Inflated Bills From Romney Campaign–Dishonesty or Incompetence?

For some reason I don’t find it to be at all surprising that the Romney campaign ripped off news organizations:

In a coda to the often contentious relationship between Mitt Romney’s staff and the press, news outlets are preparing to file a formal complaint to the Romney campaign contesting some of the seemingly inflated charges that were billed to them from the campaign trail.

It is standard procedure for presidential campaigns to arrange and prepay for meals, bus travel, and charter flights, then bill the news outlets afterward for their share of the cost. In order to travel with the candidate, reporters and their editors must agree upfront to pay for the cost of the trips, as determined by the campaign.

But many of the bills from the Romney campaign — which have continued to trickle in since Election Day — are much higher than during other campaigns.

For example, on Oct. 11, each reporter was charged $812 for a meal and a rented “holding” space, where the press waited before moving to the next event. On Oct. 18, the bill for a similar set of expenses was $461. And on the night of the vice presidential debate, the campaign planned a “viewing party” for the reporters with Romney, complete with a large rented room with a patio, massage tables, fresh cut flowers, and lots of food and booze. One campaign aide told BuzzFeed that campaign officials’ orders were to “go big” — a nice gesture, perhaps, but one that wasn’t discussed with every media outlet.

I might buy the explanation that this was due to incompetence on the part of the campaign rather than dishonesty:

One campaign aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the bills were not artificially inflated, but rather the product of a generally mismanaged campaign. The aide said the advance team — which was tasked with arranging meals and accommodations for the press — failed to communicate with other elements of the campaign and consistently spent more money than necessary.

Indeed, reporters on the trail grew accustomed to having five or six catered meals offered to them every day, with long tables full of food awaiting them at each campaign stop. The meals often went untouched and were sometimes consumed by campaign staff. It remains unclear whether those aides shouldered some of the costs of the meals.

In another case of apparent overspending, the campaign rented four “mini-busses,” seating 20 to 30 people apiece, to transport the press after a campaign event in Pennsylvania. According to an aide, the total cost was around $5,000 — divided among just 23 reporters.

An aide said they raised concerns about the costs early on — once media outlets began complaining about the outsize bills — but senior campaign officials dismissed them.

Perhaps Mittens should pick up the bills.

Petition To Build Death Star Now Requires Obama Administration Response

Death-star

On the White House’s website there is a “We The People” page which allows citizens to “petition the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country.” The White House says they will review any proposal which gets  25,000 E-signatures. A petition begin building the Death Star by 2016 has now surpassed that requirement, making this argument in its favor:

By focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense.

Just maybe this could get bipartisan support. This is both a huge public works project to stimulate the economy and a tremendously amount of money spent to build a new weapon. There’s something for both Democrats and Republicans here.

One problem: According a recent study it  would cost $852,000,000,000,000,000 — or 13,000 times the world’s GDP — just to produce the steel required to build the weapon.

The response from the Obama administration is quite obvious during the current negotiations regarding the fiscal cliff. Obama should propose 1) eliminating the Bush tax cuts on income over $250,000 and 2) reject building the Death Star in order to greatly reduce government spending from what it might potentially be. Cutting potential spending by this magnitude would eliminate the need to consider more objectionable cuts such as increasing the eligibility age for Medicare. Republicans have been demanding identification of  spending cuts from Obama while they have failed to identify cuts. This is exactly the spending cut which Obama should offer to Republicans, and let them counter with specific proposals for cuts if they do not accept this offer.

 

Quote of the Day

“Arnold Schwarzenegger has committed to appearing in at least one new “Terminator” movie. In the next movie, Arnold from the future will time travel to the past and tell Arnold from the past to wear a condom.” –Craig Ferguson

PolitiFact Lie of the Year: Romney Campaign Ad On Jeeps To Be Made In China

Mitt Romney may have lost the presidential election but he does hold the title for running the most dishonest campaign in modern history. To add to his accomplishments in this area, PolitiFact has awarded him their Lie of the Year:

It was a lie told in the critical state of Ohio in the final days of a close campaign — that Jeep was moving its U.S. production to China. It originated with a conservative blogger, who twisted an accurate news story into a falsehood. Then it picked up steam when the Drudge Report ran with it. Even though Jeep’s parent company gave a quick and clear denial, Mitt Romney repeated it and his campaign turned it into a TV ad.

And they stood by the claim, even as the media and the public expressed collective outrage against something so obviously false.

People often say that politicians don’t pay a price for deception, but this time was different: A flood of negative press coverage rained down on the Romney campaign, and he failed to turn the tide in Ohio, the most important state in the presidential election.

PolitiFact has selected Romney’s claim that Barack Obama “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China” at the cost of American jobs as the 2012 Lie of the Year.

Romney lied so frequently that it is hard to choose just one lie. This was a good choice as it was a blatant lie which Romney repeated despite considerable media coverage of the fact that he was lying. It is a perfect example for an outfit such as PolitFact to use in that it highlights the role of fact checkers in exposing a lie which wound up hurting the lying candidate. However if I were to choose the Lie of the Year I would choose one which the Factcheckers exposed with far less success–the distortion of Obama’s didn’t build it statement. While Obama was speaking of government infrastructure which businesses benefit from, the Romney campaign twisted this to claim that Obama was saying that businessmen did not build their own business. I would give this lie the award because of the audacity of the lie and the frequency with which Republicans repeated it. This including making this lie the theme of the Republican convention in 2012.

Now Waiting For All The New Jobs In Michigan

Michigan has passed so-called right to work legislation today. There’s already been a lot written about how right-to-work states wind up with lower wages for workers, which doesn’t sound like a good thing for the economy unless you are in the right wing bubble. I’m more interested in seeing data on the other question–whether right-to-work laws are really of any benefit to a state in terms of bringing in new jobs. Governor Rick Snyder says this is the case, playing the role of ventriloquist’s doll to the Koch brothers. Think Progress says this is false:

… the economic research isn’t on Snyder’s side. As Adam Hersh, Heather Boushey, and David Madland note:

“There is really no economic evidence showing “right-to-work” laws leading to more jobs or better outcomes for workers. This is seen plainly in analysis looking at the impact of such laws in Oklahoma, the only other state to adopt a right-to-work law in the past 25 years prior to Indiana doing so in 2011 and Michigan’s current legislative move. In fact, economists Sylvia Allegretto and Gordon Lafer of the University of California, Berkeley and University of Oregon, respectively, show that since Oklahoma’s law passed in 2001, manufacturing employment and business relocations to the state actually reversed their “pre-right-to-work” increases and began to fall—and this at a time when Oklahoma’s extractive industry economies were booming. To the contrary, these researchers show that right-to-work laws have failed to increase employment growth in the 22 states that have adopted them.”

Instead, right-to-work laws simply result in lower wages and fewer benefits for workers, union and non-union alike. In Michigan (and across the country), as unionization rates fall, so does middle-class income. President Obama yesterday blasted right-to-work as “giving you the right to work for less money.”

Unfortunately we can’t have a fully controlled experiment here since Michigan’s economy is recovering and new jobs might be come to Michigan regardless of the law. However, a drastic step such as adopting right-to-work laws, with their known detrimental effects, should show a clear increase in jobs coming to the state. Just something to keep in mind in two years when Snyder is up for reelection.

Incidentally, Greg Sargent describes one way in which this might be overturned.

Update: Conservatives have “right-to-work” the “death tax” “right to life” and other ways of renaming positions to affect public opinion. The mainstream media tries to make both sides sound equivalent. “Inheritance tax” and “pro-choice” sound like far more honest terms than those used by conservatives. Are there any liberal equivalents to the conservative renaming of viewpoints which I’m not thinking of? Does the lack of similar tactics by liberals mean that liberals are more honest or less skillful politically (or both)?

How The Mainstream Media Missed The Big Story Of The 2012 Campaign–The Extremism And Dishonesty Of The GOP

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein are a pair of centrists who have said what needed to be said in an  essay “Admit it. The Republicans are worse“,  and their book  It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, which clearly laid out the extremism of the current Republican Party. The two have continued to speak out on this topic, with Dan Froomkin summarizing some of their recent statements:

Post-mortems of contemporary election coverage typically include regrets about horserace journalism, he-said-she-said stenography, and the lack of enlightening stories about the issues.

But according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.

Mann and Ornstein are two longtime centrist Washington fixtures who earlier this year dramatically rejected the strictures of false equivalency that bind so much of the capital’s media elite and publicly concluded that GOP leaders have become “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

The 2012 campaign further proved their point, they both said in recent interviews. It also exposed how fabulists and liars can exploit the elite media’s fear of being seen as taking sides.

“The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties’ agendas and connections to facts and truth,” said Mann, who has spent nearly three decades as a congressional scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution.

“I saw some journalists struggling to avoid the trap of balance and I knew they were struggling with it — and with their editors,” said Mann. “But in general, I think overall it was a pretty disappointing performance.”

“I can’t recall a campaign where I’ve seen more lying going on — and it wasn’t symmetric,” said Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who’s been tracking Congress with Mann since 1978. Democrats were hardly innocent, he said, “but it seemed pretty clear to me that the Republican campaign was just far more over the top.”

Lies from Republicans generally and standardbearer Mitt Romney in particular weren’t limited to the occasional TV ads, either; the party’s most central campaign principles — that federal spending doesn’t create jobs, that reducing taxes on the rich could create jobs and lower the deficit — willfully disregarded the truth.

“It’s the great unreported big story of American politics,” Ornstein said…

“The argument we’re making is that our politics will never really get better until the Republican Party gets back into the game, instead of playing a new one,” Mann said. “We want a strong, conservative Republican Party — but one with some connection with reality.”

Their critique came not out of ideology, they said, but out of their background as devoted process junkies and honest analysts, who finally realized that their vision of collegial governance wasn’t possible any more, and it was clear why.

Both see the rise of Tea Party influence on the GOP as a major turning point. For Mann, the moment of reckoning came in the summer of 2011. “What flipped me over was the debt ceiling hostage-taking,” Mann said. It was clear then that the Republicans would “do or say anything” to hurt Obama, even if it was overtly bad for the country and false to core Republican values.

While the media did fact check Mitt Romney and the Republicans from time to time, they have failed to clearly report on how extreme the Republicans have become, feeling that objectivity meant giving equal time to the lies of Republicans and far more truthful statements from Democrats without distinguishing between the two. Republicans found that it didn’t matter if they twisted the truth a bit in their direction, as all political parties do, or invent a fictitious narrative with no connection to reality. The media would treat either the same, giving equal time to whatever each party desired to say. The media was never going to expose the fact that Barack Obama did not hold the views which Mitt Romney attributed to him or that virtually everything Romney said about Obama’s record was a lie.

Of course while the mainstream media failed to tell this story, Mann and Ornstein weren’t the only ones telling the story. The blogosphere has been exposing the extremism and dishonesty of the right wing.

SciFi Weekend: Fringe; Doctor Who Christmas Special And 50th Anniversary; Star Trek Into Darkness; Downton Abbey Christmas Special

Before this week’s episode of Fringe, theories about how the series would end fell into two categories. There were the happy endings in which the Observers were defeated, possibly including a cosmic reset going back to the day in the park. There were also predictions of unhappy endings, at least for Peter, after inserting the Observer’s device in his brain stem. This ranged from Peter dying (which has been foreshadowed so many times in the past) in order to defeat the Observers, to the possibility that Peter’s actions led to the eventual development of the Observers. After Walter warned that the effects on Peter were soon to be irreversible, it became clear that this arc would lead to one of two results–either Peter would remove the device or he would soon become bald, and with a changed personality. This week’s episode resolved the issue with a pocket knife and self-performed surgery.

Besides convincing Peter of the importance of human emotions, Olivia stuck a blow for science and math over alternative explanations to those with extraordinary abilities:  it’s all just numbers, and the invaders are better at math than we are. After she defeats the Observers, we’ll set her loose on today’s Republicans.

The series finale is to be entitled An Enemy of Fate. Presumably this refers to someone who prevents humanity’s fate of being enslaved to the Observers.

Companions have fallen in love with the Doctor, but this time it might be the Doctor falling for the new companion–and who can blame him considering what we’ve seen of Jenna-Louise Coleman:

Matt Smith says the Time Lord is “attracted” to all his female companions – and that he’s particularly struck by new partner in time Clara when he meets her in this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special The Snowmen.

“I think, in one way or another, the Doctor is always attracted to his companion and he’s certainly taken by this striking young lady,” Smith tells Radio Times in the new edition of the magazine.

And he says Clara is just what the Doctor ordered after the loss of former travelling companions Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) and Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill).

“The fall of the Ponds had a grave effect on the man,” said Smith. “I think he’s quite lonely and removed from the universe and not really as engaged as he was, at his best with Amy and Rory. “Handily, he meets a jaunty new companion, a hot chick…”

Fans will have to wait until Christmas to see the full effect Clara has on the Doctor but they’ve already glimpsed her snatching a rare kiss from him in a BBC1 Christmas trailer and Smith said “what’s interesting with a new companion is that it changes the way [the Doctor] is and affects his personality.”

The BBC have announced the airtime for the Doctor Who 2012 Christmas Special, The Snowmen. The episode will air on BBC One at 5:15 p.m, December 25. It will air on BBC America and in Canada (SPACE) on December 25. It will air in New Zealand and Australia on December 26. More pictures from the Christmas Special can be seen here.

The Doctor Who series 7 finale finished filming last week. There are rumors that the 50th Anniversary special will start filming in February. Other rumors include a title of The Eleven Doctors with all eleven Doctors appearing in some manner. The manner is not clear as not all former Doctors are living and Christopher Eccleston has said he will not appear in the special.

The trailer forStarhas been released (video above).

The Japanese trailer (above) has additional material. While the villain appears to be Gary Mitchell as opposed to Khan, there is a scene reminiscent of Spock’s death scene in Star Trek II. Hopefully that is not what is actually occurring–we don’t need a remake of The Search For Spock.

Pictures from the Downton Abbey Christmas Special can be seen here. Beware if waiting for the third season to play in the United States–these must be considered spoilers for 3rd season events based upon who is present and who is not present.

Michigan Legislature Considering Bills To Limit Access To Abortion

After the midterm elections of 2010 I found myself living in a red state. This November the Republicans realized that the situation which placed them in power has changed. The Michigan legislature will still be controlled by Republicans in the next session, but their majority is shrinking, and they realize there is a chance they will be removed in another two years. They decided to suddenly push harder for their reactionary agenda in the lame duck session. By now most have heard how Michigan has passed a “right to work” law. This isn’t the only mischief that the legislature has been up to. The Detroit Free Press reports on new legislation to limit access to abortion:

Legislation that could limit access to abortion — several measures that shot through Thursday in a chaotic day in Lansing — drew sharp criticism Friday from Michigan residents who said the proposals run roughshod over women’s rights and could allow doctors to pick and choose patients based on religious or moral beliefs.

A package of three Senate bills would prevent insurers on the state’s health care exchange — a provision of health care reform that Michigan must still establish — from automatically including coverage for abortion in their policies offered on the exchange.

Rather, an employer or an individual purchaser of the plan would have to request and pay separately for abortion coverage.

As it stands now, nearly 80% of plans in Michigan cover abortion, according to Lori Lamerand, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Mid and South Michigan…

The bills need to pass the House and be signed by Gov. Rick Snyder before they would become law.

But a similar measure to make abortion coverage available only through a supplemental policy might be closer to law.

It was tucked inside legislation that would allow Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan to change its business structure. That bill, with last-minute amendments tacked on that would apply to other insurers as well, is headed for Snyder’s desk. Snyder has pushed for legislation to allow the Blue Cross the change in its business plan.

Voters sent a clear message in the 2012 election that we do not want Republican big government forcing the repugnant moral views of the religious right upon others. If younger and more liberal voters remain engaged in two years and do not stay home as they did four years ago, actions such as this could lead to Michigan becoming a fully blue state once again in 2014. The actions of the Michigan legislature also show why there is no safety in electing a moderate Republican such as Governor Rick Snyder if he is willing to sign most of the bills passed by the Republican legislature. If Jennifer Granholm was still in Lansing, we know she would be vetoing these measures.

Quote of the Day

“The Obamas have decorated the White House with 54 Christmas trees. It’s all part of their ‘For the last time, we’re not Muslim’ campaign.” –Conan O’Brien

Quote of the Day

“Earlier today Mitt Romney was spotted on a Costco shopping spree. Romney ended up buying 14 Costcos.” –Jimmy Fallon