Dana Milbank over at the Washington Post has a wonderful column the lack of authenticity of Mitt Romney…

Following Mitt Romney on the campaign trail is a painful yet familiar experience.

Painful, because of the wince-inducing moments when you realize that, for all of Romney’s success in imitating human attributes, there remain glitches in the matrix that reveal him to be different from the rest of us.

In the past few days alone, he claimed to take pleasure in firing people, expressed his phony fears about getting a “pink slip” from the job that swelled his wealth to nearly a quarter-billion dollars and asserted misleadingly that he worked an “entry-level” job after Harvard Business School.

Romney further alleged that “I never thought I’d get involved in politics” — though he has been in politics for two decades. And he claimed that he didn’t seek reelection as Massachusetts governor because “that would be about me” — as if running for president, which he did instead, was a gesture of sacrifice and altruism.

Romney, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg argued this week, has an “authentic inauthenticity problem.”

One indisputable fact is that while Republicans love to talk a good game on making government efficient and lean, Republicans will always increase government when given the chance.  The huge deficits of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush prove that.  However, President Obama is doing much to make government more efficient and create jobs.

President Barack Obama on Saturday reiterated his call for Congress to give him the authority to consolidate government agencies, continuing a theme of trying to show he is doing everything he can to create jobs.

“Over the years, the needs of Americans have changed, but our government has not,” Mr. Obama said in his weekly radio address to the nation…

Mr. Obama held an “insourcing” forum for companies bringing jobs back from overseas and said he would eliminate tax breaks for companies shipping jobs abroad. He also said he would offer tax benefits for companies bringing jobs to the U.S.

The president also asked Congress for authority to consolidate government agencies, part of a strategy to make the government more efficient. The president’s call garnered lukewarm responses from Republicans.

Politico’s The Arena is asking a great question and asking readers to weight in:  Why did former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour free a number of convicted killers in the twilight of his term, just as he was leaving?

It’s a question that is worth answering.

In case you need some background:

Just before he left office this week, outgoing Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) issued more than 200 pardons or sentence reductions — including more than a dozen to persons convicted of murder, manslaughter or other death-related crimes. And that has sparked outrage and calls for changes in the law that gives the state’s governor such authority.

The list of Barbour’s executive orders in the last four days before his departure from office on Tuesday is posted here.

Causing particular concern in the state are the pardons given to four convicted killers, who have now been released from prison. They are, as The Associated Press reports:

“David Gatlin, convicted of fatally shooting his estranged wife in 1993 as she held her baby and wounding her friend; Joseph Ozment, convicted in 1994 of killing a man during a robbery; Anthony McCray, convicted in 2001 of killing his wife; Charles Hooker, sentenced to life in 1992 for murder.”

You honestly cannot make this stuff up.

When asked by Matt Lauer whether it would be worthwhile to have a discussion about income inequality in this country, Mitt Romney actually responded that “I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like.”

Income inequality is rising sharply.  There is no question about that.  Yet the millionaire Presidential candidate Mitt Romney says the discussion about rising income inequality should only be discussed in quiet rooms, not in a public forum like a Presidential election.

This should put Romney’s tax policy — one in which the middle class would have a tax increase while millionaires would get tax breaks — in perspective.

I’ve asked it before, and I’ll ask it again:  how can anyone who is paying attention support this guy?

I knew it would ruffle feathers, but I never knew that my post Why I’m Leaving the Republican Party…and Endorsing President Obama would blow  up as big as it did.

Previous to last weekend, my blog would get about 100 hits on a good day.  Then, in a day and a half this weekend, jeffwartman.com received over 21,000 hits.  That is because of you and your support spreading my article around.

It was not an easy article to write.  I have identified as a Republican for most of my life.  However, my conscience would no longer allow me to continue.

Please keep visiting.  I’ll keep providing content.  And spread the word!  Feel free to add me on Facebook and to “like” JeffWartman.com’s Facebook Fan Page!

Thanks again!  On to November!

Augusta Meill and Gianna Ericson have a great piece over at the Harvard Business Review blog about the danger of treating patients looking for medical care as average consumers looking for a particular product.  They write:

We see three main reasons why treating patients as consumers can create problems.

1. Patients don’t want to be there: People don’t seek out healthcare without a reason. Something is wrong and patients want to solve it and get back to normal. When patients are required to be proactive decision-makers, the health care system is often casting a very reluctant hero into the role.
2. Patients aren’t equipped to be there: Even when patients are willing to be decision makers, they may not have the tools. At a time of unusual stress, the system asks them to absorb technical information and make difficult decisions that require specialized expertise.
3. Patients aren’t in it alone: To design for patients alone is to forget that they are part of a complex system and aren’t often independent decision-makers. Decisions are shaped by other stakeholders: friends and family who support the patient, the insurance company who foots the bill, practitioners who provide care and expert advice, the hospital administrators who inform system-level protocol, and so on.

It’s a mistake to consider people looking for medical care as similar to an average consumer who may be purchasing a vehicle or looking for  cell phone provider.  It’s an attempt to dehumanize those without heath insurance and prevent reforms that would actually improve quality of healthcare in this county.  Until it’s recognized that healthcare is not a commodity, the debate over reform will always fall flat.

Read the entire piece, it’s excellent.

Currently reading:  Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero by Chris Matthews.

It’s starting to get really, really painful to listen to someone as ignorant and bigoted as Rick Santorum.  I would feel awfully embarrassed for anyone who expressed any sort of support for him.

Another reason why educated people are leaving the GOP.  Santorum is bordering on having a mental illness.

At Dublin School, a private ninth- to 12th-grade boarding school whose headmaster said the audience included three children of gay parents, Santorum’s voice dropped and became emotional as he argued that only a man and woman should have the “privilege” and “honor” of marrying.

“Marriage is not a right,” Santorum said. “It’s a privilege that is given to society by society for a reason….We want to encourage what is the best for children.”

So important is it to have both a father and a mother, Santorum suggested, that even a father who “is in jail and has abandoned” his family is better for a child than two gay parents.

Santorum is directly arguing that if a child’s father abandons his family is a deadbeat, that child is better off than one raised by two loving, same sex parents.  It’s hard to express the idiocy, lack of simple common sense, and bigotry that spews from the mind of Rick Santorum and social conservatives.

The only good thing about all of this is that the generational change in the way people view gay rights has changed.  Young people, whether Republican or Democrat, support gay rights with huge margins.  If you oppose gay rights, you have already lost, and history will view you the same way we now view supporters of racial segregation and white supremacists.  How does that feel?

I’m leaving the Republican Party.  No longer can I say with a clear conscience that the Republican Party is focused on solving problems that will benefit average Americans.

Solving problems is about pragmatically viewing data to decide upon the most effective public policy solutions.  Many times, problem solving is the complete opposite of adhering to a rigid political ideology that dictates policy regardless of consequences.  Our public servants need to be looking at what has worked, what has not worked, and using those judgments to form policy moving forward.  The Republican Party refuses to look at what works and what doesn’t — they simply base policy on whether it fits into a rigid anti-government philosophy, whether it is good policy or not.  Essentially, the effectiveness of policy is completely and totally irrelevant to Republicans.  Additionally, the Republican Party believes more strongly in obstructing anything that President Obama proposes than in real solutions that would create jobs and help the average American.

Additionally, I have specific grievances with the current “know-nothing” incarnation of the Republican Party:

• The Republican Party refuses to give full rights and liberty to same sex couples.

• The Republican Party refuses to craft real solutions to the problem of high healthcare costs.  Our healthcare costs are the highest in the world, and rising.  Our public servants need to be developing solutions that bring heathcare costs into line with the rest of the world.

• The Republican Party refuses to acknowledge the individual rights of women to control their own medical decisions and body.

• The Republican Party refuses to address the real solutions towards lowering the deficit.  Any person who says they would oppose a plan that contains a ratio of $10 in spending cutsfor every $1 in tax increases simply does not have enough of an education in economics to participate in the discussion.

Even worse, the Republican Party has bamboozled the American people by portraying themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility.  Any person who can recognize that some numbers are larger than other numbers know the obvious fact that the biggest spending Presidents are Republicans.  Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush alone are responsible for most of the national debt.  Bill Clinton cut government and actually spent less money than was taken in…but George W. Bush quickly changed that.

I believe in smart government that effectively does what it should and leaves the rest to the private sector, while still recognizing the legitimacy of the existence of government.  I believe in equal rights for all Americans, whether gay, straight, female, male, immigrant or naturally born.  The Republican Party no longer believes in any of that.

No longer should the American people stand for the weak leadership and intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican Party.  I’ll be voting for President Obama’s re-election.

How anyone can support Mitt Romney is beyond me.  He has a proven track record of having no core beliefs.  He has no political philosophy.  He merely pretends to support whatever position is popular to the group he is speaking to and will usually change that position pretty quickly.  He is the definition of an empty suit.

It’s been established that Mitt Romney does not have any real core convictions — his political positions are merely what he thinks people want to hear, but he has no real opinions of his own.   However, if anyone is still not convinced, this should close the book on that…

According to Scott, Romney revealed that polling from Richard Wirthlin, Ronald Reagan’s former pollster whom Romney had hired for the ’94 campaign, showed it would be impossible for a pro-life candidate to win statewide office in Massachusetts. In light of that, Romney decided to run as a pro-choice candidate, pledging to support Roe v. Wade, while remaining personally pro-life.

How does anyone take this guy seriously?

Pretty hard hitting ad against Ron Paul and the newsletter debacle.

Within the pages of the Walter Isaacson book on Steve Jobs, a few nuggets on Jobs’ view of public policy are enlightening.  Perhaps his most interesting thoughts are on the education system.  Isaacson writes:

Jobs also attacked America’s education system, saying that it was hopelessly antiquated and crippled by union work rules. Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform. Teachers should be treated as professionals, he said, not as industrial assembly-line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they were. Schools should be staying open until at least 6 p.m. and be in session eleven months of the year. It was absurd, he added, that American classrooms were still based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time…

In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save…

Jobs asked some questions about education, and Gates sketched out his vision of what schools in the future would be like, with students watching lectures and video lessons on their own while using the classroom time for discussions and problem solving. They agreed that computers had, so far, made surprisingly little impact on schools—far less than on other realms of society such as media and medicine and law. For that to change, Gates said, computers and mobile devices would have to focus on delivering more personalized lessons and providing motivational feedback….

Slate.com is illustrating one of the most significant policy differences between Jon Hunstman and the rest of the GOP field…