The Tears of a Mitt

So this documentary sounds really interesting, and I plan on seeing it. The trailer has the scene from election night when Romney realizes he's going to lose... holy crap.

Led By Delusional Morons, Right Until The End

This whole article about Mitt Romney's campaign is interesting, but this is particularly awesome:

Arriving at his suite in the Westin Boston Waterfront ­hotel, Romney received regular updates from his staff. He made small talk about the Patriots and the Celtics and played with his grandchildren. He was about to concede around 11:15 p.m when Republican strategist Karl Rove made his now-infamous appearance on Fox News Channel, insisting that his own network was wrong in calling Ohio for the president.

The concession call was canceled, followed by an hour of uncertainty. Then, after Fox ­executives dismissed Rove’s concerns and stood by the network’s projection, Romney said: Call the president.

Someone heard Karl Rove's insane ramblings and said "wait! wait, let's see how this plays out"... and then waited another HOUR. One of those people was almost president.

Mitt Romney: Still the Worst

Very excited for the prospect of him leaving out lives forever:

Mitt Romney has a simple explanation for donors as to why his presidential campaign came up short: President Obama gave out too much stuff.

According to reports in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, the former Republican nominee said during a call with donors on Wednesday that Obama had been “very generous” in doling out “big gifts” to “the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people” as well as to women throughout his first term. Benefits such as access to “free health care,” guaranteed contraceptive coverage, more affordable student loans, and “amnesty for children of illegals,” all combined to give the president a decisive edge in popularity.

“The President’s campaign focused on giving targeted groups a big gift — so he made a big effort on small things,” Romney said. “Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars.”

Yep. Gifts. Not everyone can "earn" all the privilege and wealth that you get when you're born as the son of a CEO massive company/Governor/Presidential candidate. Good riddance.

VOTE!

Great find by Digby:



There's a reason why the right is doing everything in their power to stop you from voting.

Don't let them win. Vote.

And if you're in Maryland be sure to vote for prop 4 (the MD Dream Act) and Prop (Marriage Equality).

And if you're in Montgomery County, vote no on prop B, which limits the collective bargaining rights of police officers. The county thinks it's so important that they're using taxpayer money to hire canvasers to astroturf support for this bill. Be sure to do your part to defeat it.

The Worst

Stay classy Romney campaign:

DAYTON, Ohio — The last-minute decision by Romney high command Monday to suspend politics while Sandy raged sent aides in Ohio scrambling to convert a scheduled victory rally into an apolitical "storm relief event" — a process that tested the campaign's agility, and left a few threads of partisanship inadvertently hanging.

On Monday morning, Romney's local team in Dayton was eagerly preparing to host the candidate the following day. A high school gym had been reserved, a stage had been rented, and a pair of celebrity guests — country singer Randy Owen, and NASCAR driver Richard Petty — had been booked to give the event some B-list heft.

Then, a little before noon, communications director Gail Gitcho announced the cancellation of "all events currently scheduled" for Tuesday. The superstorm that forecasters had been warning about for days had picked up steam, and people throughout the northeast were now bracing for the worst. In a statement, Gitcho said the decision to cancel campaign events had been made "out of sensitivity to the millions of Americans in the path of Hurricane Sandy."

But Boston wasn't quite ready to lose a full day of swing state visibility with a week left in the race. So, after some deliberation, the campaign decided to use their existing venue in Ohio to stage a makeshift, and nonpartisan, humanitarian project. It would be a way for Romney to show leadership — and get on the local news — without looking craven or opportunistic.. . .
The plan was for supporters to bring hurricane relief supplies to the event, and then deliver the bags of canned goods, packages of diapers, and cases of water bottles to the candidate, who would be perched behind a table along with a slew of volunteers and his Ohio right-hand man, Senator Rob Portman. To complete the project and photo-op, Romney would lead his crew in carrying the goods out of the gymnasium and into the Penske rental truck parked outside.
But the last-minute nature of the call for donations left some in the campaign concerned that they would end up with an empty truck. So the night before the event, campaign aides went to a local Wal Mart and spent $5,000 on granola bars, canned food, and diapers to put on display while they waited for donations to come in, according to one staffer. (The campaign confirmed that it "did donate supplies to the relief effort," but would not specify how much it spent.). . .
But even as Romney, clad in blue jeans and rolled-up sleeves, hustled around his area of the gym, shaking hands, thanking supporters, and stacking cases of bottled water on top of each other, signs of stagecraft remained.

As supporters lined up to greet the candidate, a young volunteer in a Romney/Ryan t-shirt stood near the tables, his hands cupped around his mouth, shouting, "You need a donation to get in line!" Empty-handed supporters pled for entrance, with one woman asking, "What if we dropped off our donations up front?"

The volunteer gestured toward a pile of groceries conveniently stacked near the candidate. "Just grab something," he said.
Two teenage boys retrieved a jar of peanut butter each, and got in line. When it was their turn, they handed their "donations" to Romney. He took them, smiled, and offered an earnest "Thank you."

Fake "storm relief" even ts in Ohio? Pretending to wash clean dishes? The fuck is wrong with these people?

I would do anything for your endorsement, but I won't do that.

Meatloaf/some other weird people trying to sing American the Beautiful with a very awkward Mitt Romney watching:

SNL on the Second Debate

Between this and that undecided voters skit, SNL is really raising their game this political season.

Mitt Vs. Mitt

Jew Lewison at dailykos is a great editor of video, and these are both gems.




FYI: May be less content in these parts until Thursday when midterms are over.

The Train of Thought Guide To Voting

JN's post from a few weeks back made me want to write something explaining my thinking towards the coming presidential election. Presenting:

Voting

Whatever your thoughts, and no matter how fucked our system is, not voting isn't the answer. Vote Obama, Green, Romney, or if you're truly undecided, at least vote in all the down ballot elections. Republicans are not playing around when it comes to attacking our democracy and the right to vote. This isn't something to be taken lightly. They are literally attempting to make our country less democratic, because they know in the long term they're losing. The country is becoming more tolerant and less white, two things the Republican party is freaking out over because their it means their voting base of neanderthals is moving further and further into america's fringes. Their only option is attacking our democracy. If you don't vote you're doing their work for them.

Obama Vs. Romney

Our two party system, broken government institutions and the influence of money in our electoral system have basically ensured that we will have a Romney vs. Obama type choice in presidential election for some time. As people who read this blog know, I have quite a long list of grievances with Obama and his administration, far too lengthy to get into here. The main question here is: What would be solved by voting for Mitt Romney, voting third party or not voting at all?

First let's address the third party question. Our system now is set up to make it as difficult as possible for third parties to gain any political power. This is awful, and once of the worst things about our political system. With that said, voting for one of these parties during a presidential election does not seem to be an effective ways of changing our predicament . Spending time supporting things such as fusion voting in New York or other projects that make third parties more viable at the state level seems like a much better way of changing this paradigm. No clue if I'll feel the same way in 4 years, the landscape might have changed, but right now it seems like the only third party candidates with any real support come from places like the plutocracy now movement and other self funded billionaire vanity projects. This isn't to say there isn't value in movements to try and reach the 5% federal funding threshold for third parties, but until we can change the structure of this process, a third party vote at the presidential level does not strike me as particularly useful.

People who have made arguments to not vote for Obama (Glenn Ford of the Black Agenda Report comes to mind) do so by game theory-ing out a future where a Mitt Romney presidency has done something to reinvigorate a "real" left or something along those lines. Personally, I just have much less faith in my predictive powers to base my vote on that type of forecasting. That's not to say that it isn't possible that Obama could continue to do terrible things that wouldn't be possible under President Mitt Romney, it's just that I think it's really hard to predict what will happen with any kind of certainty that far down the road.

Additionally, a Romney Administration + Republican House and Senate could easily be worse than the Bush administration. That isn't to say that we won't see horrible things from the second term of the Obama Administration + Republican House and Senate. We will most likely see them push cuts to social security and medicare, the TPP, and I'm sure more yemen bombings, with potentially the extrajudicial killing of an american citizen thrown in for good measure. With Romney we could see the Ryan budget, national right to work, Israel bombing Iran, maybe even a land war for old times' sake! While this is all guess work (especially cause Romney has held opposing views on most issues at various times), but I'm decently confident that a Romney Administration gives us a much higher potential for evil.

As awful as spending the second Obama term fighting a worse trade agreement than NAFTA and cuts to our social safety net, it's worth my vote to prevent the second set of alternatives. I really do believe (well, hope at least) we are heading to a war for the future of the Democratic party, but I don't think the election will have an effect on that one way other the other.

As noted centrist sellout Noam Chomsky said: "Choosing the lesser of two evils isn't a bad thing. The cliché makes it sound bad, but it's a good thing. You get less evil."

Sometimes it really is that simple.

Giving Money

First and most important rule: Don't give to money to the presidential race. I'm pretty sure no one reading this blog has enough money to make a difference in the Presidential race, and bragging someone  has x number of donors literally does nothing. You have limited resources, so give to places where it might actually make an impact. Obama will sink or swim without or without you. (Seriously, he will. Their goal is to raise a billion dollars. Your $20 is what percent of that? There is a better candidate somewhere who needs it more)

The best place to give money is to primary challengers, but it's too late for that this cycle. Give money to house and or important senate races. For an even greater impact, give to local races further down the ballot.

Volunteering

I've done a decent bit of canvasing and phone banking over the years, and the 2009 I reached my breaking point. A friend/co-worker of mine was rounding up people to canvas for Creigh Deeds in the Virginia Governor's race. Deeds had just spent the previous month claiming he would op Virginia out of health care reform, cap and trade, EFCA and would strongly defend their right to work laws. The conversation went like this:

Friend: Help us canvas for Creigh Deeds, he needs our help!

Me: Did you hear what he's said about literally every issue we care about over the last month?

Friend: Are you aware of how terrible Bob McDonald is?

Me: I honestly don't care. If I lived in Virginia, I'd hold my nose and vote for Deeds, but I sure as hell am not wasting my free time helping his sorry ass.

Ever since 2009, I've felt better and better about that decision, and it's now my rule. Go all in for people who have your back, or where the race is really, really important. Fuck everyone else. I worked my ass off for the Donna Edwards campaign, and would do so again in a heartbeat. The same goes for  Kweisi Mfume in the Maryland Senate primary and others. It may not seem like it, but there are plenty of people out there like them around the country who a really worthy of your free time and political activism. But fuck people who aren't on our side. Hold your nose and vote for them, but don't waste your time and energy helping them in the slightest. They just aren't worth it.

Anyhow, just my thoughts, feel free to print out this concise list of recommendations and carry it into the booth with you!

This is Bad, Even By Mitt Romney Standards

So... last afternoon evening Mitt Romney basically conceded the presidential election:

Behind closed doors, Mitt Romney sounds like the leaders of the far-right flank of his party. That’s the central message from a video purportedly taken during a Romney fundraiser earlier this year and posted online by Mother Jones Monday.

The Obama campaign called the clip “shocking.”

In the clip, which was recorded surreptitiously at a Romney fundraiser that “occurred after Romney had clinched the Republican presidential nomination,” according to Mother Jones, Romney tells a room full of donors that people who voted for President Obama — a full 47 percent of the country — are dependent on the government.

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it,” Romney said, according to the Mother Jones transcript. “That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what … These are people who pay no income tax.”

So barring an unforeseen massive event (EU collapsing, terrorist attack), I really don't know how you come back from that. As I said last night on twitter:

99% of campaign news doesn't matter. Stories that do matter:

1) The few that cross into mainstream culture (leno or snl jokes)

2) repeated stories that reinforce a narrative that crossed into mainstream culture. (Romney is rich and out of touch)

This is a massive, massive story that could not do more to reinforce Romney as an out of touch rich person if he tried. Game over. As Dave Weigel said:

At this point I'm amazed that the Salt Lake City Olympics went off without constant fires and explosions.
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) September 18, 2012

OLD MAN RAMBLES TOWARDS EMPTY CHAIR

DEAR GOD THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED:

Via twitter, some solid photoshopping here:

Important Updates:

JN sends me an updated version of the image:

And For meme purposes, Bagnewsnotes has a good screengrab:

We Have Reached Peak Wingnut

I don't want to get all hyperbolic here, but this might be the most unintentionally funny column ever. You can tell the was seething that most people don't share his homoerotic daddy issues filled view of Mitt Romney said "screw what the PC liberal elites say, I'm gonna tell it like it is!" And this is what followed. And it is incredible.

And because everyone who I've sent this to has asked: no, this is not satire. This is the actual COVER article for the National Review this month:

What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women’s pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse. The Demi Moore–Ashton Kutcher model is an exception — the only 40-year-old woman Jack Nicholson has ever seen naked is Kathy Bates in that horrific hot-tub scene. Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a college bar, and the fact that she is the chairman and CEO of Dupont isn’t going to change that.

It’s a good thing Mitt Romney doesn’t hang out in college bars.

You want off-the-charts status? Check out the curriculum vitae of one Willard M. Romney: $200 million in the bank (and a hell of a lot more if he didn’t give so much away), apex alpha executive, CEO, chairman of the board, governor, bishop, boss of everything he’s ever touched. Son of the same, father of more. It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap. The offspring of rich families are statistically biased in favor of sons — the children of the general population are 51 percent male and 49 percent female, but the children of the Forbes billionaire list are 60 percent male. Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.

Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.

That's pretty good. Can it get better? (Yes it can)

From an evolutionary point of view, Mitt Romney should get 100 percent of the female vote. All of it. He should get Michelle Obama’s vote. You can insert your own Mormon polygamy joke here, but the ladies do tend to flock to successful executives and entrepreneurs. Saleh al-Rajhi, billionaire banker, left behind 61 children when he cashed out last year. We don’t do harems here, of course, but Romney is exactly the kind of guy who in another time and place would have the option of maintaining one. He’s a boss. Given that we are no longer roaming the veldt for the most part, money is a reasonable stand-in for social status. Romney’s net worth is more than that of the last eight U.S. presidents combined. He set up a trust for his grandkids and kicked in about seven times Barack Obama’s net worth, which at $11.8 million is not inconsiderable but probably less than Romney’s tax bill in a good year. If he hadn’t given away so much money to his church, charities, and grandkids, Mitt Romney would have more money than Jay-Z.

You know what this needs? More white guy talking about rap culture! What, you're saying there's an entire paragraph of that, not just a Jay Z reference? Buckle up...

Some Occupy Wall Street types, believing it to be the height of wit, have begun to spell Romney’s name “Rmoney.” But Romney can do better than that — put it in all caps: R-MONEY. Jay-Z can keep his puny little lowercase letters and the Maybach: R-MONEY doesn’t own a flashy car with rims, R-MONEY does billion-dollar deals with Keystone Automotive and Delphi. You want to make it rain? R-MONEY is going to make it storm, like biblical. Rappers boast about their fat stacks: R-MONEY’s fat stacks live in a beachfront house of their own in the Hamptons, and the bricks in that house are made from tightly bound hundred-dollar bills. You have a ton of money? R-MONEY has 200 metric tons of money if he decides to keep it in cash.

There really aren't words for that paragraph. And for the sake of highlights and time, let's ahead to the last page:

George Romney made his money by being a boss — a leader. Mitt Romney has been the same thing. When things went wrong, people put Romney in charge of them — at Bain, at the Olympics, at a hundred companies he helped turn around or restructure. Bain is a financial firm, but Romney wasn’t some Wall Street bank-monkey with a pitch book. He was the guy who fired you. He was a boss, like his dad, and like his sons probably will be. Barack Obama was never in charge of anything of any significance until the delicate geniuses who make up the electorate of this fine republic handed him the keys to the Treasury and the nuclear football because we were tired of Frenchmen sneering at us when we went on vacation. Obama made his money in part through political connections — no, I don’t think Michelle Obama was worth nearly 400 grand a year — and by authoring two celebrity memoirs, his sole innovation in life having been to write the memoir first and become a celebrity second. Can you imagine Barack Obama trying to pull off a hostile takeover without Rahm Emanuel holding his diapers up for him? Impossible.

MITT ROMNEY IS A BOSS WHOSE HUGE PENIS BIRTHED FUTURE BOSSES. Can Obama say the same? I think not. He's wearing diapers held by a fertile white man, or something.

Reassuring arch-patriarch — maybe one with enough sons and grandsons to form a pillaging band of marauders? Hillary Rodham Clinton told us that it takes a village, and Mitt Romney showed us how to populate a village with thriving offspring.

Have I written enough about Mitt Romney and his fertile dong? I haven't? Ok, here's more:

Newsweek, which as of this writing is still in business, recently ran a cover photo of Romney with the headline: “The Wimp Factor: Is He Just Too Insecure to Be President?” Look at his fat stacks. Look at that mess of sons and grandchildren. Look at a picture of Ann Romney on her wedding day and that cocky smirk on his face. What exactly has Mitt Romney got to be insecure about? That he’s not as prodigious a patriarch as Ramses II or as rich as >Lakshmi Mittal? I bet he sleeps at night and never worries about that. He has done everything right in life, and he should own it. And by own it, I mean put it on the black card and stow it in the G6 — or at least in first class, for Pete’s sake.

And that, is how he ends the article.

3000 words of pure wingnut id. We can only be thankful that the national review has fired enough of it's normal white supremacist writing stable that this made it into their publication. As their cover story.

Paul Ryan!

A few thoughts:

• I had always thought Romney's best chance of winning was by not getting to specific of what he wants to do and make this election a referendum on how shitty the economy is. By picking Ryan his campaign obviously disagrees, because this ties him to an extremely unpopular set of policy plans.
• I said a bit of this on twitter, but there are two ways this can go as far as a debate over social security/Medicare goes:
• 1) This forces Obama to be a much stronger defender of Medicare and Social Security, which could complicate his willingness to cut them as part of a "grand bargain" (or it might not matter at all what he says during the campaign, I've argued here that very little of what is said matters)
• 2) The other side of this (as my dad also pointed out to me) is that this could easily turn into a contest of who is more serious about cutting medicare between Ryan and Obama. This isn't designed to appeal to anyone outside of hack DC journalists, and it seems so stupid it couldn't possibly happen... but keep in mind a chief Obama adviser spoke about how signing a deal with benefit cuts to medicare and social security would be a net positive and only hurt him with "the left", and this is the administration that spent time "courting" David Brooks, so anything is possible.
• I understand that Romney wanted to nail down his base, but keep in mind that people in the Democratic party who study focus groups and message stuff for a living have been attempting to tie Romney to Ryan's budget looooooooong before now. Being the mastermind behind a plan to kill medicare is as Norm McDonald would say "box office poison".
• To give you an idea about how strongly people react to the idea of Medicare cuts, many "tea party" candidates in 2010 won their elections on the dishonest idea that Obama cut Medicare in his health care bill (he did but those were cuts on the provider side, not benefit cuts, an important difference).
• Around the country, house and senate candidates in both parties have been either running against Ryan's budget, or simply running away from their vote for it. This shit is toxic. People like Medicare, and don't want it turned into a voucher system. I'm sure Romney/Ryan have a plan to deal with that, and I'll be interested to see what it is.

Anyhow, I think that's all I have for the moment, what are your thoughts?

Plain and Simple Racism From Mitt Romney

I'm sure there will be many more dog whistles from Romney surrogates like the "he's not a real american" thing as the campaign moves forward, but the man himself today said something far worse:

Mitt Romney offered up a curious assessment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a fundraiser in Jerusalem on Sunday, suggesting that Palestinian suffering — rather than an obstacle to peace — was actually an encouraging sign of Israel’s greatness.

“I was thinking this morning as I prepared to come into this room of a discussion I had across the country in the United States about my perceptions about differences between countries,” Romney told a group of high-dollar donors at a fundraiser in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. “As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality.”

As the Associated Press noted, Romney actually got the numbers very wrong: Israel’s GDP per capita was $31,000 in 2011 and Palestinians’ per capita GDP was just $1,500. Romney at no point mentioned that the Palestinian territories have for decades been occupied without sovereign control, where residents face significant restrictions on movement and employment.
“It is a racist statement and this man doesn’t realize that the Palestinian economy cannot reach its potential because there is an Israeli occupation,” Saeb Erakat, a senior Palestinian Authority official, told the AP.

Romney attributed the gap in success in part to Israel’s “culture.”

“Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said. “And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.” Among them, he cited “the hand of providence.”

So... no, it's not that Israeli culture is superior. Israel is rich and Palestine poor is due to the fact that one country has occupied the other for the past 30 or so years, while backed by the most powerful country/military force in the world.

If you're saying that "culture" is the reason why, you are being a racist. It's that simple.

Reasons for Not Releasing Tax Returns

If the worst reporter in the world Erin Burnett is saying this about you...

Free Stuff

As a follow up to the post the other day, when I saw this headline I seriously didn't believe the quote at first. I figured it was so obviously race baiting and offensive, that Romney couldn't have possibly said it hours after speaking to the NAACP. I was wrong. Yikes:

ROMNEY: Remind them of this, if they want more free stuff from the government tell them to go vote for the other guy -- more free stuff. But don't forget nothing is really free.

Romney Surrounded By Large Group of Black People

Mitt Romney is going to talk to the NAACP today. My guess is that he won't mention that his electoral strategy involves Republicans at the State level doing their best to prevent black people from voting.

I guess if he comes out of it without doing this, it will be considered a win:

George Bush Doesn't Care About Healthcare People

Conservative think tank guy Josh Barro tweeted something last night that deserves repeating:

The alternative to PPACA isn't "a health system reform that seeks to contain cost growth through progressive cost-sharing." It's nothing.
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) July 3, 2012

If Republicans had any interest in an alternative model of health reform, they would have done it when they ran the government.
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) July 3, 2012

And these are things that need to be said. As much as a bitch about the Democrats on this site, there is literally only one side of this equation that even gives the slightest fuck about making sure people have health care they can afford. The irony about Obama's legislation being written by the Heritage foundation is extra irony-y-y (not a word but stay with me) because there is no way in hell any national republican would ever try to pass this type of bill. Why? Because they don't care in the slightest about making sure people have affordable health insurance, because there is no constituency in the Republican party that demands it either.

Want proof? At the state level, there are occasionally Republican governors who didn't run for office to turn their state into a Galtian hellhole, but actually trying to find conservative solutions to real problems that states face. One of those people was Mitt Romney. Elected in Massachusetts, he used his time in office to implement a conservative solution to a problem that at the national level only matters to Democrats. The plan has been successful in some ways, and less so in others (much how I assume Obamacare will turn out), but one place it had no support was among Republicans.

When he ran for national office, by far the biggest knock on Romney was basically the ONLY commendable thing he did, which is attempt universal healthcare for his state. Of course he did it very differently than I would like, but actually caring about this issues makes him seem like Mother Teresa compared to the nihilists running against him and the "Let him die" crew voting in the primary.

So as Josh Barro (again, a conservative) pointed out, the unspoken truth here is that Republicans genuinely don't care about these issues. They never have, and they probably never will. And even the ones who would have cared 10 years ago (like Romney) see the writing on the wall that attempting anything that might help people is nearly a death sentence for your career as a Republican. So as depressing as the choice between corporate friendly pursuit of center-left ends and rule by nihilists bigots is, there is a difference.

There. That's my get out the vote message. Something tells me the Obama campaign won't be using it for a bumper sticker.

In Your Heart, You Know He's White

Mitt Romney's "Better America" ad has a pretty clear view of what a "better america" means. All white people: (from Jed at dailykos)

Well, it's at least better than the next one he had planned:

Openly Gay Romney Spokesperson Resigns For Being Gay

Apparently Mitt Romney's new National Security spokesman was just a enough of an asshole for the job, but a bit too gay:

Just one week ago, The Atlantic heralded Mitt Romney’s hiring of an openly gay spokesman for foreign policy issues as “a breakthrough in the world of Republican presidential campaigns.”

Seven days later, that spokesman had already stepped down, citing conservatives whose outrage over his spot in the campaign made it impossible to do his job.

. . .

The Romney campaign said the resignation came over its objections.

“We are disappointed that Ric decided to resign from the campaign for his own personal reasons,” Romney campaign manger Matt Rhoades told TPM in a statement. “We wanted him to stay because he had superior qualifications for the position he was hired to fill.”

Republican LGBT activists are seething, and say that the resignation shows some factions of the party still aren’t ready to see gay Americans living openly. (Neither Romney nor President Obama supports same-sex marriage — though Obama has said his stance is “evolving.”)

“It is unfortunate that while the Romney campaign made it clear that Grenell being an openly gay man was a non-issue for the governor and his team, the hyper-partisan discussion of issues unrelated to Ric’s national security qualifications threatened to compromise his effectiveness on the campaign trail,” Log Cabin Republicans Executive Director R. Clarke Cooper said in a statement. “Ric was essentially hounded by the far right and far left.”

Others were more willing to cast the blame on the GOP’s anti-gay right.

“Today is a day when national security and foreign affairs is front and center and Mitt Romney don’t have the best person available speaking on his behalf,” said GOProud co-founder Jimmy LaSalvia. “He has Bryan Fischer and Tony Perkins to thank for that.”

Gotta love that quote from the Log Cabin Republicans. He was hounded by the left (for his record on foreign policy issues) and by the right (for being gay). Totally the same thing! I'd go on about how clueless these people are are, but the log cabin republicans might seriously be the most confused motherfuckers on the planet.

Hey guys, these homophobes aren't outliers, they are the conservative movement and they are the Republican Party. I'm glad that your views on economics (or whatever) are enough to spend your days supporting people who don't think you're a human being! Heckuva job!