The voters of the USA are like a girlfriend that got promised all kinds of stuff and Obama is the boyfriend making rationalizations. He’s staying cool and distant, but if there was someone the voters thought would deliver better, they’d go for him.

Mitt Romney is not that guy. Mental note: NEVER get a spray tan immediately before doing a live news appearance on Univision. Yes, Romney got a spray tan. Yes, it looked awful and made me shudder to think if he’d appear before the NAACP in blackface. I don’t think he would, but, still, I wondered.

Both candidates appeared on Univision and 60 Minutes and neither time did they get soft questions. Obama was held to account about what he failed to deliver in his first two years, when he wasn’t blocked by a Republican House. If he was unable to build a coalition to get his agenda passed then, what will he do with a GOP-run House *and* Senate, which looks likely in January?

If Obama did badly, Romney did much worse. No specifics, the spray tan thing, and he made a sudden decision to give Univision only 35 minutes instead of the 60 he promised them. He’s not even in office, and he’s going back on his promises to the Hispanic community… does not bode well…

So, if you want a reason why the polls are running the way they are, it’s because while Obama is failing to capture the nation’s imagination like he did in 2008, Romney’s campaign in unraveling right before our eyes.

And that’s why I ain’t voting for either of ’em.

Conservatives love Ronald Reagan. This should be no surprise to anyone. Reagan always presented a charismatic face to the media. He looked comfortable in any circumstance. It doesn’t matter what did or didn’t happen off-camera: when Reagan was in the camera eye, he looked good.

Romney doesn’t have that mojo. This is why he’s not electrifying the electorate the way Reagan did. Romney frequently looks and sounds embarrassingly out of place. Where Reagan made a connection, Romney seems like a stranger.

Lt. Col. Oliver North has the same GOP-style everyman charisma. He took Iran-Contra and actually made it a positive when he ran against Chuck Robb in 1994. Chuck Robb was the Democrat version of Romney in that race, with additional twists: he had to fend off accusations of infidelity and cocaine use. Robb even said he’d take food out of the mouths of widows and orphans if it meant he’d be able to balance the budget.

It took a third-party candidate and a set of stump speeches by Bill Clinton to get Robb re-elected. Without those boosts, Robb was the only incumbent senator in 2000 to lose his bid.

There is no third-party candidate drawing away Democrat votes. There is no big GOP charismatic leader stumping for Romney. Romney has the charisma of a shrub, and I don’t mean George Bush Jr. I mean a short, woody plant common as a landscape decoration. I’m thinking a boxwood shrub.

The GOP wants another Reagan. This is not the conservative they’re looking for. They may holler that he’s better than Obama, but that’s not a reason to vote *for* him as much as it’s a reason to vote *against* Obama.

No, I am not making this up. Martial law in the Congress means that bills are debated on the floor and voted on without any time for committee deliberation or even reading the bills. Massive things, full of fine print and spaghetti legalisms, hundreds of pages long, with nothing more than a “Vote for this!” to recommend it to the legislators.

That’s rubber-stamp legislation, plain and simple. Both Republicans and Democrats resort to it, so it’s not a partisan issue. It’s wholesale failure of democratic principles, that’s what it is. The people that wrote the massive bills – the rich men and women and corporations that can afford to hire enough lawyers and make enough campaign contributions to make them happen – do not want what’s in those bills to be read. It would spoil their system of spoils.

No matter what appearances you think you might see to indicate to the contrary, America is an increasingly authoritarian plutocracy. The rich run this place, and they use both the Democrats and Republicans at their beck and call to expand their power, increase their wealth, and all the while impoverishing and oppressing us that aren’t rich. This is why discussions about Romney and Obama tire me: neither man will make a difference when it comes to reducing the power of our unelected tyrants.

47% of Americans don’t pay income taxes, although they still pay sales taxes. In that 47% are the very poor, military overseas, and the retired elderly. Also the disabled. Yet, there is one group in that 47% of Americans that don’t pay income taxes that isn’t angry about Mitt Romney’s gaffe: they’re the richest of the rich, whose incomes have gone up 385% in the last 20 years, while the bottom 90% of American incomes have declined by 1% in the same time frame. Those guys don’t pay taxes, or pay very little, and they all know how to take huge streams of taxpayer money and direct them towards their businesses and bank accounts.

It’s disgusting how the rich of this nation have forgotten that we are all debtors to the earth and our national ancestors. This is not a land to be consumed in an instant: it is to be husbanded carefully so that it will be in proper shape for our descendants. We are currently being ruled by plunderers, and the plunderers to watch are not the supposed ones that are barely able to keep from starving. No, the real plunderers, the real criminals, the real destroyers of democracy are people that live in houses with more bathrooms than bedrooms. They are the people that live in one of many houses like that, and they care nothing at all for the poor, the infirm, or the widows.

Well, let them cut aid for the poor. What they get will serve them right. I will pass over what may await them in an afterlife scenario. I will instead look to the rioting that happens around the world when people are starving and food prices go up. If our nation fails to care for its poor and they go hungry, we will see the destruction of the nation.

Even if we cling to fascism as a means of combatting nascent communism, it will be a fool’s bargain with the devil: does anyone remember that fascism demands militarism, and that when all the small targets are consumed, fascism commits a nation to a path that leads to world war. Do not point to Spain or Portugal as a model: the USA is a great power, and it must be compared to the fascism that ruled in Italy, Japan, and Germany as a possible glimpse into a future in which we forget our poor.

OK, so I endorsed Obama because I can’t stand the foreign policy people connected to Romney. Now I have to un-endorse Obama because I can’t stand the foreign policy people connected to his organization. Not only is a third carrier group underway to the Persian Gulf, which can only serve to further provoke and inflame Iran, Russia, and China, but this happened: Video of undemocratic stunt at Democratic convention…

That is unreal! The party wanted to add a platform plank that required a two-thirds majority. I don’t care if it was right or wrong to add the plank. It could have been about endorsing the official dog food of the Democratic party, for all I care. They ran the vote three times, and it was clear to me that there wasn’t a two-thirds majority for the plank… and the chairman rammed it through, anyway, claiming he heard a two-thirds majority in favor of it.

Democracy, that ain’t. Sorry, Democrats, but stuff like this should be unacceptable. At least half the people there didn’t want to have that on the party platform. In a two-thirds majority situation, the measure should have been defeated, not added to the platform.

This is all about power. Naked, aggressive power. I’ve seen this in the GOP, and I’m looking at it right now in the Democrat party. It’s like breaking a hole in the drywall and seeing the wood frame shot through with termite tunnels. How far does this go? How long has this been going on? If it’s been going on too long, is the structure able to be saved, or is it beyond repair?

I know that sounds terribly negative, and it’ll sound even more so when I say I don’t think it is savable, not with this system in place around it. I have hope for the future, but it lies more in myself and my community than in the people that hold power in the USA. There are ways to fix this mess, but they have to come from within individuals and not from within party platforms, as we can see here…

I’m going to have to vote for Obama and his associated gang of criminals come November. I say that because I cannot support Romney, due to the fascists in his close camp. Yes, I know that for the most part Obama and Romney themselves are virtually the same. However, it’s the people close to them that give me the pause that I have.

Both will bend over backwards to accommodate Wall Street. That’s a lost cause, as far as I’m concerned. The only way we’ll see Wall Street reigned in is if they don’t get Obama re-elected and he takes them down with him in his lame duck period.

So what about foreign policy? Romney’s got John Bolton in his corner, and that’s what made me come down against him. I hereby withdraw my offer to be his VP. This Bolton guy is a real spook, and I can’t be in the same room with him.

He’s been involved in Iran-Contra, denying reparations to Japanese-Americans interned during WW2, and has previously been owned by Taiwan. Bolton’s also one of the brain trust that decided it would be a great idea to lie to the American people to get the nation to invade Iraq. Bolton was also the guy that kept one and all from knowing the truth behind the connections between the CIA and international drug running back in Reagan’s days. The man is a fascist in cahoots with drug dealers, and that won’t do, see?

I’m very disappointed in Obama’s listless administration, but at the end of the day he’s still marginally better than Bush II. Romney’s embrace of the neocons would make him as bad as or worse than Bush II.

Of course, I live in Texas, so my vote probably won’t count. But I have a principle to uphold: I have to fight Fascism, even if it’s a losing battle.