There is so much to opine with Romney's eleventh hour veep pick - here's Shitepoke's in a few quick bursts:
Romney is a narcissistic shape-shifter. In his run for the presidency - as a right-wing Republican - he has had to flee from every aspect of his past:
Romney-care in Massachusetts was the virtual blueprint for the dreaded Obamacare which he now vows to repeal.
The ballyhooed Salt Lake City Olympics turns out to be a $1.4 billion earmark boondoggle on the taxpayers' tab - with untold local graft and special interest draw-downs.
Bain Capital is a rich-man's Ponzi scheme centered around plundering undervalued companies, loading them with debt and management fees, firing the help, and selling off the pieces.
And his personal finances are unambiguously so fraught with flimflam, money laundering, and off-shore accounts that they'll never see the light of day in terms of disclosure.
While the ABO (anybody-but Obama) crowd will eat glass and vote for Romney, he has failed to convince the Ron Paul-ers, the Teabaggers, and the Christianists who view the election as a Hobson's Choice. AND these are just the Republican BASE, much less Independents.
The Ryan veep pick is a desperate ploy to energize the Push-Granny-Over-the-Cliff voters and the Wall Street royalists who are licking their chops over the final three BIG tranches of public money: Medicare trust fund, Social Security Trust fund, and Federal pensions.
The up-side is that it will also energize the Dem base at the horror of this preening little fascist NeoCon punk - riding on the coattails of this Mormon oligarch - who has deemed Ryan's budget scheme marvelous - who shills for the 1% and wants to swap Medicare for a discounted coupon-clipping scheme that will let me - at 75 years' old, with diabetes, high blood pressure, and a heart condition - go out and shop the for-profit insurance market for a really keen buy!
And YES it will throw Florida's 29 electoral votes against the wall - where 3.4 million Medicare beneficiaries make up the biggest voting bloc. And Romney's flimsy line to haul in another 4.3 million Hispanic Floridians with a Marco Rubio veep pick (who famously lied about his Cuban credentials) has now snapped in two.
Yeah, I know. We're well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, but this election year has loosed a jaw-dropping Republican attempt to create a partisan wedge issue out of whole cloth. The issue: American women's right and free access to birth control. And Surprise, they're foursquare again' it. Huh? Sound like something out of the 1950's? Well, at least let's get the playing field straight.
When Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) - gratuitously dubbed Obamacare by its opponents who were banking on - and desperately scheming for - its demise, the keystone to its implementation was the so-called national insurance exchange from which employers could purchase coverage for their employees.
Any existing healthcare insurer (Blue Cross, Aetna, Kaiser, etc.) would be required to meet certain minimum coverage requirements in order to qualify for the exchange. The law additionally specified that a range of preventative care be covered with no additional out-of-pocket cost to the insured - the unassailable logic that an ounce of prevention is worth untold millions of dollars in down-stream treatment costs.
Rather than getting deep in to the weeds of administrative minutiae, Congress opted to leave the specifics of these minimum requirements to the Department Health and Human Services to define. In the run-up to the 2014 implementation of Obamacare, these details fell under the purview of Obama appointee, Department Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
For that, Secretary Sebelius proceeded to publish the recommend minimum requirements for preventative coverage. For all: colonoscopies and range of cancer screening; for men: prostate exams and PSA tests; for women: mamograms, pap tests, and birth control pills.
In excruciating umbrage to sectarian institutions under the vaunted First Amendment, churches-proper were exempted from compliance with any-and-all provisions that stuck discord between public policy and private faith. For that, a Jehovah's Witness congregation would not be compelled to cover blood transfusions for its staff, neither would a Catholic parish be required to cover birth control for its direct employees.
The quotidian obviousness of these standards would routinely fly under the radar of any partisan dogfight. But, alas, there was a fly in the ointment: Republicans in alliance with parochial right-wingers would unleash the dogs of partisan war on whom they perceived to be politically vulnerable - one Barack Hussein Obama.
Republican speaker John Boehner (above) uncharacteristically descended from the speaker's dais into the well of the House to deliver perhaps one of the most disingenuous and dishonest partisan diatribes ever uttered.
Piling on was an endless cast of Catholic prelates, denouncing the Obama administration of flagrantly usurping his constitutional mandate to protect the sanctity of religion against secular authority.
And not to miss a chance at grabbing the media spotlight, de facto head of the Republican National Committee trash-talkster Rush Limbaugh piled on heaping helping of his signature hyperbole - memorably dubbing Georgetown co-ed grad student Sandra Fluke a slut for her advocacy of contraceptives in the school's insurance program - further suggesting that she sell porn videos of her sexual indulgences to pay for her recreational coitus - rather than looking to the government for a hand-out. Fluke's 15-minutes' of fame would famously land her a spot on the 2012 Democratic National Convention speaker-roll.
Stripping away all of the partisan and parochial fireworks, It all boils down to the obligations of the Catholic Church as an employer in constitutional democracy. Catholics, under the aegis of a plethora of corporations, have extended their reach into a multitude of extra-curricular activities, including schools, universities, hospitals, charitable outfits - you name it. And no one is dismissing their eleemosynary contributions to our society.
But in doing so, they employ a broad range of private citizens - many of whom have no interest in their religion. Accordingly, they must abide by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, agreeing to not discriminate in hiring practices based on a gamut of constitutionally protected categories, including race, creed, national origin, religion - and soon to come, sexual orientation and gender identity.
The little mentioned caveat is that 28 states already require religiously-affiliated organizations - irrespective of their pulpit preachments - to cover birth control in their employee insurance plans. And notwithstanding that ninety percent of self-identified Catholic women use contraceptives at some point in their lives, the Catholic hierarchy - performing in the role of partisan shills - was itching for a political dust-up with the Obama administration:
Hey, we're run by the Catholics. You know what we say about family planning: ain't no such thing. Anything that interferes with ovulation and sperm implantation is verboten. Hey, the Pope said it; we believe it; that settles it. If you work for us, check your U.S. citizenship and your First Amendment rights at the door. You want birth control benefits in your group policy, tough shit. Shut up; get pregnant; go home; rinse and repeat.
It seems abundantly obvious that the issue is more one of control, than birth control. Do Catholic-run corporations have the right to consider all of their employees communicants - even though they are already required to hire without regard to religion? Constitutionally speaking, the answer is unambiguously - no.
For that, the Roman Catholic Church in the United States finds itself on the horns of a dilemma: get out of businesses that serve and employee at-large citizens or get with the government program.
And alas, the Obama administration finds itself on a slippery slope to suborning theocracy: capitulate with Rome, tear down the firewall between church-and-state, and leave Thomas Jefferson spinning on a rotisserie in his grave.
OH BUT WAIT: Dateline February 10, 2012, Secretary Sebelius struck a sweet deal with the insurance companies - all based on a little actuarial arithmetic - something insurance companies are quite good with. It seems (surprise) that footing the bills for prenatal and maternity costs are one of the single biggest liabilities insurance companies incur - eating into shareholder profits like a buzz saw. It seems that reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies by a mere fraction would handily pay for the cost of contraceptives for untold hundreds of women.
So here is Sebelius' compromise: Any religiously-affiliated organization that objects to paying for contraceptives in its group policy may opt-out under Obamacare guidelines. The alternative: any insurance company participating on the exchange will agree to pick up the cost of contraceptives for those women - upon request - off-policy - and free of charge.
Done. Problem solved:
(1) Churches need not fret that a cent of their funds is spent to undermine their sectarian doctrine;
(2) Insurance companies - and their shareholders - are ensured optimum return on investment by minimizing unplanned pregnancy and maternity claims;
(3) American women receive critical range of family planning and preventative medical care; and
(4) The Constitution is spared - another day - from the ravages of theocrats whose longing is to institute denominational dogma into public law.
Shitepoke invites those of you, with attention deficit disorder spans sufficient to accommodate a 12-minute vid, to inform yourself in the full PBS NewsHour report of the compromise.
Shitepoke.com, February 9, 2012
Calhoun GA
Post Script: But make no mistake about it - the unrepentant pandering
of the Republican party on this one is an unambiguous assault on
women's healthcare. Whether it be the boys in the Party or the boys in
the clergy - none of the claimants has a single uterus among them.
During an interview with Spanish language network UniVision, Mitt Romney was pressed on whether it was fair for him to pay 13 percent of his income in taxes — as he did in 2010, according to his recently released tax returns — when many middle class families pay twice that percentage. Romney proceeded to claim that his actual rate is closer to 45 or 50 percent. Here's how he spun it:
You can pause at 1:15 for the purposes of this blog
Follows is a verbatim transcript of the Romney and UniVision exchange. Shitepoke inserts his dialog as if he had been participating in the interview:
UniVision:You just released your tax returns. In 2010 you only paid 13 percent of taxes while most Americans paid much more than that. Is that fair?
Romney:Well, actually, I released two years of taxes and I think the average is almost 15 percent. And then also, on top of that, I gave another more 15 percent to charity. When you add it together with all of the taxes and the charity, particularly in the last year, I think it reaches almost 40 percent that I gave back to the community.
Shitepoke: Charity? Whoa Governor. What the hell are you talking about? I'm sure you're familiar with Schedule B on your 1040 Return. On that form, your charitable deductions are deducted from your adjusted gross income before your tax rate is calculated. When you claim a charitable deduction, you disavow that amount of income as being subject to income tax - on the premises that it qualifies as exempt income according to the tax code. You cannot equate charitable contributions with income tax.
And what this "community" you're talking about? Let's put a lot of clarity in this: you're talking about the Mormon Church - in fact $4 million in the last four years alone - $4 million in income for which you have evaded taxes by virtue of the very "charitable" (shall we say) tax code which allows any organization with a 5013C charter to charge its operating costs directly to American taxpayers.
Sorry, but when you say "give this back to the community" you really mean funnel tax exempt income into the coffers of a bunch of thugs in Salt Lake City who - well - spent $30 million to defeat California Proposition 8 - denying marriage equality to gay Americans. Uhh, some community you have there.
Romney: One of the reasons why we have a lower tax rate on capital gains is because capital gains are also being taxed at the corporate level. So as businesses earn profits, that's taxed at 35 percent, then as they distribute those profits as dividends, that's taxed at 15 percent more. So, all total, the tax rate is really closer to 45 or 50 percent.
Shitepoke: Uhh, Governor. You've got me all discombobulated here. Let's draw the distinction between equity and dividends when it comes to tax liability. Capital gains is the measurement of your gain (or loss) in shareholder equity. It has noting to do with corporate taxation. Shareholder equity is not subject to taxation - either on the corporate balance sheet or on your own tax return. Only the gain or loss in equity is subject to taxation when you sell or trade a corporate equity position (stock). That the current income tax on capital gains is 15% is purely a value judgment on behalf of the Ways and Means Committee.
Dividends are corporate profits distributed to shareholders. Dividends are taxed as ordinary income - to you and all taxpayers. True, corporate dividends are declared after corporate profits are taxed, but so what. When you mix capital gains and dividends you are mixing apples and oranges. But you knew that, didn't you
UniVision:But is it fair what you pay, 13 percent, while most pay much more than that?
Romney: Well, again, I go back to the point that the funds are being taxes twice at two different levels.
Shitepoke: Mitt, you are as full of shit as a Christmas Turkey. Your income is 99% capital gains - or as the IRS calls it unearned income. From that you subtracted - really conned - the taxpayers out of millions in direct subsidy to the Mormon Church. So your effective tax rate was actually LESS than the 13% you paid - not MORE. But your lucky in one respect, no main stream media reporter will dare challenge you on your phony math.
DISCLAIMER: Shitepoke.com blog attempts to authenticate its content. Disclosure of substantive errors is solicited and will be acknowledged. Accordingly, readers are encouraged to explore and enjoy this content, in its own right, but to always obtain additional sources for historical or academic research.
Not to put too fine a point on yesterday's South Carolina's presidential primary, but reflect that this election represented the essence of rarefied reflexive Southern conservatism:
1. No Democrats were on the ballot; so, presumably the only voters were card-carrying Republicans.
2. The modern Republican party is a product of the South - in reflexive revolt of post World War II socially progressive initiatives.
3. While the South loves Jesus and its women with equal fervor, Republicans, like Baptists, seriously believe that fifty percent of the human race doesn't have the human qualities to weigh in on the really important stuff - whether it be preaching the gospel or electing a president.
For that, this week's electioneering and voting in South Carolina took on a surrealistic aura, tapping into a well spring of antediluvian angst. Not to get too pedantic, but it's therapeutic to rewind sixty-four years to the birth of South Carolina politics as we know it.
James Strom Thurmond (1902-2003) represented South Carolina in the U.S. Senate for virtually a half century (1954-2003). But his unblemished record as a old-school cracker bigot reached its apogee in 1948, when he threw in for president under the States' Rights Democratic (Dixiecrat) Party - the first of the so-called Solid South Democratic factions to peel-off from tissue rejection, owing to their party's postwar progressive initiatives - in this case Truman's executive order to desegregate of the military. Outrage - outrage I tell you! That done it.
In one of his milder stump diatribes Thurmond allowed: "I wanna' tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches."
Strom would bail out on the race-mixing Dems and switch to the more like-minded Republican Party in his 1956 senatorial race.
In 1948. Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats peeled-off 39 Deep South electoral votes (including one so-called faithless elector in Tennessee) from the reviled turncoat white American Harry Truman - creating one of the closest presidential elections in history.
An implacable racist, Strom Thurmond harangued the Senate with the longest filibuster in history, speaking for a total of 24-hours, 18-minutes, in a failed attempt to derail the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Cots were brought for colleagues to nap on while Thurmond weighed in on - among other things - his grandmother's biscuit recipe.
Thurmond's family life was somewhat of cartoon - as he had a thing for beauty queens. He met his first wife Jean when he was judging a Miss South Carolina pageant in which she was a contestant. While she didn't win, Thurmond hired her - 24-years' his junior - as his personal secretary and proposed to her in an office dictation. Tragically, she succumbed of a brain tumor 13-years' later, childless.
But Strom really sent South Carolina's eyebrows northward in 1968, when he married Nancy Janice Moore, Miss South Carolina of 1965. He was 66 and she was 22. Yep, that's a 44-year margin of error.
Strom's and Nancy's union would produce four lily-white strapping South Carolinians in rapid-fire succession. Above circa 1990 (L-R): James Strom, Jr. (1972-); wife Nancy Janice Moore Thurmond; James Strom, Sr.; Nancy (1971-1993); Juliana (1973-); and Paul (1976-). Tragically, daughter Nancy was killed at the age of 22 by a drunk driver in Columbia, SC. Nancy and Strom separated (when he was 89) about a year after this idyllic portrait. Although they never divorced, Nancy did not attempt to hide her adulterous relationship with Dr. Thomas Rowland, Jr., president of the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSA), whom she would quietly marry in 2003 - a matter of weeks after Strom's long overdue demise.
Good ole' Strom suffered from immortality disorder. And apparently South Carolinians were complicit in the deception - not wanting to relinquish their fetish on the 19th century. Accordingly, he ran for Senate in 1996 at the age of 94. Despite unambiguous clinical evidence of advancing dementia, the immobile, doddering, and drooling novogenarian - with signature sprigged hair, dyed the color of Tang - won handily by 9 points. For that, the insentient Strom spent most of his eighth term trundled in-and-out of Walter Reed Army Hospital on the taxpayers' dime, a sort of middle-finger salute to America, courtesy of the dullards of South Carolina.
But Stom's operatives weren't done yet. Intent on defying all odds, they went on to broker his 2002 senatorial prospects, banking on the would-be 100-year-old's unblemished electoral record. When it became obvious that Strom could no longer be propped up alive, they ran the following deal by Jim Hodges, then-governor of South Carolina: Strom would resign his Senate seat, provided the governor would appoint his estranged spouse Nancy to his unexpired term, allowing her to run, in her own right in 2002, as an incumbent. The Democratic governor declined to oblige, thus steering the Thurmond dynasty safely to the curb.
But Strom would not go out without fanfare. In the run-up to his 100th birthday, Republican supplicants lined up en masse to genuflect and offer up incense to the burnt-out effigy of the wrong side of history. Front and center would be Republican Senate Minority Leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi.
On December 5, 2002 at Strom's 100th birthday fete, Lott famously proclaimed - full open-mic: "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either." Thurmond nodded - like a bobble-headed nebbish - in nostalgic regret.
Presumably the manifold problems Lott was referring to were ... admit[ting] the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches. While desultory Republican colleagues would awkwardly leap onto the bandwagon in his defense, craven party leadership would throw Lott under the political buss- stripping him of his senate leadership status.
Strom Thurmond died in his sleep on June 26, 2003, at the age of 100-years and 200-days. But, alas, he would be denied the last word. On July 1, 2003 - only 5-days after his death - Slate Magazine broke the story of then 78-year-old Essie Mae Washington-Williams, Thurmond's eldest child. It seems back in 1925 the randy 22-year-old Strom had bedded a 16-year-old black household servant by the name of Carrie Butler - and in fact, carried on a relationship with her for quite some time. Essie Mae was the mixed-race progeny of that match.
Essie Mae Washington-Williams (1925-), mixed-race eldest child of Sen. Strom Thurmond and 16-year-old black household servant Carrie Butler
As an infant, Essie Mae was sent to Pennsylvania to be raised by her aunt Mary (Carrie Butler's older sister) and her husband John Henry Washington. In 1941, when Essie Mae was 16, Carrie broke the news of her highfalutin white daddy and took her to South Carolina to call on him. For that, it seems Strom had been a walk-on player in Essie Mae's life ever since, supporting her on-and-off at intervals - including paying her tuition at South Carolina State University (SCSU), a historically all-black black institution, where she graduated with a degree in business.
Essie Mae Washington wound up in California, where she earned a masters degree in education at USC. She married an attorney, Julius T. Williams, with whom she had 4 children. She went on to have a 30-year teaching career in the Los Angeles public school system. In 2005 she was awarded an honorary PhD from her undergraduate alma mater SCSU. That same year, she published a memoir, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, which explored her sense of dislocation based on her mixed heritage, as well as going to college in the Jim Crow South after having grown up in the North.
Slate Magazine's Diana McWhorter puts an exceptionally fine point on the stultifying enigma of Ole' Strom: .... "We need not dwell on the obvious mind-boggling hypocrisies here: that someone who ran for president on an anti-pool-mixin' platform was party to an integrated gene pool. Or that Thurmond's other signature political achievement—the 24-hour-without-bathroom-break filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957—was done in the name of sparing the South from 'mongrelization.' This form of duplicity has been a Southern tradition dating back to those miscegenating slave owners."
.... "Racial conflict as a diversion from class conflict is nothing new, of course. But somehow Thurmond's subterranean Freudian life—surreptitious relationships with a black daughter and her mother—brings a fresh level of appall to the immorality of his demagoguing. That it was just 'bidness' may account for why Strom Thurmond never felt compelled to ask the forgiveness of a race he devoted so much public capital to making miserable—a race that included members of his own family."
Fast Forward sixty-four years: now come the 2012 Republican wannabes: Mitt Romney, the plastic Mormon Jesus-denying heathen from Massachusetts. Rick Santorum, the sweater-vest wearing Pennsylvania plutocrat who looks down his nose at a little recreational sodomy (hey this is South Carolina). Ron Paul, the perennial whack-job who wants to legalize dope-smokin' and outlaw the Federal Reserve. Or the authentic Newt Gingrich. Why, they didn't know what hit 'em.
Brother Newt - although he hails from Pennsylvania - has spent his political life acquiring perfect pitch when it comes to aggrieved Southern populist rhetoric. For that, he was the hands-down beneficiary of two South Carolina debates - delivering back-to-back grand slams while his opponents looked on in stunned awe.
First came Fox News' Juan Williams - who as a black man has hilariously made a career of pandering to his white betters, embracing conservatism like a Clarence Thomas acolyte. But Newt's "Food Stamp President" epithet was even a bit much for the step-and-fetch-it Williams. Cornering Newt for his unambiguous racist dog whistle rhetoric, Newt doubled down on his attack on minorities and their putative lack of work ethic. The Myrtle Beach crowd erupted in adulation. Juan retreated hang-dog at being upbraided by his fellow Fox News colleague.
Then came CNN's John King - giddy at the prospect of airing out Newt's x-wife's dirty laundry as the lead-off pitch in Charleston's Convention Center. ABC News had only days' before supposedly broken the news of second wife Marianne - the one scorned by third-wife interloper Calista, the one sharing the stage with Newt. (By the way, those even remotely following Newt viewed this as stale news on a slow day - as Marianne had already spilled these beans in an 2010 Esquire Interview - with the same lurid detail.)
Ahh - painted in the corner of bargaining for an "open marriage" with X No. 2 and today's vaunted No. 3 Calista. Newt hammered the offense, blaming the media for the pain he inflicted on three marriages. Once again the room erupted with delight.
The take-home message: "Why, don't every man have an x-old lady out there somewhere ready to make his life miserable? I ask you." Perfect pitch for the self-selected chauvinist audience. Blam. Four hundred feet over the center field fence.
Thus, given the home-court game and the rarefied demographics, Newtie swept the floor with 40% of the South Carolina Republican vote. South Carolina Republican's gambit: buying into the party propaganda that Obama is an ineffectual poseur, incapable of uttering a cogent thought without his TelePrompter, ole' Newt is just the ticket to blow a hole in his cover.
This is not to say that Newt will fare similarly on Super Tuesday - but that his racist, homophobic, xenophobic sentiments are enjoying unbridled fervor among his primary supporters. For that, he will hold many cards in a brokered convention - inspiring and giddy news for Obama and the Democrats.
