Whites for Romney

[boutons_deux]

The weird GOP attacks on Obama

If I were conspiracy-minded, I'd suspect Barack Obama has deployed several moles to sabotage his opponent. Take John Sununu, who yesterday attacked the president for having used drugs, spent time abroad and lived in Chicago. Or Phoenix Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who now claims to have proof Obama's birth certificate is a fraud. Mitt Romney's aides are vowing to expose Obama's past, insisting he wasn't "vetted" the last time around. If I were David Axelrod, I'd be smiling.

Why? Because we've heard it all before. It didn't keep Americans from electing Obama in 2008 and it won't stop them this time. These claims do resonate with some voters -- but only those who wouldn't vote for Obama if he were running against Vladimir Putin.

Most Americans just won't buy it. The president's personal approval ratings have consistently held up even amid our economic mess. A recent poll found that by a more than 2-to-1 margin, they find him more likable than Romney. Americans know Obama well by now, and they aren't going to change their minds about him as a person in the absence of powerful new information, which Republicans don't seem to have.

Smearing him doesn't raise doubts about the president. It raises doubts about the Republican party, which runs the risk of sounding like an arm of Fox News. If the GOP can explain how Obama's particular characteristics are responsible for the poor state of the economy, non-Republicans will listen. But if it focuses on trying to demonize him, they'll tune out.

The debate on the economy is one Republicans can win.

But right now, they're debating whether Obama is a sleazy pol, a drug-using punk or a Kenyan. And that's a debate Democrats will be more than happy to have.

http://mobile.chicagotribune.com/p.p...%3D0%26DPL%3D3

[Wild Cobra]

Shazbot...

You can expect that about 40% of the populous will vote democrat, and about 40% will vote republican. Most of the remaining 20% that end up not voting third party will be swayed by things. Even with those who are loyal to one part or the other, such negative campaigning works on them when they decide it's not worth voting during a particular election. Much of a win depends on increasing your own party's voter turnout and reducing the opposition party's voter turnout.

Think about it. How many people do you know who decided not to vote for one reason or another?

[boutons_deux]

Much of a win depends on increasing your own party's voter turnout and reducing the opposition party's voter turnout.

which is why felony liar Gecko's main hope is:

GOP Voter Suppression ID Laws May Affect Millions of Legal Voters

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/156377

And I'm sure the extreme right-wing activist SCOTUS JINOs are drooling for a chance to elect another VRWC tool.

[boutons_deux]

tax avoider/evader Gecko started Bain with capital from other, foreign tax evaders

Bain Capital started with help of offshore investors

When Mitt Romney launched Bain Capital in 1984, he struggled at first to raise enough money for the untested venture. Old-money families like the Rothschilds turned down the young Boston consultant.

So he and his partners tapped an eclectic roster of investors, raising more than a third of their first $37-million investment fund from wealthy foreigners.

Most of the foreign investors' money came through corporations registered in Panama, then known for tax advantages and unusual banking secrecy.

Previously unreported details, do ented in Massachusetts corporate filings and other public records, show that Bain Capital was enmeshed in the largely opaque world of international high finance from its very inception.

The do ents don't indicate any wrongdoing, and experts say that such financial vehicles are common for wealthy foreign investors. But the new details come as President Obama has criticized Romney for profiting from Bain Capital's own offshore investment en ies, which are unavailable to most Americans.

The Romney campaign declined to comment on the specifics of Bain's early investors. Romney has argued that his offshore investments are entirely proper, and that he has paid all the U.S. taxes that he owes. The offshore funds do provide tax advantages for foreign investors, allowing Bain to attract billions of dollars.

"The world of finance is not as simple as some would have you believe," Romney said in an interview this week with National Review Online.

The first outside investor in Bain was a leading London financier, Sir Jack Lyons, who made a $2.5-million investment through a Panama s company set up by a Swiss money manager, further shielding his iden y. Years later, Lyons was convicted in an unrelated stock fraud scandal.

About $9 million came from rich Latin Americans, including powerful Salvadoran families living in Miami during their country's brutal civil war.

That first investment fund — used to invest in start-up companies and leveraged buyouts — paid out a stunning 173% in average annual returns over a decade, according to a prospectus prepared by an outside bank. It was the start of the private equity powerhouse that ultimately fueled Romney's political career. He now cites his experience at Bain as a chief qualification for the White House.

Romney faced unusual complications when he launched Bain Capital, a spinoff of Bain & Co., the Boston consulting firm he joined when he graduated from Harvard Business School.

At the time, U.S. officials were publicly accusing some exiles in Miami of funding right-wing death squads in El Salvador. Some family members of the first Bain Capital investors were later linked to groups responsible for killings, though no evidence indicates those relatives invested in Bain or benefited from it.

Romney has said he checked the foreign investors' backgrounds. His campaign and Bain Capital declined to provide specifics.

Alex Stanton, a spokesman for Bain Capital, said confidentiality rules barred him from commenting on the investors.

"The hyperbole of political campaigns cannot change the fact that Bain Capital has operated with high standards of integrity and excellence, including compliance with all applicable laws and regulations regarding the vetting of our investors in consultation with experienced counsel and other advisors," he said. "Any suggestion to the contrary is baseless."

Matt McDonald, a spokesman for the Romney campaign, also declined to discuss details of the original fund. "There were many investors who saw the opportunity of a firm that could help fix broken companies and help them grow." (uh, NO! investors don't give a about takeover targets beyond suckiing $10Ms in fees and equity out of them)

But when Romney and his partners started the firm, Bain & Co. founder Bill Bain — worried the new venture could fail — barred them from soliciting current clients or corporations that would have to publicly disclose the investment, according to an early Bain Capital employee.

Bain partners put in $12 million of their own money, then sought the rest from wealthy individuals.

Records show the first investment in Bain Capital — $1.25 million in June 1984 — was in the name of Jean Overseas Ltd., registered in Panama by Marcel Elfen, a Swiss money manager. Later, the investment was doubled.

http://mobile.latimes.com/p.p?m=b&a=...%3D0%26DPL%3D3

Yoni, tell us again about you sliming Barry with Ayers, etc from decades ago.

If you're sliming was acceptable, then exposing the seedy, hidden origins and business of Gecko's Bain is acceptable, esp since Gecko is claiming Bain as his primary qualification for the WH.

[boutons_deux]

Queen Anne speaks (down) to "You People"

Ann Romney on tax returns: ‘We’ve given all you people need to know’



“You know, you should really look at where Mitt has led his life, and where he’s been financially,” Ann Romney told ABC’s Robin Roberts. “He’s a very generous person. We give 10 percent of our income to our church every year. Do you think that is the kind of person who is trying to hide things, or do things? No. He is so good about it. Then, when he was governor of Massachusetts, didn’t take a salary for four years.”

“We’ve given all you people need to know and understand about our financial situation and how we live our life,” the candidate’s wife added.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/1...=Google+Reader

En led ? you betcha!

[boutons_deux]

When run through the Universal Republican Bull Translation Device I built in my basement, that plaintive cry becomes, "McCain vetted me for the VP slot in 2008, saw my financials, and went with Palin instead...my tax records would be lethal to my campaign, and I am terrified of releasing them...Obama is being mean to me...O God, I hope my ill-advised blurt about Teresa Heinz Kerry's tax returns doesn't inspire anyone to ask about my wife Ann's returns...c'mon, America, I'm the white guy in the race, this was supposed to be easier..."

Etc.

If this were a prize fight, the referee would have stepped in to stop the bludgeoning. This ain't boxing, however: this is politics, so wear a helmet, light a candle in whatever house of worship you attend in the hope that the beatings will cease once morale improves, and do the best you can.

That's what you say to buck someone up...but I don't have the faintest idea how anyone can recover from something like this.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10...aign-klown-kar

[boutons_deux]

Solyndra and the Republican Outrage Machine

Reeling from the controversy over his “retroactive” Bain resignation, this week Mitt Romney is mounting a counter-attack. Rather than his own vulture capitalist credentials, Romney wants to talk about the supposed “crony capitalism” of the president, with Solyndra as Exhibit A. Yesterday, the campaign debuted a new ad warning that, “Obama is giving taxpayer dollars to big donors and then watching them lose it.” GOP Senator Ron Johnson went further, comparing green energy investment to Soviet communism, “the lessons of the Soviet Union.” In December, the conservative writer Conn Carroll posited that this election will be about “Bain vs Solyndra.” Wishful thinking? Too soon to tell.

But after a year of hearings, twenty-six witnesses and 187,000 do ents from the White House, all Republicans have to show for it are some context-less quotes and a lot of baseless assertions.

By March, Congressman and Solyndra Grand Inquisitor Darrell Issa, was reduced to telling <, “Was there criminal activity? Perhaps not. Is there policial influence and connections? Perhaps not. Did they bend the rules for an agenda not covered within the statute? Absolutely.”

Despite the evidence, Romney wants to convince Americans that a bad bet on Solyndra is more significant than decades of outsourcing and downsizing. There’s a real risk that reporters—hungry for scandal and hypnotized by false equivalence—will let him get away with it. At stake is more than an electoral football. Like Reagan’s fabled Cadillac-driving “welfare queen” or much-hyped claims of voter fraud or food stamp abuse, this right-wing myth-making has dire policy consequences. As Solyndra becomes shorthand for scandal, the well gets poisoned for future progress.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/168959...mailNation%27#

Gecko/Repug's counterpunch is Solyndra "scandal".

[boutons_deux]

Pathos of the Plutocrat



"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me." So wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald - and he didn't just mean that they have more money. What he meant instead, at least in part, was that many of the very rich expect a level of deference that the rest of us never experience and are deeply distressed when they don't get the special treatment they consider their birthright; their wealth "makes them soft where we are hard."

And because money talks, this softness - call it the pathos of the plutocrats - has become a major factor in America's political life.

It's no secret that, at this point, many of America's richest men - including some former Obama supporters - hate, just hate, President Obama. Why? Well, according to them, it's because he "demonizes" business - or as Mitt Romney put it earlier this week, he "attacks success." Listening to them, you'd think that the president was the second coming of Huey Long, preaching class hatred and the need to soak the rich.

Needless to say, this is crazy. In fact, Mr. Obama always bends over backward to declare his support for free enterprise and his belief that getting rich is perfectly fine. All that he has done is to suggest that sometimes businesses behave badly, and that this is one reason we need things like financial regulation. No matter: even this hint that sometimes the rich aren't completely praiseworthy has been enough to drive plutocrats wild. For two years or more, Wall Street in particular has been crying: "Ma! He's looking at me funny!"

Wait, there's more. Not only do many of the superrich feel deeply aggrieved at the notion that anyone in their class might face criticism, they also insist that their perception that Mr. Obama doesn't like them is at the root of our economic problems. Businesses aren't investing, they say, because business leaders don't feel valued. Mr. Romney repeated this line, too, arguing that because the president attacks success "we have less success."

This, too, is crazy (and it's disturbing that Mr. Romney appears to share this delusional view about what ails our economy). There's no mystery about the reasons the economic recovery has been so weak. Housing is still depressed in the aftermath of a huge bubble, and consumer demand is being held back by the high levels of household debt that are the legacy of that bubble. Business investment has actually held up fairly well given this weakness in demand. Why should businesses invest more when they don't have enough customers to make full use of the capacity they already have?

But never mind. Because the rich are different from you and me, many of them are incredibly self-centered. They don't even see how funny it is - how ridiculous they look - when they attribute the weakness of a $15 trillion economy to their own hurt feelings. After all, who's going to tell them? They're safely ensconced in a bubble of deference and flattery.

Unless, that is, they run for public office.

Like everyone else following the news, I've been awe-struck by the way questions about Mr. Romney's career at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he founded, and his refusal to release tax returns have so obviously caught the Romney campaign off guard. Shouldn't a very wealthy man running for president - and running specifically on the premise that his business success makes him qualified for office - have expected the nature of that success to become an issue? Shouldn't it have been obvious that refusing to release tax returns from before 2010 would raise all kinds of su ions?

By the way, while we don't know what Mr. Romney is hiding in earlier returns, the fact that he is still stonewalling despite calls by Republicans as well as Democrats to come clean suggests that it could be something seriously damaging.

Anyway, what's now apparent is that the campaign was completely unprepared for the obvious questions, and it has reacted to the Obama campaign's decision to ask those questions with a hysteria that surely must be coming from the top. Clearly, Mr. Romney believed that he could run for president while remaining safe inside the plutocratic bubble and is both shocked and angry at the discovery that the rules that apply to others also apply to people like him. Fitzgerald again, about the very rich: "They think, deep down, that they are better than we are."

O.K., let's take a deep breath. The truth is that many, and probably most, of the very rich don't fit Fitzgerald's description. There are plenty of very rich Americans who have a sense of perspective, who take pride in their achievements without believing that their success en les them to live by different rules.

But Mitt Romney, it seems, isn't one of those people. And that discovery may be an even bigger issue than whatever is hidden in those tax returns he won't release.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=...&sub=Columnist

[boutons_deux]

A CEO in the Oval Office?

If Mitt Romney’s association with Bain Capital ends up sinking his presidential campaign, he’s unlikely to appreciate the irony. But, if he needs consolation, he might consider seeking solace in American history. The fact is that no successful businessman has ever been a successful president, and only a few have even been serious contenders for the job.

This might seem odd, given Americans’ long romance with wealthy entrepreneurs and the enterprises they build. But a talent for developing private companies and making big profits seldom translates into wooing a majority of voters or governing a contentious republic. It may, in fact, blind one from recognizing critical differences between those equally difficult endeavors.

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=799

[boutons_deux]

O’Donnell rips Romney’s promise to put porn filters on every computer

As late as 2007, Romney had vowed to implement a policy that would restrict the freedom to browse the Internet.

“I want to make sure that every new computer sold in this country after I’m president has installed on it a filter to block all pornography, and that parents can click that filter to make sure their kids don’t see that kind of stuff coming in on their computer,” Romney said at an event in Ottumwa, Iowa.

Earlier this week, Morality in Media president Patrick Trueman, who was an anti-pornography prosecutor in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, told The Daily Caller that Romney’s campaign had assured him that the candidate would “vigorously” crackdown on the porn industry.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/2...=Google+Reader

[boutons_deux]

In a new effort to settle nagging questions about his finances, Republican Presidential pick Mitt Romney today told reporters that his dog ate his tax returns and also served as C.E.O. of Bain Capital from 1999 to 2002.

Mr. Romney’s narrative about the Irish setter Seamus Romney, shared with reporters during a campaign stop in New Hampshire, was perhaps the most emotional invocation of a pet by a politician since Richard M. Nixon’s famed Checkers speech of 1952.

“Seamus was more than a dog,” Mr. Romney said, his voice beginning to quaver. “As C.E.O. of Bain, he was a job creator.”

But Mr. Romney’s revelations about his dog’s career in private equity may have raised more questions than it answered, as a spokesperson for People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) questioned the G.O.P. candidate’s latest version of events.

“If we are to believe Mitt Romney, in 2002 while Seamus was supposedly running Bain Capital he would have been at least 140 years old [in dog years],” said PETA’s Carol Foyler. “This shaggy-dog story represents Mitt Romney’s latest act of animal cruelty.”

Minutes after PETA’s response, Mr. Romney released an amended statement, saying that Seamus Romney had served as C.E.O. of Bain “posthumously.”

It was a quieter day for Mr. Romney’s wife Ann, who, after her “you people” gaffe on ABC’s “Good Morning America” yesterday, was seen riding home on the roof of Mr. Romney’s car.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...#ixzz21H2qgE3N

[Clipper Nation]

O’Donnell rips Romney’s promise to put porn filters on every computer

As late as 2007, Romney had vowed to implement a policy that would restrict the freedom to browse the Internet.

“I want to make sure that every new computer sold in this country after I’m president has installed on it a filter to block all pornography, and that parents can click that filter to make sure their kids don’t see that kind of stuff coming in on their computer,” Romney said at an event in Ottumwa, Iowa.

Earlier this week, Morality in Media president Patrick Trueman, who was an anti-pornography prosecutor in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, told The Daily Caller that Romney’s campaign had assured him that the candidate would “vigorously” crackdown on the porn industry.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/2...=Google+Reader

Willard supposedly all about the jobs
Handjobs and blowjobs apparently don't count

[boutons_deux]

Mitt Romney Made Over $25 Million In Foreign Income While Governing, Campaigning

Mitt Romney ac ulated more than $25 million in foreign income between 2005 and 2010, while he was governor of Massachusetts and a presidential candidate, according to an analysis of his 2010 tax return.

The 2010 return lists foreign tax payments Romney made dating back to 2000. By Romney standards, the payments were modest through 2004, averaging $37,000 a year. In 2005, however, his foreign tax bill shot up to $333,149 and stayed high for the next three years, before dipping in 2009, as the financial crisis hit hard.

In 2010, Romney's foreign tax bill was down to $67,173 on declared foreign income of $1,525,982. That's a 4.4 percent rate. After expenses and various other deductions, Romney declared a net foreign income of $392,000, making his net tax rate 17 percent.

Because the presumptive GOP presidential nominee has so far declined to release his earlier tax returns, HuffPost made a rough calculation of his prior foreign earnings by assuming he paid similar tax rates in previous years.

Using that analysis, paying $333,000 in taxes would translate into gross foreign income of $7.5 million in 2005, or net income of $1.9 million. Even using the much-reduced net income figure, Romney would have earned $7 million in foreign income from 2005 to 2010.

Romney was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and served a four-year term, during which time he took no paycheck from the state. He began running for president while still governor and continued until early 2008. On the campaign trail in 2011, he joked with a Florida voter that he was unemployed.

But unemployment for Romney looks a lot more lucrative than it does for most Americans.

"That may be one of the reasons they don't want to release the returns ... they don't want people to see that income," said Rebecca Wilkins, an attorney with Citizens for Tax Justice.

Romney and Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded, have profited by setting up offshore investment vehicles and shipping American jobs overseas. The money from those activities has continued to flow to Romney long after he claims to have retired in 1999 from Bain, as evidenced by his tax returns.

One Bain investment that has been profitable for Romney, for example, is Sensata Technologies. The company is planning to shutter its Freeport, Ill., factory by November and move production to China. The soon-to-be-unemployed workers have pleaded with Romney to use his influence over Bain to stave off the closure. Romney has so far declined to do so.

Instead, Romney has transferred $170,000 worth of Sensata stock he owns to a charity he controls, a move that gave him a sizable tax deduction.

The Obama campaign has made Bain's offshoring efforts a top campaign issue, releasing a brutal ad overlaying Romney's outsourcing record atop a rendition of "America the Beautiful."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...comm_ref=false

[boutons_deux]

Here's Gecko's team playing the "foreigner, racist, birther, unAmerican card. Expect this non-stop

Romney Adviser Says Obama Doesn’t ‘Fully Appreciate’ Our ‘Anglo-Saxon Heritage’

In remarks that may prompt accusations of racial insensitivity, one suggested that Mr Romney was better placed to understand the depth of ties between the two countries than Mr Obama, whose father was from Africa.

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”

The comments were the latest attack by the Romney campaign on Obama’s multi-cultural heritage. Last week, Romney campaign co-chair John Sununu said Obama didn’t understand the “American system” because he “spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something, spent the next set of years in Indonesia.” Sununu also said Obama needed to “learn how to be an American.” (Sununu later apologized for that remark.) Later that day Romney called Obama’s policies “extraordinarily foreign.”

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/20...axon-heritage/

Obviously, all these assholes are coordinated and "on message" to paint Obama as unAmerican/black/foreign, since they can't run on the REpug record 2001-2008, nor on Gecko's record, other than Gecko running away from his MA health plan.

[boutons_deux]

Hiding in Plain Sight

If I closed my eyes, and added a creepy monotone, I could have been listening to Cheney.

The Republican speaker at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Reno, Nev., was slashing the president with jingoistic jingles: Obama is ashamed of America, an apologist sapping the greatness of a country that is the greatest force for good the world has ever known, a weakling marring the American Century by gutting the military and the economy. And, on top of that, the Obama White House doesn’t know how to keep stuff secret.

Prodded by conservatives to attack the president more aggressively, the ever malleable Mitt Romney obliged Tuesday at the V.F.W., spouting chest-thumping clichés about putting “resolve in our might.” That resolve evidently doesn’t include Mitt, who passed on Vietnam, or his five strapping sons, none of whom have volunteered for the volunteer military.

It was at the V.F.W. convention in 2002 when Cheney, who got five deferments from Vietnam, set the gold standard for mindless belligerence, pushing pre-emptive action in Iraq. “Simply stated,” he said, “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” The Arab street, he knew, would erupt in joy when we invaded.

In his speech, Romney demanded that any Obama administration leakers of classified information be found and punished because “the time for stonewalling is over,” “Americans are en led to know” and Americans deserve “a full and prompt accounting of the facts.”

After the speech, Eric Edelman, a Romney campaign adviser, chimed in on ferreting out Obama leakers in a press release; unfortunately, BuzzFeed soon pointed out that Edelman “was implicated in the country’s last major national security leak investigation — the outing of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame” when he served under former Cheney aide Scooter Libby in W.’s administration.

Romney is so secretive that he’s beginning to make the über-clandestine Cheney look like The Bachelorette.

The Boston Globe reported Tuesday that although Romney promised “complete transparency” when he stepped in to save the Salt Lake City Olympics, he became a black hole: “Some who worked with Romney describe a close-to-the-vest chief executive unwilling to share so much as a budget with a state board responsible for spending oversight. Archivists now say most key records about the Games’ internal workings were destroyed under the supervision of a staffer shortly after the flame was extinguished at Olympic Cauldron Park, after Romney had returned to Massachusetts.” (Wouldn’t it have been simpler to just burn the records in the flame?)

The public still can’t see the records, stored at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott library, named for the same man as Willard Mitt Romney.

Andrea Saul, a Romney spokeswoman, said that Mitt resigned from the Olympics job in early 2002 to run for governor of Massachusetts and “was not involved in the decision-making regarding the final disposition of records.”

Who was responsible for the final disposition? A former colleague at Bain Capital, Fraser Bullock, who succeeded Romney in the Olympic post. Ah, the old Bain handoff.

Romney spent $100,000 in state funds to replace office computers at the end of his term as governor and on the cusp of his 2008 presidential race, “as part of an unprecedented effort to keep his records secret,” reported Mark Hosenball of Reuters. Eleven Romney aides “bought the hard drives of their state-issued computers to keep for themselves,” Hosenball wrote. “Also before he left office, the governor’s staff had e-mails and other electronic communications by Romney’s administration wiped from the state servers, state officials say. Those actions erased much of the internal do entation of Romney’s four-year tenure as governor.”

It seems an hetical to Mormonism, since the Mormon Church loves to save do ents, keeping 35 billion images of genealogical information and records on church history in the Granite Mountain Records Vault near Salt Lake City.

Doesn’t Mitt have space in that split-level, four-car garage elevator in La Jolla for a little deep-storage?

As Maggie Haberman observed in Politico, Romney has made a calculated decision to hide three major elements of his background: his Mormonism, his record at Bain and his time as governor. This creates, she wrote, “a kind of self-imposed paralysis on biographical messaging that some observers, including Republicans, say may wound his campaign in an era in which voters want to achieve a kind of unprecedented intimacy with their candidates.”

Former rival Newt Gingrich told Politico Tuesday that Romney needs to relax and let people see who he is, noting that, except for family, “there’s a place where Mitt clearly doesn’t let people get.”

So far, Mitt’s casting a shadowy silhouette, hiding his fortune in foreign tax havens, hiding tax returns, destroying and hiding records as head of the Olympics and as governor, hiding a specific sense of where he would take the country.

Americans don’t want to play hide-and-seek with their presidential candidates. Romney should listen to himself: The time for stonewalling is over.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/op...gewanted=print

[boutons_deux]

Gecko is way out of his depth, gaffing badly in UK


Mitt in London: Brags About Secret Meeting, Insults Olympics

So Mitt Romney spends Tuesday pledging

[1] that as president he would never, ever leak intelligence information

and then today

[2]:

Eyebrows going up about Romney's claim to have met the Sir John Sawers, the chief of MI6. Asked about Syria by an American reporter whether he and Cameron spoke about Syria and he replies: "I appreciated the insights and perspectives of the leaders of the government here and the opposition here as well as the head of MI6"

As The Guardian explains [3]:

For our American readership, this isn't like bragging you just met David Petraeus. The British take on the national secret intelligence service comes with an extra-heavy dollop of the whole secret thing. The very existence of the MI6 was not officially acknowledged until 1994.

Good luck, Romney handlers: this is only stop No. 1 on a three-stop international tour. What will he say in Jerusalem?

Maybe if MI6 also handled Romney's tax returns then he could have kept his mouth shut?

Or perhaps he was simply distracted by trying to put out the fire caused by his other gaffe: saying [4] that he doubted Great Britain's ability to pull off the games.

"You know, it's hard to know just how well it will turn out," Romney said. "There are a few things that were disconcerting, the stories about the – private security firm not having enough people – the supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials, that obviously is not something which is encouraging."

Prime Minister David Cameron reassured Romney that everything would turn out just fine, adding [4] a bit of a rebuke to Romney: "We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world," Cameron said. "Of course it's easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere." (Like in ing Mormon land? I doubt Gecko understood Cameron's "nowhere" insult! It's said that the Americans say more than they mean (overstatement), and the English mean more than they say (understatement) )

Romney, who has made "No Apology" the centerpiece of his foreign policy, subsequently apologized,walking back [5] his comments doubting London's readiness.

I guess the moral of the story is that Mitt Romney has all of Cheney's diplomatic talent ... with none of his charm.

http://www.alternet.org/print/hot-ne...sults-olympics

[boutons_deux]

Mitt Romney: The Gated Candidate

The wealthiest Americans often choose to live in gated communities, designed to shield them from the intrusion of those Ann Romney calls "you people."

Now, Mitt Romney is applying that same notion to his campaign for the presidency. He's offering Americans a gated candidate, with whole areas of his record walled off to keep "you people" from knowing about them.

The scope of information gated off is striking and unprecedented in modern presidential politics. Romney insured that records on his stint as Governor and as CEO of the Olympics were scrubbed. He walls off access to his history at Bain, the company he led. Romney refuses to reveal his tax returns. He walls off information about the bundlers who are raising the money for the campaign to whom he will be deeply indebted. Not surprisingly, he stayed mum as Republican Senators torpedoed the legislation to require disclosure of corporate and individual contributors who give more than $10,000 to non-profits now poisoning the airwaves with attack ads.

He is as Maureen Dowd concludes, "hiding in plain sight."

This isn't a partisan concern. Joining a growing roster of Republican leaders, even the reactionary Manchester Union Leader editorialists call on him to reveal his tax returns, saying "maintaining the secrecy creates the impression, justly or not, that there is something to hide." Surely, the editorial goes on to say, Romney "could not have arrogantly believed that he could withstand any storm that developed by bluffing his way through?"

But Romney has chosen to "bluff his way through" not only on his taxes, but on his record and his donors. He clearly has made a calculated cost-benefit analysis, as befits a man from Bain. He believes the benefits of letting Americans know his background are outweighed by the costs likely to be suffered by a wealthy Wall Street predator who pays a lower tax rate than the cops who patrol his streets, is running on a platform that denounces what he did as Governor, has a campaign funded largely by hedge fund operators and Wall Street bankers, and knows what scrutiny of his management of Bain or the Olympics will reveal.

Already, we know from the scrubbed tax returns that by using available tax dodges and off shore tax havens, he pays a lower tax rate than middle income Americans. Already we're learning that Romney's Olympics team outsourced supply of US Olympic uniforms to the brutal dictatorship of Burma (Myanmar).

No wonder Romney figures he loses fewer votes by walling off his record than by revealing it.

He is the perfect tribune of the 1%. The gated candidate.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert...comm_ref=false

[boutons_deux]

Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond had to withdraw as a co-chair of Romney’s London fundraiser festivities—after Diamond was forced out of his position and then dragged before a Parliamentary select committee for a round of “what did you know and when did you know it” questioning about the filing of false reports and the manipulation of global markets. Embarrassing? Not really. The no-shame-when-it-comes-to-money-grabbing Romney campaign just made another Barclays insider a co-chair, along with representatives of of Bank of Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Wells Fargo Securities—and, of course, Bain Capital Europe.

What was Romney thinking?

First and foremost, he wanted the estimated $2 million in campaign contributions that the global financiers ponied up Thursday night.

But the Republican presidential candidate came to London to offer the the scandal-plagued bankers something in return for the checks that were delivered in increments of as much as $75,000: reassurance that he really is one of them. And that a Romney presidency would serve their interests.

Referring to the signature Wall Street regulatory reform of the Obama presidency, Romney reassured the bankers that “I’d like to get rid of Dodd Frank and go back and look at regulation piece by piece.”

While he couldn’t quite get the hang of international diplomacy, Mitt Romney was entirely comfortable standing on foreign soil and promising international bankers that, as president, he would take care of them.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/169137...ll-score-them#

[boutons_deux]

White TN man jealous over Gecko



Man Attacks Girlfriend Over Photo of Mitt Romney on Her Facebook Page


http://gawker.com/5930493/man-attack...-facebook-page

[boutons_deux]

hear say, but it has ring of truth.

We can say anything we want about Gecko's tax evasion/avoidance, until and if he ever publishes the last 10 years, like any sub-cabinet candidate must do before Senate confirmation.

Harry Reid: Bain Investor Told Me That Mitt Romney 'Didn't Pay Any Taxes For 10 Years'

Romney couldn't make it through a Senate confirmation process as a mere Cabinet nominee, the majority leader insisted, owing to the opaqueness of his personal finances.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...comm_ref=false

[elbamba]

hear say, but it has ring of truth.

We can say anything we want about Gecko's tax evasion/avoidance, until and if he ever publishes the last 10 years, like any sub-cabinet candidate must do before Senate confirmation.

Harry Reid: Bain Investor Told Me That Mitt Romney 'Didn't Pay Any Taxes For 10 Years'

Romney couldn't make it through a Senate confirmation process as a mere Cabinet nominee, the majority leader insisted, owing to the opaqueness of his personal finances.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...comm_ref=false

Of course, Reid goes on to say that he doesn't have any proof. Its telling that you support this kind of rhetoric.

[elbamba]

Mitt Romney Made Over $25 Million In Foreign Income While Governing, Campaigning

Mitt Romney ac ulated more than $25 million in foreign income between 2005 and 2010, while he was governor of Massachusetts and a presidential candidate, according to an analysis of his 2010 tax return.

The 2010 return lists foreign tax payments Romney made dating back to 2000. By Romney standards, the payments were modest through 2004, averaging $37,000 a year. In 2005, however, his foreign tax bill shot up to $333,149 and stayed high for the next three years, before dipping in 2009, as the financial crisis hit hard.

In 2010, Romney's foreign tax bill was down to $67,173 on declared foreign income of $1,525,982. That's a 4.4 percent rate. After expenses and various other deductions, Romney declared a net foreign income of $392,000, making his net tax rate 17 percent.

Because the presumptive GOP presidential nominee has so far declined to release his earlier tax returns, HuffPost made a rough calculation of his prior foreign earnings by assuming he paid similar tax rates in previous years.

Using that analysis, paying $333,000 in taxes would translate into gross foreign income of $7.5 million in 2005, or net income of $1.9 million. Even using the much-reduced net income figure, Romney would have earned $7 million in foreign income from 2005 to 2010.

Romney was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and served a four-year term, during which time he took no paycheck from the state. He began running for president while still governor and continued until early 2008. On the campaign trail in 2011, he joked with a Florida voter that he was unemployed.

But unemployment for Romney looks a lot more lucrative than it does for most Americans.

"That may be one of the reasons they don't want to release the returns ... they don't want people to see that income," said Rebecca Wilkins, an attorney with Citizens for Tax Justice.

Romney and Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded, have profited by setting up offshore investment vehicles and shipping American jobs overseas. The money from those activities has continued to flow to Romney long after he claims to have retired in 1999 from Bain, as evidenced by his tax returns.

One Bain investment that has been profitable for Romney, for example, is Sensata Technologies. The company is planning to shutter its Freeport, Ill., factory by November and move production to China. The soon-to-be-unemployed workers have pleaded with Romney to use his influence over Bain to stave off the closure. Romney has so far declined to do so.

Instead, Romney has transferred $170,000 worth of Sensata stock he owns to a charity he controls, a move that gave him a sizable tax deduction.

The Obama campaign has made Bain's offshoring efforts a top campaign issue, releasing a brutal ad overlaying Romney's outsourcing record atop a rendition of "America the Beautiful."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...comm_ref=false

So is it bad that he was such a good investor that in his twenty years in business he set himself up for life? I am not understanding the narrative here? Is it wrong to invest private money overseas? Is okay for the government to send taxpayer dollars oversea? What is the point?

[boutons_deux]

Of course, Reid goes on to say that he doesn't have any proof. Its telling that you support this kind of rhetoric.

Gecko will be hounded and trashed by what his opposition say and what citizens think until he stops hiding his tax returns. We can only conclude that Gecko knows he has so much bad stuff hide that he simply cannot release them.

[elbamba]

Gecko will be hounded and trashed by what his opposition say and what citizens think until he stops hiding his tax returns. We can only conclude that Gecko knows he has so much bad stuff hide that he simply cannot release them.

"We" being people who are already not going to vote for him.

You are essentially endorsing the birther logic. You do realize this?

[CosmicCowboy]

"We" being people who are already not going to vote for him.

You are essentially endorsing the birther logic. You do realize this?

X2

Only the Obama aplogists give a about Romney's old tax returns. Accusing him of "potentially being a felon" is just so bat boutons crazy that the mainstream sees it for exactly what it is...smoke and mirrors and diversion from what a ty president Obama has been.