At the RNC convention, there wasn’t a whole lot of talk about Romney. There were lots of Republicans talking about themselves, but Romney? Not so much.
Ann Romney was expected to talk about Romney but even then, she didn’t talk about his policies. It was just this feel-good happy crappy garbage about falling in love with a guy from her town. Maybe that passed as sweet but it certainly wasn’t inclusive in any way. The attempt to relate to women came off as phony.
And Chris Christie? He was making a speech for himself for 2016 but he certainly wasn’t making a speech for Romney.
The speeches were predictable, but nothing exciting. And some were downright weird. I’m looking at you, Santorum, with your weird disembodied hands speech.
Shorter Question Everything
The RNC Convention:
• Sums it up nicely: The press will tell you that Ann Romney did a great job in her speech tonight. The press decided that even before she spoke a word. In fact, she didn’t do a particularly good job — for most of it, she seemed like a grinning prom queen basking in the school body’s adulation; she had a lousy speech to deliver, full of generic talk about ordinary life (yours and mine as well as the allegedly ordinary life of her family), but she grinned and waved at people at what were supposed to be poignant moments, and she never really made Mitt Romney seem like a flesh-and-blood person. What she said reminded me of the eulogy for one of my aunts, delivered in a church she hadn’t attended in years by a priest who’d never met her. He was working from biographical data given to him by the family, and he pretended he knew her idiosyncrasies and virtues. That’s how Ann sounded.
• Ann Romney speech “condescending“. Ann Romney was comparing the entire nation to a high school girl being escorted home from a dance. That was her pitch: I love him, you should, too. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about the details.
• New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte says Obama “never even ran a lemonade stand,” a dig that’s definitely false, but nothing new for the GOP:
As Politifact detailed in 2009, in response to a similar allegation from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, Obama held a number of retail and food service jobs as a teenager in Hawaii—including scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins, which technically doesn’t serve lemonade but it does have a pink rasberry lemonade sorbet:
1975 or 1976 — ice cream scooper, Baskin-Robbins — Honolulu — Obama claims to have lost his taste for ice cream during this, his first job, the duration of which is not publicly known.
Date unknown — deli counter clerk, business name unknown — Honolulu — Obama had a summer job at a deli counter in Hawaii, making sandwiches, his spokesman said during the presidential campaign.
1980 — gift shop sales clerk, business name unknown — Honolulu — Obama worked at a gift shop in Hawaii selling island souvenirs the summer after his freshman year at Occidental College in California.
As Politifact noted, Obama held private-sector jobs as an adult as well, including posts at a Chicago law firm and a New York City company that helped American companies do business abroad—exactly the kind of experience Romney is accusing Obama of lacking.
[motherjones]
• Rachel Maddow: Chris Christie’s Keynote Speech Was Act ‘Of Political Selfishness‘ – “This speech not only was a bad speech. I think this was one of the most remarkable acts of political selfishness I have ever seen.” …”He waited 1800 words into a 2600 word speech to even bring [Romney] up,” she pointed out.
• “He can’t fix the economy because he doesn’t know how it was built,” Boehner said to roars of approval from a worked-up crowd during his speech here at the Republican National Convention.
• An attendee at the Republican National Convention in Tampa on Tuesday allegedly threw nuts at a black camerawoman working for CNN and said “This is how we feed animals” before being removed from the convention, a network official confirmed to TPM.
Hurricane Isaac:
• Hurricane Isaac pounded through southeastern Louisiana on Wednesday morning with 80 mph winds that sent water gushing over levees in marshy Plaquemines Parish and knocked out power to more than 400,000 homes and businesses.
• GOP Louisiana gov Jindal mad that Obama isn’t forking over the emergemcy dollars fast enough. That’s rich, given the shrieking the rightwingers start up with when ANY spending is done [that they don't benefit from personally of course]. I’m sure that, afterward, Jindal will go right back to stating that the government needs to stop emergency funding.
• Hundreds of U.S. Army National Guard troops took up strategic positions around New Orleans, preparation meant to avoid the chaos seen in the days and weeks after Katrina in August 2005. Brandishing automatic assault rifles to ward off any threat of looting, the troops in military vehicles took up positions on mostly deserted streets.
US Politics:
• We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers – Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster.
• Arizona GOP Favorite Doesn’t Want Middle Easterners In U.S. ‘Legally Or Illegally’:
Gabriela Saucedo Mercer hasn’t even won the Republican primary for Congress in Arizona yet, but she is already facing attacks from the Democratic Congressman she is hoping to unseat in November over some incendiary comments she made in the past about Middle Eastern immigrants.
In an interview with a conservative website last year, Saucedo Mercer talked in depth about her views on immigration. A Mexican immigrant herself who became a U.S. citizen, she said the issue was important because people from places other than Mexico were among those coming across the border illegally.
“That includes Chinese, Middle Easterners,” she said. “If you know Middle Easterners, a lot of them, they look Mexican or they look, you know, like a lot of people in South America, dark skin, dark hair, brown eyes. And they mix. They mix in.
“And those people, their only goal in life is to, to cause harm to the United States. So why do we want them here, either legally or illegally? When they come across the border, besides the trash that they leave behind, the drug smuggling, the killings, the beheadings. I mean, you are seeing stuff. It’s a war out there.”
[TPM]
• A federal court has blocked an attempt by Texas to redraw its electoral maps after the US justice department said the move was intended to diminish the impact of the Latino vote.
Bits and pieces:
• Six US army soldiers and three marines escaped criminal charges but received administrative punishments for mistakenly burning Qur’ans and urinating on the corpses of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, US military officials said Monday.
• “An Israeli bombing would lead to a regional war and solve the internal problems of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It would galvanize Iranian society behind the leadership and create unity around the nuclear issue. And it would justify Iran in rebuilding its nuclear project and saying, ‘Look, see, we were attacked by the Zionist enemy and we clearly need to have it.’ A bombing would be considered an act of war and there would be an unpredictable counterattack against us.” – Meir Dagan, former head of Israel’s Mossad, in the New Yorker
• Two Americans wounded when their US embassy vehicle came under fire in Mexico were employed by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of an anti-drug task force, The New York Times reported Wednesday. The two were driving with a Mexican navy captain to a military training facility south of Mexico City on Friday when their armored US embassy vehicle was fired upon by federal police, Mexican officials.
• Manhattan to be sprayed with pesticides to fight West Nile virus, will target Manhattan’s prestigious Upper West Side neighborhood and parts of the famed Central Park. The department said trucks would spray “a very low concentration” of pesticide and that “when properly used, this product poses no significant risks to human health.” However, it also urged people to stay indoors during the spraying and to remove clothes and children’s toys from outside.
F.D.Brightly
So what about Romney?
At the RNC convention, there wasn’t a whole lot of talk about Romney. There were lots of Republicans talking about themselves, but Romney? Not so much.
Ann Romney was expected to talk about Romney but even then, she didn’t talk about his policies. It was just this feel-good happy crappy garbage about falling in love with a guy from her town. Maybe that passed as sweet but it certainly wasn’t inclusive in any way. The attempt to relate to women came off as phony.
And Chris Christie? He was making a speech for himself for 2016 but he certainly wasn’t making a speech for Romney.
The speeches were predictable, but nothing exciting. And some were downright weird. I’m looking at you, Santorum, with your weird disembodied hands speech.
Shorter Question Everything
The RNC Convention:
• Sums it up nicely: The press will tell you that Ann Romney did a great job in her speech tonight. The press decided that even before she spoke a word. In fact, she didn’t do a particularly good job — for most of it, she seemed like a grinning prom queen basking in the school body’s adulation; she had a lousy speech to deliver, full of generic talk about ordinary life (yours and mine as well as the allegedly ordinary life of her family), but she grinned and waved at people at what were supposed to be poignant moments, and she never really made Mitt Romney seem like a flesh-and-blood person. What she said reminded me of the eulogy for one of my aunts, delivered in a church she hadn’t attended in years by a priest who’d never met her. He was working from biographical data given to him by the family, and he pretended he knew her idiosyncrasies and virtues. That’s how Ann sounded.
• Ann Romney speech “condescending“. Ann Romney was comparing the entire nation to a high school girl being escorted home from a dance. That was her pitch: I love him, you should, too. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about the details.
• New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte says Obama “never even ran a lemonade stand,” a dig that’s definitely false, but nothing new for the GOP:
• Rachel Maddow: Chris Christie’s Keynote Speech Was Act ‘Of Political Selfishness‘ – “This speech not only was a bad speech. I think this was one of the most remarkable acts of political selfishness I have ever seen.” …”He waited 1800 words into a 2600 word speech to even bring [Romney] up,” she pointed out.
• “He can’t fix the economy because he doesn’t know how it was built,” Boehner said to roars of approval from a worked-up crowd during his speech here at the Republican National Convention.
• An attendee at the Republican National Convention in Tampa on Tuesday allegedly threw nuts at a black camerawoman working for CNN and said “This is how we feed animals” before being removed from the convention, a network official confirmed to TPM.
Hurricane Isaac:
• Hurricane Isaac pounded through southeastern Louisiana on Wednesday morning with 80 mph winds that sent water gushing over levees in marshy Plaquemines Parish and knocked out power to more than 400,000 homes and businesses.
• GOP Louisiana gov Jindal mad that Obama isn’t forking over the emergemcy dollars fast enough. That’s rich, given the shrieking the rightwingers start up with when ANY spending is done [that they don't benefit from personally of course]. I’m sure that, afterward, Jindal will go right back to stating that the government needs to stop emergency funding.
• Hundreds of U.S. Army National Guard troops took up strategic positions around New Orleans, preparation meant to avoid the chaos seen in the days and weeks after Katrina in August 2005. Brandishing automatic assault rifles to ward off any threat of looting, the troops in military vehicles took up positions on mostly deserted streets.
US Politics:
• We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers – Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster.
• Arizona GOP Favorite Doesn’t Want Middle Easterners In U.S. ‘Legally Or Illegally’:
• A federal court has blocked an attempt by Texas to redraw its electoral maps after the US justice department said the move was intended to diminish the impact of the Latino vote.
Bits and pieces:
• Six US army soldiers and three marines escaped criminal charges but received administrative punishments for mistakenly burning Qur’ans and urinating on the corpses of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, US military officials said Monday.
• “An Israeli bombing would lead to a regional war and solve the internal problems of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It would galvanize Iranian society behind the leadership and create unity around the nuclear issue. And it would justify Iran in rebuilding its nuclear project and saying, ‘Look, see, we were attacked by the Zionist enemy and we clearly need to have it.’ A bombing would be considered an act of war and there would be an unpredictable counterattack against us.” – Meir Dagan, former head of Israel’s Mossad, in the New Yorker
• Two Americans wounded when their US embassy vehicle came under fire in Mexico were employed by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of an anti-drug task force, The New York Times reported Wednesday. The two were driving with a Mexican navy captain to a military training facility south of Mexico City on Friday when their armored US embassy vehicle was fired upon by federal police, Mexican officials.
• Manhattan to be sprayed with pesticides to fight West Nile virus, will target Manhattan’s prestigious Upper West Side neighborhood and parts of the famed Central Park. The department said trucks would spray “a very low concentration” of pesticide and that “when properly used, this product poses no significant risks to human health.” However, it also urged people to stay indoors during the spraying and to remove clothes and children’s toys from outside.