Farewell, my friend...

For Wanda.


(Tori Amos - "Gold Dust" Video link)

One more reason I love Jill Biden

Enjoy :-)


(Video link)

With friends like these...

Republican commentator and former Reagan assistant Peggy Noonan had tons of advice for Mitt Romney today. From her "Time for an Intervention" post:

The central problem revealed by the tape is Romney’s theory of the 2012 election. It is that a high percentage of the electorate receives government checks and therefore won’t vote for him, another high percentage is supplying the tax revenues and will vote for him, and almost half the people don’t pay taxes and presumably won’t vote for him.

My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning.

This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that. They’re usually young enough and dumb enough that nobody holds it against them, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know much about America....

And his tone is fatalistic. I can’t win these guys who will only vote their economic interests, but I can win these guys who will vote their economic interests, plus some guys in the middle, whoever they are.

That’s too small and pinched and narrow. That’s not how Republicans emerge victorious—”I can’t win these guys.” You have to have more respect than that, and more affection, you don’t write anyone off, you invite everyone in. Reagan in 1984 used to put out his hand: “Come too, come walk with me.” Come join, come help, whatever is happening in your life.

You know what Romney sounded like? Like a kid new to politics who thinks he got the inside lowdown on how it works from some operative.

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With less than seven weeks to go, there's still time for Romney to come out of his political coma and make a stronger showing. Which means there is still work to be done to re-elect President Obama. If you haven't contributed to his campaign, what are you waiting for? You can start right here.

Leadership quote of the day

Speaking on the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace:

... You recognize this is going to remain an unsolved problem.... We have a potentially volatile situation, but we sort of live with it. And we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately somehow, something will happen and resolve it.

-- Mitt Romney

Inspiring!

Here are the full videos of Romney speaking candidly to fundraisers at a $50,000 a plate dinner a few months ago. Thank you, Mother Jones!


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The full transcript of the video is here. And a great commentary on all of this from David Brooks:

Forty-seven percent of the country, [Romney] said, are people “who are dependent upon government, who believe they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to take care of them, who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

This comment suggests a few things. First, it suggests that he really doesn’t know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A.? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare?

It suggests that Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America. Yes, the entitlement state has expanded, but America remains one of the hardest-working nations on earth. Americans work longer hours than just about anyone else. Americans believe in work more than almost any other people. Ninety-two percent say that hard work is the key to success, according to a 2009 Pew Research Survey.

It says that Romney doesn’t know much about the political culture. Americans haven’t become childlike worshipers of big government. On the contrary, trust in government has declined. The number of people who think government spending promotes social mobility has fallen.

The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor.

Is this why Mitt Romney doesn't want to release his tax returns?

After reading this New York Times article that mentioned the IRS's amnesty program for Americans who hid money in Swiss bank accounts to avoid taxes, I found myself wondering if that's why Romney has been so adamant about not releasing any tax returns for years prior to 2010.

Apparently I'm not the only one speculating about that, as the possibility also occurred to Matthew Yglesias.

Are you better off?

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When love beckons

Twenty-five years ago on a warm Labor Day night, I stopped midway through my run across campus and said--out loud, but to no one other than myself--"I'm gay."

It was an announcement that had been working its way to the surface for a long time... the final statement of something that in the beginning was not even expressed in words. I had known I was different from the other boys since at least the seventh grade. By the time I was eighteen, I was beginning to awkwardly reach out physically. But until I was able to break the silence, there was an unyielding wall between my inner universe and the one I shared with everyone else.

I had no idea that night of the changes that would come; I didn't sense how dramatically the trajectory of my life had shifted. But in that moment there was a perceptible change in my experience of the world. The lights had just been turned on in a darkened room.

Within a month I would be the secretary for GLAS, Stanford's student group for gays and lesbians. In two months, emboldened by my first relationship with another man, I wrote my parents a coming out letter. And a mere seven years later, though decades ahead of the societal curve, Tommy and I were married in San Francisco in front of friends and family including my parents, sister, grandmother, aunt, and cousins.

During my first decade of being out I created a new identity for myself: distinct from the adolescent who didn't quite fit in, different from the young man who'd been teased as "one of the girls" during his first year at Stanford. I was out at work, with friends both straight and gay, in my volunteer work, in my relationships, and with my family. While no one who's lived with a secret for twenty years suddenly becomes an open book, my life was finally integrated. I got to be the same person on the outside as I had always been on the inside.

There are things within each of us that we may or may not share with others; in that, at least, we have a choice. And every choice we make nudges us down certain paths while steepening others. Sometimes we confidently make our way down a long road and end up lost, as uncertain as when we'd begun. None of this is too say that I regret coming out; that was inevitable. It's more a recognition that the future, more likely than not, will not match what we've imagined. It hasn't done so for me. The new life I created in the years after coming out is now frayed and tattered; a lot of dreams remain unfulfilled. On the other hand, I never expected a sitting president to bring tears to my eyes by speaking out for gay rights at his party's national convention.

IN THE DAYS that followed my momentous run across campus, I began coming out to my closest friends. One of them, Robin, wrote me and included a quote from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, which I then included in my letter to my parents:

When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest
branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them
in their clinging to the earth.

I don't think I've really understood the full meaning of that until today.

Awesome speeches tonight at the Democratic National Convention

Elizabeth Warren:


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And Bill Clinton, wow! He's still got it... no one communicates the way he does.


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Quote for the day

No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. And that matters. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people. And that’s why we need Barack Obama.

-- Elizabeth Warren