Sassistas! Our dish on the social soup.

Who Is This Guy?

A special weekend "Meet the Sass" from Westsista!

• Ran for president of the United States
• Born outside the continental U.S.
• Had a childhood without much money
• Teased by other children calling him racial names in grade school
• Worked hard to address the economic gap between whites and blacks
• Questions arose about whether he was really a natural-born citizen who was eligible to be President of the U.S.
• Strong supporter of the Civil Rights Movement
• Staunch advocate for volunteerism and public service
• Spoke out against extremists on the right and on the left
• Revived the auto industry by bringing together management and workers behind a shared mission with shared purpose, shared pain, shared success and shared rewards.

This guy might sound like Barack Obama, but he is really George Romney -- Mitt Romney’s father.

George Romney was actually born in Chihuahua, Mexico.

To most of us, the phrase “natural-born citizen” sounds clear.  You must have been born in the U.S. to be eligible. 

Here’s the actual wording:

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Obviously the first several presidents were born as British subjects in British America.

The Constitution does not define the phrase natural-born citizen, and various opinions have been offered over time regarding its precise meaning.  

The Supreme Court has never directly addressed the question of a specific presidential or vice-presidential candidate's eligibility as a natural-born citizen.

The Congressional Research Service has stated that the weight of scholarly legal and historical opinion indicates that the term means one who is entitled under the Constitution or laws of the United States to U.S. citizenship “at birth” or “by birth,” including any child born "in" the United States (other than to foreign diplomats serving their country), the children of United States citizens born abroad, and those born abroad of one citizen parent who has met U.S. residency requirements.

More than two dozen constitutional amendments have been introduced in Congress to relax the restriction, notably one designed to allow Henry Kissinger and another to allow Arnold Schwarzenegger to be eligible.

Barry Goldwater’s eligibility to run was questioned (born in Arizona before it was a state) as was John McCain’s (born in the Panama Canal Zone).

But no candidate’s eligibility has been challenged with the intensity and virulence directed toward Barack Obama.  The “birthers” still continue to insist that Barack Obama is not eligible to be president (despite the overwhelming proof he was born in Hawaii).

Who publicly and loudly challenged Barack Obama’s eligibility to serve as President of the United States?  The King of the Birthers, Donald Trump.

Who just endorsed Mitt Romney ahead of the Nevada primary caucus?  Donald Trump.  No mention was made of George Romney being born in Mexico.

Irony, thy name is politics.

 

Dollars Per Vote

Today is the Florida Republican Primary. Westsista is at the ready with her political sass!

"We're going to come out of Florida I think with a pretty good number, certainly dollars per votes we're going to run rings around the other candidates."

--Rick Santorum

I’m not trying to pick on Santorum.  His reference to the new metric -- Dollars Per Vote -- is now used openly.  It’s the amount of money candidates spend in a state divided by the vote percentage they receive.

Think about that for a minute.

If Romney had just handed a thousand dollars to everyone who voted for him in Iowa, it would have been cheaper.

How much does your vote cost?

I’m pretty sure most of us believe our vote cannot be purchased.

But is that true?  Maybe it’s all the other people out there who are weak-minded enough to make election decisions based on advertising dollars falling out of the sky.

Do you know how often the candidate with the most money wins?

94% of the time

I heard John McCain say the other day that Barack Obama out-spent him in the 2008 campaign three to one.

Am I glad that Obama won the election?  Of course. If he had not been as effective as he was at raising money, he would not have won.

To be clear, the Citizens United decision (via the Supreme Court) did not create the problem -- it just made it worse, by removing the limit on corporate (and union) giving, allowing those donations to be less transparent.

Romney is outspending Gingrich by about four to one.

Who do you think will win?  Hmm, let’s guess.  If we say the guy with the most money, we’ll be right 94 times out of 100.

We The People need to demand campaign finance reform.  Until that happens, we’ll have the best democracy money can buy.

Even Newt Gingrich doesn’t deserve to lose this way.

 

 

Open Marriage

 

How does Callista Gingrich defend

accusations of "open marriage"?

Click here to find out.

(Give it a minute to download.  It's worth it.)

Bridging Wealth Gap

 

The Sassistas! have not yet watched and/or read

President Obama's State of the Union Address from last evening.

To watch Obama's speech and follow along with fact checks and analysis,

click here for a New York Times interactive feature.

Dish, please.

Nervy Newt

Uh-oh -- it's Westsista's keen perspective on today's South Carolina primary! 

Newt Gingrich has made me laugh out loud more than any of the other Republican candidates.

Sure, he lacks the entertaining qualities of Rick Perry, who unselfishly provided many hours of mocking fun.  And he never comes close to making as many silly, unsupported statements as Michele Bachmann.

But he does remind me of another political celebrity that we haven’t heard from in a long time: Baghdad Bob

Remember him?  He was the guy who on live TV proclaiming that U.S. troops were not in Baghdad, even as you could see them behind him in the video.

It takes a special kind of person to be able to sustain that level of, let’s say, flexibility with reality.  And Newt is a very special guy.

The Women

You and I might describe a person’s behavior as “appalling” who cheats on and then dumps wife #1 when she gets sick, and then cheats on and dumps wife #2 when she gets sick.  But Newt used that word to describe being asked about an explosive interview given that day by aggrieved wife #2.  You gotta love that chutzpah, especially as it earned him a standing ovation!

Many people are guilty of cheating on their spouses, but the exceptional feat here is explaining it this way:  “partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”  Genius!  Talk about turning your weak points into strengths!  What could be more virtuous than hard work and patriotism?

Newt Gingrich went after Bill Clinton with the flaming vengeance of an archangel over Clinton’s affair with a staffer, while he was deeply immersed in his own extramarital affair with one of his own staffers. 

The Money

Newt Gingrich is the kind of guy who can pull down over three million dollars in a year, putting him in the tiniest upper tier of the top 1%, and nastily attack his opponent for . . . being even richer?

In 1988, Gingrich helped force the resignation of the Democratic Speaker Jim Wright, who was alleged to have used a book deal to circumvent campaign-finance laws and House ethics rules.  This occurred while Gingrich himself was getting money from his own “unusual” book deal that raised money from political supporters to promote sales of his book.

The Positive Campaign

In Iowa, Mr. Gingrich vowed to “stay focused on positive things.”  But I knew he would not disappoint.  I knew that deep down he was the same guy who wrote a 1996 memo encouraging Republicans to "speak like Newt" by describing Democrats and Democratic policies using the words “corrupt,” "devour," "greed," "hypocrisy," "liberal," "sick," and "traitors."   

In a delicious irony, it was his very close business partner – the conservative group Citizens United who helped him make three films – which led to the Supreme Court decision that enabled Romney’s Super PAC to run round-the-clock ads against Newt Gringrich in Iowa.

It wasn’t long before Romney’s relentless assaults caused him to abandon his positive campaign with brutal attacks on Romney.

The Mandate to Buy Health Insurance

Pop Quiz: In May 2011, who made this statement on national TV?  “All of us have a responsibility to pay—help pay for health care,” and suggested this could be implemented by either a mandate to obtain health insurance or a requirement to post a bond ensuring coverage.

Nancy Pelosi?  Harry Reid?  President Obama?

Nope.  Newt Gingrich.  You can actually see him in a 2008 video making a pretty convincing argument on the merits of the individual mandate.  Now he opposes the Obamacare mandate.

Where Newt Gingrich truly sets himself apart from the other candidates is in sheer gall.  He appears to be totally untroubled by his own unbridled hypocrisy or his non-stop carousel of positions.  I have barely scratched the surface of the “Newtisms,” without even mentioning climate change, immigration, Libya or Paul Ryan’s budget plan, but you can read about some of them by clicking here.

I don’t know about the people in South Carolina, but I would hate to see another Republican debate without Newt in it.  He makes me laugh.

 

 

The 17% Fight

Let's hear it for Westsista's take on today's New Hampshire primary!

It is estimated that the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries get about as much media coverage as the rest of the primaries combined.  People like me pray for a long, drawn-out battle where the other party’s nominees slash each other to ribbons for months. But what usually happens is that after Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida (which will be January 31^st), the nomination usually seems pretty well decided.

What’s all the fuss about the New Hampshire primary?  After all, they only have 12 delegates, out of a total of 2,286 Republican delegates. That’s way less than 1%.

Although New Hampshire is notorious for delivering surprise election results (as opposed to polls), Romney seems to be so far ahead that none of the other candidates have a chance to beat him.

Controlling for other factors statistically, a win in New Hampshire increases a candidate's share of the final primary count in all states by 27 percentage points. (Click here for a link that proves my point.)

Good news for Mitt Romney, the frontrunner. But the real fight is over second place in New Hampshire, which is worth about 17 percentage points in the final primary tally. 17% is a huge number if the ABR (Anyone But Romney) Republicans can agree on a candidate.

Although Rick Perry proved that he CAN indeed remember three things in the last debate, I don’t think he has much of a chance in New Hampshire (in fact, I think lots of people may believe he already dropped out when he said he was returning to Texas to think about the election.  Don’t bother thinking too hard, Rick Perry.)  Rick Santorum will probably not do very well either, although he may still have a shot in the South Carolina primary.

• Will it be Jon Huntsman, who has gone all in for this primary fight?   Lesser-known candidates who do well in New Hampshire can suddenly become serious contenders.
• Will it be Ron Paul, who routinely gets the least media attention proportionately for the highest amount of support?
• Or will it be Newt Gingrich, who has completely given up running a positive campaign in favor of the nasty attack ads that history has shown to be vastly most effective?

Second place here doesn’t mean second rate -- it is enormously more important than first place in most other states.

Here We Go Again

Thank you, Westsista, for a special "Meet the Sass" report on the Republican primaries!

 Although it may seem like just yesterday for those who lack the stamina of true political junkies like me, it was actually four years ago that we watched both parties duke it out for the presidential nomination.  As Barack Obama is eligible to run for another term as president, this primary is all about the Republicans. 

What a wild ride it has been!  Ever since April of 2011, many different candidates have surged ahead in the polls.

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention (aka those with lives), here’s the quick wrap-up of the race so far:

• Trump – although he never officially declared, voters seemed to like his aggressive attitude and proven track record of making money.   The fall:  Turned out he was just boring after Hawaii released Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate.
• Bachmann – attractive and able to memorize and deliver humorous talking points, for awhile she looked like the real deal.  The fall:  She was forgiven for mixing up John Wayne with John Wayne Gacy, but she finally made one crazy statement too many, repeating a mother’s lament that the HPV vaccine had caused her daughter’s mental retardation 
• Perry – also attractive and bringing that same Texas machismo which apparently never gets old.  The fall:  revealed himself to not be as good at memorization as Bachmann, not very mentally agile on his feet, and I forget the third thing.
• Cain – able to craft a catchy tagline that people could easily remember – NINE NINE NINE.  The fall:  curiously enough, not when it was revealed that at least two sexual harassment lawsuits against him had been settled out of court amid several more allegations, but when an affair surfaced where he had given his mistress money (apparently it was okay for him to screw women financially regarding sex, but not okay when they return the favor).  He also couldn’t remember what he disliked about Obama’s actions regarding Libya, but he was pretty much done by then anyway. 
• Gingrich – name recognition and perceived to be intelligent enough to do well in debates against the president.  The fall: thanks to the Supreme Court Decision (Citizens United), Romney’s Super PAC has been running negative Gingrich ads 24/7 in Iowa. In an ironic twist, Gingrich is now against the conservative Supreme Court decision and has become a believer in more transparency in campaign finance.
• Paul – consistent on issues and has a thought-out position on all the issues.  The fall:  The Ron Paul newsletters have been re-hashed again by the press, and there is some ugly stuff there – homophobic, racist and also anti-semitic.  Although he has given it a good try, it is not easy to distance yourself from the newsletters that bear your name and that have brought in millions in fund-raising.
• Santorum – may have surged at exactly the right time to have a good showing in Iowa.  His greatest weakness is that he is mostly known for his strong stance on social issues and that is generally not at the top of the voters’ list this season.

Last but not least, at some point Mitt Romney decided to seriously compete in Iowa.  Although he has never gotten over 25% in the polls, he may just be the tortoise in this race that ends up on top on the only night that counts – when the votes are actually counted.

Speaking of votes, some primaries are caucuses instead of elections.  Approximately a third of states hold caucuses for nominating presidential candidates instead of primary elections.

What’s the difference:

• Caucus – a meeting of members of a political party to nominate candidates for political offices.  This normally happens in small precincts (Iowa has 1,774).  Winner is determined from a majority of these small meetings. 
• Election – voters go in the voting booth and choose someone.  Winner is determined by votes.

Watching the primary arena is the most political fun that I’m going to have this year, so I’m riveted, waiting to see who Republicans in Iowa choose to go up against Barack Obama in November.  

 

 

Peace on Earth

 Why not shoot out the lights this holiday season?

A Scottsdale, Arizona gun club is offering families and their children the opportunity to pose with Santa while armed with assault rifles, grenade launchers, and pistols.  Young and old can preserve the moment while gripping the high-powered weapon of their choice.

What better way to mark the season than this memorable message about the Second Amendment?  The Sassistas! are curious, however . . . not only about what you think of this, but also your ideas for an appropriate holiday message to accompany these images.

 

Blaze of Glory

Social Security Reform Bill Encourages Americans To Live Faster, Die Younger

Yesterday, nowaysista forwarded the above video to the Sassistas! It speaks for itself.

 

CNN Tea Party Debate

Why don't the Sassistas! care about this?