Why Mitt Romney's Got My Vote.

I finally got him last night.

Or should I say, he got me.

Mitt Romney's hit some potholes along the way, no doubt about it, but he keeps coming back like a a grinning rash with graying temples.

Remember pretty early on, when he had to explain the whole dog misunderstanding? He handled it like any seasoned CEO would.

Apparently, it was son Tag's job to secure Seamus to the roof of the car anyway, but Tag had forgotten to pack the nail gun. Governor MittGyver deftly deduced that, while a nail gun is certainly the most reliable option for attaching a dog to the top of a car for a twelve-hour trip to Canada, a crate may work just as well.

Although the entire family believed Seamus would revel in a high speed joyride on the roof of the Family Truckster, he became so distraught that he lost canine muscle control all over the crate's interior.

Faced with few choices, Mitt chose to lead. He pulled into a gas station and hosed off both Seamus and his personal traveling compartment. Family vacation...on!

He's also experienced some difficulty relating to women's issues, actually, to women in general. I understand; he's got five sons. That's a six pack of non-caffeinated Romney beef locking horns with each other on a daily basis. No room for hens in that cockhouse.

For a while, as governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney was pro-choice, because after all, it's Kennedy country. He played their game masterfully, and once he broke free of those liberal New England shackles, he was free to represent the soul of America.

All along, he'd intuitively felt that women possessed too many rights, another point of which he and I concur. I know I'm not alone in saying that I really screwed up raising my first set of kids, and I'm aching for a chance to redeem myself by raising one or both of my daughters' children.

Thank you, my champion.

Same-sex marriage? Are you kidding? If it were legal, can you imagine what's next—a man and a donkey legally adopting donkey children?  It's good to know he can lean on his faith, one which has pretty much opposed non-traditional marriage since 1890.

Neither he nor I support federal legalization of medicinal marijuana, and once again Mr. Romney sacrificed for us. He freaked out really bad one time when he tried it in his dorm room, and he was sure his dad was just outside the door for four hours. Since then, he firmly believes that no American should ever have to be that paranoid or super hungry.

But he still hadn't shoved me all the way up his camp until last night., when he brought out the heavy artillery.

Clint Eastwood.

Mr. Eastwood utilized one of those tried and true acting exercises he learned to master while in drama school during the twenties. He spoke to an empty chair, pretending that Barack Obama sat in it.

When he wasn't stumbling over lines, Clint played the invisible president like a Duncan Butterfly. For an eighty-two-year-old, that guy can almost act.

By the time Governor Romney took to the stage, I'd already built up such a lather from Clint's stirring monologue and the video vignette of Mitt's magical family that I couldn't contain a quivering-lipped "Cmmfff," from escaping my mouth.

And just as with the dog incident, Romney seized command.

He promised twelve million jobs.

Twelve million! Finally, white people can pick my produce.

He pledged to yank healthcare from the 6.6 million Americans who became insured under the president's Affordable Healthcare Act. Good, because I'm sure at least half of those people let their kids take two suckers at the doctor's office.

Finally, he promised to assert U.S. might and influence worldwide, because "a free world is a more peaceful world." And since there's only a skeleton crew left over in Iraq and things are definitely powering down in Afghanistan, Iran looms as the next logical threat and business opportunity.

And I'm all in.

Mitt Romney sees America for what it is—a dirty, dirty place that could use a little cleanin'. And since it worked so well before, he's holding the hose again.

What do you say, America? Are you ready to be hosed?

Stupid Men, Volume 73

Remember Time-Life Books?

During the pre-internet age, they served as definitive series on thousands of topics. If you had to write a report about Neanderthals for fourth grade science, you could drop into the school library, slide out a volume on early primates and copy a few meaty paragraphs word-for-word.

You then gave yourself the tools to pen a substantive thesis in a mature voice. Plus, what were the chances your teacher would ever figure out that you'd copied the whole thing?

Time-Life produced millions of pages covering a spectrum of subjects, from the Third Reich to the Art of Sowing. And after exhaustive research to ensure that my claim rings true, I've determined that one subject has evaded the storied publisher's editorial sensibilities:

The Time-Life Library of Stupid Men.

I've covered my share of moronic males in the past—Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush, Senator Larry "I'm only gay in airports" Craig—and now I'm starting to think the series should be more of a monthly magazine than a finite hardbound collection.

Because the stupid dudes just a keep on being stupid.

Who would you say deserves first mention in this installment: Vladimir Putin or Todd Akin? How about we call it a wash and start with Putin.

The Russian president obviously has paranoid psychosis characterized by megalomania and delusions of persecution...either that or it's because he's short and could never get his eyebrows to grow out all fierce like Brezhnev could.

Whatever the reason, Putin's brought the old hammer and sickle down on the members of Pussy Riot, a feminist Russian punk rock band.

Oh, and by the way, Pussy Riot, thanks for stealing the name of my softball team.

Here's what the anonymous performers did at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. After this video appeared online, three members of the group were arrested and charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labor.

How can I put this? It was a complete and total richard move by Putin, throwing a tantrum and punishing a few artists who spoke out in a highly creative fashion. Tell me that video isn't entertaining, yet completely harmless.

And how about our favorite congressman from the Show Me state, Todd Akin (By the way, doesn't he seem a little old to have the name "Todd?"). Mr. Akin also covered his load with the Tarp of Stupid, stating that, in cases of "legitimate rape," women's bodies have a natural ability to stave off pregnancy, and thus, abortion should be banned in all circumstances.

As the great Mike Brady once said, "You know Cindy, you're not only hurting the entire Republican Party...you're also hurting yourself. And is that the kind of hurting you're hurrying to hurl?"

Legitimate rape? Does that mean sexual assaults in prison are legitimate since men can't impregnate each other, yet a pregnancy resulting from some guy raping his wife or girlfriend doesn't count?

All I can hear right now is Lisa Loopner yelling, "Todd, sometimes you're such a dumb bell!" (courtesy of Gilda Radner)

Ever since Akin shat himself, his allies, and more importantly, his financial lifeline, have shriveled to the size of a tropical fish I found on the rug while doing pushups.

One day, it just wasn't in the tank and about a week later, there it was on the rug, looking like a tiny version of a dead and shriveled up ET sprawled by the riverbank. So yeah, that's what Congressman Akin's chances have amounted to in his senatorial bid against incumbent Claire McCaskill—all dried up and wrinkly.

And now, with both Vladimir Putin and Todd Akin reeling from overwhelming public backlash, their stars must soon dim and make way for the next vitriol vomiter to grace the cover of Stupid Men Weekly.

Who will it be? I'm betting on Romney again.

America's Pampered Poor: Why Should MItt Care?

I'd like to explore a term today, just a couple of words which have been bandied about the past couple of days:

Safety net.

On Tuesday evening, basking in his winner-take-all victory at the Florida presidential primary, Governor Mitt Romney informed CNN that his campaign had chosen to focus on America's middle class.

Okay, so far so good.

Then the lug nuts loosened. "I'm not concerned about the very poor," Romney quipped, "because there's a safety net in place for them." he also downplayed his campaign's emphasis on the very rich, citing, again, a safety net which buffers them as well.

The former Massachusetts governor later retracted the comments, stating that he "misspoke."

I'm not really sure what misspeaking is; maybe you can fill me in, Mittens.

Was it a profound misfiring of brain synapses which caused you to mispronounce each of the seven words, "I'm not concerned about the very poor" together? Were you actually trying to say "My yachts can burn without the hairy four?"

Oh, okay. Sorry, man. You were attempting to speak of the four bearded captains of the Romney luxury boat fleet, who bravely protect your seagoing vessels from left wing arsonists. Now I understand.

When you're forced to talk incessantly for months on end, it makes sense that your power of enunciation might suffer. My bad.

Seriously, you don't get a free pass on this one Romney. You may have retracted your statement due to overwhelming public outcry, but it doesn't mean you wouldn't pursue this very philosophy should you be elected commander-in-chief.

Let me get this straight—both extremely rich and extremely poor people have safety nets, but not the middle class.

Naturally, the highly wealthy own a safety net. It's constructed of dead presidents. If the aristocrat loses his grip on the trapeze handle, hundreds of men named Benjamin stand below to catch the falling blueblood and pat him on the tookus as he runs back up the ladder.

I'm not sure any other safety nets need to occupy that big top.

But how about the very poor—to what do these folks have access that my other middle class homies and I don't?

They may qualify for food stamps, but only if they possess less than $2000 in total assets. In 2010, the average American food stamp recipient received $133 per month, or $4.33 per day. Wow. Time to pass the Grey freaking Poupon with that kind of mad paper.

They may be entitled to welfare. Over one-third of our states have an income limit of less than fifty percent of the federal poverty level to qualify. That means a family of four can receive TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) only if household income is less than $11,175.

Talk about pampered.

Oh, I almost forgot the healthcare safety net—the foremost coups de gras for the poor. Not only do these spoiled serfs enjoy medical attention provided by our nation's overburdened emergency rooms, often free of charge, they also enjoy the benefit of marathon waits and aerobic exercise to return to the shelters after the buses have stopped running for the night.

I can see what Mitt's talking about now, because the list just keeps going.

Let's not forget the critical and often free access to breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood, made possible largely by grants through the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation. What an indulgence.

But since Romney isn't focused on the poverty-stricken women who depend on Planned Parenthood, I'm sure he slept soundly last night...

In his narrow view, those safety nets are self-mending.

This weeks's Cheating Bastard Award goes to...

So much bad behavior from responsible adults this week.

First, Ohio State University head football coach, Jim Tressel, a man renowned for his integrity and paternal attributes, was caught lying. Allegedly, Tressel was informed by a trusted source, during April of 2010, that a few of his star players had been selling football paraphernalia (rings, jerseys, jackets.) to a tattoo shop operator, in exchange for cash and tattoos.

I wonder if that's like when you return something to Costco, and, rather than giving you the choice between cash and store credit, they say, "Okay, sir, we can refund your purchase in cash or you can step over to the right and Turk can etch a scorpion on your saggy right pectoral."

Even though the merchandise was considered property of the players, NCAA bylaws clearly state that gifts given by the institution to the student athlete may not be sold for profit, since this benefit is not available to other students at the school.

Coach Tressel waited until the fall, 2010 football season had concluded before reporting his players' transgressions to the university's compliance office, claiming that he had just learned about them. When confronted with evidence that he'd actually been informed back in April, the sweater-vest-wearing father figure stated that he would have said something, but he just didn't know whom to tell.

Hmmm...didn't know whom to tell.

Maybe that'll be my defense next time I get yelled at for not refilling the toilet paper. Didn't know whom to tell.

Let's face it. Jim Tressel didn't want to risk a few games without his star players...so he cheated.

We've all cheated, once, twice or fifty times. We cheated as kids, and we've cheated as adults.

Have you ever been with a large group of people, and someone says something really funny, but for whatever reason, you're the only one who hears? Then, when things quiet down, you repeat the joke and everyone laughs? You stole the joke. You cheated.

Or how about that time you found out you were getting the expanded cable package, but were only paying for the basic service? Sweet! Screw those guys! Cheating, nonetheless.

Little kids cheat all the time, but that's because they don't really understand the rules in the first place. In fact, every time I was forced to play Candyland with my young daughters, I not only let them cheat, I encouraged it: "You know what? Actually, your piece should be over here, on Queen Frostine. You don't really have to go back twenty-seven spaces."

The only adults who enjoy Candyland are serving time in Super Max solitary.

Our parents, and society at large, tolerates diminishing doses of cheating as we age, which is why the grown-ups who do it are the most despicable. Think about those such as  Enron and A-Rod, Milli Vanilli and Rosie Ruiz, who won the New York City Marathon thanks to a relaxing ride on a subway train.

They are not liked.

And that brings me to my other recipients of this week's Undistinguished Cheater Award: the Republican members of the Wisconsin Assembly, who circumvented rules on quorum and crammed through the passage of a bill to eliminate collective bargaining rights for state employees. Since the Democratic contingent of the Assembly has boycotted these proceedings, not enough members were in attendance to stage a vote on the bill.

However, since a quorum is only necessary for voting on bills which pertain to spending, all spending language was removed, thereby making their tactic possible.

Possible, but unethical. Possible, but highly unpopular and divisive.

Possible, because they cheated.

I'm sick of Republicans.

Writing a blog can be feast or famine.

Sometimes, ideas gush to the surface like geoducks on the first day of clam season; others, the barren desert that is my cranial cavity swirls with the tumbleweeds of cluelessness.

Today began as the latter. I awoke, thinking, okay, I guess that's it—I'm tapped out. I've squeezed the final drop of blood from my literary turnip; I've eaten the last cookie from the bag of "Thoughts Ahoy." Yet alas, no sooner had I arrived at my local gym and mounted the elliptical trainer, than I was inspired yet again.

NBC's Today Show was playing on my personal screen, the one meant to distract me from my perilously anaerobic physical condition. The topic for the opening fifteen minutes of the show was the state of the American economy and the general public's disapproval with President Obama's stewardship during its current downturn. The polls and pundits expounded about how the planets are aligning for a landslide Republican congressional takeover in November.

I'm an American. I love this place and I try not to take it for granted. But come on, folks, we can be so damned fickle. I realize we live in an age of instant gratification, where a pizza joint which serves cardboard covered in tomato sauce and cheese prospers, simply because it can answer our craving in thirty minutes or less. We want results...now.

People, how long has the President been in office? I'll answer that—twenty months. Twenty months ago, Barrack Obama and a Democratically controlled Congress inherited the worst fiscal and financial crisis since the Great Depression. We stared down the barrel of a massive federal deficit, a healthcare crisis in which thirty million Americans were uninsured and two unpopular wars.

Oh yeah, we also had a bait-switch scam known as Wall Street. I'm not going to paint one party as Dudley Doright and the other as Snidely Whiplash, here, but let's look at the deregulation fiasco as one of the major culprits to our economic demise. Ronald Reagan began the groundswell of laissez faire economic policy through a litany of legislation, wiping out many of the safeguards put in place after the stock market crash of 1929. The savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s merely foreshadowed a new era of highly leveraged, risky behavior by our formerly stodgy financial institutions.

Republican presidents and congresses established policies which resulted in the two largest financial scandals since the 1930s—the aforementioned "junk bond" fiasco and the "sub-prime" crisis, which began with the Republican controlled Congress in 1998.

Our current President has sought to stimulate our economy through numerous measures including the Troubled Asset Recovery Program (or TARP), aimed at eliminating "toxic" assets from our financial markets. He has pushed through an economic stimulus package, which, according to Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman, is short of what is truly needed to get us back on our feet, yet has staved off another full-blown Depression.

With a crumbling national infrastructure and nearly ten percent unemployment, the prevailing Republican talking point is the same ol' same ol': cut taxes and count on the old "trickle down" theory to create new jobs out of increased corporate profits. Right. Corporations are not benevolent organizations. Profits trickle across to shareholders, not down to employees.

After World War II, our federal government instituted the G.I. Bill to pay for veterans' higher education. The result was a thriving American middle class which enjoyed unprecedented prosperity, yet which has eroded with each passing decade. We need to stop being so very short-sighted and let these new programs take effect. Public works, healthcare and education can and will work if fully funded, but it seems that America's new Tea Party movement brands as socialism the same type movement that the greatest generation employed sixty years ago. Ironic.

The Republican party learned an important lesson from their matriarch, Nancy Reagan—just say no. No to improved infrastructure. No to healthcare for all. No to campaign finance reform. I'm willing to listen to any new proposals from the right, but all I've heard is warmed over retreads of George W. Bush's failed efforts. In other words, a whole lot of nothing.

It's time for America to wait more than thirty minutes for its pizza.