The primary difference between conservatives and progressives is that conservatives believe in "me" while progressives believe in "we."

 

Evidence can be found in the presidential campaign where Mitt Romney insists the individual alone can achieve anything if left alone while President Obama says individuals are only as successful as the people around them, a point the president made the other day in a speech (which of course was distorted by the far right media into "criticism" of small business owners).

 

Having built and owned a successful business for over a quarter century, I agree with Obama. Nobody in business or any other worthy pursuit ever accomplished anything important without help, guidance and encouragement, including Romney.

 

Many of the people who worked for Romney at Bain Capital  were educated in public schools and universities paid for by the rest of us. Romney's business was defended by the military we paid for. To the extent Romney's companies produced any products, they were moved to markets over roads, bridges and interstate highways the rest of us paid for with our taxes. Without the rest of us, there would have never been a Bain Capital.

 

The notion that Romney and Romney alone achieved his success is an Ayn Rand fantasy (the mother of "Objectivism," by the way, never started and built a business).

 

A friend challenged me on this, insisting the Founding Fathers would agree with Romney. I reminded him the Constitution begins with the words, "We the People..."

 

After signing the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin famously told his co-signers, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Indeed, our nation's motto is E Pluribus Unim. Out of many, one.

 

Mitt Romney sounded like an antebellum plantation owner when he addressed the NAACP convention the other day:

"...if it were possible to fully communicate what I believe is in the real, enduring best interest of African-American families, you would vote for me for president."

Romney, whose Bain Capital apparently had no African-Americans in its management ranks during his tenure and whose church discriminated against blacks for decades, now knows what's in the best interests of the black community.

"If you want a president who will make things better in the African-American community, you are looking at him," announced Romney with a straight face. "You take a look!"

They did look and it earned the GOP's presumptive presidential nominee hoots of derision. But Romney's loudest boos came when he proclaimed to the crowd he would repeal the Affordable Care Act, evidently unaware that ACA will help some 7 million uninsured African Americans, many of them children.

Of course this announcement wasn't made for the benefit of the NAACP audience. Instead, it was intended for the radical far right fringe who the Massachusetts Moderate thinks will sweep him into the White House. "I am going to give the same message to the NAACP that I give across the country," Romney told his reliable media outlet, Fox News.

Republican Party leader Rush Limbaugh went further: The "express reason" for the NAACP's existence is to "make sure that blacks don't vote Republican."

Actually, the NAACP's "express reason" to exist is the right to vote, which Republican state legislatures around the country including Georgia's are assiduously trying to prevent with draconian voter suppression laws, but that's another blog for another day.

Romney's is a continuation of the strangest presidential election strategy ever seen. Having already alienated women and Hispanic and Latino voters, he now appears intent on a trifecta, sending those few black voters who may be on the fence running to the Obama camp.

D.A. King who promised to ignore me, seems instead to have become fixated on yours truly. Should I be honored, threatened or just amused? I do appreciate the extra readers!

Let's take it from the top. Some weeks ago, I invited Mr. King to elevate the immigration debate and refrain from using a slur many Hispanic and Latinos find offensive to describe undocumented immigrants. I thought he might be a reasonable fellow, open to constructive criticism politely delivered. 

My bad.

Mr. King is a bully with a lot to say, but a man of scant substance. While he blusters on about the evils of undocumented immigrants, the parade is passing him by. America is moving on in search of reasonable and humane solutions to the immigration problem while Mr. King shrieks "stop!".

First, the Georgia State Legislature failed to pass SB 458 in its last session. Then the president announced some 800,000 young undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children may stay here legally. Finally, the Supreme Court struck down most of Arizona's draconian SB 1070 except the "show me your paper provisions" that so enrages Hispanics and Latinos.

Mr. King's approach has backfired big time with the political pay-off undeniably accruing to Democrats. The crucial Hispanic-Latino voting block, once solidly GOP until the anti-immigrant dead enders like Mr. King, Jan Brewer and Joe Arpiao shooed them off, now supports President Obama over Mitt Romney by wide margins.

Mr. King, you have my sympathies, sir. It must be terribly frustrating to see your crusade become irrelevant.

Just how low will a GOP candidate go to hold onto his office? Meet Rep. Joe Walsh (R, Ill.).

Walsh, a deadbeat dad who never served in the military, recently went after his Democratic opponent, Tammy Duckworth…that’s Lt. Col. Tammy Duckworth, a Purple Heart recipient who lost both legs and part of her arm when the Blackhawk helicopter she was piloting was shot down in Iraq. She later served in the Department of Veterans Affairs, helping our wounded warriors.

Walsh, speaking to a crowd of GOP supporters, accused Lt. Col. Duckworth of exploiting her service to win office, a false and disgraceful attack, but something you'd expect from a guy who fails to make his alimony and child support payments for his five kids.

Some of his audience chuckled at his "amusing" comments.

There are just some things you leave alone in politics, things that aren’t funny, and this is one of them. But GOP hacks like Walsh, always quick to hoot about their own patriotism, have no respect for propriety, of doing and saying the right thing.

Just imagine the far right firestorm if Obama had made a similar remark in 2007 about John McCain exploiting his service. But we get utter silence from House Speaker John Boehner and the other so-called leaders of the Grand Old Party when the victim of Walsh's verbal assault on an American war hero is a Democrat, not to mention a woman.

If you are a veteran or a woman or both and you’re thinking of voting Republican, I hope you think again.

 

Conservatives are always whining about "activist judges legislating from the bench" except when its their conservative judges attempting to legislate from the bench.



Thus, right wingers were rubbing their hands together as they counted on the five conservative Supreme Court justices act on their partisan convictions and strike down the Affordable Care Act. A Washington Times columnist even predicted the Court's ruling on immigration earlier in the week was designed to set up the president for a stinging rebuke.



So it was with great trepidation progressives watched the Supreme Court hustle to rule on Obama's signature achievement, duly enacted by Congress and signed into law by the president. I and many others were 99 percent certain the conservatives on the court would deal the president an embarrassing and costly political defeat just in time for the 2012 election.



Well hush my mouth.



Chief Justice John Roberts refused to be part of a plan to undermine the American democratic process. He voted with the four liberal-leaning justices to uphold most of ACA. Not only that, Roberts made a correction to the original legislation. He rejected the commerce clause argument offered by Obama, but called the penalty of those who failed to comply a "tax" that falls well within Congress' bailiwick.



The timing is splendid. Here we go into July 4 holiday with a rousing affirmation that, indeed, our democracy and the separation of powers created by the founders works.

Time magazine's June 25 cover is sure to grab D.A. King's attention along with the immigration news out of the White House today.

The cover features dozens of Hispanic and Latino young people under the bold title We Are Americans under which is asterisked *Just Not Legally. These folks didn't choose to break our laws and come here illegally.

They were brought to America as children by their parents from Mexico, Central America, Asia and elsewhere. They've lived here a long time. Like the hundreds of millions of other immigrants who came to the U.S., legally or illegally, they've become Americans. Today the Obama administration recognized this reality and the problems presented by deporting such people. It will begin issuing work permits to younger undocumented immigrants provided they've led law abiding lives. Up to 800,000 immigrants could be affected by the decision.

It's a policy that creates a humanitarian solution to a nagging aspect of the the illegal immigration problem. It also bypasses the GOP-led do-nothing House of Representatives, which you can expect to go into full howl along with Mr. King and his crowd.

As with so many other crucial matters - jobs, for example - Speaker John Boehner's House has failed to address the immigration issue. Obama's decision, which will likely be hailed when he addresses the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials at their convention this weekend, is a step toward creating a path toward citizenship.

Obama didn't need to do this. He's already got the overwhelming support of Hispanic and Latino voters. But the new policy does set up his 2012 presidential opponent, Mitt Romney, who's already on the record as a supporter of Arizona SB 1070-type laws and has said he would veto the DREAM act.

I predict here and now Romney will - hold on to your hats - reverse himself on the immigration stand he took during the primary when he speaks to the NALEAO Sunday.

There are dozens of baseless charges leveled against President Obama by his legions of haters. With the presidential election fast approaching, I expect we'll be hearing many more.

True or false: Under Obama, government spending has dramatically increased. Listen to enough Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, O'Reilly, Savage, et al and you would say true, Obama is just a tax and spend big government liberal who's bankrupting the nation, right?

Wrong. According to no less than Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, from fiscal year 2010 to the present, government spending — including the stimulus bill — has risen at just a 1.4 percent annualized rate under Obama, slower than at any time since the 1950s. Under George W. Bush, by comparison, government spending grew 8.1 percent from 2006 to 2009. Under Ronald Reagan, from 1982 to 1985, it grew by 8.7 percent.

Why do conservatives make stuff up? Can't they just sell us on all the benefits conservatism has to offer without attacking progressives with easily debunked falsehoods?

 

No, conservatism can't tell you what it really is. Most Americans would never vote for any candidate calling himself a conservative if the truth were more widely known and accepted because conservatism is a political ideology based on deception. There are many examples of how this deception takes place ("Obama wasn't born in America" comes to mind), but look no further than "severely conservative" Mitt Romney for proof.

In 2002, Romney was a moderate Republican governor who publicly supported a wide variety of progressive positions such as a women's right to choose abortion, gun control, gay marriage, stem cell research and global warming. He was a 55-year-old man at the time. Most 55-year-old men I know have pretty fixed views that they've held most of their adult lives.

Yet Romney would have us believe he has undergone a metamorphosis of ideological thinking, perhaps through an amazing series of epiphanies that caused him to reverse virtually all his firmly held convictions of less than a decade ago. It's simply not plausible. Sorry, but Romney is trying to deceive you. He's practicing conservatism and it's as brazenly deceptive as Obama being characterized by the right as a big spender.

 

 

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Mitt Romney either hopes you aren't paying attention of you are just plain stupid. In an interview with an Ohio television station the other day, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee made this preposterous statement:

"I pushed the idea of a managed bankruptcy. And finally, when that was done, and help was given, the companies got back on their feet. So I'll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry's come back."

In 2008, under the headline "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt", Romney wrote in the New York Times, "If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye."

Romney couldn't have been more wrong, both in claiming credit for Detroit's resurgance and that a government bailout would lead to the demise of America's auto industry.

It took a bailout (the "help" that was "given") to salvage General Motors and Chrysler, exactly what Romney didn't want to see happen just a few short years ago. As a result of the bailout, both companies are back to profitability, the loans mostly repaid to the treasury.

By now, it's what we've come to expect from Romney a man who changes positions like the rest of us change socks. So this latest flip flop to all the others: Romney was for gun control. Now he's against it. Pro-choice. Now anti-abortion. For stem cell research. Now opposes. Individual mandates yes. Now no. Liked path to citizenship. Against today. Global warming supporter. Now global warming denier. Against gay marriage ban. Now supports.