The Fraud Meets the Worst Campaigner, Ever

US President-elect Donald Trump has met one of his fiercest critics, Mitt Romney, with reports suggesting he may be considered for secretary of state.

Neither man gave details of their 80-minute meeting on Saturday. Mr Romney said the talks had been "far-reaching".

During the campaign, Mr Romney called Mr Trump a "fraud", while Mr Trump said Mr Romney's unsuccessful presidential bid in 2012 had been "the worst ever".

Yep, that's some impressive swamp-draining.

Gad, that must chap both Rudy Giuliani's and Chris Christie's asses. Christie did everything he could for Trump, including swallowing public humiliation, and he seems to be getting nothing for it. It was pretty much an open secret that Giuliani was angling to be the AG, which as we know now, didn't happen.

And yet it's ol' Willard M. Romney, the leader of the last-ditch attempt to derail the Trump Nomination Express, who gets a well-publicized meeting with The Donald.

All of which may mean nothing. The Donald plays the press like a drum kit. Only he and his kids know for sure whom he is considering for what jobs.

Meanwhile, The Donald demonstrates, yet again, that freedom of speech means nothing if his tender ego is bruised.

Rmoney Makes a Joke

His joke: "Donald Trump has had several foreign wives. It turns out that there are really are jobs Americans won't do."

Not bad, Willard. How much did you pay for that one?

Willard, Go Back to Closing American Factories and Exporting Jobs

It's the only thing you're good at.

Among Trump supporters, 56 percent said they are more likely to vote for Trump after he was denounced by Romney, while 5 percent said they are less likely to vote for Trump. Thirty-six percent said their opinions were not changed.

And among those who voted for Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee, his speech was less helpful in curbing support for Trump: 30 percent were more likely to vote for Trump, while 20 percent were less likely.

Another Empty Seat on the GOP Short Bus

Scott Walker quit the race. He blames Donald Trump, I guess for being better at running for political office than Walker is. Since he was polling somewhere between Lindsey Graham and the Herpes virus, well, even billionaires have limits on wasting money.

His plan apparently is to resurface at a divided convention. But hell, even Willard Romney is harboring that dream.

There hasn't been a "brokered convention" in over sixty years. The hope of Dead Candidate Walker and Flip-Flop Mitt that one will come to pass is proof that the only cure for fire-in-the-belly is embalming fluid.

But beyond that, if the party bosses seize control of the convention and lock out the people who have been the force behind the GOP gaining the Congress, look for them to stay home in November in large numbers.

"Good Morning. I'm Running for the Republican Presidential Nomination."

George Pataki. Frothy. Miss Lindsey. The Donald. So many are running, now, that future announcements are going to covered in the "news in brief" column of the papers.

They're going to have to trade the GOP Klown Kar in for a short bus.

The funny thing is that Frothy thinks that his campaign was a success in 2012. Which is bullshit, of course. There aren't second-place winners in elections*. What "success" Frothy had in 2012 was because Willard Romney was such a tool that even a few million GOP voters couldn't stomach him. Rmoney still won the nomination, which meant, of course, that Frothy lost.
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* Or gunfights.

Remington is Doomed

No, I'm not talking about their killing off the Para USA brand. I'm talking about them using buzzwords such as this:

In 2014, [Remington] announced its new, world-class firearms center of excellence in Huntsville, Alabama.

That's a lot of MBA-speak buzzwords packed into a single sentence.

But that's what happens when the MBAs and the beancounters take over. The MBAs put out bullshit press releases. The beancounters try to squeeze every nickel out of the process.

There was a time when companies just made good shit. Because they were run by engineers, not MBAs.[1] A true engineer-run company would make a product that was good, then they'd say, "hey, we make some good shit, here!"

But no, not an MBA. An MBA starts babbling about a "world-class center of excellence" before the cement trucks have poured the fucking floor to the factory, years before the first widget has made it to the end of the production line.

It is my humble opinion, Gentle Reader, that this country began its long slog to mediocrity when the first Ivy-league MBA school[2] opened its doors. Because that's when people began to think that management was something that can be learned in a classroom, not on a production floor. That's when people began to think that you didn't have to know anything about how your product was made to run the company.

We'd have been better off if, in 1908, TR had sent some heavy artillery to Cambridge and reduced Harvard's new business school to rubble.[3]
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[1] Or accountants.
[2] Notable graduates include Willard M. Romney and George W. Bush.
[3] "Better late than never."

RomneyBot, Version 5.0x10^9

Seems that Willard is now experimenting with being a populist:

One of the most important things to focus on in the post-Obama era, he said, was to lift people out of poverty. "Under President Obama, the rich have gotten richer and more people are in poverty than ever before," Romney said. He also touted his work as a pastor in the Mormon Church helping the sick and elderly.

The "rich getting richer" is pretty much the core of the GOP. You don't have to look hard to find GOP powerbrokers whose cause is cutting taxes for the rich and increasing them for everyone else.

That didn't sell too well on the national stage, so the man who ran in `08 as a slightly moderate conservative and in `12 as a severe conservative is now trying to find some other robe that will look good on him.

At this point, it's clear that Rmoney's core political belief is "I should be president." Which, at least, is honest. He'll say anything, do anything and become anything in order to become the president. But what he'd do as president, well, good luck guessing that. For when you try to find his bedrock political philosophy, there's no there, there.

"When the Presidential Bug Gets in Your Veins, the Only Thing That Will Get It Out is Embalming Fluid."

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said on Saturday that he was leaving his weekly Fox News show so he can explore a 2016 presidential bid.

And

While some people close to [Willard M.] Romney insist he hasn’t moved from saying he has no plans to run, the 2012 Republican nominee has sounded at least open to the idea in recent conversations, according to more than a dozen people who’ve spoken with him in the past month.

And

“America loves an underdog. We’re definitely the underdog in this race,” he said in an interview Tuesday. [Rick "Frothy"] Santorum added that being underestimated — again — “has given me a lot of latitude.”

About the only ones not considering jumping into the race are Bob Dole, John McCain and Harold Stassen.

Keep In Mind That Dubya and Willard Both Went to Harvard Business School

So it won't surprise you to learn that one of the professors of that school set a new mark for dickishness when he thought he was overcharged $4 for an order of Chinese takeout.

Seriously. The guy actually threatened legal action and filing consumer complaints.

Note that the prof also graduated from Harvard Law School. So he's got a double-barreled certificate in being a dick.

Said dick regards himself as the "sheriff of the Internet".

And, after being shamed all around the Internet, said dick now says he's sorry for threatening to sue the pants off the restaurant's owners.

Yeah, I just bet that he is.

UPDATE: The Dick did it before.

RSA Took 30 Pieces of Silver From the NSA (and Other Bits of NSA Fuckery)

There is a story out that RSA, a leader in encryption software, took $10 million from the NSA in return for designing in a back-door into its products for the NSA. RSA denies it, but their denial is not exactly ironclad. What's telling is that RSA continued to use the Dual EC DRBG random number generator as the BSAFE default RNG for six years after concerns were first raised that Dual EC DRBG had a backdoor.

The General Counsel for the Director of National Intelligence has issued a statement that the Director of National Intelligence, Mr. James Clapper, Jr. (known in this blog as "Jimmie the Perjurer") really didn't lie to Congress when he denied that the NSA was collecting data on millions (ie, 90% or so) of Americans. The denial essentially concedes, instead, that Clapper is a bit of an imbecile, in that he cannot be trusted to answer questions if he hasn't been provided with a written copy of the questions in advance.

Which makes him a little different from, oh, every other witness in any sort of court proceeding or congressional hearing, who is expected to be able to answer questions to the best of their ability without being pre-briefed. Not answering a question truthfully is a bit of a crime.

The FISA Court wielded their rubber-stamp again, approving the collection of everyone's use of every type of electronic communication for another 90 days.

The NSA has neither confirmed nor denied that it is spying on members of Congress. My feeling is that a "we can neither confirm nor deny" is pretty much a tacit confirmation.

Oh, and for one bit of non-NSA-related news, noted security expert Willard M. Romney has opined that the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia will be safe.

Then and Now; Two Decades Edition

In the campaign for the presidency in 1992, there was no shortage of Republicans bleating that the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton, was an immoral draft-dodger.

The GOP candidate in 2012, Willard Romney, used several deferments to avoid having to serve in the Vietnam War.

The very same war that the GOP was sooo upset that Clinton didn't serve in.

Worse, Romney was such chicken that he ducked out of an appearance on "The View", fearing his reception by women who are not GOP drones. So he sent Wife Of, also known as Queen Ann, who stated that to Mormons, serving as Mormon missionaries is the equivalent of serving in the armed forces.

[W]e find different ways of serving, and my five boys and my husband did serve missions, and did not serve in the military.

That's good to know that according to the Romney World View, door-to-door proselytizing in France was the same as spending a year humping a rucksack and carrying a M-16 in the Mekong Delta.*
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* Not that the son of a powerful politician would have done anything like that in the first place.

You Are Welcome to Kiss Mittens's Ass!

Either that, or he was showing those kids his "Etch-a-Sketch Reboot Switch".

That has to be the most unfortunate photo of ol' Willard since this one:

Romney's Tax Plan: Tax Cuts for Him, Taxes Raised for You and Me.

The Willard M. Romney plan for reforming the Federal tax code translates into this: If you're rich, you'll pay less taxes. If you are not, you'll pay more taxes.

Our major conclusion is that a revenue-neutral individual income tax change that incorporates the features Governor Romney has proposed – including reducing marginal tax rates substantially, eliminating the individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) and maintaining all tax breaks for saving and investment – would provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and/or lower-income taxpayers. This is true even when we bias our assumptions about which and whose tax expenditures are reduced to make the resulting tax system as progressive as possible.

Nobody will ever accuse Mittens of being a traitor to his class. He'd have been well-suited to being a feudal lord back in the days when knights were bold and serfs were slaughtered for food.

(H/T)

Next Up: The Mitt Romney Roast Pig Feast: On the Beach in Dubai!

After insulting the Brits on their Olympics and then bragging about meeting the head of MI6, Mitt Romney's Around the World Gaffe-Fest has moved to Israel.

Where he attempted to schedule a fund-raising banquet on Tisha b'Av. Which is a day of mourning and fasting for observant Jews. Which apparently the Romney campaign knew of when they scheduled the event.

Since Tisha b'Av mourns the destruction of both Jewish temples in Jerusalem, one might think that holding a photo op at the Western Wall on that day would come across as a bit tacky, as well.

I know that Rmoney's butt-monkeys are busily telling everyone who will listen that Americans don't care about what happens overseas. Which is directly contradicted by the fact that Mittens made this high-profile trip with lots of photo-ops with leaders overseas. Instead of, say, quietly going to London to watch his wife's dancing horse try to win an Olympic medal.

Leave it to a foreigner to describe Willard's real problem: He has nothing in his life that he can talk about to the American people.

If he talks about being the governor of Massachusetts, where he signed gun control legislation and universal health care, he pisses off his base.

If he talks about his work at Bain Capital, then up come the discussions of how he was really a vulture capitalist, making boatloads of cash from the misery of others.

He can't talk about his own private life, for then the subject of his car elevator and his dancing horses will be discussed.

He can't talk about growing up rich in Michigan or how he put himself through college by selling off the stock his father gave him. Hell, if Molly Ivins was right about Dubya being born on third base and thinking that he hit a triple, Mitt was born half-way to home plate and he thinks that he legged it all the way from the batter's box.

And he sure can't talk about his faith, since most of his base has qualms about that (and most other people regard Mormons as those creepy kids who come knocking on your front door when you're sitting around in your PJs and drinking that first cup of coffee on a Saturday morning).

So mostly what Mitt has left in his arsenal are lies and the money to spread them around.

UPDATE: The Romneybot is blaming the press for his gaffes. Which is rather Nixonian of him.

Mitt Romney's Favorite Airline is "Untied"

In case you've not paid attention to the Intertubes over the last day, Mittens' campaign released an iPhone app that misspelled the word "America", rendering it as "Amercia".[1]

I can just see it now: President Romney unleashes a massive bombing strike against Uzbekistan because he got confused by all of the -stans in that part of the world. Next he'll be offering to put food on our families.

I sort of feel bad about poking fun at ol' Willard over this. This is too easy, it's like shooting a large watermelon at five feet with a 12-gauge. Then again, this is the Internet. It's what we do.
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[1] By now, the batshit-loyal Republicans will be claiming that the true name of the cartographer in the 16th Century was Amercio Vespucci.

Caturday; "And We're Back" Edition

Jake is engaged in some bird watching.

The new place has better cat views, with windows on two sides and cross-ventilation. I may look into putting up a bird-feeder to improve the quality of the views for Jake.

My cable was installed yesterday. Maybe somebody can explain to me how Radio Shack stays in business. Charter (cable folks) charge $7 a month to rent a cable modem. That seemed outrageous, so I went to RatShack to buy one. They had two on the shelf, one for $120 and one for $150. I drove across the street to Wal-Mart and bought a Motorola SurfModem for $59.

I don't see how they can survive by selling little pieces-parts for electronics stuff.

Anyway, I probably ought to start paying attention to political stuff. But with Mittens now flip-flopping/outright lying on the automotive bailouts of GM and Chrysler (he is now for them when he opposed them at the time), it's shaping up to be a long six months before the election.

What Willard the Weathervane is hoping that everyone will forget is that there was no way that Chrysler and GM could have gone through a Chapter 11 restructuring in 2008-09 without government support. It took something like sixty billion dollars to fund the process and that kind of money was not available from the "private/commercial" banks at the time.

If GM and Chrysler had gone through a bankruptcy the way that Rmoney wanted, without government support, they would have gone into Chapter 7 bankruptcy. In a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the two companies would have been stripped and sold off, like a car in a chop shop. The factories would have been shuttered forever and any assets that could be sold off for cash would have been sold off.

That is what Mittens wanted to see happen, because that is the way that he and Bain Capital made most of their money. The point that most of the suppliers to the auto industry could not have survived and that they would have folded in a massive cascade, well, that makes no difference to soulless financial plunderers like Romney.

But Romney is hoping that people have short memories and that they will not understand that if the Bush and Obama Administrations had done what he wanted, this current depression would have been a lot worse.

And yes, I think this is a depression. But that's another topic and frankly, Paul Krugman does better on it.

So, What's Happening in the Clean World?

The movers came yesterday morning and unloaded my crap right into my new apartment. I am deep into the throes of unpacking and storing and sorting and, occasionally, throwing shit out. I broke a plate and a mug unpacking. The movers broke two pots and a hinge-down faceplate on my DVD/VCR, which is probably repairable with model airplane glue.

That is, if they even sell it anymore, what with the War on Drugs and all of that nonsense.

I don't have Internet at home. So I have not been paying much attention to the news, though I did hear that Ol' Willard was busy sucking up to Michael Bloomberg. Since Mike the Megalomaniac is a big fan of disarming the citizenry, you can bet that was a topic of discussion. I'll bet a box of crullers that Mittens told Mayor Mike to pay no attention to Mittens' pandering to the NRA, that a Rmoney Administration will be a friend of the Mayors Against All Guns.

Anyway, break's over, time to go back home and resume unpacking.

I hope that I can find the cabling, let alone the remotes, before the cable guy comes.

Generic Rmoney: "I Like (Name of Sport), Some of My Friends Own (Name of Sport) Teams."

Willard, Willard, Willard. Once again, ol' Willard Milton Romney managed to jam his foot securely in his mouth.

Rich and clueless. Didn't we have enough of that between 2001 and 2009?

Hey, Mitt, Maybe Your NASCAR Team-Owning Buddies Will Give You a Rebel Flag to Pin Up In Your Garage!

Mitt Romney got in touch with his inner Southerner on Thursday during a campaign stop in the heart of Mississippi, telling a crowd of supporters he was "learning to say 'y'all' " and developing a taste for grits.

After accepting Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant's endorsement, Romney turned his attention to his bodyguard, Garrett Jackson — a Mississippi native — whom he credits for his transformation into an "unofficial Southerner."

"He is now turning me into an, I don't know, an unofficial Southerner," Romney said. "And I'm learning to say 'y'all' and I like grits. Strange things are happening to me."

Rmoney has to seriously think that most Southerners flunked out around fifth grade if he thinks that people are going to buy this swill.

There's a fine line between "pandering' and "patronizing" and it seems to me that ol' Willard has tromped over it with both of his handmade-loafer-shod feet.

"I'll Be America's CEO", Where Have We Heard That Before?

[Willard Milton] Romney has repeatedly cast himself as the CEO in chief, of sorts, harping on his business experience as the main reason to send him to the White House.

We've heard that before, haven't we? Back in 2000, George W. Bush said that he would be America's CEO, based apparently on his work at Harkin Oil and his no-show job as president of the Houston Rangers.

How'd that work out for everyone?

Mittens failed to close the deal in Super Tuesday. The sole Southern state he won was a state where only he and Ron Paul were on the ballot. So Frothy and Grumpy can continue to argue that Mittens isn't the true conservative and this fight will stumble on.