Former classmates say that in prep school, Mitt Romney had a Michigan state trooper’s uniform that he would wear to pull pranks. Young Mitt used the uniform and a flashing police light on his car to pull over students from a nearby girls school. I guess when you’re a young boy, it’s a lot easier to talk to girls if they’re terrified. Between impersonating a cop and bullying the gay kid, Mitt had an interesting adolescence. We all do things when we were young that people might find distasteful. How many of us do things that people would find downright creepy?

In prep school, Mitt liked to pretend to be a cop. But when he was draft age, he refused to take part in the “police action” in Vietnam. Mitt got four draft “deferments” in all. As we’ve seen in the case of Dick Cheney, when you string enough deferments in a row, it stops being a case of deferring something, and becomes a case of permanent avoidance.

Wisconsin may have blown the recall, but now others are blowing Wisconsin out of proportion. This wasn’t a case of an election being won. It was a case of an election being purchased. Besides, a lot of Wisconsinites just didn’t like the idea of recalling a sitting governor. I guess there attitude was that Scott Walker was mistake they made, and now they have to live with it.

The conservatives in Wisconsin were successful at turning the middle class against itself. While conservatives accuse Democrats of stirring up class warfare, the conservatives are stirring up class civil warfare. First they deny decent wages and benefits to non-union workers—that’s the “divide” part of “divide and conquer”—and then they vilify the union workers who have those things. It’s more like “divide and let them conquer each other.”

On the same day that Wisconsin failed to stop Scott Walker’s anti-union agenda, cities in California voted to cut pension benefits for city workers. The conservatives say that we can’t afford to pay for the pensions. But the excuse “we can’t afford it” never seems to come up when we’re talking about paying for tax cuts. Or for wars.

Today’s Homework | Discuss | Blog Archive

Teaching hate: A 14-year-old "talkshow host" rails against homosexuality in a flurry of bigotry, religiosity, anti-Obama derangement, and very bad grammar...