Magic Beans & Fairy Tales

In the midst of your normally busy life, we hope you had a chance to see Mitt Romney address the NAACP on Wednesday in Houston.

Not surprisingly, there was was some disrespectful booing of Mr. Romney at the event, when he claimed he would repeal the Affordable Care Act if elected. Overall, Romney’s speech to the national convention of the NAACP was judged a surprising success in some corners, even if it was more bland and detail-free than usual - and that’s pretty impressive, even for Mitt Romney. That said, any success he may have reaped from his speech was likely spoiled by Romney's vague insult late Wednesday night about the NAACP crowd, when Romney said, "If they want more stuff from the government tell them to go vote for the other guy."

The fact is, Romney has been attempting to sell Americans vague promises and fuzzy details for almost his entire campaign, without giving us any real details. We looked in our daily notes for the last six months and could only find three instances where we or any other reliable media source hadn’t asked for some further specifics from Mr. Romney on… well, anything.

Romney may as well be selling magic beans, for all the specifics he’s been willing to give to the public so far - which, we still firmly believe, is a feature of his campaign, not a bug.

Even Republican Party mainstays are letting it be known that they’re now getting worried about the lack of details coming from the former Massachusetts governor. On topics ranging from Mitt's history with Bain Capitol, to his personal tax filings, Mr. Romney has continued to sidestep, evade, obfuscate, and generally try to not offend anyone with his positions.

That's a problem, when you consider the folks who might legitimately vote for him range from moderate, sane Republicans to extremist, GOP nutjobs. Point blank, you can’t keep both of these groups happy at all times, let alone the other fifty-to-sixty percent of the country.

Sadly, Mr. Romney’s über-vanilla non-committal positions fit perfectly with the odd insanity of the Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The House on Wednesday, for the thirty-third time, voted to attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act - and for the thirty-third time, their efforts were both unsuccessful and completely symbolic.

In fact, since January of 2011, the Republicans in Congress have wasted 89 hours of taxpayers' time, attempting to remove the benefits of the Affordable Care Act. At a cost of $2 million dollars a day, every day that the House of Representatives has wasted on this is an amazingly wrong-headed action for a group of people who claim so strongly that they are fiscally responsible.

One might even think the Republicans in the House were crying wolf, politically, on an effort they have no real chance of winning - especially after the decision of the Supreme Court two weeks ago today.

All this blatant denial appears to have made the political right breathless and powerless to respond to the death of one their favorite traditional talking points, that Americans are paying too much in taxes.

In fact, as the report released this week from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office details, the average Federal tax rate paid by Americans is at the lowest rate in thirty years.

When you add up all the facts, with the House Republican craziness, and Mitt Romney’s constant attempt to sell political magic beans to the least informed citizens, our American political landscape is starting to look like some kind of twisted fairy tale.

In truth, this is just what you get when one party is relatively direct about their attempts to move forward, while the other party is in severe disarray and denial about their attempts to take America backward.

We recommend hanging on to your magic carpet for the remainder of the political season. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

Uncivil War, Nebraska Style

For a while now, we’ve been watching the state Republican and Democratic conventions around the country as they’ve been choosing their candidates for local, state, and national positions.

For the most part, the Democratic conventions have gone smoothly, even in places like West Virginia, where Republicans attempted to sabotage the Democratic presidential nominating process. As expected, President Barack Obama picked up the official party nomination in every state, won the national nomination (back at the beginning of April) and is now on the ballot in every state, across the country.

For the Republican Party, however, the process has been less than a smooth path this year, even if the leading nominee for the GOP's overall nomination has quite obviously been Mitt Romney, for quite some. The latest reason for rough spots? Officially, Rep. Ron Paul has yet to withdraw from the Republican race for President.

According to the official rules of the Republican National Committee - the RNC - a presidential candidate must get a plurality (a majority) of votes at five state conventions in order to have that candidate’s name be officially entered as a contender at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, later this year.

The last chance for Ron Paul to get the delegates he needs happens to be in Nebraska, this upcoming weekend - which seems to be confusing more than a few people.

In case you haven’t been keeping up with the arcane rules of state-level party politics, at the state level in the GOP this year, just because the Republican voters of the state voted for a candidate doesn’t necessarily mean their wishes will be accurately represented at the national convention.

At many state party conventions, whoever shows up to the convention picks from the people at that event the delegates who will go to Tampa this year. And in many, many cases - including Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and others, the supporters of Ron Paul have flooded state conventions. At some state meetings, this has led to literal floor fights, and in one case, an early adjournment of the state convention.

For Republicans, this has shown the outside world the internal divisions in the former "Big Tent" of the GOP that we’ve been telling you have existed for years now.

The problem for Republicans is this. The GOP is really made up of several different factions these days, from the “Religious Right” to the war-loving Neo-Cons, from the Tea Party/Libertarians to the Wall Street bullies. Even the old-fashioned moderate Republicans have a say in what the Party does (though frankly, not nearly as much of a say as anyone sane thinks they should).

In short, Mr. Paul’s state level supporters - nominally, Libertarian Republicans - have used the official rules of the GOP game to attempt to rig the system against the wishes of the majority of Republican voters, and against the Republican Party as a whole.

Which means this weekend in Nebraska could be anything but dull for the GOP.

We know that technically, Nebraska state GOP chairman Mark Fahleson and the Tea Party/Ron Paul state leader, Laura Ebke have agreed to some kind of a truce. We also know that part of the supposed truce was to scale back the unusual security the Nebraska GOP had called for this weekend.

We also know that similar truces in other states haven’t exactly had the force of law.

All we can recommend to our Republican friends this weekend, who are planning to attend the state convention in Nebraska, is be careful and remember - Nebraska Republicans didn’t elect Ron Paul in the primary.

As one of our teachers from days gone by used to say before handing out an ugly test, “Good luck - and have fun!”

Keeping Our Cool

It should be no surprise to anyone that some of our staff, when vacationing during the brutally hot Independence Day week, decided to use their intelligence, and go someplace just a bit cooler for the holiday.

For example, Florida. No, really - the entire week of our vacation, the temperatures outside our South Florida offices barely touched 90, while the mercury in Eastern Nebraska and Washington, DC broke into triple digits.

While some relief has now come to much of the continental U.S., after two weeks of blistering heat, 46 Americans are dead due to the scorching temps - and we’re not even into the part of summer that’s traditionally the hottest. In much of America, we’ve been feeling like the heat could reduce us to a pile of ash at any moment.

For those vocal but poorly informed people who still seem to think that global climate change is a hoax, including syndicated columnist George Will, we have to ask honestly: What is it going to take for you people to understand the difference between climate and weather?

We’ve explained it in multiple ways here, over the past few years - most recently in April. As we noted then, climate scientists stated that our weather - including the long-range forecast for this summer - was going to be warmer and wetter. They didn’t say those weather conditions would happen in the same place.

So just before our vacation, Western and Northern Florida - an area that’s been in severe drought - got flooded with nearly two feet of rain in a short period of time. Meanwhile, some of the most destructive forest fires in history were rampaging just West of Denver, near where some of our family and friends live.

Thankfully, our DC offices didn’t receive any serious damage when massive storms blew through at nearly the same time as the fires in Colorado and the flooding in Florida. Those powerful storms caused some parts of the DC metro area to be without power for five days - right as some of the hottest temps of the year moved over the nation’s capital.

Even Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano understands the difference between weather and temperature. Weather would be if the U.S. had one unusually hot summer, and things went back to historically normal temps after that. Climate change is when nine of the ten hottest temperatures for the entire planet have all occurred since 2000 - with 2012 being the hottest year ever for the U.S.

Unless we acknowledge the problem, and make rational plans for dealing with it, we’ll keep seeing the horrendous wildfires, the unusual flooding, and food growing conditions that have been described as “farming in hell.”

One of our friends, Daily Felltoon subscriber and veteran Nebraska journalist Francis Moul - who also happens to be an environmental historian - published a great piece Monday in his local paper, detailing exactly what climate change might mean to food consumption.

In short, we might lose more than a few inches and a few pounds if human beings don’t take the challenge of climate change seriously.

We must push our politicians to enact legislation that has teeth in it, that will force governments, businesses, and individuals to make the kinds of change our planet needs to continue to allow it to remain fit for human habitation.

Many of those changes - including a significant shift towards renewable energy - aren’t just good for the environment. As the U.S. Interior Department noted in its report Monday, energy development on Federal lands created 1.5 million jobs last year - many of which were new jobs, created from investments in renewable energy. That's something every American can get behind.

This isn’t rocket science, folks. It’s climate science. And it’s long-past time EVERYONE accepted the fact: Climate change is real.