On November 6, 2012, Barack Obama was reelected President of the United States by nearly a three-point margin, winning 332 electoral votes to Mitt Romney’s 206 while garnering nearly 3.5 million more votes. Democrats also celebrated victories in 69 percent of U.S. Senate elections, winning 23 of 33 contests. Farther down-ballot, aggregated numbers show voters pulled the lever for Republicans only 49 percent of the time in congressional races, suggesting that 2012 could have been a repeat of 2008, when voters gave control of the White House and both chambers of Congress to Democrats.

But, as we see today, that was not the case. Instead, Republicans enjoy a 33-seat margin in the U.S. House seated yesterday in the 113th Congress, having endured Democratic successes atop the ticket and over one million more votes cast for Democratic House candidates than Republicans. The only analogous election in recent political history in which this aberration has taken place was immediately after reapportionment in 1972, when Democrats held a 50 seat majority in the U.S. House of Representatives while losing the presidency and the popular congressional vote by 2.6 million votes…

However, all components of a successful congressional race, including recruitment, message development and resource allocation, rest on the congressional district lines, and this was an area where Republicans had an unquestioned advantage. Today, nearly two months after Election Day, and one day after the 113th United States Congress took the Oath of Office on Capitol Hill, the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) is releasing this review of its strategy and execution of its efforts in the 2010 election cycle to erect a Republican firewall through the redistricting process that paved the way to Republicans retaining a U.S. House majority in 2012.

In other words, gerrymandering. Democrats have done it as well, but never to the degree or with the level of sophistication that the GOP has done recently. This corrupts democracy, and as much as the GOP likes to scream FREEDOM! like they’re Mel Gibson in Braveheart, this moves in exactly the other direction.

If you’re a (D) or an (I), you ought to be pissed off as hell at this. If you are an (R), you need to ask yourself whether you want to belong to a party that stays in power through parlor tricks and lacks even the shame to hide their activity from view. Listen to them literally boast about how they spent money to gerrymander things in their favor.

President Obama won reelection in 2012 by nearly 3 points nationally, and banked 126 more electoral votes than Governor Mitt Romney.  Democratic candidates for the U.S. House won 1.1 million more votes than their Republican opponents.  But the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives is a Republican and presides over a 33-seat House Republican majority during the 113th Congress.  How?  One needs to look no farther than four states that voted Democratic on a statewide level in 2012, yet elected a strong Republican delegation to represent them in Congress: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin…

Michigan
The effectiveness of REDMAP is perhaps most clear in the state of Michigan.  In 2010, the RSLC put $1 million into state legislative races, contributing to a GOP pick-up of 20 seats in the House and Republican majorities in both the House and Senate.  Republican Rick Snyder won the gubernatorial race, and with it Republicans gained control of redrawing Michigan’s 148 legislative and 14 congressional districts.  The 2012 election was a huge success for Democrats at the statewide level in Michigan: voters elected a Democratic U.S. Senator by more than 20 points and reelected President Obama by almost 10 points. But Republicans at the state level maintained majorities in both chambers of the legislature and voters elected a 9-5 Republican majority to represent them in Congress.

Ohio
Ohio once again proved to be the national bellwether, voting to reelect President Obama to a second term in the White House by almost two points.  On the statewide level, Ohioans also elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate by more than five points.  But the Republican firewall at the state legislative and congressional level held.  In 2010, REDMAP allocated nearly $1 million to Ohio House races, resulting in a Republican take over of the House and increasing the GOP majority in the Senate.  With the election of Republican John Kasich to the governor’s mansion, the GOP controlled the redrawing of 132 state legislative and 16 congressional districts.  Republican redistricting resulted in a net gain for the GOP state House caucus in 2012, and allowed a 12-4 Republican majority to return to the U.S. House of Representatives – despite voters casting only 52 percent of their vote for Republican congressional candidates.

Pennsylvania
A REDMAP target state, the RSLC spent nearly $1 million in Pennsylvania House races in 2010 – an expenditure that helped provide the GOP with majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.  Combined with former Republican Attorney General Tom Corbett’s victory in the gubernatorial race, Republicans took control of the state legislative and congressional redistricting process.  The impact of this investment at the state level in 2010 is evident when examining the results of the 2012 election: Pennsylvanians reelected a Democratic U.S. Senator by nearly nine points and reelected President Obama by more than five points, but at the same time they added to the Republican ranks in the State House and returned a 13-5 Republican majority to the U.S. House.

Wisconsin
In 2010, the RSLC spent $1.1 million to successfully flip both chambers of the Wisconsin legislature. With the election of Republican Governor Scott Walker, the GOP gained control of the redistricting process and gave Wisconsinites and all of America a firsthand look at what bold conservative leadership looks like.  In mid-2012, Democrats were able to regain control of the Wisconsin Senate, albeit for a period of time when the chamber was out of session. In November 2012, however, running on lines redrawn after the successes of 2010, Republicans were able to retake the Senate and add to their margins in the House.  On a statewide level, in 2012, Wisconsin voters elected a Democratic U.S. Senator by nearly six points and reelected President Obama by nearly seven points, but still returned a 5-3 Republican majority to Congress, including the GOP vice presidential nominee, Representative Paul Ryan.

And here’s their conclusion. I think it’s spot-on. Despicable, but spot-on.

After REDMAP’s success on Election Day 2010, Republicans held majorities in 10 of the 15 states that gained or lost U.S. House seats and where the legislature played a role in redrawing the state legislative and congressional district map.  In the 70 congressional districts that were labeled by National Public Radio as “competitive” in 2010, Republicans controlled the redrawing of at least 47 of those districts; Democrats were responsible for 15, and a non-partisan process determined eight.

REDMAP’s effect on the 2012 election is plain when analyzing the results: Pennsylvanians cast 83,000 more votes for Democratic U.S. House candidates than their Republican opponents, but elected a 13-5 Republican majority to represent them in Washington; Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress.  Nationwide, Republicans won 54 percent of the U.S. House seats, along with 58 of 99 state legislative chambers, while winning only 8 of 33 U.S. Senate races and carrying only 47.8 percent of the national presidential vote.

Ufda.

Cut to now. Boehner has basically concluded that he cannot get a compromise plan of any sort past his Tea Party fringe, and since the Republican Party under (and before) Boehner has operated on the basis that it needs a “majority of the majority” — in other words, a majority of its own party — to accept a proposal before they will vote on it, talks are breaking down. It doesn’t matter that even if a relatively small minority of Republicans siding with the Democrats in a coalition could easily approve such a compromise, because without the “majority of the majority”, Boehner will use his position as Speaker to prevent the bill from even reaching the floor for a vote.

So what’s going to happen? Most likely the House will pass a bill this week that makes all of the Bush tax cuts permanent for everyone. Ironically, they will do this without proposing any spending cuts, so the supposedly fiscal conservatives are proposing to greatly increase our overall deficit and debt. Why? Because they want to force the Democrats to oppose these tax cuts, which they will. Why are the Democrats opposing them? Because the vast majority of the benefits will continue to go to the 1% as they have for the past 10 years.

My guess — and that of many watchers — is that we enter the new year with no deal. That means sequestration kicks in. So much has already been written about the supposed fiscal cliff that I won’t add much except to say that I completely agree that it will be a fiscal slope and that we have 2-3 months of additional leeway before anything serious begins to happen. During that time, the balance of power in the House will shift significantly in the direction of the Democrats, although the Republicans will still hold the majority. If Boehner can somehow find a way to slip from the “majority of the majority” shackles in which he has bound himself, he would only need 20 or so Republicans in order to pass a compromise bill with the Democrats. That, of course, will not happen, but he could, potentially slough off the most conservative 50% of his own party and reach a solution. That is still unlikely, but with shifting public attitudes and frustration it is certainly possible.

So what happens under the sequestration that we will almost certainly start in 10 days? First, see the graph below. The CBO (Congressional Budget Office) has this graph showing the baseline scenario of sequestration and how it will reduce our debt (and by extension our yearly deficit as well). The alternative scenario is if we just go on the status quo without sequestration. You can click on the graphic to get the entire report.

So that provides the fiscal outlook for what sequestration accomplishes, but it leaves the “how” untouched. A great summary of sequestration “hows” is found here, with additional links to further details if you really want them. Many people believe that the sequestration already provides a better deal for the Democrats than what the Republicans are offering now, and I would tend to agree. President Obama has been willing to negotiate, however, because while sequestration brings the cuts in spending that we need, the revenue side can be tweaked to provide better support for our still less-than-healthy economy. Boehner sees and understands this, as do most of the senior Republican members, I think, but not our 2010 Freshman Class of Tea Particans. As always, they prefer to whoop and holler at the fringes more than they prefer to work for a practical, pragmatic solution that takes into account both economic and political realities.

The good news is that sequestration will work as the blunt instrument it was designed to be and will up the pressure on finding a better long-term solution. The bad news is that we may need to wait until the 2014 elections to see how angry and frustrated people get with the delaying tactics being employed by the Republicans there right now. Boehner’s legacy will be decided along the way. If he succeeds in forming a coaltion of like minded people on both sides of the aisle, he will go down as one of the greats. More likely, however, the right-wing fringe of his caucus will split from him if he goes too far, at which point Eric Cantor is a likely successor who will shift the discussion back towards the hardcore conservative end of the spectrum. That would bring us to 2014 before anything could happen, but in the interim the sequestration would function as planned. How the cuts occur will lead to more political strife, but because the legislation has already been enacted, executing it is largely the province of the executive branch – something that cannot help to push more moderate Republicans in the direction of a compromise plan now.

We’ll see. In any case it ought to be an interesting next few months.

It is almost inevitable now that gun control legislation will become a defining (and probably further dividing) issue in President Obama’s second term. To date, Obama hasn’t touched gun legislation except to slightly remove some existing controls, and despite the patriotic hand-wringing from an increasingly paranoid NRA, he hasn’t ever even shown that he considers it to be a high-priority issue. Healthcare, Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy, and the deficit have all deservedly received more attention. Iraq is done now. The economy is back on track even if not up to full steam yet. Afghanistan will be done in 2014, as will full implementation of Obamacare, and the deficit/budget issue will be largely resolved by early 2013. Now is the time to take a principled reasonable stance on gun control. The country is more than ready for it, and it meshes strongly with President Obama’s legacy of focus on rational approaches to long-standing social issues.

So, what would a rational policy on gun control look like? I don’t know, and I am not going to get into it here. What I am going to do is simply discuss why it is rational to look at gun control as a possible solution. The US is divided on gun control, but Columbine, Aurora, Tucson, Clackamas, and now Newtown are bringing the issue to a head. On one side there are firm believers that the 2^nd Amendment means that the government has no right to get involved in gun ownership, and on the other side there are people who want certain types of guns and ammunition banned.

What we do not see – and this is important – are very many people who make serious arguments that all weapons should be allowed or that all weapons should be banned. The people who do make these arguments are very few in number and in arguing from these extremist positions they largely render themselves impotent except as foils for the other side. Nobody thinks we ought to make private ownership of atomic weapons legal, and nobody wants to get rid of steak knives. We almost all agree that some controls are necessary. What we really need to do now is focus in on the middle ground and look again at where the line on controls should be.

But to do that we need to first agree on whether or not it is guns that are the problem, and here I think that the numbers are strongly in favor of more restrictions on guns, or possibly certain types of guns. On one side we have people who argue that more guns mean more shooting deaths. On the other side we have people arguing that more guns means better security. Which is it? Well, that’s a difficult question, and varying circumstances will mean that for every set of circumstances the answer will be slightly different. What we can do, however, is look at some large-scale statistics, specifically the relationship between the number of privately-owned guns in a country and the incidence of death by firearms.

That is where Dr. Pearson and his little friend “r” come into the picture. “Pearson’s r” is a statistical measure of how things correlate, or how movement in one thing affects movement in the other. If r>0, then the correlation is positive, or when the number for one thing goes up, so does the number for the other thing. When r <0, we say that the correlation is negative, so when the number for one thing goes up, the number for the other thing goes down. The value of r can range from -1.0 through +1.0, with the closer the value to either +1.0 or -1.0 determining how much of a positive or negative correlation there is. If r=1, then something is said to be perfectly correlated, and if r=-1 than it is inversely perfectly correlated. The closer r is to zero, the less correlation there is, and at r=0 there is no correlation at all.

Here are some examples of things that typically have a positive (r>0) correlation:

• Annual income : Life expectancy
• Height : Weight
• Number of siblings : Chances that the youngest child will be wearing hand-me-downs
• Number of hours spend studying : Grade on the final exam

And some things that typically have a negative (r<0) correlation:

• Annual income : Number of offspring
• Weight : Chances of becoming a professional jockey
• Number of siblings : Chances that all of them will be boys
• Number of hours spent playing video games : Grade on the final exam

Statistics lesson done. J

So what does this mean in terms of gun ownership and firearm fatalities? It turns out that for the OECD, which is the group of 34 countries most widely used to represent the developed economies, r=0.63 for this relationship. That means that there is positive relationship, which is important because it argues strongly against the notion that adding more guns increases safety. If this were true, the r would have to be negative, and it is quite far from that.

A second issue, though, is how far from negative r is. In general, statisticians would consider r=0.63 to be a moderately strong correlation. To give you an idea of how it works, let me give you an example of r=0.95. This is the correlation between the average height of a man and the average height of a woman for any country in the world. What this says is that if you go to a country where the men are tall (or short), then there is a very high likelihood that the women will be tall (or short) as well. The coefficient of determination can be calculated by taking 0.95, squaring it, and reading the result as a percentage. For r=0.95, then, we would say that the average height of a man in any country has a 90% chance of predicting the average height of a woman in the same country.

So what about for r=0.63? For r=0.63, the coefficient of determination comes to 41%, or in other terms, that the number of guns per person in a country is 41% likely to predict the number of firearm deaths in that country. That sounds low, but it’s not. It’s approximately the same correlation as smoking cigarettes is to getting cancer, and we’ve all bought into the truth that smoking is bad for you. Why not private gun ownership?

Here’s the plot for gun ownership rates and gun deaths in the OECD. Leave a comment if you want the data and I will be happy to send it to you.

One thing that jumps out is that Mexico is a huge outlier. This is likely because Mexico has an ongoing war with its drug cartels. One of weaknesses of Pearson’s r is that it is subject to distortion by outliers, so let’s see what happens if we remove Mexico from the dataset.

Now r=0.87, or 76% predictive. That is a very strong correlation. Think about that for a minute – Statistics from across 33 of the most developed countries in the world show that the rate of gun ownership in a country is 76% predictive of how many gun deaths there will be in a country. Even more importantly for the United States, the data from the USA itself is right on that predictive slope, meaning that we have no reason to believe that results in the USA will be different than for any place else.

This is, of course, just a simple example, and it looks at total fatalities by firearms, including suicides. Looking at homicides only, r=0.39 (Ex Mexico), so much less predictive. Based on this, we shouldn’t expect gun homicides to go down at nearly the rate of gun fatalities, but we would simultaneously be lowering both suicides by guns and accidental deaths, both of which are also good causes. Yes, people may simply decide to commit suicide in a different way, but perhaps by making it just that much more difficult to take their own life we provide them with some more time to seek and get help.

The point is that what we need to do is to approach this as rational adults, accept the data that we have, and understand the emotional and philosophical background that permeates any discussion of gun control in the United States. The first step is to have a clear discussion of what it is we are trying to achieve – I would argue that it is a total reduction in fatalities first, coupled with a reduction in homicides, but someone else may have a different opinion. What I would hope we could agree upon is that the status quo is not acceptable.

Then I went on a nice long 32-day trip overseas with it. During this time I used the voice capabilities of the phone like I normally do, but as I also normally do I turned off international data roaming — There's no way to run up a $1000 phone bill like using international data roaming.

The horrible suffering started when I got back to Japan and my phone wouldn't pick up data any longer. I checked the settings, reset the phone to factory, rooted the damn thing, reset it back to factory again, and even monkeyed around until I found out that my bluetooth radio was also not acting right. I tried this APN and that APN (Access Point Network) until my eyes turned red and my fingers cringed at the idea of typing any moer 20-character long random strings of passwords on to the touch panel.

I even when to my local Japanese mobile phone otaku and asked him for help. He pulled both SoftBank and Docomo cards out of his phones, and although they would work just great in his phones, my phone refused to even consider connecting to data — Voice worked fine, but no data. I resigned myself to the prospect that I somehow had a faulty phone and planned on a nice long talk next month with the HTC store in Bangkok where I bought it — Since HTC doesn't sell the HTC One X in Japan, I had to wait.

But then today I happened to go to a mobile store in Vietnam with one of my team here, and while he was purchasing a new phone I noticed that the store sold the HTC One X and asked the nice lady there to put their SIM in my phone just to confirm that it wouldn't get data.

But it did. Turned on the phone, waited for it to boot up, and data started flowing. Just like that.

Back in my room a few hours later I search again through the interwebs and find an entry that I didn't see (Why?! Why!?) the first several times through and tweaked my APN a bit. Since I'm in Vietnam, I set data to roaming and rebooted.

Bingo. It works perfectly, although we'll have to see if it also works on Friday when I get back to Japan. If yes, I'll have to update this post. Until then, here are the settings in English (The page I found it on was in Japanese.). It appears that SoftBank is detecting phone models and requiring slightly different settings for some of them– I can take my SIM card and stick it in my old bought-in-Japan-at-Softbank HTC Desire and it works with the original APNs, but the One X requires the settings below.

APN settings for HTC One X, using the SoftBank silver SIM (銀ＳＩＭ).

Name： Softbank (This can actually be whatever you want.)


APN： open.softbank.ne.jp


Proxy： Not set


Port： Not set


Username： opensoftbank


Password： ebMNuX1FIHg9d3DA


Server： Not set


MMSC： http://mms/


MMS proxy： mmsopen.softbank.ne.jp


MMS port： 8080


MMS protocol： WAP2.0


MCC： 440


MNC： 20


Authentication type： CHAP


APN type： default,mms,hipri

When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton famously said "Because that's where the money is."

My fellow Americans, and I assure you, I am one, I stood here four years ago and accepted this party’s nomination as the Democratic candidate for President of the United States. I was humbled then, humbled even further when we won, and I stand before you humbled again. I gratefully accept your nomination as the 2012 Democratic candidate for President of the United States. And when I take my oath of office for my second term, it will be with the conviction that we started something great and that we will continue to strive forward to make it something that will change our country for the better, that will change our country in ways our children and grandchildren will learn about in school, and in ways that will keep America the great, strong, and proud nation that it is.

Four years ago when I stood here,  humbled, our nation also stood humbled, humbled by excess deregulation that had put us on the brink of the worst financial crisis the world has ever seen. Humbled by two wars that killed our young people, took our resources, and sent them overseas to deserts most of us will never see. Humbled by broken finances in our government because we had spent 30 years trying to somehow magically boost our tax revenues by cutting taxes to the people and corporations that could most afford to pay them. And we did this while reducing the very most important thing that America had, the thing that defines the American Dream more than anything else: The chance for Americans to stand up on an even playing field and make something of themselves.

But not everyone spent most of the last 30 years having to work harder for less and less. Some people did well – fabulously well – but the data shows us that it is an ever-shrinking percentage of Americans that achieve this. More Americans are in poverty today than at any point in history, a situation brought on not by laziness or a desire to live off of Uncle Sam as some would say, but because economic mobility, the potential for a child to have a higher income than their parents, is now more limited in the United States than ever before. Economic mobility has been so cut back that not only are we at the lowest point in our nation’s history, we are beaten by literally every other developed country in the world. A child in Canada has a higher chance to move up in economic status than does a child in the USA. So does a child in the United Kingdom. So do children in Japan, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, and almost all of the European Union.

That’s not what America is. That’s not what the American Dream is.

My opponent in this election is trying to tell you that he is just like you – Just like me. He tried to tell you that he grew up eating tuna fish off of a door thrown across two sawhorses. Does that ring true to you?

Mitt Romney grew up as one of our country’s elite and privileged. There is nothing wrong with that, and lest the commentators try to spin it somehow, let me say it again: “There is nothing wrong with that.” But for Governor Romney to try to even imply that he knows you, that he knows your struggles, that he understands where you are coming from shouldn’t ring true. Mitt Romney didn’t take out student loans to go to school, he sold stocks. And while there is nothing wrong with that, it is not the experience of most Americans. It wasn’t my experience.

You all know my background – Born in Kenya, smuggled here in the dead of night as a future potential Manchurian Candidate……I won’t bore you with it again. But one thing about me, is that I ring true, or at least I hope I do. I started out in a family that was not so different than many American families. I went through the same kinds of struggles and changes that I know so many of you have. I wrote a book about it – a book that some of my opponents have tried to use against me. I say let them try. I am a man like any other. I worked hard. I made mistakes, I learned, and I continue to learn. And now I stand before you as President of the United States, a job that I fully intend to hold onto for another four years.

But I couldn’t have done this myself. Yes, a lot of it was me, but not all of it. The Republicans last week tried to make hay – they even made a song! – about “We Built That”. The difference between them and me – between them and you – is that we all know that the “We” in “We Built That” is the same “We” as in “We the People”. That stadium they were in? They didn’t build that. We the People built that. Those roads they drove on to get to their Convention? They didn’t build that. We the People built that. Those airports they arrived at last weekend? We the People built those as well!

We the People built this country! We built its roads and its schools, its museums and its libraries. Our institutions keep our food safe, our water pure, our communities free of crime, and our hospitals stocked with medicines that help, not hurt. We the People built all of this. The people who say “I built this.” They didn’t build that. And once again, just in case the pundits try to spin it some other way like they have before, “that” refers to what we each build our little part of America on. “That” refers to the foundation of this country, of our society, and of everything that makes all the rest of it possible.

But We the People also built this government of ours. We built it with the dreams and desires that burn within all of us, but we also built it with our flaws. For too long our income has fallen far short of our spending, and as we all know, our debt is mounting ever higher.

Almost exactly a month after I became President, I pledged to cut our nation’s deficit in half by the end of my first term. I haven’t succeeded in doing that, and while others at this convention have done an excellent job of explaining the successes of our first term, the Affordable Care Act, exiting the Iraq war, drawing down our involvement in Afghanistan, more equality for women, as well as for our LGBT community, I am taking upon myself today the responsibility to talk about the single biggest broken promise of my Administration, which is what we are doing about the deficit.

Why was I unable to uphold the pledge I made? Well, to start with, in February 2009, when I made the pledge, the best economists in the world still believed that the recession was not nearly as severe as it was. In fact, it turned out to be almost twice as bad as we thought at the time. This didn’t make keeping the pledge impossible, but it put me a lot further away from the finish line. It made it more important that we add stimulus money to the economy – stimulus money that those same economists now think prevented a Great Depression type of scenario and helped more than 3 million Americans keep their jobs.

It also made it unwise to think about raising taxes, or even to keep our taxes where they were. Reducing taxes on the middle and lower classes is one of the best ways to stimulate demand and boost the economy, so we did that. But reducing taxes also reduced our revenue. With less money coming in, the gap between what we were paying out and the income we had became even greater.

In 2010 I convened the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, what is more commonly known as the Simpson Bowles Commission. I wanted desperately to find a solution that would cross party lines, would engage all members of both the House and the Senate, because I knew that this was the only way for us to succeed. A plan pushed through by the Democrats alone would be overturned and thrown away the first time our opponents had a chance to do so. What we needed was to pull together as Americans, not Democrats or Republicans, and create something that was truly across the aisle. What we needed was something that was bipartisan and captured the imagination and determination of not just the party in control, but the entire nation.

And I had high hopes. The first attempt to create the Commission, if you’ll remember, was through the House and Senate. It passed the House with flying colors, but the Senate required more than a simple majority, and in the Senate the bill died. It died because 6 Republican Senators who started out cosponsoring the bill, voted against it at the last instant. Senator Brownback from Kansas. Senator Crapo from Idaho. Senator Ensign from Nevada. Senator Hutchison from Texas. Senator Imhofe from Oklahoma. And Senator McCain from Arizona.

So I did what a leader should do. I formed the Commission by Executive Order, and six independent experts joined with six Representatives and six Senators split evenly among Democrats and Republicans to start meeting in April. They made good progress, but there were limitations. First, because the Commission was not formed by law, but as an Executive Order, it was never going to get presented to the House and Senate for a straight up-or-down vote like I had originally hoped. It would have to go through committees and a vote on the floor like any other bill. Second, mindful of what had just happened in the Senate, when the original bill was defeated because we could not obtain a supermajority, I also required the Commission to reach a supermajority for any plan or proposal that they wanted to submit to me.

Summer came and went, and in November we had elections where a new generation – some have even called them a new breed – of Republicans were swept into office with the Tea Party movement. And on December 3^rd the Simpson-Bowles plan was voted on by the Commission. It failed with a vote of 11 for and 7 against. It failed because 6 members of Congress voted against it. The votes against it were Senator Baucus of Montana, Democrat; Representative Becerra of California, Democrat; Representative Camp of Michigan, Republican; Representative Henseling of Texas, Republican; Representative Schakowsky of Illinois, Democrat; Mr. Andy Stern, an independent expert; and Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, currently running for the position of Vice President with Governor Romney on the Republican ticket.

Now I know that the explanation I just gave was a bit long.  But the truth is sometimes a bit complicated. It certainly is a lot more complicated than the story Mr. Ryan told last week when he said that I failed to move on this plan. It certainly contains a lot more truth than the story Mr. Ryan told.

Even if the plan had passed successfully out of the Commission, we would have had a hard time of it. The plan won a clear majority in the vote – 11 to 7 – but not the supermajority that was necessary for it to have had a chance of succeeding even when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate. And it certainly didn’t have enough votes to get through the tangle of new Tea Party Republicans that were signing their own pledges over on Capitol Hill to never, ever, under any circumstance, raise taxes.

Representative Ryan has signed that pledge himself, and while the Simpson-Bowles plan cut $3 in spending for every $1 it added in new tax revenue, it did contain new taxes. So while it seems that Mr. Ryan may stretch reality here and there when it pleases him, when it came time to vote on a plan that would really move our country forward and relieve this deficit that I so strongly believe needs to be reduced, he stuck to his guns and his no new taxes pledge.

But Representative Ryan is only running on the ticket of Mitt Romney. Regarding his stance on no abortions ever, even for rape or incest, Mr. Ryan has said that it is Governor Romney’s ticket and Governor Romney will decide policy. So what is Governor Romney’s policy on taxes? Would Governor Romney accept a plan that reduced spending by $3 for every $1 it raised in new revenue? The answer is no. Governor Romney, when asked directly during the Republican Primaries, refused to allow even $1 of new taxes to be raised, even if every one of them came with $10 in spending reductions.

Ten to one. Ten to one. Where is the reasonableness in that? Where is the acceptance of reality necessary to govern a nation of divergent opinions and people like the United States. I don’t see it. The story doesn’t ring true to me.

So here’s what I am going to do. I upheld my promise to you all about healthcare. I upheld my promise to get us out of Iraq, and I will soon get us out of Afghanistan. I upheld my belief that women should be offered equal pay for equal work. I upheld my belief that a woman’s choice on whether to have a baby or not should be between her and her God without interference from big government. And I reached a milestone in my own beliefs about how we must treat members of our gay and lesbian communities with the same respect we already give heterosexual couples. Like I said, I continue to learn.

Tonight I am re-upping my pledge on the deficit. I call upon the members of the original Simpson-Bowles Commission to retake the vote on their final document within the next 30 days and to present it to me, with or without a supermajority. I will then place it before the House immediately, and we can start working on this before the elections in November.

I’m not going to make many friends with this plan. Nobody wants to do this, at least on Capitol Hill, because it means that they will have to come out with real ideas as they go around to their constituents this election season. It means that they will have to answer real questions – real hard questions – about what it is they want to cut and what it is they want to keep. It means that they will have to go out and tell stories that ring true.

Here’s the story that I’m going to tell.

We spend too much money on our military. We spend too much money on the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes Medicare and Medicaid. Defense and Healthcare are the 5000lb gorillas in the room.

I’ve already presented a plan as part of the Affordable Care Act to reduce our expenditures on healthcare while not increasing the budget and not reducing services. We’re going to revisit this and see what else can be done. The Affordable Care Act was always meant to be just the first step in realigning the cost of healthcare in the USA to levels that we see in other developed countries, so let’s get on to step two. Let’s move forward.

But that doesn’t mean vouchers. That doesn’t mean reduced services. That doesn’t mean restrictions on what you can and cannot do for your healthcare needs. It means doing things like letting government negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare providers on the costs we pay. We’re their biggest customer; Why can’t we negotiate better prices? Capitalism says we should do that. Common sense says we should do that. Economics says we should do that. The only people who say that we shouldn’t do that are lobbyists and the politicians they own.

I’d start by setting a “most favored nation” clause on drugs. I don’t know about you, but it strikes me as unfair – un-American even – that drugs developed in the USA, certified in the USA, and made here in the USA are sold in other countries for much less than they are sold for here in the USA. I suggest that we don’t put any restrictions on our pharmaceutical companies except for one very easy one; The US government will not pay more for a drug than the lowest price you charge anywhere else in the world for the same drug. You want us to pay more, raise the price elsewhere. But do not ask the American people to subsidize the healthcare systems of other countries by not allowing us to negotiate with drug companies to get the same prices their other customers do!

There’s a second component to this discussion, though. It’s not all about the Health and Human Services Department. We need to dance with that other gorilla as well.

When the Simpson-Bowles plan comes back to me – and it will come – I think that the 3-to-1 ratio of cuts to increased spending in it is reasonable, and I’ll take that ratio and work with it. When it comes to where we cut our spending, however, I am not about to sacrifice the internal security of the millions of Americans that already depend on the social safety nets we have in place. I am not about to sacrifice them for wars and military bases in foreign lands. I have been an aggressive user of US military force when necessary, and I understand the power and capabilities it brings, but I also think that our military is large enough and has enough inefficiency in it to take the same cuts Medicare and Medicaid do. For every dollar cut from the Department of Defense, we’ll look at a dollar cut over at Health and Human Services.

If the Republicans are serious about cutting the deficit and reducing our debt, this should be a balanced approach that they can live with. If, instead, they object and try to cut only our national health, welfare and social security while not touching defense. Well, I don’t think that story’s going to ring true. I think that it’s going to ring of what we too often see out of certain parts of the Republican Party, particularly the new breed of Republicans in the House of Representatives, which is a lot of hollering and screaming about the deficit and debt to use as a smoke screen to get their political and social agenda in place. I’m not about to let that happen.

Do you think that’s saying too much? Did I overstep my bounds? I don’t think so. Look at sequestration.

Last summer the US received its first ever credit downgrade. And while my critics and opponents point at me, saying that I am responsible, every adult in the room sees it otherwise. The ratings agencies specifically pointed at the obstructionism within the House of Representatives as a warning flag that showed the American political system was bound up in politics and so dysfunctional that it cast doubt upon the USA’s commitment to paying back its debt.

Three days before this happened, Speaker Boehner and I had worked out a stopgap measure. Obviously it wasn’t enough to stop the downgrade, but it was something. What we did was to extend the debt ceiling through about the end of this year, but it came with the caveat that reductions would be found for $1.2 trillion in spending or automatic across-the-board cuts would kick in. This sequestration clause was designed to do one thing and one thing only; Make the failure to find the cuts so painful that there would be no option but to get down to work and find a way.

But Congress, through the Super Committee, failed to do that and the sequestration kicked in. Nobody wants this, but we wrote a law and we failed to perform on the rules we enacted in that law. And now people are complaining that sequestration is coming and that it will be horrible.

You know what? It was designed to be horrible. It was designed to be so horrible that Congress would find something better to do in its place. But they didn’t, and now Congress has thrown this back at me and asked me to figure out how to make sequestration work. That’s not supposed to be my job. If I understand the Constitution correctly, I head up the Executive Branch of the government. The Executive Branch is responsible for – and this is a bit tricky – executing the laws, of which the budget is one, passed by the Legislative Branch. Budgets start in the House. They then move to the Senate. And if they pass both bodies they come to me. Congress couldn’t handle the law that they enacted, and they have now punted the ball in my direction. That’s not right. It doesn’t ring true. It doesn’t ring true because too many Congressmen and Congresswomen will talk themselves red in the face about reducing the deficit, but they can’t find it within themselves to actually make it happen.

So in parallel with the resurrection of the Simpson-Bowles plan, 30 days from today I will be releasing the plan I have for sequestration. I shouldn’t be the one making this decision, but Congress has absconded on their responsibilities and given the job to me. I don’t have a choice, so I’ll do the job they asked me to do, and I’m going to do it the same way that I talked about above: A dollar out of defense and a dollar out of our social safety nets.

There’s a way out for Congress, though. They can get take that Simpson-Bowles plan, push the numbers around a bit if they want to, pass it through the House and the Senate, and then send it on to me. If the plan is fair to the American people and good for America’s future, I’ll sign it. If they don’t send me something, then sequestration will start next January whether we like it or not. It will start not because I did or didn’t do anything. It will start because the obstructionism and stubborn partisanship of our Congress has grown to the point where it is hurting the American people. That’s why I am taking this stand now and why I will likely be an unpopular figure in Washington for the next several months.

And that brings me to the last part of this speech.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen tensions rise in Washington DC to levels most veteran DC staffers cannot remember. Someone’s red, or another person’s blue, or this lady’s really not a Republican if she holds a certain belief, and that guy over there isn’t a committed Democrat.  This has got to stop. And the way we stop it is simple; We hold people to their word. We make them face up to what they said or did, and we do not allow people to distort positions, twist words, or even tell flat-out lies.

As of tomorrow, I am doing something radical with my campaign. Every commercial that airs from my campaign from tomorrow will air with me speaking. No more eagles superimposed over flags blowing in the wind while someone does a voiceover on what the Republicans did or who said what. It will just be me. Just a man talking to you, the folks out there that have to make a decision in November. Just me, speaking in my own words, so that I can be held accountable for them directly. No surrogates. No plausible deniability. No fudging the numbers or fudging reality.

Life is complicated enough – your decision come voting day is important enough – that we need to all make sure that while we can argue with each other, we have to do it while grounded in the same reality. Do that and a lot more things come into focus. Do that, and you almost have to see the other guy’s point of view. Do that, and we can have a real discussion about real issues with real solutions for real people. Do that and we can have a story that rings true.

So tomorrow is a new day in this campaign. It is Day One in moving America forward. It is Day One in changing the tone of our national discourse from one of accusations to one of ideas. Tomorrow is Day One where we show that we can debate without rancor, that we can argue with intelligence and passion, but with a desire to find a solution, not just to win a partisan point.

But in order to do this, tomorrow also has to be Day One where we do not accept counterfactual items in these arguments. It has to be Day One of a story that rings true. So when I make those new commercials with just me standing there talking, one of the things I’m going to be talking about are the people that aren’t helping us move this conversation forward.

If someone attacks our campaign with something that isn’t true, I’ll defend myself and my party. If I think the words were twisted, I’ll say so directly and I’ll explain why. I will call out the people who spout lies. I will use my authority and position as President of this United States of America to let people know that you cannot get away with it. That is makes no sense. That is damages our proud nation and makes what should be great and wonderful, small and sad. And I will not discriminate between parties when I do it. There is too much at stake.

There was a great teacher once who spent his life trying to convince people to live true to themselves and true to the people around them. He taught that we should love our fellow man and that an eye for an eye was the old way, not the way forward. He taught that we needed to love each other as we loved ourselves, and he taught us that the most supreme sacrifice was when we sacrificed something we loved for something even greater.

Make no mistake, as we move forward sacrifices will have to be made. But we have the strength. We have always had the strength. America has always had the strength. And when they write about what we did during these eight years – because you know and I know that I will win again in November – When they write about what we did during this time, they will write about how America found its footing again. They will write about the American Dream. They will write about the American story, and it will ring true!

Thank you! God bless you! God bless America! Now you’ll have to excuse me. I have to go. I have work to do.

Stolen from the interwebs…Tip-o-the-beanie to fellow Redditor aw232.

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