Tag Archives: entitlement

Looking back: Farewell, Willard and Marie Anntoinette!

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Whew! That was way too close, wasn’t it?

Update:

politicaldirtylaundry:

Rachel Maddow lists the huge implications of what an Obama win means…or more precisely, what a Romney loss means in terms of what is not going to happen. There’s some pretty big stuff here and a good reminder of the tragedy that could have been.
We are not going to have a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe vs. Wade.
There will be no more Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alioto’s added to this court.
We are not going to repeal health reform.
Nobody is going to kill Medicare.
Nobody is going to make old people in this generation fight it out in the open market for health insurance.
We are not going to give 20% tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires and expect programs like food stamps and kids health to cover the cost.
We are not going to make you clear it with your boss if you want to get birth control from your health provider.
We are not going to redefine rape.
We are not going to amend the United States Constitution amendment to stop gay people from getting married.
We are not going to double Guantanamo.
We are not eliminating the Dept of Energy, the Dept of Education, the Dept of Housing at the Federal level.
We are not going to spend 2 trillion dollars on the military that the military does not want.
We are not scaling back on student loans because the new plan is you should borrow money from your parents.
We are not vetoing the dream act.
We are not self-deporting.
We are not letting Detroit go bankrupt.
We are not starting a trade war with China on inauguration day.
We are not going to have as President, a man who once led a mob of friends to run down a scared gay kid to hold him down and forcibly cut his hair off with a pair of scissors while that kid cried and screamed for help. And there was no apology, not ever.
We are not going to have a Secretary of State John Bolton.
We are not bringing Dick Cheney back.
We are not going to have a foreign policy shop stocked with the architects of the Iraq war. We are not going to do it.
We had the choice to do that if we wanted to do that as a country, and we said no.

Mitt Romney’s Oedipal conflicts

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Mitt Romney’s lovely mother, Lenore LaFount Romney, talking about how his father George was on welfare relief as a child, after he came to America as a refugee from Mexico.

[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Mitt Romney isn’t just detached from half of America, he’s detached from his own heritage. George and Lenore might have been better served if they’d loaded that silver spoon they placed in li’l Willard’s mouth (as most parents who can, will do) with some grace, empathy, and appreciation.

For their troubles, they received a kid who felt entitled, who spent his childhood bullying others: a blind teacher, an unpopular gay classmate, or pranking friends and strangers while dressed like a police officer.  A son who spent his young adulthood living in a mansion in France, avoiding the Vietnam draft, and then felt that selling some stock to live on while attending Harvard was the true measure of suffering. A man who went on to become the “King of Bain,” the real-life basis of Hollywood’s Gordon Gekko character, leveraging businesses for personal profit, wiping out American jobs that once paid living wages with benefits, shuttering factories and halting manufacturing across the land. A man who took the fortune he made in all that destruction, and put it in bank accounts all over the world — ensuring the United States government would never see a penny of tax. A man who then decided he had so much, he also deserved to be President. A man who refuses to reveal his tax returns to voters — completely contrary to what his own father practiced and believed.

  
  
  
  

source: sandandglass

OR Mitt Romney would consider his own father’s family to be among ‘those people’ who it’s his job not to worry about — those people who are “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them… people who pay no income tax.” 

Marie Anntoinette Romney: We’re used to passing up $30 million job offers

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image: The Raw Story

Perpetually confused-looking Brian Kilmeade of Fox & Friends asked Ann Romney if it was difficult for Mitt to turn down a $30 million job offer in 2008. Her answer: 

“Well, we’re used to kind of passing offers up like that. For us, our life is not about making money. We’ve been very blessed financially. Our life is now about giving back. I always trust that Mitt can always make another dollar. Poor guy, he took no pay when he did the Olympics for three years and no pay when he was governor for four years.”

Previous Marie Annoinette-isms (Think Progress):

  • “I don’t even consider myself wealthy, which is an interesting thing.” [Fox News, 3/5/12]
  • “Remember, we’d been paying $62 a month rent, but here, rents were $ 400, and for a dump. This is when we took the now-famous loan that Mitt talks about from his father and bought a $42,000 home in Belmont, and you know? The mortgage payment was less than rent.” [Boston Globe, 10/20/94]
  • “I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids.” [Prescott Bush Awards Dinner, 4/24/12]
  • “We’ve given all you people need to know and understand about our financial situation and how we live our life.” [ABC News, 7/19/12]

Also: 

Mitt Romney’s sense of entitlement is only slightly larger than his capacity for whining

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“The president’s campaign has put out a campaign that’s talking about me and attacking me. I think it’s just demeaning to the nature of the process, particularly when we face the kinds of challenges we face.” — Mitt Romney, in an interview on CBS News.

Dennis G. at Balloon Juice breaks this down the best:

The shock of it all. You run for office and your opponent talks about you, your ideas and why he thinks you are wrong for the job. Most folks would think that this just comes with the territory when you run for President, but for Mitt it is an outrage. The idea that anybody might question him offends his sense of entitlement.

In Romney’s view, he should be able to say anything he wants. Tell any lie. Mitt can attack Barack Obama as the ‘Great Other’, as an unAmerican usurper of power, as a man who hates the Country, as a man who doesn’t understand American values, as a man who wants to take the money from hard working white folks and give it to lazy brown people, as a man unfit for office, as a man who is incompetent, as a man who is a gangster thug and a thousand other insults and lies that Romney and the Wingnuts use to attack President Obama ALL the time. In Mitt’s view race-baiting is justified if it might help him win. He is fine with using code-talking to call Barack Obama an angry black man that all decent white folks should fear. It is OK for Team Mitt to lie and to promote policies that will destroy the middle class. It is OK for his side to bring all the crazy they want.

What is not OK—what Mitt thinks is out-of-bounds—is for anybody to notice and/or mention any of it.

If you call Mitt out for the ways that his policies will hurt the middle-class: that’s going over the line. If you notice that Mitt made his fortune through tax dodges and the destruction of American Jobs, well that is out-of-bounds. If you point out that Mitt is using memes about welfare and angry black men to appeal to white fear and anxiety, then you’re guilty of hate speech.

Mitt Romney wants to run for President with all aspects about him, his campaign, his record, his plans, his statements and his goals off-limits from any review or discussion.

I think we’ve all seen that Mitt can dish it out — but, wow, can he NOT take it. Not even a little bit. He’s a thin-skinned, whiny, spoiled aristocrat who can’t take criticism (he won’t release more tax returns for that reason!). He’s a guy who is used to telling people to jump and having them respond, “How high?” No one dares look directly at the King!

Dennis G. hits the nail on the head: Mitt’s sense of entitlement is massive — it may extend all the way to Kolob. Hopefully there are more of us who think Romney is not  ”entitled” to anything, let alone the White House, just because he wants it. I hope after the election Romney can go spend some quality time with his money in the Caymans or Bermuda.

4.6% — that’s your aggrievement, your entitlement, your socialism, your class warfare

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Kevin Drum would like to remind everyone what the outrage from the top elite is all about:

“I just want everyone to be absolutely clear on what this “narrative of aggrievement” is all about. It’s about Obama’s proposal that the marginal tax rate on income over $400,000 should rise from 35% to 39.6%. That’s your aggrievement. That’s your entitlement. That’s your socialism. That’s your class warfare. An increase in the top marginal tax rate of 4.6 percentage points. Four. Point. Six. This is what America’s most prosperous citizens are up in arms about. This is why Barack Obama is an enemy of capitalism. These are the spiteful shackles he proposes to use to subjugate America’s engines of job creation. It’s the reason America’s wealthiest citizens are so frightened about the future of their country. 4.6 percentage points. Just let that sink in.”

Chrystia Freeland piles on:

“The president is arguing that what works for the top of the United States isn’t working for the middle, and that is a criticism the country’s lionized elite hasn’t heard from its leader in a very long time.”

Mitt Romney speaks “Entitlement” fluently

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A clear definition of what was so wrong with Mitt Romney’s statement: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me,” from Paul Krugman:

David Atkins, over at Digby’s blog, gets at what I’ve been trying to say about Romney, and more eloquently:

[...] It goes much deeper, to Romney’s sense of privilege, and a relationship to the world around him that is alien to most Americans and reinforces everything that is wrong with the 1% in America.

The key part of what’s off-putting about the gaffe isn’t the first part about liking to fire people, so much as the second part about “who provide services to me.” Liking to fire people is bad enough, but this is the real kicker.

When it comes to basic services like healthcare, almost no one in America sees the relationship that way. Most of us wouldn’t speak of “firing” our health insurance company. No matter how much we might detest our insurance company, we probably wouldn’t describe the experience of removing ourselves from their rolls an enjoyable one.

But most of all, we don’t see the health insurance company as providing us a service. We see ourselves, rather, as indentured supplicants forced to pay exorbitant monthly rates for a basic need that responsible people with means can’t get out of paying for if we can help it. We don’t see ourselves as in control of the relationship with them. They are in control of us–and no more so than when we get sick and need the insurance most. If the company decides to restrict our coverage or tell us we have a pre-existing condition after all, we’re in the position of begging a capricious and heartless corporation to cover costs we assumed we were entitled to based on a contractual obligation. It’s precisely when we need insurance most that we’re least able to “fire” the insurance company.

The same goes for the rent/mortgage, for the utilities, for the car, for the cell phone bill, for nearly everything.

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Romney talks about paying for health insurance as if it were the same as getting a pedicure, hiring an escort or getting the fancy wax at a car wash. It’s a luxury service being provided to him, and he doesn’t like it, he can take his business elsewhere. Romney’s is the language of a man who has never wanted for anything, never worried about where his next paycheck would come from, never worried about going bankrupt if he got sick.

It is the language of an entitled empowerment utterly alien to the experience of most Americans.

The point isn’t necessarily that Romney has lived in privilege all his life; so did FDR. It’s his apparent inability or unwillingness to imagine what it’s like for those less privileged, his complete failure to try, even in his imagination, walking in someone else’s shoes that stands out.

Uncompassionate Conservatism 

Fuck yeah Anthony Weiner (Video)

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TPM:

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The House was debating a bill last night that would provide up to $7.4 billion in health care aid to rescue and recovery workers who have faced health problems since their work in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The bill ultimately failed 255-159, and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) was not happy about it. Not one bit.

In a rant that lasted for almost two minutes, a hopping mad Weiner railed against “cowardly” Republicans who claimed they were voting against the bill because of “procedure.” Weiner spat: “It’s Republicans wrapping their arms around Republicans, rather than doing the right thing on behalf of the heroes.”

David Kurtz:

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What I like about Weiner is that he reacts publicly with the range of emotions that someone truly engaged in politics should react with. Politics can be maddening, stultifying, unjust, absurd, and crazy-making. That’s why a lot of people hate politics, even people ostensibly in politics. But if you’re going to really do politics, if you’re going to engage on the battlefield, you have to grapple with all the maddening things that go along with it in order to get done what you actually want done.

Too many progressives seems to want to sit on the sidelines until someone, a Marquess of Queensberry, comes along and changes the rules of the game to make it more civilized. What I like about Weiner, or at least what I see of him in public, is that he’s in the game. He doesn’t hold himself above it or outside of it. He’s in there. He’s fighting.

A good lesson for Democrats: If you’re actually in there fighting, you don’t have to worry about “projecting” to voters that you’re a fighter.

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Related:

Love John Cole’s description of Anthony Weiner …

‘Entitlements’ and ‘heroes’ have a variety of meanings in the GOP

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‘Entitlements’ and ‘heroes’ have a variety of meanings in the GOP

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Funny how “entitlements” are completely fine with Republicans when wealth is being redistributed in the form of tax cuts for the rich and governments subsidies to oil companies. Just more examples of the Republican-TeaParty Contract with America.

In the Party of No,  the GOP is taking a bold stand against funding for medical care for our 9/11 heroes:

Steve Benen: I was under the impression that the emergency teams who responded to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are considered American heroes. The nation’s support for these men and women is unequivocal and unending.

At least, that was my impression. I guess I underestimated congressional Republicans again.

House Republican leadership is advising its members to vote against a bipartisan bill that would, among other things, bolster medical support to Sept. 11 victims.

The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2009, sponsored by New York City Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D), provides medical monitoring to those exposed to toxins at Ground Zero, bolsters treatment at specialized centers for those afflicted by toxins on 9/11 and reopens a compensation fund to provide economic loss to New Yorkers.

And it’s all paid for by closing a tax loophole on foreign companies with U.S. subsidiaries, Democrats say.

A policy statement from the House GOP leadership believes a victims’ compensation fund is too large, and would remain open too long, which in turn creates a “massive new entitlement program” — and Republicans hate entitlement programs.

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Poll shows opposition to health care overhaul declining (among everyone who isn’t a Teaparty Republican)

Fifty percent of the public held a favorable view of the law, up slightly from 48 percent a month ago, while 14 percent expressed no opinion about the measure, according to the poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

… Among Republicans, opposition to the law remained steady at 69 percent, but the intensity of that opposition ticked upward. Fifty-three percent of Republicans said they had a “very unfavorable” opinion of the law this month, up from 50 percent in June.

… The legislation was passed by Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and was signed into law by a Democratic president, and over the past month Democratic support for the legislation grew. Seventy-three percent of Democrats expressed a favorable opinion, up from 69 percent in June. Fifteen percent of Democrats expressed an unfavorable opinion, down from 19 percent in June.

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