'Toontime: Out of Options

[credit: Jim Morin, The Miami Herald]

As Romney collects more delegates with three wins in the latest round of primaries, Repugnant insiders are coming to grips with running a presidential candidate who lost the party's nomination against conservative Senator John McCain who lost to Obama in 2008. Paradoxically, Romney has destroyed his once respectable moderate credentials in his pursuit of right-wing primary votes. Santorum may win his home state of Pennsylvania, but he has already indicated he would be satisfied with the VP slot since he knows he cannot prevail against the Romney money machine. Disarray on the right notwithstanding, the Obamanator is not invincible. There are a lot of disaffected Democrats who would rather just not vote, than vote for someone who has broken so many promises made in his first presidential campaign and has accomplished only two significant agenda items in his first term: kill OBL, and pass 'Romneycare', which will no doubt be gutted by the conservative ideologue chorus known as the Supreme Court.

Readers may recall Obama promised to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour in 2008. The wage has not gone up since 2009 when the last of the raises under the Charlatan were implemented. In 1968 the minimum wage was more than $10 an hour when adjusted for inflation. Even the CEO of Walmart called for an increaseof the minimum wage in 2005, recognizing his low-income customers, "don't have the money to buy basic necessities between paychecks". Henry Ford, that American friend of fascism*, paid his Detroit workers $5 a day in 1914, primarily to keep unions out of his business. But a worker could buy a T-model with four months' pay. Today, a minimum wage worker needs a year's pay to buy the lowest-priced Ford Fiesta. The demise of the American middle class in the last half of the 20th century is a sad, sad story; the Obamanator, shackled like a latter day saint by his Wall Street and big business sponsors, has done precious little to change it.

*Henry sent Adolph Hitler a birthday present of $50,000. Hitler was something of a Ford fan since Ford helped him rearm the Wehrmacht. Hitler allegedly kept a copy of Ford's 1920 anti-semitic tirade, "The International Jew" on his desk. In 1938 Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle by Hitler's representatives on his birthday. Ford never returned the medal even after WWII.  William E. Dodd, US ambassador to Germany in the 30s wrote to FDR about the fascist dream American plutocrats nurtured, "A clique of US industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime." Beside Ford were fellow fascist sympathizers: Charles Lindbergh, Graeme Howard of General Motors, the duPonts, William Randolph Hurst, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, John Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Prescott Bush and Thomas J. Watson of IBM.