Got 2 Minutes and $7.7 Trillion?

GOT TWO MINUTES?

This video makes me wonder whether Mitt Romney will really win the Republican nomination. It obviously won’t be Perry or Cain or Bachmann (or Paul, who at least deserves respect for his principled, if to my mind mostly wrong-headed, views). Will it be Gingrich? Huntsman? Has Huntsman been the guy in capture-the-flag who just hides the whole time and everyone forgets he’s there until, at the very last minute . . . ? (Wasn’t that how it worked in Role Models? Or am I getting my movie masterpieces confused?) But, no, Republican primary voters are not going to choose Huntsman. So could it really be Newt? Watch the video.

GOT $7.7 TRILLION?

It’s not clear to me the Fed erred in quietly making available whatever it took to keep the financial system from collapsing – read the important story here – but it is clear to me that those who subsequently tried to block or weaken the Dodd-Frank financial reforms were on the wrong side of this, and have left the financial system still too vulnerable. If you watched the Barney Frank press Monday, you heard some current examples of how the Republicans are working to prevent even the regulation that Dodd-Frank did enact from being funded or staffed.

GOT THE CONNECTION?

So how do you get a large slice of the 99% to vote against their own interests, as they did in voting for Bush twice and then McCain? And as they surely will vote for Romney or Gingrich? You do it with 20 years of talk radio and Fox News and an alternate universe (something else Barney addressed Monday) in which 70% of those who voted for Bush in 2004 believed Iraq played a role in the 9/11 attack (but didn’t know Bush was planning to control Iraq long before 9/11) . . . in which people are ginned up to believe that tyranny (and gun confiscation and Sharia law) are imminent (see Monday) . . . and in which the President is not a citizen but a communist (even as, I must note ruefully, so many of my liberal friends excoriate him for being ‘Republican-lite’). Add to that the Republican full-court press to make it harder for poor people and students to vote, and the Citizens United case, and the 99% might just see the 1% winning again, as they did in 2000, 2004, and 2010. I think not – but each of us who cares about this – including those like Warren Buffett in the 1% who want to see the 99% win (and who recognize that ultimately, if the 99% do win, the 1% win even more) – needs to get fully engaged. Buffett has written his max-out check to Obama Victory Fund 2012 and is taking his time to headline fundraisers for us.

You can help, too – both with your time and your money. The campaign calculates that help NOW is three to eight times as effective as the same help next fall, when most people give it. Each paid organizer we can hire now snowballs into literally hundreds of volunteers. Every week we wait is one fewer week for that snowball to grow . . . one fewer week for our volunteers to register millions of new voters — and help millions of existing voters who lack photo IDs jump the Republican hurdles to voting. NOW is our best shot at building the turnout that, in 342 days, will take back the House, hold the Senate and White House, flip back state legislatures and governorships, and – most important of all – prevent a complete right-wing lock on the Supreme Court for the next 25 years.