A Remembrance Of Molly Ivans On Her Birthday

by Michael Handley

Mary Tyler "Molly" Ivins (August 30, 1944 ~ January 31, 2007)
An American newspaper columnist, political
commentator, humorist and author.

Molly Ivins tells a profound story about John Henry Falk and his childhood friend and what happens when you're so scared you lose your freedom. "When you make yourself less free, all that happens is that you are less free ... you are not safe."

An echo of Benjamin Franklin's warning - "Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power."

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital

by Michael Handley

The Rolling Stone has a good article on how the GOP presidential candidate Willard Mitt Romney and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs by sending them off-shore – and stuck others with the bill.

The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to get elected.

The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney's run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he's somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move.

And Romney ratcheted up the hypocrisy of his campaign even further when he chose Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his VP running mate. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, Gordon Gekko like corporate raider of a disgraced yet still defiant Wall Street, is making a calculated bluff – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps - that he can convince voters that corporate raider style governance is good for America. Romney wants voters to return to the Wall-Street-gone-wild conservative economic governance that nearly threw America into a massive depression by the end of George Bush's administration, in December 2008

OFA campaign video

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Paul Ryan's speech at the Republican Convention in Tampa last evening was factually misleading.

Even Fox News says his speech was deceptive.

Ryan lied about Medicare. He lied about the Recovery Act. He said a Romney/Ryan administration would protect Medicare even though they plan to turn Medicare into a corporate raider style private insurance voucher program. He lied about the deficit and debt.

He lied blaming Barack Obama for the closing of a GM plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin -- a plant that closed in December 2008 under George W. Bush, a month before Obama took office.

Mitt Romney pollster Neil Newhouse said on an ABC News program, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Will the American press corp fact-checkers hold Ryan and Romney accountable for making blatantly false representations to the American people - paid for with hundreds of millions of dollars from the billionaires and corporate interests that support them?

Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi

Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.

Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street's greed revolution. He's not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He's not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He's been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products.

Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.

Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation's wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world.

He's Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we'll all end up paying for the acquisition.

Read more @ Rolling Stone

GOP For Choice Poll: Government Should Stay Out Of Reproductive Decisions

by Robin Marty, Senior Political Reporter, RH Reality Check

While the GOP has ratified a party platform that includes a total abortion ban, and changes the definition of pregnancy, Republicans for Choice has discovered most Americans don't want the government involved.

Via UPI.com:

“Regardless of how you personally feel about the issue of abortion,” the polls, which surveyed 1,000 adults, asks, “who do you believe should have the right to make that decision regarding whether to have an abortion…should the woman, her family and her doctor make the decision or should the government make the decision?”

Predictably, 89 percent of Democrats believed “strongly” that the woman should decide.

More remarkably, 71 percent of Republicans and 80 percent of independents also believed strongly that the woman should decide. An additional 10 percent of Republicans believed “not strongly” that the woman should decide, and a total of 81 percent who identified as “pro-life” responded that the woman should decide.

“We challenge ALL national pollsters to include this main question (Q1) in all of their surveys to test the validity of this outcome,” Republicans for Choice said in a press statement.

The polling makes it evident that regardless of the number who self-identify as "pro-life" versus "pro-choice," when it comes to actually deciding who gets an abortion and why, people want politicians to back out.

From RH Reality Check.

Voting GOP? Just Think No!

NYTimes OpEd by Maureen Dowd

Paul Ryan, who teamed up with Todd Akin in the House to sponsor harsh anti-abortion bills, may look young and hip and new generation, with his iPod full of heavy metal jams and his cute kids. But he’s just a fresh face on a Taliban creed — the evermore antediluvian, anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-gay conservative core. Amiable in khakis and polo shirts, Ryan is the perfect modern leader to rally medieval Republicans who believe that Adam and Eve cavorted with dinosaurs.

Read Maureen Dowd's full OpEd @NYTimes

Missouri Rep. Todd Akin, Republican Senate nominee and member of the House Science, Space and Technology committee, said two weeks ago that pregnancy from rape was "really rare" because "if it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." Two words that should never be used together in the same sentence: legitimate and rape. But that’s the way Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) chose to speak about the sensitive topic that has impacted millions of women in the United States in an interview with a local television station.

Last year, Akin joined with GOP vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as two of the original co-sponsors of the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” a bill which, among other things, introduced the country to the bizarre term “forcible rape.”

Ryan, Akin and other Republicans in the U.S. Congress also cosponsored the federal Personhood Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Personhood amendment would outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, domestic violence and life-threatening ectopic pregnancies. In addition, this change to the Constitution would criminalize in-vitro fertilization and common birth control methods, including birth control pills and IUD's. As Mother Jones reported.

More: The Republican War on Women.