Instead Davis delivered a proposal based on tying the president to Jeremiah Wright, among other things. According to Baker, Ending Spending received the ad proposal on Tuesday and immediately knew it was not what they wanted. When he was contacted by the New York Times on Wednesday, he claims, he tried to make it clear that they “were not going ahead” on the proposal which was not what they’d asked for at all. He said that there had been no approval, no preliminary approval and certainly no money changing hands for the now-infamous ad proposal.

So he was kinda gobsmacked when he read the New York Times article about the Jeremiah Wright campaign ads that the super PAC headed by Joe Ricketts was apparently this close to commissioning.

In Brian Baker’s version of events,  Ending Spending approached Fred Davis, best known for viral, controversial campaign ads, and told him they liked his work. They asked him to come up with an ad campaign targerting Obama’s spending and instead got this horrible ad proposal that was all about attacking the president’s character and hanging his association with Jeremiah Wright around his neck. And then, horror of horrors, even after he “made it clear” to the New York Times that Ending Spending and Joe Ricketts wanted nothing to do with the proposed campaign (not, apparently, out of outrage but because they wanted to focus on spending not the president’s character flaws), the Times went ahead and published this story that implied that they had ASKED for ad ideas about Jeremiah Wright — on the front page!

The real story, apparently, is that the New York Times sensationalized a “nothing to see here” story – so like the liberal mainstream media, right? – and dared to suggest that the super PAC was considering the ad proposal from a guy that’s notorious for ads that are so outrageous they go viral within minutes. I mean, who would have thought that Fred Davis, who had submitted a similar proposal to the McCain campaign in 2008, would have come up with an ad featuring Jeremiah Wright?

And Baker was so indignant about the whole thing that he almost had me convinced. Then Dan Senor, who was sitting at the table with Mika, Joe and the gang, was asked what he’d thought when he first saw the story. His issue with it? Front page, above the fold — really? He was kinda sorta stunned that the New York Times was treating this like a you know, news story.

So, I guess the storyline is that the big, bad liberal media misrepresented something that was not news at all. And then, Mark Halperin — who started the segment by saying he didn’t think the Times should have run the story — asked Baker about a follow-up story in the Times that laid out the ticktock of the original story — yes, meta story story. The Times said they’d specifically asked if the ad proposal was dead or still under consideration. Halperin gave Baker a chance to reiterate that the Times knew, when they published the story, that it had already been rejected. Baker’s response?

Well, apparently Joe Ricketts had not yet seen the ad proposal and “no final decision has been made”. They were still considering it, in other words. So the New York Times was completely wrong in reporting that the report was still under consideration. Mean old New York Times reporting the news in a way the subject of the story doesn’t like again.

Mitt Romney, in repudiating the so-called Rickerts Plan to Stop Barack Hussein Obama Spending Once and For All, popped out a couple of totally AWESOME quotes that tell you all you really need to know. First:

“There’s a fiction that you can get rich by stripping a company of its assets and pocketing the profits…Now some people may know how to do that, but I don’t know how you do that.”

But even better, this was Mitt Romney’s response when he was asked about a statement he made on a radio program a few months ago:

“I don’t remember exactly what I said, but whatever I said, I stand by it.”

I guess that’s the best you can expect from the man who also said, “I don’t recall the incident, but if I offended anyone, obviously, I would be sorry.”

Source: Freebase

Mitt Romney may have said a bit more about his beliefs about religion than he did about treason when he made this statement in response to the infamous treason remarks at his campaign event yesterday.

“I happen to believe that the Constitution was not just brilliant, but probably inspired, and so was the Declaration of Independence.”

By now, you’ve probably heard that Mitt Romney failed to address statements about Obama being tried for treason at a campaign event yesterday. In freaking out about Romney’s failure to address the treason remark, the media missed something in what the former governor actually did say. What exactly did Mitt Romney mean when he said that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were “not just brilliant, but probably inspired“?

Sounds pretty innoccuous, right? For those in the evangelical community or those who have some background in theology, though, those bolded words mean much more than a simple statement of admiration for the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. “Inspired” is a word that’s reserved for religious writing that comes from God. That’s right — Mitt Romney essentially telegraphed that he believes the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were inspired by God — that He may not have given them the words directly, but His hand guided theirs to ensure that the writing reveals His own message. That’s a pretty bold statement in a country where there’s a major controversy about the separation of religion and government and the role of religion in government.

Was the Constitution “Inspired by God”?

Inspired is a word that’s usually reserved for writings that form the basis of a religion, not the founding documents of a government, and most especially not a government that holds as one of its major founding principles that it would have no established religion and that there should be no religious test for attaining offices of power in said government. In applying that word to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, Romney is implicitly stating that he believes this country and its policies were inspired by God in the same way that many people believe a religion is inspired by God.

This is something we’ve seen more and more over the past several elections — candidates who state either implicitly or tacitly that the United States was somehow established by Christians for Christians and guided by Christian principles. Yesterday, Mitt Romney took that rhetoric a step further in his response to the treason remark when he used the word “inspired”  to describe the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. If the founding documents of the United States were inspired by God, then we must be a Christian country with a Divine Provenance and a divine mission — that Shining City on the Hill to be emulated by the rest of the world. It also gives the US an implicit right to impose its will on other countries unilaterally.

Now, I know that’s a popular view among many on the right, but I see that as a scary position for the president of the United States to hold. This country was conceived of and instituted by men, forward-thinking men who deliberately drew up documents that separated the governing of the country from the influence of religion. They did not believe that “God” had handed them a mission to reform the world. They simply believed that individuals are born with certain innate rights and in this country, the government should support those rights rather than abridge them. It had nothing to do with God and everything to do with the right to choose not only your religion but your livelihood, and to determine your destiny not by your birth but by the choices that you make.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are certainly inspiring — but the only thing the writing was inspired by was the determination of the Founding Fathers to establish a land where every man had a voice and no man would be oppressed by others. In retrospect, they are remarkably progressive documents, though parts of them certainly reflect the prejudices of their time. The truly remarkable thing is that the framers recognized that their writings contained inherent prejudices, and that time would necessitate adjustments and changes to reflect progress and different circumstances. That’s why they included procedures for making those changes and adjustments. That’s something you won’t see in documents that are generally regarded as inspired by God — a tacit admission that there is room for error and a mechanism for correcting errors as they come to light.

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• America's Founding Fathers Inspired By Christianity? :: the White House Intel Report

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Every once in a while, I click on “news of the wierd” type stories on HuffPo — you know, the kind of thing you usually find as filler in local papers. This morning, I clicked on a story with the headline “Man Alleges He Bought Safe with $26,000 In It on eBay“. I figured it would be a feel-good story about a guy who got lucky. I didn’t expect to click away shaking my head at the rampant stupidity of what appears to be the general population.In a nutshell: a guy who’s been selling stuff on eBay for 15 years sold a locked safe for $129. The buyer received the safe, then posted in the buyer’s feedback that he’d found more than $26,000 inside the safe when he got it opened. The seller, incensed, wrote to the buyer asking for a cut of the find. The seller refused, stating the seller’s own policy, which reads no returns, no exchanges, no money back. At that point, the story went public locally, with the seller calling himself “the stupidest man in the world” and complaining about the moral of the guy who wouldn’t share his good fortune. According to the latest update, the seller now says the buyer was playing a practical joke, and there really was no money in the safe.

But the story is not the story. The story is the comments that follow the story. These seem to fall into several different sentiments, every one of them cringe-worthy. They are:

• What a stupid buyer! He announced the find and now he has to pay taxes on it!

• The story is fake becase:

1. who is stupid enough to sell a safe when they don’t know what’s in it? or
2. who is stupid enough to buy a safe without the combination? or
3. who is stupid enough to announce they found $26,000? or
4. what kind of stupid joke is it to say you found money?

• Why is this news and why are you stupid enough to read it here instead of going to AOL and reading it there?

• Whoever wrote this story is really stupid because it’s poorly written, doesn’t stick to the point or talks about a stupid story

That’s a whole lot of stupid on display there — and every single one of them is reinforced by people saying “Yeah, that’s pretty stupid!”

Not a single one of them — at the time I read it anyway — had a single person responding with surprise, incredulity or even headshaking chagrin of the stupidity of the comment itself. All I can figure is that:

• The maojrity of people think its acceptable and even praiseworthy to evade paying taxes.
• Nobody understands the concept of calculated profit. i.e.: the safe, as is, is unusable and worthless, but it may contain something valuable. If I crack the safe open and there’s nothing in it, I destroy any value it may have. If I sell the safe unopened, I can recover my investment and make a little money.
• Nobody understands the concept of calculated risk or the allure of a mystery. These same people probably think nothing of plunking down $5 on a lottery ticket but somehow can’t see that paying $129 on the chance that there was something in the safe was worth it to this guy.
• People believe that it’s stupid to pay taxes, or put yourself in the position of paying taxes or being asked for loans by friends.
• Quite a few people think they have magical insight into what should be news and where people should be reading it.
• Everyone’s a hater, and a lot of the critics know nothing about what makes an interesting story.

And now, having spent close to an hour noting the stupid on display, I’ve added my own stupidity to the collection, because when you come right down to it, it’s pretty stupid to extrapolate widespread stupidity from a few pages of comments on one HuffPo story.

As usual, Morning Joe is on in the background as I work this morning. The big subject this morning is the shameful attack on capitalism aka vulture capitalism is a good thing. Over and over, Scarborough has trotted out the Republican mantra — Bain Capital was just practicing capitalism and hey, you’ve gotta break a few eggs to make a cake and sometimes the recipe just doesn’t turn out right anyway. That is — Bain Capital wasn’t a bad guy. They were just practicing good business when they bought failing companies and tried to turn them around. Everyone around the table just kept nodding sagely to each of his pronouncements and essentially accepting his characterization of what Bain Capital does. Oh, and the new term for Bain Capital is “private equity company” — which is the broad category under which the business model fits, but there are private equity companies that boost and bolster companies, and there are private equity companies who make their money through leveraged buyouts, loading companies down with debt (starting with the money they used to purchase the company, often borrowed using the company they’re buying as collateral for the loan) and lowballing every other stakeholder in the equation.

Actually, to be fair, a few people did weakly raise the other point of view about how Bain Capital makes its money — and by extension, how Mitt Romney made his money — and were subjected to Joe’s standard poo-pooing of their comments with his usual attitude of “you just don’t understand how business works.” The narrative easily shifted from “creative destruction” to a discussion of the benefits of private equity companies in general — which is a whole other subject.

That is, until Joe asked Richard Trumka about Bain Capital and the importance of private equity. Trumka, best known as the evil union thug, responded with a very knowledgeable, cogent response that turned the whole discussion back around. You’ll never see it. It won’t make the rounds of Youtube because there were no fireworks, no screaming and no zingers. He simply described, in basic words, what companies like Bain Capital does and pointed out how that has nothing to do with repairing and rebuilding companies and everything to do with extracting everything of value from the company and leaving it to collapse under the weight of the debt they’ve piled onto it. It was obvious that Trumka knew exactly what he was talking about.

And Joe’s response — priceless. None of his usual bombast and swagger. Not even a response to Trumka’s observations. Without responding or arguing at all, he simply moved on to another subject. That’s it. Apparently, when he can’t intimidate, bully or belittle someone who’s secure in the facts, he just… changes the subject. Union thuggery at its absolute best.

I listened to Mittens’s victory lap after the primaries last night and tried to put my finger on what was wrong about it. I could feel it in my bones, but couldn’t put my finger on it until this morning. Now I’m listening to Joe Scarborough going on and on about “the politics of resentment” — another phrase I just haven’t been able to quite get my head around and it CLICKS.

Dear Mittens, when people call you a vulture capitalist, it has nothing to do with resenting your wealth.

That’s like saying people hate a bully because he’s stronger than them. No. If that were true, they’d dislike bodybuilders in general. They don’t. They dislike people that hurt them. And that’s the issue with people who made their money like you did — and who thinks that it should be a model for the country. There are thousands of wealthy people who engaged in free enterprise and lifted everyone around them up with it. True venture capitalists do that — they find someone with an idea and they fund it, and if it does well EVERYONE makes money. Venture capitalists do not come into an existing company, break it down, tear it apart and walk away with the lion’s share of the money while everyone else licks their wounds, and if they’re lucky, thanks the gods that they were left with the little bit they were able to cling to.

There are not always winners and losers in business. In the best business models, everyone wins — some may win bigger than others, but everyone walks away feeling like they gained something. Or, more to the point, everyone stays because they believe there is something to gain. That’s not the business model by which you made your money. And that’s not the country in which most of us want to live.

Donald Trump Thumps MSNBC Hosts on Obama’s Birth Certificate 3/31/2011

Lots of conversation this week about Trump’s idiocy, cynicism and disingenuousness in demanding to see the President’s “real” birth certificate — as opposed, I suppose, to the one that’s officially issued by the state and serves as proof that he was born in the state of Hawaii. A big part of the conversation is about the effect Trump’s BS has and will have on the political conversation, and on whether or not it makes him a viable candidate for the presidency. They’re missing the real point here… it’s not about whether it makes Trump crazy or crafty — it’s about how it makes other Republican candidates look.In fact, while the issue of the President’s birth certificate has been pushing further and further into the national discussion, Trump’s high-profile championing of the cause as a “presidential candidate” — those are air quotes, y’all — does one thing that no one seems to be recognizing. By pushing the crazy as publicly as he does, he makes candidates like Pawlenty — whose got his own crazy going — look downright sane by comparison. It’s a whole lot easier to vote for a Pawlenty or a Daniels or a Romney — all of whom have some pretty radical ideas for the country — if you can point at The Donald and say, “At least they’re not like him.”

Q: If both the U.S. national anthem and the national anthem of a foreign country were being played at an event (in the United States), which one would be played first?

A: Traditionally, as a courtesy, the foreign anthem is played first.

Just figured I’d get that out of the way.

IMG C. bmendez68

Little girl waving flag at a rally

Last night, in his speech at the Tucson memorial, President Obama called on us to live up to the image of democracy held by 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green.  This morning, Sam Stein had this to say at Huffpo:

Challenging an audience to live up to a child’s expectation would seem noteworthy only for the low setting of the bar.

I wonder if Sam Stein has ever known a 9-year-old. I have, and I can tell you that living up to your 9-year-old’s expectations is not a feat for the faint-hearted.

Christina Taylor Green was 9 years old. She had campaigned for and won a seat on her school’s student council. She was excited at the prospect of meeting her representative in the United States Congress. Her parents report that she volunteered to help with a charity that serves children. She was a little girl who still believed that she, personally, could make a difference in this world — that her actions and her words could help shape her class, her school, her country, her world.

She hadn’t yet reached the adolescent stage of cynicism and disillusionment where children lose that belief in their own ability to effect change. They stop believing in Santa Claus, they learn that their parents have clay feet and they lose that shiny certainty that yes, one person can have an impact on the world. They become a part of the apathetic crowd that doesn’t try because no matter what, the world will never change.

If I were to hazard a guess, I would guess that Christina still believed that her mother could protect her from anything, her father could overcome any adversity and that if someone, somehow, came up with a cure for cancer, the profit motives of the medical-pharmaceutical industry would not stand in the way of making it available to every person who needs it in this world. I suspect she had not yet learned to sort ideas and solutions into right and left, Republican and Democrat, Progressive and Independent.

Given the choice, I want to live in Christina’s world. Given the opportunity, I want to help move us toward becoming Christina’s country. Given the chance — which we all have as long as we are alive — I want to live up to Christina’s expectations, too.

photo credit: hoyasmeg

Because, you know, they posted the birth certificate with no prompting and for no reason whatsoever, and if they hadn’t posted it, there would be no question about Obama’s birth. Like.. what?? I had to look twice to make sure that the talking head was not a Republican shill. Nope. The TH in question is a proud bearer of the Progressive banner, and his contention — supported by Keith O’s stand-in for the evening — is that the Obama campaign essentially created the birther controversy by responding to it. Circular reasoning, anyone?