Mitt High On Supplemental Oxygen

Mitt had a strong but dishonest performance.  He was high – not on sugar, coffee, 5 hour energy, or recreational drugs.  No, Mitt was high on supplemental oxygen.  I think he inhaled an entire canister before he went on.  And I did predict in a blog post several days before the debate that the winner would be the fittest, the one who had acclimated best to the high altitude.  Romney was positively euphoric for most of the debate, so much so that he just made stuff up, left stuff out and did darn well what he pleased…and he got away with it.

Here’s a sampling of some of Romney’s snide statements with my replies in italics.

“But our training programs right now, we’ve got 47 of them, housed in the federal government, reporting to eight different agencies.”

I find it hard to believe that Romney and not the President brought up the number 47.

“If I’m president, I’ll double them, and also get the — the oil from offshore and Alaska.”

Mitt left out domestic fracking and Iran.

“My — my number-one principal is, there will be no tax cut that adds to the deficit. I want to underline that: no tax cut that adds to the deficit.”

This is voodoo math.  What he means by tax cut for the mittle class is putting a cap on home mortgage and charitable deductions such that the middle class wind up paying more even with a lowered rate. And how will he pay for these cuts? Cut is the key word.  He’ll cut every social program you can imagine and anything do to with the arts.  To him, it’s just a business enterprise.  But he won’t touch the military and won’t get away with voucherizing medicare and raising the retirement age to 99 and in the end, just like Bush and Reagan before him, the deficit will balloon.

“”I will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income Americans.”

Right.  Come on Mitt, Americans aren’t as dumb as you think…most of us anyway. Haven’t you been campaigning for the last 18 months on the idea of reducing taxes across the board by 20%?  You have.  In the words of the heckling Congressman Joe Wilson, “YOU LIE”.

“…my plan covers preexisting conditions…”

There you go again Mitt.  He didn’t mean that literally. What he meant is that the way he covers preexisting conditions is not to cover new ones.  

“Jim, I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS.”

Well, that’ll take a bite out of the deficit.  At 444 million, that’s a drop in the bucket.  This was an ideological attack, not an economic one.  Were it up to Mitt, he’d have one News outlet – Fox, which is not news, but bad entertainment. And how rude to insult the moderator’s place of employment like that.  Mitt  repeatedly disrespected Jim Lehrer and essentially promised to fire him, something Mitt enjoys doing – that and writing off half the country, even as he says he’s for the middle class.  

Just a couple other random thoughts:  Mitt’s highly oxygenated glare reminded me of the Iron Giant, which by the way is a terrific movie.  And finally, if I had to put a soundtrack to the debate, this would be the title song – The Birds Don’t Fly This High, which by the way is a terrific song, but slightly twisted.

Who Scares You the Most?

Here’s the thing: as the conventions near, there’s very little that either party can do to persuade a Republican or a Democrat to vote for the other side.  The parties are entrenched.

And here’s the other thing: Independents are notoriously unreliable as a voting block. This is just my opinion.  I have not done any research on the subject.  I will not site any statistics or quote some expert.  I will just say that an Independent is likely to be fed up with both parties and vote for the lesser of two evils. If they care about the rights of workers, immigrants, women and gays, they’ll vote Dem. If they care more about the deficit, taxes, getting even richer, preserving a comfortable lifestyle, digging, drilling and fracking to extract every drop of fossil fuels mother earth has to give, well, they’ll vote for the GOP.

Honestly, this time around, I don’t even think the Independents will make the difference.  The difference maker will be turnout. Whichever party turns out the most voters on election day will win. This is why the GOP has pandered to the vocal and reactionary Christian fundamentalist Tea Party base. If they don’t turn out, President Obama wins in a landslide. The GOP also knows that if the Dems have a high turnout on election day, it’s all over which is why they have done everything possible to make voting more difficult for poorer urban voters who are more likely to vote Democrat are not likely to have a government approved ID, don’t drive and won’t be able to get one in time to vote. They claim voter ID laws are necessary despite the fact that there has been a very low instance of voter fraud in the history of elections.  To make it harder to vote is criminal and the biggest fraud of all.  No, it won’t be the Independents who will swing the election, it’ll be the party turnouts in the swing states that will make the difference.

And here’s the last thing: I predict the campaigns and the superpacs will get uglier and uglier as we draw near to election day. It’s already pretty bad on both sides.  It won’t be “vote for me because I am great and America deserves greatness” or “my jobs plan will get the economy moving”.  Unfortunately, negative message will dominate.  Scare tactics will prevail.  We are going to hear more hate and vitriol on both sides.  Stuff like: “he’s going to end medicare, roll granny off the cliff and bring in death panels”, or “the President will take away and redistribute your small business because you didn’t make that”  or “Mitt’ll melt the polar ice-caps in his first 100 days” (he just might!)  The idea is to scare you to vote.  So the question becomes, who scares you the most?

London Olympics Off to a Great Start but…

So far, the London Summer Olympics have been pretty interesting, even though the events I like the most have not yet aired – dressage (just kidding), who gets the medal in the dancing horse event anyway, the horse or the rider?  I believe Mitt Romney’s horse  (his wife Ann’s actually) is competing in London.  The horse named Rifalca (aka “crazy legs”)  is a equine treasure that yields a handsome tax break and perhaps even precious medals.

So far, I’ve watched as much coverage as I could, and in some cases, as I could stomach.  For example, I managed to get through a water polo match as the Americans took out Montenegro.  The game is a bit silly in my view, but it is a game, at least, being that there is a ball involved, unlike dressage.  I found the caps they wear pointless – I guess they call them hats.  Are they simply decorative?  I’d like to see them wear those old diver helmets made of cast iron.  The other thing that annoys me about water polo is that dang whistle the refs incessantly blow.  Sometimes a player will get whistled for dunking a guy’s head or splashing his opponent in the face with water, and have to go dog paddle in a little roped off penalty area at the side of the pool.

The men’s and women’s bike races just took too long, and I tired watching them tire, but both featured fantastic finishes.  I enjoyed the women’s race more because they biked in the rain and it seemed far more treacherous and challenging with quite a number of spin-outs and non-fatal crashes.  Not that I enjoyed the crashes, but that the element of danger made the event more exciting.

The gymnastic qualifying rounds just seem pointless.  Couldn’t they just line them all up and have everyone go one after the other, and say the best vault wins gold, next best silver and so on for all the events.  And how many countries compete in swimming?  The Olympic Committee should just cap it at 16 countries and build a 16 lane pool.  One race per event.  My oldest daughter believes there are too many distances too and I quite agree and also think there are too many events.  There should only be the freestyle, that’s it.  The backstroke is just plain stupid. Have you ever heard of the 100 meter backwards sprint in track? Actually, that might be pretty interesting.

Beach volleyball.  I’m sorry, that belongs in the X games, not the Olympic Games.  And skeet shooting?  Come on.  That’s something for hunters, not athletes.   I could go on.

I’m partial to basketball, soccer (futbol to the purists), track and field, cliff diving, bowling and croquet.  These are the events that produce true Olympic champions.

Brian Eno OnStar Collaboration?

I was watching this OnStar commercial, the one with the the airbags and crash test dummies and detected some background music that sounded familiar,  something I used to listen to in college while studying.  Ambient music.  It sounds very much like Brian Eno.  Ambient Eno pitching OnStar?  Would he? Maybe OnStar will begin selling its system with the Complete Works of Eno. That’d be a deal that could get me back in a Chevy.