Stephen. M. Walt, reflecting on the secret video showing Mitt Romney saying that would ‘kick the can down the road’ when it comes to dealing with the Israel-Palestine issue, says something that has been puzzling me too. [Read more…]
One of Barack Obama’s personality strengths is that he does not seem to get flustered and put off stride by events and attacks. He seems to respond calmly and in measured ways to events and people have wondered how he manages it. [Read more…]
So Mitt Romney has released his 2011 tax returns and a ‘summary statement’ about his taxes from 20 previous years. It was interesting that he released them on Friday afternoon, the ‘Friday news dump’ time, which is the traditional period for releasing news that you don’t want people to pay much attention to. I think this practice arose from the times when people got much of their news from the broadcast TV networks and few people watched them on weekends when they were often pre-empted by sports events. [Read more…]
It falls to Fox News to try and clean up the repeated messes made by the Mitt Romney campaign. The Daily Show had an excellent three-part series on the extreme effort required by them to mitigate the damage done by the recent release of the video. [Read more…]
I was curious about the fact that there seems to have been no subsequent news about the effort to blackmail Mitt Romney about his past tax returns. [Read more…]
With all the attention focused on Mitt Romney’s verbal stumbles on the campaign, less attention has been paid to his running mate Paul Ryan’s activities. He too has had his share of awkward incidents. But while Paul Krugman has rightly been excoriating Ryan’s budget, calling him ‘an unserious man’ and his budget a ‘con game’, other commentators have focused more on Ryan’s odd penchant for embellishing his physical prowess to unrealistic levels. [Read more…]
(This clip appeared on September 18, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
… and he is not pleased. (Jennifer Rubin is a nutter blogger for the Washington Post.) [Read more…]
The released secret recording of Mitt Romney’s remarks to a small group of wealthy supporters provides a revealing look at the mindset of such people. They really do think of themselves as a morally superior class and that those who are poor or struggling as worthless. Matt Taibbi argues that having such delusions is the only way that they can justify to themselves the current state of affairs in which they are engaged in “massive fraud and theft” to benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of us. [Read more…]