Whoa! Look out! What was that?! Oh it was a Mitt Romney flip flop, I should have known. This week Romney claimed on more that one occasion to have seen his father march with Martin Luther King Jr. After a little research showed that Romney's father never marched with King, the GOP presidential candidate now says he meant that by saw his father he meant that he was aware of his father marching and Dr. Kings work but not the two things together or something equally stupid.
The bottom line is this, Romney's father, Michigan Governor George Romney, never marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and Mitt certainly never saw the two together. But, let's let Mitt try to explain this.
"If you look at the literature, if you look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of in the sense I've described," Romney told reporters in Iowa. "It's a figure of speech and very familiar, and it's very common. And I saw my dad march with Martin Luther King. I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort."
What a load of crap. I did a quick dictionary search and nowhere does it say saw means you get to merge two separate events together and make them one. Mitt Romney is a classic opportunist that believes that the American people will not check up on his lies.
Unlike his son, Governor George Romney was a champion of civil rights and was a man that had strong convictions and beliefs. He must roll over in his grave watching his son invoke his legacy in another set of opportunistic campaign lies.
Gore Vidal, Truthdig, December 18, 2007
I don't know how many of you were as appalled as I was at the way that the presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was totally erased from the last Democratic debate held in Iowa. This was a decision that was made, I can tell, jointly by the one-time voice of AIPAC, Mr. Wolf Blitzer, and, at the same time, The Des Moines Register - or whatever it is called - a paper of no consequence for the United States of America.
Elements of right-wingism are keeping his voice from being heard, even though there are many millions of us (Kucinich is ahead of both Biden and Dodd in the national polls) out here who like to hear his voice. He is in the great tradition of the original People's Party of the 1880s; he is in the tradition of George Washington and of Thomas Jefferson, and to silence him with a bunch of political hacks who have made such a mess of our political system, pretending these were the only voices who could talk as presidential candidates ... is it because of their campaign budgets?
Now, I know, as all of you know, that people can come in with millions of dollars, like Romney and so on, and can buy time in Iowa and in the North Pole or wherever it is they are running. They can buy it, but to get an honest member of Congress speaking out for the people of the country is a great and rare thing.
I have listened to many political debates in my lifetime, if I may pull rank because I have been around longer than anybody else, and here is a voice not only against the war but the entire course leading us to it. I haven't heard anybody who has ever listened to Kucinich who didn't say, "Oh yes, yes, what he says is true, but nobody will ever take him seriously."
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, December 21, 2007
When announcing Japan's surrender in 1945, Emperor Hirohito famously explained his decision as follows: "The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage."
There was a definite Hirohito feel to the explanation Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave this week for the Fed's locking-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-is-gone decision to modestly strengthen regulation of the mortgage industry: "Market discipline has in some cases broken down, and the incentives to follow prudent lending procedures have, at times, eroded."
That's quite an understatement. In fact, the explosion of "innovative" home lending that took place in the middle years of this decade was an unmitigated disaster.
But maybe Mr. Bernanke was afraid to be blunt about just how badly things went wrong. After all, straight talk would have amounted to a direct rebuke of his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, who ignored pleas to lock the barn door while the horse was still inside - that is, to regulate lending while it was booming, rather than after it had already collapsed.
I use the words "unmitigated disaster" advisedly.
David Evans, Bloomberg.com, December 18, 2007
It was the first day of November and Coleman Stipanovich's world was coming undone. Florida school districts and towns had begun pulling their cash out of the $26 billion money market fund he supervised, after they learned it held subprime-tainted debt.
Stipanovich, who earned $180,214 in 2006 as executive director of the State Board of Administration, was in New York in confidential meetings with Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the largest U.S. underwriter of mortgage-backed bonds. Lehman was proposing ways to help the state manage the risk of its debt investments, according to a letter the bank sent to Stipanovich after the meeting.
What Stipanovich, 58, hadn't told his boss, Florida Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, was that Lehman Brothers was the same firm that had sold the state fund $842 million of mortgage-backed debt in July and August. Those securities defaulted within four months, and totaled more failing debt than any other bank sold the state, Florida records show. ``At the time, I never knew it was Lehman Brothers that actually sold us these investments,'' Sink says.
Sink also was unaware that former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who incorporated Jeb Bush & Associates in February 2007, a month after completing his second term, had been hired as a consultant to Lehman Brothers in June. Bush is the brother of President George W. Bush.
In Today's Tequila Treehouse...
