Romney Counting on Honey Boo Boo To Win

“If you can’t blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit,” was a quote used by actor W.C. Fields and Mitt Romney used that as his strategy for the first debate against President Barack Obama.  In August a Romney pollster said, “We're Not Going to Let Our Campaign Be Dictated by Fact-Checkers.” Romney gave fact checkers whiplash and finger cramps as he twisted and contorted away from positions he had held for months.

President Obama seemed unprepared and rightly so if he had expected that his opponent would stand on positions he had been campaigning on during his entire run for President, but a different Mitt Romney showed up. The Mitt Romney that denied his economic plan, tax plan and just about everything else he said he had believed previously was counting on public distraction and media laziness.



Mitt Romney knew there would be a huge viewing audience for the first Presidential debate and figure most of the viewers had not been paying close attention to the Presidential race up until that point. Romney has some reason to believe the public is too distracted to care if what he said was true given the Republican National Convention drew fewer viewers than an episode of the reality show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. As for the news media serving as a source of fact checking, that ended when the fight for ratings became more of a priority for broadcast news divisions than journalistic purity.

Romney decided to introduce himself to over 60 million of the American electorate as a completely different politician than he had been during his prior months of campaigning. The next day when the focus was off his staff and spokespeople started to correct some of the policy shifts feeling that the information would not filter out to the voters that would not tune back in until the next debate. Welcome to the big top of reality television politics where style may rule over substance. Come on Honey Boo Boo, Mitt is counting on you.

Don’t Make President Obama The Republican’s Garbage Man

The Presidential election is coming up in November. In October the jobless rate, the lowest in 44 months,  is back where it was when President Obama took the oath office. That means President Obama has cleaned up much of the prior damage done by Republicans, now they want to move back into the White House and tear things up again with the same behavior that destroyed everything the last time around. Don’t allow President Obama to be the Republican’s garbage man.

It is a tried and tested practice in business and politics for one group to destroy something and then get out of the way and hire someone else to clean it up while they point fingers from the sidelines. Once the turnaround artist has finished getting things back in order the old guard wants to take over again and claim credit for the good results that were created by the just disposed of fixit man.



What is taking place with Mitt Romney is not a new game, but event timing is not always in the control of those trying to replay this old scam. In 2008 the economy collapsed so quickly that it was not able to be pushed until Obama won the election and took office. It is a matter of record that the financial meltdown occurred under the Republican administration of President George W. Bush. Now it is also a matter of record that the unemployment rate is now back where it was when Bush left office under President Barack Obama.

Romney’s big claim is that things should be improving faster and that is a bold assertion from someone that wanted to allow the American automobile industry to go bankrupt. The Republicans knew that their brand was bankrupt and that is why we don’t see Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and the like at the top of the ticket. Romney was a functional selection and his primary opposition was near laughable. The one shot Republicans had was to embark on a four year campaign of obstruction, demonization and rooting for American economic failure to have a chance to win the Presidency in 2012.

It’s time for the shell game to end. One of the statements Romney made during his secretly recorded fundraiser speech was that the economy would improve when he became President without him having to do anything. Romney knows that President Obama has already set the United States economy on the right track and he just wants to be able to convince the voting public to put him in office so the looting of America can happen all over again.

This should be a new day when the person that did all of the heavy lifting to clean up years of damage to America is rewarded for his hard work instead of once again watching someone else accepting accolades for something he didn’t do. Unless we vote for substance we will allow President Obama to become the Republican’s garbage man.

Hostage Taking Politics Have To End

What we have seen is the exercise of hostage taking politics by the Republican minority since President Obama took office. The Tea Party and Republicans are perfectly willing to repeatedly kidnap any segment of the American economy and hold it with threats of destruction unless they get their way.

The latest hostage was the hard earned credit rating and global economic standing of the United States unless they got what they wanted. This type of politics is no way to run a country and hopefully voters will realize who was willing to take the United States into default to get their way and take away Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Education programs are seen as wasteful spending by this all or nothing group. Bridges falling, roads crumbling and transportation projects stalling may be in our future.

You see, small or no government spending may sound ideal until you need something you once took for granted and it is no longer there. One city got a fast lesson in how things work when they voted down a tax increase and were later informed that there were not enough funds to provide school bus service and it would cost $400 per child. That is how things work. Smooth public roads, the military and national parks all come from government spending.

Most people are too young to remember almost guaranteed poverty and suffering during old age before Social Security and Medicare came into being. Do we really want to go back to that old life? Why don’t you ask your parents or grandparents if that is how they want to live?

New Demand, Old Workforce, Not Enough Jobs Ever Again

There is an ugly truth about the job market that economists and politicians will not speak. The United States and the world will never need as many workers as it has in the past to supply more than we could ever buy or consume and with almost everyone in the modern workforce, this is a huge problem. The solution is a global lower standard of living.

Automation has enabled a far smaller workforce to produce huge quantities of goods and services that called for multiples more workers in the past. Everything from automatic teller machines, automatic car washes to personal computers remove job positions from the workforce. One example is a sales division of a company that 15 years ago had an administrative assistant for each sales team that would prepare proposals, presentation materials and take messages. Now sales people use software tools like Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word and connect their laptop to a projector to do a presentation. An automated voice response answering system takes messages and the need for the administrative assistant is gone.

Many offices now have an empty desk in their lobby where a receptionist once sat. Often a sign with a list of extensions to call if you need assistance sits alongside a telephone. The combination of personal computer software and automated answering technology has eliminated a huge number of jobs forever. The same thing can be said of factory automation where robots do almost everything with humans often connecting subassemblies built by machines and performing final quality inspections. Millions of jobs have been permanently eliminated by industrial automation.

The other issue is the size of our workforce. Almost everyone is seeking employment. Most suburban neighborhoods are ghost towns during the day because everyone leaves to go to work. There was a time when a married couple would have a stay at home parent if one of them earned enough to support the family and provide a comfortable lifestyle. There have always been situations where both the husband and wife worked out of economic necessity and that was the norm. Something changed and the workforce ballooned when the norm became that the earning capability of a husband or wife was not the determinate of whether both worked. The expectation was for both members of a marriage to get jobs and work.

Social factors like a low rate of marriage and huge divorce rates create social insecurities that drives everyone to work because the thought of being suddenly alone without marketable job skills is too big of a risk.

The expectations of career goals, earning’s growth and enhanced lifestyle changed the definition of what a comfortable lifestyle entailed. Increased consumption from dual high income households combined with the use of credit by everyone fueled an outsized demand for everything from electronics to homes. This inflated demand masked the fact that normal demand could not support our work force.

The financial crisis ripped the scab off the real issue of the workforce and demand imbalance. Many consumers retreated back to an earlier model regarding buying goods and services. We had been on a “just get it if you want it” economic model and suddenly switched to a get it if you absolutely need it mentality. The days of replace it if it’s broken have replaced getting the hot new feature such as a 3D television when your current television will still last for years.

At the same time demand crashed, people ready to exit the workforce through retirement came back in because many had their retirement savings gutted by the stock market crash during the last part of 2008. The combination of low demand and swollen workforce creates a nightmare scenario that unfortunately may be solved by a painful descent into a generally lower standard of living for millions of Americans. We are now dealing with something closer to the real economy, but it happened so suddenly that there was no adjustment period, just pain for many.

Blackout – Black Unemployment Rate Rises As Overall Rate Falls

 Empty - Ghosts of The Middle Class

Sometimes statistics speak louder than shouts from rooftops. Cheers went up as the March 2011 jobless rate fell from 8.9% to 8.8%. Hold the celebrations unemployment rate for black increased from 15.3% to 15.5%, almost twice the 7.9% of whites.

What is going on in the face of celebrations surrounding the number of jobs being created and an unemployment rate that has dropped to 8.8% from 8.9% the month before, blacks seemed to be left off the party invitation list. Hispanics have little cause to be raising their glasses for a toast as well. The unemployment rate for Hispanics fell from 11.3% to 11.1%, but it is the unemployment rate among blacks that is totally disconnected and going against the tide.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics report lists the rates for blacks, whites, Hispanics and all other groups in the United States. Even inside the black community the pain is unevenly spread. Black women had a drop in their unemployment rate from 13% to 12.5% while black men went from 16.2% to 16.8%.  Let’s not gloss over the gap between black men and black women with a 4.3% more of an unemployment percentage among black men.

Let’s get away from percentages and get into how many people this represents. The tables state that 7,923,000 black women are employed compared to 6,758,000 black men. That means that 1,165,000 more black women have jobs than black men. On the flip side the number of unemployed black women is listed at 1,127,000 versus 1,361,000 black men. There is a quirk in the numbers that show fewer black women have jobs than before. The number of black women that were employed in February was 7,993,000 compared to 7,923,000 which are 70,000 fewer jobs and the jobless rate went down for black women. You may ask how fewer working black women mean a decreased in the unemployment rate, it is because so many gave up looking for work and were not counted in the numbers.

The participation rate for black women went from 63.1% to 62.1% and that caused the rate to decrease even though 70,000 fewer black women had jobs. Black men actually had an increase in the number holding jobs from 6,745,000 to 6,758,000 which is 13,000 more jobs and the jobless rate among black men went up because the participation rate went up from 68.2% to 68.7%. Simply speaking, more black men looked for jobs and the jobless rate went up due to math.

So, what is going on? Blacks don’t seem to be included in this slow recovery and what does it mean for the long term future of the black community. The unemployment rates reported are always lower than reality. What is the rate if part-time and underemployment are factored in. Where are the crisis level emergency outcries, because as we speak, decades of economic gains in the black community are being destroyed?

President Obama Shows His Birth Certificate And …

Barack Obama Birth Certificate

The thing that so many have clamored for has finally been produced. President Barack Obama produces his long form birth certificate and the reaction to it was shocking.

One of the first responses was, “He’s still a Muslim.” Of course, this is a hypothetical situation, but is exactly the type of response that would come from those with 10, not 1 reason they don’t support President Obama. Those ingrained attitudes are also exactly the reason President Obama should not show his long form birth certificate.

Barack Hussein Obama is the legitimate President of the United States. He was voted in by the people and sworn in by the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. President Obama met all of the requirements of the Constitution, election commission and every states requirement for inclusion on ballots for President of the United States.

The other reason the President should not buckle to calls to produce a long form birth certificate is that the satisfaction it would provide to the faction pushing the “He is an other” conspiracy theories. The satisfaction that group would get from having the sitting President complying with their requests would be immense. The symbolic damage of President Obama showing his birth certificate would be like he was pulled over and asked for his papers and that image would never go away. The individuals riding on the birther bandwagon are in a world of their own making and President Obama showing his long form birth certificate will not grant him acceptance into that club.  

Now some of these states have bills coming to the legislature that require a birth certificate as a part of qualification to be included on their ballot for President. It is questionable if any of these measures will become law. An article titled “Ga. latest state to propose "birther" bill” by the Associated Press March 2, 2011 and published on the CBS News website goes into the details on the measure in Georgia. These laws seems to like rules change imposed in some sports when a player comes along and takes a quantum leap beyond everyone else participating.

This is the state of American politics today with code words, finger pointing and fear mongering as the order of the day.

Nancy Pelosi Hospitalized While In Rome

U S House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi

U S House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi was hospitalized while leading a Congressional delegation there to celebrate the 150 year anniversary of the nation. Pelosi was reported to have checked into an emergency room for a two hour period and later returned to her hotel room. Reported the former Speaker of the House suffered what was described as “fainting spells.”

This trip to Rome followed a stop in Afghanistan to meet with President Harmid Karzai and U.S. military personnel.

An article titled by ABC News details the incident.