At least that was the headline in the UK Newspaper “The Sun” and other UK papers this morning….
Seems his diplomacy trip has made quite the impression…
Just not the one he intended…
He makes George W Bush look like a skilled diplomat….
Here is a great summary of his Greatest Diplomatic Blunders- so far:
Filed under Politics, Uncategorized
Romney has to be the biggest trickster since Nixon…
And at least Nixon was good to his dog….
This is an amazing-and amazingly inept- attempt at Media manipulation….
This man is dumber than W and more dishonest than Nixon….
It’s a good thing he’s not too bright or he would really be dangerous with all that money….
An official with the NAACP suggested that Republican challenger Mitt Romney brought his own black supporters to the NAACP speech yesterday to give the appearance that NAACP members were applauding him. And when Romney later told Fox News that black people at the event gave him a standing ovation and said in a private meeting they would vote for him because of dissatisfaction with Obama, they were actually his own people, the official suggested.
The revelation was made on MSNBC’s “Ed Show” by Hilary Shelton, Senior Vice President for Advocacy and Policy and the Director of the Washington Bureau of the NAACP, who said Romney flew in black conservatives to stand up at the end of his speech, allowing Romney to claim he got a standing ovation.
“I spoke with a number of African-American leaders after the event and they said, you know a lot of folks don’t want to say they’re not going to be voting for Barack Obama, but they’re disappointed in his lack of policies to improve our schools,” Romney said in an appearance on Fox, where he said he expected to get booed by the crowd and he also claimed he got a standing ovation. “Disappointed in urban policies, disappointed in the economy. 14.4% rate of unemployment among African-Americans today. The president has not been able to get the job done. People want to see someone who can get the economy going, so I expect to get African-American votes.”
Hilary Shelton told MSNBC host Ed Schultz that the only African Americans Romney met with after his speech were those that he brought with him. He never met with any NAACP members. So while he wasn’t explicitly lying about meeting with black leaders at the convention, either he or somebody on his campaign knew that he was intentionally misleading Fox viewers.
Many analysts have also questioned Romney’s motives behind going to the NAACP convention and purposely inciting the crowd by referring to the healthcare plan as “Obamacare,” a term originated among conservatives and intended to be derogatory name-calling, and saying he would try to repeal it. In a piece on The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky suggested that Romney sought the boos to excite his base of conservative white voters.
via NAACP Official: Romney ‘Flew In’ His Own Blacks to Cheer NAACP Speech.
Filed under Politics, Uncategorized
With friends like this, who needs enemies?
It’s really bad when people in your own Party say an incompetent ignoramus from Alaska is a “better candidate”…
Mittens is really having a rough week….
Good!
From TalkingPointsMemo:
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) defended Mitt Romney from Democratic speculation that he passed on him as a 2008 running mate after reviewing his tax returns, saying Sarah Palin was simply the better choice at the time.
McCain called the tax claims “outrageous” and “disgraceful” in an interview with Politico Tuesday. He said he chose Palin “because we thought that Sarah Palin was the better candidate.”
via John McCain: I Didn’t Pick Romney Because ‘Sarah Palin Was The Better Candidate’ | TPM2012.
Filed under Elections, Politics, Uncategorized
All this stuff about Romney and Bain Capital isn’t new.
He’s just upset because it has been used effectively against him before and he hoped to avoid it happening again….
Here is an ad Ted Kennedy rain against Mitt Romney when Romney ran his losing campaign against Kennedy for the Massachusetts U. S, Senate seat in 1994.
And here’s some info from ThinkProgress.org today on what’s behind this current controversy…
No wonder Romney is trying to get people to stop talking about this stuff….
Critics have highlighted a number of businesses that were bought by Bain Capital and then reorganized to maximize profit for the investment firm, with several falling into bankruptcy and vanishing entirely. In several instances however, Mitt Romney defended his candidacy by pointing out that he left Bain Capital in 1999 to run the 2002 Winter Olympics, before those companies began their collapse. With a new timeline that shows Romney was the CEO and principle owner of Bain Capital as late as 2003, that defense now sounds much more questionable. Here are four companies that folded or downsized in the three year period after Romney claimed to have left Bain Capital:
– GS Industries – 750 Jobs Lost: In a series of ads earlier this year, the Obama campaign hit Romney over Bain Capital’s purchase of GS Industries, a steel company that closed its Kansas City plant and eliminated 750 jobs in February 2001. The Romney campaign responded by claiming that Romney had left Bain Capital well before 2001, and was therefore not tied to the collapse of the GS. Bain Capital and its executives, including Mitt Romney, earned at least $12 million on the initial investment.
– KB Toys – Up to 3,500 Jobs Lost: During the primary season, Newt Gingrich’s 30 minute documentary on Romney and Bain Capital spent a significant amount of time focused on KB Toys, a retail chain bought by Bain in 2000. At the time, the Romney campaign, with an assist from fact-checking groups like PolitiFact, pointed to the calendar. As these new filings show, Romney was still very much at Bain Capital when they purchased KB Toys, and profited mightily when the company took out crippling loans to pay Bain Capital an $83 million dividend.
– Dade International – 1,700 Jobs Lost: Months after Romney claims to have left the company, Bain Capital received a $242 million bounty for its stake in the medical supply company. Romney profited substantially from the deal. In 2002, Dade International filed for bankruptcy, costing more than 1,700 people their jobs. At the time, Romney was the 100 percent owner of Bain Capital, the new documents show.
–DDi Corporation – 275 Jobs Lost: In 1996, the circuit board manufacturer was bought by a group of investors, with Bain Capital in the lead, for more than $40 million. By December 1999, DDi closed a Colorado plant and fired 275 workers. Bain Capital, with Romney still listed as Chairman and CEO, then proceeded to take DDi public, raising $170 million during the company’s IPO in 2000. Over the next few months, Bain began selling off its stock, raising almost $100 million, more than doubling its investment. The stock plummeted shortly thereafter.
In all, as many as 6,000 jobs were lost at these four companies during the period between when the Romney campaign alleges he retired, and when the Globe’s report suggests he actually stepped down.
MORE: The Bain Job Losses Mitt Romney Doesn’t Want You To Know About | ThinkProgress.
Filed under Elections, Politics, Uncategorized
You can argue that elections ought to be about real issues….
That’s how the Democrats lose so many elections they should win.
The Republicans always go for diversions and attack ads, while the Democrats wring their hands, take the high road and lose….
Well, I ‘m glad President Obama’s campaign has apparently seen the light.
The attacks on Romney and Bain Capital are off subject, but brilliant.
And they are working….
If you are going to fight dirty tricks like Karl Rove and the GOP pulls, you have to be willing to join them in the gutter.
And listen to them scream “unfair” when someone does to them what they’ve been doing to others for years….
The next white shoe to drop will be Romney’s tax avoidance…..
Joe Klein at Time gets it….
Back in June of 1988, Lee Atwater took me aside and showed me some stuff that Bush the Elder’s campaign had developed against Michael Dukakis, who was then enjoying a 17-point advantage in the polls. The “stuff” seemed laughable. Dukakis hadn’t signed an order requiring schoolchildren in Massachusetts to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He had once said that he was a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.” The most damaging bit was that he’d run a weekend parole program for prisoners, which had been abused by several inmates. (If I remember correctly, Atwater didn’t lay out the sordid details of the Willie Horton case.) In any event, I thought these “issues” were fairly pathetic–and they were. But…
They proved to be devastating. Part of it was the Dukakis campaign’s ineptitude when it came to responding–a consequence that led directly to the establishment of Bill Clinton‘s famed “War Room” in 1992. But more important, this coordinated campaign ”defined” Dukakis as an out-of-touch, soft-on-crime Massachusetts liberal, a prisoner of the “Harvard boutique” etc etc etc. He spent the entire summer on the defensive. I still think the pledge of allegiance stuff was pretty silly–Dukakis had refused to require children to say the pledge in order to honor the beliefs of Jehovah’s Witnesses–but it was a nail in a brilliantly constructed coffin.
Fast forward to now. Mitt Romney is experiencing a Dukakis-like summer playing defense. The Obama campaign has also constructed a brilliant coffin, custom-made for a turnaround artist. There are many nails in this coffin, some more important than others. The nails are being hammered in a natural progression. There is a logic to this. The current controversy over whether Romney was or was not running Bain capital during the years 1999-2002 is a relatively minor nail–the functional equivalent of the Pledge of Allegiance. Bain was involved in the global economy during those years. This meant outsourcing jobs to places like Mexico and China, which meant the creative destruction of obsolete jobs here at home. Whether Romney was directing them or not, these activities were perfectly legal. That doesn’t matter, though: there is confusion about why he was still listed as the boss if he wasn’t really the boss, which seems shifty. And there’s the question of why he was making tons of money if he wasn’t the boss, which is what this is really all about.
You can always tell when Mitt Romney is lying….
It’s anytime he opens his mouth….
Sounds like he’s trying to gloss over all the bad coverage for getting booed at the NAACP speech today…..
From TalkingPoints Memo:
After his speech to the NAACP national convention Wednesday, Romney said he connected with black leaders in private and was assured that the loud and sustained booing he got for promising to repeal the health care reform law didn’t represent the feelings of all African American voters, even if they can’t say so in public.
“I spoke with a number of African-American leaders after the event and they said, you know, a lot of folks do not want to say they will not vote for President Obama but they are disappointed in his lack of policies to improve the schools,” Romney told Fox, according to a rush transcript. “The president has not been able to get the job done and people want to see someone would can get the economy going so I expect to get the African American votes, and at the end of my speech having a standing ovation was generous and hospitable and I believe we disagree on some issues like ‘Obamacare’ on a lot of issues people see eye to eye, they want someone getting the economy going.”
Polls show Romney has made no inroads with the African American electorate. He’s pulling single-digit support among black voters in the PollTracker Average. But by Romney’s account, it’s possible black voters are simply afraid to tell pollsters their real feelings.
It seems Mitt Romney’s dog has recorded his own music video….
This story says so much about Romney’s character- or lack there of–I’m really glad it won’t go away….
I’m also glad Seamus finally gets to put forth his point of view of the infamous episode….
Filed under Pets, Politics, Uncategorized
Well, if it wasn’t clear before, this certainly makes it clearer….
Mitt Romney is the Chosen One of the 1%….
I just hope the 99% of the rest of us turn out to vote against this out-of-touch, elitist schmuck…
From the Washington-Post:
One of Mitt Romney’s strongest assets as the GOP presidential front-runner is also a potentially serious liability in the race: his heavy reliance on a small group of millionaires and billionaires for financial support.
A quarter of the money amassed by Romney’s campaign and an allied super PAC has come from just 41 people, each of whom has given more than $100,000, according to a Washington Post analysis of disclosure data. Nearly a dozen of the donors have contributed $1 million or more.
The preponderance of mega-rich supporters poses a political challenge for Romney, who has struggled for weeks over questions about his vast wealth, his history as a private equity manager and a series of gaffes that seemed to highlight his privileged station. He stumbled again on Wednesday when he told a CNN interviewer that he was “not concerned about the very poor, because they have a safety net.”
via Mitt Romney relying heavily on small group of super-rich donors – The Washington Post.
Filed under Politics
I think how one treats one’s pets says more about their character than just about anything else….
And Mitt Romney showed a careless disregard for the comfort, feelings and safety of his pet when he put him in a crate on the top of the car and drove for 12 hours on vacation…
I don’t see how we can expect him to treat people any less callously…
Even most Conservative Republicans treat their dogs better than Romney did…
He’s really in a league of his own here and to me it shows a total lack of compassion, poor judgement, objectification of animals and pretty poor critical thinking skills…
Here’s an excerpt from great column from Susan Estrich in the Courier Post about Romney and how he treated his dog…
Apparently she agrees with me…..
Presidential elections are, in a very fundamental way, tests of character. You can’t predict all the issues or crises that will face the person you elect president, which means that character, ultimately, counts for more than position papers and platforms.
And in my book, as a dog lover, nothing tells you as much about a person’s character as how they treat their dog.
So what are we to make of that infamous family vacation during which Romney put the dog in a crate on top of the car — for 12 hours? Or the more recent revelations that the dog and the crate had to be hosed down a few hours into the trip when his bowels gave way?
Filed under Uncategorized
I’ll keep saying it over and over: There is no reason to vote for a Republican unless you are a millionaire only interested in trying to protect your own interests.
Here, American’s favorite Billionaire, calls Romney out on that point:
From ThinkProgress.org:
Last week, Mitt Romney finally admitted that he pays a tax rate of 15 percent, lower than that of many middle-class families. Romney is taxed at such a low rate because, as he freely admits, all of his income comes from investments, and is thus subject to the top capital gains tax rate of 15 percent, rather than the top income tax rate of 35 percent.
However, Romney has refused to sign on to the Obama administration’s “Buffett rule,” which aims to ensure that millionaires can’t dodge taxes to the extent that they’re paying less than teachers. Today, billionaire investor Warren Buffett himself was asked about Romney’s tax rate, replying that letting millionaire investors like Romney pay such low taxes is “the wrong policy” because he makes his income by just “shoving around money”:
He makes his money the same way I make my money. He makes money by moving around big bucks, not by straining his back and going to work cleaning the toilets or whatever it may be. He makes it shoving around money. I make it shoving around money. If you look at the 400 highest incomes in the United States, they average $220 million. Something like 90 of them are effectively unemployed. They have no earned income, and that number has gone up over the years. […]
It’s the wrong policy to have. Nothing wrong about [Romney] doing that. He will not pay more than the law requires. I don’t fault him for that in the least, but I do fault the law that allows him and me, earning enormous sums to pay over all federal taxes at a rate that is about half what the average person in my office pays.
Lost in the 21st Century 