Romney as poster boy for the 1%

I wondered whether this would happen, and it is happening: Mitt Romney is representing far more than himself on the campaign trail. He has become the face that people are now associating with the 1%. Further, Romney's ideas and disconnectedness are going to deemed representative of the 1%. Romney and his friends are going to be seen as the people perceived as controlling Congress. As the America economy stays stagnant or sinks further, Mitt Romney's face is the face that people are going to associate with the destruction of the U.S. economy, and with the inability of Republicans to offer them anything other than the "free market." At this point, I'm wondering whether the Republican Convention is going to have the mood of a funeral. Nonetheless, some polls show Romney neck in neck with Obama, but I suspect that the existence of secret overseas bank accounts is a wound that's going to keep on bleeding all the way to election day, along with the fact that Romney is out there criticizing what is essentially his own health care plan. These are two non-starters for a man who will repeatedly remind many Americans of the guy that fired them and who doesn't give a shit about them.

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American Higher Education as bait and switch?

Thomas Frank at Harper's has decided to spend an entire article kicking what has become of higher education in America. Here's an excerpt from the article, which is available only to subscribers online:

[T]he purpose of college isn’t education per se. According to a report issued last year by the National Survey of Student Engagement, American undergrads spend less time at their studies nowadays than ever. They are taught by grad students or grotesquely underpaid adjuncts. Many major in ersatz vocational subjects, and at the most reputable schools they get great grades no matter how they perform. But we aren’t concerned about any of that. Americans have figured out that universities exist in order to man the gates of social class, and we pay our princely tuition rates in order order to obtain just one thing: the degree, the golden ticket, the capital-C Credential. Doubters might scoff that a college diploma is by the year turning into an emptier signifier. Nonetheless, that hollow Credential is what draws many of the young to campus, where they will contend for one of the coveted spots in that gilded, gated suburb in the sky. Choosing the winners and losers is a task we have delegated to largely unregulated institutions housed in fake Gothic buildings, which have long since suppressed any qualms they once felt about tying a one-hundred thousand- dollar anvil around the neck of a trusting teenager. [More . . . ]

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Mitt Romney’s evasions regarding U.S. involvement in Afghanistan

This insane statement about the US Military action in Afghanistan (where we blow $2 Billion/Week) was made by a senior adviser to Mitt Romney:

A senior adviser to Mitt Romney declined to provide more specific details on the presumptive GOP nominee's plan for Afghanistan on Thursday, saying it was a distraction from what "real Americans want to talk about."

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