Zingers? Really??

Mr. Romney’s team has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August. ~ NY Times

So Mitt Romney's hopes now rest on his ability to sling vicious one-liners at the President during the debates.

Roseanne for President. Or maybe Don Rickles. Romney can channel Paul Lynde and win the gay vote. If he does Phyllis Diller Mitt will lock in the women's vote. Work in a little Jimmy Kimmel and the election is his.

But these won't be spontaneous, ad-lib zingers like Reagan or Clinton could produce. Of course not. These will be pre-packaged, canned lines that Romney will spend the whole debate trying to awkwardly shoehorn into the conversation.

Read More

Romney Flips Again

Mitt Romney's campaign is flopping around like a dying fish on a boat deck trying to find a viable campaign position.

On Sunday on CBS's 60-Minutes, Romney took the position that the emergency room is the only basic care health that poor people require.

Just three days later, on NBC, Romney took the exact opposite position, proudly claiming RomneyCare in Massachusetts insured everybody and that, compassionately, the poor need not rely on emergency room care.

All this flip-flopping around makes for an unusual campaign strategy. His opponents can't pin him down to a single policy long enough to formulate a response. Besides, how can President Obama prepare for the debates if he doesn't know which Romney will show up on any particular day?

Read More

Clearing Out My Backlog

Some minor things I've been holding back.

Why the Polls May Be Wrong

The polls may be inaccurate not because any technical errors but from Republican efforts to rig voting.

• Voter ID laws prevent Democrats from voting
• Republican poll watchers challenging minority voters
• Long lines in minority voting precincts coupled with bosses threatening to fire people who are late to work on election day
• Republican voter intimidation
• Aggressive state government directed vote suppression in Florida and Ohio.

In general, the success of the Great Disenfranchisement.

NFL, Gamblers, and Scab Refs
The big unnoticed scandal in the NFL is that the replacement refs may be fixing some of the games. The Seattle-Green Bay debacle swung the results of some $200 million in legal and illegal bets. These replacement refs have not been vetted, vocal fans of certain teams have been officiating their team's games. It is probable some of the short term refs have decided to cash in. In fact, if organized crime has not been bribing the scab officials I'd be very disappointed in the Mafia.

The Lady Vanishes
A corrupt Florida Republican congressman (is there any other kind), David Rivera, is being investigated for secretly funding a primary challenger to his Democratic opponent. The key witness, Ana Alliegro, was supposed to meet with the FBI on September 6. Instead she has disappeared. She may just be on the lam in Nicaragua or maybe she has been cut into little bits and fed to Everglades alligators.

Read More

Excommunicated!

It may be hard for Mormons to convince skeptics that they are not a cult when they do things like this.

A Mormon named David Twede was threatened by LDS leaders in Florida with excommunication if he did not stop criticizing Mitt Romney in his blog. It has been a secret tenet of the faith that Romney ascending to the presidency was predicted by Prophet Joseph Smith in the White Horse Prophecy. Ann Romney has subtly alluded to this by saying that Mitt is destined to be the savior of America.

While the LDS Church cannot publicly discipline Harry Reid for apostasy without risking a firestorm they felt safer attacking a lone individual expressing his personal opinion.

Read More

The Clearest Sign All Is Not Well in Romneyland

I don't trust polls. I've seen too many campaigns get over confident, try to run out the clock, and fail in the last week. I remember how George Bush Jr. looked tipsy in the first debate in 2004 and it not mattering. Besides, shit happens. I won't feel comfortable until the day after Election Day when Ann Romney accuses Satan of denying her husband the White House.

Still, the clearest sign that all is not well in Romneyland is the dearth of comments over at rightwing blogs. The "enthusiasm factor" that was supposed to make all the difference for Republicans this year seems to have dried up.

The only topic at Redstate that has generated any interest is a review of the new iPhone. Ann Althouse used to see hundreds of comments to each of her vapid posts; now she is only getting thirty or forty. MSNBC is getting higher ratings that Fox News. It appears even rank and file wingnuts are getting tired of calling President Obama a Communist.

Read More

The Strange Case of the Missing $7 Million

Mitt Romney released his 2011 taxes. The story has been he had to artificially reduces his deductions to keep his effective tax rate from falling below 10%.

More interesting to me is that his reported income fell by one-third between January (when he filed his estimated return) and today. That's a big chunk of change. The linked article suspects Romney secreted the millions in trust accounts in an effort to make Mitt look less like disgusting fat cat.

Mitt Romney

Of course, it's possible the same grifters who are bleeding Romney's campaign funds go their hands on his personal income.

Read More

Romney's Staff Are the World's Greatest Grifters

Mover over Carlo Ponzi. Take a seat Bernie Madoff. The greatest grifters in the history of the Big Con have to be Mitt Romney's campaign staff.

Mitt Romney was supposed to have the largest political war chest ever seen in politics. He was proudly conserving his cash for a big push after the conventions. To date his spending has not been extraordinary, Obama has outspent him, yet Romney's campaign is running out of money.

Where has it gone? Tens of millions of dollars have simply disappeared. Where?? I'd love to see a Pricewaterhouse Cooper audit of Romney's campaign and Mitt should be demanding one.

Here we are just six weeks out from the election. President Obama is campaigning as full time as possible while also holding the job of leader of the free world. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is spending the majority of his time fund raising. Mitt's staff still has him pitching his campaign to wealthy donors like it was a dotcom IPO when he should be campaigning.

To top it off, Mitt's campaign staff wrote themselves big ass bonuses.

His staff has been playing Mitt as a mark and he has been a compliant sucker. What's even more impressive is that the people behind Romney's superPAC have been playing a parallel con on Mitt's billionaire buddies. 

Read More