Leadership and the Role of Government

One of the greatest tests of Leadership with a capital L is how somebody who bears the awesome responsibility of leading a nation deals with the most challenging events to befall that nation. What we've seen this week in President Obama's handling of the catastrophic event that was Hurricane Sandy is nothing less than a perfect object lesson in what that kind of Leadership means.

Clearly, there's more to leadership (I've made my point with the upper case L, so I'll revert now to lower case) than just saying the right things at the right times, though that is clearly important as well. What really defines that leadership though, is a combination of action, attitude, preparation, and having the wisdom to put mechanisms in place that can respond effectively and efficiently to this manner of event long before the event actually occurs. That wisdom is directly related to how one views the role of the federal government, and it's due to the fundamental difference in the way Democrats and Republicans tend to view that role that we've seen such a gulf between the way President Obama has handled Hurricane Sandy and the way George W. Bush handled Hurricane Katrina.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the way the GOP has veered sharply away from its traditional conservative values is the way it has developed utter and total disdain for government. That disdain has led Republican leaders consciously to make decisions that will make government LESS effective, so that they can say "see, government doesn't work, we need to hand everything over to the private sector." How else to explain George Bush's inexplicable decision to put FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in the hands of Michael Brown, aka "Brownie," a man who had zero experience in emergency management? Brown's last position before taking over FEMA was as "Judges and Stewards Commission" for the International Arabian Horses Association. Yes, you read that correctly. How would this experience prepare him for managing such a complex and vital service of the federal government? The answer, of course, is that it wouldn't, and it didn't, and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, as we all know, was a total and absolute failure.

In what must go down as one of the greatest displays of chutzpah of all time, Brown this week criticized the Obama administration for "responding too quickly" to Hurricane Sandy. In the GOP's upside-down view of the world, efficiency and preparation are clearly bad things.

And whom did President Obama appoint to the very same position? The gentleman's name is Craig Fugate. Prior to taking the reins at FEMA, Fugate was Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, a position that he held for eight years, and to which he was appointed by Jeb Bush and then re-confirmed by Charlie Crist. Florida, as we know, has regular emergencies due to its location in prime hurricane territory, and Fugate's reputation and record of accomplishment there were stellar.

What would happen, then, in a Romney administration? Romney is on record as saying that emergency management should be left to the states, and to the extent possible, to the private sector. While there is some truth to the former, in that states already do take the lead in emergency response, FEMA and the federal government are a vital component in any large-scale disaster, and when that component is anything short of top-notch, the consequences can be dire. In spite of how Romney has tried to do his shuffle-to-the-center dance, the budget direction that he and Paul Ryan are trying to push on the country would by necessity entail huge cuts in FEMA's budget. More to the point, his anti-government, privatize everything mentality, would no doubt result in a return to the pathetic federal emergency response we saw under Bush, and away from the prompt, efficient, calm leadership we have seen under President Obama.

Why I'm So Angry

Those of you who have been reading this blog or my facebook posts over the past few months have surely noticed my increasing tone of anger over the notion that anybody I care about or respect would vote for Mitt Romney, or for that matter for ANY Republican currently seeking national office. I'd like to take this opportunity to explain exactly where that anger is coming from, and why it is only increasing as the specter of a Romney Presidency becomes a more palpable possibility.

The rationale that I often hear from self-described moderate Republicans and supposedly sane conservatives who support Mitt Romney is that they believe that President Obama has failed on the economy, and that Mitt Romney will do a better job of getting it moving in the right direction. I'll get back to that in a moment. But let's first look at what that says about your priorities, and what you value. Because when you vote for a President, you don't get to select just one part of his policy agenda to support. You are de facto supporting everything that person stands for. So let's look at what Mitt Romney stands for across a multitude of issues - to the extent that we even can, given the rapidly and perpetually shifting tone of his rhetoric, and the frequently conflicting positions he has taken on everything from abortion to gay rights to the war in Afghanistan.

Let's start with issues of women's health and reproductive choice. Once a decidedly pro-choice candidate, back when he clearly felt he needed to be in order to win statewide office in Massachusetts, one of the most liberal states in the country, over time Romney has shifted to a staunchly pro-life position. While I have always been pro-choice, and always will be, I can at least understand why somebody would take a pro-life position, within reason. But the current direction the GOP has taken in this regard is so extreme as to be genuinely frightening, and decidedly fanatical. The official platform of the GOP in 2012 states explicitly that all abortion in this country should be illegal, even in cases of rape, incest, or where the health and indeed the life of the mother is at stake. To call this radical is to understate the case. Romney has tried to soft-pedal this, and say that he believes in the rape, incest, and life of the mother exceptions. But let's look at the reality. A majority of Republicans in Congress now explicitly speak out against those exceptions, including Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan. In one now-infamous speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Ryan decried the health-of-the-mother exception as being so broad you could drive a truck through it, thereby reasoning that it should not be allowed.

Think for a moment what this means. Imagine that you, or your daughter, or your sister, or any woman you love, has an ectopic pregnancy. Failure to terminate it in a timely fashion would put her health in serious jeopardy, and could likely result in her death. Given the chance, and a willing signatory in the White House, a Republican-controlled Congress could make that a crime. Imagine now that your 13 year old daughter were raped, resulting in pregnancy. Under current Republican thinking, the government would FORCE her to bear her rapist's child, against her will.

A lot of you are now no doubt saying that this will never happen, that Romney would never sign such a thing. What makes you think that? Certainly not any consistency on Romney's part, as the only thing he has shown consistently is his willingness to cave in to the demands of the most extreme parts of his Party - and those parts have gotten more and more extreme with each passing year. Consider also that Paul Ryan was a co-sponsor in Congress of the so-called "Personhood" bill, which would deem a fertilized egg as a person, thereby criminalizing not only abortion, but many forms of birth control, including the IUD. Consider also that just this last week, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Indiana, Richard Mourdoch, stated that in the case of a pregnancy that resulted from rape, that was god's will. He has since tried to clarify this, saying that he didn't think that the rape was god's will, only the pregnancy resulting therefrom. This is somehow supposed to make us feel better? And also please consider that earlier this year, Paul Ryan in a televised interview referred to rape as "another form of conception." One of the ways you judge people is by the company they keep. Mitt Romney's way of handling this sort of extremism in terms of women's reproductive rights is to endorse, support, and recruit them. He CHOSE Paul Ryan as his running mate, and Richard Mourdoch is the only candidate for U.S. Senate for whom he has actually made a commercial.

Let's now consider an issue that I take very seriously and very personally, which is marriage equality. This is an issue that many politicians have struggled with, and the movement toward acceptance of it has been too slow in coming. I personally wish that President Obama would have "evolved" more quickly than he did, but he DID, in fact, evolve, and though his position still allows for the possibility that the States can decide, he is definitely moving in the right direction. Mitt Romney's position, on the other hand, is completely radical. Not only does he not support marriage equality, but he has clearly stated that he does not even believe in civil partnerships. Further, he has endorsed the idea of a constitutional amendment banning all same-sex marriage.  

His antipathy for gay rights goes beyond his willingness to use the U.S. Constitution to formalize discrimination against a single class of people. As governor of Massachusetts, he refused to allow the Registry of Vital Records and Statistics to revise birth certificate forms for babies of same-sex couples. He further insisted on personally reviewing any applications from same-sex couples to cross out "mother" and replace it with "father or second parent," and required gay male parents to get a court order to obtain a birth certificate at all. His prejudice was so extreme as essentially to punish the children of gay parents by denying them the dignity of having their parentage recognized legally. This after declaring, in his campaign for the Senate against Ted Kennedy, that he would be more pro-gay rights than Kennedy himself. 

And what of foreign affairs issues? One of the key attacks Romney has been leveling at President Obama since his campaign for the Presidency began is that Obama has been "apologizing" for America, and that he went on an "apology tour" at the beginning of his Presidency. Every single fact-checking agency has dug into this issue thoroughly, and come back with the verdict that this is an outright lie. It's been consistently labeled a "pants on fire" claim. Yet Romney sticks by it, and refuses to recant. Another of his major attacks on Obama has been that Obama has "thrown Israel under the bus." Nothing could be further from the truth, from an absolutely factual, material sense. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has himself declared that the Obama Presidency has been the single most helpful and supportive one in history. The facts bear this up. The level of material support, intelligence sharing, and cooperation between the Obama administration and Israel is unprecedented. And yet Romney continues to tell this outrageous lie.

Perhaps even more damning, in his infamous "47 percent" speech at a fundraiser in Boca Raton, Romney discussed the situation in the Middle East, and concluded that since the Palestinians had no interest in peace, there was nothing he would be able to do about it as President, and said the best solution would be to kick the can down the road for some future administration. Every single President since the establishment of the State of Israel has been materially involved in working toward peace in the region. Romney would be the very first to have stated publicly that he is not even going to try. This would be disastrous for Israel and for the world. Those who will recall what happened in the early years of the George W. Bush Presidency will remember that, just before he took office, the treaty that Bill Clinton has negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians fell apart. Rather than showing leadership and working immediately to bring the two parties back to the table, he left the matter to fester, thus beginning one of the darkest and most intractable periods of violence and discord in the region in decades, and turning the clock back years on a potential solution. Romney seems headed for a similar course. This is not leadership, this is cowardice and ignorance.

It's not as if on other issues of international importance Romney is any stronger or clearer. From his bellicosity about Iran, which is terrifyingly reminiscent of that of George W. Bush toward Iraq, to his empty rhetoric on China (considering his record of opposing Obama's successful intervention with the importation of under priced tires, and his own investments in Chinese companies that employ what is essentially slave labor), to his basic lack of geographic knowledge (hint - Iran has its OWN coastline, and it is nowhere near Syria), Romney has shown a stunning lack of seriousness on foreign policy matters. After months of decrying the timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan, suddenly in the last Presidential debate he endorsed it. In fact, he basically endorsed virtually all of Obama's foreign policy ideas, just saying he would somehow do them better, and with more "leadership." When he said that he would not have waited to get Russia and China on board for tough sanctions against Iran, he betrayed his ignorance of how sanctions actually work. Those sanctions would be meaningless if Iran could get from Russia and China what it was being denied by the U.S. and its allies in the rest of the world. This utterly fails the "Commander In Chief" test.

Probably the single most important, landmark achievement and legacy of the Obama Presidency is the Affordable Care Act, commonly and often derisively referred to as "Obamacare." The GOP would have you believe that this is a massive socialist endeavor, a government takeover of health care that turns your personal health decisions over to the government. The lies about it have been as rampant as they are fanatical, from Sarah Palin's insane assertion that it created "death panels," to the idea that it would bankrupt the government. In fact, "Obamacare" takes what was originally a CONSERVATIVE plan, developed by decidedly Republican-leaning thinkers, and operates on the notion of personal responsibility. It creates a mechanism whereby those who CAN afford to buy health care are given more choices, where there are fewer obstacles, where rates are kept in check, and where coverage cannot be denied based on pre-existing conditions or the exhaustion of "lifetime caps." For those who cannot afford such coverage, there are mechanisms to help them do so, ranging from tax relief, to subsidies, to, in the case of the truly needy, access to free coverage through Medicaid. The concept is simple - if everybody is covered, then those of us who are don't have to pay for those who aren't. The "mandate" is simply a way of making sure that enough people are in the pool of the insured that the math works out. If you choose to opt out, there are tax penalties to pay, with very scant methods for enforcement. The percentage of Americans that would actually be affected by this is under 2%.

As to the lie that Obamacare will increase the deficit, every analysis shows that the truth is exactly the opposite, and that when fully implemented, Obamacare will actually DECREASE the deficit.

Romney's solution for those without insurance is to "go to the emergency room." Not only is emergency care the single LEAST cost-effective way to get medical care, it's the least effective, and in no way is a substitute for ongoing health care. You go to the emergency when you're HAVING a heart attack, not to maintain your health so you don't have one to begin with. 

Which brings us to the Supreme Court. In the next four years, it's likely that whoever is President will get to appoint at least one, and as many as four Supreme Court justices. That will shape the direction of the Court and the country for generations to come. There is already a slim conservative majority on the Court. Consider what an even more extreme Court would be capable of doing. Count on virtually every guarantee of individual liberty, including but by no means limited to a woman's right to govern her own body, being overturned. Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark case that said people have a right to private sexual expression in their own homes, whether that expression be heterosexual or homosexual? Consider that gone. Roe v. Wade? History. It's a sickening prospect.

Rather than going on and on and trying to cover every single issue at stake in this election, let's now turn to the putative reason that many of you are probably considering voting for Romney and Ryan in spite of their appalling stances on all of these other issues - the economy. You will say that Obama has presided over one of the worst economies in memory, and that his policies have failed to fix it. While the former is true, the latter is decidedly not.

The catastrophic collapse of the economy in 2008 was the most severe economic event since 1929. To think that it could be completely corrected in just four years is beyond wishful thinking - it's a nonsensical fantasy. The Great Depression took a decade and a half, and the largest war in history to overcome. Why should we think that the Great Recession of 2008 could be completely erased in just four years?  Every recession since 1929 pales in comparison to what happened to the economy in 2008. The fact of the matter is, it was Republican economic policies that CREATED the recession in the first place. I've covered this territory in prior blog posts, so I won't go into full detail here, but concisely put, the combination of unfunded wars, expansive tax cuts (the first time, by the way, that any nation IN HISTORY cut taxes in a time of war), a large, expensive, inefficient, and unfunded new entitlement, and reckless deregulation of the financial industry, are what created the perfect storm of stupidity that resulted in the crashing of the economy.

To address the notion that Obama's economic policies have failed, one first has to address the reality that those policies have never been fully allowed to be put into place! The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has blocked every single constructive thing that Obama has tried to do. Many of you will no doubt argue that for the first two years of his Presidency, Obama had a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress behind him. While this is true, that does not take into account the absolutely unprecedented use of Republicans in the Senate of the filibuster. Many of Obama's signature plans were stymied and never even brought to a vote - votes that he would have won if they were a matter of a simple majority, but which could never occur because he couldn't muster a single vote from a Republican on even allowing the vote to take place.

Even without Republican support, what Obama has managed to do in just four years is actually remarkable. Moody's, Bloomberg, the Congressional Budget Office, and many other independent, non-partisan analysts, have stated conclusively that Obama's stimulus package, while not large enough to achieve what a larger one could have, unquestionably saved millions of jobs, and prevented the economy from plunging from a recession into a true Depression that would have dwarfed the one of 1929.  On top of that, his rescue plan for General Motors and Chrysler not only saved those companies and by extension the entire American auto industry, but brought them to new levels of success and put them on track to greater and greater expansion. Just this past week, Chrysler announced that it was now looking to expand its operations into China, so that an American car company could be selling cars into the largest market in the world. Romney, of course, took that nugget of information and twisted it on the campaign trail into a colossal lie, suggesting that Chrysler's move was to SHIFT all of its operations to China, shutting down its U.S. facilities entirely, prompting Chrysler to issue a statement suggesting that Romney read the news more carefully in order to avoid "unnecessary fantasies."  It was their polite way of calling him a fucking liar.

When Obama took office, the U.S. economy was shedding approximately 800,000 jobs a month. It continued to do so for a number of months, before any of Obama's policies could be enacted. Since then, we have added over 5 million new jobs, with positive job creation for some 32 consecutive months. Somehow Romney and the GOP have cast this as "making things worse." I find this a very interesting definition of "worse."

And what of Romney's economic plans? He's fond of saying that Obama has no plan and no agenda for his second term, which anybody with access to the Internet or a newspaper can easily determine is simply not true. Obama his published an extensive plan which, remarkably, actually makes simple mathematical sense. Romney's plans, however, have been deliberately lacking in specifics. Every independent analyst has said categorically that his basic premises are mathematically impossible. It's hard even to know that, as he has stated one thing one day, and another thing the next. One day he says he wants to enact a five trillion dollar tax cut, plus an additional two trillion dollar increase in defense spending, and the next day he says he never said that, in spite of the fact that he's on record as having done so. The bottom line is that, in order to reduce the tax rate across the board by 20%, as he says he intends to do, there is no possible way to make up for the difference, even if he were to eliminate every single deduction taken by every single taxpayer. His answer to this problem is to say simply "of course it adds up," and suggest that once elected, he and Congress will "work it out." How can ANYBODY be so gullible and reality-denying as to believe such a load of baloney?

If you want to look at Romney's record of accomplishments on the economy, you need look no further than his record as Governor of Massachusetts. Under his watch, that state sank to 47th in the nation in job creation. Perhaps that is why he left office with an approval rating of 34%, so low that he decided not even to run for re-election, facing near certain defeat. His vaunted expertise in the private sector was never about job creation. It was about wealth creation, often at the EXPENSE of jobs. It was also not about the elimination of debt, but rather about the accumulation of debt, and then the shifting of that burden of debt onto others, so that he and his colleagues could walk away with colossal profits.

So what this all boils down to is that some of you have decided to support Mitt Romney and the GOP, based on the entirely untrue assumption that he will be better for the economy. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this is true, and quite a lot of evidence to suggest exactly the opposite. President Obama's financial course for the country has had enormous benefits already, and given four more years on the same course, there's every likelihood that those benefits would not only continue but increase.  What makes me so angry, then, is for anybody to claim to support Romney on this basis, knowing that all of his regressive, hypocritical, mean-spirited, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic policies will come along in the bargain. 

You are probably under the misconception that under Romney you will save money in taxes, and under Obama you will pay more. Here's the truth. Not opinion, but the facts. If you make over $250,000 per year, then yes - you will probably pay more in taxes under Obama, only on the amount you make in excess of $250,000. For example, if you make $300,000, you will pay an additional 4% on that last $50,000 - approximately $2.000.  You're willing to trade MY civil rights, the rights of those women in your lives to control their own bodies, and the health and well being of seniors, the disabled, children, the poor, all under the false premise that this lying, disingenuous corporate raider, in order to save $2,000. That feels like a slap in the face not only to me personally, but to everything that I hold dear about this country and about basic human morality and decency.  I can only hope that Governor Romney is defeated in spite of your misguided support of him.  

If, however, you make less than $250,000, you will not pay a cent more under Obama's plan, but will likely pay as much as $2,000 more under Romney's plan, as he erodes deductions that you count on. If that's the case, you have just shot yourself in the foot, under the mistaken belief that you would save money at the expense of my civil rights, the rights of women as described above, and so on. That feels like a slap in the face and just plain stupid to boot. Any way you look at it - if you're fortunate enough to be doing extremely well, if you're plugging along comfortably somewhere in the middle, or if you're struggling just to get by, there is simply no justification for voting for Mitt Romney, unless you actually believe the hateful, mean-spirited things he believes, in which case I have to question what sort of character you have to begin with.

It's More Than Just His Pants That Are On Fire

For those of you, however few and however stubbornly you hold to your demonstrably incorrect beliefs, here's what's really been happening to the U.S. economy. For eight years, Bill Clinton led one of the strongest economic expansions in U.S. history, with record budget surpluses to show for it. Then, beginning in 2000, George W. Bush, with the help of a rubber-stamp Republican majority in both houses of Congress for the first six years, reversed all of that and set the economy on fire.  

He did this by implementing massive tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the wealthy, launching two unfunded wars, essentially put on the credit card, one of which was based on sketchy intelligence and proved to be utterly unfounded and unnecessary, enacted one of the biggest new entitlements in the last half-century (Medicare Part D), not only unfunded but designed by intention to hamstring the government from getting the best prices, thereby leaving it to pay whatever the pharmaceutical industry demanded, and deregulated the financial industry, leaving it free to manipulate the market with highly risky mortgage derivatives, leading to the collapse of the housing bubble and resulting in the single largest loss of Americans' wealth since 1929.

When President Obama took office in 2009, the economy was in utter chaos and free-fall.  During the Presidential campaign in 2008, nobody yet knew the depth and severity of the economic collapse, which only became apparent after the election.  his is not contested opinion, this is fact.  The economy was shedding jobs by the hundreds of thousands every month, well into 2009, before any of Obama's policies could even begin to go into effect.  nce those policies did, the situation reversed. The job market stabilized, and turned around, slowly.  It has now produced a net gain since the beginning of the Obama Presidency. The 2009 stimulus, together with the auto industry rescue, have collectively saved and created at least 3 million jobs. Had the stimulus been as large as Obama and the Democrats wanted, that number would now be more like 4 million.  Had Congress passed the American Jobs Act, we could have added more than an additional 1 million jobs. The Republicans continue to blame Obama for the recession (nearly a depression) that he inherited, in spite of the FACT that it occurred on Bush's watch, and the FACT that he has lead us out of it.

But the Republicans in the House and Senate had other ideas. Rather than try to work with Obama and the Democrats to try to fix the economy and help the American people, they decided on day one to employ a strategy of obstruction, obstruction, obstruction. They held a meeting on inauguration day in which they vowed to defeat any of Obama's efforts and work to deny him a second term, as their primary objective. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has admitted as much publicly.  

Romney's plans for the economy (such as they are, with the scant and sketchy details he's made available) are to return to many of the same policies that created the mess in the first place. He moans about the deficit and the debt, but all independent analyses of his plan say that it will increase the deficit and the debt, and further transfer wealth upward.

So what we have had, in essence, is akin to an arsonist burning down a house, blaming the man who put out the fire, castigating him for taking too long to rebuild it, all the while withholding the wood, nails, and shingles he needs, and then saying they could rebuild it faster and better, but doing so by offering to douse it with gasoline. Somehow, people have been conned into thinking this could actually work. The reasons for this are the subject for another post, but suffice to say, those who believe this malarkey (thank you, Joe Biden, for reviving this marvelous word) either haven't bothered to review the facts, are so ideologically rigid that they can no longer see reason, or are biased in other ways that are in fact inexplicable. The Romney economic plan is a recipe for disaster. Wake up and smell the fire.

YES WE ARE!

In the wake of a disastrous Republican National Convention, which provided no significant "bounce" in the polls for them, produced no specific policy details whatsoever, demonstrated unequivocally the utter mendacity of Paul Ryan and the vacuousness of Mitt Romney, and the highlight of which was the surrealist fantasia of a doddering octogenarian actor (where have we seen THAT before??), the Romney campaign has become so desperate that they are now turning to a rhetorical device from 32 years ago, hoping it might have the same resonance today as it did then.  I can tell you right now that it won't.

That rhetorical device is the simple question "are you better off today than you were four years ago."  The simple and demonstrable answer to that question is "yes we are!"   That is the reason I can say with such certainty that this won't work.

It would take a very special kind of historical amnesia to come up with any other answer to the question.  At the time Obama took office, the economy was hemorrhaging an average of 800,000 jobs a month.  By the time any of his policies could even begin to take effect, the stock market had plunged to the 6,000 range, wiping out many people's retirement funds and 401Ks.  The housing bubble had burst, two wars were raging with no end in sight, the auto industry was on the verge of collapse, and the entire economy was on the brink of a total and catastrophic collapse that would have dwarfed the impact of the Great Depression.

In the intervening three years, we have now seen 29 consecutive months of job growth, fueled largely by the private sector.  If it had not been for massive governmental layoffs, primarily dictated by Republican-leaning "austerity" policies, the job growth would have been even more substantial.  The stock market is now in the 13,000 range.  GM and Chrysler are back with more vigor than ever - an accomplishment that goes beyond the million or so jobs saved, but reverberates through the entire supply chain.  A failed U.S. auto industry would have been devastating to the entire economy of the Midwest and the nation as a whole.

The Iraq war is over, and a plan is in place to phase out the war in Afghanistan.  The housing market has stabilized, and is even starting to climb back up in some places.  Interest rates remain at historic lows.

One of the powerful themes of Obama's 2008 campaign was "Yes we can."  So what I would like to see happen at the DNC over the next few days is for somebody to stand on that podium and shout "Yes We Are," and build that into a chant that will ring out through the hall and represent the truth of the situation -- that we really are.

A question for my Republican friends - why?

I have a question for any of my Republican friends or family out there.  Why would you (assuming you are planning to) vote for Mitt Romney and the Republican candidates for the House and Senate wherever you live?  I mean this in all sincerity.  Based on what policy positions do you find them preferable to President Obama and the Democrats?

Is it because of the slow recovery from the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression?  If so, let's talk honestly about a) what caused that meltdown and b) what has slowed down the recovery.  It's indisputable that the meltdown occurred under George W. Bush's watch, and largely if not entirely due to policies enacted or reinforced by him.  The measures put into place by President Obama, primarily the stimulus package and the bailout of the auto industry, also indisputably kept the economy from spiraling completely out of control and devolving into a potentially worse crisis even than the aforementioned Depression.  Even a number of Republicans have admitted as much. 

Is it because of the persisting unemployment problem?  Let's look at that as well.  In the last year of the Bush administration and the first 9 months of the Obama administration, before any of his policies could take effect, the economy was simply hemorrhaging jobs - some months as many as 800,000 jobs lost.  Since the Obama policies have been in effect, we have been gaining private sector jobs consistently, every month, for two and a half years.  The unemployment situation would be even better if not for the consistent loss in public sector jobs, through local and state-enforced budget cuts and austerity measures, mostly enacted by Republican-controlled governors and legislatures.  Without those job losses, we would now have unemployment at around 7%. 

Further, the Republicans have been harping for years now about the jobs situation, but have offered not a single constructive job plan of their own.  Rather, Obama has pressured them time and again to pass his jobs bill, which would put millions of people back to work - not through frivolous government spending, but through keeping teachers, firefighters, and police officers working, and through a number of desperately needed infrastructure projects.  These are not "liberal, socialist" ideas.  Please remember that one of the greatest public infrastructure projects in the history of the world was enacted by President Eisenhower - the interstate highway system, without which our modern economy would be unable to function.  The Republicans in Congress made it not only implicitly clear, but EXPLICITLY clear, that their primary goal for the four years following Obama's inauguration in 2009 was to make sure he was a one-term President.  It was not to fix the economy, it was not to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was not to help the millions of people being forced into bankruptcy and foreclosure.  It was to wrest political power from their perceived enemy, at the expense of the country and the American people.

Is it because of the President's foreign policies?  If you object to these based on their aggressive nature (drone attacks, indefinite detention, extra-judicial assassinations of suspected terrorists, etc), then you would certainly have objected both to President Bush's foreign policies and to those of any of the Republicans who sought the Presidency this time around, with the single exception of Ron Paul, who was so disgusted by what he has seen so far from the Romney camp and the GOP convention, that he now describes himself as an "undecided voter" and left the convention entirely.  Or perhaps you object to the fact that the President made the courageous decision to attack and kill Osama Bin Laden, the man responsible for 3,000 American deaths.  Or perhaps you object to his policies regarding Israel, even though Shimon Peres has recently said that Israel has had no better friend or advocate in the U.S. Presidency in history than Obama.  Mitt Romney likes to portray Obama as an "apologist" for America, but the facts simply don't line up behind this attack.

Is it because you oppose same-sex marriage?  If so, I need to know this, as I find opposition to this wholly insupportable with any sort of sane logic, and personally deeply offensive.

Is it because you believe the government should be able to force a woman to bear her rapist's child, or one whose gestation would threaten her very life?  This seems to me the very opposite of the supposed conservative value of keeping government out of people's lives.  

Or is it because you object to the Affordable Care Act?  Even though this legislation was modeled on the highly successful Massachusetts program put in place by Romney himself, he loves to blast this as governmental overreach and some sort of paean to socialism.  The fact is and always has been that this is a CONSERVATIVE idea, launched originally by the Heritage Foundation, on the principle that by putting in place a mandate, you keep the freeloaders (those who can afford insurance but choose not to have it, then use the emergency care system, ultimately resulting in increased costs for the insured) from wrecking the cost checks.  For those who truly can't afford insurance, other measures are in place to help them acquire it or to provide the truly poor with free coverage through Medicaid.  Republican talking points will call "Obamacare" socialized medicine, or a government takeover that strips you of your ability to make your own medical decisions.  The truth is just the opposite.  Obamacare relies primarily on private insurance, but puts into place protections for the insured that will keep costs down in the long run, prevent coverage from being denied because of pre-existing conditions, and eliminate lifetime caps that bankrupt people with devastating or chronic illnesses that require long-term, expensive care.  The number of people actually affected by the "penalties" associated with the mandate is extremely small, and there is scant enforcement mechanism.  The result, however, is the ability of the system to maintain itself, and that benefits everybody.

So which is it?  Because frankly, I don't see a single issue on which Romney and Ryan's policies are demonstrably better than Obama's, and in most cases they are disastrously, egregiously wrong.  In order to sell you on them, they've engaged in the most egregious lying and dissembling that has ever been wrought on the American people, at least in the modern era.  The best example of this is the current outrageous claim that Obama is "gutting" the work requirements from welfare.  In spite of the fact that every single fact-checking organization has decried this as an outright falsehood, the Romney camp has run FIVE separate ads (of their last 12) on this very issue, repeating this same lie.  This week a Romney spokesman asserted that their campaign would not be dictated to by "fact-checkers."  In other words - they would not be beholden to what the rest of us like to call "the truth."

So again, I ask you -- why? 

In defense of Lance Armstrong

The news today that Lance Armstrong will not continue to contest the doping charges filed against him by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency was certainly very disappointing and a bit perplexing. Lance has been the single most tested athlete in history, and has been cleared after every test - and yet the allegations persist.

If it's indeed true that Lance was using some sort of performance-enhancing drugs during his extraordinary run of Tour de France victories, it will definitely tarnish his reputation, and I will be quite disappointed in him - more for his dishonesty than for the doping itself.  

What this won't do is to invalidate completely my admiration for the man and what he has accomplished. After a start (pre-cancer) as an admittedly cocky and over-confident young man, he had not only his career but his very life threatened in the most serious and devastating way. On his initial diagnosis with testicular cancer that had metastasized to the lungs and brain, he was given approximately a 10% chance of surviving, let alone ever cycling competitively again.  

But survive he did, and came back not only a better cyclist, but a more thoughtful and dedicated man. In addition to the seven TDF wins, he founded the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which has raised, to date, over half a billion dollars for cancer research, and inspired millions of people to fight for their lives against seemingly impossible odds.  

I'm not going to justify his doping by saying that "everybody does it," but the fact of the matter is that in cycling, as in many sports, the preponderance of competitors are engaged in some manner of performance enhancement, and it becomes increasingly difficult to stay competitive without doing so. What I am going to do is to continue to give Lance the benefit of the doubt, until such time as it's proven there's no reason to, and I'm going to abide by my admiration for what the man has achieved.

When lying extends to branding

I've just read that the "theme" of the Republican Convention in Tampa next week will be "You DID build that." This cheap, dishonest swipe at the President's controversial "you didn't build that" statement elevates misrepresentation to a meta-level. They may as well just brand it the "Democrats are Commies" Convention. It's clear to anybody with more than an ounce of gray matter between the ears that the President never intended to suggest that business owners did not build their own businesses. His intent was plain and simple - to point out, correctly, that no business is built in a vacuum, wholly independent of the collective infrastructure that allows it to thrive. Without roads, bridges, telephone lines, the Internet, an electrical grid, and so on, there would be no business to build, no way to get goods, and no way to get customers, outside of perhaps a small farm in Amish country.

So make no mistake about it - the GOP is doing what it does best, which is to traffic in deliberate obfuscation and dishonesty. Next week is going to be interesting.