The Watering Hole: January 13 — When Mitt Romney Came To Town

Posted on by

This is an anti-Romney video paid for by Winning Our Future, a Super PAC that apparently supports Newt Gingrich.

It exposes Mitt Romney’s vulture capitalism with Bain — something we need to know about!  But this is coming from a rightwing PAC, and we should consider the source.  No, I don’t think we need to give Romney any quarter, but I’m suspicious of the motivation behind this video.

A quote early in the video is this, ”but in the wrong hands those dreams can turn into nightmares.”  Hello!?  The people making the video are exactly the people who supported those very actions by every politician coming down the pike for the last thirty years.

Sure, I’m happy Mitt Romney is being exposed, but we need to keep focus on the source.

This is our daily open thread — Thoughts?

About these ads

174 thoughts on “The Watering Hole: January 13 — When Mitt Romney Came To Town”

  3. Obama can pull out any part of that video to use against Romney. Romney’s business plan involved running up debt and then stealing vast amounts of money before crashing the company. What is the one pile of money still sitting in Washington DC? (figuratively) Social Security. These vulture capitalists, Senator Toomey is their champion, have been drooling over SS for years. If they put Romney in the White House, then they can finally get their greedy hands on the rest of our money. Romney’s tax plan will increase our national debt. See a trend here?

    Santorum says poor people are too fat so they don’t need food stamps. It is cheaper to buy processed food which is higher calories and contains MSG and aspartane. Both of these “flavor enhancers” have been proven to increase body fat. I’ll be posting something about that soon.

  5. 12 Correct. I missed the one that is the symbol of Islam. I guess I don’t watch enough Fox News. I’m sure they flash it on there all the time.

  6. About the video above… I tend to agree; we have to take some of this with a grain of salt. It was a hatchet piece done by a right-wing PAC. First of all, we know how right-wingers are with facts. And to be honest, a few of the comments by the people in the clip felt scripted (or at least coached).

    All that said; the clips of Romney himself, and the clips of news reports and articles do help paint a picture of Romney that we’re all suspecting: he’s the real-life embodiment of Gordon Gecko. Perhaps not quite as much of a dick (at least in terms of one-on-one personable nastiness like Gecko); but in terms of greed.

    There was a great images going around a few weeks back talking about hoarding. How a person can be considered a hoarder by collection thousands of something. Yet a person who collects millions (or billions) of dollars isn’t a hoarder.

    It would be a great visual image to take stuff a house full of millions of dollar bills (okay play money would be fine). Just to see it everywhere. And do a clip interviewing the wealthy person; just like they do on the show Hoarders.

    • I don’t have a problem with other people speaking a second language… IMHO more Americans should.

      But I do think that it is telling that the R’s use it as a club. Or is it just the French language that they use as a club?

      • The R’s will use anything as a club. If it’s different from what they do, then it’s wrong.

        And, I do agree, that being multi-lingual can be a huge asset. Sadly, too many Americans (registered Republicans) can barely speak English.

  8. The irony of this test in my world is the fact that it was sent to me by rabid republican.
    He didn’t mention his score…

      • Yeah, I could have said foaming at the mouth, howling at moon, eats his own feces and plays with imaginary friends, republican. and it would all be redundant.

  9. Rachel raised a good point last night. By now, we’ve all heard the story of Mitt Romney’s dog riding on the roof of his car. And we’ve all heard him say how much the dog enjoyed doing it. But she pointed out some things that are nto part fo the narrative, and it was awkward for her to do it because it’s an unpleasant subject. (WARNING: This may be a little gross for some.)

    First if all, it was a 12-hour trip from Boston to Toronto that the family made each year. (My thought: Vacationing in the USA ain’t good enough for you, Mitt?) Anyway, at one point during the trip, the son who was sitting in the back of the wood-paneled station wagon noticed a brown liquid dripping down the rear window. After screaming in disguist, his brothers started getting grossed out, too. Mitt heard their screams, calmly pulled off the hhighway into a service station, borrowed a hose, hosed off the car and the dog, put the dog right back up in the carrier, and calmly continued on to Toronto. This was supposedly hailed as an example of Romney’s emotion-less crisis management style, but it also shows his inhumanity to his dog. Clearly the dog was not “enjoying” the ride and was in some kind of obvious distress.

    I really have to get back to work. See you all later.

    • There’s clearly something missing in the emotional make-up of this man …. something that most people have and most sociopaths do not.

    • Even when I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth, I found the money to rent a large enough vehicle to accommodate the whole family, dog included. Mittens couldn’t do that?

    • Then he says the dog was in an “air-tight container.” No wonder the dog was shitting himself — he couldn’t fucking breathe for 12 hours.

      He views human beings as tools from which to create wealth for himself, so why wouldn’t he treat a dog like that?

  11. Back to the original subject of the post.

    I would submit to all Reagan Republicans, Ron Paulistas, fundies and Mor(m)ons (hopefully I have covered most of them), that Mitt Romney is in fact the embodiment of your values and mantras. Mitt takes the literal meaning of the Parable of Talents that you all subscribe to (instead of remembering ‘hey its a parable, the Dude is talking about me and love and making a difference in the world and … ‘) and hits the ball out of the park.

    The fact is the this is the system you worship more than you worship the message that your supposed Saviour, Teh Dude, Joe Smith, Jim Jones, Bill and Ted or whoever had to offer about love and how to live your life. The fact is that you worship money and the raw brutality of the ‘free market’ no matter how inhuman. The truth is your value system needs the Mitt Romneys. He is the hyena that picks over the carcass of those losers in the endless game of survival of the fittest played out on the Serengeti you call Wall Street. As the flies buzzed and the vultures circled and cawed jealously, Mitt Romney shoved his bloody stinking head into the rotten entrails of company after company and did what his instinct told him to do.

    Welcome to your world Reagan Republicans, Paulistas, Christ-Fascists and Mor(m)ons, Jim Jones wanna-bes and the rest of you ignorant bigots who call this value-system ‘the Execptional American Way’, look it in the face, embrace it and vote for it again, because it’s simply in your nature…..

    The rest of us will get some popcorn crack a cold one of choice and, as George Carlin put it, ‘sit back and watch the Freak Show’. At least we will for now.

    • What makes the video so dangerous to Romney, is that Bain-Boy didn’t just fire thousands of working class people in restructuring and in closing companies. He made a fucking unimaginable fortune doing it. That’s the issue.

      Other Republicans can speak about the need for free markets in a sluggish economy. But with Romney, we have a focused example of someone who made a quarter of a billion dollars by firing the white middle and working class in droves in ways that do not seem designed to promote growth or efficiency, but merely to enrich Bain. As an emotional bludgeon, it’s devastating.

        • Well if Bain is a person, then so is Stage Stores, American Pad and Paper.

          Bain is the hoodlum waiting in the dark alleyway for Stage Stores to close up after a hard day, after all the staff have gone off to their families.

          Bain waits in the shadows near Stage Stores car, sneaks up as Stage Stores puts a box of papers to work on a home in the car, then grabs them from behind knifing across the gut with a cruel serrated blade.

          Then as the entrails of this fine upstanding company spill on to the ground, the hoodlum grinds a broken bottle into his face. Stage Stores has no chance and Bain feasts on his guts and brains for a while before hacking off a limb to save for later… and of course stealing Stage Stores wlallet and the cash box lying in the back seat….

          …. crime remains unsolved like so many others…

  12. Geeze, from The New York Post, of all places:

    “Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, bought companies and often increased short-term earnings so those businesses could then borrow enormous amounts of money. That borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends. Then those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts…”

    * Bain in 1988 put $5 million down to buy Stage Stores, and in the mid-’90s took it public, collecting $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

    * Bain in 1992 bought American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), investing $5 million, and collected $100 million from dividends. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

    * Bain in 1993 invested $60 million when buying GS Industries, and received $65 million from dividends. GS filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

    * Bain in 1997 invested $46 million when buying Details, and made $93 million from stock offerings. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003.

    Romney’s Bain invested 22 percent of the money it raised from 1987-95 in these five businesses, making a $578 million profit.

    http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/ad_mitt_mistakes_jRmd2LHaPIb0bbNn1ZkgaJ

  13. About the clip… well, you can’t spell Romney without “m,o,n,e,y”

    Heck of a hit piece. But then is Newt going to position himself as really that much different? Newt started down this road…

  14. I must say, I would love to see a debate between President Obama and Stephen Colbert.

  15. Right wing is backing off attacks on Bain and vulture capitalism.

    Interestingly, the article suggests that by not continuing to attack Romney on this now may actually hurt him later:

    If Romney were forced to defend his corporate record now, he’d have the chance to practice and ultimate hone his response to what everyone knows is going to be the main attack against him this fall. And, as we saw with last week’s “pink slip” and “I like to be able to fire people” lines, Romney could use some practice on the whole responding to the attacks thing.

    Now, of course, we have to hope that the left-wing PAC’s just bury Romney with this, particularly in the rust-belt. “I Like to be able to fire people” may not play well in areas still reeling from high unemployment, and the destruction of the middle class.

  18. The U.S. has identified all four marines who urinated on the corpses of Taliban fighters and may charge them with “a war crime,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Marines were part of a sniper team in a 1,000 man battalion that recently returned from Afghanistan to Camp LeJuene, North Carolina, where the men “apparently started showing the video around as a war trophy.”

    But Bush & Cheney still walk free…

  19. Judge orders removal of school prayer mural

    “U.S. District Judge Ronald Lagueux rejected the school’s claims that the message in the mural – which opens with “Our Heavenly Father” and closes with “Amen” – was purely secular.
    “No amount of debate can make the School Prayer anything other than a prayer, and a Christian one at that,” Lagueux wrote in a 40-page opinion.”

    • They made that “purely secular” argument with straight faces, did they?

      Good to know there’s still a Judge out there with common sense.

  23. wow, 13.
    There were a couple that I wasn’t sure of; Sonia Sotomayor, and I had to remember that Steve Jobs did not found Apple by himself.

  24. Beware the transgender people.

    So Richard Floyd, when exactly did you choose to not be transgender? C’mon man! Some people are born with an 11th digit AND a nice rack! And those are the ‘obvious’ ones. Others are physically one gender and their brains are wired as the other. Once again, no possible way for any grey area with some people.

    • stomp a mudhole: To tear someone a new ass, to beat them to near death or to otherwise hurt someone to the point that they can not fight back.

      What else can we expect from a fraidy cat cracka?

    • This a logical extension of the mind set that thinks people should only be exposed to the nekkidness of people of the same gender. Why they don’t think that segregating young children in gym class showers might give them the dreaded gay thoughts is beyond me. And they are the same types who would wail the tar out of little Johnny if they catch him with a Playboy.

  25. QOTD:

    “I think, in fact, what President Obama is doing is something that America’s enemies–the Taliban, al Qaeda–have been unable to do, which is to decimate the fighting capability of this nation,” – Liz Cheney, Fox News.

  26. Is there NOTHING Mitt Romney won’t lie about? Even his own mother?

    “The Real Romney” authors Michael Kranish and Scott Helman found a May 1970 story from a Owosso, Michigan, newspaper in which Lenore Romney says of the abortion issue:
    “I think we need to reevaluate this, but do not feel it is simple as having an appendectomy. … I’m so tired of hearing the argument that a woman should have the final word on what happens to her own body. This is a life.”

    He touted his mother’s strong pro-choice feelings for years, and it was simply never true.

    Before converting to his present anti-choice position in 2005, Mitt Romney touted his mother’s strong choice credentials as proof of his own commitment to preserving women’s access to abortion. “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country; I have since the time that my mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a U.S. Senate candidate,” Romney said during his bid for the Senate in 1994.

    • From the above book, here’s the description of a classic success in Romney’s business record:

      “In 1996, Bain invested $27 million as part of a deal with other firms to acquire Dade International, a medical diagnostics equipment firm, from its parent company, Baxter International. Bain ultimately made ten times its money, getting back $230 million. But Dade wound up laying off more than 1600 people and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2002, amid crushing debt and rising interest rates. The company, with Bain in charge, had borrowed heavily to do acquisitions, accumulating $1.6 billion in debt by 2000. The company cut benefits for some workers at the acquired firms and laid off others. When it merged with Behring Diagnostics, a German company, Dade shut down three US plants. At the same time, Dade paid out $421 million to Bain Capital’s investors and investing partners.”

  27. Howard Gleckman explains carried interest, often referred to as “the carry”:

    “The carry allows general partners in investment deals to receive compensation in the form of tax-advantaged capital gains, which are taxed at 15 percent, rather than as salary, which would be taxed as ordinary income with a top rate of 35 percent. This happens because the managers are paid with a fee (up to 2 percent) plus 20 percent or more of their investor’s profits. Those profits are taxed as capital gains even though the general partners may have little or no money of their own at risk in the deal.”

    http://tinyurl.com/7bg5k72

    So you make millions off companies, even when they go bankrupt, and you get taxed at rates the middle class would love to pay. Run on that in Ohio.

      • Thank you lovely lady!

        BTW So far today my computer has only crashed once!! Wednesday and Thursday I was crashing 3 – 4 times an hour. Microsoft sent me 11 updates trying to correct my problems. I finally uninstalled Java and Shockwave and started over. Shockwave hasn’t crashed in the last hour but I lose sound and have to close the browser completely. Before I had to reboot to get sound back, so I guess that’s progress of some sort.

    • “Colbert could not get on the ballot in South Carolina – the November 1 deadline for doing so has come and gone – and the state does not provide a space for write-in votes in primaries. “South Carolina state law does not allow any write-in ballots in presidential primaries. There is no blank space on voting machines to write in a candidate,” said Matt Moore, executive director of the South Carolina GOP.”

      • “no blank space on voting machines to write in a candidate”

        Welcome to your Democracy ™. Brought to you by the Chamber of Commerce, and sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute etc etc…. you know the list

    • Awesome, so the SC primary next week is where the nations Muslim Republicans (all three of them is it?) get to pick their candidate?

      Or should I just go:
      “get-tha-f**k-out-of the country you terrorist-lovin’ South Carolina camel-jockeys” and appease my innner Limbaugh?

      • “I have a rendition to Gitmo for someone called Pachy! A rendition to Gitmo for Pachy!”

      • Fezzes are cool.

        Yeah, I remember that episode of lunacy from Beck as well. It’s one of those moments, when you really just have to stop and shake your head, and ask “Really? This is what we’re talking about now?”

  34. Gingrich leads among evangelical Christians with 40%, followed by Perry with 15%, Romney with 13%, Santorum with 12%, and Paul with 10%.

    An op-ed from a Reagan Republican. Money quote:

    “I am not a conspiracy theorist. I do not believe for one moment that if a Mormon like Mitt Romney were elected president he would be a puppet controlled by the Mormon hierarchy. But even if he kept his faith completely private, the election of a Mormon president would, ipso facto, swathe Mormonism in a respectability that it has long coveted. Such respectability would aid the church in making converts, particularly among the less-educated people of the developing world, where Mormonism is winning most of its new adherents these days. Thus, to vote for a Mormon for president would be, however unwittingly or indirectly, to assist in the propagation of a religion which, whatever good works it may be doing along the way, is still disturbingly like a cult.”

    http://punditwire.com/2012/01/11/should-mormonism-matter/

    Ouch, no wonder Mitt is behind Perry with Evangelicals.

    • I’ll be kind and just say a LOT of these candidates have a really short attention span when it comes to policy and details. They’re “headlines” kind of people.

    • Rick should read the book I just finished on the War of 1812. “Born great”? Just another Republic who never read any history.

      • War for 1812?

        Home win for Canada, eh? And they looked away from home too, scoring on the road in Washington DC early in the second half. A late substitution bringing on Andy Jackson, helped the US salvage a point in a match that all the pundits agreed with US blowhard and head coach, James Madison, the US should have dominated from the start, eh?

        With most of Canada’s depth in the squad back in Europe, contesting a highly competitive Champions League against Napoleon Bonaparte’s ‘FC Revolutionary France 1789′ team, the Canadians can be proud of their performance tonight, so back to you in the studio, Brian, eh?

  37. POLITICO Breaking News
    ————————————————-
    A U.S. district judge in Richmond ruled Friday against a suit aimed at placing Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum on the Virginia ballot for the Republican primary March 6. The suit followed Gingrich’s and Perry’s failure to meet the signature requirement last month. Mitt Romney and Ron Paul were the only candidates who qualified for the ballot.

    For more information… http://www.politico.com

    It will be interesting to see what percentage of the vote either of these clowns gets against just the other. I would love to see a “None of the Above” choice on the ballot. Then neither one would likely get more than 20% (IMHO).

    • Hurrah! Another “activist judge”!

      -

      I’m thinking Paul will win that one. How could the fundies reconcile their consciences voting for a “cultist” in Mittens?

      • I think that because the race is between two and only two people (and write-ins are not allowed, if I remember right?), the pundits will dismiss any meaning that can be derived from the results. The results will count, but no one is going to say that either of them was really tested since many of the other candidates weren’t participating. Besides, they’re going to call it after South Carolina and to hell with the other 46 states.

  38. Second alternate quote of the day (Although it was actually said some time ago.) Monica “Creepy” Crowley said:

    “For years, the left has been lying and smearing about the right, and the right has just sat there and taken it time and again.”

    Obviously, due to the fact that she didn’t burst into flames, we have a bit more proof that God doesn’t watch FAUX”News”.

    http://mediamatters.org/research/201201120021#comments

    • Monica can I borrow that projector this weekend please, I’ve rented Bladerunner Director’s Cut, see?

    • “sat there and taken it”??? Was she being serious??? For chrissakes, whenever you say anything remotely negative but absolutely true about the right, they go ape-shit. And then they lie about the left. Been doing that since before she was born.

      • I still find it impossible to tell if and when they believe the crap that comes from their mouths. In Crowley’s case I tend towards the conclusion that she knows she’s lying so, no, she’s not “being serious”.

    • Monica Crowley is the reason I quit watching McLaughlin Group. I could take Blankley and Buchanan together easier than I can stand her.

  41. I saw this on my phone at work today, but I can’t make comments from it, or I would have put this out sooner.

    In Italy, The ‘Poor’ Drive Ferraris

    On Monti’s orders, tax police swooped down on a half a dozen ski resorts and seaside spas, gathering evidence of tax evasion. A single raid on five-star hotels and Michelin-starred restaurants in the Dolomite ski resort of Cortina found 42 so-called supercars with an average price tag of 200,000 euros registered to owners squeaking by on less than 20,000 euros each year.

    Italian newspapers have labeled the offending group the “pretend poor.” Government officials promise more raids to come.

    The problems in all these countries has become the unrealistic expectations of the super rich. And if those in one country skip paying taxes with a corrupt system, then they all think they should get away with it.

  42. Apparently Richard Gere was Mitt Romney in Pretty Woman:

    [Fumbling with his tie, Edward (Richard Gere) tells Vivian (Julia Roberts) about his business.]
    Vivian (Julia Roberts): You don’t actually have a billion dollars, huh?
    Edward )Richard Gere): No. I get some of it from banks, investors… it’s not an easy thing to do.
    Vivian: And you don’t make anything…
    Edward: No.
    Vivian: … and you don’t build anything.
    Edward: No.
    Vivian: So whadda ya do with the companies once you buy ‘em?
    Edward: I sell them.
    [Viv reaches for his tie.]
    Vivian: Here, let me do that. You sell them.
    Edward: Well, I… don’t sell the whole company, I break it up into pieces, and then I sell that off, it’s worth more than the whole.
    Vivian: So, it’s sort of like, um… stealing cars and selling ‘em for parts, right?
    Edward: [sighs exasperatedly] Yeah, sort of. But legal.

  43. Leave Willard alone! He’s a person! He has feelings!

    Lets see…2012, A year when our next president could be a magic underwear wearing member of a death cult and the Mayan calender…hmmm….nah…. ;)

  44. I recently saw a clip of Willard defending putting the family dog in kennel and traveling with the dog in kennel on the roof of his gold plated Hummer (or whatever it drives) and Willard replied “The kennel was air tight”.

    So Willard….how exactly does Fluffy breath in an air tight kennel?

      • And if it was air tight why did he put a wind shield in front of it as he said he did? The poor dog was probably so scared that it resulted in him shitting, I understand that that behavior, shitting out of fear, is known as a “romney”.

    • Actually it was a white wood-paneled station wagon.

      I’m not sure Romney knows what “airtight” means. If it was truly airtight, the dog would not have survived a 12-hour trip.

    • Yep. I fail to see a moral difference between inSeannity and Ahmadinejad. And, with freaks like inSeannity saying such things, who can blame the Iranians for taking measures to ensure their security?

  47. Koch Brothers’ front group announces grades for Congress. Five senators, 39 representatives get A+

    Americans for Prosperity, founded and heavily financed by the thieving, polluting, climate change-denying, tea party-backing David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch, have posted a voting scorecard for the first half of the 112th Congress. Five Republican senators and 39 Republican congresspersons got perfect 100 percent scores. Every single one of them a Republican. The senators are Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Mike Crapo of Idaho, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Marco Rubio of Florida and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.

    Also on the Koch honor roll, but with mere A grades of 90-99 percent, are 8 senators and 45 representatives. Every single one of them a Republican. One senator (Kent Conrad of North Dakota) and 128 representatives got scores of zero. All of them are Democrats.

  48. Well, this week I learned that there’s two things that I can stay up past 8pm for now that I’m working day shift: Alabama football and Real Time With Bill Maher. Next week is a can’t-miss show. Bill Moyers, Bernie Sanders and Jennifer Granholm are on the guest list.

    • Bernie and JENNIFER – that’ll make your night, House!

      I always enjoy Moyers – thoughtful, thought-provoking and a decent human being.

      • Hi Ebb.
        Well, I know Moyers and Granholm have new shows to plug, and Bernie’s still talking up his constitutional amendment to end corporate personhood. By next Friday Thom Hartmann will be back to normal (he’s in Europe this week), so I expect they will mention Bernie’s appearance on Real Time.

Comments are closed.