PolitiFact: In the meantime, here's a helpful summary of what happens in the video, minute by minuteThere are in fact several minutes missing from the summary, such as minutes 2, 4, 5, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 25. With only sixty seven per cent of minutes covered, we rate PolitiFact's statement as Mostly True.
This isn’t about a politician making huge profits in the private sector, [I] think what Governor Perry is getting at is that Governor Romney claimed to have created 100,000 jobs at Bain and you know, people are wanting to know: Is there proof of that claim? And was it U.S. jobs created for United States [c]itizens? You know, the 100,000 jobs, and I believe that that’s what Governor Perry is getting at is, you know, own up to the claims that are being made I had and that’s fair. That’s not negative campaigning, that’s fair to get a candidate to be held accountable to what’s being claimed, especially when it comes to job creation because so many of us are so concerned about what’s going on on Main Street, as well as Wall Street.” -- Sarah Palin on Mittens' 100K job creation claim.posted by birdherder at 5:33 PM on January 12
Yeah I wonder what Romney did to Newt for newt to go so far into the weeds in his attacks. Seems like every other republican outlet is trying to shut Newt down at this point but he just won't relent.Isn't the answer obvious: He's running in an election against him. This just Newt being the incredibly craven powermad douchebag he's always been.
Remember -- this was created by a SuperPAC, not the Gingrich campaign itself. In theory, SuperPACs aren't allowed to coordinate with candidates at all. Whether that wall is truly in place or not, we wiill probably never know. But this came from somewhere else, so it's not really Newt going so far into the weeds.I don't know how that 'wall' could practically exist when the funding came from a single person, who newt personally requested the money from.
I think the Republican strategy at this point is to make Obama die of a joy-induced heart attack.Republicans thought the same thing with the Obama/Hillary fight. Ultimately it just makes the candidate stronger if they go through a tough primary without too much of the dirt sticking.
How did these transactions come about? Was this pure takeover by Bain or was there a request from the owners, a wish, that this money come in?The basic idea of a leveraged buyout is to identify an established, cashflowing company that is underperforming (and doesn't have much debt). The sponsor (Bain Capital, in this case) arranges with the existing owners of the company for the company to borrow money (from banks or by issuing bonds to investors or both). The company uses the borrowed money to buy back much of its stock from its old owners, and the sponsor buys the rest (or a controlling interest, at least). The sponsor then installs new management and tries to fix whatever was causing the company to underperform in the first place.
“The key to remember here is that he gave a donation to support Newt,” the source said. “What happens from the time when that contribution lands with that PAC to now, he’s not involved with. He’s not been involved in the strategies and the tactics.”Yeah, but come on. Why on earth would a SuperPAC not listen to it's biggest donors?
It seems like a brilliant piece of propaganda. I can't see it making a lick of difference to the primaries because Romney is already the candidate of last resort. But wow, in the general, the Obama campaign has really had this one handed to them on a plate. "Romney is blah blah bah... and it's not just us who says so."Yeah, if Romney wins you can bet lots of liberals will be passing around links to this video (and they already are!)
Laugh if you want but the last time I looked at Intrade they said Obama had a 51% chance to win (and a 49% chance to lose). It is way too early for any victory party.Romney seems like the candidate most likely to be able to beat Obama. He may say some crazy stuff on the campaign, or he might not be. I have no idea because i don't pay much attention to it at all. It's only when someone says something really nuts, like Bachman's anti-vax stuff, Gingrich's "poor kids don't appreciate hard work so lets turn them into janitors" or "OWS people need to take a bath", or Rick Perry's "Oops" Romney doesn't make those kind of outlandish statements. (Can't think of anything off the top of my head for Santorum, other then his comments on SOPA, which is not a 'major' story in the MSM) His strategy is obviously just to try to fly under the radar and seem like the 'sensible' one, which is kind of similar to Obama in 2008, although he currently doesn't have a bête noire equivalent to Hillary yet.
Romney isn't necessarily a viable candidate. A corporate raider vs. Obama with OWS protests in full swing? really? Do you imagine Romney can campaign on extending Obama care?It's hard to predict. Lots of people think Obama is too close to the banks, with Geithner and all the GS people working in his administration.
Ron Paul is the only Republican candidate with any chance for selling the country on a Republican branded reform platform. Republicans should grow some balls and run Ron Paul seriously.Santorum's ideology is the opposite of Paul's. Yet, they are both republicans. I don't really know if the average republican really, for example, wants to legalize drugs.
this video was produced independentally and then actually bid on by the different campaigns. -- It's only a matter of time before they turn their lens towards the guy we actually support.I'm pretty sure they've been doing that continuously since early 2008 or so.
That's just politics. Personally, I support the candidacy of Ru Paul. I think RuPaul is the ideal Republican candidate and I fully support him and/or her as president of these United States.RuPaul will lose to a Tom Hardy write-in campaign.
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.posted by readery at 7:37 AM on January 14 [1 favorite]The tax code is where you see the fine work of legislators being in the pocket of those that pay. And why I have avoided doing lucrative tax work. It's sickening.
The criticisms are grounded in the belief that political advertising should be factually accurate and presented in a balanced context. That would surely be desirable, and it is useful for journalists to try to hold politicians accountable for their lies. Yet to dismiss “King of Bain” because it selects facts, distorts history, and tugs unrelentingly on the viewer’s emotions would be to overlook other interesting aspects of the film. “King of Bain” is to the Super PAC era of political distortion what “Apocalypse Now” was to Hollywood’s era of the auteur director: an apotheosis of inspired excess, and a marker of the times we inhabit.What exactly did Romney do at Bain Capital? Paul Krugman posted a 1988 paper by Andrei Schleifer and Lawrence Summers on the economics of leveraged buyouts a few days ago.
... the film’s power, like that of Michael Moore’s documentaries, resides mainly in the voices of ordinary Americans speaking about their travails. Most of the film features seemingly straightforward interviews with people who lost their jobs, lost their health insurance, lost their home, skipped meals to feed their children, or moved involuntarily in search of new work. It borrows in tone from “Up in the Air,” a film about a corporate-layoff specialist, played by George Clooney, that cast non-actors who had actually been fired as Clooney’s victims.
According to the filmmakers, some of the interview subjects in “King of Bain” were paid with gift cards worth about one hundred dollars each to participate, and some of them have been quoted in the Post as saying that they did not understand the film’s purpose and that their stories were taken out of context. Still, whether or not Bain or Romney can be held responsible for their suffering, there is no question about the underlying authenticity of their narratives, and that is what comes through on the screen. To watch the film is to be carried briefly into marriages and families where people who thought they understood the rules of the economy were disabused, traumatically, of their beliefs.
Summers and Shleifer argued back in 1988 that buyouts are often aimed at “value redistribution” rather than “value creation”; specifically, a lot of the gains to the buyout specialists come from breaking implicit contracts with “workers, suppliers, and other corporate stakeholders.”A recent post by Jim Surowiecki: How Private Equity Firms Like Bain Capital Earn Profits.
They make one especially keen point: if it were really about adding efficiency, why do the same people lead takeovers in many industries, instead of people with specific expertise in each industry doing the job? Their answer is that these specialists are specialists in deal-breaking, not value creation.
In a call last Sunday morning, just hours after Mr. Romney’s double-digit loss to Mr. Gingrich in the South Carolina primary, the Romney team outlined the new approach to the candidate. Put aside the more acute focus on President Obama and narrow in on Mr. Gingrich.Politico has an interesting article describing the difference between Romney's supporters and Gingrich's supporters. Florida primary pits tea party against cocktail party.
Find lines of attack that could goad Mr. Gingrich into angry responses and rally mainstream Republicans. Swarm Gingrich campaign events to rattle him. Have Mr. Romney drop his above-the-fray persona and carry the fight directly to his opponent, especially in two critical debates scheduled for the week.
The results of that strategy, carried out by a veteran squad of strategists and operatives assembled by Mr. Romney to deal with just this kind of moment, have been on striking display here.
By this weekend, Mr. Romney’s aides were on the offensive and increasingly confident, with some combination of their strategy and Mr. Gingrich’s own performance swinging polls in Mr. Romney’s direction. Even as it acknowledged the damage inflicted on Mr. Romney by the past several weeks, his team suggested that it had learned a lesson about never letting up on rivals, especially if Mr. Romney wins the nomination and confronts Mr. Obama in the general election.
What is striking in [R. B.] Scott’s account is not merely the fact of Romney’s numerous flip-flops on political issues familiar and less so (a less familiar one: the Massachusetts Romney refused to sign Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge in 2002, while the national Romney, in January 2007, became the first Republican presidential candidate to sign it). It’s his clumsy way of trying to assert that he has not in fact changed positions. On abortion rights, he took to saying in about 2007 that he had “always been personally pro-life” but had respected Roe v. Wade as law. But if he was always pro-life, why did he and Ann make donations for years to Planned Parenthood? And why, when asked about this, did he, in Scott’s words, “gracelessly roll his own wife under the bus” by saying, “Her contributions are for her and not for me”?posted by russilwvong at 4:15 PM on February 2
Romney appears to have a strong need to ingratiate, an urge to say much more than he really needs to say. When he wanted to prove he was a hunter and a regular guy, he made reference not to hunting animals or game but “varmints.” Twice. He boasted that his father marched with Martin Luther King Jr., but, admirable as his father was on civil rights, this was not true. His sons may have avoided military service, but they were “showing support for our nation” by…working on his campaign. The list goes on.
At other moments, a very different impulse reveals itself, and Romney’s deep and perhaps even unconscious sense of class superiority rises to the surface. He likes “being able to fire people,” he said to an audience recently, expecting a laugh that did not quite materialize. Complaints about his income are nothing more than “the bitter politics of envy.” Income inequality—this is the most incredible one to me—should be discussed only in “quiet rooms.” And his speaking fee income was “not very much” ($374,000 in the year ending in February 2011). Here again, he is his father’s opposite: George Romney was known for refusing bonuses, explaining that no executive needed to make more than his $225,000 a year ($1.4 million in today’s dollars).
Both urges, to pander awkwardly and to protect the prerogatives of his class, are at play in matters of policy. Romney’s proposed tax cut, writes The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein, is roughly three times the size of George W. Bush’s 2000 proposal. It’s far more regressive—it would actually raise taxes on many working-class people, which Bush did not do—and would add to the deficit a hefty $600 billion. Likewise, Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic found that Romney’s proposed budget would cut at least 14 percent and perhaps 25 percent from every domestic program—on top of the cuts already slated to go into effect as a result of the congressional deal on the debt ceiling.
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