“Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” That was Barack Obama in 2008. And he was right. Reagan was an ideological inflection point, ending a 50-year liberal ascendancy and beginning a 30-year conservative ascendancy.

It is common for one party to take control and enact its ideological agenda. Ascendancy, however, occurs only when the opposition inevitably regains power and then proceeds to accept the basic premises of the preceding revolution

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-the-choice/2012/11/01/59b5bed0-2445-11e2-9313-3c7f59038d93_story.html?hpid=z2

Ronald Reagan started a spiral of spending money the US did not have... This has been coming back biting every one and his dog ever since... One lives in dreamland if one thinks that one day the USA would be able to repay the 17 trillion dollars it owes the rest of the world... No. Romney nor Obama won't be able to do anyting of value except nibble at the margins... The key here is to protect the general public from another highway robbery, such as the GFC (global financial crisis) that has filled the pockets of some rich people and emptied most of the rest... Ronmey promises to reduce regulation, destroy FEMA, destroy the EPA and boost the NRA... It's your call, people of the US of A... I know, you like guns better than flowers... and you don't understand evolution and in your pigeon loft "global warming is crap"... Brother...

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Mitt Romney’s campaign insults voters

THROUGH ALL THE flip-flops, there has been one consistency in the campaign of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney: a contempt for the electorate.

How else to explain his refusal to disclose essential information? Defying recent bipartisan tradition, he failed to release the names of his bundlers — the high rollers who collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. He never provided sufficient tax returns to show voters how he became rich.

How, other than an assumption that voters are too dim to remember what Mr. Romney has said across the years and months, to account for his breathtaking ideological shifts? He was a friend of immigrants, then a scourge of immigrants, then again a friend. He was a Kissingerian foreign policy realist, then a McCain-like hawk, then a purveyor of peace. He pioneered Obamacare, he detested Obamacare, then he found elements in it to cherish. Assault weapons were bad, then good. Abortion was okay, then bad. Climate change was an urgent problem; then, not so much. Hurricane cleanup was a job for the states, until it was once again a job for the feds.

The same presumption of gullibility has infused his misleading commercials (see: Jeep jobs to China) and his refusal to lay out an agenda. Mr. Romney promised to replace the Affordable Care Act but never said with what. He promised an alternative to President Obama’s lifeline to young undocumented immigrants but never deigned to describe it.

And then there has been his chronic, baldly dishonest defense of mathematically impossible budget proposals. He promised to cut income tax rates without exploding the deficit or tilting the tax code toward the rich — but he refused to say how he could bring that off. When challenged, he cited “studies” that he maintained proved him right. But the studies were a mix of rhetoric, unrealistic growth projections and more serious economics that actually proved him wrong.

This last is important — maybe the crux of the next four years. History has shown that it’s a lot easier to cut taxes than to reduce spending. Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush promised to do both, managed to do only the first and (with plenty of help from Congress) greatly increased the national debt.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitt-romneys-election-campaign-insults-voters/2012/11/02/69fcc1fc-2428-11e2-9313-3c7f59038d93_print.html

It shows him vowing to end the world ― not a good look in 2013, when the proof is in, and the peril growing with every electric storm, tsunami and nuclear meltdown.

Sandy was the October Surprise of this presidential year (in 2008 it was the Wall Street Meltdown) which ended, I think (I hope, I pray),  the vile Neo-liberal interim in Western history and returned us, probably, to the decent Keynesian sanity of the 1950s, 60s and early 70s (‘We are all Keynesians now!’ Richard Nixon bayed in 1971) before Murdoch brought us Thatcherism and all the bright barbarities that followed and killed, perhaps, half a billion children with its greed, neglect, and no-fly zones and dirty drinking water.

It was a long time coming.

But now, at last, it is here.

Prove that I lie.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012/politics/sandy-oh-sandy/

IN this year’s campaign furor over a supposed “war on women,” involving birth control and abortion, the assumption is that the audience worrying about these issues is just women.

Give us a little credit. We men aren’t mercenaries caring only for Y chromosomes. We have wives and daughters, mothers and sisters, and we have a pretty intimate stake in contraception as well.

This isn’t like a tampon commercial on television, leaving men awkwardly examining their fingernails. When it comes to women’s health, men as well as women need to pay attention. Just as civil rights wasn’t just a “black issue,” women’s rights and reproductive health shouldn’t be reduced to a “women’s issue.”

To me, actually, talk about a “war on women” in the United States seems a bit hyperbolic: in Congo or Darfur or Afghanistan, I’ve seen brutal wars on women, involving policies of rape or denial of girls’ education. But whatever we call it, something real is going on here at home that would mark a major setback for American women — and the men who love them.

On these issues, Mitt Romney is no moderate. On the contrary, he is considerably more extreme than President George W. Bush was. He insists, for example, on cutting off money for cancer screenings conducted by Planned Parenthood.

The most toxic issue is abortion, and what matters most for that is Supreme Court appointments. The oldest justice is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a 79-year-old liberal, and if she were replaced by a younger Antonin Scalia, the balance might shift on many issues, including abortion.

One result might be the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which for nearly four decades has guaranteed abortion rights. If it is overturned, abortion will be left to the states — and in Mississippi or Kansas, women might end up being arrested for obtaining abortions.

Frankly, I respect politicians like Paul Ryan who are consistently anti-abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. I disagree with them, but their position is unpopular and will cost them votes, so it’s probably heartfelt as well as courageous. I have less respect for Romney, whose positions seem based only on political calculations.

Romney’s campaign Web site takes a hard line. It says that life begins at conception, and it gives no hint of exceptions in which he would permit abortion. The Republican Party platform likewise offers no exceptions. Romney says now that his policy is to oppose abortion with three exceptions: rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at stake.

If you can figure out Romney’s position on abortion with confidence, tell him: at times it seems he can’t remember it. In August, he abruptly added an exception for the health of the mother as well as her life, and then he backed away again.

Romney has also endorsed a “personhood” initiative treating a fertilized egg as a legal person. That could lead to murder charges for an abortion, even to save the life of a mother.

In effect, Romney seems to have jumped on board a Republican bandwagon to tighten access to abortion across the board. States passed a record number of restrictions on abortion in the last two years. In four states, even a woman who is seeking an abortion after a rape may be legally required to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound.      

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/opinion/sunday/kristof-how-romney-would-treat-women.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0&pagewanted=print 

But Mitt Romney won back just two states and a couple of seats in the House of Representatives that were traditionally Republican leaning. So much for "take back our country" – it was offered on a platter and they still couldn't take it. By contrast, the Democrats took back two Senate seats and, more importantly, held on to another couple that would have gone to the Republicans had the Tea Party not forced unelectable candidates on the party.

One of the unelectables was Todd "legitimate rape" Akin in Missouri. No sooner had the seat been called than the first dart was fired at Akin by the party's policy chairman, Jason Whitman, who tweeted: "I just want to say a quick thank you to @ToddAkin for helping us lose the senate." Had Romney won the election, he probably would have become a hostage to the radicals.

But having lost, the party now is likely to engage in internal civil war, as it struggles with its policy demons – how to respect a woman's right to make her own health decisions; how to make itself acceptable to the country's huge African-American and Hispanic communities; how to live and work alongside gays and lesbians and to grant them the same citizen rights enjoyed by straights. Above all, to work together as a nation, formulating policies that work towards middle-of-the-road compromises in economic and social policies.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/us-election/republicans-next-battle-is-with-themselves-20121108-28zbf.html#ixzz2BZjCCrVm

No one wanted to be president less than Mitt Romney, his son said in an interview which came out Sunday that raises new questions about the candidacy of the losing Republican nominee.

In an interview with the Boston Globe examining what went wrong with the Romney campaign, his eldest son Tagg explains that his father had been a reluctant candidate from the start, reported AFP.

After failing to win the 2008 Republican nomination, Romney told his family he would not run again and had to be persuaded to enter the 2012 White House race by his wife Ann and son Tagg.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/163510#.UNoVa0Z_VsE

See toon at top....