Republican Primary Megathread (poll now updated)

[United Dependencies]

It's ASB!

[Yootwopia]

He's incoherent and unstatesmanlike in every sense

I think he's pretty coherent although he rants about stuff that probably a lot of regular people don't give a shit about.

He really isn't. That rant last night was a little bit radgey and didn't really say anything other than "I am Ron Paul, and I am fairly mental about most things".

[Hydesland]

I think he's pretty coherent although he rants about stuff that probably a lot of regular people don't give a shit about.

He really isn't. That rant last night was a little bit radgey and didn't really say anything other than "I am Ron Paul, and I am fairly mental about most things".

Nah

[Mike the Progressive]

Go Romney! GO!

[Cannot think of a name]

Go Romney! GO!

Is...is that enthusiasm for Mitt Romney? That alone I think might be able to get you a guest spot on a political talk show.

[Natapoc]

Go Romney! GO!

Is...is that enthusiasm for Mitt Romney? That alone I think might be able to get you a guest spot on a political talk show.

Yeah I don't think anyone particularly likes Romney. I also don't think he can win against Obama. He is not different from Obama on any of the issues conservatives care about in a meaningful way.

We can basically now declare Obama the winner of the 2012 presidential elections since there are only two choices (Romney and Obama) already even though most of the american people have not had a chance to speak on the issue.

A disenfranchised republican party also means that democrats will be more likely to pick up more house and senate seats.

Grats President Obama! We should just drop the election now and use all the campaign funds to pay for supplementary nutrition programs, education, Rent assistance for people at risk of homelessness, and other things that actually matter.

[Yootwopia]

Is...is that enthusiasm for Mitt Romney? That alone I think might be able to get you a guest spot on a political talk show.

Yeah I don't think anyone particularly likes Romney. I also don't think he can win against Obama. He is not different from Obama on any of the issues conservatives care about in a meaningful way.

We can basically now declare Obama the winner of the 2012 presidential elections since there are only two choices (Romney and Obama) already even though most of the american people have not had a chance to speak on the issue.

A disenfranchised republican party also means that democrats will be more likely to pick up more house and senate seats.

Grats President Obama! We should just drop the election now and use all the campaign funds to pay for supplementary nutrition programs, education, Rent assistance for people at risk of homelessness, and other things that actually matter.

Yeah all Obama really has to do is sign an executive order which says that "When Mitt Romney Came To Town" must be broadcast 24/7 through the campaign and he's golden.

[Tahar Joblis]

Romney did exactly what the polls predicted. There were no surprises in the NH results, and therefore, nothing really changes because of the primary itself.

Well, OK, maybe Perry will get more pessimistic as he comes to grips with reality.

[Natapoc]

Yeah I don't think anyone particularly likes Romney. I also don't think he can win against Obama. He is not different from Obama on any of the issues conservatives care about in a meaningful way.

We can basically now declare Obama the winner of the 2012 presidential elections since there are only two choices (Romney and Obama) already even though most of the american people have not had a chance to speak on the issue.

A disenfranchised republican party also means that democrats will be more likely to pick up more house and senate seats.

Grats President Obama! We should just drop the election now and use all the campaign funds to pay for supplementary nutrition programs, education, Rent assistance for people at risk of homelessness, and other things that actually matter.

Yeah all Obama really has to do is sign an executive order which says that "When Mitt Romney Came To Town" must be broadcast 24/7 through the campaign and he's golden.

That would be an illegal executive order. But it will help if that documentary is played on TV regularly.

Really, only three words need repeated: Romneycare. Mormon. Bailouts.

[Free Soviets]

best thing ever said about this primary,

"Could it be that the voters of New Hampshire gave Mittroid the win this time around in the hope that, after he loses in November, he’ll never pester them again? It must be hell on earth not to be able to visit your favorite diner without the risk of some grinning alien creature attempting to conversate colloquially with you about shooting varmints." - some random commenter on balloon juice

[Tmutarakhan]

I was rooting for an exact tie between Santorum and Gingrich, just like I was for an exact tie with Romney in Iowa, although as a mathematician I know the odds are incalculably low.

[Alien Space Bats]

Really, only three words need repeated: Romneycare. Mormon. Bailouts.

No, I think the demolition of Mitt Romney will follow a different axis:

1. Mitt Romney Wants Another War in the Gulf

Mitt Romney has pretty much hired the entire Bush II foreign policy team. Worse, he's used the very same unfortunate phrase the neo-cons used prior to Iraq (about making the 21st Century "an American Century"), with all its imperial overtones. And, to slather the icing all over the cake, he's beating the war drum vis-á-vis Iran in a way that is strongly evocative of what Bush II did vis-á-vis Iraq.

Obama can exploit this. The majority of Americans are glad that we're done in Iraq, and can't wait for us to finish in Afghanistan. It will take some subtlety, but Democrats have an opportunity to make Mitt Romney look like a man who wants to repeat the Iraq debacle on a larger scale (Iran has over 2½ times the population and 4 times the land area of Iraq). How can Romney pretend that a war with Iran won't cost thousands more lives and trillions more dollars, while tying us down for another decade or more in a place where we really don't belong? How can Romney pretend that Russia won't be the biggest beneficiary of such a war, while America sinks even deeper into debt and its military gets worn down to the point of uselessness? The people who engineered the invasion of Iraq - and who now want to double down on that folly by invading Iran - are all obviously idiots who are incapable of learning from their past mistakes; so what does it say of Romney that we wants to put such idiots back in positions of power instead of booting them out to pasture, where they belong? What kind of fool does that make Romney, that he would listen to such fools in turn.

The Iraq War happened because Bush II lacked the wisdom to understand that effective diplomacy is always better than war, however artfully waged such a war might be. Containing Saddam Hussein would have achieved everything the invasion of Iraq achieved (seriously, is there anyone who honestly believes that, had Saddam still been in power this spring, we would not have been a victim of the same Jasmine Revolution that swept Hosni Mubarak from power?!?). Diplomacy could have kept Saddam in check, just as it kept him in check for the decade preceding the Iraq War. We don't need to wage wars to "prove" America's strength; indeed, if anything, every time we fight a war, it's a failure of diplomacy, not a triumph of power.

Barack Obama is handling Iran in exactly the right way: A war between the U.S. and Iran would plunge the world into another recession (or worse); it would cost America lives we shouldn't spend and funds we can't afford; it would divert our attention from other regions of the world that badly need that attention; it would drive a further wedge between the U.S. and the rest of the world, and in the end it wouldn't advance American interests one jot.

America can't afford to spend the next ten years fighting another Middle Eastern war, and that's what Romney will have us do. Ergo, America can't afford to elect Mitt Romney.

2. Mitt Romney Can't Say "No" to the Religious Right

Mitt Romney insists that he's become more conservative over time; others simply see him as a moderate who's posturing as a conservative to win the GOP nomination. The truth is, it doesn't matter what Mitt Romney is, because he doesn't have the guts to split with the far right on any issue that might jeopardize his nomination - or, if elected, his re-election. He's a dishrag who can't refuse to give the Neaderthal wing of the GOP whatever in the Hell it pleases.

Mitt Romney has picked Robert Bork to be on his judicial advisory committee. That's right, Robert Fucking "Griswold Was Wrongly Decided" Bork. Bork's presence on Romney's judicial advisory committee explains this exchange, which - even though it worked out well for Romney - revealed exactly where he stands on the core issue of whether or not the 14th Amendment provides Americans with an inherent privacy right:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?

ROMNEY: George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising. States have a right to ban contraception? I can’t imagine a state banning contraception. I can’t imagine the circumstances where a state would want to do so, and if I were a governor of a state or...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, the Supreme Court has ruled --

ROMNEY: ... or a -- or a legislature of a state -- I would totally and completely oppose any effort to ban contraception. So you’re asking -- given the fact that there’s no state that wants to do so, and I don’t know of any candidate that wants to do so, you’re asking could it constitutionally be done? We can ask our constitutionalist here.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m sure Congressman Paul...

(CROSSTALK)

ROMNEY: OK, come on -- come on back...

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... asking you, do you believe that states have that right or not?

ROMNEY: George, I -- I don’t know whether a state has a right to ban contraception. No state wants to. I mean, the idea of you putting forward things that states might want to do that no -- no state wants to do and asking me whether they could do it or not is kind of a silly thing, I think.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hold on a second. Governor, you went to Harvard Law School. You know very well this is based on...

ROMNEY: Has the Supreme Court -- has the Supreme Court decided that states do not have the right to provide contraception? I...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes, they have. In 1965, Griswold v. Connecticut.

ROMNEY: The -- I believe in the -- that the law of the land is as spoken by the Supreme Court, and that if we disagree with the Supreme Court -- and occasionally I do -- then we have a process under the Constitution to change that decision. And it’s -- it’s known as the amendment process.

And -- and where we have -- for instance, right now we’re having issues that relate to same-sex marriage. My view is, we should have a federal amendment of the Constitution defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. But I know of -- of no reason to talk about contraception in this regard.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you’ve got the Supreme Court decision finding a right to privacy in the Constitution.

ROMNEY: I don’t believe they decided that correctly. In my view, Roe v. Wade was improperly decided. It was based upon that same principle. And in my view, if we had justices like Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia, and more justices like that, they might well decide to return this issue to states as opposed to saying it’s in the federal Constitution.

And by the way, if the people say it should be in the federal Constitution, then instead of having unelected judges stuff it in there when it’s not there, we should allow the people to express their own views through amendment and add it to the Constitution. But this idea that justice...

STEPHANOPOULOS: But should that be done in this case?

ROMNEY: Pardon?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Should that be done in this case?

ROMNEY: Should this be done in the case -- this case to allow states to ban contraception? No. States don’t want to ban contraception. So why would we try and put it in the Constitution?

With regards to gay marriage, I’ve told you, that’s when I would amend the Constitution. Contraception, it’s working just fine, just leave it alone.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I understand that. But you’ve given two answers to the question. Do you believe that the Supreme Court should overturn it or not?...

ROMNEY: Do I believe the Supreme Court should overturn Roe v. Wade? Yes, I do.

George Stephanopoulos handled this exchange very poorly, but in the end Romney ended up admitting that he would, in fact, appoint more judges and justices to the Federal Bench and to the U.S. Supreme Court who would overturn Roe.

The problem, however, is that the standard conservative approach to attacking Roe is to undermine it by denying the validity of its antecedent, Griswold. And here the question of contraception roars back to the fore, as Griswold asserts that married couples have a constitutional right to use birth control (which was later extended to unmarried couples in Eisenstadt v. Baird [1972]).

Which makes Romney's assertion that "no State wants to ban birth control" especially pivotal. To be honest, Romney is not only wrong, but is being deliberately duplicitous on this issue. Why do I say that he's being duplicitous? Because Mitt Romney endorsed Mississippi's failed Personhood Amendment, which - had it been enacted - would have banned hormonal birth control and IUD's.

So yes, it's probably (technically) true that no State currently wants to ban birth control. It is not, however, by any means true that no political party or faction in America wants to ban birth control: Indeed, a growing segment of the Religious Right wants to do exactly that, and both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have openly catered to this faction.

So what can we expect to see if Mitt Romney is elected? We can expect to see more conservative judges elected who want to overturn Roe - and, with Robert Bork handing Mitt Romney names for potential judicial candidates to be submitted to the Senate as candidates for seats on the Federal Bench and the U.S. Supreme Court, we can expect that these same judges won't just stop at Roe, but will roll the law all the way back past Griswold.

For Griswold doesn't just serve as the foundation for Roe; it also serves as the foundation for Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck down laws against sodomy. Criminalizing both gay sex and adultery in order to return us to the Bad Old Days in which State governments functioned as America's moral policemen, dictating not only who could fuck whom, but even what sex positions married couples could employ (and whether married couples were allowed to take measures to limit family size) is very definitely something the Religious Right wants, and in this day and age its the right wing of the GOP that sets the policies to be adhered to by the entire party. They may not be a majority, but they are fast becoming the tail that wags the dog.

Americans don't need "small government" of this kind; they don't need a government that paradoxically decides they can screw random strangers in the marketplace, but not screw willing partners in bed (save in Fundamentalist Christian State-approved ways); they don't need economic freedom at the cost of medieval morality enforced at gunpoint. Americans deserve the right to love whom the will, to manifest that love in whatever way they can (within the limits of their partners' consent), and to choose to have small families - or even no children at all - if they wish. Religious fanatics have no right to tell Americans that their only choices in life are to eschew sex or procreate. If they want to reserve sex for pure procreation, they can adhere to that standard within their own lives; they have no god-damned right to impose that choice on anybody else, whatever their "Good Book" says on the subject.

Mitt Romney would be no better than Rick Santorum when it comes to stopping this sort of thing from happening. The man who - out of political cowardice and the reflexive desire to win re-election (not to mention to maintain the support of his own party for any other policies he may want to enact) - refuses to stand up to the Religious Right but instead simply surrenders to them everything their little hearts desire is no better than a Fundamentalist tool. If America is to remain free, such a tool cannot be allowed to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

3. Mitt Romney Will Make the Tax System More Regressive

The reason America's economy is moving so sluggishly is because its great engine - consumer demand, centered on the middle and working classes - is not producing sufficient wealth to embolden these consumers to spend as they should. It's not because companies don't have the funds to invest in new capital and plant, to expand, and to hire more workers; indeed, companies are awash with cash. Rather, it's because absent such consumer spending, there's no need to hire more workers; current staffing levels are more than adequate to meet current demand, making hiring superfluous and thus a total waste.

Yet Romney - like all the rest of the GOP - hews to the faulty "Field of Dreams" economic model that imagines that businesses will just create jobs, if only we give them enough cash and take away their fears of regulation. Such theories are utter bunk - why should an employer hire anyone if there's no work (demand) for that person to perform (meet)? Are we supposed to believe that if employers hire workers, the orders will just magically arrive at their doorstep unbidden?

Apparently so, because no other model explains why Republicans continue to insist that demand has nothing to do with economic growth.

No, real economists - as opposed to the various Austrian crackpots who people conservative think-tanks - understand that businesses respond to demand. Thus, they understand that taking money away from consumers - those who buy the goods business sells - will only slow growth further and keep us in the doldrums. For that reason, they generally oppose the one thing every Republican is now beginning to eagerly call for: Increased taxes on working families so as to finance further tax cuts for the rich.

Hence, the problem with Mitt Romney's tax plan: Embracing the faulty theory that what's wrong with America is that the rich pay too much in taxes, it would dramatically cut taxes for those earning over $1 million a year (by over 15%), while giving a modest 2% cut to those earning between $50-$75 thousand, and then hiking taxes on those earning less than $20 thousand a year by over 60%. Oh, and it would do all this while increasing the annual budget deficit by $600 billion, because increasing the budget deficit is OK - if you're a Republican.

Republicans love to say that the poor and the working classes "don't pay their fair share' - that they "don't have skin in the game." That is pure bullshit. As I have asserted before (and proven with statistics), overall taxes at all levels - Federal, State, and local combined - correlate very closely with income, such that each demographic group in America supports its total governmental infrastructure with a contribution that is surprisingly proportional to that group's overall income. The rich pay more because the rich have more; the poor don't pay as much because the poor don't have as much. Moreover, with America's largest social program - Social Security - supported by a payroll tax that most strongly impacts those who have the greatest stake in that social program (workers whose wages would otherwise be garnished by the courts to support their indigent elderly and disabled relatives, as required by State law everywhere), and because the largest share of what's left is defense, it's hard to argue that somehow the cost of bombing the every-living shit out of Iran ought to be borne most heavily by the very people whose sons and daughters are the most likely among us to die in said conflicts.

But Republicans nonetheless make that argument. The poor "don't have skin in the game" - and so we should flay them alive while bleeding their children dry in useless Middle Eastern adventures.

To hell with that. The current tax code is already biased in favor of the rich; as I have argued again and again, the way back to prosperity is to return the nation to Clinton-era rates and the spend money on infrastructure and education in order to get the working and middle classes working - and spending - again. The rich have no cause to cry under such circumstances, as they will profit handsomely enough once the economy gets back into gear again.

4. Mitt Romney Is Part of What's Wrong With America

Understanding what Mitt Romney did at Bain Capital is crucial to understanding why Mitt Romney should not be President of the United States.

Bain Capital is a private equity firm. Private equity firms make money by purchasing distressed firms through leveraged buyouts, patching up their financials to make them look healthier, and then selling them back to the market at a profit.

It's kind of like flipping houses, except with a number of twists. First, flipping houses doesn't usually cost other people their homes - or jobs. Second, as with so many other things on Wall Street, appearances matter more than reality, so Bain doesn't really "turn firms around"; rather, it shoots them full of steroids and amphetamine, makes them look healthier, and then finds some fool who will buy them under the mistaken impression that they're healthier thanks to Bain's attention. Sadly, more often than not, that's not the case, and the drug-revived "turnaround" flames out and dies a nasty death a few years later.

But that's how Wall Street makes its money: Not by selling products that are sound, but by bamboozling buyers into thinking that what they're selling is sound. It's a culture of caveat emptor in which facts are withheld from buyers to the maximum extent the law allows so that the shill buyer never knows he's been had in the Street's endless game of musical chairs - until it's too late.

Thus, the tools and methods of Bain and its ilk: It swoops in, buying the target company with its own money (yes, Virginia, on Wall Street that's actually possible). When the deal is done, Bain owns the victim buyout target and the target is loaded with debt (that's the first effect of this tactic, and the first reason we should doubt whether this approach really helps anybody: Corporate raiders like Bain take distressed firms and load them up with debt; this, some idiots Wall Street analysts tell us, is actually a good thing - supposedly because, like Samuel Johnson's observation vis-á-vis hanging, having more debt than it can handle "focuses" the corporation on cost cutting; obviously, this means that if you're in financial trouble, the first thing you should do is borrow lots of money).

Next, Bain fills the target firm with its own managers - and then makes the target firm pay Bain hefty management fees for the privilege of having Bain managers in charge. Yes, apparently Bain's managers are just that good...

And if you don't believe that, well, go back to Samuel Johnson and focus.

Once Bain's people are in charge, they mercilessly slash expenses. In practice, that means closing plants and offices, firing workers, cutting pay, reducing benefits, outsourcing products and services overseas (and, my, won't Romney's plan for reducing or eliminating the taxes American firms pay on overseas operations really act as an incentive not to offshore operations, right?), reducing or killing pensions (because contracts only matter when they're between companies and not with workers; nobody needs to keep their word to workers, whatever kind of paper that word is written on, right?). All of this is thought of by Wall Street as "enhancing productivity", and (arguably) it does indeed do that (at the cost of worker loyalty, but who needs that?).

But right along with all of that, Bain managers often cut market development, product quality, and R&D. Economists call this "eating your seed corn", and the ones who haven't sold out to the right universally see it as a bad thing, in so far as it mortgages the future of the firm for the sake of present returns. The thing is, it does increase present returns, which makes the firm more profitable overnight. Everyone gets all excited about the higher profits, and Wall Street morons gurus declare such "turnarounds" to be "miracles".

After a year or two of increased profits, with share price rising, Bain sells the company. Since the debt incurred in buying the company remains with the company, the profits Bain realizes in doing this are huge. From there, Bain moves on to its next victim target.

In the meantime, the target is now saddled with debt. Worse, it is depreciating its "goodwill" by selling inferior product, failing to take sufficient measures to secure future business (market development) or to keep its products competitive (R&D). Half the firms Bain treated this way while Romney was in charge ultimately slumped back into bankruptcy and died. The other half only survived by the skin of their teeth.

Any resemblance between this process and the kind of bullshit that led Wall Street to bundle bad mortgage paper into commoditized vehicles and sell it to whatever fool would buy such things is, let me assure you, entirely coincidental.

The common theme in all of this is the triumph of short-term profit over long-term business sense, combined with the cynical practice of dressing up toxic assets as "great deals" and then selling them to unsuspecting suckers. Somehow this is supposed to "create value" - although, in the holistic business sense - I'll be damned if I can see how such tactics do anything of the sort.

Now, ask yourself: In the post-2008 world, what kind of world should we be driving for when it comes to Wall Street and investment? Should we be trying to encourage Wall Street to become a genuine vehicle for making business ventures possible, as a way to enable entrepreneurship? Or should we embrace the kind of short-term, current-quarter thinking that makes American businesses stupid, and leaven that with a lovely dose of encouraging investors to screw each other over by dressing losers up as winners in the name of making a quick dishonest buck? John Maynard Keynes compared stock markets to casinos; should we embrace that model, and let the house "shear" the suckers, or should we try to get the Street to do something more positive?

I submit that a President who made his fortune by running a firm that led the market in the pursuit of short-term thinking and the exploitation of gullible investors cannot be expected to do anything but embrace rules that will reinforce the systems he used to build his fortune. Mitt Romney clearly sees nothing wrong with the "current-quarter" thinking that dominates Wall Street - because his firms' raiding activities both relied upon such thinking and promoted it, even in firms they never bought (in the sense that, in conjunction with other such firms, it helped created an atmosphere in which everyone expects profit realization here and now, to the exclusion of long-term planning); he clearly sees nothing wrong with the Street's unashamed culture of caveat emptor, in so far as Bain Capital relied on said culture to dump the firms it had crippled (like Dade International, a medical supply firm whose R&D budget was slashed almost in half; Dade made tremendous profits and fetched a great price when resold by Bain - but the lack of R&D killed the company's long-term profit potential as its competitors outpaced it and its products fell behind market needs). How can a man who sees nothing wrong with such practices be expected to prevent the next mortgage bubble, given that it was precisely these tendencies (focus on immediate profit and a failure to inform prospective buyers of future risk) that paved the way for the collapsed of the supposedly AAA-rated commoditized mortgage market?

No, a vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for a continuation or even a deepening of the problems on Wall Street that created the 2008 real estate bubble. For you can blame government - Fannie, Freddie, whoever - all you want for the issuance of too many bad loans if you want; yet those loans would never have been handed off from one bank to the next by Wall Street if it hadn't been for the whole mortgage commodization scam. Without the transmission of bad loans to good banks, the damage would have been limited to the banks that originated said bad paper, and the ability of the institutions that did so to do more would have been strictly limited, It is the fact that Wall Street encourages sellers to scam buyers if they can that allowed - indeed, encouraged - the problem to swell to titantic proportions, to where it very nearly reached 1930's proportions.

You can't expect a man like Mitt Romney to fix Wall Street, because men like Mitt Romney refuse to believe that Wall Street is broken in the first place.

[Wikkiwallana]

So, after reading ASB's post, all I can say is Mitt's new nickname should be "Chum".

Because that's all that's left.

[Great Malema]

I was rooting for an exact tie between Santorum and Gingrich, just like I was for an exact tie with Romney in Iowa, although as a mathematician I know the odds are incalculably low.

That would be interesting if it does happen, but I'm thinking that Gingrich will just edge out Santorum.

[West Failure]

Not being an American I hadn't realised Mittens is a Mormon, will that be a handicap?

[Cannot think of a name]

Not being an American I hadn't realised Mittens is a Mormon, will that be a handicap?

Not as much as some would have you think.

[Natapoc]

Not being an American I hadn't realised Mittens is a Mormon, will that be a handicap?

Not as much as some would have you think.

Elections in the US are so close though that even if 1% of the people who would have supported him don't, it could cause him to lose the vote.

[West Failure]

Not as much as some would have you think.

Elections in the US are so close though that even if 1% of the people who would have supported him don't, it could cause him to lose the vote.

Realising I don't really know how Mormonism is regarded in the US as to whether that could happen. I suppose the Proposition 8 thing could gain him some Republican votes, but harm him in the actual Presidential election?

[Mike the Progressive]

Is...is that enthusiasm for Mitt Romney? That alone I think might be able to get you a guest spot on a political talk show.

Yeah I don't think anyone particularly likes Romney. I also don't think he can win against Obama. He is not different from Obama on any of the issues conservatives care about in a meaningful way.

We can basically now declare Obama the winner of the 2012 presidential elections since there are only two choices (Romney and Obama) already even though most of the american people have not had a chance to speak on the issue.

A disenfranchised republican party also means that democrats will be more likely to pick up more house and senate seats.

Grats President Obama! We should just drop the election now and use all the campaign funds to pay for supplementary nutrition programs, education, Rent assistance for people at risk of homelessness, and other things that actually matter.

Absolutely.

Progressives and liberals of America, Romney cannot win: He's too wishy-washy, he's too Republican, he's too Mormon. Therefore come November 4, don't vote and if you do, go third party, because either way, Obama is going to win re-election. You need not worry yourself, a Mormon as President? Cha, sure, what's next a woman or a blac-, er, Asian guy? Ha, I say, HA!

[Ashmoria]

Really, only three words need repeated: Romneycare. Mormon. Bailouts.

No, I think the demolition of Mitt Romney will follow a different axis:

1. Mitt Romney Wants Another War in the Gulf

Mitt Romney has pretty much hired the entire Bush II foreign policy team. Worse, he's used the very same unfortunate phrase the neo-cons used prior to Iraq (about making the 21st Century "an American Century"), with all its imperial overtones. And, to slather the icing all over the cake, he's beating the war drum vis-á-vis Iran in a way that is strongly evocative of what Bush II did vis-á-vis Iraq.

Obama can exploit this. The majority of Americans are glad that we're done in Iraq, and can't wait for us to finish in Afghanistan. It will take some subtlety, but Democrats have an opportunity to make Mitt Romney look like a man who wants to repeat the Iraq debacle on a larger scale (Iran has over 2½ times the population and 4 times the land area of Iraq). How can Romney pretend that a war with Iran won't cost thousands more lives and trillions more dollars, while tying us down for another decade or more in a place where we really don't belong? How can Romney pretend that Russia won't be the biggest beneficiary of such a war, while America sinks even deeper into debt and its military gets worn down to the point of uselessness? The people who engineered the invasion of Iraq - and who now want to double down on that folly by invading Iran - are all obviously idiots who are incapable of learning from their past mistakes; so what does it say of Romney that we wants to put such idiots back in positions of power instead of booting them out to pasture, where they belong? What kind of fool does that make Romney, that he would listen to such fools in turn.

The Iraq War happened because Bush II lacked the wisdom to understand that effective diplomacy is always better than war, however artfully waged such a war might be. Containing Saddam Hussein would have achieved everything the invasion of Iraq achieved (seriously, is there anyone who honestly believes that, had Saddam still been in power this spring, we would not have been a victim of the same Jasmine Revolution that swept Hosni Mubarak from power?!?). Diplomacy could have kept Saddam in check, just as it kept him in check for the decade preceding the Iraq War. We don't need to wage wars to "prove" America's strength; indeed, if anything, every time we fight a war, it's a failure of diplomacy, not a triumph of power.

Barack Obama is handling Iran in exactly the right way: A war between the U.S. and Iran would plunge the world into another recession (or worse); it would cost America lives we shouldn't spend and funds we can't afford; it would divert our attention from other regions of the world that badly need that attention; it would drive a further wedge between the U.S. and the rest of the world, and in the end it wouldn't advance American interests one jot.

America can't afford to spend the next ten years fighting another Middle Eastern war, and that's what Romney will have us do. Ergo, America can't afford to elect Mitt Romney.

2. Mitt Romney Can't Say "No" to the Religious Right

Mitt Romney insists that he's become more conservative over time; others simply see him as a moderate who's posturing as a conservative to win the GOP nomination. The truth is, it doesn't matter what Mitt Romney is, because he doesn't have the guts to split with the far right on any issue that might jeopardize his nomination - or, if elected, his re-election. He's a dishrag who can't refuse to give the Neaderthal wing of the GOP whatever in the Hell it pleases.

Mitt Romney has picked Robert Bork to be on his judicial advisory committee. That's right, Robert Fucking "Griswold Was Wrongly Decided" Bork. Bork's presence on Romney's judicial advisory committee explains this exchange, which - even though it worked out well for Romney - revealed exactly where he stands on the core issue of whether or not the 14th Amendment provides Americans with an inherent privacy right:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?

ROMNEY: George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising. States have a right to ban contraception? I can’t imagine a state banning contraception. I can’t imagine the circumstances where a state would want to do so, and if I were a governor of a state or...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, the Supreme Court has ruled --

ROMNEY: ... or a -- or a legislature of a state -- I would totally and completely oppose any effort to ban contraception. So you’re asking -- given the fact that there’s no state that wants to do so, and I don’t know of any candidate that wants to do so, you’re asking could it constitutionally be done? We can ask our constitutionalist here.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m sure Congressman Paul...

(CROSSTALK)

ROMNEY: OK, come on -- come on back...

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... asking you, do you believe that states have that right or not?

ROMNEY: George, I -- I don’t know whether a state has a right to ban contraception. No state wants to. I mean, the idea of you putting forward things that states might want to do that no -- no state wants to do and asking me whether they could do it or not is kind of a silly thing, I think.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hold on a second. Governor, you went to Harvard Law School. You know very well this is based on...

ROMNEY: Has the Supreme Court -- has the Supreme Court decided that states do not have the right to provide contraception? I...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes, they have. In 1965, Griswold v. Connecticut.

ROMNEY: The -- I believe in the -- that the law of the land is as spoken by the Supreme Court, and that if we disagree with the Supreme Court -- and occasionally I do -- then we have a process under the Constitution to change that decision. And it’s -- it’s known as the amendment process.

And -- and where we have -- for instance, right now we’re having issues that relate to same-sex marriage. My view is, we should have a federal amendment of the Constitution defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. But I know of -- of no reason to talk about contraception in this regard.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you’ve got the Supreme Court decision finding a right to privacy in the Constitution.

ROMNEY: I don’t believe they decided that correctly. In my view, Roe v. Wade was improperly decided. It was based upon that same principle. And in my view, if we had justices like Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia, and more justices like that, they might well decide to return this issue to states as opposed to saying it’s in the federal Constitution.

And by the way, if the people say it should be in the federal Constitution, then instead of having unelected judges stuff it in there when it’s not there, we should allow the people to express their own views through amendment and add it to the Constitution. But this idea that justice...

STEPHANOPOULOS: But should that be done in this case?

ROMNEY: Pardon?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Should that be done in this case?

ROMNEY: Should this be done in the case -- this case to allow states to ban contraception? No. States don’t want to ban contraception. So why would we try and put it in the Constitution?

With regards to gay marriage, I’ve told you, that’s when I would amend the Constitution. Contraception, it’s working just fine, just leave it alone.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I understand that. But you’ve given two answers to the question. Do you believe that the Supreme Court should overturn it or not?...

ROMNEY: Do I believe the Supreme Court should overturn Roe v. Wade? Yes, I do.

George Stephanopoulos handled this exchange very poorly, but in the end Romney ended up admitting that he would, in fact, appoint more judges and justices to the Federal Bench and to the U.S. Supreme Court who would overturn Roe.

The problem, however, is that the standard conservative approach to attacking Roe is to undermine it by denying the validity of its antecedent, Griswold. And here the question of contraception roars back to the fore, as Griswold asserts that married couples have a constitutional right to use birth control (which was later extended to unmarried couples in Eisenstadt v. Baird [1972]).

Which makes Romney's assertion that "no State wants to ban birth control" especially pivotal. To be honest, Romney is not only wrong, but is being deliberately duplicitous on this issue. Why do I say that he's being duplicitous? Because Mitt Romney endorsed Mississippi's failed Personhood Amendment, which - had it been enacted - would have banned hormonal birth control and IUD's.

So yes, it's probably (technically) true that no State currently wants to ban birth control. It is not, however, by any means true that no political party or faction in America wants to ban birth control: Indeed, a growing segment of the Religious Right wants to do exactly that, and both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have openly catered to this faction.

So what can we expect to see if Mitt Romney is elected? We can expect to see more conservative judges elected who want to overturn Roe - and, with Robert Bork handing Mitt Romney names for potential judicial candidates to be submitted to the Senate as candidates for seats on the Federal Bench and the U.S. Supreme Court, we can expect that these same judges won't just stop at Roe, but will roll the law all the way back past Griswold.

For Griswold doesn't just serve as the foundation for Roe; it also serves as the foundation for Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck down laws against sodomy. Criminalizing both gay sex and adultery in order to return us to the Bad Old Days in which State governments functioned as America's moral policemen, dictating not only who could fuck whom, but even what sex positions married couples could employ (and whether married couples were allowed to take measures to limit family size) is very definitely something the Religious Right wants, and in this day and age its the right wing of the GOP that sets the policies to be adhered to by the entire party. They may not be a majority, but they are fast becoming the tail that wags the dog.

Americans don't need "small government" of this kind; they don't need a government that paradoxically decides they can screw random strangers in the marketplace, but not screw willing partners in bed (save in Fundamentalist Christian State-approved ways); they don't need economic freedom at the cost of medieval morality enforced at gunpoint. Americans deserve the right to love whom the will, to manifest that love in whatever way they can (within the limits of their partners' consent), and to choose to have small families - or even no children at all - if they wish. Religious fanatics have no right to tell Americans that their only choices in life are to eschew sex or procreate. If they want to reserve sex for pure procreation, they can adhere to that standard within their own lives; they have no god-damned right to impose that choice on anybody else, whatever their "Good Book" says on the subject.

Mitt Romney would be no better than Rick Santorum when it comes to stopping this sort of thing from happening. The man who - out of political cowardice and the reflexive desire to win re-election (not to mention to maintain the support of his own party for any other policies he may want to enact) - refuses to stand up to the Religious Right but instead simply surrenders to them everything their little hearts desire is no better than a Fundamentalist tool. If America is to remain free, such a tool cannot be allowed to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

3. Mitt Romney Will Make the Tax System More Regressive

The reason America's economy is moving so sluggishly is because its great engine - consumer demand, centered on the middle and working classes - is not producing sufficient wealth to embolden these consumers to spend as they should. It's not because companies don't have the funds to invest in new capital and plant, to expand, and to hire more workers; indeed, companies are awash with cash. Rather, it's because absent such consumer spending, there's no need to hire more workers; current staffing levels are more than adequate to meet current demand, making hiring superfluous and thus a total waste.

Yet Romney - like all the rest of the GOP - hews to the faulty "Field of Dreams" economic model that imagines that businesses will just create jobs, if only we give them enough cash and take away their fears of regulation. Such theories are utter bunk - why should an employer hire anyone if there's no work (demand) for that person to perform (meet)? Are we supposed to believe that if employers hire workers, the orders will just magically arrive at their doorstep unbidden?

Apparently so, because no other model explains why Republicans continue to insist that demand has nothing to do with economic growth.

No, real economists - as opposed to the various Austrian crackpots who people conservative think-tanks - understand that businesses respond to demand. Thus, they understand that taking money away from consumers - those who buy the goods business sells - will only slow growth further and keep us in the doldrums. For that reason, they generally oppose the one thing every Republican is now beginning to eagerly call for: Increased taxes on working families so as to finance further tax cuts for the rich.

Hence, the problem with Mitt Romney's tax plan: Embracing the faulty theory that what's wrong with America is that the rich pay too much in taxes, it would dramatically cut taxes for those earning over $1 million a year (by over 15%), while giving a modest 2% cut to those earning between $50-$75 thousand, and then hiking taxes on those earning less than $20 thousand a year by over 60%. Oh, and it would do all this while increasing the annual budget deficit by $600 billion, because increasing the budget deficit is OK - if you're a Republican.

Republicans love to say that the poor and the working classes "don't pay their fair share' - that they "don't have skin in the game." That is pure bullshit. As I have asserted before (and proven with statistics), overall taxes at all levels - Federal, State, and local combined - correlate very closely with income, such that each demographic group in America supports its total governmental infrastructure with a contribution that is surprisingly proportional to that group's overall income. The rich pay more because the rich have more; the poor don't pay as much because the poor don't have as much. Moreover, with America's largest social program - Social Security - supported by a payroll tax that most strongly impacts those who have the greatest stake in that social program (workers whose wages would otherwise be garnished by the courts to support their indigent elderly and disabled relatives, as required by State law everywhere), and because the largest share of what's left is defense, it's hard to argue that somehow the cost of bombing the every-living shit out of Iran ought to be borne most heavily by the very people whose sons and daughters are the most likely among us to die in said conflicts.

But Republicans nonetheless make that argument. The poor "don't have skin in the game" - and so we should flay them alive while bleeding their children dry in useless Middle Eastern adventures.

To hell with that. The current tax code is already biased in favor of the rich; as I have argued again and again, the way back to prosperity is to return the nation to Clinton-era rates and the spend money on infrastructure and education in order to get the working and middle classes working - and spending - again. The rich have no cause to cry under such circumstances, as they will profit handsomely enough once the economy gets back into gear again.

4. Mitt Romney Is Part of What's Wrong With America

Understanding what Mitt Romney did at Bain Capital is crucial to understanding why Mitt Romney should not be President of the United States.

Bain Capital is a private equity firm. Private equity firms make money by purchasing distressed firms through leveraged buyouts, patching up their financials to make them look healthier, and then selling them back to the market at a profit.

It's kind of like flipping houses, except with a number of twists. First, flipping houses doesn't usually cost other people their homes - or jobs. Second, as with so many other things on Wall Street, appearances matter more than reality, so Bain doesn't really "turn firms around"; rather, it shoots them full of steroids and amphetamine, makes them look healthier, and then finds some fool who will buy them under the mistaken impression that they're healthier thanks to Bain's attention. Sadly, more often than not, that's not the case, and the drug-revived "turnaround" flames out and dies a nasty death a few years later.

But that's how Wall Street makes its money: Not by selling products that are sound, but by bamboozling buyers into thinking that what they're selling is sound. It's a culture of caveat emptor in which facts are withheld from buyers to the maximum extent the law allows so that the shill buyer never knows he's been had in the Street's endless game of musical chairs - until it's too late.

Thus, the tools and methods of Bain and its ilk: It swoops in, buying the target company with its own money (yes, Virginia, on Wall Street that's actually possible). When the deal is done, Bain owns the victim buyout target and the target is loaded with debt (that's the first effect of this tactic, and the first reason we should doubt whether this approach really helps anybody: Corporate raiders like Bain take distressed firms and load them up with debt; this, some idiots Wall Street analysts tell us, is actually a good thing - supposedly because, like Samuel Johnson's observation vis-á-vis hanging, having more debt than it can handle "focuses" the corporation on cost cutting; obviously, this means that if you're in financial trouble, the first thing you should do is borrow lots of money).

Next, Bain fills the target firm with its own managers - and then makes the target firm pay Bain hefty management fees for the privilege of having Bain managers in charge. Yes, apparently Bain's managers are just that good...

And if you don't believe that, well, go back to Samuel Johnson and focus.

Once Bain's people are in charge, they mercilessly slash expenses. In practice, that means closing plants and offices, firing workers, cutting pay, reducing benefits, outsourcing products and services overseas (and, my, won't Romney's plan for reducing or eliminating the taxes American firms pay on overseas operations really act as an incentive not to offshore operations, right?), reducing or killing pensions (because contracts only matter when they're between companies and not with workers; nobody needs to keep their word to workers, whatever kind of paper that word is written on, right?). All of this is thought of by Wall Street as "enhancing productivity", and (arguably) it does indeed do that (at the cost of worker loyalty, but who needs that?).

But right along with all of that, Bain managers often cut market development, product quality, and R&D. Economists call this "eating your seed corn", and the ones who haven't sold out to the right universally see it as a bad thing, in so far as it mortgages the future of the firm for the sake of present returns. The thing is, it does increase present returns, which makes the firm more profitable overnight. Everyone gets all excited about the higher profits, and Wall Street morons gurus declare such "turnarounds" to be "miracles".

After a year or two of increased profits, with share price rising, Bain sells the company. Since the debt incurred in buying the company remains with the company, the profits Bain realizes in doing this are huge. From there, Bain moves on to its next victim target.

In the meantime, the target is now saddled with debt. Worse, it is depreciating its "goodwill" by selling inferior product, failing to take sufficient measures to secure future business (market development) or to keep its products competitive (R&D). Half the firms Bain treated this way while Romney was in charge ultimately slumped back into bankruptcy and died. The other half only survived by the skin of their teeth.

Any resemblance between this process and the kind of bullshit that led Wall Street to bundle bad mortgage paper into commoditized vehicles and sell it to whatever fool would buy such things is, let me assure you, entirely coincidental.

The common theme in all of this is the triumph of short-term profit over long-term business sense, combined with the cynical practice of dressing up toxic assets as "great deals" and then selling them to unsuspecting suckers. Somehow this is supposed to "create value" - although, in the holistic business sense - I'll be damned if I can see how such tactics do anything of the sort.

Now, ask yourself: In the post-2008 world, what kind of world should we be driving for when it comes to Wall Street and investment? Should we be trying to encourage Wall Street to become a genuine vehicle for making business ventures possible, as a way to enable entrepreneurship? Or should we embrace the kind of short-term, current-quarter thinking that makes American businesses stupid, and leaven that with a lovely dose of encouraging investors to screw each other over by dressing losers up as winners in the name of making a quick dishonest buck? John Maynard Keynes compared stock markets to casinos; should we embrace that model, and let the house "shear" the suckers, or should we try to get the Street to do something more positive?

I submit that a President who made his fortune by running a firm that led the market in the pursuit of short-term thinking and the exploitation of gullible investors cannot be expected to do anything but embrace rules that will reinforce the systems he used to build his fortune. Mitt Romney clearly sees nothing wrong with the "current-quarter" thinking that dominates Wall Street - because his firms' raiding activities both relied upon such thinking and promoted it, even in firms they never bought (in the sense that, in conjunction with other such firms, it helped created an atmosphere in which everyone expects profit realization here and now, to the exclusion of long-term planning); he clearly sees nothing wrong with the Street's unashamed culture of caveat emptor, in so far as Bain Capital relied on said culture to dump the firms it had crippled (like Dade International, a medical supply firm whose R&D budget was slashed almost in half; Dade made tremendous profits and fetched a great price when resold by Bain - but the lack of R&D killed the company's long-term profit potential as its competitors outpaced it and its products fell behind market needs). How can a man who sees nothing wrong with such practices be expected to prevent the next mortgage bubble, given that it was precisely these tendencies (focus on immediate profit and a failure to inform prospective buyers of future risk) that paved the way for the collapsed of the supposedly AAA-rated commoditized mortgage market?

No, a vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for a continuation or even a deepening of the problems on Wall Street that created the 2008 real estate bubble. For you can blame government - Fannie, Freddie, whoever - all you want for the issuance of too many bad loans if you want; yet those loans would never have been handed off from one bank to the next by Wall Street if it hadn't been for the whole mortgage commodization scam. Without the transmission of bad loans to good banks, the damage would have been limited to the banks that originated said bad paper, and the ability of the institutions that did so to do more would have been strictly limited, It is the fact that Wall Street encourages sellers to scam buyers if they can that allowed - indeed, encouraged - the problem to swell to titantic proportions, to where it very nearly reached 1930's proportions.

You can't expect a man like Mitt Romney to fix Wall Street, because men like Mitt Romney refuse to believe that Wall Street is broken in the first place.

ya ya thats all fine and true but its more likely to come down to:

mitt romney says he likes to fire people and....he has fired many thousands of people in his day.

[Mike the Progressive]

No, I think the demolition of Mitt Romney will follow a different axis:

1. Mitt Romney Wants Another War in the Gulf

Mitt Romney has pretty much hired the entire Bush II foreign policy team. Worse, he's used the very same unfortunate phrase the neo-cons used prior to Iraq (about making the 21st Century "an American Century"), with all its imperial overtones. And, to slather the icing all over the cake, he's beating the war drum vis-á-vis Iran in a way that is strongly evocative of what Bush II did vis-á-vis Iraq.

Obama can exploit this. The majority of Americans are glad that we're done in Iraq, and can't wait for us to finish in Afghanistan. It will take some subtlety, but Democrats have an opportunity to make Mitt Romney look like a man who wants to repeat the Iraq debacle on a larger scale (Iran has over 2½ times the population and 4 times the land area of Iraq). How can Romney pretend that a war with Iran won't cost thousands more lives and trillions more dollars, while tying us down for another decade or more in a place where we really don't belong? How can Romney pretend that Russia won't be the biggest beneficiary of such a war, while America sinks even deeper into debt and its military gets worn down to the point of uselessness? The people who engineered the invasion of Iraq - and who now want to double down on that folly by invading Iran - are all obviously idiots who are incapable of learning from their past mistakes; so what does it say of Romney that we wants to put such idiots back in positions of power instead of booting them out to pasture, where they belong? What kind of fool does that make Romney, that he would listen to such fools in turn.

The Iraq War happened because Bush II lacked the wisdom to understand that effective diplomacy is always better than war, however artfully waged such a war might be. Containing Saddam Hussein would have achieved everything the invasion of Iraq achieved (seriously, is there anyone who honestly believes that, had Saddam still been in power this spring, we would not have been a victim of the same Jasmine Revolution that swept Hosni Mubarak from power?!?). Diplomacy could have kept Saddam in check, just as it kept him in check for the decade preceding the Iraq War. We don't need to wage wars to "prove" America's strength; indeed, if anything, every time we fight a war, it's a failure of diplomacy, not a triumph of power.

Barack Obama is handling Iran in exactly the right way: A war between the U.S. and Iran would plunge the world into another recession (or worse); it would cost America lives we shouldn't spend and funds we can't afford; it would divert our attention from other regions of the world that badly need that attention; it would drive a further wedge between the U.S. and the rest of the world, and in the end it wouldn't advance American interests one jot.

America can't afford to spend the next ten years fighting another Middle Eastern war, and that's what Romney will have us do. Ergo, America can't afford to elect Mitt Romney.

2. Mitt Romney Can't Say "No" to the Religious Right

Mitt Romney insists that he's become more conservative over time; others simply see him as a moderate who's posturing as a conservative to win the GOP nomination. The truth is, it doesn't matter what Mitt Romney is, because he doesn't have the guts to split with the far right on any issue that might jeopardize his nomination - or, if elected, his re-election. He's a dishrag who can't refuse to give the Neaderthal wing of the GOP whatever in the Hell it pleases.

Mitt Romney has picked Robert Bork to be on his judicial advisory committee. That's right, Robert Fucking "Griswold Was Wrongly Decided" Bork. Bork's presence on Romney's judicial advisory committee explains this exchange, which - even though it worked out well for Romney - revealed exactly where he stands on the core issue of whether or not the 14th Amendment provides Americans with an inherent privacy right:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?

ROMNEY: George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising. States have a right to ban contraception? I can’t imagine a state banning contraception. I can’t imagine the circumstances where a state would want to do so, and if I were a governor of a state or...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, the Supreme Court has ruled --

ROMNEY: ... or a -- or a legislature of a state -- I would totally and completely oppose any effort to ban contraception. So you’re asking -- given the fact that there’s no state that wants to do so, and I don’t know of any candidate that wants to do so, you’re asking could it constitutionally be done? We can ask our constitutionalist here.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m sure Congressman Paul...

(CROSSTALK)

ROMNEY: OK, come on -- come on back...

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... asking you, do you believe that states have that right or not?

ROMNEY: George, I -- I don’t know whether a state has a right to ban contraception. No state wants to. I mean, the idea of you putting forward things that states might want to do that no -- no state wants to do and asking me whether they could do it or not is kind of a silly thing, I think.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hold on a second. Governor, you went to Harvard Law School. You know very well this is based on...

ROMNEY: Has the Supreme Court -- has the Supreme Court decided that states do not have the right to provide contraception? I...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes, they have. In 1965, Griswold v. Connecticut.

ROMNEY: The -- I believe in the -- that the law of the land is as spoken by the Supreme Court, and that if we disagree with the Supreme Court -- and occasionally I do -- then we have a process under the Constitution to change that decision. And it’s -- it’s known as the amendment process.

And -- and where we have -- for instance, right now we’re having issues that relate to same-sex marriage. My view is, we should have a federal amendment of the Constitution defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. But I know of -- of no reason to talk about contraception in this regard.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you’ve got the Supreme Court decision finding a right to privacy in the Constitution.

ROMNEY: I don’t believe they decided that correctly. In my view, Roe v. Wade was improperly decided. It was based upon that same principle. And in my view, if we had justices like Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia, and more justices like that, they might well decide to return this issue to states as opposed to saying it’s in the federal Constitution.

And by the way, if the people say it should be in the federal Constitution, then instead of having unelected judges stuff it in there when it’s not there, we should allow the people to express their own views through amendment and add it to the Constitution. But this idea that justice...

STEPHANOPOULOS: But should that be done in this case?

ROMNEY: Pardon?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Should that be done in this case?

ROMNEY: Should this be done in the case -- this case to allow states to ban contraception? No. States don’t want to ban contraception. So why would we try and put it in the Constitution?

With regards to gay marriage, I’ve told you, that’s when I would amend the Constitution. Contraception, it’s working just fine, just leave it alone.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I understand that. But you’ve given two answers to the question. Do you believe that the Supreme Court should overturn it or not?...

ROMNEY: Do I believe the Supreme Court should overturn Roe v. Wade? Yes, I do.

George Stephanopoulos handled this exchange very poorly, but in the end Romney ended up admitting that he would, in fact, appoint more judges and justices to the Federal Bench and to the U.S. Supreme Court who would overturn Roe.

The problem, however, is that the standard conservative approach to attacking Roe is to undermine it by denying the validity of its antecedent, Griswold. And here the question of contraception roars back to the fore, as Griswold asserts that married couples have a constitutional right to use birth control (which was later extended to unmarried couples in Eisenstadt v. Baird [1972]).

Which makes Romney's assertion that "no State wants to ban birth control" especially pivotal. To be honest, Romney is not only wrong, but is being deliberately duplicitous on this issue. Why do I say that he's being duplicitous? Because Mitt Romney endorsed Mississippi's failed Personhood Amendment, which - had it been enacted - would have banned hormonal birth control and IUD's.

So yes, it's probably (technically) true that no State currently wants to ban birth control. It is not, however, by any means true that no political party or faction in America wants to ban birth control: Indeed, a growing segment of the Religious Right wants to do exactly that, and both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have openly catered to this faction.

So what can we expect to see if Mitt Romney is elected? We can expect to see more conservative judges elected who want to overturn Roe - and, with Robert Bork handing Mitt Romney names for potential judicial candidates to be submitted to the Senate as candidates for seats on the Federal Bench and the U.S. Supreme Court, we can expect that these same judges won't just stop at Roe, but will roll the law all the way back past Griswold.

For Griswold doesn't just serve as the foundation for Roe; it also serves as the foundation for Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck down laws against sodomy. Criminalizing both gay sex and adultery in order to return us to the Bad Old Days in which State governments functioned as America's moral policemen, dictating not only who could fuck whom, but even what sex positions married couples could employ (and whether married couples were allowed to take measures to limit family size) is very definitely something the Religious Right wants, and in this day and age its the right wing of the GOP that sets the policies to be adhered to by the entire party. They may not be a majority, but they are fast becoming the tail that wags the dog.

Americans don't need "small government" of this kind; they don't need a government that paradoxically decides they can screw random strangers in the marketplace, but not screw willing partners in bed (save in Fundamentalist Christian State-approved ways); they don't need economic freedom at the cost of medieval morality enforced at gunpoint. Americans deserve the right to love whom the will, to manifest that love in whatever way they can (within the limits of their partners' consent), and to choose to have small families - or even no children at all - if they wish. Religious fanatics have no right to tell Americans that their only choices in life are to eschew sex or procreate. If they want to reserve sex for pure procreation, they can adhere to that standard within their own lives; they have no god-damned right to impose that choice on anybody else, whatever their "Good Book" says on the subject.

Mitt Romney would be no better than Rick Santorum when it comes to stopping this sort of thing from happening. The man who - out of political cowardice and the reflexive desire to win re-election (not to mention to maintain the support of his own party for any other policies he may want to enact) - refuses to stand up to the Religious Right but instead simply surrenders to them everything their little hearts desire is no better than a Fundamentalist tool. If America is to remain free, such a tool cannot be allowed to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

3. Mitt Romney Will Make the Tax System More Regressive

The reason America's economy is moving so sluggishly is because its great engine - consumer demand, centered on the middle and working classes - is not producing sufficient wealth to embolden these consumers to spend as they should. It's not because companies don't have the funds to invest in new capital and plant, to expand, and to hire more workers; indeed, companies are awash with cash. Rather, it's because absent such consumer spending, there's no need to hire more workers; current staffing levels are more than adequate to meet current demand, making hiring superfluous and thus a total waste.

Yet Romney - like all the rest of the GOP - hews to the faulty "Field of Dreams" economic model that imagines that businesses will just create jobs, if only we give them enough cash and take away their fears of regulation. Such theories are utter bunk - why should an employer hire anyone if there's no work (demand) for that person to perform (meet)? Are we supposed to believe that if employers hire workers, the orders will just magically arrive at their doorstep unbidden?

Apparently so, because no other model explains why Republicans continue to insist that demand has nothing to do with economic growth.

No, real economists - as opposed to the various Austrian crackpots who people conservative think-tanks - understand that businesses respond to demand. Thus, they understand that taking money away from consumers - those who buy the goods business sells - will only slow growth further and keep us in the doldrums. For that reason, they generally oppose the one thing every Republican is now beginning to eagerly call for: Increased taxes on working families so as to finance further tax cuts for the rich.

Hence, the problem with Mitt Romney's tax plan: Embracing the faulty theory that what's wrong with America is that the rich pay too much in taxes, it would dramatically cut taxes for those earning over $1 million a year (by over 15%), while giving a modest 2% cut to those earning between $50-$75 thousand, and then hiking taxes on those earning less than $20 thousand a year by over 60%. Oh, and it would do all this while increasing the annual budget deficit by $600 billion, because increasing the budget deficit is OK - if you're a Republican.

Republicans love to say that the poor and the working classes "don't pay their fair share' - that they "don't have skin in the game." That is pure bullshit. As I have asserted before (and proven with statistics), overall taxes at all levels - Federal, State, and local combined - correlate very closely with income, such that each demographic group in America supports its total governmental infrastructure with a contribution that is surprisingly proportional to that group's overall income. The rich pay more because the rich have more; the poor don't pay as much because the poor don't have as much. Moreover, with America's largest social program - Social Security - supported by a payroll tax that most strongly impacts those who have the greatest stake in that social program (workers whose wages would otherwise be garnished by the courts to support their indigent elderly and disabled relatives, as required by State law everywhere), and because the largest share of what's left is defense, it's hard to argue that somehow the cost of bombing the every-living shit out of Iran ought to be borne most heavily by the very people whose sons and daughters are the most likely among us to die in said conflicts.

But Republicans nonetheless make that argument. The poor "don't have skin in the game" - and so we should flay them alive while bleeding their children dry in useless Middle Eastern adventures.

To hell with that. The current tax code is already biased in favor of the rich; as I have argued again and again, the way back to prosperity is to return the nation to Clinton-era rates and the spend money on infrastructure and education in order to get the working and middle classes working - and spending - again. The rich have no cause to cry under such circumstances, as they will profit handsomely enough once the economy gets back into gear again.

4. Mitt Romney Is Part of What's Wrong With America

Understanding what Mitt Romney did at Bain Capital is crucial to understanding why Mitt Romney should not be President of the United States.

Bain Capital is a private equity firm. Private equity firms make money by purchasing distressed firms through leveraged buyouts, patching up their financials to make them look healthier, and then selling them back to the market at a profit.

It's kind of like flipping houses, except with a number of twists. First, flipping houses doesn't usually cost other people their homes - or jobs. Second, as with so many other things on Wall Street, appearances matter more than reality, so Bain doesn't really "turn firms around"; rather, it shoots them full of steroids and amphetamine, makes them look healthier, and then finds some fool who will buy them under the mistaken impression that they're healthier thanks to Bain's attention. Sadly, more often than not, that's not the case, and the drug-revived "turnaround" flames out and dies a nasty death a few years later.

But that's how Wall Street makes its money: Not by selling products that are sound, but by bamboozling buyers into thinking that what they're selling is sound. It's a culture of caveat emptor in which facts are withheld from buyers to the maximum extent the law allows so that the shill buyer never knows he's been had in the Street's endless game of musical chairs - until it's too late.

Thus, the tools and methods of Bain and its ilk: It swoops in, buying the target company with its own money (yes, Virginia, on Wall Street that's actually possible). When the deal is done, Bain owns the victim buyout target and the target is loaded with debt (that's the first effect of this tactic, and the first reason we should doubt whether this approach really helps anybody: Corporate raiders like Bain take distressed firms and load them up with debt; this, some idiots Wall Street analysts tell us, is actually a good thing - supposedly because, like Samuel Johnson's observation vis-á-vis hanging, having more debt than it can handle "focuses" the corporation on cost cutting; obviously, this means that if you're in financial trouble, the first thing you should do is borrow lots of money).

Next, Bain fills the target firm with its own managers - and then makes the target firm pay Bain hefty management fees for the privilege of having Bain managers in charge. Yes, apparently Bain's managers are just that good...

And if you don't believe that, well, go back to Samuel Johnson and focus.

Once Bain's people are in charge, they mercilessly slash expenses. In practice, that means closing plants and offices, firing workers, cutting pay, reducing benefits, outsourcing products and services overseas (and, my, won't Romney's plan for reducing or eliminating the taxes American firms pay on overseas operations really act as an incentive not to offshore operations, right?), reducing or killing pensions (because contracts only matter when they're between companies and not with workers; nobody needs to keep their word to workers, whatever kind of paper that word is written on, right?). All of this is thought of by Wall Street as "enhancing productivity", and (arguably) it does indeed do that (at the cost of worker loyalty, but who needs that?).

But right along with all of that, Bain managers often cut market development, product quality, and R&D. Economists call this "eating your seed corn", and the ones who haven't sold out to the right universally see it as a bad thing, in so far as it mortgages the future of the firm for the sake of present returns. The thing is, it does increase present returns, which makes the firm more profitable overnight. Everyone gets all excited about the higher profits, and Wall Street morons gurus declare such "turnarounds" to be "miracles".

After a year or two of increased profits, with share price rising, Bain sells the company. Since the debt incurred in buying the company remains with the company, the profits Bain realizes in doing this are huge. From there, Bain moves on to its next victim target.

In the meantime, the target is now saddled with debt. Worse, it is depreciating its "goodwill" by selling inferior product, failing to take sufficient measures to secure future business (market development) or to keep its products competitive (R&D). Half the firms Bain treated this way while Romney was in charge ultimately slumped back into bankruptcy and died. The other half only survived by the skin of their teeth.

Any resemblance between this process and the kind of bullshit that led Wall Street to bundle bad mortgage paper into commoditized vehicles and sell it to whatever fool would buy such things is, let me assure you, entirely coincidental.

The common theme in all of this is the triumph of short-term profit over long-term business sense, combined with the cynical practice of dressing up toxic assets as "great deals" and then selling them to unsuspecting suckers. Somehow this is supposed to "create value" - although, in the holistic business sense - I'll be damned if I can see how such tactics do anything of the sort.

Now, ask yourself: In the post-2008 world, what kind of world should we be driving for when it comes to Wall Street and investment? Should we be trying to encourage Wall Street to become a genuine vehicle for making business ventures possible, as a way to enable entrepreneurship? Or should we embrace the kind of short-term, current-quarter thinking that makes American businesses stupid, and leaven that with a lovely dose of encouraging investors to screw each other over by dressing losers up as winners in the name of making a quick dishonest buck? John Maynard Keynes compared stock markets to casinos; should we embrace that model, and let the house "shear" the suckers, or should we try to get the Street to do something more positive?

I submit that a President who made his fortune by running a firm that led the market in the pursuit of short-term thinking and the exploitation of gullible investors cannot be expected to do anything but embrace rules that will reinforce the systems he used to build his fortune. Mitt Romney clearly sees nothing wrong with the "current-quarter" thinking that dominates Wall Street - because his firms' raiding activities both relied upon such thinking and promoted it, even in firms they never bought (in the sense that, in conjunction with other such firms, it helped created an atmosphere in which everyone expects profit realization here and now, to the exclusion of long-term planning); he clearly sees nothing wrong with the Street's unashamed culture of caveat emptor, in so far as Bain Capital relied on said culture to dump the firms it had crippled (like Dade International, a medical supply firm whose R&D budget was slashed almost in half; Dade made tremendous profits and fetched a great price when resold by Bain - but the lack of R&D killed the company's long-term profit potential as its competitors outpaced it and its products fell behind market needs). How can a man who sees nothing wrong with such practices be expected to prevent the next mortgage bubble, given that it was precisely these tendencies (focus on immediate profit and a failure to inform prospective buyers of future risk) that paved the way for the collapsed of the supposedly AAA-rated commoditized mortgage market?

No, a vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for a continuation or even a deepening of the problems on Wall Street that created the 2008 real estate bubble. For you can blame government - Fannie, Freddie, whoever - all you want for the issuance of too many bad loans if you want; yet those loans would never have been handed off from one bank to the next by Wall Street if it hadn't been for the whole mortgage commodization scam. Without the transmission of bad loans to good banks, the damage would have been limited to the banks that originated said bad paper, and the ability of the institutions that did so to do more would have been strictly limited, It is the fact that Wall Street encourages sellers to scam buyers if they can that allowed - indeed, encouraged - the problem to swell to titantic proportions, to where it very nearly reached 1930's proportions.

You can't expect a man like Mitt Romney to fix Wall Street, because men like Mitt Romney refuse to believe that Wall Street is broken in the first place.

ya ya thats all fine and true but its more likely to come down to:

mitt romney says he likes to fire people and....he has fired many thousands of people in his day.

Exactly. I mean when one runs a company, you shouldn't fire anybody. That guy who kept missing deadlines and came in late, give that man a bonus! The other guy charged with sexual harassment, by George, why doesn't he fly with the corporate jet. The truth is any businessman, from Bill Gates to the Beloved Steve Jobs fired people. Thousands of people. And their companies, to be frank, are probably better off as a result.

And the end of the day, it's going to come down to this: Looking back, four years ago, are you better off? Do you feel the country is heading in the right direction? Are small businesses comfortable with hiring? Are consumers okay with spending? Did President Obama keep the promises that he made, from healthcare, which Obamacare established corporatism with, to foreign policy (expanding foreign intervention and neoconservative policies in Yemen, Libya, against Syria, Iran, etc.) and national security (National Defense Act, renewing features of the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay)?

It's a referendum on a candidate who ran as an agent for change and instead brought more of the same.

[Alien Space Bats]

It's a referendum on a candidate who ran as an agent for change and instead brought more of the same.

That theme only offers the challengers an opportunity if they can reasonably present themselves as able to deliver the change that the incumbent did not.

Can Republicans do this? No. They offer to not only do all the same things Obama did, but to do them all more forcefully and with fewer apologies, along with additional things that voters who wanted change would find even more unpalatable. That fact puts the ball back in the President's court, as he can keep his base by saying, in essence, "I never said that change was easy, and I never said that it would come overnight.")

[Ashmoria]

ya ya thats all fine and true but its more likely to come down to:

mitt romney says he likes to fire people and....he has fired many thousands of people in his day.

Exactly. I mean when one runs a company, you shouldn't fire anybody. That guy who kept missing deadlines and came in late, give that man a bonus! The other guy charged with sexual harassment, by George, why doesn't he fly with the corporate jet. The truth is any businessman, from Bill Gates to the Beloved Steve Jobs fired people. Thousands of people. And their companies, to be frank, are probably better off as a result.

And the end of the day, it's going to come down to this: Looking back, four years ago, are you better off? Do you feel the country is heading in the right direction? Are small businesses comfortable with hiring? Are consumers okay with spending? Did President Obama keep the promises that he made, from healthcare, which Obamacare established corporatism with, to foreign policy (expanding foreign intervention and neoconservative policies in Yemen, Libya, against Syria, Iran, etc.) and national security (National Defense Act, renewing features of the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay)?

It's a referendum on a candidate who ran as an agent for change and instead brought more of the same.

*shrug* im not saying its fair or just (but it is) im saying that people dont care much about theoretical wars if the candidate doesnt come right out and advocate them. they care that mr romney took over companies and fired people without a second thought.

real companies who have to lay off workers who have worked for them for many years HATE to lay those people off. they do it if they have to but only if they have to.

people who are unemployed, who were unemployed and now are working for less, people who are related to those who are unemployed, etc wont like a candidate who made his fortune firing people without a second thought.

[Mike the Progressive]

It's a referendum on a candidate who ran as an agent for change and instead brought more of the same.

That theme only offers the challengers an opportunity if they can reasonably present themselves as able to deliver the change that the incumbent did not.

Can Republicans do this? No. They offer to not only do all the same things Obama did, but to do them all more forcefully and with fewer apologies, along with additional things that voters who wanted change would find even more unpalatable. That fact puts the ball back in the President's court, as he can keep his base by saying, in essence, "I never said that change was easy, and I never said that it would come overnight.")

Please. The difference between Obama and the Republicans is the latter are honest of their views. Again, Obama ran as this "great" progressive to only do the same thing. At least with the Republicans, you know where they stand. Even polls show that the president's base is getting restless, angry and disenchanted. Do you think the same number of young adults will come out to vote? Do you think the same number of Latinos? Of blacks? And Asians? Whatever base Obama built was given victory because independent voters and those that rarely voted, did so out of the belief that he would change things. People don't care why things aren't changing, they only care why they haven't changed yet. Obama can keep whatever remains of his base, he's lost the independents and therefore the election.

[Farnhamia]

Exactly. I mean when one runs a company, you shouldn't fire anybody. That guy who kept missing deadlines and came in late, give that man a bonus! The other guy charged with sexual harassment, by George, why doesn't he fly with the corporate jet. The truth is any businessman, from Bill Gates to the Beloved Steve Jobs fired people. Thousands of people. And their companies, to be frank, are probably better off as a result.

And the end of the day, it's going to come down to this: Looking back, four years ago, are you better off? Do you feel the country is heading in the right direction? Are small businesses comfortable with hiring? Are consumers okay with spending? Did President Obama keep the promises that he made, from healthcare, which Obamacare established corporatism with, to foreign policy (expanding foreign intervention and neoconservative policies in Yemen, Libya, against Syria, Iran, etc.) and national security (National Defense Act, renewing features of the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay)?

It's a referendum on a candidate who ran as an agent for change and instead brought more of the same.

*shrug* im not saying its fair or just (but it is) im saying that people dont care much about theoretical wars if the candidate doesnt come right out and advocate them. they care that mr romney took over companies and fired people without a second thought.

real companies who have to lay off workers who have worked for them for many years HATE to lay those people off. they do it if they have to but only if they have to.

people who are unemployed, who were unemployed and now are working for less, people who are related to those who are unemployed, etc wont like a candidate who made his fortune firing people without a second thought.

The people Romney said he liked or would like to fire are his insurance company. That quote is totally out of context (Romney's campaign people did actually try to defend the out-of-context quote without putting it in context but hey ...). Of course, it is true that 22% of the companies Bain "reorganized" ended up in bankruptcy. Here's a column from Denver's own Mike Littwin that explains it.