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Showing posts with label Mitt Romney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mitt Romney. Show all posts

Monday, November 19, 2012

10 Reasons the GOP Is Really Messed Up -- According to Republicans

Karl Rove uses white board on 'The O'Reilly Factor'
to illustrate his polling theory.
It's too right-wing. Or not conservative enough. It could be the contempt for voters, or being the Party of Stupid. One thing's for sure: Everybody hates Karl Rove.
November 18, 2012

Just as the Republican Party might have contemplated an end to its wound-licking (the better to gin up its scandal-making machine for President Barack Obama’s second term), vanquished Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney proved to be -- for liberals, at least -- the gift that keeps on giving.
The president, Romney told a group of campaign donors on a November 14 conference call, won re-election by promising free stuff to his homeboys and women’s libbers and brown people who inconveniently declined to self-deport -- or words to that effect.

“What the president -- president's campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government,” Romney told his fat cats, apparently unaware that reporters were listening in.     READ MORE

Friday, November 16, 2012

Romney 'gifts' comment not a new idea on the right

Mitt Romney likely sees benefits for regular folk as
"gifts," but tax breaks for those like him and wife Ann
aren't, the writer says
By Paul Waldman, Special to CNN
updated 2:38 PM EST, Thu November 15, 2012
 
Editor's note: Paul Waldman is a contributing editor at The American Prospect and the author of "Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success." Follow him on his blog and on Twitter.

(CNN) -- It took until the presidential campaign was over, but Mitt Romney finally figured out the sinister plan Barack Obama executed to win re-election. Here's how it worked: During his first term, Obama craftily carried out policies that helped improve Americans' lives, thereby tricking them into voting to re-elect him. Diabolical!

OK, that wasn't exactly how he put it. But in a conference call with his major donors after the campaign ended, Romney attributed his loss to the fact that Obama gave "gifts" to various groups to win their loyalty. Young people, women, Latinos, African-Americans, all voted for Obama because he showered them with presents, he concluded.

"With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift," Romney said. "Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents' plan, and that was a big gift to young people."
 

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Bain-Owned Sensata Illegally Threatens Workers for Organizing

(Photo: Peoples World / Flickr)
Thursday, 25 October 2012 10:08 By Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future | Report Bain-owned Sensata threatened to retaliate and immediately close their Freeport, Ill plant if workers there don't stop protesting the outsourcing of their jobs to China. Retaliation threats happen to be illegal. The workers have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Threats Of Retaliation The story is up at Bainport.com. For some background, Bainport is named for Bain Capital which owns Sensata, and Freeport, Ill, the town where Sensata is closing a factory and sending all the equipment and jobs to China. The workers and supporters have set up a tent camp across from the factory and are asking Bain's former owner Mitt Romney to come and help. Bain Capital + laying off workers in Freeport = Bainport. Monday: Rally and march on Sensata: Freeport Journal-Standard, Jesse Jackson speaks to Sensata protesters,
package from the plant. After Jackson’s speech he led protestors across the street to the lobby of Sensata, where in recent weeks nine protestors had been arrested. The crowd chanted “full severance now” and “save our plants, save our jobs” as they converged on the lobby. READ MORE

Monday, October 22, 2012

Romney Said He Paid 13% in Taxes, But He Strategically Avoided Saying Income Taxes

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT


Last week, we posted a widely read commentary, "Did Romney Possibly Commit Fraud on His Income Taxes, But Received Amnesty?"

But there was another significant flare up about Romney's undisclosed income taxes last week, yet again.  The New York Times headlined it this way: "Romney Says He Paid at Least 13% in Income Taxes." The New York Times article of August 17 also this quotation and reporter interpretation, "'Every year, I’ve paid at least 13 percent,' he [Romney] said, referring to his effective federal income tax rate, which is a higher effective rate than most people pay."

There is a problem with the New York Times article and it is a big one.  Mitt Romney never referred directly to what he has or has not paid in income tax; he only referred to what he and his wife have paid in taxes in general over the last several years. (There is a second problem: The New York Times reporter implies that 13% is a high income tax rate.)

The Boston Globe also made the same mistake as the New York Times, inferring what Romney wanted them to think, rather than what he actually said.   READ MORE

Thursday, October 18, 2012

How Mitt Romney Cynically Exploits White Tribalism and Resentment

Romney offers an easy-to-grasp explanation that speaks to white anxiety about the future.
October 16, 2012

SIDNEY, OHIO—At the Shelby county fairgrounds in Sidney, Ohio, on Oct. 10, a jumbotron showed a bus approaching. Image became reality as Mitt Romney’s bulbous white chariot glided into the rally of thousands.

 It was an impressive entrance, for those who are impressed by RVs.
Bounding up to a podium, Romney was ready to proselytize. Thousands of faces turned toward him in the chilly evening air. Word was that Romney’s conquest of Obama in the first debate had infused his robotic demeanor with passion. It was hard to see much evidence of that.

To polite applause, Romney blandly declared, “That’s an Ohio welcome. Thank you guys.” He tried to rouse the audience with a counter to Obama campaign chants of “Four more years,” and the crowd hesitantly recited “Four more weeks,” their tone as flat as the surrounding farmland.

No matter. Romney dove into his stump speech. It was the gospel of lower taxes, freer trade, stronger military, and drill, baby, drill, and the audience was receptive. He hit all the buttons, “jobs,” “small business,” “compete,” and “opportunities.” Some specifics drew hearty cheers: “Get rid of the death tax,” “get that pipeline in from Canada,” and “our military must be second to none.”
The crowd responded favorably because the ideas are presented simply and clearly. People are hurting, and Romney says he’ll create more jobs and put more money in your pocket. His message is he won’t do it through welfare, like Obama, but by encouraging American values like entrepreneurialism, strength, and self-sufficiency.

Author Thomas Frank calls this brand of politics “Pity the Billionaire … a revival crusade preaching the old-time religion of the free market.”    READ MORE

Mitt Romney's Heartless Advice to a Woman Whose Pregnancy Might Have Killed Her

Mormon women remember Romney's advice when he was a church leader, and there wasn't much 'moderate' about it.
October 17, 2012

The summer of 1983 was blistering hot in New England. A record heat wave saw temperatures soar toward the 100-degree mark from June well into September. July had been the hottest month ever recorded at Boston's Logan Airport.

The region's beloved Boston Red Sox, full of hope and promise early in spring and claiming first place in the American League East as late as June 1, apparently melted in the heat, losing game after game and tumbling to last place by mid-July, where they were to remain the rest of the season.

It was also during the sweltering summer of 1983 that the family of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made its celebrated escape from the oppressive New England heat for the cooler climes of Beach O'Pines, Ontario, where the Romney family owns a beachfront cottage in a gated community on the shores of Lake Huron. Prior to departure, Mitt Romney placed the family dog—an Irish setter named Seamus—into a dog carrier and lashed it to the roof of the family's Chevy station wagon for the 12-hour drive into Canada.

The infamous dog ride (dubbed the "Seamus incident") was to become a full-blown issue in the 2012 presidential primaries, as Romney's chief Republican opponent, Rick Santorum, invoked the incident to attack Romney's "character."    READ MORE

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

CPAC Set to Host White Nationalist Leader

A project of People For the American Way dedicated to monitoring and exposing the activities of the right-wing movement. Learn More >
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Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, along with several Republican senators and congressmen, are set to appear at the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference, but the GOP brass aren’t the only ones set to be at CPAC. As we’ve previously reported, CPAC will play host to anti-gay groups such as the Family Research Council, the birther leader of WorldNetDaily, and the Apartheid-nostalgic Youth for Western Civilization.

But that isn’t all.

Following speeches from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Michele Bachmann, CPAC is hosting the panel “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity” with Peter Brimelow, the founder and head of VDARE.com.
VDARE is a White Nationalist website, run by Brimelow, which frequently publishes the works of anti-Semitic and racist writers and is named after Virginia Dare, who is believed to be the first child of English parents born in the Americas. Brimelow, an immigrant from Great Britain, expresses his fear of the loss of America’s white majority, blames non-white immigrants for social and economic problems and urges the Republican Party to give up on minority voters and focus on winning the white vote. He also said that a New York City subway is the same as an Immigration and Naturalization Service waiting room, “an underworld that is not just teeming but also almost entirely colored.”     READ MORE

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close


By Matt Taibbi,
Rolling Stone Magazine
 26 September 12

The press everywhere is buzzing this week with premature obituaries of the Romney campaign.

New polls are out suggesting that Mitt Romney's electoral path to the presidency is all but blocked. Unless someone snags an iPhone video of Obama taking a leak on Ohio State mascot Brutus Buckeye, or stealing pain meds from a Tampa retiree and sharing them with a bunch of Japanese carmakers, the game looks pretty much up – Obama's widening leads in three battleground states, Virginia, Ohio and Florida, seem to have sealed the deal.

That's left the media to speculate, with a palpable air of sadness, over where the system went wrong. Whatever you believe, many of these articles say, wherever you rest on the ideological spectrum, you should be disappointed that Obama ultimately had to run against such an incompetent challenger.

Weirdly, there seems to be an expectation that presidential races should be closer, and that if one doesn't come down to the wire in an exciting photo finish, we've all missed out somehow. Frank Bruni of The New York Times wrote a thoughtful, insightful editorial today that blames the painful, repetitive and vacuous campaign process for thinning the electoral herd and leaving us with only automatons and demented narcissists willing to climb the mountain: READ MORE

Friday, August 31, 2012

Why Romney's Panicked Campaign May Pander Even Harder to the Far Right

How far can right-wingers influence Romney on foreign policy, one of the campaign’s blank slates?

  August 14, 2012

Mitt Romney, a corporate takeover executive in the private sector, is now in full political makeover mode as he campaigns for president, starting with his attention-deflecting choice of radical U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate.

Washington insiders recognize the symptoms of a panicked campaign and see that the attempted makeover is not complete—and won’t be until the Republican National Convention adjourns and the fall campaign begins. And so we are seeing seemingly bizarre musings from known GOP ideologues trying to fill in Romney’s blank pages.

The latest example from this not quite stage-managed spectacle is the emergence of Grover Norquist, the GOP’s longtime anti-tax crusader, now saying the Romney-Ryan pronouncement that the Pentagon budget must be protected from Democrats’ cuts is wrong, because, like anything big in government, there’s excessive spending, waste and fraud to be cut—even in the military.

Does this make Norquist a peacenik? No way.  READ MORE

Romney's Campaign Strategy: Lie, Lie, and Lie Some More -- Can Democracy Survive with 0% Media Accountability?

The Romney camp is boldly lying because they are making a calculation that it will work! We better hope it doesn't.
August 13, 2012

The Romney campaign has turned to a strategy of swamping the public with flat-out, blatant lies, one after another, again and again, endlessly and lavishly repeated. They do this because they are making a calculation that it will work! So what is going on? And can democracy survive this assault?
The Growing List Of Lies

This week's lie is the "Obama gutted welfare reform" nonsense. See Bill Scher's must-read response,  Romney's Welfare Lie: A Betrayal Of Conservatism . The reporting conveys the Romney message, like this:  Romney accuses Obama of dismantling welfare reform . The lie is driven home by a massive $$-driven carpet bombing of ads.

The next-most recent lies was  the "Obama is trying to keep military families from voting" lie . This lie, repeated over and over, coordinated with outside groups, reinforces the "Democrats are anti-military" narrative.READ MORE

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Author Romney Cited On ‘Culture’ Says Romney Didn’t Read His Book

By Zack Beauchamp on Aug 2, 2012 at 10:21 am

In making his controversial argument that “culture” was the main reason Israelis were wealthier than Palestinians, Mitt Romney cited two authors who had written major works on the wealth of nations, Daniel Landes and Jared Diamond. The latter took to the New York Times op-ed page on Thursday to clear the record, saying Romney’s account of his argument was wildly inaccurate. While Romney saw Diamond as arguing that “physical characteristics of the land” like iron deposits were the key determinants of a nation’s success, Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel instead emphasizes water access, local plant and animal life, and geographical features like latitude as being determinative. Diamond calls Romney’s interpretation “so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it.”

But, in Diamond’s view, this misrepresentation isn’t “the worst part.” Rather, it was his reduction of an immensely complex subject to a simplistic, one-word explanation:

Even scholars who emphasize social rather than geographic explanations — like the Harvard economist David S. Landes, whose book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” was mentioned favorably by Mr. Romney — would find Mr. Romney’s statement that “culture makes all the difference” dangerously out of date. In fact, Mr. Landes analyzed multiple factors (including climate) in explaining why the industrial revolution first occurred in Europe and not elsewhere.
   READ MORE

Nuns Challenge Romney To Spend A Day With Them To Learn About Plight Of America’s Poor

Sister Simone Campbell
By Travis Waldron on Aug 8, 2012 at 1:05 pm

The group behind the Nuns On A Bus tour that highlighted the ill-effects of the House Republican budget in congressional districts across the country is now setting its sights on the party’s presidential candidate, inviting Mitt Romney to spend a day with the nuns to learn about the plight of America’s poorest citizens.
NETWORK, a national Catholic social justice lobby, is inviting Romney to “spend a day with Catholic Sisters who work every day to meet the needs of struggling families in their communities,” according to a release. The group is specifically targeting Romney a day after his campaign released a misleading ad about welfare reform that Sister Simone Campbell, NETWORK’s executive director, said “demonize[s] families in poverty” and shows Romney’s “ignorance about the challenges” the poor face in America:
Recent advertisements and statements from the campaign of Governor Romney demonize families in poverty and reflect woeful ignorance about the challenges faced by tens of millions of American families in these tough economic times,” stated Sister Simone Campbell. “We are all God’s children and equal in God’s eyes. Efforts to divide us by class or score political points at the expense of the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters reveal the worst side of our country’s politics.”   READ MORE

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Mitt Romney Olympic Archive Still Off-Limits

Mitt Romney at a news conference
about the 2002 Winter Olympics
July 23, 2012, ABC News

More than a decade has passed since Mitt Romney presided over the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, but the archival records from those games that were donated to the University of Utah to provide an unprecedented level of transparency about the historic event, remain off limits to the public. And some of the documents that may have shed the most light on Romney's stewardship of the Games were likely destroyed by Salt Lake Olympic officials. 

The archivists involved in preparing the documents for public review told ABC News that financial documents, contracts, appointment calendars, emails and correspondence are likely not included in the 1,100 boxes of Olympic records, and will not be part of the collection that will ultimately be made public. 

The Salt Lake City Winter Olympics represent a crucial chapter in the Romney biography -- his selection to oversee the Games came in the wake of a bribery scandal.  

Romney ... frequently cites the experience as part of what qualifies him to assume the presidency. But the absence of publicly available records that detail the decisions he made while running the games has increasingly become an uneasy subject for the library, which has for months been receiving inquiries from journalists and other researchers trying to subject Romney's version of the events to an analysis based on documents from the events. 
Romney [has] already faced criticism for his decisions to keep secret some of his past tax records and some details about his investment holdings.

Note: For lots more from reliable major media sources on institutional secrecy, click here.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

35 Questions Mitt Romney Must Answer About Bain Capital Before The Issue Can Go Away

Mitt Romney conducted numerous TV and other media interviews yesterday in order to minimize the damage his campaign has received regarding discrepancies surrounding his tenure at Bain.



During times of crisis it is often a smart strategy to give virtually unlimited access to the media in order to push out your message aggressively and satisfy reporter curiosity so that the issue can be pushed of the front burner. John McCain famously did this well earlier in his career when dealing with his own Keating five controversies. Unfortunately for the Romney Campaign, The slew of TV interviews did little to satisfy the media. In times of crisis, a strong candidate will come up with answers that satisfy the basic questions surround the controversy and will make people want to move on to another subject. Romney, however, could not seem to come up with basic messages that resolved the controversies.    READ MORE

Friday, July 13, 2012

Romney Invested in Medical-Waste Firm That Disposed of Aborted Fetuses, Government Documents Show

"Fetuses Are People My Friends!"

And these documents challenge Romney's claim that he left Bain Capital in early 1999.

| Mon Jul. 2, 2012 3:00 AM PDT
 
Earlier this year, Mitt Romney nearly landed in a politically perilous controversy when the Huffington Post reported that in 1999 the GOP presidential candidate had been part of an investment group that invested $75 million in Stericycle, a medical-waste disposal firm that has been attacked by anti-abortion groups for disposing aborted fetuses collected from family planning clinics. Coming during the heat of the GOP primaries, as Romney tried to sell South Carolina Republicans on his pro-life bona fides, the revelation had the potential to damage the candidate's reputation among values voters already suspicious of his shifting position on abortion.
 
But Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney founded, tamped down the controversy. The company said Romney left the firm in February 1999 to run the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and likely had nothing to with the deal. The matter never became a campaign issue. But documents filed by Bain and Stericycle with the Securities and Exchange Commission—and obtained by Mother Jones—list Romney as an active participant in the investment. And this deal helped Stericycle, a company with a poor safety record, grow, while yielding tens of millions of dollars in profits for Romney and his partners. The documents—one of which was signed by Romney—also contradict the official account of Romney's exit from Bain.  READ MORE

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Elizabeth Warren: "No, Mitt, Corporations Are Not People"

"CORPORATIONS  ARE PEOPLE MY FRIENDS!"
I like this:
Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren took direct aim at Mitt Romney at an Obama fundraiser on Monday, dredging up his remark that "corporations are people."
"No, Mitt, corporations are not people," she exclaimed. "People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick,... they live and they die. Learn the difference.
"And Mitt, learn this: we don't run this country for corporations, we run it for people," Warren continued, drawing cheers from the crowd at Boston Symphony Hall.
She should do this, because Scott Brown is doing an excellent job of being the Eddie Haskell of American politics, with half the state of Massachusetts acting as his gullible June Cleaver:   READ MORE

Some Employers and Republicans Want to Lower the Minimum Wage -- Here's Why They're Completely Out of Touch

"CORPORATIONS  ARE PEOPLE MY FRIENDS!"
In Arizona, GOP legislators fight to allow employers to pay teens working part-time three dollars per hour less than the state minimum wage - a mere $4.65 per hour.
June 25, 2012

If you've been on Facebook this week, you've probably seen the Chris Rock quote making the rounds:
"I used to work at McDonald's making minimum wage. You know what that means when someone pays you minimum wage? You know what your boss is trying to say? It's like, 'Hey, [if] I could pay you less, I would, but it's against the law.'"
Now it seems that some minimum wage employers are trying to pay their workers less -- and to even make it legal to do so. It seems unfathomable that anyone would consider the minimum wage -- which, for a full-time worker, provides a yearly salary that is thousands of dollars below the poverty line for a family of three or four -- to be too high. But in Arizona, Republican legislators are pushing a bill that would allow employers to pay teenagers working part-time a full three dollars per hour less than the state minimum wage, which works out to a mere $4.65 per hour.

And the Florida legislature is considering lowering the state minimum wage for tipped employees by more than half, from the current $4.65 per hour to the federal minimum of $2.13. OSI Partners, the company that owns Outback Steakhouse, supports the legislation.

Given the current political discourse on how best to create good jobs and help struggling families, OSI's involvement is especially noteworthy since the firm is owned by Bain Capital, the company that Mitt Romney co-founded and in which the Republican presidential nominee still has tens of millions invested.
  READ MORE

Friday, May 11, 2012

Everything You Need to Know About Mormonism

Mitt Romney
Pundits still haven't figured out how to talk about Romney's Mormon religion. Here's everything you need to know.
May 6, 2012

Liberal politicians and pundits, from Brian Schweitzer to Lawrence O'Donnell to Jon Stewart. have begun bringing up -- and stumbling over -- the subject of Mitt Romney's religion. The following is an excerpt from Alex Pareene's e-book,"The Rude Guide to Mitt."It can be purchased at Amazon,Barnes & Noble, iTunes and the Sony Reader Store.
“The precipitous mountain pass that led the [Mormon] pioneers down into the Salt Lake Valley and still is the route of access from the east on Interstate 80, was first explored by my great-grandfather, Parley P. Pratt,” Mitt Romney cheerfully writes in “Turnaround,” the airport bookstore leadership manual he wrote in 2004 while governor of Massachusetts.

“He had worked a road up along ‘Big Canyon Creek’ as an act of speculation when his crop failed in the summer of 1849. He charged tolls to prospectors making their way to California at the height of the Gold Rush and even had a Pony Express station commissioned along his pass.”

Romney doesn’t add — and why should he? — that Pratt was murdered in 1857, by the husband of a woman he took as one of his “plural wives.” (His ninth.) Pratt was in San Francisco proselytizing and promoting polygamy. The woman converted and eloped with Pratt, then pretended to renounce Mormonism in order to get her children from her parents, where her estranged husband had sent them. The husband tracked Pratt from California to Arkansas, and shot him dead when it became clear that he could not have Pratt jailed. This incident contributed to the general sense of apocalyptic paranoia among the Mormon community that led to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormon settlers — acting, according to some, on orders from Brigham Young — killed an entire wagon train of families on their way to California. There were rumors, before the Mormon militia attacked the wagon train, that Pratt’s killer was among the mostly wealthy Arkansans in the train. 

The Mormons attempted to blame the murder of children and women on Indians, though Mark Twain and others believed that the “Indians” were likely Mormons in war paint. (Archaeological evidence — dug up, embarrassingly, during preparations for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics — supports that theory.)   READ MORE

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

The GOP's Race Problem

Texas Governor Rick Perry, left, speaks as former
Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, and former
Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney listen at the
South Carolina Republican presidential candidate
debate in Myrtle Beach, Monday, January 16, 2012.
(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, Pool)


Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Mitt Romney's Dangerous Foreign Policy Team: Nostalgic for Bush, Hellbent on War with Iran The candidate's foreign policy team features the usual belligerence, mixed with some serious nostalgia for a thoroughly discredited foreign policy framework. May 2, 2012


It's hard to watch the Romney campaign with a straight face. Their latest crackup has one Romney adviser, John Lehman, warning of the “Soviet threat," and another, Pierre Prosper, complaining that the administration hasn't done enough to stand with Czechoslovakia. And those comments were hardly the first time we've heard throwbacks to the Cold War in this campaign. But don't laugh too hard—it might distract from the dangerous and discredited worldview Romney's foreign policy team is pushing.


Despite Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan and his ramping up of drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, Romney claims Obama is a president who does not want “America to be the strongest nation on earth,” as he told an audience at the Citadel military college in South Carolina.   READ MORE