TPM has a great little analysis of the effect Romney’s ’47%’ video has had on his Presidential campaign. In short, it’s not good:

The snap shot is that 57% of independent voters had an unfavorable view of Romney’s outburst (according to a Washington Post poll) – the exact demographic Romney stated he was trying to get at in the talk he was giving. Said Romney:

What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.

The polling looks absolutely devastating if even vaguely accurate as Romney is basically right – his entire campaign must be built around capturing independents – and it now looks like he has lost them.

It really makes you think – if that was originally Romney’s idea to go for the center, why on earth has he run such a nasty, ultra right wing campaign for the better part of the election? It was always going to be an incredibly difficult task for Romney as he had to shore up the base that didn’t trust him, and attract the center at the same time. Given the GOP base now closely resembles something akin to fascism, doing both would have been close to impossible as Romney is now finding out.

I hate to write Romney’s obituary so early as there’s always a danger he could pull the upset, but it’s looking like a demographic catastrophe for the GOP in November. This is equally troubling for their long term prospects as a bad loss will throw the party into further chaos. It’s impossible to predict which faction of the GOP wins out in the long term because American political culture, particularly on the Right, is inherently erratic and unstable. One would think that they’d choose moderation in the face of electoral defeat, but given the direction in which they went after the banking crisis (even further to the Right) anything is possible.

Who knows, the Romney-Ryan ticket might look moderate in years to come. A pretty scary thought.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab (via the USA Today):

Americans don’t believe GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney hit a home run with his choice of Paul Ryan as a running mate, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, with more of the public giving him lower marks than high ones.

Ryan, a Wisconsin congressman, is seen as only a “fair” or “poor” choice by 42% of Americans vs. 39% who think he is an “excellent” or “pretty good” vice presidential choice.

Romney pollster Neil Newhouse said in a statement that the findings reflect the fact that Ryan, a House member since 1999, isn’t widely known.

USA TODAY/Gallup polls of registered voters after the announcements of running mates since Dick Cheney in 2000 all showed more positive reactions. Only Dan Quayle in a 1988 Harris Poll of likely voters was viewed less positively than Ryan, with 52% rating Quayle as a “fair” or “poor” vice presidential choice. The Ryan poll includes all adults, not just registered voters.

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"We have affordable healthcare. You don't. And we like it!"

By Robert Parry: The newly minted Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan is placing a big – and some might say cynical – bet that the stereotype of the “greedy geezer” is real, that Americans now eligible for Medicare or close to it don’t care that the popular health program won’t be there for their children and grandchildren.

In picking Rep. Ryan as his vice presidential running mate, Romney has taken on Ryan’s plan for replacing Medicare for senior citizens with a voucher program that will end the current fee-for-service program and shift more of the financial burden for health care onto Americans after they turn 65.

However, as Romney and Ryan quickly explained in a TV interview, the Ryan plan wouldn’t affect people currently on Medicare. In its current form, Ryan’s plan for turning Medicare into a voucher system (or “premium support” as Ryan calls it) wouldn’t begin until 2022.

Since senior citizens vote in higher percentages than other demographic groups, Romney and Ryan are trying to split the current Medicare recipients away from those Americans in later generations. The reasoning goes: If today’s seniors think that they’ll still get theirs, they won’t care that their kids and grandkids might be stuck with an inferior program costing each one more than $6,000 extra.

Last year, when Ryan’s was pushing his Medicare overhaul, he and other advocates specifically stressed to seniors at town hall meetings that they would continue to get the system’s guaranteed benefits, an explanation that drew applause from some voters in that age group but prompted concerns from others.

For instance, in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, 64-year-old Clarence Cammers hesitantly asked Ryan a question that got to the heart of the matter. After describing himself as a disabled veteran living on Social Security, Cammers said he could stand some cutbacks for himself; that wasn’t his concern.

“I will be fine,” Cammers said. “I guess what I’m saying is, what are all these changes going to mean for my son?”

Cammers was noting the hard truth that it would be younger Americans who would face Ryan’s scheme of replacing Medicare with government vouchers that would fall short of covering the costs of private insurance.

Pleasant Language

Though Ryan inserted some pleasant language promising that the sick will get adequate care, the reality is sure to be different, essentially requiring the elderly – many who will have preexisting conditions – to navigate through a complex system of insurance companies offering varying levels of coverage. Plus, many insurance companies don’t want anything to do with old and sick people.

As the Brookings Institute’s Henry Aaron explained to the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, “We’ve all heard about the great proportion of health services used by people in the last year of life. That means if you’re an insurer, you want desperately to not enroll those people. That means you need to try every marketing device you can not to get stuck with the sickies.”

Indeed, the projected budget savings from Ryan’s “premium support” system would be derived from the shortfalls between the vouchers and the cost of medical care for seniors. In other words, the money would be taken out of the pockets of the elderly or be saved by them skipping treatments that they otherwise would receive.

Even for current and near-term Medicare beneficiaries, the Republican plan would have that effect for people needing lots of prescription drugs. The Ryan plan would repeal the current subsidy for seniors facing the “doughnut hole” gap in drug benefits.

But the hardest impact of the Ryan plan would hit those turning 65 in 2022 and later. Though Ryan’s sketchy 2011 proposal lacked many of the specifics needed to fully evaluate its effects, a New York Times editorial noted, “there is little doubt that the Republican proposal would sharply reduce federal spending on Medicare by capping what the government would pay at very low levels. …

“The Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2022 new enrollees would have to pay at least $6,400 more out of pocket to buy coverage comparable to traditional Medicare. Huge numbers of Medicare beneficiaries live on modest incomes and are already struggling to pay medical bills that Medicare does not fully cover. We should not force them into private health plans that would charge them a lot more or provide much skimpier benefits.”

In the years beyond 2022 — under Ryan’s original plan – the gap between Ryan’s voucher and the actual cost of medical care would widen even more because he would attach it to a slower measure of inflation than the rise in medical costs.

“We’re looking at linking to an index that grows less rapidly than health-care costs by three to four percentage points a year,” said Aaron of the Brookings Institute. “Piled up over 10 years, and that’s a huge erosion of coverage.”

Ryan’s plan also would repeal the Affordable Care Act, known as “Obamacare,” meaning that tens of millions of non-seniors would be on their own to grapple with large insurance companies that aggressively seek to weed out customers with preexisting conditions that might require expensive care.

In December 2011, Ryan did embrace a compromise Medicare plan with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, that would index government support levels to the average rise in insurance costs and would let seniors sign up for what essentially amounts to a “public option,” i.e. a government-run program.

However, assuming Romney and Ryan win in November — and bring in a Republican House and Senate — it’s not clear which plan the Republicans would push, since they might no longer need significant Democratic help. They might go back to Ryan’s initial plan which was approved by the House Republican majority.

Premature Death

The obvious result of Ryan’s original Medicare plan would be that many Americans who are now under 55 would die prematurely because they would have to skip treatments or be forced deeper into poverty as they struggled to meet the premium demands of the insurance industry.

Which gets us back to Clarence Cammers’s question: “what are all these changes going to mean for my son?”

The Republican assumption about the “greedy geezers” is that they don’t share Cammers’s concern; all they care about is their own welfare; they want to live as long and as healthy a life as possible but don’t feel the same for their kids and grandkids.

But the GOP bet on the “greedy geezers” is even more startling in that Romney and Ryan are gambling that these seniors and near-seniors would prefer lowering the top tax rates even more for millionaires and billionaires than seeing their progeny enjoy a full and fulfilling life.

Because of Romney-Ryan new tax cuts (and President George W. Bush’s old tax breaks), Ryan’s budget plan doesn’t foresee a balanced budget for nearly three decades – and only then if his original Medicare overhaul plan is enacted and medical costs are shifted heavily onto the backs of the next generations.

Romney and Ryan are further betting that Americans are ready to embrace a brave new world of unbridled selfishness as envisioned by Ryan’s idol, novelist Ayn Rand, who dreamed of a place where “supermen” of industry would be unchained from a society demanding that they share the bounty of their success with others.

In her influential writings, Rand ranted against social programs that enabled the “parasites” among the middle-class and the poor to sap the strength from the admirable rich. But she secretly accepted the government benefits of Medicare after she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

A two-pack-a-day smoker, Rand had denied the medical science about the dangers of cigarettes, much as her acolytes today reject the science of global warming. However, when she developed lung cancer, she connived to have Evva Pryor, an employee of Rand’s law firm, arrange Social Security and Medicare benefits for Ann O’Connor, Ayn Rand with an altered spelling of her first name and her husband’s last name.

In 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, Scott McConnell, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute’s media department, quoted Pryor as saying: “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out.”

So, when push came to shove, even Ayn Rand wasn’t above getting help from the despised government. But her followers, including Paul Ryan, now want to strip those guaranteed benefits from other Americans of more modest means than Ayn Rand.

Lecturing a Voter

These Republican priorities hit home at a town hall meeting held by Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Georgia, in May 2011 when one of his constituents worried that Ryan’s plan would leave Americans like her, whose employer doesn’t extend health benefits to retirees, out of luck.

“Hear yourself, ma’am. Hear yourself,” Woodall lectured the woman. “You want the government to take care of you, because your employer decided not to take care of you. My question is, ‘When do I decide I’m going to take care of me?’”

However, another constituent noted that Woodall accepted government-paid-for health insurance for himself. “You are not obligated to take that if you don’t want to,” the woman said. “Why aren’t you going out on the free market in the state where you’re a resident and buy your own health care? Be an example. …

“Go and get it in a single-subscriber plan, like you want everybody else to have, because you want to end employer-sponsored health plans and government-sponsored health plans. … Decline the government health plan and go to Blue Cross/Blue Shield or whoever, and get one for yourself and see how tough it is.”

Woodall answered that he was taking his government health insurance “because it’s free. It’s because it’s free.”

The Romney-Ryan ticket has shoved its chips into the middle of the table with a gamble that Americans so despise the federal government – and the country’s first African-American president – that they will ignore such hypocrisies as demonstrated by Ayn Rand and Rep. Woodall.

And for those already on – or soon to be on – Medicare, the Republican bet is that these seniors and near-seniors will be the greediest of geezers, enjoying the health program for themselves but willing to take the risk that their children and grandchildren will be left at the mercies of private insurance giants.

The Romney-Ryan calculation suggests the Republicans really do believe that today’s senior citizens represent the most selfish generation in American history.

To read more of Robert Parry’s writings, you can now order his last two books, Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, at the discount price of only $16 for both. For details on the special offer, click here.]

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.

Report originally published at ConsortiumNew.com

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While the Romney campaign is aggressively fighting back against reports that their candidate’s tenure at Bain Capital went on for longer than he once claimed, a document filed by Romney in 2000 could prove extremely detrimental to his run at the Presidency. The Jan. 3rd 2000 SEC filing with Romney’s signature states that “Mitt Romney is principally engaged in the business of serving as sole stockholder of BCI VI, Inc. (Bain Capital Investors VI)”, standing in direct contrast with other financial disclosure forms filed by Romney in later years claiming that he had left the company in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics.

And there’s also this (from the Huff Post):

Add another document to the pile of evidence contradicting Mitt Romney’s continued insistence that he ended his active role with Bain Capital in early 1999, part of his long-running effort to avoid responsibility for the company’s activity, related to outsourcing and bankruptcies, during the years that followed.

A corporate document filed with the state of Massachusetts in December 2002 — a month after Romney was elected governor — lists him as one of two managing members of Bain Capital Investors, LLC “authorized to execute, acknowledge, deliver and record any recordable instrument purporting to affect an interest in real property, whether to be recorded with a Registry of Deeds or with a District Office of the Land Court.”

Check out the SEC document in its entirety below:

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Obama's Healthcare mandate here to stay

From the LA Times:

By calling on Republicans to approve a one-year extension of tax cuts for families earning less than $250,000 a year, President Obama escalated the election-year focus on taxes, emphasizing a key distinction between the two parties and seeking to create a mandate for a tax plan after the election.

Neither White House officials nor congressional leaders expect a tax bill to pass before November. Mitt Romney and fellow Republicans want to extend existing cuts for all taxpayers, regardless of income. Obama says the country can’t afford the cost — the price tag for the upper-income tax cuts is about $800 billion over 10 years.

White House aides said Monday that if he was reelected, the president would veto any move to extend all of the upper-income tax cuts.

The tax cuts passed during theGeorge W. Bushadministration expire on Dec. 31, along with the payroll tax cut approved under Obama. If all those cuts go away, a middle-income family that makes about $70,000 a year would face a tax increase of about $3,000. Higher-income families would feel a much bigger bite.

Those tax increases, along with automatic spending cuts scheduled to take effect at the same time, would shrink the federal deficit in half overnight. But many economists say the sudden impact would also throw the nation back into recession.

Congress probably won’t let that happen — lawmakers won’t want to inflict that much pain on so many voters and risk lasting damage to the economy at the same time. So some tax cuts will probably be extended. Which ones will depend on who wins in November.

Over the next four months, both parties hope to frame the issue to their advantage, with much depending on how voters view Americans earning more than $250,000 — the top 2% of the income scale, as Democrats emphasize, or the “job creators” that Republicans talk about.

Even before Obama made his announcement, the Romney campaign sought to push its interpretation, issuing a statement, echoed by congressional GOP leaders, that accuses Obama of seeking to “raise taxes on families, job creators and small businesses.”

Later, in a radio interview, Romney called Obama’s plan “a massive tax increase on job creators and on small business.”

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US Senator Marco Rubio looks to be the VP favorite for Mitt Romney (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From the Guardian:

Florida senator Marco Rubio is the clear favourite to become Mitt Romney‘s vice-presidential running-mate, according to associate professor Jody Baumgartner who runs a model to help predict vice-presidential picks.

Baumgartner’s forecast comes as ABC reported that Rubio is not yet on the list of candidates being vetted by the Romney campaign team.

More than 20 names have been mentioned so far as possible running-mates for Romney. But Baumgartner noted that Romney in July mentioned three names for this shortlist: Rubio, New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Virginia governor Bob McDonnell.

Based on that, he ran their details through his model, which crunched statistical data on 20 previous vice-presidential picks dating back to 1960. On that basis, he predicted “Rubio would get the nod”.

According to Baumgartner, associate professor of politics at East Carolina University and author of books that include The American Vice-Presidency Reconsidered, his model would have correctly picked 13 of the 20 nominees dating back to 1960 and five of the seven since 1992: Al Gore, Jack Kemp, Dick Cheney, John Edwards and Joe Biden. The model would not have predicted Joe Lieberman and Sarah Palin.

Baumgartner fed into his model details of Rubio, Christie and McDonnell, including the size of the candidate’s home state, regional and ideological balance, years in public office, military experience and age.

Baumgartner said the results of his analysis “suggest that the probabilities of each of the individuals being selected are: Chris Christie 14%; Bob McDonnell 9% and Marco Rubio 76%.

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By Bob Cesca: It happened for the first time today. The thought occurred to me that President Obama could lose in November. I was watching Paul Krugman’s appearance on This Week, and the disconnect between what is true and what is fantasy — dreamed up by the Romney campaign and the Republicans — is massive enough that Romney could slip through the breach.

I enumerated a long list of positive economic indicators here yesterday, but I don’t get the sense that it matters much from a thousand feet. In other words, the economy is growing slowly enough, the unemployment rate is just high enough and the (inconsequential — for now) deficit is large enough that a campaign as cynical as Romney’s can get away with all varieties of lies and misleading claims.

The inability of the press to adequately debunk these claims opens that breach even further.

And what can the president do about it? What are his options? Certainly it’s impossible for him to say the economy isn’t strong enough and needs more of a kick in the ass to get it moving. It would be a political blunder of epic proportions. The president would be featured in every Romney ad lamenting the weak economy. He also can’t pass any new spending programs to create the aforementioned ass-kicking. The congressional Republicans won’t let him. They won’t pass any new spending he’s requesting, while simultaneously blaming him for not doing anything about jobs. Meanwhile, they held the world hostage by refusing to increase the debt limit, forcing the president to cut spending far beyond what should ever have been done in a slower-than-usual economy. The sabotage strategy.

The reason the economy hasn’t totally back-slid is because of the success of the president’s pre-midterm policies.

It doesn’t matter, though. The successes, regardless of whether they’re weak successes or wildly powerful ones are, sadly, irrelevant.

When Karl Rove famous said he’s building a non-reality based empire way back in 2004, that’s precisely what he’s done.

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

It worked for years. It gave us sideshows like Birthers and Teleprompters and the notion that President Obama, an African American man who was raised by a single mother and his grandparents and who worked his way up from nothing to become president, is somehow a man of privilege and celebrity. It’s also given us the reign of Fox News Channel and the Mitt Romney campaign, both of which are based on twisting voter/viewer perceptions and injecting the opposite of that which is true.

One thing we’ve learned from Mad Men is that Americans will buy whatever they’re told to buy, no matter how dangerous or artificial. Taco Bell just reported that they’ve sold 100 million Doritos tacos. Only 15 percent of Americans agree with evolution science, while the rest either believe Creationism or Intelligent Design. So-called “reality shows” are almost as scripted as regular shows. And President Obama is running around spending money like an escaped mental patient who picked up a pillow case full of cash on the median strip of a highway. While that fakery is being pumped into your gourd, he’s another lie about Romney’s plan to reduce the deficit (it won’t) and stimulate more economic growth (it won’t). And by the way, aren’t you tired of all the drama and weirdness and racial talk that’s accompanied this black president experiment? Let’s go with someone who looks like a creepy CGI president from a crappy Robert Zemeckis movie. He “looks” like the presidents you remember from the good ol’ days — what could possibly go wrong?

I’m not generally this pessimistic about the American voter. After all, they elected Barack Obama in 2008 — winning states like Indiana and North Carolina. They can’t all be ignorant easily-led automatons. But let’s face it, Americans are suckers for the Big Lie. If it’s on TV or plunked into their email in-box, it must be true. We’re jittery and impatient at a time when calm and patience is required otherwise people like Mitt Romney and John Boehner will feed us more deregulatory Reaganomics and bubble economies and, consequently, beg many more deep recessions with no options to repair them. (Imagine trying to pass a stimulus or, worse, another bank bailout after Mitt Romney’s tax cut plan adds $5 trillion to the deficit.)

So if you’re thinking about becoming complacent about this election, take another look at what’s going on. There’s much to be done between now and November in order to sufficiently counterbalance the suckers.

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White People: Mitt Romney's target audience. Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Chez Pazienza: The important thing to keep in mind as you watch Mitt Romney’s brand new campaign ad — the one that officially kicks off his general election push for the White House — is that everything you’re seeing, and not seeing, is intentional. We’ve witnessed some pretty impressive missteps and gaffes from the Romney camp over the last several months, but make no mistake: The advertising of a presidential candidate is a tightly choreographed piece of theater where nothing is done spur-of-the-moment and nothing is left to chance. Penetrating the psychology of your target audience is too important — that audience is always shown exactly and only what the campaign and its promotional team want it to see.

What this means is that it’s not an accident that every single face you see in Romney’s new “Promise of America” ad is white. Every single one. There isn’t a person of color to be found in the two-and-a-half minute spot that features Mitt Romney, all chiseled central casting looks and very carefully edited diction, vowing to restore our country to its former greatness as Hans Zimmer-style orchestration swells to a sweeping crescendo. And again, while over the next few days you’re probably going to hear a lot of people talk about how this is a huge oversight on the part of the Romney campaign, it absolutely is not. It’s exactly according to plan. Because Romney knows who he has to win over in a commanding way and right out of the gate — white, Christian middle-Americans either outwardly reeling or quietly concerned over what they see happening to “their” country.

Only breathtaking incompetence on the part of Team Romney would lead to a campaign ad in which a substantial portion of the electorate — one growing at an exponential rate — wasn’t represented at all, even in the interest of cynical pandering. Sure, Romney spokesman Eric Fehnstrom screwed up royally by coming right out and admitting that his guy is an “Etch-a-Sketch” who can erase his positions and draw entirely new ones at will, but that was an off-the-cuff comment — this is a carefully constructed promotional campaign. And what the Romney camp is saying with this is unmistakable: Regardless of the rise in status that minorities have enjoyed over the past few decades, culminating in the election of a black man to the highest office in the land, good, old-fashioned white people are still the backbone of this country — the “real” Americans. No, Romney isn’t denigrating black and brown people — not directly — he’s simply and subtly letting it be known to those who need to hear it that when he talks about restoring our country, he means going back to a 1950s, Pleasantville vision of America — a time before, well, everything became so darned complicated and less “pleasant” because minorities suddenly seemed to be a powerful cultural and political force throughout the nation.

For the very specific audience Romney is attempting to appeal to in the “Promise of America” ad, there’s an original sin at play in the tumultuous times our country has been forced to endure recently, one that wasn’t a singular event but has instead played out over several decades. That sin: change — progress. Specifically the loss of influence by the people who had traditionally been in control of the nation and who could rest comfortably in the privilege bequeathed to them by God and the founders — coincidentally, people who looked very much like the smiling faces featured in the Romney ad.

Romney has made it clear right off the bat: He’s reaching out to white America.

And that makes it clearer than ever just what the choice is going to be this November.

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The best money can buy

By Ben Cohen: Michael Scherer has a great article in Time Magazine on how much each of the Republican candidates spent vs. how many votes they have received in the primaries thus far. The breakdown:

How much has the entire Romney campaign spent per vote received? $17.14, which is a lot more than the $2.54 that Santorum spent, or the $9.05 that Gingrich has spent, and topped only by the $31.55 that Paul spent.

What do these numbers tell us? Both a lot and a little. We can say convincingly that Santorum has been overperforming, compared with the field, while Romney has been underperforming. If Romney were a corporation, it would hire a Bain consultant to come in and figure out how to reduce its cost per vote.

It is interesting that the two candidates most obsessed with the efficiencies of the market are essentially the least efficient when it comes to dollars spent vs. performance. Romney and Paul have failed the ‘ideas’ market and have been bailing themselves out in order to compete. Scherer suggests Romney hire a consultant to improve performance. I’ll take it a step further – he should fire himself.

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