The Impending Romney Loss and What It Means

[Hodgson]

British bookies know the pulse of America's heartland?

Doubtful.

I'd take those odds. Wish I knew how to bet.

[Scanner]

Dogpatch:"I would like to see Romney win but it seems the Gods have spoken"

Or as is the case for a Western Democracy, the people have spoken (to pollsters).

[Charles J. White]

RedGreen:"Canada is basically a US vassal state.

I'm not saying that's good or bad, only that it is."

I'm saying you are simply wrong. If you were right Canuck troops would have been committed to Iraq, but the Canadian gov't of the day had no interest in Iraq (correctly), and made no effort to support the US invasion.

There is a big difference between 'ally' and 'client state'.

That is because Chretien kept us out of Iraq for the most part, and was also the kind of guy who balanced budgets and paid down net debt - he was a leader

[Dogpatch]

RedGreen:"Canada is basically a US vassal state.

I'm not saying that's good or bad, only that it is."

I'm saying you are simply wrong. If you were right Canuck troops would have been committed to Iraq, but the Canadian gov't of the day had no interest in Iraq (correctly), and made no effort to support the US invasion.

There is a big difference between 'ally' and 'client state'.

That is because Chretien kept us out of Iraq for the most part, and was also the kind of guy who balanced budgets and paid down net debt - he was a leader

Not so Charles

Chretien had the CF on alert in case the UN OK'd the Iraq war - Chretien was a man of many things but he was not a leader

[Charles J. White]

RedGreen:"Canada is basically a US vassal state.

I'm not saying that's good or bad, only that it is."

I'm saying you are simply wrong. If you were right Canuck troops would have been committed to Iraq, but the Canadian gov't of the day had no interest in Iraq (correctly), and made no effort to support the US invasion.

There is a big difference between 'ally' and 'client state'.

That is because Chretien kept us out of Iraq for the most part, and was also the kind of guy who balanced budgets and paid down net debt - he was a leader

Not so Charles

Chretien had the CF on alert in case the UN OK'd the Iraq war - Chretien was a man of many things but he was not a leader

You must have missed the words "for the most part", I'm aware of that

[Red Green]

British bookies know the pulse of America's heartland?

Doubtful.

I'd take those odds. Wish I knew how to bet.

You can open up an InTrade account. I don't think the odds are quite what that bookie is offering, but they still favor Obama.

[Dogpatch]

Published: Aug. 10, 2012 Updated: Aug. 11, 2012 8:58 a.m.

Mark Steyn: Obama the great disabler

The other day, I passed a Republican Party county office here in my home state, its window attractively emblazoned with placards declaring "Believe in America. Romney 2012" and "New Hampshire Believes. Romney 2012." There's not a lot of evidence for the latter proposition, but I'm certainly willing to believe that Romney believes that New Hampshire believes. An hour or two later, I chanced to be passing a television set just as the station went to break. The words "WE BELIEVE" appeared on the screen, followed by youthful hands raised to a clear blue sky at the dawn of a new day, shafts of sunlight gleaming through ears of corn, a puppy gamboling across a meadow, a kitten playfully pawing, happy green t-shirted volunteers of many races unloading a recycling carton ... and I thought, despite myself, "Well, say what you like, but the reassuring vapidity of the Romney campaign is at least getting more professional." At the end, in the spot where the off-screen voice is supposed to say "I'm Mitt Romney, and I approve this message," it instead said: "Introducing Purina One Beyond: a new food for your cat or dog."

Well, what do I know? By contrast, the Obama campaign's theme is "Forward" – which, in the context of a second term for Mister You-Didn't-Build-That, I'd carelessly assumed was a poignant allusion to "The Charge of the Light Brigade":

'Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!' he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred."

But apparently the focus groups are oblivious to Lord Tennyson, and "Forward" is seen as sunny and optimistic rather than a deranged lemming-like march into the abyss. In that sense, "Forward" is unusually honest for the Democrats, at least compared with their recent assertions that Romney hasn't paid any taxes in 10 years and personally gives women terminal cancer. "Forward" means "Even more of the same": You can't say he isn't warning us.

Against this, Romney offers "Believe in America." It's a slogan designed not to frighten the horses and, like Purina One Beyond, appeal to both cats and dogs, Republicans and Democrats – or at least those mercurial "independents" on whose whims and fancies the fate of the republic depends. If it were up to me, the campaign slogan would be "You're screwed, losers. Steyn 2012" – or, after yielding to the consultants' internals showing that moderates want something more sunny and upbeat, maybe "Get real, you chumps. Steyn 2012." That's the reason I'm not running. Well, that and the Hawaiian birth certificate.

I wouldn't claim to know what America believes or even what "New Hampshire Believes," but this is what I believe – that another four years of the present statist ascendancy will seal America's fate. As noted here previously, the International Monetary Fund predicts that China will become the world's dominant economic power by 2016. So the guy elected in November will be the first president since Grover Cleveland to know what it feels like to be the global also-ran. Even this, however, understates the size of catastrophe the United States faces. There are no precedents in history for a great power spending itself to death on the scale America is doing. Obama has added $5 trillion to the national debt, and has nothing to show for it. Do you know how difficult that is to do? Personal debt per citizen is currently about 50 grand, but at least you got a La-Z-Boy recliner and a gas-fired barbecue out of it. Obama has spent America's future, and left no more trace than if he and his high school "choom gang" had wheeled a barrow of five trillion in large notes behind the gym and used them for rolling paper. Right now, combined total debt in the United States is just shy of $700,000 per family. Add in the so-called "unfunded liabilities" that a normal American business would have to include in its SEC filings but from which U.S. Government accounting conveniently absolves itself, and you're talking about a debt burden per family of about a million bucks. In other words, look around you: the paved roads, the landscaped shopping mall, the Starbucks and the juice bar and the mountain bike store. ... There's nothing holding the joint up.

Hmm. "There's nothing holding the joint up. Steyn 2012": How's that poll with the focus groups? Not exactly "Morning in America," is it? But what happens when you blithely ignore debt for a few decades? Here's a headline from The Wall Street Journal's "Smart Money" this very week: "More retirees are falling behind on student debt, and Uncle Sam is coming after their benefits." Maybe that's the slogan. "It's twilight in America: More retirees are falling behind on student debt."

Half the country is entirely unaware of the existential threat Obama-sized government represents, and Mitt seems in no hurry to alert them to what's at stake, save for occasional warnings that if we're not careful America will end up like Europe. We should be so lucky. The more-likely scenario is something closer to the more corrupt and decrepit fiefdoms of Latin America. Look at the underlying assumptions of the Mitt-gives-you-cancer ad – that in America a businessman is somehow responsible not only for his employee's health, but that of the employee's family members years after said employee has left said employ. No Euro-socialist would even understand the basis of the attack: In its assumptions about the ever-more-tortuous and farther-flung burdens the state can place upon private business, it is quintessentially American.

This election represents the last exit ramp before the death spiral. (Yes, yes, I know: too long for a campaign button.) Obama has spent the past four years making things worse. More debt, more dependency, more delusion. For Act Two, he's now touting the auto bailout as a model for ... everything! "I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry." In the past three years, he has "created" 2.6 million new jobs – a number that does not even keep up with the number of (legal) immigrants who arrive each month. Obama does not "create" jobs, he creates disabled people: In the same period as 2.6 million Americans signed on with new employers, 3.1 million signed on at the Social Security Disability Office. Obama is the first president in history to create more disabled people than workers. He is the biggest creator of disabled people on the planet. He has disabled more people than the Japanese tsunami. More Americans have been disabled by Obama than have been given cancer by Mitt Romney. "Ask yourself, 'Are you more disabled now than you were four years ago?' Obama 2012." Followed by the wheelchair logo with the Obama "O" where the wheel should be. In the Democrats' Dependistan, the wheelchair ramp is downhill all the way.

I support Romney, and I'm not rattled by a bad week's polls. But I am bothered that Romney's insipid message does not rise to the challenge this nation faces. Maybe the milquetoast pantywaist candy-assed soft-focus "Believe in America" shtick will prove sufficient under a relentless barrage of nakedly thuggish attack ads designed to Barry Goldwater the guy. But John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, thinks not: "This is a race he should be able to win," he wrote, "so if he loses, it won't be because Obama won it. It will be because he lost it."

Just so. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. The hour is late, and the man needs to get in the game.
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/ameri ... omney.html

[Red Green]

Good article by Steyn.

What he realizes, without saying so much, is that Romney is running for president so he can get the biggest title one can get in politics. Yeah, governor is great and all, but POTUS is the most exclusive country club on earth! And let's face it, he's got the money, he's got the looks, he's got a crazy bunch of religious weirdos ready to back him..... I mean, he DESERVES to be president.

Romney is not running to fix anything. He doesn't give a flying "F" about anyone in the US except himself and some of his buddies. We got to this point EXACTLY because people go into politics not like the founding fathers did, which was to serve the country and protect their posterity, but rather for the purposes of self-aggrandizement and personal enrichment. The fact is that the country has not been made better by this political class, it has merely survived it but that time is (as Steyn notes) passed. Romney, should he get lucky enough to overcome all his campaigning and get elected, will simply stall the decline of the US empire rather than fix it. In four years there will be another referendum on his approach and if it is deemed satisfactory, the country will get 4 more years of slower decline into abyss and if it is not deemed satisfactory the choice will be faster decline. This is why I believe that we must hope that Romney will be defeated. We cannot afford anymore people looking to join the country club and get the special jacket to wear around and impress their friends. What we need are people who are ideologues, in a good way. People who are there to DO THE THINGS THAT NEED TO BE DONE rather than just join the club. Most likely that will be Rand Paul in 2016 or perhaps one of the other liberty / constitutionalists currently in Congress.

[RedDog]

Romney is not running to fix anything. He doesn't give a flying "F" about anyone in the US except himself and some of his buddies.

I suggest you underestimate America and Americans and what motivates them. Perhaps you haven't been there long enough. Dick Cheney left an $11M/year job as CEO at Halliburton to serve his country again at $300K. It's not always the money. Money was not what he needed.

[DA_Champion]

Romney is not running to fix anything. He doesn't give a flying "F" about anyone in the US except himself and some of his buddies.

I suggest you underestimate America and Americans and what motivates them. Perhaps you haven't been there long enough. Dick Cheney left an $11M/year job as CEO at Halliburton to serve his country again at $300K. It's not always the money. Money was not what he needed.

Cheney is now far richer than he would have been had he stayed at Haliburton.

[Red Green]

Romney is not running to fix anything. He doesn't give a flying "F" about anyone in the US except himself and some of his buddies.

I suggest you underestimate America and Americans and what motivates them. Perhaps you haven't been there long enough. Dick Cheney left an $11M/year job as CEO at Halliburton to serve his country again at $300K. It's not always the money. Money was not what he needed.

Apparently you're delusional enough to think that the only money they get is a salary. Running for office is an investment in one's future for these people. And beyond that it gives them something more than what they can get in the business world: power and influence on a global scale.

There's money and then there's power. They compliment each other.

[Dogpatch]

The Killing

Column: The battle to define Mitt Romney is over—and Romney lost

BY: Matthew Continetti
August 10, 2012 5:00 am

The Massachusetts multimillionaire who won his party’s nomination largely on perceptions of “electability” had become the target of a ferocious blitz of negative advertising. Partisans and media decried many of the attacks as misleading or false. The nominee, busy raising money, had yet to respond with a commensurate ad buy that made the positive case for his candidacy. He relied instead on outside groups to pummel the incumbent’s record. And though unaffiliated consultants worried that the challenger may have unilaterally disarmed in the contest to define his biography, personality, and policies, campaign operatives and their media allies said the race was more or less tied. The choice was made to stay the course, and to accumulate a war chest that could be spent in the fall.

“This decision may be remembered as the most brilliant move of the campaign,” wrote Ryan Lizza, “or the one that cost” the nominee “the presidency. It is a large-scale version of rope-a-dope—allow your opponent to unload with his most powerful punches as you hunker down and bide your time, waiting to unload in the next round, once the other guy has spent himself.”

The “other guy” to whom Lizza referred in his May 3, 2004, New Republic article was of course George W. Bush, whose portrayal of John Kerry as a flip-flopping tax-and-spend liberal weak on national security was a success. President Bush eked out re-election, 51 percent to 48 percent nationally, thanks to a hundred thousand votes in Ohio and some trusty Diebold machines.

Eight years later, the positions are reversed. The incumbent whose poll numbers are in dangerous territory is a Democrat. The Massachusetts multimillionaire is a Republican. It is conservatives who are crying foul over the incumbent and his allies’ negative advertising, not liberals.

What has not changed is the incumbent’s use of donations from millionaires and billionaires to define his opponent in terms anathema to the voters who will decide the election, while in the midst of the onslaught the challenger engages in a version of rope-a-dope. The voters to whom the Bush appeal was targeted in 2004 were the right-leaning independents who may have had second thoughts about the Iraq war after David Kay reported that he had been unable to find weapons of mass destruction, but who also were leery of the ashen-faced and aristocratic liberal from the north.

In 2012 Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, chief strategist David Axelrod, White House senior adviser David Plouffe, and super PAC strategists Bill Burton and Paul Begala are out to disillusion white voters without college degrees in the Rust Belt and Mountain West, who will elect Mitt Romney president if they vote Republican by the 30-point margin they gave the GOP in 2010, but who could also give President Obama a second term if they do not turn out in great numbers, or if their support drops to the 18-point margin they gave John McCain in 2008.

We are therefore witnessing a well-rehearsed and coordinated and almost balletic exercise in voter suppression, as Obama and his helpers spend hundreds of millions of dollars convincing middle America that Romney is a rich elitist who made a fortune in rapacious finance capitalism, and whose concern for the bottom line trumps transparency, compassion, and community. The objective of this campaign is to tie Romney down, Gulliver-like, with connections to the most lurid aspects of Bain Capital and the global economy, thereby hobbling his ability to make his case and dragooning white voters into apathy.

The chief objective of any candidate is to define himself positively and his opponent negatively. Romney has allowed the Obama team to define him in their terms. He has three opportunities—his vice presidential pick, his convention speech, and his performance in the debates—to seize the initiative and escape the fetters Obama has constructed. Failure to do so would leave this close election to chance. Romney risks John Kerry’s fate.

The mystery is why the GOP nominee allowed himself to fall into this trap. He and his team knew the Bain attacks were coming. The late Ted Kennedy used Bain as a cudgel to beat back Romney’s senate challenge in 1994. As early as last August, Politico reported that the Obama campaign’s “mission” was to “destroy Romney.” Both Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich flung Bain at the frontrunner during the Republican primaries. Ann Romney put it well when she told CBS News that the entirety of Obama’s re-election strategy was “let’s kill this guy.” The most senior levels of the Romney campaign had assured conservatives that Republicans were prepared for the attacks on private equity. They’ve had a funny way of showing it.

One has rather had the impression of a campaign overwhelmed by the volume and salaciousness of Obama’s smears. It was May when Axelrod and company loosed Bain on the campaign trail once again, and persisted in the offensive despite protests from Cory Booker, Bill Clinton, Deval Patrick, and other Democrats. That month also saw the political debut of Joe Soptic, the steelworker who lost his livelihood in a Bain deal, and who would star in commercials for both the Obama campaign and the Obama super PAC Priorities USA.

In July the argument intensified, with the Obama and Romney camps squabbling over when exactly the Republican nominee “retroactively retired” from the company he created, with Obama For America deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter suggesting Romney may have committed a felony, and with Obama portraying Romney as a man willing to ship just about every job overseas but his own. In July, too, surrogates for Obama inside and outside the media launched another line of attack that focused on Romney’s reluctance to release his tax returns for years prior to 2010. A high profile report in Vanity Fair suggested Romney was squirreling away money in secret overseas accounts. Other media speculated that Romney did not release the returns because he may have paid an extraordinarily low effective tax rate on investment income. The theories were legion. It did not matter that these allegations were based on absolutely no evidence. It did not matter that Romney has no legal or even moral requirement to release any more returns than he thinks are necessary. What mattered was that suspicions were raised. Doubts were sown. Cynicism spread.

Leave it to Harry Reid to crank the amplifier up to eleven by alleging, without substance, that an anonymous Bain investor once told him Romney had paid no taxes for 10 years. There is no evidentiary hurdle a smear must clear—if a Democrat utters it. Nancy Pelosi stood by our national embarrassment of a Senate majority leader. The Obama campaign released an ad raising the zero percent question and asking, “Isn’t it time for Mitt Romney to come clean?” Meanwhile Joe Soptic returned to the stage in an Obama super PAC advertisement suggesting that Romney was somehow responsible for the death of Soptic’s wife by cancer. The official Obama campaign initially denied knowledge of Soptic’s story in an attempt to distance itself from the ridiculously offensive television spot, only to later reverse its position.

Tax avoidance, felony, possible murder—this is the picture of Mitt Romney that Barack Obama has presented to the American people. One can point out the numerous factual errors and distortions and elisions in the portrait. One can observe, as Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades did in a fundraising e-mail issued Thursday, “This week, the Obama campaign hit a new low.” One can suggest that the race has continued to be stable and that, in the current hostile environment, to be within the margin of error is a good thing for the Republicans. And yet all of these arguments were just as applicable to the candidacy of John Kerry eight years ago as they are to Mitt Romney’s candidacy today.

If Obama loses, it will be because Mitt Romney reminded white voters without college degrees of the threat Obamacare poses to individual liberty and national solvency; of Obama’s ritual sacrifice of energy independence and economic growth on the altar of environmentalism; of the burden that future generations will bear because of Obama’s spending; of Obama’s support for a redefinition of marriage and for an amnesty of illegal immigrants. Whatever prevents Romney from pointing these things out—whether it comes from the Obama campaign or from within Romney’s high command—also prevents him from winning the presidency.

Mitt Romney did not kill Joe Soptic’s wife, but the Obama campaign is effectively killing Mitt Romney’s reputation. It may be ugly. It may be dishonest. But if it succeeds, like all killings it will be irrevocable.

This entry was posted in Obama Campaign, Politics and tagged Mitt Romney, Obama campaign, Priorities USA. Bookmark the permalink.
http://freebeacon.com/the-killing/

h/t Maggie's Farm

[Ogopogo]

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/rusty-weis ... their-inco

Revealed: Liberal Website That Attacked Romney’s Cayman ‘Schemes’ Actually Headquartered There

By Rusty Weiss | August 23, 2012 | 20:06
101 64 Reddit0 5
A A

Earlier today, the liberal website Gawker did a document dump including 950 pages worth of confidential documents affiliated with Bain Capital.

The idea was to expose Mitt Romney's alleged tax-dodging schemes with offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. Problem being, the parent corporation known as the Gawker Media Group has a little secret of their own.

Gawker writes:

Today, we are publishing more than 950 pages of internal audits, financial statements, and private investor letters for 21 cryptically named entities in which Romney had invested—at minimum—more than $10 million as of 2011 (that number is based on the low end of ranges he has disclosed—the true number is almost certainly significantly higher). Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, depending on whom you ask).

Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama's fiscal approach and his money managers' embrace of those same policies.

So if being based in the Cayman Islands immediately translates to a 'tax-avoidance scheme available only to the preposterously wealthy', then why is Gawker complaining?

After all, the Gawker Media Group is domiciled in - you guessed it - the Cayman Islands.

Financial journalist, Felix Salmon reported:

Gawker Media has been going through a big corporate revamp over the past year or so. The ultimate parent company has never been in the U.S.: it used to be Blogwire in Hungary, but now Blogwire Hungary has become a subsidiary of a Cayman Islands entity called Gawker Media Group Inc, which also owns various U.S. operations like Gawker Media LLC, Gawker Entertainment LLC, Gawker Technology LLC, and Gawker Sales LLC.

Then there's this little tidbit of information; something regarding obscene profits, untaxed revenue, and side-stepping the IRS…

The Hungarian companies get all of Gawker’s international income, which flows in from 13 different salespeople in ten different countries and which, since it’s international income flowing to a Hungarian company owned by a Cayman Islands parent, is basically pure profit which never comes close to being taxed in the U.S. The result is a company where 130 U.S. employees eat up the lion’s share of the U.S. revenues, resulting in little if any taxable income, while the international income, the franchise value of the brands, and the value of the technology all stays permanently overseas, untouched by the IRS.

This is weapons-grade hypocrisy...

Cross-Posted at the Mental Recession
About the Author
Rusty Weiss is Click here to follow Rusty Weiss on Twitter.

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/rusty-weis ... z24Vs27pRl

[Red Green]

Gawker is not applying for the position of chief tax enforcer of the US. Gawker is doing the citizens of the US a service.

F Romney, Bain Capital and all the other dickwads that fall in line to crow about Gawker being on the Caymen Islands. With any luck, I'll be there one day.

[DA_Champion]

Red Green - congratulations !!!