Romney’s fundraising comes down to Earth, lessons from video games, when extremism goes mainstream, voting wrongs, the GOP’s national security fail, Romney’s buses, life expectancy, Homer votes, reverse-secession, and undecided voters.
Welcome to the Daily Sausage.
First up, we have a very good explanation as to why Romney may, ironically enough, run into money problems in the very near term. Essentially, Romney’s big donors are tapped out. He has a small number giving the $5,000 maximum donation, which they can only do once. Obama’s supporters, on the other hand, are much more numerous and only giving out $10 or $25, which means the President can continue to hit them up for cash. This, by the way, is the same problem that John McCain ran in to in 2008; his fundraisers were tapped out by September and October, and he spent the rest of the campaign struggling to find the cash to compete.
Fox News is reporting that the Honduran government has agreed to let an investment group build an experimental city with no taxes on income, capital gains, or sales.
Dammit people! This is how you end up with Rapture! Next think you know the Koch Brothers will be shooting themselves up with stem cells and shooting lightning bolts and bees out of their hands.
On Wednesday the head of the Alabama Republican Party wholeheartedly endorsed a film titled “Dreams From My Real Father” that claims that President Obama’s real father is Frank Marshall Davis, a communist organizer from Chicago. Keep this in mind, as it will be important later.
The New York Review of Books’ Elizabeth Davis has a phenomenal article on the GOP’s attempts to steal the 2012 election, titled “Voting Wrongs”.
The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf has an article on the GOP’s mistaken critique of President Obama’s foreign policy.
Once upon a time, the Republican party was the party of foreign policy, or at least that was the perception in American politics. For the last decade and a half, neoconservatism has slowly but surely ruined that perception.
Consequently, the modern GOP finds itself grasping at straws when it comes to criticizing the President’s foreign policy, while nominating someone with zero foreign policy experience as the nominee. Romney’s ineptness overseas was visible to anyone that cared to watch. It’s hard to believe that he’d be anything but a willing puppet to his neocon advisers, and that’s just downright scary.
Speaking of Romney, during last week’s Univision performance the Romney Campaign had to bus in supporters to pad the audience and threw a temper tantrum after a less than flattering introduction. Romney really is the rich kid that nobody likes that has to buy his friends and throws a temper tantrum whenever something doesn’t go his way.
Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff has a new map on where life expectancy is falling in the United States. Remember this, it’ll be important later.
Repeating the Treehouse of Horror bit from four years ago, Homer Simpson votes. It is interesting that the issue of voter ID laws has penetrated the cultural zeitgeist to that degree.
Okay, you remember all that stuff I told you to remember? Well, now’s the time to remember it.
There is an argument to be made that the rest of the United States would be better off without the South. Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia (Sorry, Psssh), North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma… These states all comprise a region of the country that is, slowly but surely, draining valuable resources from the rest of the country. Their population is, on average, getting fatter, poorer, less educated, and living shorter lives. They all receive more tax dollars than they collect. And they export a particularly vicious and ugly strain of conservatism that melds the worship of Secular free market with Sacred social issue activism that poisons the political well in the rest of the country.
So, I decided to do a little thought experiment. What would happen if you wiped out the South, electorally speaking?
What I did was I figured out the percentage, electoral college wise, each state contributes. I wiped out the ten Southern states, and redistributed their proportions to the remaining states. How very liberal of me!
On our new Southern-less map, President Obama wins 395 to 143, or by 30 more points than he did in 2008. The GOP would be wiped out from a Congressional status as well; without the Solid South, the GOP is relegated to extreme minority status in both houses of Congress.
Imagine a world where Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were fighting each other for votes in New York, Illinois, Texas, and California, instead of those states having been locked up long ago? What might those debates look like? Would we still be getting Mitt “severely conservative” Romney, or would we get the guy that debated Ted Kennedy and governed Massachusetts? Would we still be getting Barack “centrism forever” Obama, or would we get the most liberal member of the Senate? The South’s presence fundamentally changes the nature of our national dialogue, and not in a good way.
And finally, we ask ourselves, “Who are the undecided voters?”. You know, morons.
