Parsing The Political Polls & Predicting The Outcome: What Do You Think?

How is it that with one week to go, Barack Obama has a slight lead in about half of the national polls and Mitt Romney has a slight lead in the other half of the national polls?  How is this possible when Obama is going to get most of the African-American and other minority votes, and a big share of the independent women and young adult/college graduate vote?

My view is that Obama voters are generally underrepresented in polls, and nail biting aside, Obama will win the popular vote on November 6 by a few percentage points and win the Electoral College in a landslide.

What is your view?  Do you think that the polls are accurate?  If not, why?  And what is your prediction for the popular and Electoral College vote results?

Contrasting Obama & Romney On Foreign Policy: Restraint Versus Bellicosity

There are plenty of reasons why Mitt Romney would be a lousy president, but the biggest is that he is a hothead and a dullard. This was on display when, flying in the face of protocol and common sense, he excoriated President Obama for being soft on terrorism mere hours after the U.S. ambassador to Libya was slain in Bengazi last month. And then did the same thing all over again in the second presidential debate.

Expect a course correction -- or at least a toning down from Romney on Libya -- during the final presidential debate tonight, which will focus on foreign policy, because his attacks have not resonated with voters and focus groups, let alone Honey Boo Boo.  Kind of like that binder filled with women thing.  Or perhaps he'll just try a new line of attack.

Foreign policy is a minefield for Romney to begin and unexpectedly a big positive for Obama.  This is because his administration has shone so brightly in a world that could not be more different than the Cold World with myriad hotspots, while Romney maintains a Cold War view and has been hypnotized by saber-rattling neocons as was George W. Bush with the catastrophic consequence of the Iraq War.  Romney also doesn't have a scintilla of foreign policy experience unless you consider going door-to-door as a Mormon missionary in France as counting. .

To the surprise of the punditocracy, Obama has seized the foreign policy high ground long held by the Republican Party and because of this Romney has not been able to lay a finger on him.

Obama has been able to do in three and three-quarter years what Bush could not do in eight: Destroy the leadership of Al Qaeda, get the last U.S. troops out of Iraq, and assist in toppling two Middle Eastern dictators and the bad guys who had long held Burma hostage. Were it not for the albatross of Afghanistan bequeathed by his predecessor, and bumbled early on by Obama himself, he would pretty much have a clean sweep.

These successes are a result of patient consensus building between the White House, Pentagon and State Department and carefully calibrated responses rather than massive troop deployments. The emphasis has been on multilateralism not unilateralism, and diplomacy over breast beating while avoiding the kind of triumphalism in which the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis reveled.

* * * * *

If there was a pivotal moment in the second debate -- and perhaps the  presidential campaign -- it was when Obama termed "offensive" Romney's accusations that his administration was politicizing the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other diplomats in Bengazi on September 11.  Obama looked presidential; Romney looked cheap.

There was no "Mission Accomplished" moment after the U.S.-led coalition toppled the Qaddafi regime last year, and no American lives had been lost in bringing a tentative sort of democracy to Libya until the deaths of the four. Libyans have been so grateful for Obama's steady if understated role, and God knows the U.S. needs allies in the region, that they took to the streets in protest over the deaths and attacked the Islamic militias thought to be responsible.

Meanwhile, Obama and his allies are playing a patient game over Syria, where the Assad regime has killed tens of thousands of rebels and their families, and disappeared an estimated 30,000 people in what will be a protracted civil war unless there is an effort to try to replicate the Libyan experience, something that would not occur until after Election Day.

Obama was candid going into the war to topple Qaddafi: It had risks and with risks come responsibilities, including an instability that still has not been completely exorcized. A component of Romney' balls-to-the-wall plan for Syria includes, believe it not, arming women and children, a neocon wet dream and recipe for even more bloodshed.

* * * * * 

Iran is likely to dominate tonight's debate, and the prescriptions offered by Obama and Romney to curb the Islamic Republic's nuclear program are starkly different.

Obama has led the international community in advocating tougher sanctions that have exacerbated Iran's economic woes and squeezed the country's emerging middle class, the upshot of which could be negotiations that would save face for the regime while it dials back its nuclear program. Many Middle Eastern analysts see that outcome as increasingly likely, while Teheran said over the weekend that it would agree to post-election talks.  Romney, on the other hand, has said that if elected he would support Israel in air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities that would plunge an already volatile region into full-scale war involving the neighbors of both countries, as well as Hezbollah and Al Qaeda.

Obama has been firm but restrained. And presidential.  He has refused to play politics whether it be Libya, Syria, Iran or anywhere else, while Romney has displayed no restraint, let alone a sense of perspective, good sense and evidence of a steady hand when it comes to these hotspots.

For this reason, Romney is a particularly unattractive choice for a nation that has been at war for 11 years, the longest in its history.  It speaks volumes that unlike Obama, his foreign policy outlook has devolved and not evolved in the six years that he has been running for president.

America's Most Dangerous Organized Crime Family: The Republican Party

There is no better example of the depths of deceitfulness to which the Republican Party has sunk than its efforts to suppress the vote by ramming through laws based on bogus claims of voter fraud that disenfranchise Democratic voters while it engages in systematic fraud itself.

This outrage was on offer in Florida, where suspicious voter registration forms were found in nine counties, including the county where those infamous hanging chads led to the U.S. Supreme Court to throw the 2000 election for George W. Bush.  The forms were the work of Strategic Allied Consulting, a firm hired by the state Republican Party to sign up new voters.  

Among problems with the forms were incorrect addresses, addresses that don't exist, signatures that don't match the names, signatures in the same handwriting, dates of births that don't match the names, and names that match with names in death records.

Washington, D.C.-based Allied Consulting is owned by Nathan Sproul, who has been involved in GOP voter registration "efforts" since at least 2004, an election in which there were widespread allegations of fraud involving his company that the Bush Justice Department failed to diligently pursue. 

 One aspect of this fraud was fiendishly clever: Sproul's employees impersonated members of Democratic-leaning groups, registered as many Democrats as possible and then destroyed their legitimate registrations instead of turning them over to local canvassing boards.

In addition to Florida, Strategic Allied also was hired by the Republican National Committee to conduct registration drives this year in four other swing states that Mitt Romney must win if he is to oust Barack Obama.

There is no reason to believe that Strategic Allied drives outside of Florida aren't dirty, as well, and officials in North Carolina are looking into that possibility.

Meanwhile, a videotape of an employee of the firm shows her working outside a store in Colorado Springs where she told potential voters that she wanted to register only Republicans and that she worked for the county clerk's office.  The woman was fired, while Strategic Allied itself was canned in Florida after the embarrassing revelations about its true agenda emerged.

Which begs a very big question: How many other fraudulent Republican efforts are ongoing but have not been found out?

Probably a good many, although the lid has been blown off a scheme in the Democratic stronghold of Riverside County, California to register voters as Republicans without their knowledge.

Complaints were filed by 133 residents of a Riverside County state Senate district who say they were added to GOP rolls without their knowledge, calling into question the party's boast that Republican membership has skyrocketed 23 percent there.  More than 27,700 residents of the district have become Republicans since January, according to the California secretary of state's office, magically erasing a registration edge long held by Democrats.

* * * * *

The reason that the Republican Party is working so hard to disenfranchise blacks, Latinos, university students and low-income people who vote Democratic and will vote to re-elect Obama, is perversely simple:

Pretty much everyone save for angry white men and their compliant wives are fleeing the Republican Party in droves.  The party no longer has its once considerable clout when it comes to national tickets outside of the South, where antipathy toward racial minorities and uppity women of all colors, remains strong.  And as was the case in the 2008 presidential election, many of the independent women Romney needs to carry the day are repelled by the party's efforts to deny them access to family planning and contraception, deny them abortions regardless of the circumstances, and deny them equal pay for equal work.

So what's the GOP to do?

Rather than moderate its message, it's trying to suppress turnout in the expectation that some Democrats may lack the photo identification cards required by voter laws not coincidentally passed in states with Republican governors and legislatures.  It's tough luck if elderly votes who no longer have photo IDs because they no longer drive, let alone elderly veterans who carry Veterans Administration cards that lack photos, are unable to vote.

Republican operatives well understand that there is very little voter fraud such as someone voting twice.  Therefore, the GOP is concentrating on getting away with voter registration fraud such as registering nonexistent people to vote or signing up legitimate voters without their signatures or permission, while trying to disenfranchise Democrats. 

* * * * *

As it is, efforts to put in place tough voter registration laws have largely been rebuffed by courts with the encouragement of Attorney General Eric Holder, most recently in Pennsylvania.

The Republican-dominated legislature had passed and Tom Corbett, the Republican governor, had signed an especially draconian law. It not only required photo IDs, but state-issued IDs in the case of voters who did not have drivers licenses, passports or other documents with photos.  Voters who did not have certain kinds of photo IDs would be allowed to vote, but only provisionally and might be required to provide further identification after the election if their vote was to be counted.

Laws also have been set aside or held in abeyance in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin, while in Florida and Ohio, early voting and voter-registration drives have been restored after legal challenges.

The Pennsylvania law, which a high-ranking Republican state legislator unashamedly boasted was designed to suppress the vote in an effort to give Romney a leg up, was challenged by the ACLU after it was found that upwards of 750,000 people could be disenfranchised.  Robert Simpson, a lower court judge, could have done the courageous thing by declaring that the photo ID requirement was unnecessary and unfair, but he upheld the law although the state executive tasked with enforcing it acknowledged under oath that she knew of no cases of voter fraud in the Keystone State, her department had done little to speed the photo ID authorization process, and to boot she didn't know the specifics of the law, either.

The Democratic-dominated state Supreme Court rode the the rescue, voting 4-2 to require Simpson to show why the law would not hurt potential voters who might not be able to obtain photo ID cards in time to register to vote. Simpson ruled that the state had not done enough to ensure that potential voters had access to the documents required to get photo ID cards under the law, so he delayed full implementation of the law until after the election.  He created an element of confusion, deliberately in my view, in also ruling that voters still could be asked to produce photo IDs on November 6, but if they did not have them still could vote, leaving open the possibility that less informed voters might conclude they won't be allowed to cast ballots.

While Democrats cheered the victory, although it may be a temporary one, it drew venom from the state party's right wing, which accused Simpson of "judicial activism" and overstepping his authority in a ruling "skewed in favor of the lazy," and excoriated Corbett for the law's failure to pass muster. 

Responded Philadelphia City Commission Chairwoman Stephanie Singer:  "There's one thing we can't disagree on, [and] that is that no one can be disenfranchised."

* * * * *

It is sadly unsurprising that there are no voting rights advocates anymore in a Republican Party that once proudly referred to itself as The Big Tent. 

The party's efforts to deny people the right to vote by undermining a cornerstone of our democracy are not merely criminal.  They are treasonous in every sense of that weighty word and part and parcel of an ideological extremism that has manifested itself in the party's blood lust to go to any end to deny Obama a second term.

Cartoon du Jour

From Caglecartoons.com

Obama Seizes The Foreign Policy High Ground From The GOP & Isn't Letting Go

Today's offering was going to be about the presidential campaign having entered a period of statistical probability; that is, what you see is what you will get on Election Day.  By this measure, Mitt Romney has been toast for the last week or so as swing state after swing state has swung into the Obama column.  That subject seemed . . . uh, a little too predictable, as well as the fact that many pundits are belaboring the obvious these days.  Besides which, I have to save stuff for a day-after election post-mortem, the working headline for which is What Possibly Could Go Wrong?  The Story Of The Historic Romney-Ryan Collapse, and muse on what Republicans will do after their drubbing.  Blame everyone but themselves, of course.

Then it occurred to me that the very area where primary candidate Barack Obama was most vulnerable in 2008 was his lack of foreign policy experience and that foreign policy, beyond the first steps toward health care reform, is his signal achievement.

Hillary Clinton, the last opponent standing at the mid point of the primary season, memorably called into question Obama's ability to be decisive on foreign policy in a television ad riffed on so effectively by cartoonist Pat Oliphant that questioned whether voters could trust him to take a 3 a.m. call in the Oval Office about a world crisis.  In the general election, John McCain was no foreign policy slouch even if he did choose a running mate who was moronically inept when it came to what went on beyond her kitchen window, and he too hammered Obama for being a neophyte.

But in an enormous political reversal, Obama has seized the foreign policy high ground long held by the Republican Party, and try as he might, Romney has not been able to lay a finger on him.

For good reason. Obama has been able to do in three and three-quarter years what George Bush could not do in eight: Destroy the leadership of Al Qaeda, get the last U.S. troops out of Iraq, and assist in toppling two Middle Eastern dictators and the bad guys running Burma. Were it not for the albatross of Afghanistan bequeathed by his predecessor, Obama would pretty much have a clean sweep.

So how did he do it?

* Consensus building between the White House, Pentagon and State Department.

The key players in this effort have been Clinton, who has served magnificently as secretary of state; Vice President Biden, who has drawn on his own formidable foreign policy experience, and Robert Gates, the wizened Bush administration holdover, who stayed on as defense secretary until July 2011. 

* Carefully calibrated responses rather than massive troop deployments.

The emphasis has been on multilateralism and not unilateralism, including the involvement of NATO countries, and diplomacy over bellicosity while avoiding the kind of triumphalism in which the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis reveled.

Nowhere has Obama succeeded more than in Asia.

By taking advantage of China overplaying its hand in the South China Sea, he has reconfirmed the central role of the U.S. the region with the opening of a new base in Australia, while the rapprochement with Burma also has long-term strategic implications. 

Obama also has been lucky. 

Iran, despite the usual Islamic Republic bloviating, has pretty much minded its own business as the tougher sanctions pushed by the White House have taken hold.  Israel and Palestine remain stalemated but not at war, and other potential hotspots have not boiled over.

The largest foreign policy setback on Obama's watch is a qualified one.

The administration was unable to work out an agreement with Iraq to maintain a U.S. troop presence beyond the end of 2011, making it more likely that Iraq will continue to unravel into sectarian warfare and further destabilize the region.  Note, however, that this would not be a concern had that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis not invaded Iraq in the first place, an action that surely is the greatest foreign policy failure in American history.

It also is a certainty that once the U.S.-led NATO coalition withdraws from Afghanistan the country will further devolve into chaos because of the Taliban and meddlesome Pakistani interests, but the blame here also belongs to the Bush administration. The U.S. appropriately invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks but soon bled that conflict of troops and resources to fight the Iraq war, while giving up on taking out Osama bin Laden.

Navy commandos took out the Al Qaeda leader on Obama's orders, but many of his cadre have perished in drone attacks that despite administration denials exact a level of collateral civilian damage that I find unacceptable.

* * * * *

"Without putting a single U.S. service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives, and our NATO mission will soon come to an end," Obama said as he took a muted victory lap after the death of Colonel Moammar el-Qaddafi, the longest surviving strongman. "We've demonstrated what collective action can achieve in the 21st century."

Romney has proven to be profoundly inept if not downright dangerous when it comes to foreign policy. 

Recall that he had the temerity to say Quaddafi's death "did not validate" the president's approach to Libya, which in retrospect makes somewhat less shocking his fact-free rush to judgment denouncing Obama last month after the death of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three others as being "disgraceful." Then there is the statement captured on the infamous 47 Percent video that his response to the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, the most intractable foreign policy issue for American presidents for the last several decades, would be to kick the can down the road.

McCain has been one of the few Republicans to praise the president for his foreign policy chops, although he and others have been critical of the administration's somewhat botched response to the Libya killings.

"I think the administration deserves great credit," McCain has said. "Obviously, I had different ideas on the tactical side, but the world is a better place."

Cartoon copyright 2008 
by Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

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Cartoon du Jour

Walt Handelsman/Newsday

Random Musings On The Autumnal Equinox & The Hapless Mitt Romney

Sandy Hook is the most unusual of New Jersey's many fine beaches.  This is because the Staten Island skyline is a mere 20 miles away and behind it loom lower Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.  Then there is the experience of floating in the ocean on one's back beyond the breakers while taking in the Statue of Liberty and looking skyward at a Lufthansa Airbus making its approach to Newark International Airport while contemplating the vicissitudes of the worst run presidential campaign of my lifetime.  Yes, even worse than Michael Dukakis in 1988.

And so on the last day of summer 2012 we repaired to Sandy Hook with the woofs -- Jack and Nicky, our brother-sister chocolate Labrador retrievers -- whom the Dear Friend & Conscience had rescued from cage-bound lives in Upstate New York last year and have slowly but surely returned to good health.  As in you can practically see your reflection in their luxuriant coats.

* * * * *

Jack and Nicky had never seen the ocean, let alone tested their swimmerly chops in it, but early in the month we spent a weekend some 180 miles to the south of Sandy Hook at the Delaware shore, where the beaches, if anything, are even finer than New Jersey's.  This is because of the foresight of a liberal Republican governor, a now extinct species, who with the help of an environmentally conscious citizenry pressured the state General Assembly to approve a Coastal Zone Act that barred industrial development on or near the state's coastline.  

This was 1970, the early days of the nascent environmental movement. The act survived challenges by Big Oil that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, a then liberal and now also an extinct species.  Today Delaware has pristine beaches, virtually all of them state parkland and open to the public.  Four of the beaches are dog friendly year-round.

One such beach is at Cape Henlopen where Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic.  It was there that Jack rode his first wave.

Words do not do justice to the sight of a 100-pound Lab being picked up by a wave and propelled to shore, front legs splayed out, ears flapping in the wind and eyes bugging out of his head.  Jack artfully landed on the beach, shook from head to toe, turned around and sprinted back into the surf in search of another wave.

* * * * *

But I digress. 

The weather at Sandy Hook and the Delaware shore was typical of that during the most magnificent summer in recent memory.  Rain when it was needed but otherwise sublimely sunny days with low humidity.  I was able to swim practically every morning and grew a bumper crop of peppers, among other veggies, the hotter varieties of which have gone into a big cast iron skillet every couple of weeks or so for my spicy clam sauce (email me if you'd like the recipe), which we washed down the other night with the first bottles from the annual U.S. release of Spaten Oktoberfest.  I guess you might say that life is good because we're 47 Percenters.

* * * * *

Life is not good for Willard Mitt Romney, and if ever a presidential wannabe is getting their just deserts, it is he.

Obama is leading in most national polls and leading by large margins in polls of registered votes.  Undecideds are breaking for the Islamofascist-socialist incumbent in the wake of Romney's 47 Percent train wreck of a video, and the man who was sure to go down to defeat leads in every swing state but one, where he is tied.   Support for the Republican ticket has crumbled among the 47 percenters who are the senior citizens that he GOP wants to put on a raft and send out to sea. Democrats are stomping Republicans by a 6-1 margin for early ballot requests in the GOP heartland of Iowa.  Yes, Iowa.  Meanwhile, my own poll of bumper stickers and yard signs from metro Philadelphia to North Jersey shows Obama winning in a landslide, while McCain stickers and signs had been ubiquitous in 2008.

Romney can't catch a break (but thanks for releasing those artificially inflated 2011 tax returns) and, of course, doesn't deserve a break when most of his wounds are self inflicted.

The turmoil among clueless campaign staffers and the GOP's circular firing squad are grabbing more headlines than what he is saying on the stump.  No matter.  Despite vows of a new Romney 3.0, he's peddling the same old snake oil and laying eggs as he did in an interview on 60 Minutes last night in stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that he is up against the electoral wall. Obama's unflappable cool was on display in an interview later in the program. 

* * * * *

The biggest story last week beyond the 47 Percent debacle was senior GOP pundit Peggy Noonan calling for an intervention for the hapless candidate and Romney sycophant John Sununu, who looks and talks more like Dick Cheney every day, telling her to shut her yap hole. Same for Tommy Thompson, whom he compared to Obama.

Michael Gerson, who served as George W. Bush's chief speechwriter, also is in Sununu's crosshairs because he called Romney's 47 Percent remarks "stupid and callous" and "nonsense." 

"Romney was appealing to a common Republican belief that the expansion of government has produced a class of citizens who live off the sweat of others, regard themselves as victims and refuse to accept responsibility," Gerson said.  "Yet a Republican ideology pitting the 'makers' against the 'takers' offers nothing. No sympathy for our fellow citizens. No insight into our social challenge. No hope of change. This approach involves a relentless reductionism. Human worth is reduced to economic production. Social problems are reduced to personal vices. Politics is reduced to class warfare on behalf of the upper class."

And all the while the Wingnut Wurlitzer grinds away, vomiting up a movie the other day claiming that Obama’s real father is an obscure African-American communist, while the insufferable Anne Romney, whose biggest daily decision is which of her Cadillacs to drive, whines that her husband is misunderstood. 

The next biggest story is the bevy of Republican Senate candidates -- including those in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Nevada, Virginia and Wisconsin -- who are trying to inoculate themselves from the Romney disaster in progress. "If your standard-bearer for the presidency is not doing well, it’s going to reflect on the down ballot," acknowledged Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, who has seen his once comfortable lead disappear.

Unless Romney can begin to turn things around -- hell, anything around -- in the run-up to the first presidential debate on October 3, he is effectively toast.  It will be a loss that the Tea Party will own. 

Cartoon du Jour

Tony Auth/Philadelphia Inquirer

Why Obama Went Soft On A Dark Chapter: The Bush Torture Regime

WE DO NOT TORTURE TERROR SUSPECTS.

~ George W. Bush (November 7, 2005)

As one of the flew bloggers who wrote extensively about the Bush Torture Regime and enthusiastically supported Barack Obama, the most bitter pill of his first term is that he has pretended this dark chapter in the history of our once great democracy never happened.  That is okay, in a pretzel logical sort of way, because this decision was a result of him wanting to take office in a spirit of bipartisanship without the distraction of what would be viewed by Republicans as a partisan prosecutorial witch hunt.  So while Obama certainly didn't take the high road, I am able to rationalize the road that he did take in a larger context.

Meanwhile, the door to making anyone, let alone George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Addington and John Yoo, accountable for their crimes -- crimes that are unambiguously delineated in international law and the Geneva Conventions -- was quietly and effectively slammed shut last month when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the only two cases under investigation relating to the torture regime were being closed without charges being filed.

The timing of the announcement would seem to be perfect because the press corps was sunning its collective backside in the Hamptons during the lull before the Republican and Democratic conventions, but Holder could have made the announcement at midnight on New Years Eve in Times Square and it would have been greeted with a practiced yawn. 

This is because many Americans continue to believe that using Nazi-like torture methods against terrorists is okey-dokey although its effectiveness has been discredited, including by World War II military intelligence veterans who said a carrot often eventually elicited valuable information from German and Japanese soldiers while a stick did not. Furthermore, the torture regime dealt a body blow to America's standing aboard that has not been restored, Obama's good acts notwithstanding, while most of the mainstream media studiously ignored years of horrifying reports emanating from Iraq, Afghanistan, the network of so-called dark CIA prison sites and, of course, Guantánamo Bay.

The two cases involved the deaths of an Afghan detainee and an Iraqi citizen, and mark the end of a contentious three-year investigation by the Justice Department over whether CIA personnel and their superiors should be held accountable for the abuse of prisoners in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Justice did not say publicly which cases had been under investigation, but officials previously confirmed the identities of the prisoners as militant suspect Gul Rahman, who died in 2002 after being shackled to a concrete wall in near-freezing temperatures at a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit, and Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in CIA custody in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where his corpse was infamously photographed (above) packed in ice and wrapped in plastic.

Holder, in asserting that the admissible evidence was insufficient to obtain criminal convictions, disingenuously suggested that the end of the investigation should not be seen as a moral exoneration of those involved in the prisoners' treatment and deaths, but it certainly will have that effect for Bush, Cheney and other administration heavies.

"It is hugely disappointing that with ample evidence of torture, and documented cases of some people actually being tortured to death, that the Justice Department has not been able to mount a successful prosecution and hold people responsible for these crimes," said Elisa Massimino, president of Human Rights First. "The American people need to know what was done in their name."

Massimino said her group’s own investigation of the prisoners' deaths showed that initial inquiries were bungled by military and intelligence officers in charge of prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. I would suggest that this was done deliberately. 

Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee has wrapped up its own three-year investigation of the CIA interrogation program, but its report is still classified and most certainly will remain so until after the election. In April, responding to a book by a former CIA official asserting that brutal interrogations had produced the intelligence that helped locate Osama bin Laden, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, called that claim "misguided and misinformed." Feinstein has been one of the very few politicians of any stripe to express outrage over the torture regime.

At the end of the day, no one has been prosecuted for torture in the U.S., although there have been some unsuccessful efforts abroad.

This includes CIA officials who deliberately destroyed videotapes of interrogations, while calls for a so-called truth commission have been rejected.  But irony of ironies, former CIA officer John C. Kirakou is awaiting trial on criminal charges that he told journalists the identities of CIA officers who participated in brutal interrogations, some of which included near drowning through waterboarding.

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/The Washington Post

What Photo Caption Would Mitt Write?

Like Romney is in free fall, already.  How else to explain his profoundly crass, factually inaccurate and self-serving account of the tragedy in Benghazi, Libya?  Which he continues to repeat.

This man is not merely an empty suit.  He is an amoral stooge despite his oh so righteous Mormon props, and yet again reaches a new low in how clueless he is about what it takes to be presidential.  And a real human being. 

Why Republicans Are Shamelessly Playing The Race Card & Why That Will Backfire

Time for a super-sized reality check, folks: It has been nearly 150 years since Abraham Lincoln, once but no longer the Republican Party's greatest hero, emancipated the slaves.  Yet the inheritors of Lincoln's mantle have concluded that the only way to defeat Barack Obama in what is shaping up to be the most important election since 1932 in determining the future course of this once great nation is to shamelessly play the race card.

There are many reasons to loath today's Republican Party: It's war on women and gays, blood thirst for going to war against Iran, opposition to weaning America from its addiction to fossil fuels, and a profoundly obdurate attitude that has prolonged the aftereffects of the worst recession since the Great Depression, which catapulted FDR into the White House after his 1932 landslide victory over Herbert Hoover, who like Romney was supposed to be a brilliant entrepreneur but like Romney would, crapped out bigtime in the Oval Office.  But crafting the core of the Republican message in this presidential election year around Obama's skin color -- and alternately that he isn't an American citizen -- is sick.

That message is part of a larger mosaic in which, by the GOP's reckoning, entitlement programs are race based and therefore blacks are fair game. Never mind that more whites use food stamps than blacks and Latinos combined. By coloring poverty black even in areas where there are few minorities in justifying slashing or eliminating food stamps, the WIC program and assistance to poor pregnant women, Republicans hope to attract white voters.

This is nothing new. 

Richard Nixon scapegoated blacks through his Southern Strategy.  This was reinforced by Ronald Reagan when he railed against "welfare queens," amplified by George H. W. Bush with his "Willie" Horton campaign ads (which were put together by a consultant who is now working for the Romney-Ryan campaign), and in 2008 through allegations pushed by surrogates for John McCain that Obama embraced the more radical ideas of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. 

Republicans will deny to a man that this dog whistling -- which one pundit noted is more like an air raid siren -- is central to their strategy to take back the presidency, but Ron Fournier, of all people, begs to disagree.

Fournier was a longtime Associated Press editor oft criticized for being in the GOP bag.  To no one's surprise, when he left the AP it was to become an editor at National Journal, a leading conservative rag where he could openly carry the party's water.  But Fournier recently went off script -- make that well off script -- when he publicly criticized the Romney-Ryan campaign on C-SPAN for a television ad claiming that Obama has dropped the work requirement for welfare recipients. 

The ad has been widely debunked, although Romney and Ryan continue to lie about the change to the federal law, a change that in fact was made at the request of Republican governors who wanted more state-level flexibility.  Meanwhile, a Romney spokesman let slip a candid admission: The campaign is not beholden to fact checkers.

The ad, Fournier said, was proof that the campaign was "playing the race card." 

Fournier, who is from overwhelmingly black and poor Detroit, said that welfare is a hot button issue in his hometown and that the ad was "pushing that button . . . playing to that racial prejudice. And I'm wondering: are you guys doing that on purpose?"

Of course they are doing that on purpose, but it is a losing strategy.

The Republican Party has been slowly but inevitably slipping into a self-induced coma as its voter base has shriveled and become overwhelmingly white and male.  It doesn't need these voters, some if not many of whom oppose Obama simply because of his race and will pull the big lever from Romney and Ryan come November 6. 

What the GOP does need to win are sufficient numbers of independent voters in crucial swing states, but most of these are women and while many of them are not necessarily enamored of the president -- after all, the effects of the recession fell disproportionately hard on them -- they are horrified by the party's opposition to access to affordable health care and reproductive counseling, abortion under all circumstances, as well as equal pay for equal work. 

These back to the Stone Age positions are, of course, enthusiastically endorsed by Ryan and somewhat less so by Romney in his biggest flip flop of all -- a shameless embrace of the party's hardcore right wing.  (Although, by golly, he now says he would keep parts of Obama's landmark Affordable Care Act.)  This goes a long way to explaining why Obama leads in most of those crucial swing states and leads by comfortable margins in some of them.  Incidentally, PollTracker found after considerable number crunching that 91.5 percent of the voters who of support Romney are white, 6.4 Latino and 2.1 black.  Some 66.2 percent of Obama's support comes from whites, 12.5 from Latinos and 21.4 from blacks.

No matter. 

White anger and rage are at the heart of the Tea Party manifesto and the Tea Party has become the Republican Party.  To them blacks are lazy parasites, illegal immigrants should be electrocuted or shot dead at the border and Muslim-Americans marked like Jews were in Nazi Germany.  In their view, marshaling white anger against a president they consider to be a usurper is paramount.

By the way, the soundtrack to this tragedy is the sound of Abraham Lincoln spinning in this grave.

The image above was sent by a member of the central committee of the Orange County (Calif.) Republican Party with the caption "Now you know why -- no birth certificate!"

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

40 Years On, The Allmans Are Better Than Ever & That's Saying A Lot

Gregg and Duane Allman (top) and the Allman Brothers Band today

Keeping a rock band going after the death or departure of a key member is a tricky business and many an ensemble has faltered or failed as a result of that.  Examples abound, including Deep Purple, Van Halen and Jefferson Starship.  Cult band Little Feat has survived but never has been as good since the death of leader Lowell George, while the various post-Grateful Dead incarnations have survived and succeeded, but without their late leader Jerry Garcia have not been as good even at their best.  Long story short, George and Garcia were irreplacable.

The Allman Brothers Band is a rare and conspicuous exception.

The band's artistic and commercial breakthrough arrived in 1971 with the release of At Fillmore East, which I consider to be the best live rock album ever.  Then in October of that year Duane Allman, the band's leader and a blues-rock guitarist nopareil, died in a motorcycle accident at age 24.  Bass player Berry Oakley died in another motorcycle accident a year later.  Chuck Leavell and Lamar Williams replaced Allman and Oakley and the band briefly attained even greater commercial success with the hit single "Ramblin' Man," but internal turmoil perhaps inevitably took down the band, which disbanded in 1976, reformed briefly in 1979 and dissolved again in 1982.

In 1989, the band got back together with Duane's brother Gregg still playing keyboards and singing lead locals, Dickey Betts still on guitar and Jai Johnny Johnson and Butch Trucks still on drums.  A series of personnel changes in the late 1990s included the departure of Betts, then early in the 2000s the band finally found stability with the addition of Oteil Burnbridge on bass and Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks, the nephew of Butch Trucks, on guitars.  The band has been going strong ever since and has a huge and devoted multi-generational fan base.

Fast forward to the second weekend in August and the First Annual Peach Festival at the Montage ski area outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  This three-day orgy of music featured 24 bands on two stages, including the Zac Brown Band, O.A.R, the Susan Tedeschi-Derek Trucks Band, Robert Randolph & The Family Band, and Blind Boys of Alabama, as well as Friday and Saturday night performances by the Allmans that concluded their summer 2012 tour. 

* * * * *

I was fortunate enough to see the Allman Brothers twice before Duane's death.  While I have followed them from afar over the years and have friends who religiously attend multiple shows during the band's now legendary month-long series of concerts at the Beacon Theater in New York City, I had not seen them live in over 40 years.

I expected them to be good and they delivered and then some.  We bailed before their Friday night set, which actually began about 12:20 on Saturday morning and rambled on to 3:30. Our mountain retreat is about an hour away and the woofs needed to be walked and fed. 

We were about 20 rows from the immense stage on Saturday night when they kicked off a two-hour set at a more reasonable time -- at least for someone who betrays his age in noting his last Allman's show was when Richard Nixon was president. 

From the first note of "Don't Want You No More" -- and I mean the very first note, I was transported back to 1971 and the Spectrum in Philadelphia.  The air was thick with marijuana smoke back then as well, but what was so wonderful is that first note conveyed the same tightness and power that the original Duane Allman-driven band had in spades. 

If there is any aspect of this band better than the original, it is the addition in the 1990s of sensational percussionist Marc Quiñones, while Butch Trucks and Johnson -- now calling himself Jaimoe -- have continued drumming up a storm.  The current band's sound is so immense and at times complex that it would be unable to succeed so marvelously without these three. 

Jaimoe's Jasssz Band was featured on a side stage on Saturday afternoon before the Allmans set, which was sublime as I spent most of their jazz-blues performance standing in a water park wave pool about 150 feet from the stage.

* * * * *

The journalist in me was curious to know how the Allmans had succeeded after such a long and bumpy ride. 

The consensus answer, articulated best by two fiftysomething guys from San Jose, California who had flown in to see the last two shows of the tour, was informative: The band in its current incarnation got it together when the members who drank and drugged to excess went straight or left.  Betts had notorious alcohol and cocaine habits that eventually resulted in him being shown the door, while Gregg Allman also had his nose deep in the bag. 

Then there is Warren Haynes, a workaholic musician like Garcia in his earlier years when he also had several side bands, whose presence has had a stabilizing influence. 

It is through Warren, I was told, that Gregg finally went straight and began writing songs again.  He has had two lengthy hospitalizations in recent years, the first for a liver transplant (no surprise there), yet was back on stage at Montage looking the worst for wear but with his Hammond B-3 chops as good as ever and "a voice that reflects the vicissitudes of personal losses and victories over the years," as a friend puts it.

How wonderfully reaffirming that the Allman Brothers Band, so much further down the road four decades on, can look back on all those personal loses but are able to revel in their victories, not the least of which has been surviving.

Top photo by David Tamoff/Retna Ltd. via Corbis

Cartoon du Jour

Joel Pett/Louisville Courier Journal

Yo Republicans, It's Called A God Job

How are Republicans going to explain that while their party out-Gods the Democrats by a country mile, Hurricane Isaac already has disrupted their national convention in Tampa?  And is almost certain to hit New Orleans?

Moving beyond the fact that the Republican rocket scientists who chose the Florida city apparently were unaware that late August is the apex of hurricane season in the Gulf of Illegal Immigrants -- hey, remember Katrina in 2005 guys? -- George Bush sure hasn't forgotten and I am not alone in thinking that his meh reaction to that enormous disaster was the turning point of his presidency. 

Projections now have Isaac missing Florida and slamming into . . . New Orleans and the other population centers devastated first by Katrina and then by Bush administration nglect.  Were it not for the potential for destruction, death and misery, I would suggest that Isaac is well deserved for Republicans and especially Mitt Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan, who has ferociously opposed funding most disaster aid.

As it is, the convention will not be the choreographed love feast that Romney's handlers wanted.

First Todd Aiken didn't get the memo requesting that knuckle draggers like himself suspend the War on Women rhetoric until after the convention, while vocal Akin supporter Mike Huckabee -- who says that he "does not fully support Romney" -- will give a prime time speech.  Meanwhile, Ron Paul supporters threatened to upset the entire Republican apple cart and with it the illusion of unity.

Photograph from NASA's Earth Observatory

Wanted: A Smoking Gun To Prove That Romney Knowingly Profited From Fraud

Did soon to be Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney profit from healthcare companies that committed massive Medicare fraud?  Absolutely, as the record shows that was the case in at least two instances.  What is less clear is whether he was aware of these criminal activities.  In this regard the record suggests that it would have been difficult for Romney to miss the fraud, and if he is the master strategist and corporate know it all that he claims to be, he would not have missed it.

The companies are Damon Clinical Laboratories, which in 2004 paid the then-largest healthcare criminal fraud fine -- $35.3 million -- as well as a $83.7 million civil fine, and industry giant Health Care Corporation of America, which in 2002 agreed to a $1.7 billion settlement with the Justice Department because of accusations of wide ranging fraud.

Medicare is much in the news not because of pervasive healthcare industry fraud, but because Romney and Paul Ryan, his vice presidential pick (who reportedly was selected because of a $100 million bribe from one of the Koch brothers), are ceaselessly painting themselves as defenders of Medicare by obfuscating what President Obama intends to do with $700 billion in cuts he has made, which is distribute this money more equitably through the Affordable Care Act.

While their claim is utterly lacking in credibility, a potential bombshell lurks behind it: That in the cases of Damon and HCA, as well as possibly other companies, the eagle-eyed Romney, as CEO of Bain Capital and still a beneficiary of its money-making prowess, saw the fraudulent activities of these companies not as a turn-off but an opportunity to make big bucks because both were adept at milking greater profits even if it was at substantial taxpayer expense.

In 1988, Damon began the systematic practice of Medicare fraud that ended up costing taxpayers $400 million, according to the prosecutors' estimate.  In 1990, with Romney at the helm, Bain bought a minority stake in Damon.  He took a seat on its board of directors and was on its Strategic Planning Committee.  Romney later said he believed Damon CEO Robert Rosen's claim that the company was in compliance with government regulations.  In other words, he was uncurious about whether the claim was accurate and whether Bain had bought into a company that might not be operating above board.

Then in 1993, Corning bought Damon with Romney's encouragement, netting Bain between $7.4 million and $12 million, depending upon who is doing the counting.  Romney walked away with a paltry $437,000.  Corning immediately uncovered the fraud that had been perpetrated under Romney's nose for upwards of four years and went to the feds.  

In his unsuccessful 1994 bid to unseat Ted Kennedy, Romney boasted about the role he played in Damon's growth, then in 2002 when running for Massachusetts governor he had the temerity to claim that he helped uncover the fraud, which if nothing else shows that Romney had no inhibitions about lying through his ivories years before his presidential bids.

The key to HCA's success at generating enormous profits from its 163 hospitals during the Bush Recession, a time when many hospitals were going broke, was based on getting more revenue from insurance companies and patients by billing more aggressively, reducing emergency room overcrowding by refusing to treat some uninsured patients, reducing staffing to inadequate levels, providing kickbacks to doctors who referred patients to its hospitals, doing unnecessary surgeries, and of course fraudulent Medicare billing that prosecutors' estimated ran into the billions of dollars. 

Rick Scott was HCA's CEO during much of the period when there was fraudulent billing.  He resigned but was not charged in the fraud, went on to become a venture capitalist and then Florida's governor.  He is as enthusiastic a Romney supporter as former Governor Charlie Christ is a detractor.

When HCA's profits began sagging in 2006 because of fewer patient admissions, in part as a result of its skinflint practices, investment bankers from Merrill Lynch approached Bain and two other private equity firms to discuss a buyout, which took place later that year.

In the years since, HCA's industry-leading profit growth raised the value of its holdings to nearly three and a half times the initial investment of Bain and the two other firms in the $33 billion deal.  The firms -- with Romney along for the ride -- took the money and ran.  In 2011, HCA once again became a public company and floated a successful stock offering.

* * * * *

Most people naively view Medicare as a huge social program, but it is much more.

Medicare is a system of contracts that transfers more than $500 billion in taxpayer funds each year into the private sector.  While Medicare has taken the profit out of providing health insurance to seniors, it has left untouched the profit motive in the delivery of healthcare services. 

As one commentator put it, "Medicare's billions have played a central role in building the commercial healthcare leviathan it is today."

This begins to explain why providers, including individual physicians running Medicare mills, as well as Fortune 500 pharmaceutical and medical device companies, regularly try to bilk the system for more than they are entitled to, but in the forefront are for-profit hospital systems like HCA.  At the end of the day, it is these rapacious fraudsters and not poor and indigent seniors who created the Medicare crisis.

* * * * *

I feel liked a damned fool for not seeing it coming. 

The corporatocracy has become a shadow government that in some respects is more powerful than the federal government.  A tiny segment of the population, now commonly referred to as 1 percenters, has virtually all of the wealth as the chasm between the rich and middle class and poor grows apace.  The 1 percenters own practically everything else, so why not the White House?  Could this Vampire Elite do worse than with Romney, who is one of their own, as president?  Unlikely.  

Can the money that Bain and Romney made from Damon and HCA and Romney continues to make because of the millions he receives in largely untaxed stock dividends be considered blood money?  Absolutely. This is because Romney tries to project a holier-than-thou image and has boasted about all of the great things that Bain did under his tutelage. 

Meanwhile, there probably is a smoking gun in the form of someone who worked for Bain or in Bain, Damon or HCA documents that reveal Romney was well aware that taxpayers were being fleeced.  My gun is a pea shooter, so concerned voters should hope that The New York Times, which has aggressively investigated HCA's dark side in recent weeks, or some other media outlet with a conscience is looking for that smoking gun as Romney is coronated later this week in Tampa.

When found, that alone would disqualify Mitt Romney to run for president, let alone be president.

* * * * *

The information in this article was drawn from The Daily Kos, Dirt Diggers Digest, The New York Times and RedState. Links here, here, here, here and here.