This isn’t the first time I’ve marveled at the skill of the Barack Obama propaganda shop.  And I’m sure it won’t be the last.

If Barack Obama could line up every undecided voter in America and make them watch this, Clockwork Orange style, I think he’d have a fairly serene cruise to reelection.

Of course, if people paid attention to what had actually happened over the last 3 years, and how much he got done in the face of an obstructionist opposition party and an often cowardly Democratic party, pieces like this would be unnecessary.

I’ve already gone on record saying that Barack Obama will be reelected in November. I think, barring a Greek meltdown or an Israeli attack on Iran, the economy will keep adding jobs, economic news will continue to be good enough and people will feel more confident, and unemployment will get down to – or below – 8%.  And I think Mitt Romney’s honesty and humanity deficits will come to haunt him.  And yes – the GOP will nominate Mitt Romney.

I’m certainly aware that there will be a lot of cash laid out to defeat the President, but where saying mean things about an undefined Republican primary opponent can play a big role in defining that opponent the way you’d like, it’s a bit harder with someone who has been in front of you for four years.  I actually think SuperPac money will be far more problematic down-ticket, in races for the House, Senate, and Governorships.

But not as much at the Presidential level.

One other thing.  Obama likes to campaign, and in many ways, he’s better suited for its poetry than he is for the dull, often disappointing prose of governing.  He’s starting to have fun, and while Mitt Romney has been swinging at an Obama he’s created out of lie upon lie (see above), Obama will get to swing back at a very real and flawed GOP candidate who sticks his chin out and drops his guard. A lot.

And expect more gauzy videos that speak to the benefits of the things Obama has done.  Like this, from 2008.

Or these, on the Affordable Care Act:

If ever you’re looking for Exhibit A for why giving everyone a gun doesn’t necessarily make for a safer society, here it is:

A case involving the fatal shooting of an unarmed Florida teen, which has sparked outrage and calls for justice, is in the hands of the state attorney’s office.

Police say Trayvon Martin, 17, was returning from the convenience store to the home of his father’s fiancee in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, around sunset on February 26.

A neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, 28, saw the teen and called 911 to report a suspicious man, authorities said.

The 911 dispatcher told Zimmerman not to confront Martin, but by the time police arrived, the teenager lay dead with a gunshot wound in the chest, said Bill Lee, the Sanford police chief. He was carrying a small amount of cash, some candy and an iced tea.

Zimmerman told police he shot Martin in self defense, authorities said.

There’s so much wrong with this case I don’t know where to start.

First, Martin’s family has lost their son for the crime of walking in a neighborhood where some yahoo thought he didn’t belong.

Second, the Sanford police didn’t charge Zimmerman with anything.

Apparently, Zimmerman decided to get all macho and confront Martin, who must have wondered why this idiot was hassling him for walking to his father’s fiancee’s house. Zimmerman provokes a fight, and Martin – outweighed by 100 pounds – does well enough that Zimmerman decides to shoot him.

From there, the Sanford, Florida police department goes down one long path of fail.

…after the shooting, a source inside the police department told ABC News that a narcotics detective and not a homicide detective first approached Zimmerman. The detective pepppered Zimmerman with questions, the source said, rather than allow Zimmerman to tell his story. Questions can lead a witness, the source said.

Another officer corrected a witness after she told him that she heard the teen cry for help.

The officer told the witness, a long-time teacher, it was Zimmerman who cried for help, said the witness. ABC News has spoken to the teacher and she confirmed that the officer corrected her when she said she heard the teenager shout for help.

The Sanford Police Department refused to release 911 calls by witnesses and neighbors.

Several of the calls, ABC News has learned, contain the sound of the single gunshot.

Lee publically admitted that officers accepted Zimmerman’s word at the scene that he had no police record.

Two days later during a meeting with Trayvon’s father Tracy Martin, an officer told the father that Zimmerman’s record was “squeaky clean.”

Yet public records showed that Zimmerman was charged with battery against on officer and resisting arrest in 2005, a charge which was later expunged.

Many years ago, I drove with a good friend to Florida, where he’d gotten a new job. His car broke down outside Ocala, and we got towed to the local garage, which was guarded by a large, menacing dog whose breed, from a distance, escaped me.

“Does he bite?” I asked the guy who ran the place.

“Not if you’re white,” came the reply.

If you’re still wondering if this is a complete travesty of justice, just imagine that Zimmerman is a 28-year old black man with a record of resisting arrest and battery on a police officer, and Martin was a blond, blue-eyed local high school student, and tell me that the Sanford police wouldn’t be able to figure out if Zimmerman had committed a crime.

I certainly hope something happens to Zimmerman, although this being Florida, having his gun taken away is probably the least likely option.

From the religion desk:

A computer specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is going to court over allegations that he was wrongfully terminated because of his belief in intelligent design.

Opening statements in the lawsuit by David Coppedge were expected to start Tuesday morning in Los Angeles Superior Court after lawyers spent Monday arguing several pretrial motions.

Coppedge, who worked as a team lead on the Cassini mission exploring Saturn and its many moons, claims he was discriminated against because he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work.

Oh, bother.

Look – Coppedge is entitled to any damned fool opinions he wants (although hawking intelligent design in a building full of scientists is either incredibly ambitious or incredibly dumb), but if this guy was handing out DVDs at the workplace and annoying his coworkers his faith doesn’t give him any special protection compared to the person who is trying to get you to go to a weekend Lifespring conference.

An employer has a right to control the tenor of a workplace.  That doesn’t mean he gets to fire you if you have a Rick Santorum bumper sticker on your car, but if you spend your days, for example, telling your single coworkers that any sex they might be having is sinful and disgusting, that might not be conducive to the most harmonious office.

I’d feel the same way if someone was pushing Obama literature on dedicated Republicans after they’d asked him to stop.  The workplace isn’t Hyde Park; it’s dedicated to a specific set of tasks.

Lots of people are turning the first amendment on its head. The first word in the amendment is “Congress”, for crying out loud. Here it is:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Just as Rush Limbaugh doesn’t have a first Amendment right to a nationally syndicated radio show, and Sarah Palin isn’t entitled to spout idiocies without criticism, David Coppedge is not entitled to say anything he wants to anyone he works with at his workplace. He is entitled to say what he wants without the government penalizing him for his speech.

To give you an idea of how annoying Coppedge was, there’s this:

In the lawsuit, Coppedge says he believes other things also led to his demotion, including his support for a state ballot measure that sought to define marriage as limited to heterosexual couples and his request to rename the annual holiday party a Christmas party. [Emphasis mine]

Well, we know where Bill O’Reilly will come down on this one.

I’m sure, had Coppedge’s Jewish colleagues pointed out to him that there’s more than one holiday in December, he would have claimed they were trampling on his religious freedom.

One other thing: hawking intelligent design doesn’t exactly speak well of one’s adherence to the scientific method.

[As a side note, when Dover, Pennsylvania required Intelligent Design in their 9th grade science curriculum, they got smacked down but hard.]

If you’re wondering why Republicans are gloomy about this fall, perhaps these charts will help you.  (Red, if you’re wondering, is UNfavorable.)

The one above shows Mitt Romney’s favorability ratings over the last 14 months. By way of comparison, here are Barack Obama’s from the same period in 2008:

And here is Obama over the same period as Romney (i.e., January 2011 – present):

Not overwhelming, but solid – and headed in the right direction.

For reference, this is John McCain in 2008:

Now, 2012 is not 2008.  In 2008, people thought well of John McCain, but not so much of Sarah Palin, and clearly they didn’t think McCain had any answers on the economy.

And they were, at the very end, extremely frightened.

I don’t think people are frightened this year. I think they’re frustrated.  This campaign will hinge on Romney’s ability to make people frustrated with Obama, and convince them that he (Romney) has a way out of this mess vs. Obama’s ability to give them another target for their frustration and convince them that Mitt Romney doesn’t have a clue.

I’m still putting my money on the incumbent – even with higher gas prices and SuperPacs and the craven dishonesty of Mitt Romney.

Or maybe because of Romney’s dishonesty.

Obama’s got a pretty good case to make – you can go with the Washington Monthly’s 50, 25, or 13 top accomplishments – and, come this fall, he’ll be ready to make it.

I don’t think Romney will wear well on the big stage. He doesn’t wear well in the Republican primaries, and is only surviving because a) he is running against lilliputian opponents and b) neither of those opponents is willing drop out to coalesce the anti-Romney vote.

It’s certainly not impossible for Mitt Romney to win this fall – we’re a Greek implosion and a war with Iran away from that – but I think he’s got – spitballing – a 1 in 3 chance.  And while it’s not impossible to climb out of a 15% favorability gap, it doesn’t help that the gap has been growing.

And no, Mitt – just because Newt Gingrich is unbelievably weak doesn’t mean you’re strong, just as Rush Limbaugh bullying Sandra Fluke doesn’t make him manly.

Because it’s where I’m from.

If you were a major consulting company – say, for example, Bain & Company* – and someone came to you and told you that while you were leading your major competitors in sales by from 50% – 75%, but that you were spending nearly 4 times as much money marketing your product as your competitors, would you tell them that:

a) they clearly have an inefficient marketing strategy, or

b) their product must be inferior if their significant marketing spend isn’t crushing the competition.

If you were Mitt Romney, which would you rather hear?

Also, extra credit for consulting nerds: Would you call Mitt Romney a cash cow, a dog, or a question mark? Show your work.

*Yes, I know Mitt founded Bain Capital. But he started at Bain & Company, and Bain Capital was simply Bain and Company with skin in the game.

Any thought that the DC press corps is composed solely of the learned and thoughtful can be easily dispelled by Ed Henry, formerly of CNN; currently working for (of course) Fox News.

Today’s Ed Henry “why are you using precious oxygen” question:

I wanted to follow up on Israel and Iran because you have said repeatedly you have Israel’s back.  And so I wonder why, three years in office, you have not visited Israel as President.  And related to Iran and Israel, you have expressed concern about this loose talk of war, as you call it, driving up gas prices further.  Your critics will say on Capitol Hill that you want gas prices to go higher because you have said before, that will wean the American people off fossil fuels, onto renewable fuels.  How do you respond to that? [Emphasis mine.]

Well, see above.  And I’m not even going to get into the silliness that is the why haven’t you visited Israel part of that question. (Obama does, later on. Full transcript here.)

This is not, of course, the first time Obama has been, shall we say, dismissive of Mr. Henry. Back in 2009, Henry asked the President why he’d waited two days to comment on AIG paying bonuses when it was being supported up by American taxpayers. The exchange (video here) is a classic:

HENRY: Thank you, Mr. President.  You spoke again at the top  about your anger about AIG.  You’ve been saying that for days now.  But why is it that it seems Andrew Cuomo seems to be in New York getting more actual action on it?  And when you and Secretary Geithner first learned about this 10 days, two weeks ago, you didn’t go public immediately with that that outrage — you waited a few days, and then you went public after you realized Secretary Geithner really had no legal avenue to stop it.

[Obama answers a different part of Henry's Question, and then Henry follows up.]

HENRY: On AIG, why did you wait — why did you wait days to come out and express that outrage?  It seems like the action is coming out of New York and the Attorney General’s Office.  It took you days to come public with Secretary Geithner and say, look, we’re outraged.  Why did it take so long?

THE PRESIDENT:  It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak, you know?  (Laughter.)

And then there was the time Henry gratuitously quoted a Mitt Romney campaign slam.

I’m guessing Henry is beyond embarrassment by now.  If it were me, I’d maybe run my POTUS questions by a few friends first and see if the did spit takes before I unloaded them on national television.

Also, and not to bury the lede, Obama takes a swing at Mitt Romney, too:

Now, what’s said on the campaign trail — those folks don’t have a lot of responsibilities.  They’re not Commander-in-Chief.  And when I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I’m reminded of the costs involved in war.  I’m reminded that the decision that I have to make in terms of sending our young men and women into battle, and the impacts that has on their lives, the impact it has on our national security, the impact it has on our economy.

This is not a game.  There’s nothing casual about it.  And when I see some of these folks who have a lot of bluster and a lot of big talk, but when you actually ask them specifically what they would do, it turns out they repeat the things that we’ve been doing over the last three years, it indicates to me that that’s more about politics than actually trying to solve a difficult problem.

Now, the one thing that we have not done is we haven’t launched a war.  If some of these folks think that it’s time to launch a war, they should say so.  And they should explain to the American people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be.  Everything else is just talk.

Empty talk from an empty suit, but Obama was too politic to say so.

Amused has a post up where she asks liberals to stop falling back on the “birth control pills aren’t just for birth control” argument:

Look, I know that a lot of women, even virgins, take hormonal birth control for certain gynecological problems, to control cramps, etc. Still, the primary purpose of such medication is to prevent pregnancy, and the majority of women who take such pills, take it for this reason alone. To rely on the off-label use as a justification for mandating coverage implicitly concedes the wingnut argument that sexually active women, even married women, should just “hold an aspirin between their knees” if they don’t want to get pregnant.

Or, as Amanda Marcotte put it last week,

We need to frame our arguments as a full-throated, unapologetic belief that sex is good, women are good, and women’s right to enjoy sexual pleasure without shaming or government interference is good. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing enough of that. Instead, the most important argument—that a woman has a right to be a sexual creature and that sex is good—being abandoned by all sorts of liberals and feminists. The most common form this concession takes is well-meaning, and often person conceding the argument that women who have sex for pleasure are somehow less-than don’t intend to concede it. But that’s nonetheless what they’re doing. That concession looks like this:

“Some women aren’t even taking the birth control pill for contraception! They need it for cramps/endometriosis/etc.”

Every time you say this, a right winger wanting to imply that women who have sex for pleasure are sluts gets his wings.

Amen to that.

Contraceptives should be covered because they are a basic health need. Whether women choose to make use of that coverage to control cramping, cysts, or to have tons of sex without getting pregnant is nobody’s damned business.  The notion that anyone thinks it might be is deeply disturbing on so many levels.

When the history of the 2012 Presidential election is written, I suspect the imbroglio between Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke to be a mere footnote to the larger issue of the Republican Party deciding to alienate 73% of the women in this country by getting into a tussle over contraception.

But even small windows have views, and the path of Rush Limbaugh from mocking – in the vilest terms imaginable – the unassuming Ms. Fluke to “apologizing” to her via a posting on his website revealed the ugly specter of a group of hollow Republican “leaders” too timid to tell Rush off.

Save, in fairness, for Scott Brown.

Let’s run off a few, shall we?

John Boehner (through a spokesman!): “The speaker obviously believes the use of those words was inappropriate, as is trying to raise money off the situation.”

Rick Santorum: “Well, he’s taking — you know, he’s being absurd. But that’s, you know, an entertainer can be absurd. And — and he’s taking the absurd, you know, the absurd — absurd, you know, sort of, you know, point of view here as to how — how far do you go? And, look, I’m — he’s — he’s in a very different business than I am.”

And then there’s Mitt Romney: “I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used.”

I suggested a few days ago that perhaps the problem with certain GOP leaders was they didn’t have daughters. Sadly, both Boehner and Santorum do; I’m sure they’d respond exactly the same way if Rush was calling Lindsay Boehner a slut and suggesting that Elizabeth Santorum make a sex tape.

[Does anyone else remember what happened when David Shuster said that Chelsea Clinton was being "pimped out" by her mother?]

So – back to Mitt. What language, exactly, would you have used to call Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute?

If ever there was an opportunity for a politician perceived as weak, vacillating, and living in fear of the GOP base to demonstrate, for one, brief, shining moment, that he was not, this was it.  And he blew it.

They’re called ‘Sister Soulja moments‘ because they are, in fact, moments.

How hard is it to say that while you may disagree with Ms. Fluke’s position (and, quite frankly, Romney may not know whether he disagrees with it or not), the language was despicable and vile, and that Mr. Limbaugh owes Ms. Fluke a personal apology?

Apparently, when you put your soul in a blind trust in order to win the Presidency, it’s damn near impossible.

Anyway, I have a fantasy that, after the third and final debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, when Obama is leading by enough to make his reelection virtually inevitable, he says to Romney, as they’re shaking hands, “In case you’re wondering, ‘I’ll just say this – it’s not the language I would have used’ is when I decided to kick your ass.”

I mean, are any of these people human?

 

Shorter Rush Limbaugh: I’m really sorry some of my advertisers are less afraid of me than the entire Republican Party.

More on the non-apology apology here.