Obama on CBS This Morning, Friday July 13:

When some people question why I would challenge his Bain record, the point I've made there in the past is, if you're a head of a large private equity firm or hedge fund, your job is to make money," Mr. Obama said. "It's not to create jobs. It's not even to create a successful business - it's to make sure that you're maximizing returns for your investor. Now that's appropriate. That's part of the American way. That's part of the system. But that doesn't necessarily make you qualified to think about the economy as a whole, because as president, my job is to think about the workers. My job is to think about communities, where jobs have been outsourced.

So Obama's view is that being the head of a hedge fund, devoted to the mere making of money for investors even in ways that do not create anything productive like jobs and a successful business is an appropriate way of life.  Nothing wrong with it.  It's just part of the American Way; part of our system.

Israel astounded international observers this week as former Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy announced in effect: "Israel never occupied nobody!" Imagine a President Romney asking Justice Scalia to provide a definitive interpretation of the Obamacare decision. The results could hardly be more unsurprising.

Fox, meet chicken coop. Chicken coop, meet fox. With Netanyahu assembling / stacking this committee of like-minded thinkers to come up with a way to prove their settlements were legal, they creatively fell back on familiar ground: the West Bank was already Israel's so they could build wherever they want anyway.

The story about Romney's investment in the Chinese firm—Global-Tech Appliances—IN 1998 has so many legs it might become the nexus-centipede of Bain, Romney, Outsourcing, China, Telling Lies, and the flawed Republican presidential campaign of 2012.

Heretofore Romney has been able to muddy the record on his direct involvement in outsourcing because some previous outsourcing claims were fudged by the question of whether Romney was still at Bain Capital during the period 1999-2002. The "story" that Romney was not involved in Bain during that period is unraveling by virtue of SEC filings in which he claimed to be Sole Owner, Chairman and CEO of Bain, and also by testimony to the Massachusetts Ballot Commission that his full intention was to return to Bain—the latter rationale he absolutely needed to qualify for a run at the Governorship. Despite facts to the contrary, the story of "how" involved he was can be one of those never ending run-abouts. But the story about Global-Tech is much more damning to Romney than a debate about how connected to Bain he was in the 1999-2002 time period.

Warning. This diary does not contain any slams against republicans or democrats.

It has been said that the two biggest motivations of humans are to obtain pleasure and to avoid pain. I believe with some variations, this is mostly true. Add into this our instinct for survival and you can probably explain most behaviors. But I am just guessing here, I suppose.

This was a whole lot simpler when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s and even into the 1970s. We had to live with a very real - to most Americans and I would say also Russians - threat of global annihilation. I am not going into the propaganda factor here, because at the time this was not a consideration. For the people then it was very real. We had seen it right before our very eyes.

Administrations are invariably criticized for things they do right, for things they do wrong, and for things they fail to do at all. They are invariably criticized for doing too much and criticized for doing too little. Conservative critics of the current Administration tend to do the former. Liberal, by contrast, would do well to focus on the latter. For thus far, this Administration’s failures – in domestic policy at least – are more the product of doing too little too late, than of doing too much too soon. Nowhere is that failure clearer than in the Administration’s inept handling of the home foreclosure crisis.[1]

The Obama Administration did not invent or create the foreclosure crisis. It inherited it, just as it inherited a major financial crisis and a looming recession. But unlike the financial meltdown, the home foreclosure problem inherited by the Obama Administration was in its infancy as the new president took office. The housing crisis then played itself out predominantly on Obama’s own watch; with the numbers of foreclosures soaring as they did only because the Administration failed to act with a speed and an effectiveness appropriate to the occasion. It is a failure that may yet bring a heavy electoral price.

For the life of me I can't see Willard Romney as the leader of a Republican Party which in body, mind and spirit embraces teavangelicals masquerading as colonial rebels. Romney is oh, so much more like a Redcoat than a Lexington, Massachusetts militiaman. And Obama---even though he in many ways is an elitist for whom the teavangelicals have as much visceral hatred as the real colonial rebels had for their British overseers---Obama seems much more of an everyday American to me than Romney ever will.

tmmcarthy recently did a nice blog on FactCheck and facts.

Here, I present the FactCheck.org Greatest Hits, then and now:

(1) FactCheck September 23, 2004: "Kerry Exaggerates Cost of Iraq War" in pre-election ad. FactCheck says the war cost 'is still under $120 billion' whereas Kerry said it was $200 billion. Important information for the public from FactCheck....? By 2008 the cost of the war was extimated to exceed $3,000 billion ($3 trillion) and beyond by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist. Thanks for that fact check, FactCheck, it helped us a lot.

Imagine the 2 leaders of the world's Conservative movement agreeing that industry is destroying the environment, and taking decisive, concerted action to stop it.

That in effect is what happened in 1987 when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol, to ban CFCs, which took effect less than 2 years later and had drastically beneficial effects on the Ozone Hole. 

Of course it wasn't just conservatives who pushed this measure, and it was based on science that evolved over a decade, but from the view of 2012 it's still amazing. Now the conservative official line is that man can't really affect the environment, which rather than relying on the "6000" history of the world, simply denies confirmed reality of 25 years ago. Work across the aisle for the sake of the Environment? Pshaw. Rio? D.O.A.