Following an announcement by the Romney campaign that universal healthcare was available somewhere back East, Interstate routes 80, 70 and 40 were clogged with old cars, pickup trucks and U-Hauls in what looked to be the largest mass migration since the 1930's.

Google map servers crashed as millions searched for information about Massachusetts. In the confusion Wikipedia opened a page on a state called Massatuusetts, and wily contributors had a field day misdirecting folks to out West somewhere---"it's between California and Nevada", people were yelling out to others in the McDonalds drive-thru lanes.

Where's the outrage from Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and the rest of the right wing media cabal? Not only is Romney being trashed by the British press, but the Prime Minister himself ridiculed the great American state of Utah, calling it the middle of nowhere!  What arrogance. I've had enough of these insults. Romney took the trouble to grace the shores of England only to meet a disrespectful host. He should finish his fund raising, dump that small meaningless country, which, if it hadn't been isolated from Europe by a choppy channel, would have been overrun by Hitler in WWII. The fact is that Romney should just come back home.......oh.

Romney's faux pas in London illustrate the essential truth of the man and the campaign. Seldom has a Presidential candidate been as internally compromised as this Republican nominee is. The reason he says nothing of any substance about himself is because most of what a normal candidate would say about his experience leads down a booby trapped path. Romney is like the guy whose wife has just discovered his affair. There is nothing he can say which isn't worse than simply keeping his mouth shut and looking dumb. All Romney had to do was romance our ally for a couple of days and not bust the Queen's furniture. It should have been an easy assignment. But he blew it.   

In an interview on CNN, Steve Rattner, Obama's auto industry turnaround chief and by background a "private equity guy", said that Romney had used "every trick in the book" He then referred specifically to Romney's $100 million IRA, revealing that he had talked to his fellow industry people and, "None of us had even known that there was a possible trick, if you will." Damn, Mr. Rattner, I wasn't born yesterday. Give it up!

I spent the better part of a decade commuting to work in an executive recruiting firm in Manhattan.  We focused on senior management assignments, including in the finance industry. In ten years I had lived the corporate suite vicariously and any yearnings I might have had to play the executive role were well sated.  After I left I spent fifteen years in artistic and teaching pursuits and then founded a small manufacturing services business which today keeps me off the streets.

One seldom hears about the really fine executives. But somewhere along the line the top tier began to be confused with actors and are essentially loudmouths---encompassing three prototypes: The flamboyant; the super hero; and those who are simply boorish and full of themselves. Trump, Dimon and Romney.

Actually there is a fourth type, the seedy. In my former lifetime we once introduced an uptown candidate with a public persona of squeaky clean, upstanding family man. Nice guy, really. But he wasn't right, either for L.A. (his wife would never have moved) or for a job in Hollywood. The Chairman who interviewed him was a cigar chomping, crude individual (think casino magnate). When our candidate asked about benefits the Chairman's face screwed up and he chewed half way through his cigar. "The benefits are a pension program, health plan and all the show girls you can eat." Seedy doesn't quite nail it, does it?

One of the advantages of a business guy like Willard Romney running for President is that despite the rude public dissection of his career, an ordinary member of the rank and file such as myself can learn business methods which would normally be kept in secret files. If Romney loses the election, and because he no longer has any active involvement in any of his businesses, he will most likely write a book and advertise it on Bloomberg---something like, "Business is a Fiscal Cliff---How to walk right up to the edge without going to Jail!". I'm not waiting for Romney's chapter on Retirement. I retroactively retired over the weekend.

I emailed my stock broker to retroactively withdraw the sale order for a thousand shares of Apple Computer I gave him in March, 2002, when Apple shares dropped from $25 to $23 in one day. I expect that my broker will change his records appropriately, will so inform the registrars of Apple common shares, and I look forward to seeing that $600,000 appear on my July statement. I can't wait to show the wife that statement because if she's said it once, she's said it a hundred times, "...if you just hadn't sold that Apple stock when you did, we could be retired by now."  Well, now we are retired and maybe she'll shut up about Apple.

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.

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.

The Texas Republican Party is backtracking from the Party platform plank, "Knowledge-Based Education", (that's one for the family archives) which opposes critical thinking skills and has already been approved by a state convention. A party spokesman said the language made it into the platform by mistake, adding that "...the plank should not have included "critical thinking skills" after "values clarification". I'm guessing Texas Republicans will not spend much time thinking about that correction.

Having spent a great deal of time in Texas and doing business in the state, the overall Platform seems well out of step with the many moderates in the state and perhaps even with the more religious and conservative wing of the Republican party.

Even though Romney's prospects look dismal by virtue of today's polling matchups with the President, I would not count him out. And anyone who thinks this election will be won by more than a few points in the national popular vote is dreaming. Romney may look like a lost dog but he will be rescued by Karl Rove, Frank Luntz and the Super Pac money crowd, as well as the unlimited wealth of the Koch Brothers funneled into the election on his behalf.

As was predicted on this site previously, the onslaught of negative advertising from both camps will reduce this election to a choice between which candidate one dislikes the least. Having said that, Romney's numbers (if you exclude what seems to be an outlier in Rasmussen's national polling) have deteriorated rather quickly. Whereas for the last three years Obama has been on the defensive, it is now Romney who must make a comeback---particularly with women and Independents. 

After listening to the Jesus-trumpeting of Rick Santorum for the last week and then having bile rise up in the back of my throat at the obscene remarks of Franklin Graham on MSNBC this morning, Romney, by comparison, is looking like a saint or even Jesus Christ Himself.

This past week has seen such an outburst of psychologically disturbing sexual and gender references by old white men---and for that matter, old white women---well connected to the socially conservative Republican Party that I have been puzzled as to what chemicals might have been put into their water supply---but I doubt that it is estrogen, because estrogen would presumably make men effeminate and cause prostate cancer whereas the outburst has seemed more like an overdose of testosterone.