August 25, 2012 by mhasegawa

Bye, Bye Josh

I woke up this morning to word of the pending trade. It is now official. Josh Beckett is gone along with Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez and Nick Punto. We got virtually nothing in return, but lots and lots of freed up cash since the Dodgers are picking up most of the remaining contracts. May Josh eat his fried chicken and drink his beer and enjoy his new clubhouse. Crawford was never healthy enough to figure out if he could have made it here in Boston, but he never really lost that “deer in the headlights” look. Gonzalez was a contributor despite the fact that he turned out to be whiner. And Nick Punto? He tweeted this

Even though Gonzalez looks happy here, he had the grace to tweet this

“Thanks to Red Sox nation for everything. You guys are great!”

But Adrian is happy to be headed for California. I guess there are west coast guys and east coast ones and he is a west coaster.

Will this be what it takes to turn the Sox around? Too late for this season, I’m afraid, but to quote from Dan Shaughnessy in his column this morning in the Boston Globe

You want them to blow it up?

This would be blowing it up.

The prospective blockbuster would signify a white flag on this horrible season. More than that, it would mark the end of a failed era of big names, big salaries, big egos, and maddening underachievement,

Will any of the prospects the Sox acquire emerge as blue-chip big leaguers? We don’t know. That’s not what this trade is about. This trade is about clearing the air of the stench created by the 2011 and 2012 Red Sox. It’s about saying goodbye to arrogance, unearned entitlement, and poor performance from top-priced talent. It’s about changing the rotten culture of the Sox clubhouse, a malaise that has turned even diehard fans against the once-beloved franchise.

After 12 infuriating months of passivity, sloth, and denial, the Sox look like they’re finally admitting they have a problem. This is always an important first step. The deal would be a whopper . . . in terms of the people who are leaving Boston.

Let’s make sure we keep Clay, Dustin, Ortiz, and Ellsbury. Let’s make sure we nurture Middlebrooks, Lin, and our other minor leaguers. Let’s build for the future.

Peter Abraham argues that the quartet that were traded are not bad people, just good players not suited for the big media market. Maybe true of Crawford and Gonzales, but Beckett’s bad boy, don’t care what fans think attitude got really old – especially when he had bad game after bad game. Josh was a star in 2007 and tried to live off that without doing anything new. Boston fans can be brutal and he did nothing to help.

Don’t know about anyone else, but I’m going to tune in to the Sox tonight, but to check out what is going on. Good luck to the Sox and good luck to the new Dodgers and their teammates.

August 24, 2012 by mhasegawa

The Republicans and Disfunction

I’m reading It’s even Worse than it Looks: How the american Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of extremism by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein. And yes, it is depressing especially when I’m reading it while also looking at the Republican Platform which has been described by Think Progress as the “most conservative in modern history.” OK so maybe Think Progress is on the left but they have a pretty good summary. Here are just a few subheading from the summary.

NO ABORTION IN CASES OF RAPE OR INCEST

NO LEGAL RECOGNITION OF SAME-SEX COUPLES

REPLICATE ARIZONA-STYLE IMMIGRATION LAWS.

NO WOMEN IN COMBAT

NO NEW TAXES, EXCEPT FOR WAR.

The New York Times said this in an editorial last Tuesday

Over the years, the major parties’ election-year platforms have been regarded as Kabuki theater scripts for convention week. The presidential candidates blithely ignored them or openly dismissed the most extreme planks with a knowing wink as merely a gesture to pacify the noisiest activists in the party.

That cannot be said of the draft of the Republican platform circulating ahead of the convention in Tampa, Fla. The Republican Party has moved so far to the right that the extreme is now the mainstream. The mean-spirited and intolerant platform represents the face of Republican politics in 2012. And unless he makes changes, it is the current face of the shape-shifting Mitt Romney.

The draft document is more aggressive in its opposition to women’s reproductive rights and to gay rights than any in memory. It accuses President Obama and the federal judiciary of “an assault on the foundations of our society,” and calls for constitutional amendments banning both same-sex marriage and abortion.

…

In passages on abortion, the draft platform puts the party on the most extreme fringes of American opinion. It calls for a “human life amendment” and for legislation “to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.” That would erase any right women have to make decisions about their health and their bodies. There are no exceptions for victims of rape or incest, and such laws could threaten even birth control.

The draft demands that the government “not fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage,” which could bar abortion coverage on federally subsidized health-insurance exchanges, for example.

The platform praises states with “informed consent” laws that require women to undergo medically unnecessary tests before having abortions, and “mandatory waiting periods.” Those are among the most patronizing forms of anti-abortion legislation. They presume that a woman is not capable of making a considered decision about abortion before she goes to a doctor. The draft platform also espouses the most extreme Republican views on taxation, national security, military spending and other issues.

Over all, it is farther out on the party’s fringe than Mr. Romney ventured in the primaries, when he repudiated a career’s worth of centrist views on issues like abortion and gay marriage. But the planks hew closely to the views of his running mate, Paul Ryan, and the powerful right-wing. Mr. Romney has a chance to move back in the direction of the center by amending this extremist platform. It will be interesting to see if he seizes it.

Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia might not have gotten the Vice Presidential nod, but he delivered the platform. He should be proud.

Mann and Ornstein have a long quote from a former Republican Congressional staff, Mike Lofgren, who wrote in 2011 why he was leaving after almost thirty years [pages 54-55] Part of that quote reads

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.

Later Lofgren writes

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

The platform is the Ryan agenda no matter how much he tries to say that it is Romney who is running for President. Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan and no one can convince me he didn’t know what Ryan’s positions were or what legislation he had sponsored. The Republicans like to say they are for smaller, less intrusive government, but the platform seems pretty intrusive to me. If they have their way, they will be imposing their views on the rest of us.

August 22, 2012 by mhasegawa

Obama and Women’s Healthcare

While I was working on the last post about Akin, Ryan etc., I ran across this great summary of what the Affordable Care Act does for women. In a column titled Obamacare(s) for Women, Katha Pollitt published in the Nation she provided this handy list of benefits.

Women will get a lot out of the Affordable Care Act. Here are just some of the ways:

1. As many as 10 million will get coverage in 2014 under Medicaid expansion, and by 2016, thanks to other provisions of the ACA, that number will grow to 13.5 million women.

2. By 2014, all plans sold to individuals will be required to cover maternity care. According to the National Women’s Law Center, 12 percent of those plans include that. Remember when Arizona’s Jon Kyl said he didn’t think his insurance should have to cover pregnancy and childbirth because he would never need it? The ACA destroys the mindset that care needed only by women is of no general concern.

3. More than 20 million women will get expanded coverage of preventive services—prenatal care, mammograms, pap smears, breast-feeding supplies, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, well woman checkups, immunizations, birth control and more.

4. Insurance companies will be barred from dropping women’s coverage when they become pregnant or sick.

5. Companies will be barred from denying coverage because of “pre-existing conditions,” like having had breast cancer, being pregnant (funny how that keeps coming up), having had a Caesarean or being the victim of domestic violence.

6. No more “gender rating”—charging women more for coverage just because they are women. This practice, already banned in some states but permitted in thirty-seven others, costs women a staggering $1 billion a year.

7. Older women will receive expanded preventive services through Medicare, like bone-density screenings for those at risk of osteoporosis.

8. The expansion of Medicaid will cover people who make up to 133 percent of the poverty line (about $31,000 a year for a family of four). True, enabled by the recent Supreme Court decision, at least eight red-state governors have said they will reject it. Let’s see how that works out for them.

9. The birth control provision is mammoth all by itself. Not only will it be costless to the patient; all methods must be covered. That means women will be able to choose the kind of birth control that works best for them, which means they are more likely to use it consistently. In particular, it means insurance must cover the most effective methods, including the IUD, which many plans exclude. At up to $1,000 upfront, it is too expensive for many women to shell out for, even though the IUD is one of the cheaper methods when you consider that it lasts for ten years or more. If anti-choicers really wanted to lower the number of abortions, they would be cheering this huge expansion of access to contraception. But no.

If Romney wins, women can wave goodbye to what Planned Parenthood has called “the single biggest advancement in women’s health in a generation.” Think about that next time someone tells you there’s no difference between the candidates. It’s just not true.

The President signs the Affordable Healthcare Act. Photo by AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

August 22, 2012 by mhasegawa

Akin, Ryan, Romney and Women’s Healthcare

I was cooking dinner and listening to a rerun of Tom Ashbrook’s On Point when I heard Mary Kate Cary say that she agreed with the President that rape was rape, but did not agree with him that male legislators were making health care decisions for women and that they should just let women decide for themselves. The President’s exact words from a report from CBS News

“Rape is rape,” Mr. Obama told reporters at the daily White House briefing Monday. “And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we’re talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and certainly doesn’t make sense to me.”

Mr. Obama added that Akin’s remarks underscore “why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women.”

The president acknowledged that his GOP rival Mitt Romney and other Republicans have distanced themselves from Akin’s statements. However, he said, “The underlying notion that we should be making decisions on behalf of women for their health care decisions, or qualifying ‘forcible rape’ versus ‘non-forcible rape’ — those are broader issues….between me and the other party.”

Mary Kate Cary, a former speech writer for President George H. W. Bush, went on to confuse the fact that women probably do make more decisions about health care treatment than men since they are still most likely to take the children to the doctor, with the male legislators setting boundaries on what kind of treatment women can actually choose. (Thanks to my husband for helping me clarify that.)

So what does all this mean? It means that Todd Akin, Paul Ryan and the Republican platform are imposing their religious ideas on everyone and removing choice. And here I thought that they were the party of small government! What with banning abortion in all situations and/or requiring vaginal ultrasounds before an abortion, I think they are actually intruding in health care decisions. At the same time, none of them cares about what happens to the child after this forced birth because there will be no available safety net for her or for her mother under the Ryan/Romney cuts to the safety net in the budget combined with the proposed repeal of the Affordable Care Act. There will also be no way for women to prevent pregnancies as there will be no contraception available under the ACA and no funding for Planned Parenthood.

Todd Akin and all his pals who don’t believe that a woman can get pregnant during rape, make that forcible rape, may be on the extreme edge of an extreme edge but they do represent the majority view of the Republican party. This from the New York Times this morning

As an orator, Representative Todd Akin of Missouri may stand out for his clumsiness. But as a legislator, Mr. Akin has a record on abortion that is largely indistinguishable from those of most of his Republican House colleagues, who have viewed restricting abortion rights as one of their top priorities.

It is an agenda that has enjoyed the support of House leaders, including Speaker John A. Boehner and Representative Eric Cantor, the majority leader, who has called anti-abortion measures “obviously very important in terms of the priorities we set out initially in our pledge to America.” It became inextricably linked to the near-shutdown of the federal government last year when an agreement to keep the government open was reached only after it was linked to a measure restricting abortion in the District of Columbia.

Even as Congressional Republicans, including Mr. Boehner, denounced Mr. Akin’s remark that victims of “legitimate rape” were able to somehow prevent pregnancy, an agenda to roll back abortion is one that House Republicans have largely moved in step with.

In an anti-abortion measure once sponsored by Mr. Akin, Mr. Ryan and scores of other Republican lawmakers, an exemption was made for victims of “forcible” rape, though that word was later removed.

On Tuesday, Republicans approved platform language for next week’s nominating convention that calls for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion with no explicit exceptions for cases of rape or incest. That is a view more restrictive than Mr. Romney’s, who has said that he supports exceptions to allow abortions in cases of rape.

Ryan center and Akin to the right in a photograph by J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

So Democrats can now keep tying Paul Ryan, Todd Akin and the Republican Platform together while Mitt, as usual, tries to dance away from taking a position. After all as Republican Party Chair, Reince Priebus said “this is the platform of the Republican Party, it is not the platform of Mitt Romney.” I titled this “Akin, Ryan, Romney and Women’s Health Care” but if they have their way, women won’t have health care. There is already a large gender gap. We can enjoy watching it get bigger.

August 19, 2012 by mhasegawa

Why Obama may lose

OK. I’ve been a little out of sorts the last few days election=wise. I’ve been spending a little time working in one of Elizabeth Warren’s field offices making voter ID calls and doing data entry. It is going to be a close race with Scott Brown and every vote is going to count. And then I saw this in yesterday’s New York Times as part of Charles M. Blow’s column.

If you know any of these people tell them to register and/or to vote. There is still time. If even some of them vote, it will make a difference and if all of them do, it will be a landslide re-election for President Obama.

This is one of the reasons why Patrick McDonnell and Mutts have captured my mood perfectly

August 16th 2012 - Mutts

[From August 16th.]

Let’s get out there, find those voters and get them to the polls. Then maybe Crabby won’t have to be quite so crabby!

August 15, 2012 by mhasegawa

Joe Speaks

Yesterday Vice President Joe Biden got carried away and maybe used an unfortunate turn of phrase, but, as usual Joe spoke honestly and told the truth. And how do I know he told the truth? Just look at Mitt Romney’s reaction.

So what did Joe actually say? According to the Washington Post

Campaigning in southern Virginia on Tuesday, Vice President Biden told an audience that Mitt Romney’s approach to regulating the financial industry will “put y’all back in chains,” a remark that triggered a flurry of Republican criticism, including a sharp rebuke from the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

“Look at their budget and what they’re proposing,” Biden said. “Romney wants to let the – he said in the first hundred days, he is going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They are going to put y’all back in chains.”

This set off a firestorm. Joe walked back the remark a little, but basically stood by what he said. Mitt Romney went a little nuts. (and, according to the Daily Kos, a scripted nuts since Mitt used a teleprompter). The New York Times put it this way

Standing in front of a stately town hall here in central Ohio, under a giant banner that read “Victory in Ohio,” Mr. Romney called Mr. Biden’s claim “another outrageous charge.”

“This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like,” he said.

In a personal dig that he wrote at the last minute Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Romney told the president to “take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America.”

The Times also reported that the White House stood by the Biden remarks.

Republican U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney is seen in a tele prompter reflection waiting to speak to supporters at the Chillicothe Victory rally in Chillicothe, Ohio August 14, 2012. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton (UNITED STATES)

Republican U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney is seen in a tele prompter reflection waiting to speak to supporters at the Chillicothe

Victory rally in Chillicothe, Ohio August 14, 2012. Photograph by Shannon Stapleton.

So what are we to make of all this? The campaign is going to get very ugly. I think the Democrats are right to let Joe Biden be the attack dog and hopefully let President Obama be above the fray. But on a fundamental level, Joe Biden is right. The impact of the Republican proposals is on the poor even more that on the middle class. And the poor are still to a great extent people of color who understood what Joe was saying.

Jonathon Capehart put it this way in the Washington Post

So much for the selection of Paul Ryan as the veep nominee as the end of the petty bickering and the start of the campaign of “big ideas.” Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul claims that “President Obama’s campaign keeps sinking lower.” What was the offense? Vice President Biden said the word “chains.”

In tone and bite, Biden is to the Obama campaign what John Sununu is to the Romney campaign. Only the vice president is polished and likeable. Biden was speaking at a Virginia rally that the Associated Press reports “included hundreds of black people,” and he warned the assembled that Romney wanted to do away with the post-2008 regulations on Wall Street. “Unchain Wall Street,” Biden said. “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.” Yeah, that was wince-worthy. It shall join all the others on the Biden blooper reel. But the high dudgeon of the Romney campaign is rather precious.

This is the campaign that seemed perfectly fine with Sununu saying he wished the president “would learn to be an American.”

…

This is the campaign that has been mute in the face of Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) hyperbolic assertion that Obama would “rather you be his slave.”

This is the campaign that is allowing Newt Gingrich to host “Newt University” at the Tampa convention this month. The former House speaker is fond of calling Obama a “food stamp president.”A wicked phrase that has more racial baggage than a klansman’s El Camino.

This is the campaign of the candidate who uttered the equally racially fraught “if they want more stuff from government … more free stuff” when talking to supporters in Montana about what he told the NAACP about his desire to repeal Obamacare.

Let’s all be honest. This is a campaign about race. There is a black man in the White House. The Republican’s are fighting a last ditch battle to maintain a white majority in the United States electorate. We see this in the allegations of voter fraud and the purging of voter rolls. We see this in the audiences that surround Mitt and Paul Ryan. Yes, this is an election about economic policy and jobs, but the subtext is always race.

August 13, 2012 by mhasegawa

Paul Ryan’s Proposals in a Nutshell

The Boston Globe columnist, Scott Lehigh wrote what I think is one of the best summaries of Paul Ryan’s budget proposal compared to President Obama’s proposals. And whether Mitt Romney likes it or not, he is tied to the Ryan budget which he once described as “marvelous”.

Lehigh describes the Ryan budget this way

There will be a fierce fight to frame the argument, but Romney and Ryan will have a tougher challenge persuading the relatively small percentage of undecided voters. With Ryan as his running mate, Romney will no longer be able to hide behind strategic ambiguity about his budget and tax cut plans. To date, a lack of key details has made those proposals hard to analyze, which has obviously been intentional. Nor does the Republicans’ presumptive nominee want to be pinned to the details of Ryan’s Medicare plan, which would shift thousands in health care costs onto the backs of future generations of seniors; one of the talking points the campaign distributed to help Republicans discuss Ryan’s selection is that, as president, Romney will have his own Medicare proposal. But absent necessary details about Romney’s proposal, Ryan’s plan will and should stand as a fair campaign proxy.

Second, the reality is that you simply can’t accomplish what Romney and Ryan hope to — that is, a large, new across-the-board tax cut while tackling the long-term federal budget deficit — without hitting both middle-class and moderate earners. A recent analysis by the nonpartisan, well-regarded Tax Policy Center illustrated that very point. It showed that Romney’s vague assertion that he could pay for his new tax cut by closing loopholes and deductions, but without targeting those important to the middle class, was undoable. If Romney hews to his resolution to pay for his tax cut through loophole closings, the elimination of deductions would be so extensive that the average middle class family would see a tax hike, according to the center’s analysis.

Of course we already know that Romney considers the Tax Policy Center to be a Democratic front. The difference in approaches?

Now, with the baby boomers retiring and increasingly drawing on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the nation faces a large gap between future spending commitments and future revenues. But though tax cuts helped create the problem, Romney and Ryan insist it must all be solved through spending cuts. That flies in the face of several recent bipartisan deficit commissions, which have said that policy makers should rely on both spending cuts and new revenues.

President Obama, by contrast, wants tax breaks for upper earners to expire, which would mean more revenue, and thus lighter cuts in future spending. Because Obama wants to keeps the tax breaks for families making less than $250,000, substantial spending cuts will still be required, including reductions in entitlements. Obama has left many of those details for the future. But that failing is less egregious than Romney’s. Obama, after all, would recapture $750 billion or more (over 10 years) by ending the Bush tax cuts. And the president isn’t proposing a large new tax cut.

We can only hope that the Democrats can define Paul Ryan as successfully as they were able to define Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney will no longer be able to hide behind strategic ambiguity about his budget and tax cut plans with Paul Ryan as his running mate.

Photograph by SHANNON STAPLETON/REUTERS

August 11, 2012 by mhasegawa

Marii K. Hasegawa

I haven’t written for quite a while. Over the past couple of months I have been dealing with two life changing events: The final illness and death of my mother and my own retirement from working life. (I am one of the lucky ones who can afford to retire.) But I wanted to make my first post back about my mother. So here is her obituary.

Marii Kyogoku Hasegawa

September 17, 1918 to July 1, 2012

Marii was born in the tiny seaside village of Tada-no-umi near Hiroshima to Itsuzo and Kiyo Kyogoku. Her father, a Buddhist priest in the Kyogoku family temple, came to Los Angeles, California in 1919 to minister to the Japanese community. Marii and her sisters grew up and were educated in California. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1938 with a degree in home economics.

After the start of World War II, when 110,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were relocated, Marii and her parents were interned at the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah. There she worked as a social worker and wrote for the literary quarterly, Trek. Because she had skills needed outside of the camp, she was released and moved to Cleveland where she worked as a dietician at a hospital. Two of her college roommates were in Philadelphia where she moved to take a job with the Food, Tobacco and Agricultural Workers Union.

In Philadelphia she met Ichiro Hasegawa, originally from Seattle, Washington, who had come east from the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. They were married in 1946 and lived in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey and Richmond, Virginia until his death in 1999. She moved to the Loomis Village Retirement Center in South Hadley, Massachusetts in 2001.

Marii was a life-long champion of peace and justice, working with a number of organizations but particularly with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom where she was a national board member and served as President from 1971 to 1975. In 1973 she travelled to Hanoi with an international delegation of women using her Japanese passport, as it was illegal at that time for Americans to travel to North Vietnam.

In 1996 she traveled to Tokyo to accept the Niwano Peace Prize which is awarded annually by the Buddhist Niwano Foundation to persons who have contributed to inter-religious cooperation furthering the cause of world peace. A documentary film of her life, Marii Hasegawa: Gentle Woman of a Dangerous Kind, was released in April 2012.

Marii had many other interests. She was a Girl Scout leader and a PTA president. She travelled extensively with her husband and family. Marii loved following tennis and college basketball. Most recently she enjoyed watching Rafael Nadal win the 2012 French Open. She was an excellent cook, a skill she taught her daughters. She was an avid reader and in her last years particularly loved good mystery stories. At Loomis Village, she was active in current affairs discussions, book groups, and the chorus. She wrote poetry and attended concerts regularly.

What we didn’t have roon to say was that my sister and I learned much from our mother. She was the one who taught to cook, to work hard, to love books, and to love peace and justice. She encouraged us to be what we wanted to be. I know she was worried at the end about whether Elizabeth Warren could beat Scott Brown and she disliked Mitt Romney with a almost the same passion with which she loved President Obama. She was looking forward to voting this year. My mother was an extraordinary woman and I will miss her.

May 13, 2012 by mhasegawa

The Last Word from Newt

Even though we probably haven’t really heard the last word from Speaker Gingrich, it is nice to think that we have. Here is what may be that last word from Doonesbury today.

Newt started out his quest for the 2012 Republican nomination by telling the truth about the Paul Ryan budget. I think the two things I will remember him most for are the Contract on American and Right Wing Social Engineering. Maybe he can start a new career helping zoos and conservation centers.

May 12, 2012 by mhasegawa

Romney’s empathy or the lack thereof

I’ve been following closely the stories on the bullying incident at Cranbrook. I was, like many, horrified at the incident. But I was more horrified by the fact that no one at Cranbrook thought it necessary to discipline the young men involved. And I was most horrified by Mitt Romney’s nervous giggle when asked about the incident. I’ve been groping for an explanation of why he doesn’t remember what happened when the others involved remember it clearly. Then I read this very interesting article in the Boston Globe this morning. The story quoted a gentleman named Don Gorton.

While some observers have expressed doubt that anyone could forget such a dramatic episode, one activist who has studied bullying said he believes Romney may, in fact, have no recollection.

Teenagers who bully others often don’t remember the incidents because they weren’t traumatic for them, said Don Gorton, chairman of the Anti-Violence Project of Massachusetts, a nonprofit group that seeks to reduce violence against gays and lesbians.

“Empathy is the critical variable,’’ Gorton said. “If they don’t feel their victims’ pain, the episode won’t stand out. It wasn’t a big deal for them.’’

Empathy. That is what explains a great deal about Mitt Romney. He lacks empathy. People have been saying that he can’t relate to the common person and he has given many examples. He likes to fire people. A young person who can’t find a job should get his or her parents to give them a loan to start a business. He supports the Ryan budget which raises the defense budget at the expense of the middle class and poor. Plus he certainly was cruel to poor Seamus the dog.

In the Massachusetts Governor’s Office

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Author: mhasegawa