The 'First Bullshitter' Proves Himself a Liar Again
Mitt Romney claimed to have written only an acceptance speech, not a concession speech. Yet, when he came to the podium at 12:55am, to deliver a concession speech, he looked at no teleprompter, as far as I could see, and consulted no written notes, but delivered his speech brilliantly nonetheless. So, is he such a quick study that he could have written a (gracious, not bitter) concession speech and memorized HUNDREDS of words in an hour and forty minutes since all the networks (even Fox) declared Obama the winner? If so, a man as stunningly beautiful as he is, should assuredly have a great future as a Hollywood star. Or did he in fact write — or, far more likely, have his professional speechwriters write (after all, he IS a megamillionaire, so has all kinds of "help" with every part of his life) — a concession speech well before 11:15pm (when all the major media declared Obama re-elected), and learn it well by 12:55, on the understanding that he had no chance of becoming President?
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Interestingly, President Obama also spoke without a teleprompter, even tho Republicans have, for years, suggested that Barack Obama cannot speak without a teleprompter.
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I have mentioned to my friend Joe from Belleville (a northern suburb of my city, Newark, NJ) for MONTHS that I did not see how Romney could possibly win, and actively disbelieved the pollsters who claimed to see the election as too close to call. I have been redeemed.
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On January 4, 2012, I observed here:

The general thinking now is that Mitt Romney's march to the nomination is inevitable and irresistible. But Romney is almost certainly not electable either, first because he is a Mormon, and a significant portion of the Republican base is hostile to Mormonism; and second because Romney is a moderate or Liberal Republican posing as Conservative, and few people, to none, are fooled. To the extent that the Republican Party of today hates moderates and Liberals, support of the rank and file in the general election will be unenthusiastic — so unenthusiastic that many Conservative Republicans will simply stay home. And since the Republican Party has to turn out every possible voter to win the White House, any significant rate of abstention by the Republican base would ensure Obama's re-election.
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How significant a reduction in turnout might occur? Well, Rick Santorum got 25% of the caucus vote in Iowa, representing the anti-Romney, true or Radical Conservative vote in Iowa. Iowa is not representative of the Nation, and its Republicans are much more conservative than Republicans nationally. [Mind you, Obama actually won Iowa.] If instead of 25%, the hardcore Conservative base of the Republican Party that adamantly rejects Romney is 10% of the Party, that should still be well more than enuf to render Mitt Romney, like his father, George Romney, a mere footnote in Presidential electoral history. The elder Romney was also a moderate [In actuality, George Romney declared against the Vietnam War, so became, in many people's eyes, and rightly, a Comsymp enemy of the United States], at a time when the Republican Party was much less Radical Conservative than it is today. George [or Ho Chi Minh] Romney dropped out of the race, and Richard Nixon became President. Nixon would, today, be regarded as too far Left to be electable. What chance does Romney the Younger have in the hyper-Conservative Republican Party of today? We shall see.
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I bet a nickel that even if Romney wins the nomination, it will be by less than an overwhelming proportion of primary voters; and another nickel that if he wins the nomination, he will lose the general election.

Had anyone taken those two bets, I'd have won a dime.
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I never believed, for an instant, that any of the 2012 crop of Republican challengers stood a chance of defeating President Obama, and made that plain as early as January 19, 2012, when I published these observations in this blog:

The polls that show a close contest against Obama are almost assuredly wrong, and the only way Tepublicans have any chance whatsoever of winning the White House is if they can block hundreds of thousands of people from voting, which they sure are trying to do. And not just by discouraging people, but by actually enacting laws to bar as many as FIVE MILLION voters!
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If Republicans are really concerned, as Romney pretends, about people voting multiple times, why doesn't he just advocate an Iraq-style solution, indelible ink for the fingers of anyone who has voted? That's quick and simple, and I haven't heard any reports of people in Iraq getting the ink off in order to vote multiple times. We could create a Purple Badge of [Civic] Courage — a play on the universally-known phrase "Red Badge of Courage" from an esteemed writer from my city, Newark, NJ, Stephen Crane — by which people could show their civic-mindedness and encourage others by appearing in public with a proud, purple finger.
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This would show us visually the level of participation in elections by various communities, and at once encourage hesitant voters and reproach nonvoters. It would be, for media, "shorthand" evidence of voting levels, engagement, apathy, and willful abstention.
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Anyone who does not have a purple finger (or lite lavender for dark-skinned people, if purple would not stand out, which it probably would) could expect to be asked, repeatedly, "Why didn't you vote?", thus bringing community disapprobation to work for increased voting levels.
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Every State in the Union could have purple-finger laws in place by this November's election. The costs would be trivial. And people NOT entitled to vote would not want to be found to have a purple finger when the authorities come calling to investigate a claim of illegal voting.
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You want a foto ID? OK: take a digital picture of each voter, with purple finger, as s/he emerges from the voting booth, with the name of the voter inextricably connected electronically to the foto. No needless documents to collect, at a fee, in order to get another form of foto ID; no application to a state agency for a foto ID. No expense to the individual voter at all, just a totally trivial expenditure — esp. given our multi-billion-dollar national elections — for some ink and digital fotos to be entered into a database. Such a foto could thereafter be printed out alongside the voter's signature in the books we have to sign when we go to vote, updated for each time we vote. Simple, no?
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How much do you want to bet that Republicans will find some excuse not to go for it?

Even earlier, on Friday, December 30th, 2011, I observed here:

In Massachusetts, Romney ran as a Liberal Republican; now he pretends he has seen the lite, and become a Conservative Republican. Nobody is buying that. * * * At this point, the possibility of Republicans getting their act together and defeating President Obama appears to be nil. Some other candidate would have to come to the fore, during the primary season or at the convention if the convention can, somehow, deadlock. If my state's governor, Chris Christie, were to jump in, that would certainly shake things up — and that is not just a fat joke. Christie, like Romney, got into the governorship of a Liberal state as a fluke. He might be defeated if he runs for re-election. But his popularity in NJ, or lack thereof (I have been at an event where he was both applauded and booed), does not alter the fact that he appears to be popular outside NJ. Still, he is a relative moderate, from the Liberal Northeast, and that might be enuf to turn off the Republican base. * * *
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A successful candidate would have to be socially and fiscally conservative; competent; already famous, since there is no time for an unknown to achieve name recognition and wide popularity; well-financed; what else? No extremist can be elected by the Nation. Is it equally true that no moderate can be nominated?

NJ Gov. Christie has, in fact, been blamed, as recently as tonite on Fox News in its coverage of the Republican disaster, for some of the disaffection from (one-term) 'Governor' Romney, for having been seen to embrace President Obama for the President's quick and persuasive action in helping my state in recovering from the astounding devastation of Superstorm Sandy, which has proved vastly worse than anything I have seen in my 67 years.
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Now that Barack Hussein Obama has won re-election, I and other little-d and big-d Democrats can rest comfortable in the reality that in the current United States, the enemies of the people have, for now, been blocked, defeated — but not necessarily crushed, because they will always find some reason to (pretend to) believe, in their twisted, racist, retrogressive mind, that the election did not mean what everyone else on Earth believes it means.
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I do not for an instant think that the Retrogressives will understand themselves to have been roundly defeated, and so give up on their attempts to end democracy and substitute minority rule in the United States. 246 times, the Republicans threw up, from January 2009 to November 2012, filibusters to block everything Democrats tried to do. If the past is any indicator of the future, then, and it almost always is, the crushed Republicans will NOT accept that they have been repudiated by the PEOPLE, but continue to try to invoke the unconstitutional filibuster to block the people's will. Democrats must, from a position of strength, ABOLISH the filibuster and every other rule or procedure in Congress that has frustrated the intent of the Framers of the Constitution that has given us MINORITY RULE when the Framers always intended only MAJORITY RULE.
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If Democrats do not do that, with their great win, they will BETRAY the people and continue MINORITY RULE.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:08 AM