Where's the aloha?

Driving into town last week, I saw a couple of unMaui slogans on cars.

First, on the side of a new Honda: "Punish and torture . . . "

I don't know what to make of that, but it was disturbing to see the car turning into the hospital.

Less obscure was a slogan on the back window of a working pickup truck: "Take a shower. This isn't Paia."

Clear but mean-spirited.

The haole-go-home stickers have been less common recently, and I haven't seen "Puinsai" for years.

So it goes.

In which RtO agrees with Mitt Romney

First, let’s clear up something. RtO does NOT believe that Mitt Romney believes airplane windows should crank down. I’ve watched the tape. Romney was trying to make a joke.

He doesn’t know how to go about it,  but he was joking. Trust me.

Romney caught some heat when the tape of his secret talk to the rich degenerates in Florida was revealed for saying that the Palestinians are not interested in peace. No kiddin’. They had an election  about that, and the no-peace group won in Gaza. The pretend-for-peace guys won on the West Bank.

There wasn’t a peace party on the ballot anywhere.

So if you believe – as RtO does not believe – that Palestinians govern themselves (internally anyway) by a democratic process, Romney’s statement was pellucid truth. Who could object to pellucid truth?

Quite a few people, obviously.

A good time for Palestinians to have been for a peaceful settlement would have been early in 1967, when there weren’t any Jewish settlements in the West Bank (nor any Jews either), or in Gaza.

The Arabs have been trying to exterminate the Israelis for over 60 years now. At the beginning of the effort, there weren’t even any Palestinians. Nobody in 1948 self-identified as a Palestinian, just as nobody in 1800 self-identified as a Rumanian. Now, or course, we have self-conscious Rumanians and Palestinians.

On the whole, neither development seems like a net gain, although Americans can be grateful that a Rumanian army was available for Stalin to attack at Stalingrad in 1943; but the tides of nationalism have a logic that ignores cost-benefit analysis. I cannot think of any benefit to anybody from Palestinian nationalism.

So Romney’s on solid ground. I wish I could think he understands why.

What color are Smurfs?

Tricia and I went to see "Frankenweenie" over the weekend. I like Tim Burton films, although this is not one of his best. I didn't feel like I'd wasted $7.50 (senior discount), however.

I did think I'd wasted an hour watching previews -- actually only 15 minutes by my watch. (It's an anti-Rolex, a 50-year-old HMT from India. All it does is tell time, and even that only to within a minute every couple of hours. I bought it because of its lack of functionality.)

There's going to be a Smurf movie, it seems. Apparently there was another already. The signage said the Smurfs are blue. Surely they were purple?

Is this a Democratic plot, or what?

I once met a man who claimed to have every Smurf item ever made, at that time about 4,000 Smurf dolls, Smurf lunch boxes, Smurf mouse pads and, for all I know, Smurf condoms. He carried around a picture of a room in his house filled with Smurf stuff.

I'd swear it was all purple.

Another alternative energy misstep

The Washington Post has an enlightening background report on the bankruptcy of A123, which tried to make batteries for electric cars.

RtO is already on record as dubious about electric cars. And just about every other kind of alternative electricity, based on nearly 40 years of reporting on failures of one kind or another. Heard much about fuel cells lately?

Probably not.

The Post says to expect to hear about this in political terms. No doubt. Romney has already told several lies about government-backed alternative energy programs.

You have to wonder why. The truth is bad enough.

What's not mentioned by the Republicans, ever, when they jump on Solyndra, for example, is that these bad deals got a lot more private money than government-guaranteed loans. In A123's case, a hell of a lot more.

Sort of puts the kibosh on the idea that business can do a better job.

Jack Welch takedown

Bloomberg News takes down the ridiculous Jack Welch on employment numbers:

If former General Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer Jack Welch’s charges of a political fix to manipulate economic data ahead of the presidential election are true, there must be a vast econometric conspiracy embracing auto dealers, real estate agents, the Federal Reserve and corporate America’s 96-year-old Conference Board.

But other reporters had already exposed Welch for the nut that he has become. What's worth reading are the comments of the rightwingers at the bottom. Bottom here being used in two senses.

Truth squads

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, I'm going to restate the obvious: This has been the most entertaining political campaign since 1968. And it's getting better all the time.

Setting aside the always laughable racist lunatic Ron Paul (because none of his supporters are old enough to vote), I think most people would have picked Michelle Bachmann as the most entertaining candidate, and she's still at it even though she's out of it (in both senses of that phrase): See here for an example that even some Republicans found bizarre.

But move over, Michelle. A new top dog is in town, and his name is Mitt. Never in my most imaginative speculations would I have proposed that the Republicans would have to follow Romney around with a "truth squad." But they have had to.

In Des Moines (graveyard of rightwing nuts -- it's the place where Lindbergh made his antisemitic speech and started the downfall of the America First movement), Romney made a statement about abortion policy that was insuppportable to even his party. The Des Moines Register (a paper I worked at once, long ago) gave  the most Mitt-friendly spin to his statement, but  the fact remains that the party had to disavow it.

And that wasn't the only time.

Not a democracy

Rightwingers are fond of correcting anyone -- leftwinger or not -- who describes the country as a democracy. No, it's a republic, they say, just as if that means something.

Anyhow, the McCarthyites have always made it perfectly clear that they don't like democracy. Here's a line from a rightwinger today at a blog I sometimes read. It concerns Romney's lie during the debate about how his health plan would cover preexisting conditions.

The Republican (yes, Republican!) truth squad had to correct him the next morning. He left out 38 million people. Anyhow, when I mentioned that Romney had won the debate by telling lies, this was the response from Angry Old Guy:

Romney is trying desperately to fudge the issue because he knows the correct policy is politically toxic.

Wow.

To hell with those voters. Too lazy to take responsibility and too dumb to know what they want.

Somebody didn't get the memo that Romney was "completely wrong" about the 47%.