July 18, 2012

NSFW..but oh my goodness.. "Mr. Mitt Romney"

googling for 2003 videos of Mitt & stumbled upon this song written by a "supporter"..

http://yhoo.it/M9jfPl

July 18, 2012

100,000% return for Bain employee IRA participation.. calls it a complicated "scheme"

This video explains a LOT about the IRA investment.....and why Mittens may not want it closely scrutinized

http://yhoo.it/MsT5YK

July 18, 2012

Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, etc?

"No, because if I tell the truth it will prove that I am guilty".

Romney is taking the campaign version of "the 5th".

It may be "legal", but juries convict every day when people take the 5th..

July 18, 2012

If you're a conservative who hates taxes, please do the following. ...(102 Reasons not to pay taxes)

http://crazyoldmanwtf.blogspot.com/2011/11/102-reason-not-to-pay-taxes-republican.html

If you're a conservative who hates taxes, please do the following.


1. Do not use Medicare.

2. Do not use Social Security


4. Do not ask the National Guard to help you after a disaster.

5. Do not call 911 when you get hurt.


9. Do not use public restrooms.



31. Do not listen to tsunami, hurricane, or earthquake alert systems.





The fact is, we pay for the lifestyle we expect. Without taxes, our lifestyles would be totally different and much harder. America would be a third world country. The less we pay, the less we get in return. Americans pay less taxes today since 1958 and is ranked 32nd out of 34 of the top tax paying countries. Chile and Mexico are 33rd and 34th. The Republicans are lying when they say that we pay the highest taxes in the world and are only attacking taxes to reward corporations and the wealthy and to weaken our infrastructure and way of life. So next time you object to paying taxes or fight to abolish taxes for corporations and the wealthy, keep this quote in mind…


“I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.” ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
THIS LIST WAS COMPILED BY STEPHEN D. FOSTER JR AND SHARED ON MATTHEW DESMOND'S SITE @:

July 18, 2012

Pennsylvania Voting ID spelled out..

http://www.dmv.state.pa.us/voter/voteridlaw.shtml

they do not accept cash
apparently they do not make appointments (like we do in CA)


Here is the "work-around affirmation" for people without ID.

http://www.dmv.state.pa.us/pdotforms/voterid/VoterAffirmationNoProofofID.pdf

July 18, 2012

Hate to say it, but Mitt & Ann are "Don Draper & Betty"

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/us/politics/16romney.html?pagewanted=all

They have "play-acted/reenacted" the 50's" for their whole lives.

This article from 2007 when he was running against McCain spells it out.

he's attractive like Don
he's super-secretive like Don
he's driven to succeed at any cost like Don
he demands complete fealty from his woman

she's Betty to a tee (except for the drinking)
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The Stay-at-Home Woman Travels Well

By JODI KANTOR
Published: December 16, 2007

MOUNT Pleasant, S.C.
Elise Amendola/Associated Press

TEAM ROMNEY Competition runs in the family, which holds a “Romlympics” each summer.

AT a recent shrimp dinner here for Republican women, Ann Romney seemed less like a campaign spouse trawling for votes than like visiting nobility. She was probably the wealthiest person in the room and, according to the crowd, the prettiest, too. “You are so beautiful!” one woman gushed. Another presented her with flowers. But when the visitor in the regal red jacket spoke, she turned out to be an informal, just-us-girls type. She introduced the House of Romney by whipping out poster-size photos of her five sons and 10 (now 11) grandchildren, and she confided how multiple sclerosis once left her unable to walk. She talked about the time a manicurist doing her nails back in Boston dissolved in tears of gratitude over an education program that her husband had introduced as governor of Massachusetts. So chatty was her approach, she never actually asked the audience for their votes. The crowd adored it. In explaining why, they listed the reasons that Mitt Romney has put his wife front and center in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination — in contrast to Rudolph Giuliani, whose politically inexperienced, thrice-married wife, Judith, has remained largely silent, and Mike Huckabee, whose wife, Janet, has only recently begun to campaign on her own. Mrs. Romney, 58, is young-looking but long-married, they noted. The word “classy” came up, as did the name Laura Bush.

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HER husband was running unsuccessfully for a United States Senate seat in Massachusetts in 1994, and Mrs. Romney was derided as superficial, pampered and too deferential to him. In a Boston Globe interview, she talked about slimming down to her high school weight (117 pounds), the investments she and Mr. Romney lived off as students, and the number of times the couple had ever argued: once.

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She spent the first decades of her marriage raising five sons. She taught 6 a.m. Mormon scripture classes five days a week for her sons and other children, and put sesame-seed chicken on the table for her boys at 5:30 p.m., hours before Mr. Romney returned home to Belmont, Mass., a suburb of Boston, from his work in consulting and then private equity. She even went to bed surrounded by her kids, who held searching late-night talks in their parents’ bedroom. Mr. Romney is so devoted to his wife, said Laraine Wright, an old friend, that when he had to spend a few days in another city for work, he would sometimes fly home at night, just so they could see each other. And once, when a Romney son insulted his mother, Mr. Romney sped home at midday to set him straight. The seeming perfection of the Romney’s union has led to some eye-rolling, but their claim of total harmony is a bit easier to understand in light of their religious beliefs. When Mormons wed, there’s no “till death do us part.” Couples are actually “sealed” in a ceremony meant to bond them for eternity. One result is that the church emphasizes perfecting, marriages — talking out problems, getting help. “It’s like constant marriage counseling,” said Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, a religion professor at the University of North Carolina.

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“A real education,” Mrs. Romney called it as she nestled last month, wearing jeans and pearls, on a couch in the Boston campaign office she decorated for her husband.

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Though she used steroids to combat her initial attack, today Mrs. Romney takes no medicine for her disease, instead relying on alternative therapies such as horseback riding — she calls it “joy therapy”— to keep herself well. But doctors say that only medication, which patients often resist because of unpleasant side effects, slows the long-term progress of the disease. In an interview, Mrs. Romney talked about her decision to forgo medication haltingly, even asking that this article not address it. “I would recommend no one to do what I did because it was such a leap of faith,” she said. She called the medicines effective, but added: “A lot of people get really sick from the drugs and they feel like they’re not helping them anyway. That was kind of my case.”

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During her rehabilitation from her initial attack, she took up dressage, going from a novice so weak that she could barely sit in the saddle to a winner of top amateur medals. She sometimes enters professional-level contests, against the advice of her trainer, Jan Ebeling. “She wants to measure herself against the best,” he said. Dressage is a sport of seven-figure horses and four-figure saddles. The monthly boarding costs are more than most people’s rent. Asked how many dressage horses she owns, Mrs. Romney laughed. “Mitt doesn’t even know the answer to that,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you!”

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July 18, 2012

Sewers leased as tax shelters.. How Romney-esque

Makes me more interested than ever to see what shelters Romney employed.. THIS is why he's reluctant..

Enjoy this blast from the past..

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/tax/etc/synopsis.html





Introduction: Feb. 19, 2003

It was one of corporate America's biggest hidden profit centers in the past decade -- the tax shelter -- and it became so lucrative that last year it helped major U.S. companies cut their tax rate to just half of what they had historically paid, leaving individual taxpayers to make up the difference.

The General Accounting Office estimates that illegitimate tax shelters cost the government more than $85 billion in recent years. "Anything that's not being paid that should be paid, that's basically what the honest taxpayer is making up," asserts Charles Rossotti, a Republican businessman who became commissioner of Internal Revenue in 1997 and spent five years battling bogus shelters. Rossotti estimates that because the government is not collecting all that is owed -- the biggest piece of which is illegitimate tax shelters -- everyone else is paying 15 percent more than they should.



How investigating "Tax Me If You Can" led producer Rick Young into the sewers of Bochum, Germany. In "Tax Me If You Can," FRONTLINE correspondent Hedrick Smith investigates the rampant abuse of tax shelters since the late 1990s. Through interviews with government officials, tax experts, and industry insiders, Smith uncovers an avalanche of bogus transactions -- created by some of America's biggest and most-respected accounting firms, law firms, and investment banks -- that were then aggressively marketed to big corporations and wealthy individuals.

"These were close to sham transactions -- some were clearly sham transactions, [that] had nothing to do with investment," says John "Buck" Chapoton, former treasury department policymaker in the Reagan administration. "They simply were financial mechanisms for creating losses -- tax losses, not economic losses."

FRONTLINE's Smith notes, "Chasing bogus tax shelters for the IRS was like a game of cat and mouse. The IRS had a terrible time finding them because they were hidden deep in tax returns. Once the IRS spotted one type of shelter and issued a regulation to block it, the shelter promoters had designed a new one. The IRS was forever playing catch-up."

snip for more deliciousness

July 18, 2012

Found an interesting discussion of how republicans handled debt limit in 2005

hypocrites

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message19858/pg1

Needs to go over 8 TRILLION!!!

I love it!!

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration announced Wednesday that it will run out of maneuvering room to manage the government´s massive borrowing needs in two weeks, putting more pressure on Congress to raise the debt ceiling when it convenes for a special post-election session.


snip


"Due to debt limit constraints, we currently do not have the capacity to settle our four-week bill auction scheduled to settle on Nov. 18," Timothy Bitsberger, acting assistant Treasury secretary for financial markets, said in a statement.

snip

The Republican-controlled Congress put off dealing with the debt ceiling before adjourning in October, preferring not to force members to vote on the politically sensitive issue of adding to the national debt before the November elections. The government hit the current debt ceiling of $7.384 trillion on Oct. 14, forcing Treasury to begin a series of bookkeeping maneuvers to keep financing the government´s normal operations without breaching the debt ceiling. But Treasury Secretary John Snow has warned that those special measures would last only until mid-November. The Treasury Department´s actions have included reducing the amount of debt in government trust funds to free up room for further borrowing from the public. The nonpublic debt is then replaced in the trust funds once the debt ceiling is increased along with any lost interest payments. Republicans have proposed that the debt ceiling be raised by $690 billion to $8.074 trillion, an amount that would get the government through next September, when the 2005 budget year ends.


The need to raise the debt ceiling reflects the record budget deficits of the past two years. The deficit for the 2004 budget year, which ended Sept. 30, was an all-time high of $413 billion, surpassing the old mark, in dollar terms, of $377 billion in 2003. Democrats blame the surging deficits on Bush´s tax cuts, while the administration contends the tax cuts provided critical economic stimulus to help lift the economy out of the 2001 recession. The administration says the president has a plan to cut the deficit in half by 2009, but critics contend that the real problems will come in later years as retiring baby boomers put unprecedented strains on Social Security (news - web sites) and Medicare.

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July 17, 2012

Rare bird sighting.. The Scarlet Regent Vulturine Mitt

apologies to:

Vulturine Guineafowl
Scarlet Ibis
Regent Parrot

July 17, 2012

Politically hip? "Morning Joe" not living up to the hype (Ouch !)

http://www.depauliaonline.com/opinions/politically-hip-morning-joe-not-living-up-to-the-hype-1.2880811#.UAVorZGG5ad

Politically hip? "Morning Joe" not living up to the hype

By Timothy Lydon

Published: Monday, July 16, 2012


In the latest issue of The New York Times Magazine there is a full page spread for the MSNBC talk show "Morning Joe." The ad features co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski walking down a Manhattan street in the fall. They are dressed in black, in contrast with the pink glow on the concrete from Radio City Music Hall. In the image below, Willie Geist, the show’s pop culture authority is on set checking his smart phone. The images are coupled with laudatory pronouncements: "...unlike anything else on morning television," writes The New York Times; "An important wake-up call for political and media leaders," says the Associated Press; "Appallingly Entertaining" reads the capstone endorsement from The New Yorker.

This glossy advertisement is an appropriate representation of the show: a well-honed, appealing image, butultimately facile . Viewers get only as much analysis as can fit between commercial breaks, but hardly enough to awaken any sort of political consciousness.

Brzezinski has celebrity fever (as evident by her puckered lips in the magazine spread), Scarborough plays his classic rock, Geist has his irony - winking at all 20-somethings out there watching - and all the guests on the show know it’s going to be a good time in the morning, void of anything substantial like corporate malfeasance, executive pay, financial deregulation, and inequalities in education and healthcare for children of color.

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And how can the “Morning Joe” newscasters criticize the financial institutions responsible for the 2008 recession when these very same institutions pay for commercials on MSNBC’s sister channel CNBC?

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