joseph Stalin