A major news organization in Utah passed over Mitt Romney today in favor of endorsing Barack Obama for President of the United States.
This is a big flipping deal for Mitt, who prides himself on his Mormon heritage. Wow. And the Salt Lake Tribune editors were not complimentary to their Olympics-saving Native Son either. This must be devastating to the Romney family. Ann must be talking Mitt down right now, trying to "stabilize" him as she worries about his mental health.
Perhaps reading what's left of his bank book would do it? Or maybe Tagg can threaten to take a swing at Obama again? Or perhaps perusing that binder of women. *wink*
Some excerpts from this breathtaking document . . .
Nowhere has Mitt Romney’s pursuit of the presidency been more warmly welcomed or closely followed than here in Utah. The Republican nominee’s political and religious pedigrees, his adeptly bipartisan governorship of a Democratic state, and his head for business and the bottom line all inspire admiration and hope in our largely Mormon, Republican, business-friendly state.
But it was Romney’s singular role in rescuing Utah’s organization of the 2002 Olympics from a cesspool of scandal, and his oversight of the most successful Winter Games on record, that make him the Beehive State’s favorite adopted son. After all, Romney managed to save the state from ignominy, turning the extravaganza into a showcase for the matchless landscapes, volunteerism and efficiency that told the world what is best and most beautiful about Utah and its people.
BUT . . .
From his embrace of the party’s radical right wing, to subsequent portrayals of himself as a moderate champion of the middle class, Romney has raised the most frequently asked question of the campaign: "Who is this guy, really, and what in the world does he truly believe?"
. . . Where, we ask, is the pragmatic, inclusive Romney, the Massachusetts governor who left the state with a model health care plan in place, the Romney who led Utah to Olympic glory? That Romney skedaddled and is nowhere to be found.
Therefore . . .
The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board had hoped that Romney would exhibit the same talents for organization, pragmatic problem solving and inspired leadership that he displayed here more than a decade ago. Instead, we have watched him morph into a friend of the far right, then tack toward the center with breathtaking aplomb. Through a pair of presidential debates, Romney’s domestic agenda remains bereft of detail and worthy of mistrust.
Therefore, our endorsement must go to the incumbent, a competent leader who, against tough odds, has guided the country through catastrophe and set a course that, while rocky, is pointing toward a brighter day. The president has earned a second term. Romney, in whatever guise, does not deserve a first.
I'm not sure how the Romney campaign thinks they can appeal to independents and centrists with the Paul Ryan pick. He is a candidate that mainly appeals to extremists and oddballs of the Republican Party.
While Romney can flip-flop because he has held less conservative positions in the past, Ryan has been too far-right to etch-a-sketch himself. And to make that worse, he has inspired starry-eyed man-crushes from conservatives who are hate-mongers and near-sociopaths. So he can't erase their statements either. Why would they love him if he wasn't a radical extremist?
In May 2012, ex-VP and scary-guy Dick Cheney said:
"I worship the ground that Paul Ryan walks on. I think he's an enormously talented individual and he's trying to do the right thing, and he deserves all the support we can give him. And I hope he doesn’t run for president because that would ruin a good man who has a lot of work to do." (via Think Progress )
Ryan also has a long-standing mutual admiration society with Glenn Beck, wingnut guru of the bizarre. In 2010, we have the following on-air encounter, Transcript Via Media Matters:
BECK: I don't follow the people day-to-day in Washington, but I hear -- when I hear names over and over again, I look into them. Paul Ryan is a name I keep hearing, just, you know, "He's a god among conservatives."
. . . Hello, Congressman. How are you, sir?
RYAN: Hey, nice to meet you.
BECK: Nice to meet you, sir. Tell me -- tell me -- tell me your thoughts on progressivism.
RYAN: Right. What I have been trying to do, and if you read the entire Oklahoma speech or read my speech to Hillsdale College that they put in their Imprimis magazine -- you can get them on my Facebook page -- what I've been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism. Because I see progressivism as the source, the intellectual source for the big-government problems that are plaguing us today. And so, to me, it's really important to flush progressives out into the field of open debate --
BECK: I love you.
RYAN: -- so people can actually see what this ideology means, and where it's going to lead us, and how it attacks the American idea. [Premiere Radio Networks, The Glenn Beck Program, 4/12/10]
Then they went on to agree that "Progressivism is a Cancer" on sociey (see below), and somehow anyone who has a progressive idea is "influenced by Austrian intellectuals" in the big bad city of Madison, WI, while the good folks in tiny Janesville, Ryan's hometown, were more influenced by the founding fathers and God Almighty.
BECK: OK. Hang on just a second. I -- did you see my speech at CPAC?
RYAN: Yeah, I've read it. I didn't see it. I've read a transcript of it.
BECK: OK. I think we're saying the same thing. I call it --
RYAN: We are saying the same thing.
BECK: it's a cancer.
RYAN: Exactly. Look, I come from -- I'm calling you from Janesville, Wisconsin --
BECK: Holy cow.
RYAN: -- where I'm born and raised, where we raised our family, 35 miles from Madison. I grew up hearing about this stuff. This stuff came from these German intellectuals to Madison, University of Wisconsin, and then sort of out from there at the beginning of the last century. So, this is something we are familiar with where I come from.
It never sat right with me, and as I grew up, I learned more about the Founders and reading the Austrians and others, that this is really a cancer. Because it basically takes the notion that our rights come from God and nature, and turns it on its head and says, "No, no, no, no. They come from government. And we here in government are here to give you your rights and therefore ration, redistribute, and regulate your rights." It's a complete affront of the whole idea of this country. And that is, to me, what we as conservatives -- or classical liberals, if you want to get technical --
BECK: Thank you.
RYAN: -- ought to be doing to flush this out. [Premiere Radio Networks, The Glenn Beck Program, 4/12/10]
Ryan sounds just like Sarah Palin from backwater Alaska, or like any number of Glenn Beck's anti-intellectual cuckoo followers who believe they own American history somehow, unlike we scary Democrats who simply can't understand their "pure" vision of what the United States is supposed to be. Like the Harvard-educated Rick Santorum, Ryan is just a hypocrite who makes it sound as if he has never left his small town, even though he was thoroughly educated at public Miami university in Ohio - *where more scary intellectuals dwell* - and he is also a seven-term congressman who has lived in Washington DC for years, not in tiny Janesville, WI. Dare I mention that he received "progressive" help in the form of Social Security benefits that helped pay for his public education? Dare I mention he is paid a salary by the big-bad-government right now, and would again if he ever becomes VP ~ which is looking less-likely every day, but still... voters should look at the way Ryan has lived as a public servant with "progressive" health care and benefits for his family. Actually, just like Santorum and Palin, "cognitive dissonance" is the right term for Ryan's opinions - the contradiction between the way Ryan has actually lived his life and what he says to ultra-conservatives like Beck. Constantly running for office while slamming big-government.
Finally, Rush Limbaugh loves the guy - need I say more?
“We now have somebody on the ticket who’s us,” Limbaugh said of the newly named Republican vice-presidential nomineee. “[Somebody] who can explain all of this, who believes all of this in his heart, in his soul, and he can do it with optimism and a smile on his face.”
. . . “The pick signals a decision was made somewhere that … we’re going to go head-first, going to take it straight to them and we’re going to win or we’re going to lose [but we are going to] articulate exactly what we believe,” Limbaugh said.
He added later, “The presence of Paul on stage with Romney has elevated Romney … Romney’s a new guy.”
As Ed Schultz put it last night:
Mitt Romney has picked the most radical Vice President in the history of the Republican Party.
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.
. . . The poll also finds 17% of adults say they are more likely to vote for Romney in November because Ryan is his running mate -- about the same impact Sarah Palin had for John McCain four years ago among registered voters.
. . . Republicans, however, see the appeal in Ryan, who was hailed this weekend as a bold, innovative thinker by party stalwarts. The poll finds 36% of Republicans are now more likely to vote for Romney. In 2008, only 3 in 10 Republicans said the choice of Palin made them more likely to vote for McCain.
. . . Why am I concluding that Mr. Romney would have chosen Mr. Ryan only if he felt he was losing? Because from a Politics 101 point of view, this isn’t the most natural choice.
. . .The last time an ordinary member of the House was elected vice president, and the last Republican, was more than 100 years ago: in 1908, when William Howard Taft and James S. Sherman, a New York congressman, were chosen by voters. (Coincidentally, that fall was also the last time that the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.)
Politics 101 suggests that you play toward the center of the electorate. Although this rule has more frequently been violated when it comes to vice-presidential picks, there is evidence that presidential candidates who have more “extreme” ideologies (closer to the left wing or the right wing than the electoral center) underperform relative to the economic fundamentals.
Various statistical measures of Mr. Ryan peg him as being quite conservative. Based on his Congressional voting record, for instance, the statistical system DW-Nominate evaluates him as being roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.
Editor Tom Goldstein of the SCOTUS Blog calls the Immigration Ruling a "Big Win" for Obama Administration in discussion with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC.
I think the Administration has to be very happy with the decision in the Arizona immigration case. They clearly won with respect to three of the four provisions of the very tough Arizona immigration law and it was basically a tie on the fourth. They didn't lose. The Supreme Court saying that on the ask for your papers provision, they didn't know enough about how the statute would be applied to know whether it was constitutional or not and they would have to wait to decide that question. They made pretty clear that you could ask for immigration papers if you had a reasonable cause if you weren't going to hold people for too long just to check their immigration status. So it does uphold that principle which is very important to a lot of Conservatives who favor the law that you can ask about the status but beyond that, it was a big win for the Obama Administration.
Hi, Peter. Thanks for taking the time. After reading over the opinion, what’s your immediate takeaway?
Well, it’s a split decision in that both sides got a bit of what they wanted. But in my view, it’s really only nominally a split decision. I think it’s mostly a victory for opponents of the law.
...*snip*...
Remind us again what 2(B) enabled the federal government to do, if you would.
Sure. That portion allows state authorities to ask someone to show his or her immigration papers if the officer has a reasonable suspicion that the person might be here illegally.
But 2(B) really doesn’t have any teeth, at least not in the way other provisions of the law do. 2(B) allows state officials to call [the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency] and say ‘hey, we think someone’s here illegally.’ But ICE doesn’t necessarily have to do anything in response to the state’s call.
And that’s part of why I really think this is mostly a win for the law’s opponents. Two of the three provisions that were struck down outright did have teeth — they allowed the state to put an alien in jail.
And 2(B) could be struck down later?
Right. The court ruled on the facial challenge to the law. But it’s kicking back to the lower courts the issue of whether the law is constitutional in the ways in which it gets applied. For now, we’ll have to allow those to work their way through the court system
...*snip*...
Justice Antonin Scalia, one of three dissenting justices, read a fairly scathing statement from the bench. What did you make of this?
It struck me as so much crying in the wilderness, to be honest. His view is pretty jurisprudentially extreme, and I think it could likely be the last time that Scalia gets to weigh on in immigration issues during his court tenure.
But I think a broad takeaway here is that on a court divided such as this one is, it’s Justice Kennedy who calls the shots.
Nowhere has Mitt Romney’s pursuit of the presidency been more warmly welcomed or closely followed than here in Utah. The Republican nominee’s political and religious pedigrees, his adeptly bipartisan governorship of a Democratic state, and his head for business and the bottom line all inspire admiration and hope in our largely Mormon, Republican, business-friendly state.
The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board had hoped that Romney would exhibit the same talents for organization, pragmatic problem solving and inspired leadership that he displayed here more than a decade ago. Instead, we have watched him morph into a friend of the far right, then tack toward the center with breathtaking aplomb. Through a pair of presidential debates, Romney’s domestic agenda remains bereft of detail and worthy of mistrust.
