ricin

Oh, poor Mitt Romney. It seems that every three or four weeks we hear from a somber Mitt Romney. Damn, he was “this close” to winning the election. Remember the original reason that he lost wasn’t that he was a terrible candidate who made the Republican base nervous. No. Instead, it was that the president and Democrats gave Americans stuff. Now, Mitt Romney was on Fox News, telling their sad, tearful conservative viewers that, “I spoke with a leading Democrat, one of the top leaders of the Democratic party and he said, ‘I thought you had won, one week out…'” Romney told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto on Friday that “[t]his was a very close race. But events occurred. The employment rate dropped below 8% for the first time just weeks before the election. That changed the national mood, the media celebrated that. Had it stayed above 8%, that would have made a difference.” Let’s go over the facts again, just for fun. The presidential race between Romney and Obama wasn’t about voters in Texas, Oklahoma, Utah or Alabama, states in which Romney won handily. Romney had to win the battleground states. He needed to win Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Because of electoral math, Obama needed to win three or four out of these eight states, whereas Romney needed to win six or seven of these eight states. Romney had to win two out of three of the big states (Florida, Virginia and Ohio). Romney won one out of eight. He lost all three big states. The only battleground state that Mitt won was North Carolina. That’s it. Florida was close, but Ohio wasn’t. Now I’m not sure who this Democrat was who believed Romney had won. Clearly he wasn’t informed with the data. Maybe he was watching those same polls that Fox News was publishing. The bottom line is that Romney was a mediocre candidate at best. In order to beat a sitting President, the Republican candidate needed to have really excited the base and changed the conversation in these battleground states. Romney didn’t do either.

Domestic Spying – I’m pretty sure that most of the Patriot Act is bad for us, the American citizens. The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analyzing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications. The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.

Over the last week or two we have started to hear more and more about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. As you remember, Trayvon Martin was walking home from a corner store when he was confronted by Mr. Zimmerman, purportedly because Trayvon didn’t look right. Trayvon was shot. Zimmerman claims self-defense which rests on the Stand Your Ground law. Complex questions surround this case. I promise you that no matter how this trial unfolds and what the final verdict is thousands of Americans are going to be unhappy. This has turned into a classic Right versus Left brawl. Both sides have issues. Neither Zimmerman nor Martin were saints. Lies have been told on both sides. All I can tell you is that this is going to get a lot uglier.

I’m not how ricin has become a popular means of self-expression and protest. In Spokane, Washington, another letter is suspected to be tainted with ricin. Then out of Texas, a wife somehow tried to frame her husband by sending ricin letters to President Obama. The whole thing is very bizarre.