In your honest, non-biased opinion ... who won the debate tonight?

[Nbadan]

I challenge anyone who voted for a Romney win to define exactly how Romney won? Based on what?

[rascal]

I challenge anyone who voted for a Romney win to define exactly how Romney won? Based on what?

Style over substance. Romney said nothing but looked better doing it. Obama often looked down too passively, and with his hesitations and long pauses right in the middle of his sentenses gives the appearance he is unsure of himself. Also Romney was more aggressive brushing off Lehrer and making sure he always got in the last word on every topic. Romney disagreed with Obama and Obama not calling him out on it made Obama look weak.

Style over substance wins these debates with the average voter. If you really look into what they said Romney did not win.

[Yonivore]

Yet, somehow Bain managed to create jobs.

lol thinkprogress deflection.

Because wealth creation for investors translates to job creation for the en ies in which Bain invests. It's a natural byproduct.

[Yonivore]

I challenge anyone who voted for a Romney win to define exactly how Romney won? Based on what?

Based on his handing Obama his own ass at the end of the debate.

[Yonivore]

People are acting like Obama wiped all over himself during the debate. Whatever. Yeah, Romney whipped him pretty good, but he was the same Obama he's always been. His performance, while maybe not as good as his 2008 debates, was far better than anything McCain, Bush, Kerry, or Gore ever offered up in a debate. If you think he sucked, either you were comparing him to the image of him you had put up on a pedestal, or you're just looking for an excuse not to vote for him.

Unfortunately, he wasn't debating McCain, Bush, Kerry (his debate coach), or Algore.

I do believe that's the first time in presidential debate history a candidate has asked the moderator to move to the next topic because he couldn't answer or respond.

[rascal]

Why was Romney allowed the final word on every topic?

[boutons_deux]

Because wealth creation for investors translates to job creation for the en ies in which Bain invests. It's a natural byproduct.

PussyEater has no clue how PE LBOs work. The ONLY PRIORITY is sucking wealth for investors out of the buyout victim, NOT creating jobs or saving the victim company, both of which are distantly secondary side-effects.

[Wild Cobra]

Maybe people need to learn how to create wealth instead of thinking it's a zero sum game, and sponging off of others.

[Yonivore]

Why was Romney allowed the final word on every topic?

Most of the time Obama had no response and just wanted Jim Lehrer to go to the next topic.

[Yonivore]

PussyEater has no clue how PE LBOs work. The ONLY PRIORITY is sucking wealth for investors out of the buyout victim, NOT creating jobs or saving the victim company, both of which are distantly secondary side-effects.

I think the hundreds of thousands of employees working for successful Bain ventures would both disagree with you and tell you to go yourself.

[boutons_deux]

I think the hundreds of thousands of employees working for successful Bain ventures would both disagree with you and tell you to go yourself.

For those companies that survived Bain's wealth-sucking, they grew AFTER Bain sold them off and/or was no longer the controlling investor. GFY

[boutons_deux]

So Romney Lies—So What? Who Cares?

For at least the last couple of decades, the Republican Party has been anti-modern, but Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for president, is modern, even post-modern. I don’t mean that as a compliment. The man is a serial liar in a society that increasingly tolerates lying and cheating.

Maybe Romney and his lying-mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, are on to something about the American character these days. One example of that is the ludicrous belief held by many that President Obama is "the other," not born in the United States and a secret Muslim.

"Factual truth is no longer as relevant as it used to be," says modern communications wizard Henry Jenkins of the University of Southern California. "Modern media consumers will buy anything that ‘rings true’ to them."
So without going through the whole list of Romney-Ryan whoppers, I will quote Joe Conason, an Obama-lover writing on Truthdig.com. He sees a "deep well of dishonesty" in the Romney campaign. Conason’s most interesting thought after he shows Obamacare and Romneycare in Massachusetts are the same thing, verified by various fact-checkers, is this:

"He ... knows that when he claims economic growth alone will erase the deficit, without raising taxes, he is inventing impossible numbers. As The National Memo’s Howard Hill demonstrated, the assumptions behind his claims are ridiculous. For the numbers to work, he would have to create not 12 million jobs, as he promised to do by 2016, but 162 million—more than the total current U.S. workforce. Or else the jobs created would have to pay more than $443,000 per year on average."

So who cares? Not the increasing number of Americans who are lying and cheating—or are just plain stupid. One of the more disturbing stories of this last summer was one by Richard Perez-Pena of The New York Times about cheating in the country’s best high schools and colleges, including Stuyvesant High School, Harvard University and the Air Force Academy."There have always been struggling students who cheat to survive," Donald McCabe, a professor at Rutgers University Business School, told Perez-Pena. "But more and more there are students at the top who cheat to thrive."

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...=Google+Reader

America the Beautiful, on its unstoppable decline into rampant corruption of all life, just like all the empires before it.

[TeyshaBlue]

For those companies that survived Bain's wealth-sucking, they grew AFTER Bain sold them off and/or was no longer the controlling investor. GFY

VC. lolz

[SA210]

Obama has a history of getting manhandled and having his ass handed to him in debates..

"uh.uh..uh.."

[Nbadan]

Style over substance. Romney said nothing but looked better doing it. Obama often looked down too passively, and with his hesitations and long pauses right in the middle of his sentenses gives the appearance he is unsure of himself. Also Romney was more aggressive brushing off Lehrer and making sure he always got in the last word on every topic. Romney disagreed with Obama and Obama not calling him out on it made Obama look weak.

Style over substance wins these debates with the average voter. If you really look into what they said Romney did not win.

Plus, the in bent doesn't have the luxury to just pull things out of his ass and flat out lie about 5 trillion in new middle class taxes...

[Nbadan]

So, Obama lying is OK too....why all the blow up over Bengazi?

[boutons_deux]

Romney Tests the Limits on Lying

Mitt Romney might be the most brazen political liar since James Polk, who served as the 11th U.S. president (1845-1849) and lied through his teeth – to Congress, to his cabinet, to the newspapers – to get the country into a war with Mexico.
Of course, other presidents have lied to a similar end, for instance President Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War and President George W. Bush on the Iraq War. But Polk operated with the same audacious “lying is part of what I do” disposition that Mitt Romney does.


James Polk, the 11th President of the United States.


If one has any doubt about Mitt Romney’s mendacious temperament, the first presidential debate should have put it to rest. According to one analyst, Romney let loose with “27 myths in 38 minutes,” finishing with a big grin after most of these prevarications. He produced trumped-up assertions, false statistics and wild exaggerations about taxes, energy independence, job creation, the deficit, Medicare, “Obamacare,” and military spending.

If the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri came back to life today and produced an updated list of lost souls for the “Inferno” section of his Divine Comedy, Romney would certainly earn a spot in the 8th rung of . That is where Dante placed, among others, the “falsifiers, those who attempted to alter things through lies or alchemy.” Their punishment was “based on horrible … diseases such as rashes, dropsy, leprosy and consumption.”

By the way, there seems to be a su ion that Romney also cheated during the first debate. The debate rules say that the candidates cannot use “prepared notes.” However, a video of the debate shows that he had put what looks like a white piece of paper down on his podium, or maybe it was just his handkerchief. But who could believe that Romney might cheat?

Some Specifics

The second presidential debate, scheduled for Oct. 16, will be partially about foreign policy. As a run-up to the moment, Romney gave a speech on foreign affairs. It should be kept in mind that between Oct. 8th and Oct. 16 he might completely change his positions. The man has such a flip-flop record that this is quite possible.

However, assuming he doesn’t do that, let’s take a look at just how truthful are his foreign policy statements:

As Robert Parry points out in Consortium News, Romney lied when he said Obama “has not signed one new free trade agreement in the past four years.” Obama has in fact signed three (South Korea, Panama and Columbia). Romney also lied when he said that Obama was “silent” during the suppression of demonstrations in Iran after the reelection of President Amadinejad. Obama spoke out on multiple occasions.

By the way, one might not approve of NAFTA-style trade agreements. I certainly don’t. But that does not make Romney’s lies about Obama’s actions acceptable.

Parry goes on to detail how Romney’s accusation that Obama’s foreign policy is “weak” is groundless. After all, he is talking about the man who wages war in Afghanistan, helped bring down the dictatorship in Libya, and took down Osama bin Laden. Parry explains that Romney credits a lot of this to the U.S. military as if Obama had nothing to do with it.

Once more, Obama’s foreign policy has much about it that can be criticized. So, why do it through sheer falsehoods? Perhaps because Romney actually has no problem with Obama’s actions, but does not want the public to associate them with the president.

Then there is Romney’s sudden embracing of a Palestinian state when just a few months ago he described such a goal as “almost unthinkable to accomplish.” At that time the reason he gave for his position was that Palestinians are not interested in peace.

That was an outrageous lie.

It is hard to believe that he has now changed his mind. More likely he is attempting to preclude any charge that he has abandoned the search for peace, even as he asserts that Obama has not displayed leadership toward that same end.
When it comes to the Arab Spring, Obama allegedly missed “an historic opportunity to win new friends and share our values in the Middle East.” Who would these friends be? Those fighting against “evil tyrants and angry mobs who seek to harm us.”

This is so much gobbledygook. Most of the evil tyrants are our longstanding old friends and the angry mobs are the only hope for any governmental improvement.

Parry points out that the real difference between Romney and Obama is that Romney is much more the militarist. He has embraced neocon advisers, given carte blanche to Israel and verbally attacked Russia as “without question, our No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

All of this suggests that between Obama (who is certainly no saint and has plenty of blood on his own hands) and Romney, it is the latter who is more likely to get the nation into yet another war. As Juan Cole has observed, “wars and lots of other conflicts are not a foreign policy vision, they are a nightmare.”

Does Lying Work?

So, does this serial falsification work? Can it actually help get a mythomanic elected president? It seems that the answer is yes.

According to a Pew Research Center poll taken after the first Obama-Romney debate, “It’s official. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney…erased President Barack Obama’s lead.” According to a graph of the poll results Romney’s picked up five percentage points to come even with Obama. Sixty-four percent of voters “thought that Romney was more informative than President Obama.”

The liar is more informative!? How is that possible? Well, you start with a lot of ignorance. The ignorance is not a function of lack of intelligence, but a function of lack of accurate contextual knowledge.
As a consequence the level of understanding of the average American about government policy on national issues such as health care, energy independence, job creation, the deficit, military spending and even taxes is considerably lower than their average IQ. It is even worse when we get to foreign policy and its formulation.

Into the resulting knowledge vacuum come the misleading statements and assertions of politicians, so-called experts, and media spokesman of all descriptions. Fox News has made millions of dollars selling advertising that accompanies biased opinion passed off as fact.

In the end what the majority of Americans think they know about both domestic and foreign policy is based on media hear-say. Romney’s assertive and stylized lying fits well into this scenario. And his style also passes for strength and self-confidence.

Is it Pathological?

Romney’s lying is so pervasive, so ever-present, that one starts to wonder if it is pathological. There is a mental illness characterized by habitual lying. It goes by the name of Pseudologia Fantastica. Here are some of the characteristics of this ailment:

a. The lies told “are not entirely improbable” and “upon confrontation, the teller can admit them to be untrue, even if unwillingly.” In other words, the liar is aware that he or she is lying.

b. The lies told cast the teller in a favorable light.

c. The tendency to lie is a long-lasting one and not the product of the moment. It reflects an innate trait of the personality.

Well, Romney fits this pattern when it comes to the first two traits. It is hard to tell about the third. We will have to await the in-depth biographies that are certain to hit the market in short order. However, there is no doubt that the man has an easy facility for lying. One doubts if it keeps him up at night.

When the powerful lie it is a problem for all of us. That is because we do not usually act on the basis of what is true. Rather we act on the basis of what we think is true. When it comes to foreign policy, what the powerful and the media tell us is what most of us accept as true.

This distinction between what is true and what we think is true is critically important. If what we believe is true approximates the reality outside of us, then our plans and actions usually work out. If, however, what we think is true is off the mark, we can end up walking right off a cliff.

In the last 50 years Americans have been walking off cliffs quite regularly, with the result that millions have been killed and maimed. They have done so in large part because they have a hard time knowing when they are being lied to, especially about foreign policy.



If the Pew poll cited above is any predictor, nothing is going to change any time soon. Elect Mitt Romney and that walk toward the cliff might turn into a run. Reelect Obama, and the cliff will probably remain our self-destructive destination, but perhaps the
pace will be more measured.

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/10/11...mits-on-lying/

[jack sommerset]

This "bounce" in the debate still has some spring. God bless

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican challenger Mitt Romney has extended his lead over President Barack Obama to 3 percentage points, according to a Reuters/Ipsos tracking poll released on Thursday, ahead of a high-stakes debate between the two candidates' running mates.

http://news.yahoo.com/romney-extends...070151573.html

[ElNono]

This "bounce" in the debate still has some spring. God bless

Not gonna lie, jack, Mitt sure capitalizing on it. Another good read here:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes...staying-power/

[Clipper Nation]

Obama has a history of getting manhandled and having his ass handed to him in debates..

As does Willard...

[jack sommerset]

Not gonna lie, jack, Mitt sure capitalizing on it. Another good read here:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes...staying-power/

I can't see Obama doing much in the debates. He can mudd sling about the 47 percent comment, make some math jokes, talk about possible flip flopping but at some point Romney, the moderators are going to make this guys talk about his record. Those undecided voters prolly will make up their minds this week so IMO, this next debate is freaken HUGE for the dems. Especially considering all those polls going the other direction this close to election time. God bless

[boutons_deux]

"I can't see Obama doing much in the debates"

If St Ronnie can say "Mr Gorbachev, take down that wall", Barry can say "Slimeball Gecko, show The American People 10 years of tax returns".

It's perfectly reasonable to conclude with great confidence that Gecko has something horrible to hide, something he AND he handlers know would be fatal to his campaign.

My guess is he evaded taxes via Switzerland and took up the IRS' offer of amnesty in 2009 to avoid prison for false declaration (ask Wesley Snipes how that works).

[ElNono]

I can't see Obama doing much in the debates. He can mudd sling about the 47 percent comment, make some math jokes, talk about possible flip flopping but at some point Romney, the moderators are going to make this guys talk about his record. Those undecided voters prolly will make up their minds this week so IMO, this next debate is freaken HUGE for the dems. Especially considering all those polls going the other direction this close to election time. God bless

As I said on the actual debate thread, Barry gonna have a hard time spinning the 4 year fest. The good news for him is that Mitt is full of too, so he has something to work with. IMO, undecided voters don't watch the circus unless there's some major gaffe...

[boutons_deux]

lol @ goalpost move. Keep re-framing the argument, bot.

I literally picked the first two I came across. I gave more data in that one post than you give up in a year with your mindless prattle and parade of blog posts. Grow the up.

Inside Bain's Chinese Sensata Factories, Where Workers Put in 12-Hour Days for $.99-$1.35 an Hour



Sensata enjoyed record revenues last year – this isn't about making the “hard choices” necessary to save a failing enterprise. The workers in Freeport have been working 24 hours a day, in three shifts. They make $14-17 per hour, with benefits.


According to a report by the Ins ute for Global Labour and Human Rights, one of Bain's first actions after buying Sensata was to set up “12 Sensata/Bain capital funds 'organized under the laws of the Cayman Islands' so as to avoid paying taxes.” They'll get a small tax break for relocating the plant – the one Mitt Romney insisted did not exist during the first debate – and then use those offshore funds to defer taxes on some of the income the company generates.


American tax-payers, on the other hand, have paid $780,000 to retrain some of Sensata's laid off workers in Illinois, according to the New York Times . One would be hard pressed to come up with a clearer example of capturing private gains while socializing the costs.


Mitt Romney is not directly involved in Bain Capital, but he did build its business model. In 1998, when he was actively running Bain, he personally visited the Global-Tech Appliances plant in Dongguan, China. He witnessed, personally, the horrific conditions the plant's workers were toiling in for .24 cents an hour, and didn't hesitate to invest millions in the firm.

http://www.alternet.org/election-201...ys-99-135-hour

If TB claims Gecko is responsible for ALL of Staples jobs today, then it's completely the same to claim that Gecko is personally responsible for destroy profitable Sensata's jobs in USA.