July 11, 2012

Bain & Co.Employed "Director of Outsourcing"

"Bain & Co., the management consulting company Mitt Romney worked at before leaving with several colleagues to found the private equity firm Bain Capital, employed a "director of outsourcing," according to news reports.

Mark Gottfredson, now a director at the firm's Dallas office, has worked and written extensively about corporate outsourcing strategies — including a piece in Harvard Business Review on the successes 7-Eleven had in so-called capability sourcing.

Source

http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/bain-co-employed-director-of-outsourcing

July 10, 2012

Mitt Romney's Refusal to Release More Tax Returns

July 10, 2012

Will This Election Break the Rules?

The Morning Plum:Will This Election Break The Rules

By Greg Sargent
At first glance, today’s Post/ABC News poll would seem to lend support to the conventional wisdom: A bad economy means the election will be nothing more than a referendum on the incumbent — period, full stop. But dig a little deeper and it looks as if voters may be seeing things in more nuanced terms.

The poll finds Barack Obama and Mitt Romney tied at 47-47 among registered voters. Obama’s approval is upside down at 47-49, and it’s even worse on the economy, 44-54. The right track/wrong track numbers are awful, at 33-63. Romney leads on which candidate is more trusted to handle the economy, 49-45, which suggests voters’ dissatisfaction with Obama’s performance have left them more than open to Romney as an alternative.

But when people are asked to compare the two, the picture shifts.

Obama leads on who understands the economic problems people are having, 51-40. Obama leads on who is more likely to stand up for what he believes in, 52-36. Obama leads on who has presented a clearer plan for dealing with the economy situation, 47-35..........."

http://tinyurl.com/7p6lvof

July 10, 2012

Question about the grey highlighted paragraphs in posts

How do you make them grey?

July 10, 2012

Posting Question

Do we have the capability to move a post from one group to another without
deleting and reposting?

July 10, 2012

Obama Wins Crucial Cookie Related Precursor To Re-Election

By Elizabeth Dias | @elizabethjdias | July 10, 2012

Once again it is time for the First Lady Candidate Cookie Contest, when Americans judge Presidents and would-be Presidents by their wives’ culinary skills. It’s a ridiculous exercise–this ain’t Mamie Eisenhower’s Million Dollar Fudge recipe of 1955, it’s 2012. But since the good folks at Family Circle magazine have asked Americans to do their “patriotic duty” by tasting Ann Romney’s and Michelle Obama’s cookies, we figured we could skip the social commentary and answer the crucial question: How do they taste?

Here in the TIME offices we conducted a blind taste test, analyzing both cookies and doughs. We debated the flavor and texture: Was one too greasy? The other too minty? This was a thorough examination, we assure you. Our favorite by a 9-3 landslide: Michelle Obama’s white and dark chocolate chip cookie over Ann’s M&M confection.........."


http://swampland.time.com/2012/07/10/obama-wins-crucial-cookie-related-precursor-to-re-election/

July 9, 2012

The Timing of Vice Presidential Picks

July 9, 2012

With the Supreme Court having already decided on President Obama’s health care law and the news cycle relatively sparse, we’re starting to reach the stage of the campaign when there will be rampant speculation as to who Mitt Romney will pick as his vice presidential running mate. But as you listen to all the talk, it’s worth keeping in mind that in recent history, presumptive nominees haven’t announced their running mates until right before the party convention........"

http://washingtonexaminer.com/the-timing-of-vice-presidential-picks/article/2501642

( a table in the link)

July 9, 2012

Mitt Romney: Hostage Taker?

BRIAN BEUTLER JULY 9, 2012, 10:58 AM
Mitt Romney: Hostage Taker?

I suspect a lot of politicians and talking heads and reporters will treat President Obama’s renewed push to allow the high-income Bush tax cuts to expire as deja vu. And in their defense, there’s some overlap between what’s about to play out in the political realm, and what happened in 2010, when Democrats fractured over the issue and agreed to extend all the Bush tax cuts for two years.

But the story’s actually much different now, and that mostly has to do with the fact that this time around Republicans have a presidential candidate on the ticket. Not just any presidential candidate, either, but one personifies the class of super-rich that benefited from the Bush tax cuts so much more than everybody else.

Here’s why that matters.

One piece of this story that’s playing out exactly as it did two years ago is that congressional Republicans have once again adopted a legislative strategy that more or less amounts to hostage taking. They’re happy to renew the middle-income Bush tax cuts — tax cuts that, by the way, apply to everybody, including rich people — but only if tax cuts benefiting only the wealthiest Americans are part of the deal. If Dems don’t agree to that, then Republicans will block everything in between and allow all the tax cuts to expire, including for regular folks who can’t really afford it in this economy. Indeed, the broader economy can’t really support all that fiscal contraction — which is why we constantly hear dire warnings about the threat of the so-called “fiscal cliff” at the end of the year.

Last time around, nobody really had to answer for that strategy — nobody with any real accountability anyhow. This time around Mitt Romney will play that part. And he’s going to have little choice but to own the hostage taking. There’s almost no conceivable way the right will give him enough berth to dodge the issue, let alone break with Congressional Republicans. This is the core of the GOP’s identity, and the single biggest organizing principle uniting the Conservative movement.

So here we’ll have Mitt Romney — the millionaire outsourcer guy who claims to believe wealthy Americans are already doing just fine — saying it’s appropriate to hold the middle-class’s tax cuts hostage until the yacht-owning set that finances his campaign gets its tax cuts too.

There may be some nimble Republican politician out there who could dance around this problem, but I don’t think Mitt Romney can. Which is why the fight will be so clarifying and, I assume, why the White House and Obama campaign seem eager to relaunch it.

In the end, the legislative politics that determine what actually happens to the Bush tax cuts will be shaped by the election. Obviously, if Republicans win they won’t need to take anything hostage. But I doubt that’s enough to protect Romney from having to answer for the strategy as it exists right now. And I don’t think screaming “tax hike!” will suffice.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/07/mitt_romney_hostage_taker.php

July 9, 2012

Obama Winning The Ad Wars In Swing States

July 09, 2012

Obama Winning the Ad Wars In Swing States
A new USA Today/Gallup Poll of swing states finds President Obama "is the clear winner in the ad wars. Among swing-state voters who say the ads have changed their minds about a candidate, rather than just confirmed what they already thought, 76% now support the president, vs. 16% favoring Romney."

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/07/09/obama_winning_the_ad_wars.html

July 8, 2012

How Obama Allies Are Defining Romney

Robert Draper’s New York Times Magazine story about Priorities USA Action, the pro-Obama super-PAC, is the most interesting political story of the week. One takeaway from Draper’s story is that Priorities USA really does have a big role in the campaign. The tepid pace of the recovery suggests that Obama can’t run on a “look what we did” platform. He can only persuade Americans that Mitt Romney won’t make things better.
And here Priorities USA has a central role. Most voters have well-defined opinions about Obama. Romney is the variable here. And undecided voters have almost no opinion about him whatsoever:

While conducting a different focus group — this one with non-college-educated Milwaukee voters on the eve of Wisconsin’s April 3 primary — Burton and Sweeney were surprised to learn that even after Romney had spent months campaigning, many in the group could not recognize his face, much less characterize his positions.

In the same passage, Draper explains that Burton and Sweeney couldn’t effectively sell voters on Romney’s support of the Ryan plan, since cutting Medicare in order to clear budgetary headroom for tax cuts for the rich, while an accurate description of the Ryan plan, struck those voters as so cartoonishly evil that they found the charge implausible. (“[T]he respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.”)............." (see link below)


http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/07/how-obamas-allies-are-defining-romney.html?imw=Y