The Republic of T.

OK. I can’t take it anymore. First “blah people,” and now this? Take a look at this and then tell me what you think Rick Santorum said, almost said, or meant to say.

If he had a prepared speech, he must have diverted from it there. So, I don’t guess releasing it would help matters.

And does anything on this list of words he could have been trying to say make sense in the context of his remarks?

Do you really think Santorum almost used the n-word?*As one commenter points out, there are several words that start with a “neg-” sound:

Words starting with neg

Words Found

negate negated negation negative negatively

negativism negativistic negativity neglect neglected

neglectful neglectfully neglectfulness negligee negligence

negligent negligently negligible negligibly negotiable

negotiate negotiating negotiation negotiations negotiator

Anyway, by the of the day it will be racist to suggest that Santorum almost said the “n word.” I give the hell up.

But I will point out just one thing. Isn’t it at least significant that it’s apparently very easy to believe that a Republican presidential candidate would use the “n word” in reference to President Obama.

What would Trayvon Martin tell us about his last moments, if he could tell us anything? Unfortunately, there are no recordings of 911 called made by Trayvon Martin. That doesn’t mean he’s not heard on the 911 calls that have been released. It’s very likely that he was. And, if so, that was the last time his voice was heard.

But the bits and pieces of the story from reports, witnesses, and 911 calls come  together in a nearly complete story of what happened on that rainy February night in Sanford, FL, when Trayvon Martin met George Zimmerman.

Based on my reading of various reports, I think this is a likely scenario of what happened. Keep in mind, this is unfolding in about 15 minutes; from Zimmerman’s call to 911 at 7:00 pm, to the arrival of the police around 7:15pm.

(Note: In my examination of the 911 calls, I do not examine whether Zimmerman used a racial slur or not. My goal here is to simply offer a likely explanation for what happened.)

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Author Elizabeth Stone, in an often quoted observation, once noted that “Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” In the nine years since we became parents, I’ve found that to be true. When my kids are apart from me, or I’m apart from them, there is a part of me that doesn’t truly relax again see or hear from them again. It’s a tension, a tugging at the heart that you learn to live with as a parent, because sooner or later your children have to venture away from the safety of your gaze and your embrace.

It starts when they learn to crawl, and then walk. They venture a bit further out each time, looking back of reassurance. Before long, they’re off to school, and eventually even stop looking back. Of course, that doesn’t stop you looking after then until you can’t anymore. I’m not sure if or when it ends. Our oldest is still in grade school. But I suspect it lasts into their adulthood. (My own mom, some forty-odd years after my birth, still worries if she doesn’t hear from me for what she thinks is too long, and gently reminds me to call more often.) If nothing else, you need to know where they are and that they’re OK.

That tugging at the heart becomes a vice-like grip when we don’t know where our children are, or whether they’re OK. Most of us have felt it, though — if we’re lucky — during those brief moments when your child disappears from your field of vision on the playground, or disappears down an aisle in the grocery store. They reappear, and eventually you can breathe again.

But sometimes, like Trayvon Martin, they don’t come home.

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I wrote earlier that I sometimes walk our oldest son to school, and watch him until I just can’t see him anymore. It’s one of the quirks I’ve developed as a parent. (Another, which we’ve both developed, is that every night at bedtime we tell our children that we love them. For my part, I always wanted that to be the last thing they heard from us at the end of the day.

I think I my lingering and watching as our oldest son goes off to school, until he’s out of my field of vision and out of my reach stems from the same thing. I wrote a while back that being committed to the people we love means realizing how vulnerable our loved ones are every time they step out of the door to go to work, school, or even to the corner store — and how powerless we are to protect them once they leave the safety of our arms and step out into a troubled world.

In some part of my mind, I realize that on any given day that lingering look could be my last. So could the words I say.

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Yesterday, I wrote that Mitt Romney will have a long, humiliating road to the GOP convention. Michael Tomasky has detailed the stops along and humiliations along that road, and it’s not pretty. He predicts Romney may end up with enough delegates to win the nomination, but at the cost of losing more that 20 states “to a candidate who was a joke four months ago.”

What looks like a long, hard slog for Romney may also be a road to oblivion for the GOP.

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Mitt Romney is down South, trying to win votes in the Alabama and Mississippi Republican primaries. So, I will respond as a Southerner to Romney’s announcement that he won’t be enrolling in Medicare, because he’s worth $150-to-$200 million and doesn’t need it: Well, bless his heart.

Once again, I reminded of Will Allen Dromgoole’s poem, “The Bridge Builder,” in which an old man crosses a river only to start building a bridge across it. (A “bridge over troubled water,” if you will.) Asked by a traveler why he’s building a bridge over a river he’s already crossed, the old man speaks of one who will pass that way after him. “I am building this bridge for him,” he explains.

As I said of Romney’s billionaire backer Ken Griffin, Romney sound like the kind of guy who would cross that bridge, and then either blow it up or build a toll booth on it.

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When it comes to changing Mitt Romney’s image as a rich guy who’s out of touch with the economic realities of the lives of middle- and working-class Americans, the Romney’s — Mitt, who doesn’t follow NASCAR, but has friends who own NASCAR teams; and Ann, who drives a couple of Cadillacs but doesn’t think of herself as rich — haven’t been doing themselves any favors. Recent comments from hedge fund billionaire and Romney campaign shareholder Ken Griffin probably won’t do much to help Romney connect with those voters.

Griffin, who’s given $150,000 to Romney’s super PAC, and $2,500 to Romney personally, sat down with the Chicago Tribune’s Melissa Harris that rich guys like him have “insufficient influence” on government.

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Conservatives love Small Town America™. They extol its virtues all the time. Too bad conservative economics is wiping Small Town America™ off the map.

Move over ! Two years ago, I wrote that Colorado Springs was a conservative “Utopia,” for its rejection of tax increases, which led the city to lay off firefighters and police officers, stop paving roads, eliminate evening and weekend bus service, reduce garbage service, turn off streetlights, and asked residents to mow the grass in public parks (light work, since the city’s water cutbacks ensured most grass in most parks would be dead). Tent cities began springing up as the city cut social services.

David Sirota called it conservatism’s real “shining city on the hill.”

This is what Reaganites have always meant when they’ve talked of a “shining city on a hill.” They envision a dystopia whose anti-tax fires incinerate social fabric faster than James Dobson can say “family values”—a place like Colorado Springs that is starting to reek of economic death.

But that was so two-years-ago. Move over, Colorado Springs! Youngtown, Arizona has totally got you beat. (more…)

I’ve gotten used to it, over the years — that look people get just before their eyes glaze over and their polite smile freezes in place, as I begin to answer the ubiquitous Washington DC question that everyone asks everyone upon first meeting. In New York it’s “Where do you live?” In the south, where I’m from , it’s “Who are your people?” In Washington DC it’s “Who do you work for?” or “Where do you work?” or “What do you do?”

I know before I start to answer that question, I’m probably going to lose people before I’m done. It was true back when I told people I was “blogmaster.” It’s true now that I tell people I blog for a progressive political think tank.

“Think tank?” their faces say. “What the hell is a think tank? What do you do all day at a think tank.” Yes, even in Washington in they are something of a mystery to some people. So I hope lots of people read this description of what goes in a think tank, by Slate’s Katy Waldman.

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As I wrote yesterday, at this point it no longer matters whether or not Mitt Romney takes the positions he does because he truly believes they are right or to satisfy conservatives in his party. The right-wingers who own his party will demand his fealty, if Romney wants the Republican nomination. They will demand even more of President Romney, because at that point he will owe them — and they will own him. So, they’re his positions now. He owns them and he owns the consequences.

In that sense, Romney’s dizzying about-face on minimum wage, isn’t so much another page in his long history of “flip-flops,” so much as example of an increasingly well-trained candidate jumping through another flaming hoop standing between him and the White House. With, of course, a little encouragement from the whips of the ringleaders of the right.

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They don’t call it “Super Tuesday” for nothing. Ten states hold primary elections, and results can make or break a candidate who has made it this far. Even when the results aren’t all that “super” for any one candidate, the contest can be a defining moment for the candidate who’s still standing when the dust settles.

That’s the case for Mitt Romney. Romney eked out a victory over Rick Santorum in the “must-win” Ohio primary, as well as four other states — including two states where his closest rivals weren’t even on the ballot. Santorum pulled off victories in Tennessee, Oklahoma, and North Dakota, while Newt Gingrich won Georgia. So, Romney is not defined by a string of game-changing Super Tuesday victories, so much as what he had to do to win even as much as he did.

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Mitt Romney, in the latest permutation of his “pander-to-win” campaign strategy, has declared that he wants to take America back to the Age of Enron. Remember Enron? “The Smartest Guys in the Room”?

Mitt Romney, just in time for Super Tuesday, says he wants to take us back to that. Well, not in so many words. Romney actually pledged to repeal the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) — which would leave nothing to prevent another Enron disaster, and almost guarantee a repeat of the scandal.

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Make it stop. Won’t somebody please make it stop? Apparently, Bristol Palin is still famous for reproducing. (Accidentally, or not.)

Lifetime has picked up Bristol Palin: Life’s A Tripp, a 10-episode docuseries chronicling Bristol Palin’s life as a young, single mother living in the spotlight of being Sarah Palin’s daughter. The series will focus on how Bristol adjusts to life in Alaska with her son Tripp and her interactions with with her parents, former Alaska governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Todd, and siblings. “From the first moment she was thrust into the public eye, Bristol and her son have been the subjects of a huge amount of curiosity and misunderstanding,” said Rob Sharenow, EVP, Programming, of Lifetime Networks. “This show will reveal the real Bristol Palin and her journey as a daughter, a mother and a young woman making her way in the world.”

So much for being “into the whole Hollywood thing.” This is why I continue to hate most “reality television.” First, it tends to highlight and bring out the worst in people. Second, it has this annoying way of making celebrities out of people who have no discernible talent. (more…)

As a Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney should wear a warning label: “CAUTION: following changes in this candidate’s positions could cause whiplash and other injuries.” Seriously, you could hurt yourself trying keep up with the speed with which this guy changes his mind.

The only thing more stunning than Romney’s ideological agility and changeable convictions is that — contrary to what you might be inclined to think — Romney’s flip-flops aren’t quite the gaffes the appear to be. Neither, for that matter, are his convictions. They’re more tactics than convictions, really. Thus they change whenever necessary, and always in service of Romney’s real, bedrock conviction.

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The “Birthers” are back. In truth, they never left. Perhaps you thought, even hoped, that they were finally relegated to shouting form the sidelines about birth certificates. Well, you were wrong.

• Orly Taizt won a minor victory when a Georgia judge denied an Obama administration motion to have her challenges to the president’s eligibility for the ballot thrown out.
• Republicans in Pennsylvania are challenging Obama’s eligibility to appear on the ballot there.
• Former attorney to “D.C. Madam” Deborah Jean Palfrey,  Montgomery Blair Sibley (currently disbarred), is running for president, and has filed his own birther lawsuit.
• Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio may have problems his own, but tomorrow he’s due to announce the results of a birther investigation he performed as a “favor” to President Obama.

Some forms of mental illness just don’t get better. Birtherism is one of them, and birthers have taken it “to the next level.”

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It seems like just yesterday Mitt Romney released his 59-page “plan for jobs and economic growth.” That’s because it practically was just yesterday. Romney released “Believe in America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth,” around the beginning of September 2011. It was even available as a free e-book on Amazon.Com. It was, as Richard Eskow put it, “the same old job-killing madness.” Implementing it, Bill Scher noted, would require “slashing the social safety net.”

That was before Romney retroactively lost the Iowa caucuses to Rick Santorum. That was before Newt Gingrich turned Romney into “The Man From Bain,” and surged to victory in South Carolina. That was before Romney found himself running neck-and-neck with a guy he had been leading by 38 points.

That’s gotta be enough to drive a guy who’s gone from “inevitable” to “in-question” more than a little crazy. In Romney’s latest economic agenda, it’s starting to show. (more…)

Now that my post-20th-GOP-debate waves of nausea have subsided, I’d like note one good thing that came of the whole ordeal. Their economic agendas are disastrously wrong-headed, and their attacks on President Obama go beyond borderline bigotry. But when the remaining GOP standard bearers attack each other, they are usually spot-on.

The latest example is Mitt Romney’s attack on Rick Santorum for voting “No Child Left Behind” and the earmarks that built the infamous “Bridge To Nowhere” in which he basically called Santorum (as Jed Lewison put it) an “unprinicpled hack.”

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Thanks in large part to the phenomenon of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, 2008 was known as the year of the small donor. While Barack Obama can’t called it’s herald, his decision to accept, if not embrace, the reality of super PACs suggests that the 2012 presidential election — the first post-Citizens United presidential election — may become known as the Year of the Super PAC. (There’s word that even Occupy Wall Street could get a super PAC.) Maybe. But that barely scratches the surface. So far, the 2012 race suggests that behind every successful candidate is a well-funded super PAC. And behind every power well-funded PAC is an even more powerful backer with very deep pockets. Take a closer look, and bigger story is that 2012 election may turn out to be The Year of the Billionaire.

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Four Republican Senators — Thune, Toomey, Hutchison, and Brown — held a press conference today, to remind Americans about their job creation legislation. Wait. Republicans have jobs bills? Oh! That’s why they had to remind us. Sen. John Thune, in the YouTube video below call on Sen. Harry Reid to stop blocking what he called bills “that deal with capital the issue of capital formation for our job creators.” Huh?

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In this morning’s Progressive Breakfast, I referred to Mitt Romney’s Michigan TV spot as “Romney’s Auto Bailout Spin-Out.” Well, as it happens, things are worse than I thought. Just to recap, Santorum is pounding Romney in Michigan. This is a little embarrassing, because Michigan is supposed to be Romney’s home turf. His dad, George Romney, was Michigan’s governor for six years. Plus, Mitt needs to win Michigan. (more…)