Mitt’s Dislikeability

Everybody Hates Mitt

A new e-book from Glenn Thrush and the folks at Politico contains this interesting tidbit concerning Barack Obama’s feelings about Mitt Romney:

“One factor made the 2012 grind bearable and at times even fun for Obama: he began campaign preparations feeling neutral about Romney, but like the former governor’s GOP opponents in 2008 and 2012, he quickly developed a genuine disdain for the main. That scorn stoked Obama’s competitive fire, got his head in the game, which came as a relief to some Obama aides who had seen his interest flag when he didn’t feel motivated to crush the opposition. Obama, a person close to him told me, didn’t even feel this strongly about conservative, combative House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Hill Republican he disliked the most. At least Cantor stood for something, he’d say.

“When he talked about Romney, aides picked up a level of anger he never had for Clinton or McCain, even after Sarah Palin was picked as his running mate. ‘There was a baseline of respect for John McCain. The president always thought he was an honorable man and a war hero,’ said a longtime Obama adviser. ‘That doesn’t hold true for Romney. He was no goddamned war hero.'”

A brief digression: as John McCain taught America, you can be a war hero and also be a jerk; the latter doesn’t subtract from the former. But McCain is the one politician who is always defined by the most admirable thing he ever did, even though it happened four decades ago, while most politicians are defined by the worst thing they ever did. In any case, assuming Thrush’s reporting is accurate, it’s interesting to see the famously cool and detached Barack Obama actually displaying emotions.

It’s a reminder that politicians, even presidents, are human beings. If someone was going around the country every day telling anyone who would listen that you sucked at your job, and not only that, you also don’t really understand or believe in America, you’d have to be the Dalai Lama not to decide that that person is, down to his very core, an asshole.

Of course, Mitt Romney is a special case. As Kevin Drum says, “something about the presidency seems to have brought out the worst in him. His ambition is so naked, his beliefs so malleable, his pandering so relentless, and his scruples so obviously expendable, that everyone who spars with him comes away feeling like they need to take a shower.” The fact that Romney hasn’t given us much reason to like him means there’s nothing to counteract the negative reaction we have to the awful person he is as a politician. Different candidates are able to do this in different ways. With Barack Obama it was his inspiring personal story, with McCain it was the war record, with George W. Bush it was his easy-going, friendly manner. The result is that even when we see them engaging in some campaign hardball, we’re able to tell ourselves, “OK, I didn’t like that much, but I realize that he’s basically a good guy.”

Romney doesn’t have an inspiring story (feel your heart flutter at “Son of wealth and privilege grows up to obtain even more wealth and privilege”), and his manner is, shall we say, strained. There have been occasional attempts to use his wife Ann and sons, the interchangeable Tagg-Craig-Turf-Gorp or whatever their names are, to humanize Romney, but it never seems to get very far. So when he makes up things about his opponent or refuses to tell us how much money he has or what he does with it, there’s nothing on the other side of the character scale to counteract the impression voters are left with. The person he is as a candidate is all anyone can see. And that person is pretty repellent. So it’s no surprise that his favorability ratings are extremely low and probably going nowhere but down.

Mario Piperni on the Lies About Planned Parenthood

Republican’s Campaign of Lies Against Planned Parenthood

August 6, 2012 By mario piperni

This is what right-wing insanity sounds like…on a good day.

[Planned Parenthood] deals out nothing but deception, death, personal devastation, and moral degradation. Never will I agree to give that bloody, indecent, immoral organization one penny. I will not be satisfied until it is outlawed.

The above words were part of an email that North Carolina Republican State Rep Larry Pittman sent to Planned Parenthood in response to the following letter sent out by PP urging NC lawmakers to not defund the organization.

Planned Parenthood is an essential community provider in North Carolina. Each year, at nine health centers across the state, they provide over 18,000 tests for sexually transmitted infections, over 11,000 life-saving breast and cervical cancer screenings, and contraceptive services to more than 61,000 women.

Planned Parenthood makes the case that the organization’s work actually helps in cutting down on the number of abortions performed each year by providing contraceptive services. Wingnuts like Pittman aren’t listening. Despite the fact that abortion services only account for 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s revenue (all non-profit, btw), Pittman is still able to say:

My sources tell me that 75 percent of [Planned Parenthood’s] income comes through abortions.

Typical right-wing crap. When the facts are not to their liking, they have no qualms in making up a new batch to match their thinking on whatever it is they’re trying to smear, destroy or revert back to Victorian norms. Logic doesn’t work on these people (contraception results in fewer abortions – could anything be more obvious?) and facts have no meaning for them (they create their own), so what is one to do?

Do your best to vote these dishonest, intellectually challenged vermin the hell out of public office. Not always possible, but certainly well worth the effort.

___

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Andrew Sullivan on Mitt’s Problem with the Undecided

Romney’s Undecided Voter Problem

by Patrick Appel

Could cost him the election:

Approximately half of undecided voters have an unfavorable impression of Romney, while his favorability ratings are mired in the teens. That’s an average net-favorable rating of -33, which is all the more remarkable considering that about one-third of voters didn’t offer an opinion of Romney at all. Put differently, Romney is disliked by an astonishing 75 percent of undecided voters who have formulated an opinion of the Republican nominee.

Last week, Larry Bartels and Lynn Vavreck took a close look at Republicans still making up their minds:

Undecided Republicans are twice as likely as other Republicans to say they favor gay marriage (40 percent), twice as likely to express positive or neutral attitudes toward African-Americans (31 percent), and only half as likely to deny the existence of global warming (23 percent). Only 42 percent favor repealing Obamacare (compared with 78 percent of other Republicans). These are the sorts of Republicans most likely to have been alienated by Romney’s dogged appeals to “the base” during the Republican primaries. Whether he can moderate his image enough to win them back without exacerbating the common complaint that he “says what he thinks people want to hear” remains to be seen.

Elizabeth Kolbert sighs.

Humor: The Borowitz Report

Mars Rover Should Not Get So Much Attention, Say Higgs-Boson Scientists

Posted by Andy Borowitz

 

GENEVA (The Borowitz Report)—The landing of the Mars science rover Curiosity does not qualify as a significant scientific achievement and should not be getting so much of the public’s attention, says the team of scientists who discovered the Higgs boson last month.

“People see these beautiful pictures from outer space and they’re inclined to think that something amazing has been achieved,” a spokesperson for the Higgs-boson team said. “Let the Mars rover do something of genuine value, like, say, discover how the universe was created. Then I’ll be impressed.”

As for the NASA scientists behind the Mars rover, the Higgs-boson spokesman said, “I don’t think we should be too quick to use the word ‘scientist’ here. Honestly, anyone can grow a Mohawk and put on a headset and look cool and all, but that hardly makes you a scientist. Let’s see some of these dudes discover a particle or something along those lines. I mean, come on.”

From the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, response to the Higgs-boson team’s comments was swift and irate, as a NASA spokesman called the remarks “an unacceptable diss.”

“You know the difference between the Mars rover and the Higgs boson?” said a NASA spokesman, his face red with anger. “You can actually see the Mars rover.”

The NASA official went on to say that “I can understand why the Higgs people think they found something that’s real and all, but as far as I can tell their so-called ‘boson’ is about as real as a leprechaun or a Smurf.”

In Geneva, the Higgs team was quick to fire back a response: “At the Large Hadron Collider lab, we’re used to honest disagreements between scientists. But we’d like to see that douche come over here and say that to our face.”

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Photograph by Brian van der Brug/Getty Images.

Climate Change Is Here — and Worse Than We Thought

By James E. Hansen, Published: August 3

James E. Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988 , I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.

But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.

My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now.

These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.

Twenty-four years ago, I introduced the concept of “climate dice” to help distinguish the long-term trend of climate change from the natural variability of day-to-day weather. Some summers are hot, some cool. Some winters brutal, some mild. That’s natural variability.

But as the climate warms, natural variability is altered, too. In a normal climate without global warming, two sides of the die would represent cooler-than-normal weather, two sides would be normal weather, and two sides would be warmer-than-normal weather. Rolling the die again and again, or season after season, you would get an equal variation of weather over time.

But loading the die with a warming climate changes the odds. You end up with only one side cooler than normal, one side average, and four sides warmer than normal. Even with climate change, you will occasionally see cooler-than-normal summers or a typically cold winter. Don’t let that fool you.

Our new peer-reviewed study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, makes clear that while average global temperature has been steadily rising due to a warming climate (up about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century), the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide.

When we plotted the world’s changing temperatures on a bell curve, the extremes of unusually cool and, even more, the extremes of unusually hot are being altered so they are becoming both more common and more severe.

The change is so dramatic that one face of the die must now represent extreme weather to illustrate the greater frequency of extremely hot weather events.

Such events used to be exceedingly rare. Extremely hot temperatures covered about 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of the globe in the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. In the last three decades, while the average temperature has slowly risen, the extremes have soared and now cover about 10 percent of the globe.

This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.

There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.

The future is now. And it is hot.