Through The Looking Glass

In case you missed the news coming from the G20 meeting being held in Mexico over the past few days, President Obama and Europe's leaders both seemed to be looking at each other's problems and wincing, glad they were not in the other guy's shoes.

If you only pay attention to American media, we can see how you might have missed any news coming from the G20. From the meeting between President Obama and Russia's President Putin, to discussions about what to do about Syria, to the economic decisions that will likely influence nearly everyone on the planet, the G20 is quite obviously not the place for the kinds of amateur political stunts that lead the headlines in much of American political media.

That seriousness was very clear from the address and press conference President Obama gave last night, to U.S. and foreign media organizations, at the end of the G20 meetings.

Unfortunately, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's recent attempt to impose internal American politics on the Eurozone - specifically upon Germany - raised its ugly head, during the President's presser.

Much of the U.S. media either missed or purposely ignored the recent op-ed in the German business journal "Handelsblatt", written by one of Mr. Romney's top economic advisors, Glenn Hubbard. Hubbard's piece followed the vague line of Romney's own current economic plans, advising the Germans to increase austerity while ignoring investment - which is exactly the opposite of what Europe needs to do.

For those who understand that certain protocols involving international politics have been created for a reason, the blatant attempt by Mr. Romney to influence the economic policy of a foreign nation - in order to influence our own American elections - is just plain rude.

President Obama and the White House, as they handled other recent significant violations of respect and decorum, treated the op-ed published in the German business journal from the Romney camp with an amazing amount of class and respect. The White House barely uttered a word about the Romney camp's overreach, simply allowing Mitt Romney and his advisors to appear to be small and craven.

That continued on Tuesday evening at the President's press conference when he was asked again about the German op-ed piece.

President Obama deferred criticism of Mr. Romney and his advisors' op-ed back to the Romney campaign, and reminded the media that America has, "one president at a time and one administration at a time. And I think traditionally, the notion has been that America’s political differences end at the water’s edge.”

The President went one step further, reminding the gathered media that Romney's advisor, "may not be familiar with what our suggestions to the Germans have been" - which made both Romney and his advisor look like simple meddlers.

The fact is, France - one of the two most powerful economic forces in the Eurozone - has a new left-leaning government, one that has no plans to continue with the failed austerity plans that Mr. Romney and his advisors were pushing.

As the news from the G20 made clear, the leaders of Europe have begun to move towards the Keynesian economic ideas of President Obama, and France's new President Hollande, including significant internal investment. Europe's leaders also made it clear the previously non-integrated nature of the Eurozone will be changing rapidly, a reform President Obama and others have been urging for some time.

In short, the latest G20 meetings may have been one of the few gatherings of world leaders we've seen that actually seemed to accomplish a great deal in a short period of time.

We just hope all the G20 leaders follow through on their plans, speedily, or we'll all be poor examples for world leadership.

Very poor examples indeed.

Nailing Down The Reason For American Stupidity

As we climb through the stacks of articles and links each day about massive issues like the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling on the Affordable Care Act, or simpler issues, like Mitt Romney's flip-flopping on immigration, we continue to note an ever present theme - and we're not the only ones.

From Greg Sargent and Jonathan Bernstein over at the Washington Post's "The Plum Line" blog, to Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Beast, to Steve Benen at MSNBC, and Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly, many of us in the media have continually pointed out the unusual depth and breadth of lying being done by Republican politicians and officials, of all types and kinds this year.

Benen has twenty-two lists chronicling "Mitt's Mendacities", just from this year, just from Mitt Romney.

The lying isn't the theme we've noticed though - and it isn't why the working class, working poor, and the shrinking middle class of America feel like they're cowering in a trash can just to stay alive.

The single biggest reason that all those classes of Americans have continued seeing their wages fall, their retirement shrink, and possibly - thanks to one of the most untrustworthy liars in America, Supreme Court Justice Antonia Scalia -  losing their newly won health care insurance, is simple.

It's their own conscious amnesia.

Take a look at health care, for example.

Less than twenty years ago, Hillary Clinton was the First Lady, pushing for a plan for universal health insurance coverage. The Republican response to the Democratic idea of 'Medicare for all' was to come up with a plan for health care that kept private insurance companies in the health insurance system.

Republicans called that plan, "The Individual Mandate" - which is the same idea that the GOP and their shills on the Supreme Court are now so desperate to defeat, as part of President Obama's Affordable Care Act.

In fact, Justice Scalia is likely to rule in direct opposition to his own decisions and words from just a few years ago on this very issue. For a justice of the Supreme Court to blatantly ignore settled law, as well as court rulings he was part of just a few years ago, is proof enough that Scalia has absolutely no business sitting in judgement on the highest court in the land.

This is hypocrisy at the highest level - but instead of confronting it, the American people seem to have chosen to cower in a can and try to hide, as though evil like that will simply go away if we stay out of sight.

Mr. Romney's complete lack of principles on immigration is an even more recent example of this kind of selective amnesia.

Less than a year ago, when Texas Governor Rick Perry entered the GOP race, Mr. Romney attacked Gov. Perry fiercely over the issue of immigration reform. Romney took the extremist far right position, while ideas that Perry had - ideas very similar to the action President Obama took on Friday - were blasted as "amnesty" and harboring illegals. Gov. Perry's ideas were nothing of the sort - but that didn't stop Mr. Romney from crucifying Perry as soft on immigration.

Fast forward to this past weekend, when Romney didn't even have the strength of character to say whether he'd get rid of the President's policy of leniency on immigration for certain young undocumented immigrants.

A HUGE dichotomy like that deserves a massive shout of "Hypocrite" from Americans. Sadly, from most Americans - even Republicans - Mr. Romney's cowardice has only received a shrug, as most Americans crawl back into their cans, like a million little Oscar the Grouches.

If Middle Class Americans want to know why things have gotten so bad for them, we could certainly provide the answer - again.

We're just not sure it's worth the effort to repeat ourselves on this issue.

DREAMing Of Better Days

While Mitt Romney may have been avoiding immigration questions like the plague yesterday on CBS's "Face The Nation", many Americans are still talking about the Department of Homeland Security's official directive, announced by President Obama on Friday afternoon.

If you'd heard of the announcement at all, you may have only heard or read commentators talking about the new policy as Obama's own DREAM Act - which it really is not.

What the new policy is - in short - is a temporary easing of immigration policy towards younger undocumented immigrants, who were brought here by their parents as children and have basically grown up as Americans. These aren't new immigrants to America. They're kids who grew up here, and are now just becoming adults - young adults who aren't usually 'taking jobs from Americans' as anti-immigrant forces are crying about over their beers.

This new immigration policy isn't a "DREAM Act" - something the President stressed on Friday. It doesn't even put these immigrants-in-name-only on a path to full legal citizenship, as the initial bi-partisan DREAM Act attempted to do, or as the most recent Democratic version of the DREAM Act legislation proposed.

What the President's action does is give these young men and women a temporary reprieve, for a couple of years, so they don't have to worry about being deported. This also gives Congress time to figure out how to handle an issue they should have tackled long ago.

It was a near certainty that as soon as President Obama made his immigration announcement, the right-wing hacks and hyper-partisans would begin bashing and belittling him for it. This time, President Obama wasn't even finished giving his Rose Garden announcement when a right-wing wannabe journalist interrupted the President by shouting a biased question - one that the President did not have to answer, but did.

For now, we'll simply say that the guy who disrespected the office of the President so brazenly is an unprofessional hack - and we hope the White House Corespondent's Association bans him and his organization from the Press Corps immediately.

Other partisans followed close behind the interrupting fool - including Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who immediately claimed President Obama's actions on the immigration issue were politically motivated.

That claim is hard to see as anything other than sour grapes as the President's immigration action also mirrors closely the proposal of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who praised the Obama plan on Friday. Further, Mr. Obama's action is supported by multiple legal scholars, including Republicans and conservatives, who say the President's action is well within the powers of his office.

This kind of bold action is exactly what many Americans - especially progressives - have been wanting to see from Obama for some time. It shows that if the Congress is not going to act, the President will, when he can.

This action may have been good policy - but it was also good politics, as it's now put Mr. Romney in a bit of a bind on the subject of immigration.

None of this back and forth will lessen the worries of the anti-immigration supporters, who continue to cry in their beers that illegals are taking over America.

It also won't solve the issue of young men and women who've never known another country other than America as their homes - and are in most ways, as American as you or I.