Elections 2012

Bain Capital has fallen off the radar lately, but an explosive new piece in the Washington Post should put it back in the spotlight:

Mitt Romney’s financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.

During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

This isn't some conspiracy theory or speculation. This information comes from federal documents filed by Bain. They admitted the practice in documents that lying on is a federal offense.

Mitt Romney was the king of outsourcing American jobs! The man the GOP wants to put in the White House is a big reason that we have lost our manufacturing base and now there is proof!

Of course the GOP will probably champion him more as a hero now because what Romney did was in the interest of his own fortune and not of others. He is the greedy rich guy and that is what the GOP loves. Forget country and fellow citizens - it's the party of Gordon Gecko!

Josh Mandel, Ohio's State Treasurer who is also taking on Sherrod Brown for Senate, is hiding something:

In a letter to Seth Metcalf, Mandel's general counsel, the state Democratic Party asked for the resumes of 34 people Mandel appointed to posts in the treasurer's office, noting that their eighth request from May 3 has not been answered by Metcalf. Democrats have been seeking the resumes for more than a year, with reports surfacing earlier this year that Mandel awarded state jobs to political staffers and longtime friends, including Metcalf, who he went to college with. Mandel is challenging U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D).

State law requires that they respond in a reasonable amount of time to such requests.

True it could be to the fact that Mandel spends more time on his political career than he does his actual job, even skirting the job Ohio tax payers pay him to do.

But this is a darling of the Tea Party, so they ignore anything that might be fishy from their candidates. They just want "the other guy", no matter who it is.

Here's how the GOP supports small business:

COUNCIL BLUFFS(KPTM)-- Dianne Bauer opened up her cafe to Mitt Romney and his campaign for a small round table discussion Friday morning before his speech at Bayliss Park.

This isn't the first politician that has asked Bauer to use the Main Street Cafe in downtown Council Bluffs.

"With Rick Perry he made a point of stopping in the kitchen before he ever went to the other side to address the public and the media to thank us and introduce himself to us," said Bauer. "That's what I thought we would get here, just normal. This was all out, like you'd think Obama was here."

Bauer's issues with the campaigns staffers started the night before when they started staging the cafe for the event.

She described many of their demeanors as "arrogant".

She says her cafe was not treated with the respect it deserved.

"Stuff got broke. My table cloths they just got ripped off, wadded up and thrown in the back room,"

She says the boom truck she allowed the campaign to borrow to gain access to the roof now has an 8-inch gouge in it that she'll have to take the time to repair.

The campaign told her to send them an itemized list of anything that was broken, and they would pay for it, but Bauer says that won't fix everything.

"My dad's picture, an emblem my dad gave me, it got broke. Those aren't things you can replace,"

Rick Scott, the Republican Governor of Florida, has devised a plan to steal the state for Mitt Romney. Via Think Progress:

On Wednesday, November 7, Mitt Romney could wake up as the President-elect thanks to one man: Florida Governor Rick Scott. With little fanfare, Scott is undertaking an audacious plan to kick thousands of Floridians off the ballot just before this year’s elections. It’s a sloppy, chaotic and possibly illegal plan. But it just might work.

Even state officials are admitting it has problems:

4. Florida election officials have acknowledged that, as a result of Scott’s voter purge, eligible voters will be removed from the rolls. “It will happen,” Mary Cooney, a spokeswoman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, told ThinkProgress. On or about June 9, anyone who hasn’t responded to the ominous and legalistic letter informing them of their purported ineligibility will be removed from the rolls. Some eligible voters won’t have been able to respond by that time due to travel, work obligations, family obligations or confusion as to the purpose of the letter. Some will forget to open it. Others may have moved.

This is a slap in the face to our nation and constitution. Of course America's right has proven time and time again that they really don't like the document our nation is built on. They claim they do, but when push comes to shove they only cling to the part about carrying guns.

The AP has done some great fact checking into a speech Mitt Romney gave yesterday on the economy. It turns out, to no shock, that Romney is echoing many of the lies that the right has constantly been pushing for the past several years. Here's one of my favorites:

ROMNEY: "America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of your dollars to the companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined."

THE FACTS. Hardly. Presidents from George Washington through George W. Bush ran the national debt up to $10.62 trillion, the amount it was on the day Obama took office. Today, it is $15.67 trillion, according to the Treasury Department's Bureau of Public Debt. So it has gone up by $5.05 trillion under Obama. That's roughly half of the amount amassed by all the other presidents combined.

In short, the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled.

Today's Washington Post is out with a story of a young Mitt Romney:

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

Today Matt Drudge is pushing this piece that links to Breitbart:

This is from President Obama's campaign kickoff in Ohio yesterday. The image apparently came from the Romney campaign directly. Here's what Breitbart says about it:

Barack Obama launched his campaign in unspectacular fashion today at Ohio State University, the largest college in the crucial swing state. A photo posted to twitter by Mitt Romney's campaign spokesman Ryan Williams reveals sparse attendance. The above image, according to Williams, was taken during the President's first official campaign speech.

But as PoliticsUSA points out, that photograph was apparently taken pre-rally. They have supplied numerous pictures and even a video showing a much different story.

Still, I didn't buy it 100%. Instead I decided to search out a better image and I ended up finding one. This is a panoramic image, but I decided to crop in and focus on one area, which is the same area as the photo being pushed by Breitbart.

The Daily Mall has this piece up:

Barack Obama has already held more re-election fundraising events than every elected president since Richard Nixon combined, according to figures to be published in a new book.

Obama is also the only president in the past 35 years to visit every electoral battleground state in his first year of office.

The figures, contained a in a new book called The Rise of the President’s Permanent Campaign by Brendan J. Doherty, due to be published by University Press of Kansas in July, give statistical backing to the notion that Obama is more preoccupied with being re-elected than any other commander-in-chief of modern times.

Doherty, who has compiled statistics about presidential travel and fundraising going back to President Jimmy Carter in 1977, found that Obama had held 104 fundraisers by March 6th this year, compared to 94 held by Presidents Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Snr, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush combined.

Since then, Obama has held another 20 fundraisers, bringing his total to 124. Carter held four re-election fundraisers in 1980, Reagan zero in 1984, Bush Snr 19 in 1992, Clinton 14 in 1996 and Bush Jnr 57 in 2004.

Needless to say the right is starting a storm over this already. Here's Weasel Zippers:

He excels at two things and two things only: Running up enormous debt with other peoples’ money and raising cash for his own self-serving ends. He is nothing more than an ordinary street hustler in an extraordinary position.