Religion is never a vaild basis for public policy. Never. Yet religious belief forms the basis of social conservatives’ positions against reproductive rights, sex education, marriage equality, gender equality, and freedom of expression. Take those arguments away, and the endless culture wars vanish in an instant. Allowing them to be made at all, let alone directly requesting candidates do so, only serves to strengthen the delusion of their having any place in political discourse.

Maybe we should be grateful to Raddatz for her poorly constructed question anyway. It did give both candidates the opportunity to tell us exactly where they stand on the issue of religion’s place in politics. Ryan, unsurprisingly enough, doesn’t think separation between the two is possible, let a lone desirable, saying, “I don’t see how a person can separate their public life from their private life or from their faith. Our faith informs us in everything we do.” Governance based, not on the public good, or the constitution, but on Paul Ryan’s personal Catholic faith are what he have to look forward to, in the unlikely event of a Ryan presidency.

Biden began his response similarly, stating the importance of his faith in his personal life. However, he doesn’t see it as a rationale for policy positions, telling us, “I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews, and I just refuse to impose that on others, unlike my friend here, the — the congressman. I — I do not believe that we have a right to tell other people that — women they can’t control their body. It’s a decision between them and their doctor.”

While I might wish the Vice President had included atheists, Buddhists, or Jains in his statement, the content renders any such complaint irrelevant. As long as he’s leaving religion out of his policy decisions, basing them instead on fact based reality, his inclusiveness, or lack thereof, in this moment, just doesn’t matter. Especially considering the equal opportunity oppression his opponents offer.

He found the words, almost 40 minutes worth of words. But he didn’t use them the way most humans do, to construct meaning and communicate it. All those words can be summarized as follows:

1) America is awesome!
2) Americans are awesome, and entitled to all kinds of awesome things!
3) Families are great!
4) Mittens loves his family!
5) It’s not really that Mitt’s mad at President Obama, he’s just very, very, disappointed in him.

About as substantial as marshmallow Fluff, but not nearly as delicious.

To be fair, he did restate his goal of creating, “jobs, lots of jobs.” 12 million to be exact. But he said nothing about how he’d do it. And he did say the thing about making America energy independent by 2020, but again, not even a hint as to how he’d go about it.

Mittens has declared his past, professional and personal, and his future plans off limits. It’s as if he expects us to take his word for it, that his history qualifies him for the presidency, and that he has lots of good plans, which will successfully accomplish good things. He’d apparently like us all to make a leap of faith, and give him our votes in ignorance of his history, what he’d do as president, and how he’d get it done. This, more than any evangelical prejudices, may be where his Mormon faith hurts his campaign.

The Church of Latter Day Saints is organized along a strict hierarchy. Members are discouraged from questioning either the Church’s doctrine or its leadership. Growing up in such a culture, Mittens was probably expected to take a lot of things on faith. As an adult, serving as a Bishop, he expected others to extend the same respect to him. It would explain his surprised annoyance when reporters, or voters, question him on one of his forbidden subjects. He doesn’t quite believe anyone has the right to challenge him in any context. If he’s serious about his bid for the presidency, he’s going to have to learn to tolerate, and answer, questions the both the media and voters deem important. Just because we say so, that’s why.

Almost everything about Mittens is annoying. There’s the constantly whiny voice, the high waisted mom jeans, the prodigious sense of entitlement, and the amount of time and energy he must devote to making his hair do that poofy thing it does. His very being is annoying like nails on a blackboard, or a little brother who won’t stay on his side of car during a cross country road trip.

Then there are the things he says, rarely sufficiently substantial to elicit actual anger, but so very, very, irritating. How much he likes the height of the trees in Michigan, being able to fire people, and hunting, “small varmints.” Describing himself as unemployed, trying to make a $10,000 bet with Rick Perry over some aspect of health care reform, telling a baker, inside his very own bakery, that his cookies looked like they’d come from 7-11. Mittens says such stupid, stupid, things.

And now he’s taken his show on the road, heading to the UK, Poland, and Israel. Presumably, the idea is to meet with world leaders, make himself seem presidential by association. Thus far, that’s not quite how things are working out. Instead, he’s managed to annoy an entire new nation, the UK, by saying something stupid. How unsurprising.

What exactly did he say?

You know, it’s hard to know just how well it will turn out. There are a few things that were disconcerting, the stories about the private security firm not having enough people, supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials, that obviously is not something which is encouraging.

The “it,” in question being, of course, the summer Olympics. Instead of looking presidential with the Prime Minister, he’s being scolded like a school boy. To be fair, after meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron, he did backpedal just a bit. But, life not being much like an etch-a-sketch after all, he couldn’t make his previous statement disappear.

Mittens won’t get to Israel for a few more days, but he’s already irritated a good portion of its population by scheduling a fundraising dinner on a Jewish fasting holiday. He postponed the event, but the damage was already done. Who knows what he’ll get up to in Poland?

Once again, I find myself wondering if Romney even wants to be president. He doesn’t seem to be trying all that hard. Or perhaps I’m overestimating him, and this really is the very best he can do. I’m not sure which possibility bodes worse for a Romney presidency.

As maddening as the sorry state of our news is the discourse around it, or rather, the lack thereof. Anyone who dares to mention it is of course, dismissed as a biased liberal. Some try to sidestep such accusations by claiming both sides of the political spectrum are equally at fault. This would be fine, were it true, but it’s not. MSNBC and Current TV on the liberal side make no bones about their biases, but stick with fact based reality in their reporting. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, for instance, is unabashedly liberal, but does her homework like nobody’s business, as does Current’s Cenk Uygar, host of The Young Turks They can do that, because liberal opinions can stand the scrutiny of reality, unlike many conservative ideas.

Over on the conservative side of things, at Fox, reality is uniquely ethereal. And that’s not just my liberal bias at play. Study after study shows how ill informed Fox viewers are. They are, it turns out, less well informed than people who don’t watch any television news at all.

A 2003 study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found Fox viewers 80% more likely than others to harbor demonstrably false beliefs about the Iraq war. Things like Sadaam Hussein’s imaginary role in the 9/11 attacks, or the existence of nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. In 2009, an NBC survey found Fox viewers believed ridiculously untrue things about President Obama’s proposed health care reform. It would provide health care for illegal immigrants, government funding for abortions, and would ultimately result in an NHS style government takeover of the health care system, none of which were ever remote possibilities. In 2010 a Stanford University study study found Fox viewers more likely to disbelieve in the very real scientific consensus that global climate change is happening, and it’s our fault. I could go on and on with these, but I think you get my point. No studies exist having found comparable disconnections from reality among viewers of any other networks, not even MSNBC.

I never loved Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing the way a lot of liberals did. I couldn’t say exactly why, but I didn’t find the characters engaging, couldn’t muster up much interest in how, or even if, their storylines resolved. Instead of inspiring me to see the possibility of change, comparing Martin Sheen’s impossibly perfect progressive president with Bush era realities just depressed me. So my expectations for Sorkin’s new HBO series, The Newsroom, were so low as to be essentially nonexistent, especially after I read a couple of less than stellar reviews. Emily Nussbaum’s for the New Yorker in particular put me off the show. She didn’t love it, and thought only those who, “share its politics,” would. To me, this description conjured up visions of a West Wing retread, more tiresome preaching to the progressive choir. I didn’t even bother watching the first few episodes till weeks after they’d initially aired.

When I did, I was shocked by how much I liked it. Not just because of the excellent cast, or the much better writing than I ever remember finding on The West Wing, but because of its basic premise. We’re getting shitty news, and it’s leading to shitty government, more or less. Television news matters, and it doesn’t have to be this way. Where’s the political agenda in that proposition, exactly? It strikes me as something everyone should be able to get behind.

Emily Nussbaum is one of my favorite television critics. We’re even Facebook friends. Even when I’ve disagreed with her opinions in the past, I’ve never thought she was flat out wrong, just that we disagreed, in the way we’re always told reasonable people can. This time is different, though. By ascribing a politically partisan slant to The Newsroom‘s agenda, she’s unquestioningly accepting the false premise that the desire for better, fact based reality style, news is implicitly a liberal one. That, because facts do, more often than not, support liberal perspectives, only liberals care about getting them right. To be fair, I can’t in good conscience say I’m sure Nussbaum is wrong to do so, but I find the possibility she might not be unbearably depressing.

To be fair, Occupy never had much of a chance with me. I was done the Sunday afternoon the Wall St. contingent decided to block the Brooklyn Bridge. A friend of mine described it as having been, “a huge win.” But couldn’t tell me how so, or for whom. With its annual media income of $43,666, Brooklyn is hardly a stronghold of the one percent. All I could think of was how pissed off I’d have been, if I still lived there, and had somehow wound up stuck on the bridge that day. I’ve tried to care about the NYPD’s bad behavior with the protestors. It’s the kind of thing I usually care about. But the whole thing was just so stupid, I cannot do it.

To be even fairer, I’ll agree that, as Occupy supporters always point out, they have succeeded in bringing issues of income inequality into mainstream political discourse. But they did that months ago, and haven’t moved past raising awareness of their concerns in all this time. Looking at their upcoming events, they’re all about getting attention for one issue or another, by marching, banging pots and pans, or, their old stand by, camping out in public spaces. They haven’t moved an inch in the direction of proposing solutions, or strategies for making them happen.

Well, they might tell you they have. They see the best approach to creating change to be opting out of electoral politics, and going for, “direct action, boots on the ground, democracy.” Though no one can seem to formulate how exactly it’s going to make anything happen. The idea is that our government is so grievously broken, with so little difference between the two major parties, voting has become pointless. Again, the stupidity kills a tiny piece of my soul.

This is, of course, disturbingly similar to the rhetoric we heard from Nader supporters in 2000, who brought us the Bush regime. No real difference between Bush and Gore? A few thousand dead Iraqis might beg to differ. The differences between Obama and Romney are every bit as real. Obama’s not my dream president, not by a long shot. But things will get worse for the poor, old, children, women, and minorities during a Romney presidency in ways they won’t if Obama gets a second term. Not to mention the inevitable explosion in income inequality, with all the attendant differences of privilege and power, President Romney would bring about.

If the lessons of 2000 are too distant for the occupiers, the much more recent history of the tea party shouldn’t be. Tea partiers first appeared as protestors in April, 2009. By November of the following year, they’d shifted focus to electoral politics so successfully their 63 new members of Congress hold John Boehner hostage to their agenda. How can anyone who’s paying attention say voting is pointless?

Let’s look at one of the occupiers’ focal points, student debt. Financial institutions aren’t going to lower interest rates, or change repayment schedules, because people are banging pots and pans, or camping out, on their doorsteps. Nor will any amount of boots on the ground direct democracy get colleges to lower tuition or fees. Federal legislation, a combination of regulation, subsidized loans, tax deductions, and increased funding for higher education, would probably help. But why would legislators devote time and energy to the concerns of avowed non-voters?

The Occupy National Gathering will be held from June 30-July 4, in Philadelphia. Maybe the occupiers will use the time to develop policy goals, and strategies for effecting them. But since,

the highlight of the gathering will be the crafting of a Vision of a Democratic Future. On July 4th the National Gathering (#natgat) will facilitate a visioning process designed to allow all voices to be heard while allowing repeat visions to organically rise to the top. Together, by all those who choose to participate, a Vision of a Democratic Future will be conceived.

I’m not holding my breath. Has any movement ever achieved self-parody so quickly?

Steyn starts with a line from a bio of Obama, found on his literary agent’s website:

Barack Obama, the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

From there, he goes into a lot of blather about Obama having lied about where he was born at that time, claiming a Kenyan birth that never was, what that says about who the President is, his relationship to American culture, blah, blah, blah. It might be vaguely interesting if the premise upon which it’s based were true, but it just isn’t.

First, to state the obvious, someone working for Obama’s agent said he was from Kenya. Not Obama himself. Since he did not yet have a book to promote, correcting an error in his bio wouldn’t have been anyone’s top priority.

Then there’s the book Obama did publish, in 1995, Dreams From My Father. It begins with the story of his parents relationship, its disintegration, and his birth, all of which took place in Hawaii. His first trip to Kenya also features prominently in the narrative. Looking at this logically, what kind of an idiot is going to tell his literary agent he was born in Kenya, when the book she’s going to be promoting on his behalf explicitly, repeatedly, states otherwise? Especially when his Hawaiian birth had been mentioned in publications including the New York Times, and the LA Times. After he’d told journalists he was born in Hawaii just a year before, why would he change his story for his agent, then change it back again for the actual book? In what universe does that make sense?

And really, if Obama had told anyone, anyone at all, he was born in Kenya, don’t you think we’d have heard from him or her by now?

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not remotely suggesting Obama’s decision to state his support, for same sex marriage, and its timing, were made without consideration of the political implications. He’s a politician, failure to do so would suggest incompetence, not some sort of moral purity. But this wasn’t about short term gain, an immediate surge in polling. Though the fundraising bumpwas surely nice. Obama’s playing a longer game here. He’ll be reaping the benefits until election day.

His 2008 victory wouldn’t have happened without the excitement he generated among progressives and young voters. They didn’t just give him their votes, they spent untold hours volunteering,and persuading their friends and families to give him a chance. The repeated small donations they tended to make didn’t hurt either. Getting them back on board was crucial to making his reelection reality, and not at all a given.

Progressives had arguably unrealistic expectations for Obama’s presidency. He didn’t campaign as one of them, yet they assumed his agenda overlapped with theirs almost entirely. So when he let the public option die, or signed the NDAA, their disappointment was beyond all reason. There’s been a small contingency, coming from the Occupy movement, and presumably made up of people to young to remember the 2000 election, talking about voting for third party candidates as a means of teaching the Democratic party some kind of a lesson, or because there’s no real difference between it and the GOP, or between Obama and Romney. As so often happens with the Occupiers, the reasoning’s not quite clear. But for the most part, progressives hadn’t so much been considering voting for anyone else, as just sitting this one out. Or maybe giving Obama their votes, and nothing else, neither money nor free labor. Obama’s support for marriage equality gives them something they’ve been wanting for a good long while, and creates a glaringly obvious difference between himself and Mittens. It gives them a reason to fall back in love with him, repeat their 2008 effort on his behalf.

Young voters had shared some if Progressives’ disappointment, but more than that, they’d just lost interest in him. As a rule, presidential campaigns are more exciting than actual presidencies. Obama’s has been no exception. People born in 1982 or later, also known as millenials, strongly support marriage equality. By following their lead, Obama’s gotten them excited and engaged again. He’s made his reelection as important to them as the first one was, winning back their time, money, and votes.

Historically, a focus on social issues has tended to benefit Republican candidates. By forcing Romney to reiterate his unpopular opposition to same sex marriage, Obama is calling attention to the disconnect between the American electorate at large, and the conservative extremists who drive so many of the GOP’s positions. Romney can choose between swinging back towards the more moderate approach to LGBT rights he used to take, thereby further alienating his party’s base, and staying where he is now, alienating everyone else. I’m guessing he’ll go with the latter. Whatever will he do with himself, come November seventh? It’s been a long time since he’s had a real job, I hope his interview skills aren’t too rusty.

Throughout the Republican primaries, conservatives said they couldn’t trust Mitt Romney’s commitment to their cause, because he’d come to them later in life. They thought he was insincere in his convictions, had only moved to the right to further his doomed presidential aspirations. To be fair, it’s hard to say they’re wrong. It does seem awfully convenient, his being so much more moderate when he was trying to become governor of liberal Massachusetts. If he wanted to make himself a viable candidate for the GOP nomination, he had to shift some of his positions. No one can make it through the Republican primary process without asserting his or her abiding love of the unborn, as often and as loudly as possible, for instance. What I’ve yet to figure out, though, is why they cared so much.

Nor do I understand why anyone cares about Obama’s reasons for voicing his support. He’s not my friend or family member. He has no obligation whatsoever to share his thoughts with me. Fortunately, I’m not terribly interested in them, it’s his words and deeds with which I’m concerned. They have the potential to change lives. As far as his motivations, well, that’s his business.

The assumption around the internet seems to be that an action motivated by political expediency somehow matters less than one born of principle. But the reality is, it’s the electorate’s responsibility to hold elected officials, presidents included, accountable for what they say. If we can’t be bothered to do the necessary work, that’s our failure. Arguably, a position stated
by a politician who wants to be reelected, or is pondering his or her legacy, is more likely than others to be maintained and acted upon. Self interest does tend to be a powerful motivating force.

The real question, though, is why anyone thinks this merits our attention. President Obama is a politician, and quite a skilled one, at that. Politicians by definition do things for political reasons. It’s just what they do. Not every decision is politically determined, but no decision is made without an examination of the probable political consequences. Of course, a position or action not accompanied by political advantage isn’t going to happen. That’s just how this works. So can we please stop pretending otherwise, and change the subject already?

Asked yesterday about an incident in which his friends tackled a younger boy whose long blond hair he’d found inexplicably disturbing and held him down while he cut his hair, Romney laughingly said he didn’t remember it. While his convenient memory lapse defies belief, it’s hardly surprising. The laughter, though, that’s a different matter entirely.

Most obviously, it gives the lie to his earlier apology for any harm his high school activities had caused. How much can he really regret something he still, all these years later, finds funny? Clearly, he hasn’t changed quite as much as he’d like us to believe, hasn’t developed much of a capacity for compassion or remorse.

His laughter suggests indifference, not only to his own past antics, but to the anti-gay bullying still taking place in schools across the country. As does his treatment of The Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, during his single term as governor of Massachusetts. The commision had been created by Republican governor William Weld, in 1992, in response to research showing the appallingly high rate of suicide among LGBT teens. Its aim was to prevent suicide by reducing harassment of LGBT students in school. Suicide prevention is generally a pretty uncontroversial goal, but as soon as he took office, Mittens started trying to reduce the commission’s funding, finally did away with it entirely. He expects a pass for his high school behavior, because it was so very long ago, but this happened in 2006. Isn’t it fair for us to question how much his own past influenced his lack of interest in preventing abuse of LGBT kids as governor?

As the day wore on, Mittens took less and less responsibility for his behavior. Instead, he claimed the story was planted by President Obama’s campaign. What difference that would have made if true is beyond me. Would the story be less true if had come from the president’s campaign?

Equally disturbing are the plethora of headlines asking if Romney’s high school hate crimes matter, having been so long ago and all. If such behavior were a thing of the past, like smallpox and cassingles, they might not. But we all know that’s far from the case. We’ve all heard the horrible statistics about LGBT teen suicide, and the role bullying plays.Jack Denton Reese, 17, of Utah, Kenneth Weishuhn, 14, of Iowa, and Jay Jones, 17, of Minnesota, all committed suicide in the last three weeks, after being bullied because of their sexuality. Would Romney tell their friends and families the harassment was ok, as long as it made for a funny story?

Mittens in particular was disturbed by Lauber’s long blond hair, his friends recalled, saying things like, “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” Not content to rant and rave about Lauber’s hair, or to attack him verbally, Mittens and his entourage decided physical assault was the appropriate course of action. So his friends tackled Lauber, and held him down, while Mittens cut off his hair.

Romney says he has no recollection of these events. His laughing denial demonstrates a complete failure in gaining no adult perspective as to the seriousness of his adolescent behavior. His friends had no trouble recalling both the incident and their subsequent remorse. They certainly didn’t see any humor in it. He’s also claiming the behavior he doesn’t remember wasn’t motivated by thinking its victim was gay. How much does that really matter though? Is there a motivation that could make a violent assault acceptable?

People do stupid things when they’re 17. Of course they do. But most of us grow up, and achieve a grown up understanding of their stupidity. It’s absurd to suppose Romney really doesn’t remember this attack. For that to be credible, it would have to have been one of many such events, which, actually, might well be the case.

For me, this becomes most disturbing looked at in the context of Romney’s history of animal cruelty, specifically strapping Seamus the Irish Setter to the roof of the family car for a lengthy road trip. While he never claimed it had slipped his mind, both incidents suggest a failure of compassion, and a willingness to abuse those over whom he has any sort of power. In both cases, when questioned, he showed absolutely no capacity for acknowledging, or learning from, his mistakes. More sociopathic than presidential, wouldn’t you agree?

On the plus side, this might be just what Mittens needs to win over any hesitant Santorum supporters.