da Chipster

The first night of the 2012 Democratic National Convention is in the books and – man! – it was one for the books! The Honorable Julian Castro, mayor of San Antonio (where my mama is from) rocked the house, and showed the GOP what a real future of Hispanics in politics (and America) looks like, and Michelle was, quite simply, stunning.

But the real story emerging Tuesday was the lack of bump for Rmoney-Lyin coming out of the Republican National Convention. Typically, a ticket receives much more favorable poll ratings in the days immediately following their convention, sometimes upward of 20 points. And this makes sense, when voters have just been subjected to a 3-day pep rally glorifying the candidate and excoriating his opponent.

In recent years, however, this bump has been much less. 2004, 2008 and now, 2012 have all shown bumps under 5%. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, 24-hour news channels have extended the horse race for President to a 2-year marathon, so you’re getting a lot more exposure prior to the convention. Second, convention coverage has dwindled on networks, so out of a 72-hour infomercial, we only see a few hours of the high-profile speakers, most of whom we are well familiar with.

Furthermore, my favorite mathematician, Nate Silver, has shown that in the course of the last week, Obama’s chances for re-election have gone UP to better than 3 in 4. Bookmark that site, it’s beauteous.

What this means in practical terms for this election is similar to what it meant for 2004. You can’t run an entire campaign saying “I’m not him” unless you’re Jimmy Carter in 1976 and the “him” is the specter of Richard Nixon.

If, however, you are Mitt Romney, noted liar, cultist (to Evangelicals, I could care less what planet his “god” is from) and out-of-touch zillionaire with the lowest likability ratings since Simon Legree, it means that at what should be your high point, you’re still looking up from the bottom of a very deep well…and it’s starting to rain.

(PS: Customers, any Susan/Bubba sightings on the TeeVee or Interweb videos?)

When I signed up for this thing, nobody mentioned the 7:00 am breakfasts when you don’t get back to the hotel until 2:00 am and you’re too damn old to be doing this stuff.

Okay, so I knew about the too damn old but the 7:00 thing was a shocker. I didn’t even know there was a 7:00 am.

National conventions are busy. Caucuses all day, stunning speeches at night. As the media is telling you, Julian Castro and Michelle Obama owned that stadium. People didn’t move. We didn’t even look at each other because we were too involved with the stage. I saw something historic last night.

Honey, all that and pink pumps!

Lots of people say they saw me and Ole Bubba on tv last night. That is entirely possible. We did have credentials. Here we’re are checking in with our constable, Ruben Davis and his wife Sharon.

And I even got to pose with the Young Democrats officers since I’m president of the Old Silver Democrats. This is me, Trisha Fredericks and State Representative candidate Vy Nguyen.

And The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee interviewed one of the Texas Democrats, Bill Rosenberg. Samantha Bee is gorgeous in person.

I haven’t seen protestors except for some crazy people holding up abortion porn signs and letting their children hold the most offensive signs. And some street preachers with microphones yelling about this is American and they have free speech to talk very loudly about how God hates government. Irony porn.

My favorite SDEC member, Vickie Vogel, took this picture for me because she knew I would love it.

We just heard that President Obama will give his speech at the covered arena. There’s loads of rain here.

One more thing, in case you ladies were wondering, Julian Castro is even better looking in person. Yeah, Honey, he’s a hunka hunka burnin’ love.

This place is Disneyland for political junkies.

Because it works.

When Paul Ryan delivered his address to the Republican convention, many commentators – even one from the Fox News organization – pointed out that it was quite possibly the biggest pack of lies ever delivered by a politician since Joe McCarthy’s 1950 speech in West Virginia. Some would have given McCarthy the nod for truth on the grounds that he appears to have actually believed that the phantoms no one else could see in the State Department were actually there. Of course, Ryan also believes that he ran a sub 3-hour marathon so it is quite likely that he too has a rich fantasy life where he has a little 28 room, 11-bath cottage in Galt’s Gulch. The thing is that although facts like how fast you have run a marathon or whether your budget will ever be balanced without dismantling Medicare, Social Security, Food Stamps may seem to have a liberal bias, they can have an equally conservative bias if you happen to be conservative and even more so if you are numbered among the “antennas to Heaven” crowd of uber-Christian conservative Christians (like the ones in Todd Snider’s song. Consider, if you will, the humble condom.

When I was in high school (Class of ’69) condoms were hard to obtain if you were a high school student. This often led to comical exchanges between drug store clerks who mistook a request for “some rubbers” as a request for pull-on overshoes especially when the clerk would ask “What size?”. So many young men were forced to fall back on those obtainable (in 5 “vibrant” colors) from vending machines in the men’s rooms of a local gas station and sold “for prevention of disease only”. Now, of course, they have their own aisle at Wal-Mart, Target, and at least 3 feet of shelf space in most grocery stores. Okay, maybe not in your town but here in Snake Collich, Pennsyltucky it’s difficult to avoid them. Clearly, the local merchants have decided that making condoms available to young people is good for business. After all, they not only reduce unwanted pregnancies, they also reduce the spread of serious, life-threatening diseases. What’s not to like about condoms? That’s the liberal point of view – it focuses on the end result which is judged to be a good one. If you are of the opposite opinion which starts with the firm opinion that anything which reduces the risk of extra-marital, hetero-sexual hanky-panky is in and of itself bad because extra-marital sex of any kind (including the non-hetero variety) is evil and therefore making condoms difficult to obtain was a good thing and the current ease of access is due to the moral decline of our nation and that in order to return to a state of moral order, condoms and any other form of birth control, must be controlled.

A recent study (you can read it here if you’re prone to insomnia) looks into this matter more closely and concludes that conservatives tend to believe that condoms simply don’t work. The study put it this way: “..the more participants endorsed the belief that condom education was morally wrong even if it prevented pregnancy and STDs, the less they believed that condoms were effective at preventing these problems, and the more they believed that promoting condom use encouraged teenagers to have sex.”

Republicans lie all the time and get away with it is because their core constituency is just like Elder Price (in The Book of Mormon) who “just believes”. Even when the news media points out that Paul Ryan is lying, his followers continue to believe him.

Don

Sam in Kyle

Over the years each First Lady has had a cause. We have Lady Bird to thank for much of the beauty we see along our roadways. Betty Ford championed rights for women and Rosalyn Carter highlighted those with mental disabilities. Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” was as big a flop as her husband’s presidency but it was still an effort. Barbara Bush and Laura Bush both championed literacy, sadly with lackluster results in their immediate family. For Hilary Clinton, her cause was health care and Michelle Obama’s is childhood obesity.

So if by some hideous fate Ann Romney ends up as First Lady what will her cause be? She’s already announced that she will be working to prevent teen drug use. Yet, judging by this article, her efforts may well be directed toward torturing young drug users into submission. Romney has a long history of being involved in “rehab” schools for teens—not just any institutions, but “tough love” ones with disturbing reputations for abuse.

Bain Capital acquired CRC Health in 2006. Although Romney had left the company by then, he still receives money from the profits. Three Bain partners sit on the board; two have donated $500,000 to his super PAC. Among the allegations against the clinics are that, “children have died of neglect under their care as the pressure that Bain exerts on the company to make a profit filters down to their patients.”

Robert Litchfield, a major Romney fundraiser and fellow Mormon, is the founder and board member of the World Wide Association for Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS). Among the allegations brought against the school by former patients are that, “Staff routinely locked teens in dog cages, sexually and physically abused them, starved them, and emotionally brutalized them.”

Another major Romney supporter is Melvin Sembler, a “Florida strip-mall magnate who was a national fundraising chair for Romney in 2008 and is again a Florida State Co-Chair for Romney’s finance committee.” Sembler’s drug rehab clinics, Straight Inc., had a long reputation for abuse including one young girl who, “testified to being beaten, raped, locked in a janitor’s closet in pants soiled by urine, feces, and menstrual blood…”

“You can trust Mitt; he loves America,” said Ann this week at the world’s largest Klan rally. This must be what is called ‘tough love’ really, really ‘tough love’. And even though Mitt has a well-deserved reputation as a flip-flopper, I have no doubt that he and Paul Ryan will treat our nation exactly the way his friends treat teen drug users.

One of the really cool things about being a delegate is that you get free stuff, literally stuffed. I got a tote bag with a cute stuffed donkey in it.

Today was Carolina Fest Day and me and ole Bubba met Fenway Fran in downtown Charlotte for an obscene display of fried food and everything you can imagine with OBAMA written on it for seven city blocks. Ole Bubba got interviewed by Fox News and told them that there were more minorities in one block of Charlotte today than there was at the entire GOP convention. If you hear that hell froze over, flip on Fox News and see Bubba.

About a block down the street, MSNBC had a whole set up instead of just interviewing people on the street.

I will be attending my second party in a few minutes. National conventions are busy places and, Honey, my tired is starting to hurt.

So now I’m bonafide. This is Kate and me making sure people know where we’re from.

And here’s my papers. Fenway Fran made the oh so classy necklace they are hanging from.

We spent the afternoon hugging people from Texas who arrived safely and our fearless leader, Gilberto Hinojosa, will arrive this evening. He fell off his bicycle and is still healing up.

We heard some rumblings about our volunteers in training being held up at the stadium because somebody is protesting. The price of democracy.