Romney Likens Hurricane Relief to Cleaning up "Rubbish and Paper Products" from a Football Field

Providing further proof that he is not only out of touch but also devoid of any empathy for others, Mitt Romney has likened hurricane relief in the wale of Hurricane Sandy to cleaning up "rubbish and paper products" from a football field.  Apparently, Romney has been too busy counting his money or concocting new campaign lies to take the time to watch the media coverage of the horrific devastation in New York and New Jersey and other areas damaged by the storm.  Or perhaps in Romney's mind, given his multiple homes, recovery from the storm is as simple as moving to one of your other residences while the one that has been devastated is rebuilt.  The more I see of this man, the more terrified I am of the prospect of someone like him in the White House.  Salon looks at Romney's incredible out of touch comment on hurricane relief.  Here are excerpts:

It’s become a platitude to say that no one should be playing politics with Hurricane Sandy, but that’s silly. When the performance of government suddenly becomes a literal matter of life and death to many Americans, we ought to be thinking about what kind of government we want to have, and that involves politics.

It’s impossible not to see that this storm has devastated Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy. The response to the hurricane has seemed like one long dramatic Obama campaign commercial, a lesson in “We’re all in this together,” while Romney, the man who said he’d dismantle FEMA, flails on the sidelines.

Romney’s “relief” event outside of Dayton, Ohio, was surreal enough to be a campaign parody, with the candidate comparing the federal government’s hurricane relief efforts to the time he and some friends had to clean up a football field strewn with “rubbish and paper products.”

[O]utside of Romney’s embarrassing European tour this summer, when he insulted Britain over Olympics planning and divulged a secret briefing by MI6, this is Romney’s worst moment yet. As the storm approached, political reporters dredged up his pledge to “absolutely” restructure FEMA to give power to the states. At a Republican debate in June 2011, he suggested the private sector should do more, because federal spending even on FEMA was “jeopardizing the future of our kids.” Tell that to the kids of New Jersey, Gov. Romney. And of course the Ryan budget would slash funding for FEMA.

After Romney’s laughable relief event Tuesday, reporters swarmed him to ask if he still favors sending FEMA funding and responsibility back to the states. .  .  .  .  .  Romney won’t answer because he can’t.

The heroes of Sandy, so far, are the first responders, the cops and firefighters and emergency technicians, the folks evacuating patients from hospitals and trapped citizens from flooding. These are the people who’ve been demonized by Republicans for the last two years: the public workers who have become the new “welfare queens.” 

No one can be reassured by Romney’s empty posturing. Unless there is some government-abetted or neglected further disaster, I think Obama will be reelected next Tuesday. Hurricane Sandy has reminded us what’s at stake.

Look at the photos in this post and then try to tell me Romney doesn't have his head up his ass and that he would not be a menace in the White House.

Why Is the New York Times Promoting "Ex-Gay" Therapy?

I nearly spit up my morning coffee this morning when I saw a ridiculous piece in the New York Times that on its face is supportive of the psychologically tortured and disturbed "ex-gay" crowd and even makes the statement that "thousands of men across the country, often known as “ex-gay,” who believe they have changed their most basic sexual desires through some combination of therapy and prayer." Yes, and I think I am Queen Victoria and that my partner is Prince Albert.  That claim would have the same legitimacy as the claims of the "ex-gay" crowd.  Perhaps the biggest lie in the piece is that it regurgitaes the claim that thousands believe they have "changed" their orientation even though time and time again NONE of the proponents of the witch doctor like "ex-gay" programs have EVER produced names to back up the claims.  That's right, NEVER.  Fortunately, the story does include some coverage of the positions of legitimate medical and mental health experts who say claims of "change" are at best self-delusion.  My advice to the "ex-gays" is to find a different denomination that doesn't embrace ignorance and bigotry and which accepts modern knowledge and stop torturing themselves.  Remaining in an anti-gay religious tradition is nothing more than than a form of self-flagellation and masochism.  Here are some article highlights that look at the truth about these bogus claims:

Ex-gay men are often closeted, fearing ridicule from gay advocates who accuse them of self-deception and, at the same time, fearing rejection by their church communities as tainted oddities. Here in California, their sense of siege grew more intense in September when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law banning use of widely discredited sexual “conversion therapies” for minors — an assault on their own validity, some ex-gay men feel. 

Signing the measure, Governor Brown repeated the view of the psychiatric establishment and medical groups, saying, “This bill bans nonscientific ‘therapies’ that have driven young people to depression and suicide,” adding that the practices “will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery.”

Major mental health associations say teenagers who are pushed into therapy by conservative parents may feel guilt and despair when their inner impulses do not change. 

Reparative therapy suffered two other major setbacks this year. In April, a prominent psychiatrist, Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, publicly repudiated as invalid his own 2001 study suggesting that some people could change their sexual orientation; the study had been widely cited by defenders of the therapy.

Then this summer, the ex-gay world was convulsed when Alan Chambers, the president of Exodus International, the largest Christian ministry for people fighting same-sex attraction, said he did not believe anyone could be rid of homosexual desires. 

Critics like Wayne Besen, the executive director of Truth Wins Out, which fights antigay bias, liken such therapy to faith healing, with apparent effects that later fade away.   They also point out that the failures of such therapy are seldom reported. 

S. Marc Breedlove, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Michigan State University, said there was overwhelming evidence that sexual orientation is affected by both biology and environment. Clearly, he said, reparative therapy helps some people alter sexual behavior. But that is far different, he noted, from transforming instinctive sexual desires, something never proved in scientific studies.

Religion has damaged so many lives.  It is sad that these want to be "ex-gays" cannot see that they are being sold a false bill of goods and that they might just as well consult a voodoo practitioner as to enroll in an "ex-gay" program.  In view, proponents of reparative therapy make snake oil merchants look reputable and make Mitt Romney look like an honest person.

Romney Versus the Automakers and the Truth

Throughout this presidential campaign Mitt Romney's dishonesty has been shocking. Many say they have never seen a candidate so willing to lie and make up stories out of thin air.  Sadly, too often the media has aided Romney by lacking to call him what he is: a liar.  Perhaps some of Romney's most incredible lies have involved the auto industry - an industry that Romney was willing to utterly collapse and die.  As noted yesterday, both Chrysler and General Motors have felt compelled to speak out because Romney is running ads and making statements that simply are not true.  And Romney knows they are untrue.  The man simply cares nothing about the truth.  His sole values seem to be amazing more money and power for himself.  Literally not else matters, especially honesty and telling the truth.  I am honestly coming to believe the man is a sociopath.  A column in the New York Times looks at Romney's lies about the auto industry.  Here are excerpts:

When General Motors tells a presidential campaign that it is engaging in “cynical campaign politics at its worst,” that’s a pretty good signal that the campaign has crossed a red line and ought to pull back. Not Mitt Romney’s campaign. Having broadcast an outrageously deceitful ad attacking the auto bailout, the campaign ignored the howls from carmakers and came back with more. 

Mr. Romney apparently plans to end his race as he began it: playing lowest-common-denominator politics, saying anything necessary to achieve power and blithely deceiving voters desperate for clarity and truth. 

This started months ago when he realized that his very public 2008 stance against the successful and wildly popular government bailout of G.M. and Chrysler was hurting him in the valuable states of Ohio and Michigan. In February, he wrote an essay for The Detroit News calling the bailout “crony capitalism on a grand scale” because unions benefited and insisting that Detroit would have been better off to refuse federal money.

When that tactic didn’t work, he began insisting at the debates that his plan for Detroit wasn’t really that different from President Obama’s. (Except for the niggling detail of the $80 billion federal investment.) 

That was quickly discredited, so Mr. Romney began telling rallies last week that Chrysler was considering moving its production to China. Chrysler loudly denounced it as “fantasies,” saying it was only considering increasing production in China for sale in China, without moving a single American job. 

The Romney campaign ignored the company, following up with an instantly notorious ad saying President Obama “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.”  

Nearly 1.5 million people are working as a direct result of the bailout. Ohio’s unemployment rate is well below the national average. G.M.’s American sales continue to increase, and Chrysler said this week that its third-quarter net income rose 80 percent. These companies haven’t just bounced back from the bottom; they are accelerating. 

What Mr. Romney cannot admit is that all this is a direct result of the government investment he would have rejected. It’s bad enough to be wrong on the policy. It takes an especially dishonest candidate to simply turn up the volume on a lie and keep repeating it..  .  .  .  .  Mr. Romney is providing a grim preview of what kind of president he would be.

What I find deeply disturbing is that Romney claims to be a deeply religious man.  Yet he lies with impunity.  As with the Christofascists and the Catholic Church hierarchy, the truth simply doesn't matter.   No wonder the younger generations are fleeing organized religion in record numbers.  Increasingly, being a Christian or in Romney's case, Mormon, is synonymous with being a liar.

More Wednesday Male Beauty

Quote of the Day: Refuting the GOP Claim that Obama's First Term Has Been a "Failure"

I - like most of us I suspect - love immediate gratification.  It's an aspect of human nature I suspect.  But sometimes our desires for immediate gratification simply cannot be met given all of the attendant circumstances.  A case in point is the nation's economy.  Having launched my law firm with the intent to focus heavily on real estate as it turns out right before the real estate market collapsed I know first had the financial cost the economic collapse shepherded in by Bush?Cheney and the GOP controlled Congress.  As a result, I had high hopes for Obama and recall sitting with a group of gays and straights in the Bourbon Street Pub in Key West on Inauguration  Day 2009.  Many people were in tears that day.  Have all of our hopes been realized?  Certainly not, but compared to where the nation was we have come a long way.  Yes, we might have gone even further toward full recovery, but we had a major obstacle: the GOP controlled House of Representatives which obstructed virtually everything Obama sought to do from Inauguration Day onward. But did Obama fail us?  Andrew Sullivan sums up the reality of what Obama has accomplished - in spite of the Republicans.  Here are the principal highlights:

I have no idea what standard people are using to declare Obama's first term a failure. To save us from a Great Depression, rescue the auto industry, re-regulate Wall Street, decimate al Qaeda, kill bin Laden and Qaddafi and provide universal healthcare? That's failure? 

Unemployment is lower now than it was when he took office, and moving downward. Next year's IMF-predicted US growth is higher than any other developed country. Compared with austerity-ridden Europe, where unemployment is still climbing, Obama's, Geithner's and Bernanke's leadership has been stellar. The US has never exported as much as now as a percentage of GDP ever. Given the catastrophe Obama walked into, and the froth-flecked obstructionism of his opposition, he's had a remarkably successful, historic first term. His long game also makes much of the progress promised durable only if he gets a second term.

He told us it would take two terms; he predicted obstruction and setbacks; yet he has persisted - and succeeded. But take his second term away? Back to ballooning, rather than shrinking deficits, millions left without access to private health insurance, a guaranteed war against Iran, climate change policy handed over to the oil and coal companies, and massive spending on defense we don't need. Not to mention torture.

And a highlight from Chait's case against Romney:

[T]he reality remains that a vote for Romney is a vote for his party — a party that, by almost universal acclimation, utterly failed when last entrusted with governing. Romney may be brainier, more competent, and more mentally nimble than George W. Bush. But his party has, unbelievably, grown far more extreme in the years since Bush departed.  .  .  .  .  The party has almost no capacity to respond to the conditions and problems that actually exist in the world.

And Andrew doesn't even factor the contrast so far between Obama's response to Hurricane Sandy compared to the failed GOP response after Hurricane Katrina.  Oh, and did I mention that Romney has surrounded him with countless former Bus/Cheney advisers? 

"Anti-Gay GOP Arizona Attoney General Caught After Hit and Run Accident While Having Affair

Just yesterday this blog looked at the hypocrisy of an anti-gay marriage supporter in Maine who was arrested as part of a prostitution ring sting.  Now, we have the rabidly anti-gay Attorney General of the State of Arizona who has been caught having an affair with a woman not his wife.  Worse yet, he left the scene of an accident while rendezvousing with his mistress.  Like Donald Fortin in Maine, Attorney General Tom Horne (pictured at right) doesn't really give a damn about "protecting marriage."  He's just a flaming anti-gay bigot and a total hypocrite.  The Arizona Daily Star has details on Horne's affair and hit and run offense.  Here are highlights:

PHOENIX - Tom Horne caused more than $1,000 worth of damage when he clipped another car in a parking garage and just drove off, in order, according to FBI agents, to conceal an affair he was having with his passenger.

Phoenix police records obtained Tuesday include detailed witness accounts by FBI agents who were following Horne, Arizona's attorney general, on March 27 as part of a campaign finance investigation. They said they watched him back his borrowed vehicle into a white Range Rover in the parking garage of a Phoenix residential complex.

FBI agents said that after the fender-bender, Horne and the woman, since identified as Carmen Chenal, who works for Horne, walked off and entered the residential area of the complex where Chenal lives.

The FBI report details how Chenal left the Attorney General's Office that day in a Volkswagen she'd borrowed from Linnea Heap, another employee at the office. Five minutes later, Horne left in his own gold Jaguar. 

According to the report, they met up at a parking garage and emerged several minutes later with Horne, now wearing a baseball cap, driving the Volkswagen.  From there, they went to the residential parking section of a garage at 202 W. Roosevelt St.

FBI agent Grehoski made it clear in several of the interview transcripts released that he believes Horne was hiding something.

"You know, we've heard that Tom is supposed to be honest to a fault," he told Heap during an interview about a month after the accident.  "But he isn't," Grehoski continued. "He's driving someone else's car, crashed, and left the scene of an accident. Having some rendezvous with Carmen in her apartment. I mean, that's not ethical. That's not honest. That's slimy."

And in an interview with Amy Rezzonico, the spokeswoman for Horne's office, Grehoski says outright, "You've got a guy having an affair."

From there, they went to the residential parking section of a garage at 202 W. Roosevelt St.

Chrysler CEO Pushes Back on Romney Lies - GM Joins Push Back

UPDATED:  Not only has Mitt Romney been lying about Chrysler, he's also been lying about events and job lay offs at General Motors.  Here are highlights from Politico as GM calls out Romney for his lies:

Via the Detroit Free Press, Mitt Romney's auto bailout Ohio radio ad is prompting some pushback from General Motors:

“We've clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days,” GM spokesman Greg Martin said. “No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country.”

The ad's contention about the jobs lost under GM is what Martin pushed back on — the ad says the company cut 15,000 jobs "under President Obama" but is going to double China production. The majority of those job losses, the Free Press says, took place ahead of the restructuring through the bailout.

The spot implies the auto bailout, which is popular in parts of the Midwest, was a mistake. As the Atlantic's Molly Ball notes, the messaging from Romney has been blurry on this subject — he has called the bailout bad while also saying it was his initial idea to call for a bakruptcy process.

I have been active in politics for many years and I truly do not believe that I've ever seen any politician more willing to simply outright lie than Mitt Romney.  It's one thing to different on interpretations of data or policies.  It is something totally different to just flat out lie.  Yet that is precisely what Mitt Romney is doing in an ad that claims that Chrysler is planning to move jobs manufacturing Jeeps to China.  It's simply not true, but that means nothing to Romney and his morally bankrupt campaign.  Politico reports on Chrysler's push back against Romney's baldfaced lie.  Here are highlights:

The Toledo Blade reports on the latest turn of the screw in the auto-related debate that has overshadowed the final week of the race in Ohio:

Chrysler Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne circulated an email to Chrysler Group LLC employees today strongly restating the automaker's promise that it will not move existing U.S. production of Jeeps to China.

In the email, Mr. Marchionne said he felt obligated to again address the company's production plans over continuing "public debate."

The note did not directly reference politics or the presidential election, but Chrysler's plans for Jeep have become a major political talking point over the past week, especially in Ohio. Speaking in Defiance last week, Republican candidate Mitt Romney seized on a misrepresentation of a Bloomberg story, suggesting that Chrysler was considering moving existing Jeep production to China.

Romney has stuck with the Jeep-related line of attack against Obama, though in a modified form that only implies — rather than stating explicitly — that Chrysler might move jobs from Ohio to China. It's a decision that has puzzled Republicans both in and outside Ohio: after letting Obama dominate the auto-bailout debate on the airwaves for months, Romney has re-engaged the auto fight at the last minute on less-than-firm footing, with an attack that now has Chrysler weighing in against him.

Frankly, it is to a point where if I were talking to Romney face to face and he said it was raining outside, I'd want to go look out the window and confirm it before I took the statement as true.  The man is a pathological liar.  We cannot afford putting such a totally dishonest man in the White House.

Wednesday Male Beauty

Chris Christie praises Obama, Doesn’t "Give a Damn" About Romney Photo Op

It long ago became obvious to me that most Republicans place their political party above the welfare of the nation and its citizens. One need look no farther than the GOP House's blocking of numerous legislative efforts that would have helped millions of Americans. Sadly, that same mindset is prevailing in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy with one possible exception: Mew Jersey Governor Chris Christie who had little patience with efforts by Fox News to bring Mitt Romney into the news coverage about the New Jersey clean up effort. What's even more fun is that Christie lavished praise on Barack Obama. No doubt the Mittster is none too happy with Christie.  Kudos to Christie.

Experts: Sandy's Terrible Impact no Surprise

Unless one is in a coma - or a Neanderthal member of the Republican Party or the Koch brothers who seek to amass more and more wealth at any cost - it ought to be obvious that something is happening to the world's climate and that mankind needs to pay attention to its role in the causation of the violent changes taking place.  This year has seen record heat, far more tropical storms and hurricanes than are the norm, and the sea levels are rising.  Yet Republicans at both the federal and state level (Virginia has more than its share of flat earth believers in the Virginia GOP) continue to deny the reality that something troublesome is happening.  CNN is carrying an article that more or less states we'd better get used to more events like Hurricane Sandy.  And for coastal cities, that means waking up to the need to commence construction of meaningful protections against storm surges.  Here are article excerpts:

(CNN) -- We should not be surprised. That's the view of many climate scientists as they survey the destruction wrought by the superstorm that ravaged the Northeast this week. The melting of Arctic ice, rising sea levels, the warming atmosphere and changes to weather patterns are a potent combination likely to produce storms and tidal surges of unprecedented intensity, according to many experts.

Recognizing the threat, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is developing a strategy for mitigating the growing risk from storm surges and flooding along the city's 500 miles of coastline. In such a densely-populated area of so much expensive real estate, surrounded by a complex web of estuaries, tides and ocean, it is a huge challenge. And in the face of global changes, even a city as inventive as New York can only do so much.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted in 2007 that the global average sea level would rise between seven and 23 inches by the end of this century.  .  .  .  . Combine that with a trend toward more intense storms and New York is "highly vulnerable," professor Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University told CNN.  "(Superstorm) Sandy is a foretaste of things to come," he predicted, "from the combination of bigger storms and higher sea levels, both of which contribute equally to the growing threat."

Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences, recently modeled the effect of climate change on storm surges for the New York area. In a paper published by Nature in February, he and three colleagues concluded that the "storm of the century" would become the storm of "every twenty years or less."

The conclusion of Oppenheimer and his colleagues is that storms will become larger and more powerful.   "Climate change will probably increase storm intensity and size simultaneously, resulting in a significant intensification of storm surges," they wrote. Sandy had a diameter of some 900 miles, much larger than most storms.

A growing body of evidence links the disappearance of summer ice cover in the Arctic with changing weather patterns.  Over the past three decades, about 1.3 million square miles of Arctic sea ice has disappeared, equivalent to 42 percent of the area of the lower 48 states.  .  .  .  .  Less sea ice means warmer water. Sea surface temperatures off the coast of the northeast United States are now the highest ever recorded.

Given the scale of the challenge, Oppenheimer and others believe there needs to be urgent remedial action to mitigate the effects, such as raising subway entrances and reinforcing the lower floors of buildings. At the moment, Oppenheimer said, there's a lot of evaluating hazards and too little action to address them.

Douglas Hill of the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook University has proposed a chain of massive sea barriers in Long Island Sound that could be closed to prevent flooding whenever a storm surge threatens. One would be close to the Verrazano Narrows bridge. (The Thames Barrier in London performs such a role in a more modest way.) But the cost would probably exceed $10 billion; a barrier in Venice cost $7 billion.

Whether Sandy will drive the issue of climate change up the political agenda seems doubtful. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 67% of Americans believe the Earth is warming, up slightly since 2010, but that's 10 percentage points less than in 2006. Among both Democrats and Republicans, the percentage has declined, as has the number (now 64%) who say it's a serious problem.