The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Yes, I have accordion stories and other amusing what-not, and they’ll all return tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy…Romneypalooza!

The Onion’s Take: Romney Apologizes To Nation’s 150 Million ‘Starving, Filthy Beggars’

“Let me make this absolutely clear: I have the utmost respect for all of the filth-encrusted, lesion-covered degenerates of this nation,” Romney said. “In the coming weeks, I look forward to meeting real Americans in their squalid, roach-infested hellholes in every corner of this country. I promise to stand up for every one of you, even the 47 percent of you huddled together for warmth, fighting your own family members for moldy crusts of bread as you wallow in your own excrement.”

Added Romney, “And I look forward to serving you as your next president.”

I was an army brat, Mitt. I saw military families using food stamps to get by. They sacrifice. You mock them. Shame on you. #RomneyEncore

— Mattison (@Mattison) September 18, 2012

David Brooks, New York Times: Thurston Howell Romney

The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor.

Romney’s comments also reveal that he has lost any sense of the social compact. In 1987, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, 62 percent of Republicans believed that the government has a responsibility to help those who can’t help themselves. Now, according to the Pew Research Center, only 40 percent of Republicans believe that.

The Republican Party, and apparently Mitt Romney, too, has shifted over toward a much more hyperindividualistic and atomistic social view — from the Reaganesque language of common citizenship to the libertarian language of makers and takers. There’s no way the country will trust the Republican Party to reform the welfare state if that party doesn’t have a basic commitment to provide a safety net for those who suffer for no fault of their own.

The final thing the comment suggests is that Romney knows nothing about ambition and motivation. The formula he sketches is this: People who are forced to make it on their own have drive. People who receive benefits have dependency.

But, of course, no middle-class parent acts as if this is true. Middle-class parents don’t deprive their children of benefits so they can learn to struggle on their own. They shower benefits on their children to give them more opportunities — so they can play travel sports, go on foreign trips and develop more skills.

People are motivated when they feel competent. They are motivated when they have more opportunities. Ambition is fired by possibility, not by deprivation, as a tour through the world’s poorest regions makes clear.

If I had a nickel for every time Romney said something stupid, I’d be in his income bracket. #RomneyEncore #47percent

— Nick_Anderson_ (@Nick_Anderson_) September 18, 2012

Paul Krugman, New York Times: The Real Romney

Actually, if you look at the facts, you learn that the great bulk of those who pay no income tax pay other taxes; also, many of the people in the no-income-tax category are (a) elderly (b) students or (c) having a bad year, having lost a job — that is, they’re people who have paid income taxes in the past and/or will pay income taxes in the future. The idea that half of Americans are just grifters is grotesque.

Romney’s almost making me start to miss the Santorum Surge.

— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) September 17, 2012

Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo: Devastating

So the country is divided in two: on one side, the self-sufficient and high-achieving Republicans and on the other side the losers who think government needs to take care of them.

This is the caricature of Mitt Romney, who was born on 3rd base (in Ann Richards memorable phrase), thinks he hit a triple and thinks the broad middle class who’ve relied on government for student loans or social security or anything else are losers who can’t get their act together and take responsibility for themselves. Only this tape says that caricature Mitt Romney is the real Mitt Romney.

I guess the moral is “Don’t rip on the 47% while they’re still in the room serving you drinks” #RomneyEncore

— Mark Critch (@markcritch) September 18, 2012

Matt Welch, Reason: Romney’s 47 Percent Line Is a Common GOP Trope, and it’s Wrong*

This is economic determinism at its worst, going against the very message the Republican Party was trying to sell to the world during its quadrennial national convention last month. Over and over again, we heard speakers there talk about how their immigrant grandparents came to this country, worked hard, built “that,” never asked for a handout, and as a result their descendants have enjoyed the American Dream of ever-upward mobility. What the 53/47 dividing line says, to the direct contrary, is that income status is a permanent political condition, defrocking all Americans of agency and independent thought.

Most people at some point will be part of the 47 percent (indeed, nearly most already are). When my friends and I were comparatively poor, as people often are in their 20s and early 30s, we (for the most part) didn’t “believe” that we were “victims,” didn’t “believe the government has a responsibility” to care for us, and didn’t vote for Democratic political candidates “no matter what.” We mostly took personal responsibility and care for our lives, and acted according to our idiosyncratic individual values and whims.

I should theoretically be the target audience for this stuff. I never took out a federally guaranteed student loan, never enjoyed the mortgage-interest deduction; I worry all the time about government spending and entitlements, and I am not unfamiliar with the looter/moocher formulation. But this kind of reductionism does not reflect individualism (as David Brooks charges), it rejects individualism, by insisting that income tax is destiny. It judges U.S. residents not as humans but as productive (or unproductive) units. (Though as long as people are thinking that way, is there any category of resident less taker-y than illegal immigrants with fake Social Security cards who file income taxes?) And it prematurely valorizes one class of government-gobbling Americans while prematurely writing off another.

I’m millionaire-at-birth Mitt Romney & If you lazy 47% don’t vote for me my taxes might go up 3%.#RomneyEncore

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) September 18, 2012

Dick Morris, Fox News: Mitt Romney is Right

As you read this, keep in mind that former Clinton aide Dick Morris has a history of tax delinquency. The IRS was after him for $1.5 million in 2003, and in 2008, he owed the state of Connecticut over $450,000 — nine times the U.S. real median income in 2011 — in back taxes.

Generalities are always unjust. And painting with broad strokes will do many individuals an injustice. But the fact remains that our electorate is basically bifurcated into those who pay taxes and those who receive benefits.

The danger comes not with the benefit but with the sense of entitlement. Why do so many people feel Romney will be better at improving the economy and yet still plan to vote for Obama? The answer is that they care more about preserving their entitlements than about improving the economy. They have come to rely on political action more than economic growth as the key to their solvency.

Did Romney err in telling it like it is? It would have been better if he had made a forthright, factual statement on the issue. It looks bad for these unpleasant facts to come out in a “gotcha” moment at a videotaped private event. But the fact remains that an Obama reelection would turn the tide psychologically in America from the land of upward mobility through hard work and initiative and toward a country akin to Greece: dependent on government aid in the form of a subsidy and government handouts.

By stating this fundamental truth, albeit off the record, Romney has done a service for which he should be praised not excoriated. It all boils down to what John Kennedy said: There are those who ask what their country can do for you, and those who ask what you can do for your country.

Found via AZSpot. Click to see the original.

Mitt Romney’s running mate has been a little silent, but that’s understandable — he’s got his hands full at the moment.

Bonus Reading: Ayn Rand Fun Facts: Complete with bibliography, because it’s always good to cite sources.

There’s a Simpsons quote for every occasion, and in this particular case, I think the right one comes from the episode titled Krusty Gets Kancelled, the one in which Gabbo makes his debut:

“47% of the voters are S.O.B.’s.”

In the episode, Gabbo speaks his true feelings about the children during a commercial break, unaware that Bart has secretly switched the camera on so that everything he says goes live on the air. “All the kids in Springfield are S.O.B.’s,” Gabbo complains, as puppeteer Arthur Crandall asks him to stop insulting his audience.

Yesterday, Mother Jones publicized a number of surreptitiously-shot videos at a fundraiser dinner held in May where Mitt Romney had his Gabbo moment, in which he called about half the country moochers and grifters:

The Romney in these videos is so different from the one we normally see at press conferences and town halls. He’s not awkward, stilted or robotic like the one whom we often see on TV or the one we hear about when he’s talking to people he doesn’t like. This one’s relaxed, comfortable, happy to be holding court and shooting from the hip. He’s talking to people whom he sees as equals, or at least doing better than what he perceives as “middle income”, which he recently defined in an interview on Good Morning America as being “$200,000 to $250,000 and less”:

While you could debate that “middle income” is a meaningless term, the upper bound of $250,000 that Romney uses as a definition of “middle income” is 5 times the real median income. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, it was $50,054 in 2011, which coincidentally is only slightly more than the $50,000 that attendees of the fundraiser dinner paid to attend. Even if you’re making a little less than the lower figure Romney cites — a paltry $200,000 — you’re doing well. Page 38 of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2011 report says that if your household income is $186,000, you’re in the top 5%.

Where are those layabouts 47% percent who don’t pay income taxes? This map from an article in the Atlantic shows that they’re mostly in red states — that is, states where the voters tend to vote Republican (and often against their own best interests):

Update: Here’s how that 47% breaks down, as pointed out by NPR, who in turn point to this July 2011 report from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center:

“Low income” is defined as below $26,400 for a family of four. In contrast, Romney’s in a family of nearly twice that size (him, his wife Ann, and five kids) but his 2010 income was three orders of magnitude larger ($21 million), most of it from his money working for him (dividends, capital gains and interest).

Update: It should also be noted that two-thirds of that 47% do pay payroll tax, which is 15.3%. That’s a bigger proportion than Romney’s income tax rate, which is a stunningly low 13%. How do I get in on that action?

What Romney’s saying is that if you’re not well off, it’s because you’re a slacker. It’s a standard conservative trope. Yes, there are people who don’t make money because they can’t get off their asses to do an honest day’s work. But there are also people who make a fair bit of money who also do very little work. I met them when I went to Crazy Go Nuts University (one of the “Canadian Ivies”) and in the working world, most notably at Toronto’s Worst-Run Startup, which was run by a hyperkinetic yet lazy trust fund kid who was more interested taking the team rock climbing than actually making software. If you work in an office with more than a few dozen people, you probably have someone who’s raking in the dough but not doing much. The converse of what he’s saying is that if you’re well off enough that you can spend the equivalent of the U.S. 2011 median income to bask in Romney’s aura for a couple of hours, you must be awesome, and as one Romney crony puts it, he was just playing to the audience.

The hastily-assembled press conference put together by the Romney campaign is pretty weak sauce:

In a post in Esquire’s Politics Blog, aptly titled The Worst Thing Romney Has Said About Americans Yet, Charles P. Pierce makes these astute observations about Romney (with added emphasis by Yours Truly):

To this moment, I guarantee you, Romney is probably astonished at what all the fuss is about. This is simply the way the world is. There is himself, Willard Romney, and his perfect family, and his perfect life, and there is The Help, and The Help gets drunk on the job, and prunes the shrubbery badly, and pockets the silverware, and makes off with the odd can of salmon out of the pantry. He is who he is today because his breeding and his genes and his god have arranged him to be through a serious of immutable laws against which only a fool or The Help would presume to argue. He is what his golden life has made him to be, and his golden life was only the bare minimum of that to which god and nature entitled him. To ask him to doubt any of this is to ask him to doubt gravity or the movement of the tides.

…

We are coming rapidly toward a devastating confluence of two colliding panics. The Romney campaign is panicking about itself, and the Republicans are panicking about the Romney campaign. He cannot come back from this, honestly. This is who he is. This is what he believes the world to be. Half the electorate already thinks he’s a fake, which means he’s not a very good one. There’s really only one campaign left to him now.

I have no idea why my friend John Bristowe decided to move to Australia; the place seems to be packed with nothing but Nature’s most deadly creatures:

Update

For the benefit of those people who didn’t get the “Clock Spider” reference (or who for some reason need nightmare fuel), here are the photos of this internet-famous spider. He’s a Huntsman spider that was found lurking behind a wall clock in Darwin, Australia:

Ooh! What’s that behind the clock?

AIEE!!! Clock spider! KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!

This Wednesday should be an interesting one for Toronto-area techies! During the workday, there’s this event:

It’s the return of the monthly Toronto Techie Dim Sum lunch this Wednesday, September 19th at noon. It’s a gathering of techies and their friends to get together over a friendly, cheap and cheerful dim sum lunch. There are no formal presentations or discussions or sales pitches; it’s lunch, with as much or as little “networking” as you like. It’ll happen at the usual place: Sky Dragon restaurant, located at the top floor of Dragon City mall, located on the southwest corner of Spadina and Dundas. For more details, see this blog entry.

Later that day, Ladies Learning Code will be throwing their Fundraiser Party at CSI Annex (720 Bathurst Street, halfway between Bloor and Harbord). They now have a permanent atelier at the Annex branch of the Centre for Social Innovation large enough to hold workshops for dozens of eager learners who want to get a better idea of how the technology they use every day works, but it costs money, hence Wednesday’s fundraiser. According to their Indiegogo page, they’ve surpassed their $10,000 fundraising goal, but you can still get tickets and help support them — just get them at http://ladieslearningcodeparty.eventbrite.com/!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

While we were in Montreal, The Lady Friend and I paid a visit to the Biodome, whose prime attraction this summer was the newly-born lynx kitten. At twelve weeks of age, it looked like more like a household cat than a creature of the wild.

In the spirit of Caturday, I’m posting these pictures that The Lady Friend took. He’s just too adorable, even if he’s a wild animal who’s probably in league with the godless killing machines.

I love how his paws seem to belong to a much larger cat.