Look back on Mitt Romney in 2011:
KING: You’ve been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I’ve been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it’s the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?
ROMNEY: Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.
Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut — we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do? And those things we’ve got to stop doing, because we’re borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we’re taking in. We cannot…
KING: Including disaster relief, though?
ROMNEY: We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.
You know he’s not going to do a thing to slow the advance of global climate change (or does he think that can be done at the level of individual states, too?), and he doesn’t support federal emergency services. Why should he? Disasters like this don’t discomfit the rich.
When I discuss the national debt with right-wing people, whether in person or online, the reaction I obtain when I mention the wars and immense military waste and subsidies for corporations used to surprise me. Mention of these drains on the treasury actually makes them happy. They get excited and animated. “Yes! No money left, that’s right. It’s all gone. No use crying over what happened in the past [unless, of course, it’s to denounce a liberal]. Going forward, well, sorry, but there’s just no money for [fill in the blank here].”
I have come to realize that the right-wing of the U.S. really does not care about anything other than dividing the world into the categories of “deserving” and “undeserving” and anything they can do to crush the “undeserving” is OK. The belief that some vast horde of lazy (probably non-white) people who do not want jobs are living the life of ease on public assistance haunts them. “Entitlements” sets their hair on fire but changing the climate, well, since the killer hurricanes did not materialize immediately after Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth then, well, it’s all random stuff the librils are trying to take advantage of to give money to the undeserving.
Yes privatize everything so people like him can make more money. Look at the contracters in the Middle East they make more than our soldiers. Disgusting!
Why the fuck do those people worry themselves sick about the stupid debt when they can’t be bothered to worry about climate change or peak oil ?
If they think Jeebus or Moron-E or Qui Gon Jin is coming on his white horse/spaceship/armored tank to clean up the crap they’re continuing to merrily spread around them and shit brand new petroleum (except this it’ll be tar sands, cause He’s taken Immodium. Weep, mortals.) in Texas and Alaska in their lifetime, can’t He also wipe the damned debt?
These people make no freaking sense.
And from the news reports I’m reading, Romney is standing by his anti-FEMA bullshit even as a hurricane smashes into the East Coast? I don’t know if that move is politically courageous, oblivious to reality, or just plain sociopathic!
And the scary thing that there are is a significant portion of the American people who actually think its a good idea!
/snarky post about how Obama and Romney are the same anyway
It’s probably all three once you remove the undeserved positive connotation from the term “courage”. I assume it would just be easier to swap it with “arrogance” instead.
Not his kids,* and no one (except him) has any intention of making people who can’t afford it pay more taxes, but of course that’s neither here nor there. I guess they have to get fucked some way or another. And it does seem simpler to cut spending and fuck them over that way, without going through the trouble of making them pay extra for it first.
*But I don’t know. Maybe part of his mysterious economic plan is making everyone give him their firstborn child. I could see how that might raise the GDP. It doesn’t really matter. Job creators are always like that. You can’t let your competitors (the citizens) know all about your trade secrets (what they’re voting for). That’s just good business sense.
Its sad but a lot of people who cashed FEMA checks are still going to vote for Romney. Joplin lost its biggest hospital, a major shopping center, its best beer provider, most of its schools, a walmart, and 7000 homes. Without FEMA this town would be nothing. A ghost town with the middle cut out. To say funding FEMA is immoral because of overspending in other departments is little different than saying feeding your kid is immoral because you blew all your money at a casino.
This talk about moving things to the states seems like a silly rhetorical shell game that makes it sound as if the state governments all have underutilized magic money trees to pay for disaster relief if the FEMA relinquishes responsibility.
Most states already have their own emergency management agencies as well as there own National Guard forces that work in concert with FEMA when there is a disaster. FEMA is there to augment the state and local relief efforts when a disaster is extraordinarly large. What Romney is suggesting is that we replicate FEMA by 50X to save money. I guess state owned debt doesn’t count.
BTW, we already have privatized disaster relief. It is called homeowners insurance. FEMA is there to deal with the impact that comes when the shared (i.e. public) infrastructure is destroyed (the whole being greater than the sum of its part).
The one reasonable argument conservative can make is that excessive state sponsored disaster relief money flowing to individual homeowners can create a dis-incentive for people to save for a rainy day and carry adequate private insurance which means that the people who do carry insurance are paying twice (once for themselves and once for the people who don’t bother carrying insurance). Instead of making that very unpopular argument, they make the federal government into a wasteful boogey man and try to make it sound as if moving responsibility to the states or private sector will make it all better without throwing anyone under the bus.
\BCT
Romney is ahead in Florida polls but hey they don’t need to worry – they never get hit with any strong storms there.
Like PZ, I have never been a fan of Obama and he’s an idiot for not merely failing to mention climate change as the single most important issue needing to be addressed but that aside, at the debate in Boca Raton Florida to not have said that if you want to vote for Mitt you better hope to don’t get hit by any hurricanes for at least 4 years because he thinks you should be on your own.
He might have also mentioned where they could find Mitt discussing this in his own words and have added something to the effect … although he’s sure that like every other position Mitt has that has been expressed openly and promptly repudiated by the majority of Americans he’ll have a new position or say that his comments were totally misinterpreted/taken out of context.
FFS-it seems the government just takes our tax dollars and throws them in a furnace, regulation do nothing but burden companies and citizens with no benefits whatsoever, no cost-savings overall, nothing whatsoever. They’ve been repeating this bullshit for so long, they may have worn down the opposition, and the corporate-lead media sure isn’t helping.
Since the god-smitten alway claim that these events are brought to us by their god because of the gays/liberals/abortions/pre-marital sex/whatever why not make the churches pay?
Actually I think rMoney was refering to his prior statements, about the federal government having money to do things, rather than handing it all over to the private sector. He is so self-absorbed that he missed the entire point of King’s question: That there are matters, like FEMA, that can only be co-ordinated on a national level. To him, it would all devolve to the individual. What next? Privatised emergency response? I do not want to type this too loudly, we might give the idjit ideas.
rMoney seems to be totally ignorant as to how disasters work. Every single day we are facing immanent disaster, but for the hard (and highly co-ordinated) work of engineers and other professionals¹, that make sure that the infrastructure to deliver necessities is always up and working. Disasters merely interupt these systems² for a while – with potentially horrific consequences.
….
¹ STEM subjects are necessary, not as much for “progress”, but also to maintain modern infrastructure, without which we could not survive in the manner to which we are accustomed. Disasters give us a small glimpse as to where we really are, but for technology. Goddists seem to be the first to forget this and to actually attempt to undermine our societies’ very technological foundations³.
² Leaving aside immediate, personal hazards.
³ History is rife with examples of technological failure leading to societal collapse.
Yes, just cut the programs that keep the kids alive now so you can stop worrying about their future.
It’s like saying you won’t pay for life-saving surgery now because that would deplete the college funds.
Strap him to a nice chair
Leave him in Times Square
Hurricane Sandy will come
And fling him into the sun
All our worries will go away
When the states go bankrupt — hey, hey!
But Giliell!
Don’t you know that Jesus will take care of everything?
It’s obvious.
Mittens just wants to support the large segment of America that would prefer the US embrace Feudalism.
Feudalism:
Because being a serf means never having to say you’re sorry.
“Just BELIEBE!!!”
Justin Belieber?
Ichthyic
True.
But there is that stepping into the gutter.
And tugging your forelock (because you cannot afford a cap to doff).
But at least you’re not dead!!(happyface)!!
But at least you’re not dead!!(happyface)!!
exactly. hey, some serfs had it pretty good. Their lords would always look out for them and make sure they were never killed by rampaging lions.
The answer of course depends on what time of day you ask Mittens.
IIRC, he starts his day being politically courageous, spends the mid day to evening being completely oblivious, and becomes sociopathic at night when he deals with responding to liberal media requests for information.
Ok, so maybe it’s mostly just being oblivious to reality after all.
@ Ichthyic
.
If you want to know what a modern feudalist state looks like, look no further than Hong Kong. It is glorious to be rich here. But not much fun living in a cage dwelling.
(One mitigating factor is healthcare, I’m sure Mitt can do feudalism better.)
Romney’s a big fan of Big Government, when it puts big money in the pockets of big corporations. “. . . And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better. . .”
But by Jingo, if you want your roads fixed, bridges built or ::GASP!::: health care, No Big Government! WE can’t afford this!
FEMA fecked up Big Time with New Orleans (Hurricane Katrina, 2005). As far as I know, it hasn’t fecked up since(not in any serious manner). Rmoney won’t admit Cheney & Bush ][‘s regime failed and Obama’s hasn’t.
The thing is, FEMA does put money into the private sector because those are the contractors that remove the debris, repair the roads, restore the power, repair the houses. The way Mitt thinks FEMA ought to work is how it does work., which he would know if he knew enough to be President.
I remember reading after Katrina that FEMA is a Democratic program and Democratic presidents have put people who are competent in charge of it, but Republicans use it as a government perk to reward supporters.
This belief makes me crazy. The money doesn’t go into a furnace or down the toilet or into a hole in the ground. Every penny is carefully counted and then GOES INTO SOMEONES POCKET!!
Sorry for the shouting. The money doesn’t disappear. It’s being stolen.
By the man behind the curtain.
Anyway, every christian knows that god sends storms to punish Obama voters. Vote for rMoney and he will make magic underwear for the whole US to protect us from any bad.
So we don’t need FEMA.
Also, have you noticed how much better New Orleans looks since god sent Katrina to wash so much of that ugly brown stain off?
I’m so sick of this State’s rights shit. In this day and age why can’t we just have a standard set of laws that apply across the board. I was just talking with my dental hygienist about how certification is different in each state and how much of a cluster fuck it is to move to a state where re-certification is required, some states allow hygienists to do extractions and fillings whilst others don’t. It seems to me that there is more red tape generated at the state level that at the federal level.
anteprepro:
When I think of the word “courage,” I tend to think of the ability to override fear and press on with whatever you seek to accomplish. It’s a quality that can exist in someone regardless of the rest of their character or the morality of their goals. In this case, Mittens would ignoring the perfectly rational fear of endangering his political aspirations by advocating the end of federal disaster benefits while a disaster is taking place. Immoral, but gutsy.
However, “arrogance” could work too.
“FEMA fecked up Big Time with New Orleans…”
Donin’ a good job there, Brownie!
I agree with you entirely, but most people seem to disagree with us. They use the word “courage” as if it were a virtue in itself, rather than realizing that “courage” is only noble if the other actions of the person, the actions that are carried out in the face of obstacles that could incite fear, are themselves noble. From our perspective there is such a thing as BAD courage. But I don’t think such a thing exists in the popular mind. Just look at the uproar by people objecting to calling suicide bombers “courageous”. Because “courage” is a good thing and they will shout down any attempt to attribute a good thing to bad people, ensuring that “courage” will always be considered a good thing.
1st, I recall when President Carter created FEMA there was no hissing or howling from the right. He noticed that in the response to disasters at the State and local level everyone could see duplication of effort, confusion and lack of a coordinated response. The “M” in FEMA stands for “Management.” The republican attack on government started later, making FEMA into “just another entitlement program.” This crap about returning responsibility to the states is a big, fat, hairy lie.
2nd, regulations work. They worked really well. The we had 25 years (and counting) of deregulation. So does that mean that the regulations that are left have to do the work of the ones that were abolished? It’s not like an office where other people do the work when someone is gone.
If there was only one regulation in the world there are right-wing nuts who will 1.) blame it for everything that goes wrong, and 2.) use whatever went wrong as “evidence” that regulations do not work, and both even if the regulation does not have anything to do with what went wrong.
Ignoramuses, please try reading the Federal Register now and then. No regulation comes about like magic. They come about as a result of well-documented problems, entail a comment period and hearings in which anyone can object to the regulation being enacted in the first place.
For the record, as much as I dislike President Obama (for much the same reasons as PZ gives) he has had his administration sort through regulations and removed ones found obsolete, or no longer useful. This is the honest way to do deregulation, not “let’s get rid of all regulations and let the invisible hand take care of everything.” Really? Like it did before? Like when we had company towns, child labor, air pollution incidents that killed thousands, and, oh, catastrophic financial collapse. Can you say “Glass Steagall?”
I think we should follow Romney’s advice and go beyond the states all the way to the private sector. We’ll privatize disaster relief. That way only those who can pay for the services will be saved. A perfect Romney World. Only the people whose wealth proves that they “deserve” to live will get protection, rescue, etc.
Romney has shown, in so many ways, that he doesn’t know anything about running a country, or about social responsibility. He doesn’t understand equity in a general, human sense. “Private equity” says it all.
By the way, FEMA fecked up in New Orleans in part because George Bush appointed a man to head the agency who had no experience.
In George W. Bush’s personal experience, incompetent people can be elected or appointed to positions of authority. No problem from his point of view. Not only was Bush’s FEMA Director incompetent, but unlike Obama, Bush was not competent to help. He did not sit in the situation room pulling everything together, calling Governor Christie at midnight to clear up the details for the hardest hit area, etc.
Romney would be likely to appoint incompetents as well. He can’t vet people any better than he can vet his sources. Now he’s got Chrysler calling him on the carpet fer chrissakes. No matter, he’ll compound the error about Jeep by making an ad that repeats the same lie.
I don’t think I’ll ever understand how something I’ve helped pay for is “entitlement”. That just makes no sense to me.
Excerpt above is from the New York Times’ editorial board.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, had high praise for Obama:
Because I also helped pay for it and yet I didn’t get any immediate benefit from it, so fuck you, I don’t understand common goods or even insurance and I want a refund because I didn’t have to use it.
Mitt Romney is looking right into the face of defeat in Ohio. So what does he do? He tries to cheat by telling another whopper of a lie. In a campaign speech he said Chrysler was preparing to move “all” Jeep production to China. Not true. When he was caught lying, Romney blithely doubled down on the lie. He turned the lie into a TV ad.
Add this to my long list of evidence that Romney is incapable of vetting his sources, and that he is willing to act on information he has gleaned from bogus sources.
Add this to my long list of evidence that Romney is one of those slimy prevaricators that lies by telling a technical truth that he knows will be misunderstood.
Add this to my list of evidence that Romney is an exceptionally good liar, and an exceptionally sneaky one.
You see, Mittens is just worried about the childrenz, if the starve to death while trapped in a collapsed house due to the lack of disaster relief then they don’t have to worry about paying the debt rMoney will create by cutting his own taxes and buying more bombs (because money spent on the military is magical and doesn’t count in the deficit like money spent on schools).
Should Obama get re-elected, it would provide much-needed egg on faces of so many of those ideologue ‘make Obama a one-term President’ Republicans/conservatives.
One would hope with re-election, Obama would fully utilize that classic ‘got nothing to lose’ second term, and push hard for important socio-economic changes.
Romney might be on to something here: let’s take away everything the federal government does, reassign it to the states, and then each state succeed from the union. If the federal government’s role truly is to do nothing, than let’s tell the federal government to shove off. That will certainly make things better off! (Well, the rich states will be okay but the poorer ones may have to unionize to make it all work out.)
Any states wish to join Cascadia, a union of liberal west coast states?
As i said in another forum, if you thought Katrina was a clusterfuck, just wait until Haliburton gets its hands on disaster recovery.
Future children matter more than current children. Fetuses matter more than expectant mothers. It’s just one big exercise in reality-denying.
Federal involvement in disaster relief can be interpreted as a form of national defense, though defense against nonhuman enemies.
Obama and Romney are not running in isolation. They are attached to these entities called political parties. A vote for either is also a vote for their party, and an indication of support for the party’s platform and overall conduct in general, even when as we all know the party platforms are not so much declarations of intended policy as documents of theoretical preferences, in practice.
The Republican Party’s platform is regressive in the extreme and the party’s behavior is obstruction, division, fear-mongering, racism, lies, and vote suppression.
Conversely the Democratic Party’s platform this year is one the most progressive ever proposed by a mainstream party in American history.
Should Obama lose to Romney it will be a political message for all of the following:
1. Obstructionism and vote suppression are political strategies that WORK, and should be emulated.
2. Making your platform more progressive is not the way any party should go if it wishes for electoral success.
3. There is no political price to be paid for veiled racism or misogyny. If you can use it to rile up and mobilize your base, go for it, as you will not be called out on it and therefore have absolutely nothing to lose.
4. You can say anything you want to anyone, and change it at the drop of a hat, anytime you want, and you will not suffer for it at the polls. Lie all you want because no one will call you out on it, and even if someone does, it won’t matter, the voters won’t punish you for it.
Good luck advocating for progressive causes of any sort in the next 20 years in that environment.
Even more importantly, Obama’s re-election would be a repudiation of obstructionist tactics. He will have political capital to more forcefully push his agenda against those who would obstruct him. It would be a message to obstructionists to cease and desist for face electoral oblivion.
A Romney victory would on the other hand be an endorsement of obstructionist politics. Indeed, if Romney should win, would we not see the progressive left urging the progressive caucus in the senate to filibuster any attempt to repeal Obamacare, or defund Planned Parenthood, or restore DOMA, to obstruct any attempt to implement any part of the Ryan budget? Would there not be enormous political pressure on Harry Reid and other top Democrats to deploy a “One-Term-President” strategy of obstruction against Romney’s administration? The left wing already views Romney as a liar and a cheat. If he should win on this perceived platform of lies, would one not think that the bitterness would run deep and poison future attempts at bipartisanship?
Possibly, but we would see the Congress Democrats “triangulating” even further to the right.
Some of their subsidiaries were down at Katrina. For instance, they replaced three federal security officers (two SEC1s and an SECM (me (well, technically I was a trainee, but . . . ) with 28 officers (at $10.00 an hour for the front line people (much less than I was making) but $60.00 per hour paid to the company for overhead). Been there, done that.