Romney Video Offers Nothing New

 Sure, lask week's secretly-recorded fundraiser video of Mitt Romney disparaging and writing off nearly half of Americans, gave us a candid glimpse of how the Republican presidential candidate really views the average American.

 But all the hubbub almost felt overblown, for it only confirmed what the average fifth grader already should have known.

 No matter what Romney claims for the TV cameras, his priorities will never lie with the people.

 While neither political party is immune from the growing corrupt influence of Big Money, it's long been clear that Romney and his state-of-the-art obstructionist House Republicans celebrate an unprecedented cozy allegiance to Wall Street.

 We've known that Romney is the guy who was great at raking in millions of dollars for himself and a handful of fellow executives at the investment company Bain Capital -- while leaving a trail of bankruptcies, layoffs and outsourced jobs.

 And he's the guy hoarding millions in a Swiss Bank account and off shore in places like the Caymen Islands and Bermuda to avoid taxes. Maddow: Romney's tax return is a mess for the campaign 

 Last, but by far not least, Romney represents a party which made its number one priority the past four years, to block President Barrack Obama's every attempt to improve the economy. Just so conservatives can claim the president is failing us.  

It's been the one glaring hypocrisy of the past four years and this whole election season. And it that should provide voters with all they need to know to make a smart choice come November.

Better Yet, Forget 'Better Off?'

This notion that Americans should be better off four years after President Barrack Obama took office is inherently corrupt, for it blatantly ignores the devastating conditions under which he took office.

 The recently-departed author/activist Gore Vidal once described America as the “United States of Amnesia.” We seem to have such short memory spans. And that’s the way the sideshow barker republicans like it.

 So, in typical condescending fashion, the phony conservative party leaders insist that Americans need only to base their presidential choice on an oversimplified, disingenuous question: Are You better off than four years ago?

 Never mind that this country was already losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month in the wake of the most disastrous and crooked presidency in history, when Obama took the reins at the White House.

  Of course, the House Republicans planned it this way. After the last two years in particular of obstructing the president’s every attempt to address our economic woes, they childishly and hypocritically point the finger at Obama and insist: “He did it!”

 

 Even the most powerful swimmer can only get so far in stormy waters – with a ball and chain clasped to his ankle. At least, President Obama hasn't gone under and taken this country with him. To the contrary, he may just be finding his rhythm.

Kevin McKinney

Hurricane Timing Illustrates GOP Damage

Torrents of disingenuousness breaching the boundaries of truth. Then anything goes. Partial truths are melded with blatant lies and peddled as gospel.

In the midst of it all, conservative mouthpieces desperately cling to their trickled down and trickled out message that the rich and influential must be ferried to safety first if we are to survive this storm.

Ravage the middle class; shelter the privileged few. Despite what they say, that’s clearly what they intend to do. That’s what they’ve been doing. And it will never be enough.

Of course, no sly sleight of hand – no matter how deft – could make Hurricane Isaac disappear. In a timing that was indeed eerie, if not flat out prophetic, Isaac made landfall in Louisiana and Mississippi gulfcoasts just as Republicans unveiled their plan to further wreak havoc on the struggling masses.

Will Americans pay heed to that nagging feeling in their guts that tell them the Republicans’ overly confident, slickly-packaged message of hope, is in actuality layered with lies and just as wanting as our troubled economy?

As Democrats face their share of challenges this week with rainy weather in Charlotte, NC, the irony of Isaac arriving on the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, targeting the same vulnerable Gulf Coast states, shouldn’t be lost.

It was as if an awesome all knowing force – infinitely more intelligent, powerful and justified than the robber baron brotherhood – was speaking. But, the looming question remains: Was anybody listening?

Kevin McKinney

(Wildwood Leader, September 6, 2012)

Like Hurricane GOP Full of Hot Air

   
 Interesting how, for the second Republican convention in a row, a hurricane threatened to drown out all the pompous windbags bent on further ravaging the middle class, while sheltering the privileged few.

 And appropriately enough, as the ponderous, slow-moving Hurricane Isaac made landfall in New Orleans, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie took the stage and attempted to hog the spotlight.
 

 He spouted much about his own perceived accomplishments in the Garden State, but like his metaphorical meteorological counterpart a few hundred miles west, Christie was mostly full of hot air. For a while there, it appeared the governor's delusions of grandeur got the best of him, and he thought he was the guy running for president.

The result was that Americans got a good look at the arrogance, indifference and single-mindedness that define the Republican Party. Such disingenuousness across the board - tearing down the president and blaming him for the devastating mess their own party leader left after eight disastrous years in the White House.

 Little wonder George W. Bush and his puppet master Dick Cheney were nowhere to be found at the convention.

 Fact checkers are clear. Talk of President Barack Obama raiding Medicare is a joke. As many as 10 million jobs were created in the private sector and public sector through Obama's stimulus and bank bailout programs. And the Congress (including the unprecedentedly obstructionist House Republicans) is to blame for the drop in the U.S. credit rating, not the president.
 

 Really, all this reflects just what the Republican Party thinks of the American people. The party strategists clearly consider Americans a naive and shallow bunch - easily swayed by blatant lies packaged as convincing sound bites.
 

 Let's really hope and pray that Americans wake up and prove themselves smarter than all that come this November.

 Kevin McKinney

(The Press of Atlantic City, Voice of the People, Sept. 7, 2012) 

Big Money Blues

Who says you can’t buy the White House if you got the dough? And as a down payment, why not slap down a million bucks or so from the untold millions bilked from the American people over the last several years?

 Essentially, that’s what presumed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, his band of Big Money manipulators, and the complicit Senate Republicans are banking on doing. And nothing less. All in much the same reckless, shady manner by which our financial industry nearly bankrupt this country.

 The conservative party once again demonstrated its self-obsessed indifference to democratic fairness by recently blocking the Disclose Act that simply would have alerted citizens as to where some of this nation’s most powerful and influential corporations are placing their bets this election year.

 For reasons that continue to become increasingly clear, obstructionist Republicans in Congress, intent on playing by their own set of rules, would rather you not know who their sugar daddies are.

 That singular, inexcusable, corrupt move to deny transparency by Republicans, is so pathetically revealing, and should tell middle class Americans all they need to know about the true priorities of the once inaptly labeled “moral majority” party.

 As if we really didn’t know already, by Congressional Republicans’ persistent refusal to budge on those tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, as far as they’re concerned, the corporate elite takes precedent over the people.
It’s not as if the Disclose Act would have prevented mega corporations – like Wall Street banks, health insurance and drug companies – from funneling tens of millions of dollars through outside fundraising groups largely endorsing Romney.

The goal of the Act was to introduce some desperately-needed transparency into campaign fundraising, at a time when scandalous daily headlines reveal more and more about the unwieldy influence and criminal practices in the financial industry. Transparency was something even Republicans have long claimed to favor. Not anymore.

 Of course, there are so many things wrong with this picture that it literally makes you sick to your stomach if you stare at it long enough. Little wonder why Americans would simply rather tune out and opt instead to follow the race for the next American Idol.

 For the first time in American history a presidential challenger is on pace to out raise a sitting president. In June alone, just one of Romney's super PACs raised $20 million. In the meantime, millions of children in this country go to bed hungry. Millions of folks have lost their homes to the 2008 economic crisis. Millions more could still follow suit. And the future of the economy?

 We should know by now that no one man has all the answers. And as a country, we need to spend more time formulating the questions. President Barrack Obama has made some mistakes, but he's also done some things right. He's certainly not immune from the corporate influence and has a good deal to answer to. But to think of yanking him from office just as he's hitting his stride is flat out dumb.

 As Americans, our duty doesn’t begin and end on Election Day. We need to pay attention all year round.
Now, thanks to some screwy legal loopholes exploited by notorious right wing schemers like Karl Rove – an “outside” group like American Crossroads can spend millions of dollars in anonymous contributions to run ads promoting Romney for president.

 What that means, in theory and most assuredly in practice, is that the Wall Street robber barons responsible for nearly bankrupting this country can legally dump the same millions of dollars they stole from Americans over the years, into brainwashing campaigns designed to insert one of their very own as the next president of the United States.

 Ain’t that America. Capitalism at work, baby. Home of the brave? Land of the free?

Kevin McKinney

(Wednesday, July 25, 2012, Opinion, Shore News Today)