You might think, if you are a leader of a political party, that you would seek as much air time on television and radio as possible. You might also think that it would be beneficial to your party if your candidates were able to penetrate the airwaves that traditionally are filled with information from and about opposing parties.

The operative word in the sentences is “think.” At the risk of sounding too judgmental, it strikes me that Republicans frequently have trouble rendering decisions that require real thinking rather than impulsive action based on beliefs that are likely founded on little or no reason.

Looking for a report on recent Republican actions that is “fair and balanced,” we got our latest information from Fox News.

The Republican National Committee has voted to boycott any presidential primary debates primary debates planned by CNN and NBC if they proceed with lengthy television features on Hillary Clinton, widely expected to be a 2016 Democratic candidate.

Okay, if I have this correct, the RNC (Republican National Committee) is going to try to prevent Republican candidates running for president from participating in debates sponsored by either CNN or NBC because those two networks will be presenting documentaries or docudramas about Hillary Clinton who may or may not be the 2016 Democratic nominee for president. Or as Fox further reports:

The RNC claims that a Clinton-themed documentary and a separate miniseries — in the works from CNN and NBC, respectively — will put a “thumb on the scales” in the upcoming 2016 presidential election.

The draft resolution, obtained by Fox News in advance and later voted on by RNC officials, calls on CNN and NBC to cancel what it describes as “political ads masked as unbiased entertainment.”

There are several assumptions that the RNC makes that are highly questionable. First they assume that the programs on Hillary Clinton will be slanted favorably towards her. We all know that she has plenty of baggage in the closet and it wouldn’t take much for either or both of the television networks to go for the ratings by promoting the films as “tell-alls” about Ms. Clinton. The RNC potentially could be biting the hand that feeds it.

Secondly, both CNN and NBC have millions of regular viewers. They may not tune in to watch a Republican debate on Fox but would likely watch it on more mainstream networks such as these two. But Fox reports:

Even before the Clinton dispute, Republican leaders favored plans to have fewer presidential debates with more friendly moderators. They believe their 2012 presidential candidates spent too much time beating up on each other in last year’s months-long primary season, contributing to Mitt Romney’s loss.

“Our party should not be involved in setting up a system that encourages the slicing and dicing of candidates over a long period of time with moderators that are not in the business of being at all concerned about the future of our party,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus told reporters.

The RNC may well be right that in the 2012 presidential debates Republicans spent too much time beating up on each other. But it is doubtful that such conduct had anything to do with the questions that were asked by reporters. The RNC may also be correct that the debate moderators are not concerned about the future of their party. However, the RNC fails to ask the obvious question, “Is it the job of debate moderators to concern themselves about the well-being of the Republican Party?”

Finally, it is not beyond the realm of possibility for a television network to incorporate a little bit of revenge into its decisions. Ideally CNN and NBC would not have any of their programming affected by a possible boycott, but it’s quite conceivable that anyone along the chain of command could work to shade these networks’ coverage as deliberately anti-Republican.

One of the key challenges for the Republican Party is to stop making decisions that actually sound like jokes and instead to actually be serious about public policy. They claimed that they learned a lot from their experiences in 2012 yet with decisions like the boycott, they make us all wonder.

The post The curious “thinking” of Republicans continues appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Occasionally we see the underbelly of the Republican Party when members make outrageous remarks. But what really goes on when House or Senate Republicans caucus? These meetings are all secret (as are the Democratic ones).

Early in the first Obama Administration, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said “his number-one goal was to make sure that Barack Obama was a one-term president.” Was he speaking only for himself for all or most Senate Republicans? After he said it, what was the reaction within the Republican caucus?

These are all questions to which we don’t know the answers. And it’s doubtful that any non-Republican will sneak a hidden camera into a caucus meeting the way it was done at a Mitt Romney fundraiser in May, 2012 (but not revealed until September of that year).

Is there any Republican in either the Senate or House GOP caucus who finds the meanness of many Republicans to be so repugnant that he or she feels compelled to inform the whole world of what’s going on behind closed doors? Is there any Republican who feels that the GOP is too negative about the role of government, that it’s only defined by negativity, or that he or she came to Washington to do something other than further tighten the grip of gridlock?

If there is such a person, it would be a true act of statespersonship to come forward and tell the rest of us what’s going on in these meetings. It’s doubtful that such a “whistle blower” would come from a district that is solidly red. But there are Republicans who won in competitive districts and those Republicans have the same right to attend the caucus meetings as anyone else.

Acts of courage in Congress are not unprecedented; John F. Kennedy and Theodore Sorenson wrote about them back in 1956 in their book Profiles in Courage. This Republican would not only receive praise from Progressives, but also from many moderates including the remaining vestige of “mainstream Republicans.” He or she might not win re-election, at least as a Republican, but this person could receive high accolades in the present time and very positive assessment when viewed through the eyes of history.

Other Republicans in Congress, such as McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, would have to scramble to try to convince the general public that they are not as bad as the whistle-blower depicts. But the reality would be best expressed through the words of one of their deceased own (former Vice-President Spiro Agnew), they are “nattering nabobs of negativity.” Many of the destructive elements of the Republican machine are available to all of us now; others lurk behind closed doors. Now is the time for the rest of us to see the full Republican Party as it really is. Will a courageous and not so nasty Republican please step forward?

The post Time for a Republican whistle blower appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Benghazi isn’t a scandal. It’s what the character named Detective Bobby Simone, of TV’s Law & Order, would have called “a situation.” [Simone once said, ” Everything’s a situation.” What he meant, of course, was that you can’t apply one-size-fits-all rules to everything that happens. And shit does, indeed, happen.] Such is the case with the attack on the American consulate [not embassy–there’s a big difference, people] in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. Although Congressional Republicans–and let’s not forget the unfortunate Mitt Romney, who stepped into a huge puddle of oops over Benghazi during the Presidential debates–continue to rail, rant, stomp their feet, hold interminable hearings, throw tantrums, raise money off it,  and try to turn it into either an impeachable scandal or a future campaign talking point against Hilary Clinton–there’s no there there–and they know it.

Editorial cartoonists know it, too. Here are a few of their visual commentaries on the Benghazi brouhaha:

The post Benghazi: Political cartoonists have their say appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Shortly after assuming the presidency following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson announced his commitment to a war on poverty. That was the unofficial name of legislation first introduced by Johnson in his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964.

In the  2012 presidential election, the code word for equality was “middle class.” Certainly the middle class has been and still is in need of economic support from the government as well as from the wealthy households that are making more than a quarter of a million dollars each year. President Obama has been consistent in standing by his pledge that federal income taxes for the wealthy be raised from 35% to 39.6%.

Those in the middle class are generally active voters who were committed to maintaining the limited wealth that they have accumulated and retaining jobs that allow them to garner each year at least a livable wage or more. It is important for every politician who wants to win his or her race to focus the campaign toward the needs of the middle class. Republicans also try to appeal to the middle class, even though their policies generally favor the wealthy, at the expense of the middle class and the poor.

Lyndon Johnson grew up poor along the Pedernales River in central Texas. He experienced the rugged chores of farming as his family struggled to make ends meet. He also went from town to town peddling various wares. In 1926, Johnson enrolled in Southwest Teachers College. from which he graduated,  and then found a job teaching in a one-room school house. This was obviously quite a difference from Mitt Romney, whom you might remember as the most recent Republican candidate for president.

While Barack Obama did not grow up as poor as LBJ, he clearly was aware of the plight of those with little or no money, because of his three years as a community organizer in Chicago. Even though he directed most of his comments in the campaign toward helping the middle class, he never lost sight of the needs of the poor, who he came to know so well after college and in the years that followed. His concern for the poor goes beyond those in the United States; it is essential to his international strategy, in which he strives to eradicate poverty in developing countries. He believes that eliminating income inequality in poor countries around the world is an essential part of strengthening global stability and promoting peace. As Zachary A. Goldfarb reported in the November 23 edition of the Washington Post,

When Barack Obama published his autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” about racial identity in 1995, he talked with his neighborhood newspaper in Illinois, the Hyde Park Citizen, about the economic disparities he had seen while exploring the world as a child and young adult.

“My travels made me sensitive to the plight of those without power and the issues of class and inequalities as it relates to wealth and power,” he said in that interview. “Anytime you have been overseas in these so-called third world countries, one thing you see is a vast disparity of wealth of those who are part of the power structure and those outside of it.”

Goldfarb goes on to say:

Obama’s actions as president provide a glimpse of how he views legislation as a means to his end. His health-care reform law, aimed at covering as many of the uninsured as possible, takes a shot at addressing income inequality by imposing new taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Beginning next year, upper-income earners will pay new surcharges that will result in an average additional tax bill of $20,000 for the top 1 percent.

The poverty rate in the United States has grown considerably in recent years. As Bloomberg Businessweek reports,

For half a decade, the percent of Americans living below the poverty line has increased each year, from 12.3 percent in 2006 to 15.1 percent in 2010. Today the Census Bureau released its analysis of U.S. poverty in 2011, and the official poverty rate essentially held at 15 percent, meaning that 46.2 million people live below the poverty line.

A recent Frontline program on PBS explored the plight of poor children in Iowa. As I watched it, I couldn’t help but wish that John Boehner, Eric Kantor, and Mitch McConnell had been in the same room as me. I would have been most interested in their response to this depiction of poverty. I would have wanted to think that they would have a cathartic moment and changed their policies to favor legislation to address the needs of the poor. However, my reality bone told me that in all likelihood they would have blamed the victims, the poor children of eastern Iowa, rather than support any action to improve their lives.

Most progressives hope that Barack Obama has a secret, and so far undisclosed set of policies, that he wants to propose and see enacted in his second term. These may include stricter gun control laws, a new stimulus package, and a quicker withdrawal from Afghanistan. If the president “wins” the battle over the so-called “fiscal cliff,” it would be refreshing and encouraging to have him advance more of a comprehensive policy toward meeting the needs of the poor. There is little doubt that he would support such a policy. The question is whether he thinks that it would be a battle that he could win. The key to this decision lies primarily in restoring a veto-proof majority in the Senate as well as a new majority in the House in the 2014 mid-term elections.

The post Obama sees the poor as well as the middle class appeared first on Occasional Planet.

For the first time in history, an Israeli prime minister took sides in an American election. The right wing, saber rattling prime minister of Israel, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, broke tradition and openly endorsed Mitt Romney for president.

Before November 6, Bibi, and everyone else, assumed he would coast to victory in the upcoming January 22 elections. But, thanks to his backing loser Mitt Romney, overnight, he has become a loser in the eyes of the Israeli people. The general feeling among Israelis is that he intervened where he shouldn’t have and, by doing so, foolishly endangered U.S. Israeli relations.

It’s no secret that, during his first term, Obama and Netanyahu had a chilly relationship. That Netanyahu meddled in the election and backed Romney doesn’t bode well for their future relationship. Larry Derfner writing on November 7 at liberal Israeli web magazine +972:

If Romney had won, people here would be hailing Bibi right now as a genius, a prophet. But Obama won, which makes Bibi, in Israeli eyes, a screw-up of historic magnitude. He went and tracked mud on the Oval Office carpet right in front of the president’s eyes. The president couldn’t say anything during the campaign because of American domestic politics, but the campaign’s over and now Israelis are wondering when and how this newly liberated president is going to take revenge on them for their prime minister’s spectacular arrogance. Conclusion: The only way to get America back on our side is to get rid of Bibi. That, I believe, is the mood in Israel on this fine morning.

Another first: Republican Party brought Israeli politics into election

In another post, Derfner points out that Netanyahu was not the only one who broke new ground. For the first time, the Republican Party brought Israeli right-wing politics into a U.S. election:

This was the first U.S. presidential election in which one of the two parties took the Israeli right-wing line, attacking the other party for endangering Israel’s existence, and calling on American Jews (as well as Christians) to vote for it and donate money to it at least partly on that basis. This wasn’t a marginal, low-key theme, either; in heavily Jewish states, especially the swing state of Florida, the message was as bombastic as can be. Roughly 6.5 million American Jews had this message drummed into their skulls by the Republicans (who took their inspiration and much of their phrasing from the leader of world Jewish nationalism, Bibi Netanyahu): that voting for Obama meant “throwing Israel under the bus.” This was the first time Israel became a left/right issue in a presidential campaign, and the right flogged it with absolutely all their might.

Why did Netanyahu insert himself into the U.S. elections? Billionaire Sheldon Adelson, owner of the influential Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, and a stalwart backer of Netanyahu, enlisted Netanyahu’s help in supporting Romney. Although Adelson spent $100 million trying to get Romney elected, his efforts failed, and failed spectacularly with the Jewish community. Result? 70% of American Jews voted for Obama.

Thanks to his arrogance and poor judgment in openly backing Romney, Netanyahu faces the upcoming Israeli elections weakened. The newly emboldened center-left political parties of Israel, those dedicated to peace in the Middle East, are scrambling to decide whom to run against him.

Moderate Ehud Olmert, prime minister of Israel 2006 to 2009, who resigned from his party after being charged with corruption, has in recent days been addressing the American Jewish community promising to play a strong role in the upcoming elections and hinting a return to public life. Derfner writes:

The politicians making this case [that they could beat Netanyahu] are Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni. Separately or together, in Kadima or in a new party, they have the potential to knock over Netanyahu in January, form a center-left coalition government, and resume the negotiations they started with Abbas in 2007, when Olmert was prime minister and Livni foreign minister, then left off at the end of 2008 when they launched Operation Cast Lead.

Because of that war and the long siege of Gaza that preceded it (which continued under Netanyahu), I have no love for Olmert or Livni. My natural inclination is to vote for Meretz [Zionist social democratic political party]. But regardless of which left-wing party one votes for, it is absolutely necessary that Olmert and/or Livni enter this election, because there must be a major party running on a peace platform, and only they can fill the bill.

Who lost besides Netanyahu and Romney?

. . . this election was a tremendous blow to the American Jewish right, which has just been getting stronger and more extreme in step with Israel and the Republicans. It’s a blow to AIPAC and the rest of the Israel lobby. It’s a blow, of course, to Netanyahu, particularly because of his unprecedented support for one of the candidates, who happened to lose. It’s a blow to the whole Israeli right.

And they’re all connected – the Republicans, the American Jewish right, the Israel lobby, Netanyahu, Likud-Beiteinu, the settlers, the rest of the Israeli right. Jewish nationalism, all of it, from the inner core to the outer shell, just experienced an earthquake, and there’s a lot of broken stuff lying around.

Larry Derfner’s commentary underscores the fact that the presidential elections in the United States have profound consequences at home and around the world. One can only hope that America’s turn to the left will continue to weaken right-wing forces in the United States, and give Israel encouragement to elect a a more peaceful, progressive government on January 22.

The post Bibi made a bad bet appeared first on Occasional Planet.

When my friend who worked in the Obama campaign’s analytics department told me about Project ORCA, I thought he was talking about an environmental initiative to protect marine life. In our post-election, post-elation debrief, Asher relayed to me the stress he felt on election day while monitoring exit poll results. He had observed that Obama supporters were not showing up to the polls at the rates originally projected while more Romney supporters were going to the polls than projected. Upon analyzing the data, however, he found it to be weak as Obama supporters were far less likely to report back. (Collective sigh of relief.) While the Obama campaign’s “Get out to vote” (GOTV) efforts may have shown weak, troublesome data, the mechanism of reporting, analyzing, and utilizing such data worked.

Project ORCA was the Romney campaign’s sophisticated, high-tech poll-monitoring GOTV strategy. When Asher told me about its massive failure, I did not fully understand how it failed or what it’s objective was… that is, until I read the following first hand account from a Romney campaign volunteer: “The Unmitigated Disaster Known as Project Orca.”

While I am extremely happy about the outcome of the election, I can’t help but feel sorry for the tens of thousands of fired up Romney supporters whose energy was under-utilized –dare we say suppressed?—on election day. This failure mirrors the GOP’s go-to tactic of throwing money — rather than people — at an issue.

The post Romney’s Project ORCA: Technology fails, shoe leather wins appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The current conflict regarding FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) is essentially about whether the federal government should have primary responsibility for addressing disasters, or whether the states, localities, and private organizations should handle these issues. If any disaster demonstrates why FEMA needs to continue to exist in its present form as a federal agency, Hurricane Sandy is it. This disaster hit a dozen states. All of them border at least one other state that was hit; they all have common needs in responding to the effects of the rain and wind. People in these states have all been without electricity, gasoline, essential food products and water. The number of families that are homeless along the New Jersey coast, on Staten Island, and on Long Island is well into the thousands.

Help has come from all over the country. The military, which is under the control of the federal government as opposed to the states, has delivered everything from heavy equipment to gasoline and water from a other areas. Huge C-17 and C-130 Hercules transport planes have flown in supplies from as far away as California. There is no way that each of the states that were hit by the hurricane could have fended for themselves, although Governor Romney has suggested that they should.

To better understand the recent states’-rights movement, we need to look back more than 40 years. In the mid and late 1960s, under the strong influence of President Lyndon Johnson, Congress passed civil rights bills that provide protection for minorities in issues such as voting rights, public accommodations, and fair housing. Southern Democrats (and there were a lot of them in the mid-1960s) and some Republicans opposed the civil rights movement. They viewed these laws were an encroachment of states’ rights. In reality, the states’ rights argument was just a cover to continue to discriminate against African-Americans and other minorities. In the 1968 elections, Republican Richard Nixon appealed to southern states to leave the Democratic Party and join him in the Republicans’ effort to support states’ rights. This point of view was further exploited by third party candidate George Wallace from Alabama.

By 1972, the South had basically flipped from Democrat to Republican. It has been that way ever since. What’s important to keep in mind is that the genesis of the southern migration from Democrat to Republican was the issue of states’ rights, a euphemism for racism. Over the past 40 years, the racism has continued to be an underlying motivation of the states’ rights movement. That’s why so many efforts towards voter suppression, primarily in northern states, have been directed towards making it more difficult for African-Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities to vote. Anything that can strengthen the states’ rights movement is favored by the mainstream of the Republican Party. These include the dismantling of FEMA, the voucherization of Medicare, the reduction of Medicaid funding, and a host of other programs. Presumably, the Republicans feel that they can advance their agendas more effectively at the state level. They’re probably right about that.

As Jared Bernstein wrote in a special report to the CNN website,

Neither we as individuals nor our cities or states can do it all ourselves. Imagine, as Mitt Romney has advocated, that FEMA were eliminated, privatized, or handed off to states in a block grant. Or consider the House Republican budget — authored by Rep. Paul Ryan and endorsed by Romney during the primaries — a proposal that would cut 22% from the part of the budget that supports this type of aid to the states, amounting to a loss of $28 billion in 2014, including a $2 billion cut in New York state alone.

Further imagine — and if you’ve been following the hundreds of thousands of state layoffs of key personnel in recent months, this shouldn’t be a stretch — that a disaster like Sandy occurred at a time when state budgets are already under great strain (as are many families’ budgets).

So, as you weigh the presumed advantages of farming out the responsibilities and resources of FEMA to the states, consider the recent origin of states’ rights. It has to do with racial discrimination. In reality, the movement goes back to the beginning of the settlement of America by Caucasians and the slaves from Africa that were forced into what became the Confederacy. The U.S. Constitution endorsed discrimination through the “three-fifths” clause, and eventually the Civil War was fought over the issue. What lies behind the 21^st Century Republican movement of states’ rights is what is sometimes called “America’s original sin.” From civil rights to FEMA, it’s important to strengthen the federal government, which is the real protector of our human rights and the general welfare of the country.

The post FEMA: another example of why states’-righters are wrong appeared first on Occasional Planet.

President Obama’s policies have “helped the middle class and kept a deep recession from becoming worse. He repaired America’s reputation in the world. And he got important legislation passed.For that, the nation is better,” says the Kansas City Star in its endorsement of President Obama for a second term in office.

As evidence, the editorial includes a list of the President’s top first-term accomplishments:

• Ended the war in Iraq.
• Is on track to responsibly bring troops home from the war in Afghanistan, following the killing of America’s top enemy, Osama bin Laden.
• Pushed through tax cuts for the middle class.
• Signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to better protect women from discrimination.
• Ended “don’t ask, don’t tell,” allowing gays and lesbians to serve without prejudice in the military.
• Created the Consumer Financial Protection bureau, which has successfully led to new safeguards.
• Sparked efforts to improve education and expand and lighten the cost of student college loans.
• Boosted the fuel economy standards for cars.
• Signed the Affordable Care Act, his signature achievement so far that will give Americans access to insurance, regardless of pre-existing conditions and without limits.

As to Mitt Romney, the Star says that it couldn’t endorse him because, “We have no clue which Romney he would become as president,” and goes on to enumerate the many issues on which Romney has changed positions during his career and during the presidential campaign. “In too many ways, Romney resembles a slick salesman, willing to fudge and say anything to close the deal,” adds the Star.

In addition,

Romney’s comment in a private donor setting — belittling the 47 percent who don’t pay income taxes as freeloaders — is damning and hard-to-shake evidence that he may not really care so much about many Americans of lesser portfolios.

And it’s immensely troubling that Romney’s tax plans don’t add up. His wish to lower all tax rates, without specifying how he’d counter the revenue loss with elimination of deductions and loopholes, is not acceptable. Will home mortgage and charitable deductions get the boot? Or will he eventually try to sell his fluctuating “cap” on the total dollar amount of deductions, which in some iterations wouldn’t make a dent in the debt?

Romney’s abortion ideas and general views on women (no comment on pay equity) are troubling. There is a real risk his Supreme Court appointments would be anti-abortion, and women’s private health decisions could be dangerously restricted.

Bottom line:

We look ahead to four more years of Obama’s reasoned, compassionate and forward-looking ideas on good jobs, fair taxes and better education to meet the global competition.

The post KC Star: Obama’s reasoned, compassionate and forward-looking ideas appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Barring feasible foul play by Republicans, Barack Obama will probably win the Electoral College in 2012, which means that he will serve for another four years as President. Much is being said about Ohio as a swing state, along with Florida, Virginia, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Colorado. Obama carried all of them in 2008, along with North Carolina, a onetime swing state. As of Sunday, October 28, 2012, Nate Silver of www.fivethiryeight.com gives Obama a 73.6 percent  likelihood of winning the Electoral College with 295 votes, twenty-five more than is needed for victory. However, Obama’s lead over Romney in the popular vote is only 50.3% to 48.7%.

There are a number of progressive issues that President Obama passed or tried to pass in his first term. This list does not include abolishing, or at least reforming the Electoral College. In the history of the United States, there have been three elections in which the candidate who won the popular vote lost the presidency in the Electoral College. The most recent was 2000, when Al Gore had nearly a half million more popular votes than George W. Bush. Had the election been decided by the popular vote, it would have been of little consequence that Bush supposedly received 537 more votes than Gore in Florida.

So let’s suppose that Mitt Romney wins the popular vote in 2012. This would be an increase of only 1.4 percent of the vote. At the same time, President Obama triumphs in the Electoral College and wins a second term. Conceivably, this could make the Republicans mad enough that they would feel that they were gypped, because their candidate received more votes than the Democratic candidate. At the same time, Obama along with other Democrats would continue to recognize that the Electoral College is extremely unfair and essentially disenfranchises voters in the more than 40 states that are not considered swing states.

While the President is not involved in the process of amending the Constitution, there could be bi-partisan support for an amendment to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with the popular vote. Republicans would have the motivation of thinking that they had been cheated in 2012; Democrats would have the motivation of advancing the cause of true democracy.

In practicality such a change would probably help the Democrats in the short run. With intense campaigning in states such as California, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Maryland, they would pick up millions of popular votes. The Republicans would pick up at least hundreds of thousands of votes in Texas, Georgia, Arizona, Louisiana, and Missouri. The raw numbers would favor the Democrats, but as each census reflects the migration of Americans from the north to the south, the long-range advantage would go to the Republicans.

It is indeed difficult to handicap to party would benefit most from a constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College and replacing it with the popular vote. However, each party would have convincing reasons to feel that it would benefit in the long range. The one winner would be American democracy. President Obama, please put this measure on your second term agenda.

The post Perverse best-case scenario: Romney wins popular vote, Obama wins Electoral College appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In 2008, the Des Moines Register endorsed then Senator Barack Obama for president over Senator John McCain. For largely inexplicable reasons, this year the Register endorsed former Governor George Romney over President Obama.  This is the first time that the Register has endorsed a Republican for president since 1972, when it urged readers to give Richard Nixon a second term, rather than supporting Senator George McGovern and his efforts to end the Vietnam War.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell shows the absurdity of the Register’s thinking.  He reveals how the very reasons that the paper endorsed Obama in 2008 are even more apropos in 2012.  He shows how the reservations that it had about Nixon in 1972 in many ways apply to Romney in 2012.

Below, you can read a short summary of O’Donnell’s comments of Tuesday, October 30.  The full presentation is available in the following video.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 …O’Donnell accused The Des Moines Register of “adopting Mitt Romney’s magical thinking” by endorsing the Republican candidate for president.

In the Rewrite segment on Tuesday’s edition of The Last Word, he called their decision one of the “most embarrassing endorsements in the history of that newspaper.”

His bone to pick with the Iowa paper’s editorial board revolved around how they argued the case for Romney, not their specific choice of candidate. It’s “not because they chose Romney,” O’Donnell said. “Not because they chose a Republican, but because they gave absolutely no rational reason for it.”

The Register justified its entire endorsement on the basis of  consumer confidence.

The op-ed main’s rationale for Romney: “Consumers must feel more confident about their own economic futures to begin spending on the products and services that power the economy. A renewed sense of confidence will spark renewed investment by American companies. Industry will return to full production and hiring will begin again.”

O’Donnell said it’s the result of “pure magical thinking that the very sight of Mitt Romney taking the oath of office will suddenly make consumers run out to Best Buy and load up on TVs made in Japan.”

The last time the paper got behind a Republican candidate for president was in 1972, when they endorsed Richard Nixon.

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