Election 2012: The Final Week in Review -- FORWARD!

 OBAMA SCORES!

Team Obama: 303 332 vs. Team Romney: 206
H/T: MrsTarquinBiscuitbarrel

 Don't you love it when a plan comes together?
 

H/T: Mmboucher

FOUR MORE FOR FORTY-FOUR

The Current and Future President of the United States.

President Obama's Victory: A Win for All Americans

If the only thing Barack Obama wanted in life was to make his way into the history books, he achieved that in 2008 by becoming America's first black president.  

Folder left for President Obama on the Oval Office Resolute Desk by outgoing 
President George W. Bush on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009

Fortunately for our country, Barack Obama did not intend to become just another historical African American figure to be trotted out for high school essays during Black History Month. 

When the President-Elect raised his right hand and placed his left on the Lincoln Bible that cold January day to take the Oath of Office, he did so with a vision for the nation that was constructed of neither lies, nor  hidden agendas, nor inconsistencies. During the previous twenty-one months, he had told the American electorate what he wanted  to accomplish, and he asked us to take that arduous journey with him.   We did, and we are a better nation for it. 

A Conspiracy Collapses

Curses!  He's still there!

As the sun set on the first inauguration of Barack Obama, GOP congressional leaders -- including Romney's failed running mate, Paul Ryan -- and other soulless Republican plotters met at The Caucus Room restaurant in Washington to set in place a scheme to sabotage the new president's legislative agenda.  By the time the 2010 mid-term elections rolled around, the Republicans had embraced and supported the Tea Party candidates and were feeling a confident superiority of taking over the House of Representatives.  Yeast-Bread-Rising Mitch McConnell felt emboldened enough just before those elections to state publicly, We need to say to everyone on Election Day, “Those of you who helped make this a good day, you need to go out and help us finish the job.”

And what was the job?  The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. 

So, how'd that work out for you guys, Mitch?


Mitt Romney, the Dark Horse with the Dark Soul

Akk!  I lost?  He won? 
Are you sure?

Republican strategists are already finding excuses for Romney's loss, and we can expect shallow analyses for a number of weeks or months.  They will refuse to acknowledge that out of eight of the worst primary candidates in the history of this country, they chose the wrong man, for the wrong time, for the wrong country.  Surely there's somewhere on Earth that would appreciate his regressive policy positions, but it is not America in the Twenty-First Century.

So much has been written and said about the GOP candidate's lies, shifting position stands, and proven lack of ability to lead America that there is little need to rehash them in this post.

Suffice to say, Mitt Romney lost because he is the most professionally corrupt, politically inept, morally challenged, and emotionally barren candidate possible, a man possessing all the integrity and compassion of a Chia Pet.

 

All the PAC Money and All the PAC Men... 

...could not put Romney together again.  

H/T: Sleuth1

Cut to Fadeout

Going...

Going...

Gone.

 

END NOTE: Honoring Seamus

Election 2012: Week Four in Review

by Sunnyjane

 You're a creep, Biden.                                  And you're a lying piece of crap, Ryan.

 

                                                  

Nailing Ryan's Jello to the Wall

It should be recorded in the annals of political history that in the general election of 2012, the Democratic Party Campaign actually Let Joe be Joe in the vice presidential debate.   Nowhere to be found at this debate was the powder puff from 2008, where Biden was forced to go easy on Sarah Palin because she was -- and remains -- an ignorant, vacuous, lying, self-centered scrap of Valley Trash whose mental and emotional stability were already being questioned behind the closed doors of both campaigns.

Chug-a-lug, Chug-a-lug

The far-right member of the Smirk and Smug ticket nervously gulped water throughout his fact-challenged and fairy-tale-laden session with Vice President Joe Biden.  However, it was obvious that Congressman Paul Ryan's liquid obsession contained not even a trace of thiopental sodium -- commonly known as truth serum.  And kudos to moderator Martha Raddatz  for ignoring the instructions that the Republican vice presidential candidate be introduced as Mister Paul Ryan, rather than Congressman Paul Ryan. Such a demand was a patently transparent effort by the Romney campaign to distance the Wisconsin Representative from 112th Congress's ninety-two percent unfavorable rating.  How many rungs down the scum-sucker ladder can this group possibly descend?

Joe Biden arrived in Danville, KY, to expose Paul Ryan not just as unfit to assume the presidency should events be such that the office is thrust upon him, but to draw a clear comparison between the core tenets of the Obama administration and what a Romney administration would do to the country.  It is popular for each campaign to utter those time-honored words, This is the most important election in the history of America!  This year, it is true.  I am old enough to remember a time when coffee cups were devoid of clever messages, the word remote was just an adjective, and feminine products were kept behind the counter and carefully wrapped in brown paper by the druggist -- yeah, like that wasn't a dead giveaway.  So with those credentials, I can firmly state that never have I seen an election where the differences in the two candidates' visions for the direction of this nation were so absolute: one with a vision that will carefully and thoughtfully move us ahead in a continuously complex and changing world, the other a vision that would hurt us both economically and on they world stage, and socially, send us back to an era of aluminum powder photography.  Perhaps Ryan should apply for a job as driver of the Mystical Magic Mathmobile after November 6; I understand all the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile jobs are taken.

We've all read the debate analyses, most of which were heatedly partisan and others fairly well-balanced.  Fact-checkers went into overdrive, while the media, pundits, and bloggers from all sides of the political spectrum clickity-clacked their way through every adverb and adjective in their on-line dictionaries, and ISP technicians hosed down their over-heated servers. 

Admittedly on the partisan side, I found that Alternet had one of the best summaries on the debate in their 10 Best Biden Put-Downs of Paul Ryan in Veep Debate post.  It's well worth the read.

An Unlikely Endorsement

From a state that most pollsters have conceded to Mitt Romney comes a surprising but welcomed endorsement from North Carolina's Winston-Salem Journal, which endorsed John McCain in 2008: 

Americans have a clear choice between two presidential candidates with starkly different ideas for spurring the economy, providing for the health of our people, defending our interests abroad, educating our children and protecting our environment. We believe that President Barack Obama’s progress on these issues merits him a second term in the White House.

The Democratic president … is calm under pressure and courageous in standing up for the rights of all Americans, including the poor, veterans, the elderly, women, gays and immigrants. In contrast, we’ve sometimes found it hard in the last few weeks to tell just what Obama’s challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, really stands for.

While Obama commits the occasional gaffe, we can’t imagine him ever dismissing 47 percent of his fellow Americans.

Obama has had a generally strong four years. He and Vice President Joe Biden form a seasoned, consistent ticket, one much more promising and reliable than that of Romney and his running mate, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

And another endorsement for President Obama from the conservative Journal Star in Nebraska. 

The Second Presidential Debate

Just five days after Joe Biden stripped Paul Ryan of any credibility he was assumed to possess, President Obama and Mitt Romney meet again in Hempstead, New York, at Hofstra University for a town-hall format debate.  From their respective campaigns: 

Romney's advisers suggested the Republican nominee would continue to moderate his message as he did in the Oct. 3 meeting to help broaden his appeal to the narrow slice of undecided voters. In recent days, Romney has promised his tax plan would not benefit the wealthy, emphasized his work with Democrats as Massachusetts governor and downplayed plans to strengthen the nation's abortion restrictions. He told an Iowa newspaper, for example, that he would not pursue abortion-related legislation if elected. That's in direct conflict with last year's pledge to cut federal funding from Planned Parenthood.

Robert Gibbs, the Obama campaign’s senior adviser had this to say about Romney’s first debate:  I think Mitt Romney's performance was, indeed, magical and theatrical … largely because for 90 minutes he walked away from a campaign he had been running for more than six years previous to that.

  
An Obama campaign spokesperson said,  The American people should expect to see a much more energized President Obama.

END NOTE

They've got our backs.  Let's make sure we've got theirs.

                             

Countdown to Election 2012: Week Sixteen in Review

by Sunnyjane

 Just take the photo, lady,  I'm sick of your bawling kid!

Somewhere in this raggedy and rampage-filled week, Mitt Romney started buying more Twitter followers.  Now I'm not sure how that's done -- or what his campaign is trying to prove by doing it -- but it smacks of  fourteen-year-olds with raging hormones sending love letters to themselves.  Besides that, the tweets from these accounts are so bad, it is my belief that he's outsourcing the whole thing to China.  Adding insult to injury, Politicususa points out that Romney still has only two hundred thousand real human followers, while President Obama has almost eighteen million.  This is not a new thing, of course; Romney was buying Twitter followers back in 2011.  Gingrich, Palin, Bachmann, Pawlenty -- they've all played this little game.  Hey, what's the going rate for a Twitter follower these days, anybody know?


That Taxing Tax Tangle

Are they laughing at me?  They're
laughing at me, aren't they?

On Friday the 13th, Mitt told the country -- and anyone else who had the misfortune to be watching their TV at the time -- that he ain't gonna release any more tax returns, dadgum it all and that's all there is to it so stop asking him! 


Republican leaders and their talking heads throughout the land have publicly called on Romney to hand over the tax returns -- to no avail.  I have the feeling if Mitt makes it to the White House, he's going to have an Enemies List long enough to reach one of Bain's call centers in India.


And though they are certain that Mitt has nothing to hide, even that revered conservative ragazine National Review has told him in no uncertain terms that he should release the returns, respond to any attacks they bring, and move on.  While speculation abounds regarding what's in those returns that he doesn't want anyone to see, a highly probable one is that he took the 2009 tax amnesty for hiding money in a secret (non-disclosed to the IRS) Swiss bank account when Switzerland's largest bank, caught up in an international tax evasion dispute, said it would disclose the names of more than 4,000 of its U.S. account holders.  Remember that while he disclosed twenty-three years to the McCain campaign in 2008, they would not have seen the year 2009 return.  TaxReturngate, anyone?


Mitt dismisses the whole Show Us Your Tax Returns brouhaha as [The Obama campaign's]  opposition people look for anything they can find to distort, to twist, and to try and make negative, and I want to make this a campaign about the economy and creating jobs. And they want to make this campaign about attacking people and diverting attention from our job picture in this country.   [Memo to Mitt: If there's nothing to attack in those returns, what's your problem?] 

Perhaps Mitt will Pull a Palin and release his tax returns the day before the election, eh?

When the Missus Muffs the Message

Sorry, but you people don't
deserve the full 'Ann wave.'

Since the Romney campaign most likely couldn't find a viable Republican to take their candidate's side in this imbroglio, they decided to trot out Mrs. Mitt to hammer home the point.  Whether Ann said people or you people in her interview with Robin Roberts, the message was clear: nobody's getting any more information about our financial situation and about how we live our life.   Take that, you Ninety-Nine Percenters!   Lost in the people/you people noise, however, is something more telling.  When pressed by Roberts on why they didn't just show the returns,  Ann responded, Because there are so many things that will be open again for more attack... and that's really, that's just the answer.  Hmmm...


This is not Ann's first bout of Foot-in-Mouth disease.  We all remember that she doesn't consider herself wealthy, that she loves the fact that there are women out there who don't have a choice and must go to work and raise their children, and that she's going to unzip Mitt to prove he's not stiff.   [Way too much information, Ann.  Seriously.]


From the A Village is Missing Its Idiot File

*Rush Limbaugh decided that Bane, one of the characters in the movie Dark Knight Rises, is part of a liberal media conspiracy against Romney and Bain Capital.  Do you think that it is accidental that the name of the really vicious fire breathing four eyed whatever it is villain in this movie is named Bane? he asked his fire-breathing-four-eyed listeners.   


Considering that Bane has been a comic book character since 1993 would suggest that Rush has been diving into the Oxycontin bottle big time.  


Of course the next day, most likely after he came out of his drug-induced stupor, he denied the whole thing: I never said that. I didn't say there was a conspiracy theory.

Akk!  There are Muslims
everywhere! 

*From her subterranean hidey-hole in North Bugged-Eyedistan, Michele Bachmann created a veritable shitstorm by accusing Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff and aide to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, of being an infiltrator for the Muslim Brotherhood.  John McCain wasted no time taking to the Senate floor and ripping Ms. Bachmann a new one.  He was joined by others in condemning Bachmann, and rightly so.  Perhaps the most telling criticism came from Ed Rollins, Bachmann's former campaign chairman, who wrote in a damning Fox News op-ed, I am fully aware that she sometimes has difficulty with her facts, but this is downright vicious and reaches the late Senator Joe McCarthy  level.   Bachmann then decided to go after Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim ever elected to the U. S. House of Representatives and the first African American elected from Minnesota,  insisting that he has a long record with the Muslim Brotherhood.  Wrong!   

Even the Anti-Defamation League forcefully condemned the allegations, saying in a recent statement: Absent clear evidence of direct ties between these individuals and the  Muslim Brotherhood, such allegations foment fear and cast the kind of suspicion that undermines rather than advances American counterterrorism efforts.


After having his arm twisted, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (House Intelligence is as perfect an oxymoron as you'll see in a long time) finally dropped his support for Bachmann's little witch hunt.  

*Bill O'Reilly has decided that Obama wants to ‘restrain capitalism’ because of slavery ‘grievances'  and loud-mouthed Romney surrogate John Sununu went totally berserk on Fox News and said of President Obama, He has no idea how the American system functions, and we shouldn't be surprised about that because he spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something, spent the next set of years in Indonesia, another set of years in Indonesia, and, frankly, when he came to the U.S., he worked as a community organizer, which is a socialized structure, and then got into politics in Chicago.   And not to be outdone, Rush Limbaugh pounded his desk and said, This is what we have as a president: a radical ideologue, a ruthless politician who despises the country and the way it was founded and the way in which it became great. He hates it.

*George Zimmerman says he has no regrets for killing Trayvon Martin because doing so was God's plan.  Georgie, that God's plan thingy didn't work for Sarah Palin in 2008, and I sincerely doubt it's going to work as a good defense for you in this particular instance.  But Zimmerman also wants African Americans to apologize to him.  Uh huh.

*Using brietbart.com as a viable source, The Donald reiterated his Obama Birther shtick again by tweeting With @BarackObama listing himself as "Born in Kenya" in 1999 http://bit.ly/JaHQW0  HI laws allowed him to produce a fake certificate. #SCAM.  Not to be outdone, Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced his investigative team has found secret codes -- or something like that -- on President Obama's fraudulent Hawaiian birth certificate.  

*The Romney campaign was delivered quite a blow when Gregory Peterson, a well-connected Utah fundraiser, was arrested for multiple rapes.  Further information on Peterson can be found here and here.


Nice company you're keeping there, Mitt. 

Other Inanities from the Right


It seems that doughy-jowled Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader (who hopefully will remain in the position of minority) was for disclosing the names of high-money contributors before he was against it.  In fact, he was for more disclosure than outlined in a bill being voted on in 2000 concerning 527 Political Groups.  He told Tim Russert of Meet the Press, Republicans are in favor of disclosure... the more disclosure, the better. If you’re going to do that, and the Senate voted to do that, and I’m prepared to go down that road, then it needs to be meaningful disclosure.  The ‘527s are just a handful of groups. We need to have real disclosure. And so what we ought to do is broaden the disclosure to include at least labor unions and tax-exempt business associations and trial lawyers so that you include the major political players in America. Why would a little disclosure be better than a lot of disclosure?   [The Senate voted against the Disclose Act last week.]

Thumbody in Mith's campaign loth my
imbitathun to thpeak at tha conbenthun

Calls for Sarah Palin -- whose voice makes woofers and tweeters wince -- to screech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa are beginning to surface and there is some debate as to the wisdom of that.  Gingrich says Absolutely, she should, while others think absolutely not! [Just to clarify, there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that the campaign doesn't want her to speak because they're afraid she'll call their candidate Gov. O'Rama.]  


John McCain didn't help her cause when he recently said of his vice-residential selection in 2008, I picked Sarah Palin because she was the better candidate.  No doubt we'll hear more about this in the very near future, as the convention is barely a month away.  


Of God and Gun Rights: The Massacre in Aurora 

There is little to say about the horror in Colorado except to acknowledge the outrageous and inhumane philosophies of the Right.


That certified Cretin Russell Pearce of Arizona seemed to blame the victims for not being armed, saying on his Face Book page, Had someone been prepared and armed they could have stopped this "bad" man from most of this tragedy. He was two and three feet away from folks, I understand he had to stop and reload. Where were the men of flight 93????


Louie Gohmert of Texas blames the whole thing on America's turning away from Judeo-Christian values.


John Boehner, Speaker of the House, taped a warm little speech praising the First Responders who got to the theater complex in two minutes of the shooting.  Of courses, he failed to add that the House Republicans have dramatically cut spending for First Responders.  


And the NRA's response?   ++++crickets++++


UPDATE:  Interesting article on the Five Issues that Divide Gun Owners and NRA Leadership.  Maybe there's hope?


End Note

President Obama:  Can you believe that?  Ann Romney actually said we'd find more things in their tax returns to attack.

Countdown to Election 2012: Week Seventeen in Review

by Sunnyjane

President Obama:  But the best part is, he wants me to apologize!
Vice President Biden:  No shit?  Apologize?   Bwhahahaha!

In what in a bygone era would be called That Was The Week That Was, we're going to review the weeks before Election 2012, and the last week was a humdinger!  As we have come to learn -- in a very painful way -- Mitt Romney's relationship with the truth is somewhat, um, strained.  He has always been able to mutate the facts surrounding his business and political experiences according to which way the political wind is blowing.  But this isn't 2001, when he was running for governor of Massachusetts; nor is it 2008, when he lost in the presidential primaries to John McCain.  No, this is an entirely different election, and Mitt Romney hasn't gotten the message that it's become much easier to actually check the facts. 

Before we know it, the political silly season will be upon us and it makes sense to keep track of everything that's going on as the weeks race by.  So let's take a look at what happened in America during Week Seventeen.

A Contrast in Dedication to the American People

At the end of the seventeenth week before Americans elect the next person to lead the government of the United States, President Barack Obama stood in the rain to speak to thousands of Virginia voters. 


Meanwhile...








Mitt Romney lounged poolside at his opulent home in New Hampshire -- not with some of his, ahem, dedicated super-sharp campaign advisers, but with one of his five wealthy sons and his iPad. Is there an app for Tone Deaf on that thing?





The Pain of Bain that Refuses to Wane

So Mitt Romney had a bad week.  Tough!  He deserved everything he got -- and more.  But we've all read the articles and seen the videos of Mitt's adamant refusal to release more years of his tax returns for his time at Bain Capital.  And he continues to insist that he did not have any authority or any dealings at Bain after 1999, and even demanded an apology from President Obama for making statements he found offensive.  That little pimple became a festering boil as the Obama campaign continued to give the lie to Romney's assertion that he's a jobs creator, and the Democrats virtually said, Yeah, while at Bain you created jobs -- in China!   So despite various proof to the contrary -- including SEC filings that say he was, indeed, active in Bain business during his time orchestrating the 2002 Olympics in Utah -- Romney still maintains the opposite. There's a lie in there somewhere, and Americans know it. For one thing, because he wanted to run for governor of Massachusetts and had to prove that his major residence was in that state, he gave sworn testimony in 2002 that he remained on the board of the Staples Corporation and Marriott International, the LifeLike Corporation during that time.  OK, let's see the tax returns, Mitt.


You know the fecal matter has hit the oscillating air mover when even Fox News goes after the presumptive Republican candidate.  In a scorching commentary on July 11, Joe Trippi made the case that if Mitt Romney were not at the top of the ticket, he'd never even pass the vetting process for vice president.


Think about it, wrote Trippi. What candidate for president -- even a GOP candidate for president -- would pick a guy as a running mate who would only hand over one year of tax returns, as Mitt Romney has done? 

And would anybody pick that guy if that one tax return revealed Swiss Bank accounts and more than $30 million in off-shore accounts in the Cayman Islands -- especially in an election year when public anger at Wall Street remains so high?

   

The answer is: no. No presidential candidate in their right mind would pick such a candidate as their running mate.

It does make you wonder how horrified John McCain may have been when told about the contents in those twenty-three years of Mitt Romney's tax returns when he was being vetted as a vice presidential running mate in 2008.


Did Arthur Culvahouse say:  John, we've had a thorough look at Romney's tax returns.  You'd be nuts to even consider this guy. Better to go with the twit from Alaska and hope for the best. Surely your guys can teach her a little something and keep her on message, right?   Hello?  John?

Other Issues in the News to Muse

Unflappable Me

-- Former Vice President Dick Cheney, the guy who convinced George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq because Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction and that's where al-Qaeda was hiding (neither of which had any basis in reality), held a fund-raising dinner for Romney.


It's not that the Romney Campaign's coffers are running on empty, but rather that Cheney can't stand sitting on the sidelines.  So, the man with the bought-heart chose to make a pretty choke-provoking statement.   After declaring that Mitt is the only man who can make the right decisions in unexpected foreign policy crises, he added insult to injury and continued:


When I think about the kind of individual I want in the Oval Office in that moment of crisis, who has to make those key decisions, some of them life-and-death decisions, some of them decisions as commander-in-chief, who has the responsibility for sending some of our young men and women into harm's way, that man is Mitt Romney," Cheney said to applause.

Ha, Ha!  I'm white and you're not!

-- After saying in his speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,  This is going to be a battle about describing my heart, my passion to help -- if you will -- the great majority of Americans,  Romney declared that he would cut all unnecessary spending, including Obamacare.  That's terrific, Mitt; cut one of the things that the majority of Americans desperately need: affordable health care.  Of course, he knew full well in his racist heart that he'd get booed -- it was his plan all along as he pandered to his fellow bigots out there in far-right land.  He did fail to mention that he is in favor of Voter ID Laws that would potentially disenfranchise more than two million African Americans in November.  If Mitt Romney possesses one core value, it's racial prejudice.


Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone had the best take on Romney's speech to the NAACP that I read:  Romney really showed us something in his luridly self-congratulating N.A.A.C.P. gambit, followed by the awesomely disgusting "free stuff" post-mortem speech he delivered the next night in front of friendlier audiences. The twin appearances revealed the candidate to be not merely unlikable, and not merely a fatuous, unoriginal hack of a politician, but also a genuinely repugnant human being, a grasping corporate hypocrite with so little feel for how to get along with people that he has to dream up elaborate schemes just to try to pander to the mob.

-- During the week, former President George H. W. Bush got a wee bit torqued up at Grover Norquist's tax pledge and said, The rigidity of those pledges is something I don't like. The circumstances change and you can’t be wedded to some formula by Grover Norquist.  It's -- who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway? 


-- Eric Holder, United States Attorney General, said that the voter ID laws being passed in various GOP states were nothing more than poll taxes,  which are illegal under the Constitution.  


-- Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown introduced the Stolen Valor Act bill.  The inspiration for the bill, Vietnam veteran Doug Sterner, is pleased about the bill, but says he is supporting Elizabeth Warren because of Brown's determination to help repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act.   "That weighs very, very heavily on my decision to endorse [Elizabeth] Warren," the lifelong Republican said. Expanding access to health care is "very much a matter of humanity."  


-- A study finding that House GOP female staffers make $10,000 less than their male counterparts.  That's called Equality, Republican Style.


-- The Democratic Governors Association released a video attacking three GOP governors and Sarah Palin for being assholes lying about the Affordable Healthcare Act.

-- In Florida, 98% of welfare recipients who were tested for drug use passed.  Cost to the tax payers?  $178 million. Savings from the 2% who didn't pass?  $60,000.


Way to hold costs down, fools.




-- CBS reported that those overly zealous spending-cuts advocates in the House have spent nearly $50 million -- thus far -- to repeal Obamacare.  Let's see, that's about a comfortable annual salary ($50,000) for 960 Americans.  Of course, they went to great lengths to protect their own healthcare plans.  And after such a laborious session, the congress creeps spent valuable tax payer money having a long discussion on the two Congressional golf teams.  Do we understand House priorities now?

-- Nobody likes the idea that the Olympic togs designed by Ralph Lauren were made in China, while the textile manufacturing industry in our own country could certainly have used a nice contract to make official clothing for athletes representing, uh... America.


Not that having America's sports ambassadors rigged out in clothing made in other countries is new, you understand.  No, in 2002 while Mitt Romney was chief honcho of the Salt Lake City shindig, the manufacturing of the official wear was outsourced to Burma, or as the committee at the time stated indignantly,  The torch relay clothes were NOT made in Burma. They were manufactured in Myanmar.  So there!  Only problem is, Burma and Myanmar are the same country, and one which has the most devastating record on human rights. 

End Note

Sixteen weeks to go, fellow Americans!   There are the Olympics being held from July 27 to August 12 in London, a vice-presidential running mate to be chosen, the Republican National Convention in Tampa from August 27 through August 30, the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte from September 3 through September 6, those presidential and vice presidential debates, and all that campaigning to be done.  Hold on to your magic underwear, folks -- it's going to be a wild and crazy ride from now until November 6.

Vice President Biden:  So, how'd that apology to Romney go?